| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Melvin G. Holli. The American Mayor: The Best and the Worst Big-City Leaders. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 210. Cloth $47.50, paper $18.95.

Professors of urban history and social science agree about who the very best and very worst American mayors have been. Melvin G. Holli surveyed 160 experts (sixty-nine responded) and found a strong consensus that Fiorello H. La Guardia, Tom Johnson, David Lawrence, and Tom Bradley are among the nation's very best mayors, while Big Bill Thompson, Frank Hague, Frank Rizzo, and Jimmy Walker place among the very worst. 1

There could hardly have been a better scholar to oversee this task. Holli is not only the author of Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics (1969) and seven other books about city politics but also the coeditor, with Peter D'A. Jones, of the Biographical Dictionary of American Mayors, 1820–1980 (1981). This book describes Holli's survey and his findings. The first chapter offers all too brief sketches of the ten worst mayors. Three succeeding chapters present more substantial political biographies of the ten best. (Appendixes list the next twelve worst and the next twenty-four best.) . . .

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