Book Review

In American Pharaoh, the journalists Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor offer a highly readable and detailed account of the life of Chicago's mayor Richard J. Daley. Already widely praised in the popular press, this book presents a familiar interpretation of the powerful Chicago politician, revealing nothing surprising to any scholar of twentieth-century politics or urban government. Daley is depicted as the last great machine boss, a lover of power, and the nation's chief defender of a political culture and white ethnic life-style that seemed well on its way to extinction at the time of his death in 1976. According to Cohen and Taylor, the Chicago Democratic organization, the rigid piety of Irish Catholicism, and the lily-white neighborhoods of neat bungalows housing breadwinning fathers, faithful wives, and dutiful children were all sacrosanct elements of the Daley faith. And his devotion to these icons of an earlier era won him an army of admirers among those resistant to change and an equally large corps of detractors among so-called progressive elements. Cohen and Taylor conclude their biography with Daley's funeral, a ceremony marking the end of an era. Apparently no epilogue discussing his enduring significance was deemed necessary.

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