Book Review

Taking her title from New York ward politician George Washington Plunkitt's famous dismissal of municipal reformers as mere "morning glories" that withered quickly (as opposed to political machines that flourished "like fine old oaks"), Amy Bridges looks at cities where reform was a long-term success. From the Progressive Era through the 1960s, most of the large cities of the Southwest were governed by reform regimes. In the 1910s and 1920s, they set up commission systems with mixed results, but after World War II they replaced these with city-manager systems with weak mayors and citywide councilmen—systems that lasted until the 1970s. While standard accounts of the history of American city government associate reform successes with small, homogenous suburbs such as Winnetka, Illinois, and Scarsdale, New York, Bridges shows that attention to the Southwest changes this picture considerably. There, reform cities included Dallas, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Antonio, which had large and diverse populations. While Albuquerque, Austin, and San Jose were smaller, they too were ethnically diverse cities ruled by reform systems. Houston, which did not adopt reform government, serves as a foil to help to unravel the politics of municipal reform in the region. Bridges calls the regimes of the southwestern reform cities "Big City Reform," shows that this variant of municipal government was indeed a very important part of the national picture, and devotes most of the book to showing just how government and politics worked under it.	1
Big City Reform was undemocratic. It rested on a panoply of devices for disfranchising the poor and, particularly, African-Americans and Chicanos. Some of these, like the high Texas poll tax, were statewide laws, part of the legacy of southern race relations. Others used familiar strategies developed by northern urban reformers (the unsuccessful "morning glories") to dampen voter participation: citywide elections, nonpartisanship, elections scheduled in off-years and odd months, few and inconvenient polling places. Reformers nominated candidates for city offices in the closed-door meetings of nonpartisan slating groups, which even their members had to admit were actually political parties. Once in office, the reformers provided what their core constituents wanted: frugal government, low taxes, good schools, and high-quality services and amenities for Anglo middle-class neighborhoods. There was little or no corruption and minimal provision of social services for poorer residents. Reform governments also pursued growth agendas including the aggressive annexation of outlying areas, whose developers and middle-class residents enjoyed the extension of services and amenities in a pattern that leapfrogged past poor neighborhoods and communities of color. Bridges demonstrates this point by surveying the locations of libraries and parks, and noting the long-term neglect of basic services (such as drainage) in African-American and Chicano areas of certain cities. The growth agendas finally caught up with reform regimes in the 1970s, by which time they had accumulated large municipal debts and begun to face a new environmentalist resistance to growth among their core Anglo middle-class constituents.	2
Middle-class discontent, however, is not what destroyed the reform regimes. The civil rights movement organized communities of color to oppose their exclusion from what an anti-reform Dallas politician in 1965 called the "'father knows best' approach" to city government (176). District elections and the end of suffrage restrictions doomed Big City Reform. This, Bridges concludes, has finally ended the distinctiveness of southwestern city government. It has left a legacy, however, in the relative political inexperience of urban communities of color in the Southwest.	3
Framed as a contribution to a political science literature that has excluded the Southwest, this book actually makes its most important theoretical contribution by stressing the importance of rules and institutions in shaping political culture. Bridges rejects cultural explanations of reform. Reformers in the Southwest campaigned against the systems of government that they overthrew, rather than invoking ethnocultural language or attacking particular "bosses" or "ward-heelers." They also benefited from the institutional weakness of political parties in the region. The main reformist arguments were that reform charters would enable city governments to do a better and more professionalized job at promoting and managing growth and would be better able to resist the temptations to corruption offered by powerful utility companies.	4
The chief weakness of this book is its organization. Bridges adopts a chronological and thematic approach that discusses all of the cities simultaneously, which makes it difficult to follow the particular histories and remember the key players in any one of the cities. Clearly, though, this reflects a tradeoff, since Bridges is arguing for the distinctiveness of the Southwest, while she also is arguing for the shared history of its cities. There are also occasional errors such as referring to the IWW as the "International" rather than the "Industrial Workers of the World." Nevertheless, Morning Glories tells an important story convincingly. Old debates about city politics that were based on the experience of the Northeast and Midwest, particularly the one about whether it was bosses or reformers who represented democratic aspirations, are renewed by Bridges's evidence from the Southwest. Now that we know what reformers did when they won, the bosses look a little better. Bridges makes this point explicit in her conclusion. Chicago's heritage of machine politics, with voter participation rates much higher than those of the southwestern reform cities, allowed a victorious Carol Mosely Braun to tell her African-American constituents in 1992, "we know how to do this" (217). One might still question this interpretation of machine politics, but Bridges has made it very difficult to pose "reform" as a more democratic historical alternative.	5
Robin L. Einhorn University of California, Berkeley

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