At its zenith during Mayor Richard J. Daley’s era, Chicago’s political machine was an enormous self-sustaining network, and the city ran on it for decades. And by the time the younger Burke turned ...

As President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt finished speaking, he signaled Anton Cermak with a flick of his wrist to meet him at Roosevelt’s nearby car. Chicago’s mayor was in Miami to convey his ...

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Chicago’s machine politics is legendary, but the power play now on display in the Windy City would make the late Richard Daley blush. On Friday Mayor Brandon Johnson’s handpicked school board voted ...

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In the 1919 mayoral campaign in Chicago, a young Richard J. Daley signed up as a precinct captain in Chicago’s 11th Ward, and he hitched his wagon to the Cook County Democratic Organization, otherwise ...

Ed Burke was born into the machine. The son of a Democratic ward boss and 14th Ward alderman, the younger Burke grew up in a home steeped in Chicago’s particular street-level realpolitik: Smooth over ...