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https://www.videri.org/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=Kltpzyxm Videri - User contributions [en] 2026-04-05T08:45:32Z User contributions MediaWiki 1.24.1 https://www.videri.org/index.php?title=Dark_Rose&diff=1474 Dark Rose 2013-10-30T04:57:26Z

<p>Kltpzyxm: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Infobox book<br /> | name = Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland<br /> | author = Robert C. Donnelly<br /> | publisher = University of Washington Press<br /> | pub_date = 2011-05-06<br /> | pages = 208<br /> | isbn = 9780295991115<br /> | image = [[File:Dark_Rose_cover.jpeg|200px|alt=Cover]]<br /> }}<br /> <br /> <br /> In February 1957, two reporters inaugurated the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field by exploding the reputation of Portland, Oregon; instead of the sleepy frontier city people had imagined – if they had any conception of the city at all – the Portland that emerged from the testimony was infested with prostitution and gambling, overseen and coordinated by a craftily constructed alliance of organized crime, the Teamsters Union, and local politicians. Thomas Donnelly focuses on this era of Portland's disreputable past in his analysis ''Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland''. What emerges from his narrative of the city's struggles with organized crime – and the local business and political leadership's complicity with it – provides a stark contrast with Portland's current mythology of itself as an urban utopia. Portland's contemporary status as a progressive stronghold among American cities may be well-earned, its “livability” a function of its grassroots, neighborhood-based activism, environmentalism, mass transit, and Urban Growth Boundary and other legacies of the 1960s and '70s; what Donnelly's narrative provides is an important corrective to notions of the city as a timeless, untroubled oasis of liberalism.<br /> <br /> Donnelly situates his story at the intersection of multiple streams of national experiences, including the histories of American cities, the intertwined relationship of organized crime and labor, and the specifics of Portland itself. ''Dark Rose'' performs a delicate balancing act, then: Donnelly casts Portland as both representative of these larger national dynamics and as an deviation from them, as both an example and an exception. For Portland to be worthy of study, then, it can not simply be just another city whose “demonstrated patterns of vice and corruption” are “consistent with those present in in larger U.S. cities” (5); for Donnelly, the particulars of Portland's “exceptional case study” also demonstrate the ways in which the city may be different from the norm, especially in the unique circumstances of its vice and corruption's resilient resistance to the best efforts of progressive reform (5).<br /> <br /> To help ground the the specifics of Portland's exceptionalism, Donnelly contextualizes the scandalous events of the 1950s by briefly detailing their specific, particular antecedents. Donnelly conducts a chronological survey that leans heavily on the work of Portland historians Carl Abbott, Jewel Lansing, and E. Kimbark MacColl, synthesizing these secondary sources (among others) into a tale that casts Portland as a boomtown characterized by simultaneous waves of criminality and economic growth. By the 1880s, the growth spurred by east coast elites' investments in the lumber and Willamette River-based shipping industries brought many men looking for work to its environs; as happened in other cities, this influx of laborers “stimulated the construction of saloons, dancehalls, and brothels where men indulged in various 'sinful' pleasures” (26). The city's business elites profited not only from their legitimate enterprises, but by providing utilities, maintenance contracts, and real estate, they saw returns from the rapid increase of disreputable ones as well; having hands in two pockets of Portlanders, then, the business community was “disinclined to stifle the profitable gambling, liquor, and prostitution operations that reformers wanted to eliminate” (27). Portland's rampant vice was often met with several Progressive attempts to reform the local government's cozy relationship with criminality; as one example among many, Donnelly cites the efforts of Mayor Harry Lane, a Democrat who successfully ran against the Republican machine in 1905 on “a platform supporting the working class and … [opposing] corporate interests and political corruption” (38). While Donnelly notes that Lane's administration is remembered mostly “for its fight for morality and humanity” (38), it is probably more noteworthy that it was ineffective; its “meager results,” undermined by a city council that would simply reverse his vetoes, made “clear that big business and political bossism ruled the city” (39). Joe Simon, Lane's successor after the election of 1909, quickly worked to unfetter the liquor trade and lift restrictions that curtailed the prostitution businesses, returning the city to (scurrilous) business as usual. In his campaign against Harry Lane, Thomas Devlin sloganeered that “The reformer ultimately fails” (38; Donnelly cites Lansing's ''Portland'' as the source); while Devlin lost his race, his prophecy seemed to be accurate, as Progressive reforms never seemed to take hold in the city, allowing vice to fester until the middle of the 20th century.<br /> <br /> The primary focus of ''Dark Rose'' – the interaction of Portland's political and vice interests with a new player, the Teamsters Union – begins in the post-WWII era. As Donnelly explains (citing both the Portland City Club's introspective report ''Conscience of a City'' and Gardner and Olson's study of urban corruption, ''Theft of the City''), unlike other cities whose corruption diminished with the repeal of Prohibition and the introduction of the New Deal, Portland's vice industries grew dramatically in the run-up to the war, bucking the national trend and becoming better organized, concentrated and efficient. The war itself spurred a massive growth spurt in Portland's population, thanks to its pivotal role in the shipbuilding industry; as Donnelly notes (citing Abbott), the rapid influx of young men who came to work in the booming Portland economy also fueled the vice industries, who were eager to relieve them of their wages. The political leaders of the era – Mayor Earl Riley and Police Chief Lee Jenkins – believed that “a policy of toleration and cooperation in Portland was easier to administer than trying to police the illegal activities all over the city” (57), a policy made even more convincing by the graft proceeds that made their way into their pockets (Donnelly quotes MacColl's suggestion that Riley took in $60K per month in protection money and kept the sum in a safe in his office at City Hall!, 58). More importantly for the unfolding of the Portland '50s scandal, though, was the introduction of a self-appointed “vice czar” (60) into the mix, a bootlegger and brothel owner who stitched disparate gambling parlors, pinball machine halls, shady bars, and whorehouses into an empire. Expertly distributing graft among police and politicians while strong-arming those who would challenge his authority, James Elkins emerged in the late 1940s as the focal point of Portland's vice and corruption.<br /> <br /> The bulk of ''Dark Rose'' concerns itself with Elkins's domination of Portland's vice industry, his mastery (and corruption) of local politics, and his response to the Teamsters' decision to move into Portland and take over his racket. Donnelly's account becomes more compelling, robust, and distinctive as it circles its main interest: Donnelly leaves much of his reliance on secondary sources behind as he turns his narrative towards Elkins, employing impressive investigative chops in his sifting through 1950s Oregon newspaper accounts, municipal legal proceedings, Congressional testimony, FBI and police reports, wiretap transcripts, and personal interviews with some of the story's key actors (including Wallace Turner, one of the two reporters who broke the story in the first place). What emerges is a detailed, methodical chronology of the events that brought Portland to the attention of Congressional inquiry, convincingly revealing a city overrun with organized crime and political corruption.<br /> <br /> As Donnelly carefully details, Elkins pursued a two-prong approach to running Portland's vice. Politically, he orchestrated payoffs and kickbacks to “every level of city government” (63), extending his reach by bribing local law enforcement and financing the election of representatives small and large (including the mayor himself, Fred Peterson). As a criminal entrepreneur, he employed a scam that assured him a monopoly: he would “authorize” aspiring racketeers a franchise into his gambling or prostitution networks, offering protection from The Law's interference in exchange for a weekly payoff. After a while, though, he would coordinate police raids that would temporarily shut the criminal businesses down, strangling the local operator's profits; after several repetitions of payoffs-and-shutdowns, the frustrated would-be entrepreneurs would be forced to abandon their operations, leaving Elkins with new, uncontested revenues and profits. Once Elkins established his rhythm of hostile takeovers of local criminal businessmen, his criminal empire paced the growth of the booming city itself; because of the time-tested tolerance of graft and political corruption that Donnelly documented earlier, Portland's citizens rarely rebelled against its criminal element (a crusading anti-crime mayor, Dorothy McCullough Lee, was elected to one term in 1948, but the city's business elites effectively squelched her efforts at reform, leaving her to be defeated by her crooked successor Peterson in 1952). By the mid-1950s, newly affluent Portlanders fled for the suburbs on the east side of the Willamette leaving the crime-ridden central city behind to fester, ignoring the efforts of crusading reporters and reformers; as Donnelly explains, “Elkins and other vice racketeers were generally successful because most Portlanders simply did not care” (72).<br /> <br /> One group of people who did care about the rise of organized, rationalized, efficient crime in Portland, though, was the unscrupulous, power-and-revenue-hungry leadership of the Teamsters Union. Seeing an opportunity in Elkins's one-man control of the city, the Teamsters began to try to apply their organizational strong-arming to its gambling and prostitution industries. In an elaborate scheme, the Teamsters' official Clyde Crosby met with Elkins and William Langley, a local lawyer who aspired to become Portland's District Attorney; after maneuvering Langley into office, the Teamsters and Elkins were in position to make Portland's rackets more efficient than ever. Elkins rightfully sensed that he was destined to be squeezed out by the powerful union, though; laying a trap for both the union and local law enforcement, Elkins secretly taped hours of conversations between his Teamster collaborators, DA Langley, and scores of other criminals and local officials. Rather than see his foes succeed in dethroning him, Elkins went public and brought his recordings to reporters at the daily ''Oregonian'' – and the story became a local sensation. The scandalous, sensational headlines ultimately reached eastward to Washington, where Senators John McClellan and Robert Kennedy were collecting evidence in their mounting investigation of union racketeering; upon visiting Portland and learning about the depth of the scandal first-hand, Kennedy decided that the Portland story would be “crucial” to their case against union racketeers in the larger cities of New York, Detroit, and Chicago (129). The McClellan Committee ultimately called nearly two dozen witnesses from Portland between 1957 and 1960, including Elkins, Langley, and Crosby as well as the newly elected – and scandal-scarred – mayor, Terry Schrunk. Before the Committee adjourned, Portland was laid bare as a city struggling with organized crime, its parade of criminals providing “the crucial evidence for the committee to link the Teamsters with municipal corruption and organized crime” (143).<br /> <br /> What were the net effects of the Portland Vice Scandals? Donnelly's analysis is both illuminating and frustrating, the “moral” of the story unsatisfying and its narrative anticlimactic. While one might think that the city would be chastened or humbled – Senator Karl Mundt believed that the “people of Portland” would be embarrassed to have a “mayor who flunks a lie-detector test and a district attorney hiding behind the Fifth Amendment” (144, from the McClellan Committee hearings) – the opposite appeared to be the case, with many Portlanders rejecting the Committee's findings as a “witch hunt” (145). Mayor Terry Schrunk, whom the committee strongly suggested was tied to Elkins, found himself accused of corruption back home, with no less a luminary than Robert Kennedy testifying against him; RFK's celebrity did not sway the courtroom, though, and – failed lie-detector test be damned – Schrunk was exonerated. Schrunk became one of the city's more popular mayors, serving four terms (1957-1972), while being, in Donnelly's estimation, ineffective. On Schrunk's watch, “no changes were made to Portland's model of municipal government” (149); having become gun-shy after his legal difficulties, Schrunk governed conservatively, making him less like the “great mayors of the 1950s and 1960s” like Philadelphia's Clark or New York's Lindsay (150), and more representative of “the political consensus of the 1950s” (150, Donnelly quoting Abbott). Three different Portland grand juries issued 115 indictments between 1956 and 1957; ultimately only Langley, Elkins, and one of Elkins's lieutenants were found guilty (152; a madam was fined $250 too), with Langley's punishment being only a $428 fine. Donnelly maintains that “Portland provides the basis for a broader understanding of issues of urban corruption and crime in American cities” (162), and his belief that the city's vice scandal provides “incredible insight into how labor, business and government operated in the 'open city' of the twentieth century” (162) seems well-founded by his detailed, revealing expose; unfortunately, the conclusion that “Beneath all the lovely lawns and rose gardens there was an immense amount of corruption” (Donnelly quoting Turner, in an interview, 162) leaves readers with a murky, melancholy inconclusiveness. Donnelly ends his Portland expose with Schrunk entrenched in office and a semi-retired Elkins killed in an Arizona mysterious auto accident in 1968. Donnelly does not walk readers from Schrunk's water-treading leadership to that of his successor, "great mayor" Neil Goldschmidt, the trailblazing progressive leader (and future Oregon governor) who was among the critical factors leading to Portland's current reputation as a mecca for community involvement, ecological foresightedness, and visionary mass transportation; readers curious as to how the city might have lurched from one extreme to another are best served by turning towards Abbott and Lansing themselves. Donnelly also does not use the example of the '50s vice scandals to suggest a continuity with more contemporary scandals, such as Goldschmidt's well-guarded statutory rape scandal (a secret kept quiet for decades, in part, by the ''Oregonian''), Sam Adams's 2007 sex scandal, or the workplace-infidelity scandal within the current mayor's Health Department of the summer of 2013; interested readers might want to turn through the archives of Portland's alternative weeklies for more details of those events, and reach conclusions of their own. In Portland -- if not other cities -- progressivism does not seem to preclude scandalous behavior from elected officials; Devlin's ominous warning of "The reformer ultimately fails" is what haunted this reader upon closing ''Dark Rose''. <br /> <br /> Donnelly's book is a provocative, rigorously researched treatment of the interaction of crime and corruption in Portland, and, along with Phil Stanford's journalistic, noir-inflected ''Portland Confidential'' and Finn J.D. John's fun, "lusty" collection of late 19th and early 20th century anecdotes ''Wicked Portland'', makes a worthy addition to the growing library of works dedicated to detailing the seedier side of Portland's past.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Twentieth Century United States]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Wikify]]<br /> [[Category:Urban Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Book Summaries]]<br /> [[Category:Portland, Oregon]]<br /> [[Category:Robert C. Donnelly]]</div>

Kltpzyxm https://www.videri.org/index.php?title=Dark_Rose&diff=1473 Dark Rose 2013-10-30T04:47:09Z

<p>Kltpzyxm: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Infobox book<br /> | name = Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland<br /> | author = Robert C. Donnelly<br /> | publisher = University of Washington Press<br /> | pub_date = 2011-05-06<br /> | pages = 208<br /> | isbn = 9780295991115<br /> | image = [[File:Dark_Rose_cover.jpeg|200px|alt=Cover]]<br /> }}<br /> <br /> <br /> In February 1957, two reporters inaugurated the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field by exploding the reputation of Portland, Oregon; instead of the sleepy frontier city people had imagined – if they had any conception of the city at all – the Portland that emerged from the testimony was infested with prostitution and gambling, overseen and coordinated by a craftily constructed alliance of organized crime, the Teamsters Union, and local politicians. Thomas Donnelly focuses on this era of Portland's disreputable past in his analysis ''Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland''. What emerges from his narrative of the city's struggles with organized crime – and the local business and political leadership's complicity with it – provides a stark contrast with Portland's current mythology of itself as an urban utopia. Portland's contemporary status as a progressive stronghold among American cities may be well-earned, its “livability” a function of its grassroots, neighborhood-based activism, environmentalism, mass transit, and Urban Growth Boundary and other legacies of the 1960s and '70s; what Donnelly's narrative provides is an important corrective to notions of the city as a timeless, untroubled oasis of liberalism.<br /> <br /> Donnelly situates his story at the intersection of multiple streams of national experiences, including the histories of American cities, the intertwined relationship of organized crime and labor, and the specifics of Portland itself. ''Dark Rose'' performs a delicate balancing act, then: Donnelly casts Portland as both representative of these larger national dynamics and as an deviation from them, as both an example and an exception. For Portland to be worthy of study, then, it can not simply be just another city whose “demonstrated patterns of vice and corruption” are “consistent with those present in in larger U.S. cities” (5); for Donnelly, the particulars of Portland's “exceptional case study” also demonstrate the ways in which the city may be different from the norm, especially in the unique circumstances of its vice and corruption's resilient resistance to the best efforts of progressive reform (5).<br /> <br /> To help ground the the specifics of Portland's exceptionalism, Donnelly contextualizes the scandalous events of the 1950s by briefly detailing their specific, particular antecedents. Donnelly conducts a chronological survey that leans heavily on the work of Portland historians Carl Abbott, Jewel Lansing, and E. Kimbark MacColl, synthesizing these secondary sources (among others) into a tale that casts Portland as a boomtown characterized by simultaneous waves of criminality and economic growth. By the 1880s, the growth spurred by east coast elites' investments in the lumber and Willamette River-based shipping industries brought many men looking for work to its environs; as happened in other cities, this influx of laborers “stimulated the construction of saloons, dancehalls, and brothels where men indulged in various 'sinful' pleasures” (26). The city's business elites profited not only from their legitimate enterprises, but by providing utilities, maintenance contracts, and real estate, they saw returns from the rapid increase of disreputable ones as well; having hands in two pockets of Portlanders, then, the business community was “disinclined to stifle the profitable gambling, liquor, and prostitution operations that reformers wanted to eliminate” (27). Portland's rampant vice was often met with several Progressive attempts to reform the local government's cozy relationship with criminality; as one example among many, Donnelly cites the efforts of Mayor Harry Lane, a Democrat who successfully ran against the Republican machine in 1905 on “a platform supporting the working class and … [opposing] corporate interests and political corruption” (38). While Donnelly notes that Lane's administration is remembered mostly “for its fight for morality and humanity” (38), it is probably more noteworthy that it was ineffective; its “meager results,” undermined by a city council that would simply reverse his vetoes, made “clear that big business and political bossism ruled the city” (39). Joe Simon, Lane's successor after the election of 1909, quickly worked to unfetter the liquor trade and lift restrictions that curtailed the prostitution businesses, returning the city to (scurrilous) business as usual. In his campaign against Harry Lane, Thomas Devlin sloganeered that “The reformer ultimately fails” (38; Donnelly cites Lansing's ''Portland'' as the source); while Devlin lost his race, his prophecy seemed to be accurate, as Progressive reforms never seemed to take hold in the city, allowing vice to fester until the middle of the 20th century.<br /> <br /> The primary focus of ''Dark Rose'' – the interaction of Portland's political and vice interests with a new player, the Teamsters Union – begins in the post-WWII era. As Donnelly explains (citing both the Portland City Club's introspective report ''Conscience of a City'' and Gardner and Olson's study of urban corruption, ''Theft of the City''), unlike other cities whose corruption diminished with the repeal of Prohibition and the introduction of the New Deal, Portland's vice industries grew dramatically in the run-up to the war, bucking the national trend and becoming better organized, concentrated and efficient. The war itself spurred a massive growth spurt in Portland's population, thanks to its pivotal role in the shipbuilding industry; as Donnelly notes (citing Abbott), the rapid influx of young men who came to work in the booming Portland economy also fueled the vice industries, who were eager to relieve them of their wages. The political leaders of the era – Mayor Earl Riley and Police Chief Lee Jenkins – believed that “a policy of toleration and cooperation in Portland was easier to administer than trying to police the illegal activities all over the city” (57), a policy made even more convincing by the graft proceeds that made their way into their pockets (Donnelly quotes MacColl's suggestion that Riley took in $60K per month in protection money and kept the sum in a safe in his office at City Hall!, 58). More importantly for the unfolding of the Portland '50s scandal, though, was the introduction of a self-appointed “vice czar” (60) into the mix, a bootlegger and brothel owner who stitched disparate gambling parlors, pinball machine halls, shady bars, and whorehouses into an empire. Expertly distributing graft among police and politicians while strong-arming those who would challenge his authority, James Elkins emerged in the late 1940s as the focal point of Portland's vice and corruption.<br /> <br /> The bulk of ''Dark Rose'' concerns itself with Elkins's domination of Portland's vice industry, his mastery (and corruption) of local politics, and his response to the Teamsters' decision to move into Portland and take over his racket. Donnelly's account becomes more compelling, robust, and distinctive as it circles its main interest: Donnelly leaves much of his reliance on secondary sources behind as he turns his narrative towards Elkins, employing impressive investigative chops in his sifting through 1950s Oregon newspaper accounts, municipal legal proceedings, Congressional testimony, FBI and police reports, wiretap transcripts, and personal interviews with some of the story's key actors (including Wallace Turner, one of the two reporters who broke the story in the first place). What emerges is a detailed, methodical chronology of the events that brought Portland to the attention of Congressional inquiry, convincingly revealing a city overrun with organized crime and political corruption.<br /> <br /> As Donnelly carefully details, Elkins pursued a two-prong approach to running Portland's vice. Politically, he orchestrated payoffs and kickbacks to “every level of city government” (63), extending his reach by bribing local law enforcement and financing the election of representatives small and large (including the mayor himself, Fred Peterson). As a criminal entrepreneur, he employed a scam that assured him a monopoly: he would “authorize” aspiring racketeers a franchise into his gambling or prostitution networks, offering protection from The Law's interference in exchange for a weekly payoff. After a while, though, he would coordinate police raids that would temporarily shut the criminal businesses down, strangling the local operator's profits; after several repetitions of payoffs-and-shutdowns, the frustrated would-be entrepreneurs would be forced to abandon their operations, leaving Elkins with new, uncontested revenues and profits. Once Elkins established his rhythm of hostile takeovers of local criminal businessmen, his criminal empire paced the growth of the booming city itself; because of the time-tested tolerance of graft and political corruption that Donnelly documented earlier, Portland's citizens rarely rebelled against its criminal element (a crusading anti-crime mayor, Dorothy McCullough Lee, was elected to one term in 1948, but the city's business elites effectively squelched her efforts at reform, leaving her to be defeated by her crooked successor Peterson in 1952). By the mid-1950s, newly affluent Portlanders fled for the suburbs on the east side of the Willamette leaving the crime-ridden central city behind to fester, ignoring the efforts of crusading reporters and reformers; as Donnelly explains, “Elkins and other vice racketeers were generally successful because most Portlanders simply did not care” (72).<br /> <br /> One group of people who did care about the rise of organized, rationalized, efficient crime in Portland, though, was the unscrupulous, power-and-revenue-hungry leadership of the Teamsters Union. Seeing an opportunity in Elkins's one-man control of the city, the Teamsters began to try to apply their organizational strong-arming to its gambling and prostitution industries. In an elaborate scheme, the Teamsters' official Clyde Crosby met with Elkins and William Langley, a local lawyer who aspired to become Portland's District Attorney; after maneuvering Langley into office, the Teamsters and Elkins were in position to make Portland's rackets more efficient than ever. Elkins rightfully sensed that he was destined to be squeezed out by the powerful union, though; laying a trap for both the union and local law enforcement, Elkins secretly taped hours of conversations between his Teamster collaborators, DA Langley, and scores of other criminals and local officials. Rather than see his foes succeed in dethroning him, Elkins went public and brought his recordings to reporters at the daily ''Oregonian'' – and the story became a local sensation. The scandalous, sensational headlines ultimately reached eastward to Washington, where Senators John McClellan and Robert Kennedy were collecting evidence in their mounting investigation of union racketeering; upon visiting Portland and learning about the depth of the scandal first-hand, Kennedy decided that the Portland story would be “crucial” to their case against union racketeers in the larger cities of New York, Detroit, and Chicago (129). The McClellan Committee ultimately called nearly two dozen witnesses from Portland between 1957 and 1960, including Elkins, Langley, and Crosby as well as the newly elected – and scandal-scarred – mayor, Terry Schrunk. Before the Committee adjourned, Portland was laid bare as a city struggling with organized crime, its parade of criminals providing “the crucial evidence for the committee to link the Teamsters with municipal corruption and organized crime” (143).<br /> <br /> What were the net effects of the Portland Vice Scandals? Donnelly's analysis is both illuminating and frustrating, the “moral” of the story unsatisfying and its narrative anticlimactic. While one might think that the city would be chastened or humbled – Senator Karl Mundt believed that the “people of Portland” would be embarrassed to have a “mayor who flunks a lie-detector test and a district attorney hiding behind the Fifth Amendment” (144, from the McClellan Committee hearings) – the opposite appeared to be the case, with many Portlanders rejecting the Committee's findings as a “witch hunt” (145). Mayor Terry Schrunk, whom the committee strongly suggested was tied to Elkins, found himself accused of corruption back home, with no less a luminary than Robert Kennedy testifying against him; RFK's celebrity did not sway the courtroom, though, and – failed lie-detector test be damned – Schrunk was exonerated. Schrunk became one of the city's more popular mayors, serving four terms (1957-1972), while being, in Donnelly's estimation, ineffective. On Schrunk's watch, “no changes were made to Portland's model of municipal government” (149); having become gun-shy after his legal difficulties, Schrunk governed conservatively, making him less like the “great mayors of the 1950s and 1960s” like Philadelphia's Clark or New York's Lindsay (150), and more representative of “the political consensus of the 1950s” (150, Donnelly quoting Abbott). Three different Portland grand juries issued 115 indictments between 1956 and 1957; ultimately only Langley, Elkins, and one of Elkins's lieutenants were found guilty (152; a madam was fined $250 too), with Langley's punishment being only a $428 fine. Donnelly maintains that “Portland provides the basis for a broader understanding of issues of urban corruption and crime in American cities” (162), and his belief that the city's vice scandal provides “incredible insight into how labor, business and government operated in the 'open city' of the twentieth century” (162) seems well-founded by his detailed, revealing expose; unfortunately, the conclusion that “Beneath all the lovely lawns and rose gardens there was an immense amount of corruption” (Donnelly quoting Turner, in an interview, 162) leaves readers with a murky, melancholy inconclusiveness. Donnelly ends his Portland expose with Schrunk entrenched in office and a semi-retired Elkins killed in an Arizona mysterious auto accident in 1968. Donnelly does not walk readers from Schrunk's water-treading leadership to that of his successor, "great mayor" Neil Goldschmidt, the trailblazing progressive leader (and future Oregon governor) who was among the critical factors leading to Portland's current reputation as a mecca for community involvement, ecological foresightedness, and visionary mass transportation; readers curious as to how the city might have lurched from one extreme to another are best served by turning towards Abbott and Lansing themselves. Donnelly also does not use the example of the '50s vice scandals to suggest a continuity with more contemporary scandals, such as Goldschmidt's well-guarded statutory rape scandal (a secret kept quiet for decades, in part, by the ''Oregonian''), Sam Adams's 2007 sex scandal, or the workplace-infidelity scandal within the current mayor's Health Department of the summer of 2013; interested readers might want to turn through the archives of Portland's alternative weeklies for more details of those events, and reach conclusions of their own. In Portland -- if not other cities -- progressivism does not seem to preclude scandalous behavior from elected officials; Devlin's ominous warning of "The reformer ultimately fails" is what haunted this reader upon closing ''Dark Rose''.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Twentieth Century United States]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Wikify]]<br /> [[Category:Urban Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Book Summaries]]<br /> [[Category:Portland, Oregon]]<br /> [[Category:Robert C. Donnelly]]</div>

Kltpzyxm https://www.videri.org/index.php?title=Dark_Rose&diff=1472 Dark Rose 2013-10-30T04:42:07Z

<p>Kltpzyxm: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Infobox book<br /> | name = Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland<br /> | author = Robert C. Donnelly<br /> | publisher = University of Washington Press<br /> | pub_date = 2011-05-06<br /> | pages = 208<br /> | isbn = 9780295991115<br /> | image = [[File:Dark_Rose_cover.jpeg|200px|alt=Cover]]<br /> }}<br /> <br /> <br /> In February 1957, two reporters inaugurated the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field by exploding the reputation of Portland, Oregon; instead of the sleepy frontier city people had imagined – if they had any conception of the city at all – the Portland that emerged from the testimony was infested with prostitution and gambling, overseen and coordinated by a craftily constructed alliance of organized crime, the Teamsters Union, and local politicians. Thomas Donnelly focuses on this era of Portland's disreputable past in his analysis Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland. What emerges from his narrative of the city's struggles with organized crime – and the local business and political leadership's complicity with it – provides a stark contrast with Portland's current mythology of itself as an urban utopia. Portland's contemporary status as a progressive stronghold among American cities may be well-earned, its “livability” a function of its grassroots, neighborhood-based activism, environmentalism, mass transit, and Urban Growth Boundary and other legacies of the 1960s and '70s; what Donnelly's narrative provides is an important corrective to notions of the city as a timeless, untroubled oasis of liberalism.<br /> <br /> Donnelly situates his story at the intersection of multiple streams of national experiences, including the histories of American cities, the intertwined relationship of organized crime and labor, and the specifics of Portland itself. Dark Rose performs a delicate balancing act, then: Donnelly casts Portland as both representative of these larger national dynamics and as an deviation from them, as both an example and an exception. For Portland to be worthy of study, then, it can not simply be just another city whose “demonstrated patterns of vice and corruption” are “consistent with those present in in larger U.S. cities” (5); for Donnelly, the particulars of Portland's “exceptional case study” also demonstrate the ways in which the city may be different from the norm, especially in the unique circumstances of its vice and corruption's resilient resistance to the best efforts of progressive reform (5).<br /> <br /> To help ground the the specifics of Portland's exceptionalism, Donnelly contextualizes the scandalous events of the 1950s by briefly detailing their specific, particular antecedents. Donnelly conducts a chronological survey that leans heavily on the work of Portland historians Carl Abbott, Jewel Lansing, and E. Kimbark MacColl, synthesizing these secondary sources (among others) into a tale that casts Portland as a boomtown characterized by simultaneous waves of criminality and economic growth. By the 1880s, the growth spurred by east coast elites' investments in the lumber and Willamette River-based shipping industries brought many men looking for work to its environs; as happened in other cities, this influx of laborers “stimulated the construction of saloons, dancehalls, and brothels where men indulged in various 'sinful' pleasures” (26). The city's business elites profited not only from their legitimate enterprises, but by providing utilities, maintenance contracts, and real estate, they saw returns from the rapid increase of disreputable ones as well; having hands in two pockets of Portlanders, then, the business community was “disinclined to stifle the profitable gambling, liquor, and prostitution operations that reformers wanted to eliminate” (27). Portland's rampant vice was often met with several Progressive attempts to reform the local government's cozy relationship with criminality; as one example among many, Donnelly cites the efforts of Mayor Harry Lane, a Democrat who successfully ran against the Republican machine in 1905 on “a platform supporting the working class and … [opposing] corporate interests and political corruption” (38). While Donnelly notes that Lane's administration is remembered mostly “for its fight for morality and humanity” (38), it is probably more noteworthy that it was ineffective; its “meager results,” undermined by a city council that would simply reverse his vetoes, made “clear that big business and political bossism ruled the city” (39). Joe Simon, Lane's successor after the election of 1909, quickly worked to unfetter the liquor trade and lift restrictions that curtailed the prostitution businesses, returning the city to (scurrilous) business as usual. In his campaign against Harry Lane, Thomas Devlin sloganeered that “The reformer ultimately fails” (38; Donnelly cites Lansing's Portland as the source); while Devlin lost his race, his prophecy seemed to be accurate, as Progressive reforms never seemed to take hold in the city, allowing vice to fester until the middle of the 20th century.<br /> <br /> The primary focus of Dark Rose – the interaction of Portland's political and vice interests with a new player, the Teamsters Union – begins in the post-WWII era. As Donnelly explains (citing both the Portland City Club's introspective report Conscience of a City and Gardner and Olson's study of urban corruption, Theft of the City), unlike other cities whose corruption diminished with the repeal of Prohibition and the introduction of the New Deal, Portland's vice industries grew dramatically in the run-up to the war, bucking the national trend and becoming better organized, concentrated and efficient. The war itself spurred a massive growth spurt in Portland's population, thanks to its pivotal role in the shipbuilding industry; as Donnelly notes (citing Abbott), the rapid influx of young men who came to work in the booming Portland economy also fueled the vice industries, who were eager to relieve them of their wages. The political leaders of the era – Mayor Earl Riley and Police Chief Lee Jenkins – believed that “a policy of toleration and cooperation in Portland was easier to administer than trying to police the illegal activities all over the city” (57), a policy made even more convincing by the graft proceeds that made their way into their pockets (Donnelly quotes MacColl's suggestion that Riley took in $60K per month in protection money and kept the sum in a safe in his office at City Hall!, 58). More importantly for the unfolding of the Portland '50s scandal, though, was the introduction of a self-appointed “vice czar” (60) into the mix, a bootlegger and brothel owner who stitched disparate gambling parlors, pinball machine halls, shady bars, and whorehouses into an empire. Expertly distributing graft among police and politicians while strong-arming those who would challenge his authority, James Elkins emerged in the late 1940s as the focal point of Portland's vice and corruption.<br /> <br /> The bulk of Dark Rose concerns itself with Elkins's domination of Portland's vice industry, his mastery (and corruption) of local politics, and his response to the Teamsters' decision to move into Portland and take over his racket. Donnelly's account becomes more compelling, robust, and distinctive as it circles its main interest: Donnelly leaves much of his reliance on secondary sources behind as he turns his narrative towards Elkins, employing impressive investigative chops in his sifting through 1950s Oregon newspaper accounts, municipal legal proceedings, Congressional testimony, FBI and police reports, wiretap transcripts, and personal interviews with some of the story's key actors (including Wallace Turner, one of the two reporters who broke the story in the first place). What emerges is a detailed, methodical chronology of the events that brought Portland to the attention of Congressional inquiry, convincingly revealing a city overrun with organized crime and political corruption.<br /> <br /> As Donnelly carefully details, Elkins pursued a two-prong approach to running Portland's vice. Politically, he orchestrated payoffs and kickbacks to “every level of city government” (63), extending his reach by bribing local law enforcement and financing the election of representatives small and large (including the mayor himself, Fred Peterson). As a criminal entrepreneur, he employed a scam that assured him a monopoly: he would “authorize” aspiring racketeers a franchise into his gambling or prostitution networks, offering protection from The Law's interference in exchange for a weekly payoff. After a while, though, he would coordinate police raids that would temporarily shut the criminal businesses down, strangling the local operator's profits; after several repetitions of payoffs-and-shutdowns, the frustrated would-be entrepreneurs would be forced to abandon their operations, leaving Elkins with new, uncontested revenues and profits. Once Elkins established his rhythm of hostile takeovers of local criminal businessmen, his criminal empire paced the growth of the booming city itself; because of the time-tested tolerance of graft and political corruption that Donnelly documented earlier, Portland's citizens rarely rebelled against its criminal element (a crusading anti-crime mayor, Dorothy McCullough Lee, was elected to one term in 1948, but the city's business elites effectively squelched her efforts at reform, leaving her to be defeated by her crooked successor Peterson in 1952). By the mid-1950s, newly affluent Portlanders fled for the suburbs on the east side of the Willamette leaving the crime-ridden central city behind to fester, ignoring the efforts of crusading reporters and reformers; as Donnelly explains, “Elkins and other vice racketeers were generally successful because most Portlanders simply did not care” (72).<br /> <br /> One group of people who did care about the rise of organized, rationalized, efficient crime in Portland, though, was the unscrupulous, power-and-revenue-hungry leadership of the Teamsters Union. Seeing an opportunity in Elkins's one-man control of the city, the Teamsters began to try to apply their organizational strong-arming to its gambling and prostitution industries. In an elaborate scheme, the Teamsters' official Clyde Crosby met with Elkins and William Langley, a local lawyer who aspired to become Portland's District Attorney; after maneuvering Langley into office, the Teamsters and Elkins were in position to make Portland's rackets more efficient than ever. Elkins rightfully sensed that he was destined to be squeezed out by the powerful union, though; laying a trap for both the union and local law enforcement, Elkins secretly taped hours of conversations between his Teamster collaborators, DA Langley, and scores of other criminals and local officials. Rather than see his foes succeed in dethroning him, Elkins went public and brought his recordings to reporters at the daily Oregonian – and the story became a local sensation. The scandalous, sensational headlines ultimately reached eastward to Washington, where Senators John McClellan and Robert Kennedy were collecting evidence in their mounting investigation of union racketeering; upon visiting Portland and learning about the depth of the scandal first-hand, Kennedy decided that the Portland story would be “crucial” to their case against union racketeers in the larger cities of New York, Detroit, and Chicago (129). The McClellan Committee ultimately called nearly two dozen witnesses from Portland between 1957 and 1960, including Elkins, Langley, and Crosby as well as the newly elected – and scandal-scarred – mayor, Terry Schrunk. Before the Committee adjourned, Portland was laid bare as a city struggling with organized crime, its parade of criminals providing “the crucial evidence for the committee to link the Teamsters with municipal corruption and organized crime” (143).<br /> <br /> What were the net effects of the Portland Vice Scandals? Donnelly's analysis is both illuminating and frustrating, the “moral” of the story unsatisfying and its narrative anticlimactic. While one might think that the city would be chastened or humbled – Senator Karl Mundt believed that the “people of Portland” would be embarrassed to have a “mayor who flunks a lie-detector test and a district attorney hiding behind the Fifth Amendment” (144, from the McClellan Committee hearings) – the opposite appeared to be the case, with many Portlanders rejecting the Committee's findings as a “witch hunt” (145). Mayor Terry Schrunk, whom the committee strongly suggested was tied to Elkins, found himself accused of corruption back home, with no less a luminary than Robert Kennedy testifying against him; RFK's celebrity did not sway the courtroom, though, and – failed lie-detector test be damned – Schrunk was exonerated. Schrunk became one of the city's more popular mayors, serving four terms (1957-1972), while being, in Donnelly's estimation, ineffective. On Schrunk's watch, “no changes were made to Portland's model of municipal government” (149); having become gun-shy after his legal difficulties, Schrunk governed conservatively, making him less like the “great mayors of the 1950s and 1960s” like Philadelphia's Clark or New York's Lindsay (150), and more representative of “the political consensus of the 1950s” (150, Donnelly quoting Abbott). Three different Portland grand juries issued 115 indictments between 1956 and 1957; ultimately only Langley, Elkins, and one of Elkins's lieutenants were found guilty (152; a madam was fined $250 too), with Langley's punishment being only a $428 fine. Donnelly maintains that “Portland provides the basis for a broader understanding of issues of urban corruption and crime in American cities” (162), and his belief that the city's vice scandal provides “incredible insight into how labor, business and government operated in the 'open city' of the twentieth century” (162) seems well-founded by his detailed, revealing expose; unfortunately, the conclusion that “Beneath all the lovely lawns and rose gardens there was an immense amount of corruption” (Donnelly quoting Turner, in an interview, 162) leaves readers with a murky, melancholy inconclusiveness. Donnelly ends his Portland expose with Schrunk entrenched in office and a semi-retired Elkins killed in an Arizona mysterious auto accident in 1968. Donnelly does not walk readers from Schrunk's water-treading leadership to that of his successor, "great mayor" Neil Goldschmidt, the trailblazing progressive leader (and future Oregon governor) who was among the critical factors leading to Portland's current reputation as a mecca for community involvement, ecological foresightedness, and visionary mass transportation; readers curious as to how the city might have lurched from one extreme to another are best served by turning towards Abbott and Lansing themselves. Donnelly also does not use the example of the '50s vice scandals to suggest a continuity with more contemporary scandals, including Goldschmidt's well-guarded statutory rape scandal (a secret kept quiet for decades, in part, by the Oregonian), Sam Adams's 2007 sex scandal, or the workplace-infidelity scandal within the current mayor's Health Department of the summer of 2013; interested readers might want to turn through the archives of Portland's alternative weeklies for more details of those events, and reach conclusions of their own. In Portland -- if not other cities -- progressivism does not seem to preclude scandalous behavior from elected officials; the ominous warning of "The reformer ultimately fails" is what haunted this reader upon closing ''Dark Rose''.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Twentieth Century United States]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Wikify]]<br /> [[Category:Urban Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Book Summaries]]<br /> [[Category:Portland, Oregon]]<br /> [[Category:Robert C. Donnelly]]</div>

Kltpzyxm https://www.videri.org/index.php?title=Dark_Rose&diff=1471 Dark Rose 2013-10-30T02:43:35Z

<p>Kltpzyxm: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Infobox book<br /> | name = Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland<br /> | author = Robert C. Donnelly<br /> | publisher = University of Washington Press<br /> | pub_date = 2011-05-06<br /> | pages = 208<br /> | isbn = 9780295991115<br /> | image = [[File:Dark_Rose_cover.jpeg|200px|alt=Cover]]<br /> }}<br /> <br /> <br /> In February 1957, two reporters inaugurated the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field by exploding the reputation of Portland, Oregon; instead of the sleepy frontier city people had imagined – if they had any conception of the city at all – the Portland that emerged from the testimony was infested with prostitution and gambling, overseen and coordinated by a craftily constructed alliance of organized crime, the Teamsters Union, and local politicians. Thomas Donnelly focuses on this era of Portland's disreputable past in his analysis Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland. What emerges from his narrative of the city's struggles with organized crime – and the local business and political leadership's complicity with it – provides a stark contrast with Portland's current mythology of itself as an urban utopia. Portland's contemporary status as a progressive stronghold among American cities may be well-earned, its “livability” a function of its grassroots, neighborhood-based activism, environmentalism, mass transit, and Urban Growth Boundary and other legacies of the 1960s and '70s; what Donnelly's narrative provides is an important corrective to notions of the city as a timeless, untroubled oasis of liberalism.<br /> <br /> Donnelly situates his story at the intersection of multiple streams of national experiences, including the histories of American cities, the intertwined relationship of organized crime and labor, and the specifics of Portland itself. Dark Rose performs a delicate balancing act, then: Donnelly casts Portland as both representative of these larger national dynamics and as an deviation from them, as both an example and an exception. For Portland to be worthy of study, then, it can not simply be just another city whose “demonstrated patterns of vice and corruption” are “consistent with those present in in larger U.S. cities” (5); for Donnelly, the particulars of Portland's “exceptional case study” also demonstrate the ways in which the city may be different from the norm, especially in the unique circumstances of its vice and corruption's resilient resistance to the best efforts of progressive reform (5).<br /> <br /> To help ground the the specifics of Portland's exceptionalism, Donnelly contextualizes the scandalous events of the 1950s by briefly detailing their specific, particular antecedents. Donnelly conducts a chronological survey that leans heavily on the work of Portland historians Carl Abbott, Jewel Lansing, and E. Kimbark MacColl, synthesizing these secondary sources (among others) into a tale that casts Portland as a boomtown characterized by simultaneous waves of criminality and economic growth. By the 1880s, the growth spurred by east coast elites' investments in the lumber and Willamette River-based shipping industries brought many men looking for work to its environs; as happened in other cities, this influx of laborers “stimulated the construction of saloons, dancehalls, and brothels where men indulged in various 'sinful' pleasures” (26). The city's business elites profited not only from their legitimate enterprises, but by providing utilities, maintenance contracts, and real estate, they saw returns from the rapid increase of disreputable ones as well; having hands in two pockets of Portlanders, then, the business community was “disinclined to stifle the profitable gambling, liquor, and prostitution operations that reformers wanted to eliminate” (27). Portland's rampant vice was often met with several Progressive attempts to reform the local government's cozy relationship with criminality; as one example among many, Donnelly cites the efforts of Mayor Harry Lane, a Democrat who successfully ran against the Republican machine in 1905 on “a platform supporting the working class and … [opposing] corporate interests and political corruption” (38). While Donnelly notes that Lane's administration is remembered mostly “for its fight for morality and humanity” (38), it is probably more noteworthy that it was ineffective; its “meager results,” undermined by a city council that would simply reverse his vetoes, made “clear that big business and political bossism ruled the city” (39). Joe Simon, Lane's successor after the election of 1909, quickly worked to unfetter the liquor trade and lift restrictions that curtailed the prostitution businesses, returning the city to (scurrilous) business as usual. In his campaign against Harry Lane, Thomas Devlin sloganeered that “The reformer ultimately fails” (38; Donnelly cites Lansing's Portland as the source); while Devlin lost his race, his prophecy seemed to be accurate, as Progressive reforms never seemed to take hold in the city, allowing vice to fester until the middle of the 20th century.<br /> <br /> The primary focus of Dark Rose – the interaction of Portland's political and vice interests with a new player, the Teamsters Union – begins in the post-WWII era. As Donnelly explains (citing both the Portland City Club's introspective report Conscience of a City and Gardner and Olson's study of urban corruption, Theft of the City), unlike other cities whose corruption diminished with the repeal of Prohibition and the introduction of the New Deal, Portland's vice industries grew dramatically in the run-up to the war, bucking the national trend and becoming better organized, concentrated and efficient. The war itself spurred a massive growth spurt in Portland's population, thanks to its pivotal role in the shipbuilding industry; as Donnelly notes (citing Abbott), the rapid influx of young men who came to work in the booming Portland economy also fueled the vice industries, who were eager to relieve them of their wages. The political leaders of the era – Mayor Earl Riley and Police Chief Lee Jenkins – believed that “a policy of toleration and cooperation in Portland was easier to administer than trying to police the illegal activities all over the city” (57), a policy made even more convincing by the graft proceeds that made their way into their pockets (Donnelly quotes MacColl's suggestion that Riley took in $60K per month in protection money and kept the sum in a safe in his office at City Hall!, 58). More importantly for the unfolding of the Portland '50s scandal, though, was the introduction of a self-appointed “vice czar” (60) into the mix, a bootlegger and brothel owner who stitched disparate gambling parlors, pinball machine halls, shady bars, and whorehouses into an empire. Expertly distributing graft among police and politicians while strong-arming those who would challenge his authority, James Elkins emerged in the late 1940s as the focal point of Portland's vice and corruption.<br /> <br /> The bulk of Dark Rose concerns itself with Elkins's domination of Portland's vice industry, his mastery (and corruption) of local politics, and his response to the Teamsters' decision to move into Portland and take over his racket. Donnelly's account becomes more compelling, robust, and distinctive as it circles its main interest: Donnelly leaves much of his reliance on secondary sources behind as he turns his narrative towards Elkins, employing impressive investigative chops in his sifting through 1950s Oregon newspaper accounts, municipal legal proceedings, Congressional testimony, FBI and police reports, wiretap transcripts, and personal interviews with some of the story's key actors (including Wallace Turner, one of the two reporters who broke the story in the first place). What emerges is a detailed, methodical chronology of the events that brought Portland to the attention of Congressional inquiry, convincingly revealing a city overrun with organized crime and political corruption.<br /> <br /> As Donnelly carefully details, Elkins pursued a two-prong approach to running Portland's vice. Politically, he orchestrated payoffs and kickbacks to “every level of city government” (63), extending his reach by bribing local law enforcement and financing the election of representatives small and large (including the mayor himself, Fred Peterson). As a criminal entrepreneur, he employed a scam that assured him a monopoly: he would “authorize” aspiring racketeers a franchise into his gambling or prostitution networks, offering protection from The Law's interference in exchange for a weekly payoff. After a while, though, he would coordinate police raids that would temporarily shut the criminal businesses down, strangling the local operator's profits; after several repetitions of payoffs-and-shutdowns, the frustrated would-be entrepreneurs would be forced to abandon their operations, leaving Elkins with new, uncontested revenues and profits. Once Elkins established his rhythm of hostile takeovers of local criminal businessmen, his criminal empire paced the growth of the booming city itself; because of the time-tested tolerance of graft and political corruption that Donnelly documented earlier, Portland's citizens rarely rebelled against its criminal element (a crusading anti-crime mayor, Dorothy McCullough Lee, was elected to one term in 1948, but the city's business elites effectively squelched her efforts at reform, leaving her to be defeated by her crooked successor Peterson in 1952). By the mid-1950s, newly affluent Portlanders fled for the suburbs on the east side of the Willamette leaving the crime-ridden central city behind to fester, ignoring the efforts of crusading reporters and reformers; as Donnelly explains, “Elkins and other vice racketeers were generally successful because most Portlanders simply did not care” (72).<br /> <br /> One group of people who did care about the rise of organized, rationalized, efficient crime in Portland, though, was the unscrupulous, power-and-revenue-hungry leadership of the Teamsters Union. Seeing an opportunity in Elkins's one-man control of the city, the Teamsters began to try to apply their organizational strong-arming to its gambling and prostitution industries. In an elaborate scheme, the Teamsters' official Clyde Crosby met with Elkins and William Langley, a local lawyer who aspired to become Portland's District Attorney; after maneuvering Langley into office, the Teamsters and Elkins were in position to make Portland's rackets more efficient than ever. Elkins rightfully sensed that he was destined to be squeezed out by the powerful union, though; laying a trap for both the union and local law enforcement, Elkins secretly taped hours of conversations between his Teamster collaborators, DA Langley, and scores of other criminals and local officials. Rather than see his foes succeed in dethroning him, Elkins went public and brought his recordings to reporters at the daily Oregonian – and the story became a local sensation. The scandalous, sensational headlines ultimately reached eastward to Washington, where Senators John McClellan and Robert Kennedy were collecting evidence in their mounting investigation of union racketeering; upon visiting Portland and learning about the depth of the scandal first-hand, Kennedy decided that the Portland story would be “crucial” to their case against union racketeers in the larger cities of New York, Detroit, and Chicago (129). The McClellan Committee ultimately called nearly two dozen witnesses from Portland between 1957 and 1960, including Elkins, Langley, and Crosby as well as the newly elected – and scandal-scarred – mayor, Terry Schrunk. Before the Committee adjourned, Portland was laid bare as a city struggling with organized crime, its parade of criminals providing “the crucial evidence for the committee to link the Teamsters with municipal corruption and organized crime” (143).<br /> <br /> What were the net effects of the Portland Vice Scandals? Donnelly's analysis is both illuminating and frustrating, the “moral” of the story unsatisfying and its narrative anticlimactic. While one might think that the city would be chastened or humbled – Senator Karl Mundt believed that the “people of Portland” would be embarrassed to have a “mayor who flunks a lie-detector test and a district attorney hiding behind the Fifth Amendment” (144, from the McClellan Committee hearings) – the opposite appeared to be the case, with many Portlanders rejecting the Committee's findings as a “witch hunt” (145). Mayor Terry Schrunk, whom the committee strongly suggested was tied to Elkins, found himself accused of corruption back home, with no less a luminary than Robert Kennedy testifying against him; RFK's celebrity did not sway the courtroom, though, and – failed lie-detector test be damned – Schrunk was exonerated. Schrunk became one of the city's more popular mayors, serving four terms (1957-1972), while being, in Donnelly's estimation, ineffective. On Schrunk's watch, “no changes were made to Portland's model of municipal government” (149); having become gun-shy after his legal difficulties, Schrunk governed conservatively, making him less like the “great mayors of the 1950s and 1960s” like Philadelphia's Clark or New York's Lindsay (150), and more representative of “the political consensus of the 1950s” (150, Donnelly quoting Abbott). Three different Portland grand juries issued 115 indictments between 1956 and 1957; ultimately only Langley, Elkins, and one of Elkins's lieutenants were found guilty (152; a madam was fined $250 too), with Langley's punishment being only a $428 fine. Donnelly maintains that “Portland provides the basis for a broader understanding of issues of urban corruption and crime in American cities” (162), and his belief that the city's vice scandal provides “incredible insight into how labor, business and government operated in the 'open city' of the twentieth century” (162) seems well-founded by his detailed, revealing expose; unfortunately, the conclusion that “Beneath all the lovely lawns and rose gardens there was an immense amount of corruption” (Donnelly quoting Turner, in an interview, 162) leaves readers with a murky, melancholy inconclusivity.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Twentieth Century United States]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Wikify]]<br /> [[Category:Urban Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Book Summaries]]<br /> [[Category:Portland, Oregon]]<br /> [[Category:Robert C. Donnelly]]</div>

Kltpzyxm https://www.videri.org/index.php?title=Dark_Rose&diff=1466 Dark Rose 2013-10-29T17:00:17Z

<p>Kltpzyxm: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Infobox book<br /> | name = Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland<br /> | author = Robert C. Donnelly<br /> | publisher = University of Washington Press<br /> | pub_date = 2011-05-06<br /> | pages = 208<br /> | isbn = 9780295991115<br /> | image = [[File:Dark_Rose_cover.jpeg|200px|alt=Cover]]<br /> }}<br /> <br /> <br /> THIS BOOK REVIEW IS A WORK IN PROGRESS!<br /> <br /> In February 1957, two reporters inaugurated the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field by exploding the reputation of Portland, Oregon; instead of the sleepy frontier city people had imagined – if they had any conception of the city at all – the Portland that emerged from the testimony was infested with prostitution and gambling, all overseen and coordinated by an unholy alliance of organized crime, the Teamsters Union, and local politicians. Thomas Donnelly focuses on this era of Portland's disreputable past in his analysis Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland. What emerges from his narrative of the city's struggles with organized crime – and the local business and political leadership's complicity with it – provides a stark contrast with Portland's current mythology of an urban utopia. Portland's progressive status among American cities is well-earned, with its “livability” owed to its grassroots, neighborhood-based activism, environmentalism, mass transit, and Urban Growth Boundary and other legacies of the 1960s and '70s; what Donnelly provides is an important corrective to an image of a city as an untroubled utopia.<br /> <br /> Donnelly situates his story at the intersection of streams of history including those of American cities, the relationship of organized crime and labor, and the specifics of Portland itself. Dark Rose performs a delicate balancing act, then: Donnelly casts Portland as both indicative of larger national dynamics and as an deviation from them, as both an example and an exception. For Portland to be worthy of study, then, it can not be simply another city whose “demonstrated patterns of vice and corruption” are “consistent with those present in in larger U.S. Cities” (5); for Donnelly, the particulars of Portland's “exceptional case study” demonstrate how the recurrence of vice and corruption repeatedly undermined the best efforts of progressive reform (5).<br /> <br /> Before diving into his account of the scandalous events of the 1950s, Donnelly contextualizes the incidents briefly detailing their antecedents. Donnelly leans heavily on the work of Portland historians Carl Abbott, Jewel Lansing, and E. Kimbark MacColl , synthesizing these secondary sources (among others) into a tale that casts Portland as a boomtown beset by waves of criminality as well as economic growth. By the 1880s, the growth spurred by the lumber and Willamette River-based shipping industries and the investments spear-headed by the Eastern elites that settled into the city brought many men looking for work to its environs; as happened in other cities, this influx of laborers “stimulated the construction of saloons, dancehalls, and brothels where men indulged in various 'sinful' pleasures” (26). The city's business elites profited not only from their legitimate enterprises, but as providers of services such as utilities, maintenance contracts, and real estate, they saw returns from the rapid increase of disreputable ones as well; having hands in two pockets of Portlanders, then, the business community was “disinclined to stifle the profitable gambling, liquor, and prostitution operations that reformers wanted to eliminate” (27). Portland's rampant vice was often met with several Progressive attempts to reform the local government's cozy relationship with criminality; as one example among many, Donnelly cites the efforts of Mayor Harry Lane, a Democrat who successfully ran against the Republican machine in 1905 on “a platform supporting the working class and … [opposing] corporate interests and political corruption” (38). While Donnelly notes that Lane's administration is remembered mostly “for its fight for morality and humanity” (38), it is probably more instructional that it was ineffective; its “meager results,” undermined by a city council that would simply reverse his vetoes, made “clear that big business and political bossism ruled the city” (39). Joe Simon, Lane's successor after the election of 1909, quickly worked to unfetter the liquor trade and lift restrictions that curtailed the prostitution businesses, returning the city to (scurrilous) business as usual. In his campaign against Harry Lane, Thomas Devlin sloganeered “The reformer ultimately fails” (38; Donnelly cites Lansing's Portland as the source); while Devlin lost his race, his prophecy seemed to be accurate, as Progressive reforms never seemed to take hold in the city, allowing vice to fester up to the middle of the 20th century.<br /> <br /> The primary focus of Dark Rose – the interaction of Portland's political and vice interests with a new player, the Teamsters Union – begins in the post-WWII era. As Donnelly explains (citing both the Portland City Club's introspective report Conscience of a City and Gardner and Olson's study of urban corruption Theft of the City), unlike other cities whose corruption diminished with the repeal of Prohibition and the introduction of the New Deal, Portland's vice industries grew dramatically in the run-up to the war, bucking the national trend and becoming better organized, concentrated and efficient. The war itself spurred a massive growth spurt in Portland's population, thanks to its pivotal role in the shipbuilding industry; as Donnelly notes (citing Abbott), the rapid influx of young men who came to work in the booming Portland economy also fueled the vice industries, who were eager to relieve them of their wages. The political leaders of the era – Mayor Earl Riley and Police Chief Lee Jenkins – believed that “a policy of toleration and cooperation in Portland was easier to administer than trying to police the illegal activities all over the city” (57), a policy made even more convincing by the graft proceeds that made their way into their pockets (Donnelly quotes MacColl's suggestion that Riley took in $60K per month in protection money and kept the sum in a safe in his office at City Hall, 58). More importantly for the unfolding of the Portland '50s scandal, though, was the introduction of a “vice czar” (60) into the mix, a bootlegger and brothel owner that stitched disparate gambling parlors, pinball machine halls, shady bars, and whorehouses into an empire; expertly distributing graft among police and politicians while strong-arming those who would challenge his authority, James Elkins emerged in the late 1940s as the focal point of Portland's vice and corruption.<br /> <br /> The bulk of Dark Rose concerns itself with Elkins's domination of Portland's vice industry, his corrupt mastery of local politics, and his eventual decline as a crime kingpin when the Teamsters decided to move into Portland and take over his racket. Donnelly's account becomes more interesting, robust, and unique as it circles its main interest: Donnelly leaves much of his reliance on secondary sources behind as he turns his narrative towards Elkins, employing investigative sifting through 1950s Oregon newspaper accounts, readings of legal proceedings, Congressional testimony, FBI and police reports, wiretap transcripts, and personal interviews with some of the story's actors (including Wallace Turner, one of the two reporters who broke the story in the first place). What emerges is a detailed, chronology of the events that brought Portland to the attention of Congressional inquiry, revealing a city overrun with organized crime and political corruption.<br /> <br /> Elkins pursued a two-prong approach to running Portland's vice. Politically, he orchestrated payoffs and kickbacks to “every level of city government” (63), extending his reach by bribing local law enforcement and financing the election of representatives small and large (including the mayor himself, Fred Peterson). As a criminal entrepreneur, he employed a scam that assured him a monopoly: he would “authorize” aspiring racketeers a franchise into the gambling or prostitution community, offering protection from raids for a weekly payoff. After a while, though, he would coordinate police raids that would shut the criminal businesses down, strangling the local operator's profits; after several repetitions of payoffs-and-shutdowns, the aspiring entrepreneurs would abandon their operations, leaving Elkins as the beneficiary. Once Elkins established his rhythm of hostile takeovers of local criminal businessmen, his criminal empire grew along with the booming city itself; because Portland already had a long history of graft and political corruption, its citizens rarely rebelled against its criminal element (a crusading anti-crime mayor, Dorothy McCullough Lee, was elected to one term in 1948, but the city's business elites effectively squelched her efforts at reform, leaving her to be defeated by her crooked successor Peterson in 1952). By the mid-1950s, newly affluent Portlanders fled for the suburbs on the east side of the Willamette leaving the crime-ridden central city to fester, regardless of the efforts of crusading reporters and reformers; as Donnelly explains, “Elkins and other vice racketeers were generally successful because most Portlanders simply did not care” (72).<br /> <br /> Who did care, though, was the corrupt leadership of the Teamsters Union. Seeing an opportunity in Elkin's one-man control of Portland, the Teamsters began to try to apply their organizational strong-arming to its gambling and prostitution industries. In an elaborate scheme, the Teamsters' official Clyde Crosby met with Elkins and William Langley, a Portland lawyer who aspired to become District Attorney; after installing Langley, the Teamsters and Elkins were set to make Portland's rackets more efficient than ever. Elkins sensed that he was destined to be squeezed out by the powerful union; laying a trap for both the union and local law enforcement, Elkins secretly taped hours of conversations between his Teamster collaborators, DA Langley, and scores of other criminals and local officials. Rather than see his domination of the city come to an end, Elkins brought his recordings to reporters at the daily Oregonian – and the story became a local sensation. The story's headlines ultimately reached back to Washington, where Senators John McClellan and Robert Kennedy were collecting evidence in their mounting investigation of union racketeering; upon visiting Portland and learning about the depth of the scandal first-hand, Kennedy decided that the Portland story would be “crucial” to their case against union racketeers in the larger cities of New York, Detroit, and Chicago (129). The McClellan Committee ultimately called nearly two dozen witnesses from Portland between 1957 and 1960, including Elkins, Langley, and Crosby as well as the newly elected – and scandal-tinged – mayor, Terry Schrunk. Before the Committee adjourned, Portland was laid bare as a city struggling with organized crime, its parade of criminals providing “the crucial evidence for the committee to link the Teamsters with municipal corruption and organized crime” (143).<br /> <br /> What were the net effects of the Portland Vice Scandals? Donnelly's analysis is helpful, but ultimately unsatisfying. While one might think that the city would be humbled – Senator Karl Mundt speculated that the “people of Portland” would be embarrassed to have a “mayor who flunks a lie-detector test and a district attorney hiding behind the Fifth Amendment” (144, from the McClellan Committee hearings) – the opposite appeared to be the case, with many Portlanders rejecting the Committee's findings as a “witch hunt” (145). Mayor Terry Schrunk, whom the committee strongly suggested was tied to Elkins, found accused of corruption back home, with no less a luminary than Robert Kennedy testifying against him; RFK's celebrity did not sway the courtroom, though, and – failed lie-detector test be damned – Schrunk was exonerated. Schrunk became one of the city's more popular mayors, serving four terms (1957-1972), while being, in Donnelly's estimation, ineffective. On Schrunk's watch, “no changes were made to Portland's model of municipal government” (149); having become gun-shy after his legal difficulties, Schrunk governed conservatively, making him less like the “great mayors of the 1950s and 1960s” like Philadelphia's Clark or New York's Lindsay (150), and more representative of “the political consensus of the 1950s” (150, Donnelly quoting Abbott). Three different Portland grand juries issued 115 indictments between 1956 and 1957; ultimately only Langley, Elkins, and one of Elkins's lieutenants were found guilty (152; a madam was fined $250 too), with Langley's punishment being only a $428 fine. Donnelly maintains that “Portland provides the basis for a broader understanding of issues of urban corruption and crime in American cities” (162), and his belief that the city's vice scandal provides “incredible insight into how labor, business and government operated in the 'open city' of the twentieth century” (162) seems well-founded by his detailed, revealing expose; unfortunately, the conclusion that “Beneath all the lovely lawns and rose gardens there was an immense amount of corruption” (Donnelly quoting Turner, in an interview, 162) leaves readers with a murky, melancholy inconclusivity.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Twentieth Century United States]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Wikify]]<br /> [[Category:Urban Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Book Summaries]]<br /> [[Category:Portland, Oregon]]<br /> [[Category:Robert C. Donnelly]]</div>

Kltpzyxm https://www.videri.org/index.php?title=Twentieth_Century_United_States&diff=1450 Twentieth Century United States 2013-10-25T20:07:56Z

<p>Kltpzyxm: </p> <hr /> <div>==Book Summaries==<br /> * Donna Alvah. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/women-and-children-first-the-importance-of-gender-and-military-families-in-the-cold-war-era/ Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946-1965] (2007).<br /> * Alex Cummings. [[Here's How to Make a New Page: The Revenge, 1955-1957|Here's How to Make a New Page]] (2013).<br /> * Luis Alvarez. [[The Power of the Zoot|The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II]] (2008). <br /> * Karen Anderson. [[Wartime Women|Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II]] (1981). <br /> * Eric Avila. [[Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight|Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles]] (2004). <br /> * Beth Bailey. [[America’s Army|America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force]] (2009). <br /> * Beth Bailey & David Farber. [[The First Strange Place|The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii]] (1992). <br /> * Beth Bailey. [[From Front Porch to Back Seat|From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America]] (1989).<br /> * Mark Brilliant. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/californication-race-ethnicity-and-unity-in-twentieth-century-california/ Californication: Race, Ethnicity, and Unity in Twentieth Century California] (2012). <br /> * Amy Bridges. [[Morning Glories]] (1999). <br /> * Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002). <br /> * Alan Brinkley. [[Voices of Protest|Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression]] (1983). <br /> * Charlotte Brooks. [[Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends|Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California]] (2009).<br /> * Robert Caro. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/dog-days-classics-robert-caros-controversial-portrait-of-robert-moses-and-new-york/ The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York](1974)<br /> * Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/dog-days-classics-political-boss-and-midwestern-pharaoh-richard-j-daleys-chicago-legacy/ American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for the Nation and Chicago] (2001)<br /> * Lizabeth Cohen. [[A Consumers’ Republic|A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America]] (2003). <br /> * Lizabeth Cohen. [[Making a New Deal|Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939]] (2008). <br /> * Nancy F. Cott. [[Public Vows|Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation]] (2002). <br /> * Pete Daniel, [[Lost Revolutions|Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s]] (2000)<br /> * Mike Davis. [[City of Quartz|City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles]] (2006). <br /> * Mike Davis & Michael Sprinker. [[Magical Urbanism|Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City]] (2001). <br /> * Michael J. Dear. [[The Postmodern Urban Condition]] (2001). <br /> * Robert C. Donnelly. [[Dark Rose]] (2011). <br /> * Steven Erie. [[Globalizing L.A.|Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development]] (2004). <br /> * Steven P. Erie. [[Beyond Chinatown|Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California]] (2006). <br /> * Elizabeth Ewen. [[Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars]] (1985). <br /> * Barbara Ferman. [[Challenging the Growth Machine|Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh]] (1996). <br /> * John M. Findlay. [[Magic Lands|Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940]] (1993). <br /> * Steven Gregory. [[Black Corona|Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community]] (1999). <br /> * Jason Hackworth. [[The Neoliberal City|The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism]] (2006). <br /> * William Ivy Hair. [[Carnival of Fury|Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900]] (2008). <br /> * Chester W. Hartman. [[Yerba Buena|Yerba Buena: land grab and community resistance in San Francisco,]] (1974). <br /> * Georgina Hickey. [[Hope and Danger in the New South City|Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940]] (2005). <br /> * Richard Hofstadter. [[The American Political Tradition|The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it]] (1989). <br /> * Daniel Horowitz. [[Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”|Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism]] (2000). <br /> * Daniel Martinez HoSang. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/erasing-race-whiteness-california-and-the-colorblind-bind/ Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California](2010)<br /> * Jonathan Hughes (Editor)& Simon Sadler (Editor).[[Non-Plan|Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism]] (2000). <br /> * Daniel Hurewitz. [[Bohemian Los Angeles|Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics]] (2007). <br /> * Marilynn S. Johnson. [[The Second Gold Rush|The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II]] (1994). <br /> * Tony Judt. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/neoliberalisms-license-to-ill/ Ill Fares the Land] (2011).<br /> * Larry D. Kramer. [[The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review]] (2004).<br /> * Joel Kotkin. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/americas-ace-in-the-hole-is-of-course-its-awesomeness/ The Next Hundred Million:America in 2050] (2010)<br /> * Kevin M. Kruse. [[White Flight|White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism]] (2007). <br /> * Matthew D. Lassiter. [[The Silent Majority|The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South]] (2007). <br /> * William R. Leach. [[Land of Desire|Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture]] (1994). <br /> * Michael F. Logan. [[Fighting Sprawl and City Hall|Fighting Sprawl and City Hall: Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest]] (1995). <br /> * Roger W. Lotchin. [[Fortress California, 1910-1961|Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare]] (2002). <br /> * Lisa Lowe. [[Immigrant Acts|Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics]] (1996). <br /> * Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd. [[Middletown|Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture]] (1959).<br /> * Catherine Lutz. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/3187/ Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century] (2001). <br /> * Nancy MacLean. [[Freedom Is Not Enough|Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace]] (2008). <br /> * Isaac Martin. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/stalking-the-tax-man-the-pervasive-influence-of-the-property-tax-revolt/ The Permanent Tax Revolt: How Property Tax Transformed America] (2008).<br /> * Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton. [[American Apartheid|American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass]] (1993). <br /> * Carol Lynn McKibben. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/3187/ Racial Beachhead: Diversity and Democracy in a Military Town] (2012).<br /> * Lisa McGirr. [[Suburban Warriors|Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right]] (2002). <br /> * James Miller. [[Flowers in the Dustbin|Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977]] (2000). <br /> * Glen M. Mimura. [[Ghostlife of the Third Cinema|Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video]] (2009). <br /> * John Hull Mollenkopf. [[The Contested City]] (1983). <br /> * Maggi M. Morehouse. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/double-victory-from-wwii-to-the-avf-african-americans-and-the-u-s-military/ Fighting in the Jim Crow Army: Black Man and Women Remember World War II] (2000).<br /> * Edward P. Morgan. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/a-mediating-mess-how-american-post-wwii-media-undermined-democracy/ What Really Happened to the Sixties: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy] (2011)<br /> * Charles Moskos Jr. and John Sibley Butler. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/double-victory-from-wwii-to-the-avf-african-americans-and-the-u-s-military/ All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way] (1996).<br /> * Andrew H. Myers. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/3187/ Black, White, and Olive Drab: Racial Integration at Fort Jackson, South Carolina and the Civil Rights Movement] (2006).<br /> * Armando Navarro. [[The Cristal Experiment|The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control]] (1998). <br /> * Becky M. Nicolaides. [[My Blue Heaven|My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965]] (2002). <br /> * Margaret Pugh O’Mara. [[Cities of Knowledge|Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley]] (2004). <br /> * Gilbert Osofsky. [[Harlem|Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto : Negro New York, 1890-1930]] (1996). <br /> * Rick Perlstein. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/essence-precedes-existence-the-problem-of-identity-politics-in-hurewitzs-bohemian-la/ Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America](2009).<br /> * Rebecca Jo Plant. [[Mom|Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America]] (2012). <br /> * Daniel T. Rodgers. [[Contested Truths|Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence]] (1998). <br /> * David Roediger. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/08/30/dog-days-classics-the-wages-of-whiteness-and-the-white-people-who-love-them/ The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class] (1991).<br /> * Adam Rome. [[The Bulldozer in the Countryside|The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism]] (2001). <br /> * Richard Ronald. [[The Ideology of Home Ownership|The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing]] (2008). <br /> * Peter Henry Rossi & Robert A. Dentler. [[The Politics of Urban Renewal|The Politics of Urban Renewal: The Chicago Findings]] (1981).<br /> * Mike Royko. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/dog-days-classics-political-boss-and-midwestern-pharaoh-richard-j-daleys-chicago-legacy/ Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago] (1971) <br /> * Roger Sanjek. [[The Future of Us All|The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City]] (1998). <br /> * Bruce Schulman & Bruce J. Schulman. [[The Seventies|The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And Politics]] (2002). <br /> * Joel Schwartz. [[The New York Approach|The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City]] (1993).<br /> * Josh Sides. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/making-san-francisco-josh-sides-erotic-city/ Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco] (2009). <br /> * Nayan Shah. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/intimate-citizenship-the-influence-of-marriage-sexuality-and-transience-on-national-membership/Stranger Intimacy:Contesting Race, Sexuality and Law in the American Northwest] (2012). <br /> * David J. Silbey. [[A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902]] (2007).<br /> * Rickie Solinger. [[Beggars and Choosers|Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States]] (2002). <br /> * Allan H. Spear. [[Black Chicago|Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920]] (1969). <br /> * Todd Swanstrom. [[The Crisis of Growth Politics|The Crisis of Growth Politics: Cleveland, Kucinich, and the Challenge of Urban Populism]] (1988). <br /> * Ronald Takaki. [[Hiroshima|Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb]] (1996). <br /> * Robert Wiebe. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/dog-day-classics-robert-h-wiebe-and-the-search-for-order/ The Search for Order, 1877 - 1920] (1967).<br /> * Andrew Wiese. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/getting-to-the-mountaintop-the-suburban-dreams-of-african-americans/ Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century] (2004)<br /> * Rhonda Y. Williams. [[The Politics of Public Housing|The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality]] (2004). <br /> * William Appleman Williams. [[The Tragedy of American Diplomacy]] (2009). <br /> * Gwendolyn Wright. [[Building the Dream|Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America]] (1983).<br /> *Zimmerman, Andrew. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/the-ties-that-bind-the-transnational-trick-of-immobilizing-the-mobile/ Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South] (2010).</div>

Kltpzyxm https://www.videri.org/index.php?title=Dark_Rose&diff=1441 Dark Rose 2013-10-20T03:42:17Z

<p>Kltpzyxm: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Infobox book<br /> | name = Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland<br /> | author = Robert C. Donnelly<br /> | publisher = University of Washington Press<br /> | pub_date = 2011-05-06<br /> | pages = 208<br /> | isbn = 9780295991115<br /> | image = [[File:Dark_Rose_cover.jpeg|200px|alt=Cover]]<br /> }}<br /> <br /> <br /> This book review is a work in progress!<br /> <br /> [[Category:Twentieth Century United States]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Wikify]]<br /> [[Category:Urban Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Book Summaries]]<br /> [[Category:Portland, Oregon]]<br /> [[Category:Robert C. Donnelly]]</div>

Kltpzyxm https://www.videri.org/index.php?title=Dark_Rose&diff=1440 Dark Rose 2013-10-20T03:40:22Z

<p>Kltpzyxm: Created page with "{{Infobox book | name = Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland | author = Robert C. Donnelly | publisher = University of Washington Press..."</p> <hr /> <div>{{Infobox book<br /> | name = Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland<br /> | author = Robert C. Donnelly<br /> | publisher = University of Washington Press<br /> | pub_date = 2011-05-06<br /> | pages = 208<br /> | isbn = 9780295991115<br /> | image = [[File:Dark_Rose_cover.jpeg|200px|alt=Cover]]<br /> }}<br /> <br /> <br /> This book review is a work in progress!<br /> <br /> [[Category:Twentieth Century United States]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Wikify]]<br /> [[Category:Urban Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Book Summaries]]<br /> [[Category:Portland, Oregon]]<br /> [[Category:Steven P. Erie]]</div>

Kltpzyxm https://www.videri.org/index.php?title=File:Dark_Rose_cover.jpeg&diff=1439 File:Dark Rose cover.jpeg 2013-10-20T03:33:47Z

<p>Kltpzyxm: </p> <hr /> <div></div>

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