CHAPTER ONE

The American Mayor

The Best & The Worst Big-City Leaders

By MELVIN G. HOLLI
The Pennsylvania State University Press

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AMERICA'S BIG-CITY MAYORS
The Experts Name the Best
and the Worst

The American mayoralty, though it is one of the important political

executive offices in the nation (president of the United States and
governor being the other two), has escaped the kind of ranking
scholars have employed to evaluate our chief executive office, the
American presidency. From some of those polls, we have a clear
sense about who the great U.S. presidents, as well as the worst, are.
Our picture of the American presidents, and their reputations and
rankings among the American historians and social scientists, come
from two pioneering polls of experts that Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.
conducted in 1948 and 1962, and from more-recent surveys, such as
the one by Robert K. Murray and Tim Blessing in 1989 and the ones
by Steve Neal in 1982 and 1995. The Neal survey focused on both
the ten best and the ten worst presidents.

We have no comparable surveys of the best and worst American

mayors. Scholars know about the American mayoralty in discrete
fragments from monographs, urban biographies, and articles on
individual cities and studies of single cities and their mayors. Yet
the pieces of the puzzle remain scattered and unassembled and do
not add up to a big-picture rating of the American urban executive.
Although individual opinions abound, no comprehensive synthesis
or collective judgment is available.

Efforts to create such a synthesis have probably been stymied by

the size of the task (dozens of cities and hundreds of mayors,
compared with only thirty-nine presidents at the time of the Murray-
lessing poll in 1982) and by the endless details on the separate
histories of dozens of cities. These formidable obstacles have
probably discouraged historians or political scientists from
undertaking to assay mayoral histories, as Schlesinger et al. did the
presidency. Unhelpful also is the relatively small number of
textbooks on U.S. urban history, which generally cover only a few
dozen mayors for their reputations as either reformers or nefarious
scoundrels. The result is that we have no clear sense of who among
American big-city mayors are the Washingtons and Lincolns or the
Hardings and Grants.
In an effort to get a handle on the problem and to assemble a
comparable information base, I and a co-investigator directed and
edited The Biographical Dictionary of American Mayors 1820- ,

980 (1981). We chose 1820 as the beginning point of the modern

American mayoralty because it is a date agreed on by most scholars
who have studied the evolution of the office. We confined the
Dictionary to big-city mayors and defined the fifteen largest cities as
those with the longest duration in the top-fifteen population class.
We also factored in less-objective criteria, such as a city's historical
importance as a regional capital. The historical big-fifteen were
Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland,
Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York,
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and St. Louis. More than
one hundred scholarly experts wrote biographies on subjects of their
expertise.
Building on this base of expert-written biography, the new survey
sought to determine who were the best and the worst big-city
mayors among the 679 whose biographies appeared in the
Dictionary Recognizing that a few of the nation's most heralded
.

urban reformers were from cities that fell below the big-fifteen in
population, I then expanded the number of mayors available for
ranking by lowering the population threshold to include mayors
from cities of more than 200,000 population. In preparing the list of
questions to send to the experts, I included as an aide-mémoire a list
of fifty-three noteworthy and newsworthy mayors, a few from cities
not in the top-fifteen-population class, such as Toledo and Jersey
City.
The survey consisted of two basic questions and asked the experts
to name and rank the ten "best" mayors who had served since the
inception of the modern office in 1820 and the ten "worst" historical
mayors who had served since that time. The interpretation of "best"
and "worst" was left to each respondent, who was free to use his or
her own criteria in making those judgments. An earlier pre-test
conducted with a small sample indicated that providing criteria for
the respondents not only was space-consuming but also would not
lead to a much different result. Other polls of this same type, such as
Murray-Blessing, concluded similarly that an elaborate set of
dimensions or criteria proved "relatively useless" in determining the
greatness or lack thereof in American presidents. My pre-test agreed
and found that the results were likely to be about the same, whether
the polling instrument provided criteria or whether each respondent
was asked to judge by his or her own criteria.

Methodology

The survey was conducted over a five-month period from January to

May 1993. Questionnaires were sent to 160 potential respondents
drawn from writers for the Biographical Dictionary of American
Mayors from other biographers of mayors, and from urban
,

historians and social scientists who had published work related to

cities and mayors. All nonrespondents were sent a second
questionnaire. Returned and usable responses were received from 69
(43 percent) of the survey pool, a response level that compared
favorably with other polls of this type. The respondents as a group
were well qualified by their credentials to undertake the task: fifty-
ine came from university or college teaching; four came from
academic administration; three came from publishing and
journalism; and three from various other occupations, including
freelance writing and consulting. History and the related social
sciences were well represented: fifty-one experts were drawn from
the field of U.S. urban and political history, and eighteen were from
the political and social sciences, which included a few archivists and
urban consultants. The bias in favor of history was dictated by the
nature of the two disciplines: the historians' expertise tended to
range over the two centuries in which our mayors were in office,
while political scientists tended to be very knowledgeable about the
twentieth century, especially the latter half. As a group, thirty of our
experts had published biographical entries in the Biographical
Dictionary fifty-nine had published articles related to the subject of
,

the survey in journals and periodicals, and forty-eight respondent-

xperts had published one or more books related to some aspect of
urban governance or history. It was reassuring to discover that only
six respondents had not published on the subject of the survey but
were, nonetheless, knowledgeable experts who had published in
nontraditional ways, such as in the electronic media or in lecture
forums. Our sixty-nine participating experts appeared to be well
qualified as a group to undertake the mayor survey. They are listed
with their academic and employment affiliations in Appendix I.

All-Time "Best" Mayors (1820-1993)

Who were the best mayors? Our experts picked leaders who
spanned the entire 173-year period of the modern office of mayor
(Table 1). The winners range from Boston's "Great Mayor," Josiah
Quincy (1823-28), the quintessential WASP, to New York's ethnic
Fiorello La Guardia. Selected first by the survey on the all-time best
list is La Guardia (1934-45), a Republican fusionist reformer of
New York City. A stouthearted fireplug of a man who built modern
New York, La Guardia also fought "Murder Incorporated," read the
comics to children over the air during a newspaper strike, and was a
symbol of ethnic probity and honesty—an antidote to the
widespread public view that ethnic politicians and crooked
politicians were one and the same and part of the problem of big
cities. Known as the "Little Flower," he was judged by many
contemporaries and later scholars to be "the most outstanding mayor
in United States history." A significant number of our present-day
experts agree: thirty-eight of the sixty-one who voted for La Guardia
ranked Gotham's chief executive as number one.
In second place, and several full mean ranks lower, is Cleveland's
reform mayor Tom L. Johnson (1901-9), a millionaire traction
magnate and steel mill owner who forsook business to fight for good
city government and against what he called the "forces of
Privilege." Although he is considerably below La Guardia in the
"times ranked first" column in the frequency table, Table 1, Johnson
ranks high in the number of respondents (46), thus putting him in
second place. Johnson's fight for a modernized and humanized city
administration, low utility and streetcar rates, just taxation, and
home rule made him a favorite mayor of Progressive Era reformers
and also, evidently, of our experts.
Next and a mean rank below Johnson, in third place, is the mayor
who helped bring about the "Pittsburgh Renaissance," David L.
Lawrence (1946-59). The Democratic Party boss who reduced
smoke pollution and rebuilt Downtown Pittsburgh was also later
elected governor of Pennsylvania and was considered a mover and
shaker in the Democratic convention circles that nominated John F.
Kennedy for the presidency in 1960. Lawrence attracted the votes of
thirty-four of our experts, and his mode of four approximates his
mean rank of three.
Detroit Mayor Hazen S. Pingree (1890-97) placed fourth in the
historical "best" sweepstakes, two full ranks below his onetime
antagonist and later admirer Tom L. Johnson. Pingree, who elicited
votes from thirty-four respondent-experts, was one of the most
important pre-Progressive reform mayors and made a national
reputation for himself supporting a novel work-relief program for
the poor and fighting for municipal ownership and for low utility
and tax rates for the urban masses. Pingree, who was wealthy like
Tom Johnson, also became a reformer later in life.
In fifth place is Toledo's colorful Progressive Era mayor, Samuel
"Golden Rule" Jones (1897-1904). A picturesque and eccentric
millionaire manufacturer who railed against the very monopoly
system (patent laws) that had made him wealthy, Jones sometimes
took to standing on his head on streetcorners to make a point, and he
preached Christian love and brotherhood to all who would listen. He
instituted a "Golden Rule" in his factories, having to do with higher
pay and more leisure time for workers to enjoy his Golden Rule
Park while listening to his Golden Rule Band serenade the
proletariat. In office, Jones tried to humanize the city's treatment of
the poor and unemployed, took nightsticks away from the police,
and frequently discharged criminals from the police court because
he believed they were the products of a bad society. He also
campaigned for municipal ownership of the utilities, public
ownership of national trusts, fair pay for labor, and a better social
order for all. And thus one of the most chronicled-by-the-press
popular mayors of the fin-de-siécle period did not escape the notice
of our experts, who ranked Jones fifth-best among all the mayors
who ever held office.
Sixth in the rankings is Chicago's six-term mayor, Richard J.
Daley (1955-76), who set a record for the longest period in that
office in his city and was the most powerful mayor in the Windy
City's history. Probably the last boss of an effective big-city political
machine in the land, Irish American Daley is credited with heading
off downtown blight, encouraging an unprecedented building boom
in the Chicago Loop while keeping the city solvent and the books
balanced, and guiding his city through a turbulent decade, the
1960s. And, we might add, he survived that career-killing decade
that ended so many promising upward-bound political careers. He
was also soundly denounced by his contemporaries for ordering
police to "shoot to kill" in the 1968 Westside Martin Luther King
riots and for his crackdown on antiwar protesters at the Democratic
National Convention the same year. Controversial in his lifetime,
Daley remains controversial in death. Yet the experts rated him a
solid sixth in the "best" mayors since 1820.
Another Irish American mayor, Detroit's Frank Murphy (1930-
3), secured seventh place, drawing one first-place vote and five
second-place votes, and the affirmative votes of twenty of our
respondents. Democratic Murphy helped to establish the U.S.
Conference of Mayors, was a New Dealer before there was a New
Deal, lobbied for federal aid to cities, and tried to feed the hungry
during the Great Depression—and balance the city's books. Mayor
Murphy has become better known to urbanists since the publication
of Sidney Fine's definitive biography, Frank Murphy: The Detroit
Years (1975). Murphy deserves wider recognition, especially
because his postmayoral career of upward movement is remarkable
and striking for a mayor. After service in city hall, Murphy rose
rapidly to become governor-general of the Philippines, then
governor of Michigan, and next a U.S. Attorney General. He ended
his public career as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Few big-city
mayors have experienced such dramatic and visible upward political
mobility. Even for the best of them, the mayor's chair is generally a
terminal office—as it would be for our next-ranked mayor, Daniel
Hoan.
Milwaukee's long-term socialist mayor Daniel W. Hoan (1916-
0) was ranked eighth by our urban experts. Although this self-
dentified socialist had difficulty pushing progressive legislation
through a nonpartisan city council, he experimented with the
municipal marketing of food, backed city-built housing, and was a
fervent but unsuccessful champion of municipal ownership of the
street railways and the electric utility. His pragmatic "gas and water
socialism" met with more success in improving public health and in
providing public markets, city harbor improvements, and purging
graft from Milwaukee politics. Perhaps Hoan's most important
legacy was cleaning up the free-and-easy corruption that prevailed
before he took office. Hoan's quarter-century in office made that
change stick, and it seems to have elevated Milwaukee's politics a
notch above that of other big cities in honesty, efficiency, and
delivery of services. Although Milwaukee does not quite roll up the
sidewalks at night, the city has for many years had the reputation of
a well-run and orderly burg led by attentive burgermeisters. Never a
doctrinaire Socialist, Hoan departed from the party's opposition to
America's entry into World War I. Reelected six times, he was
finally defeated in 1940, leaving a legacy of good government and
delivery of services.
Ranked ninth is the survey's most recent mayor, Los Angeles'
Tom Bradley (1973-93). To rank ninth in a field of more than 700
"noteworthy and newsworthy" mayors is clearly a mark of
distinction and more than a mere consolation prize. Elected five
times by a predominantly white and Hispanic electorate, Bradley
possessed diplomatic and conciliatory political skills that served him
and his city well. When first elected, Bradley was almost sui generis
among big-city black mayors—a calm and moderate voice of reason
in an age of revolutionary rhetoric and red-hot Black Power politics.
Yet even his deliberative style was not enough to calm the Los
Angeles riots of 1992, which hastened the end of the Bradley era.
Although receiving no "times ranked first" or "times ranked second"
votes from our experts, Bradley did garner enough affirmative votes
to secure ninth place statistically.

Rounding out our top-ten "best" is the earliest and at the same
time the first modern mayor ever to serve one of the nation's largest
cities: Boston's Josiah Quincy I (1823-28). Known to his
contemporaries and to urbanists ever since as the "Great Mayor,"
Quincy was judged by our experts to have a mean rank of 9.82,
which places him tenth. Far ahead of his time, Quincy is credited
with a long list of innovations, including strong executive
leadership; an early version of city planning and renewal before the
words were coined; improving sewage, sanitation, and pure water
supplies; enforcement of the vice and gaming laws; separating the
"worthy" from the "unworthy" poor, and juveniles from hardened
criminals; expanding the market area and encouraging business
development—all in the brief span of six years. He went from city
hall to a distinguished presidency of Harvard College, wrote
histories, and in the 1850s engaged vigorously in debating such
public issues as slavery. He died at the age of ninety-two.

The Worst Mayors (1820-1993)

In naming the ten all-time worst mayors (Table 2), it is conceivable

that our sixty-nine respondent-experts, with ten choices each, might
have cast 690 negative votes on 690 different mayors, with no one
scoundrel emerging as first-worst. Mathematical probability and the
outrageous records of some rascals who have sat in city halls would
suggest that such a statistical nightmare was unlikely to happen.
And it did not. Nonetheless, our experts did rank a total of eighty-
wo different mayors for failing grades in deciding on the ten worst.
These eighty-two dishonorable mentions was larger than the number
selected in any of the other poll questions, the runner-up being the
ten-best question, which elicited the names of seventy-one different
mayors. Our experts apparently found more sinners than saints in
city hall.

Taking the first-worst prize is Chicago's Mayor William H. "Big

Bill" Thompson (1915-23, 1927-31), one of the most colorful if not
most corrupt mayors in the city's history. Big Bill, who received
campaign funds from such gangsters as Al Capone, won the
sobriquet "Kaiser Bill" during World War I for his pro-German
stand, and he earned more notoriety in the 1920s for his "America
First" program, his campaign to censor school textbooks, and his
threat to punch King George "in the snoot." Perhaps Big Bill's first-
orst designation is a small price to pay for the $1.5 million that
may have been ill-gotten booty that turned up in his safe-deposit
box after his death. The experts ranked Big Bill a solid and
undisputed first place; he led the pack in the times-ranked-first
column and also in the number of experts (forty-five) who put his
leadership in the mayoral hall of shame.
In second place is one of the twentieth century's most powerful
and politically corrupt bosses, Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague
(1917-47). Averse to physical labor, young Hague, after being
expelled from school in sixth grade as a "bad boy," grew up as a
street hoodlum in his grimy slum neighborhood. His early life was a
far cry from the taxpayer-supported luxury he later enjoyed in two
different summer and winter palatial homes and in a private suite in
the Waldorf Astoria, which he used when not sailing on luxury
liners to European vacations. The mean-spirited and profanity-
pouting Hague was an urban tyrant who used strong-arm tactics
and the police and the courts to physically and legally intimidate his
opponents into submission while he boasted, "I am the law." The
"King of Hanky Panky" ran his city and state of New Jersey for
thirty years like a warlord over a fiefdom, and was so powerful that
even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was repulsed by this
gritty grade-school dropout, was unable to rid the Democratic Party
of him. In fact, the New Deal did just the opposite—feeding Jersey
City gobs of life-giving work-relief money and patronage, with
which the Hague machine ground out victories for FDR and more
power for Hague.
Although of Irish extraction, Hague had none of the sentimental
attraction of Boston's outstanding scoundrel, Mayor J. Michael
Curley. When Hague made a final appearance on "Frank Hague
Day" at the opening-day ceremony of the Jersey City Giants
baseball season in 1949, the stands erupted with catcalls and booing
so loud that Hague's speech could not be heard. Our experts saw in
Hague the same endearing qualities those Jersey City baseball fans
did and voted Hague the second-worst mayor of all times.
Slightly less offensive than Hague, and third on our list of
unworthies, is New York's debonair dandy James J. Walker (1926-
2), a former Tin Pan Alley songsmith and Tammany faithful who
loved good times. Mayor Jimmy Walker, who presided over an orgy
of corruption, was caught with his hand in the public till in a series
of public hearings before New York's then-governor Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Fearing a trial and a possible jail term, Mayor Jimmy
resigned and fled to Europe with his showgirl mistress. Neither
posterity nor our experts seem to find much redeeming value in
Jimmy Walker's mayoralty, which they ranked an undisputed third-
orst in history.

without Boston's "lovable scoundrel" Mayor J.

A worst-list
Michael Curley (1914-17, 1922-25, 1930-33, 1946-49), also known
as the "last-hurrah mayor," would be like corned beef without
cabbage on St. Patrick's Day. Twice jailed, the unstoppable Curley
made more political comebacks than a dying opera diva. A
masterful and cynical exploiter of his own people's poverty, he
inflamed the ethnocultural conflict of his city and turned Boston city
politics into a three-ring circus for half a century. Although, as his
biographer Jack Beatty shows, Curley grossly enriched himself at
public expense and lived far beyond the means of an honest public
servant, financial self-aggrandizement was not really what Curley
was about. Curley lived for politics and loved coming in first, no
matter which office or honor he ran for. He undoubtedly would have
resented coming in fourth-worst in a ten-person field, had he lived to
see this expert survey.
Taking fifth-worst prize is Philadelphia's six-foot-two-inch, 250-
ound "tough cop" mayor, Frank Rizzo (1972-80). The bête noir of
white liberals, black radicals, and the city's news media
establishment, Democrat Rizzo saw himself as cracking down on
crime, holding the line on taxes, and being the champion of the
"little people" and blue-collar workers who supported him. A
politician to the very end, although then a Republican, Rizzo died
with his boots on in the middle of a heated campaign for mayor in
July 1991. His fifth place is secured by a modal rank of six, Rizzo
having been ranked first-worst by two respondents and second-worst
by four. In all, thirty-six gave Rizzo failing grades.
Fully deserving of sixth place in our roll call of dishonor is New
York City's Abraham Oakey Hall (1868-72), a clear villain in the
nation's political history. Known as "Boss Tweed's mayor," Oakey
Hall was a front man for the infamous Tweed Ring that fleeced the
city of millions of dollars in ill-gotten booty and ran one of the most
scandal-ridden and corrupt administrations in the nation's history.
After the fall of the Tweed Ring in 1871, Mayor Hall was indicted
and tried three times, but he escaped with acquittals—unlike Tweed,
who died in jail. Hall drew the censure of twenty-four of our
experts, seven of whom ranked him first among the worst; overall he
was ranked sixth-worst.
Next, and seventh, is Cleveland's Dennis Kucinich (1977-79).
Only thirty-one years old when elected, Cleveland's "boy" mayor
had failings that were not the sins of venality or graft for personal
gain, but rather matters of style, temperament, and bad judgment in
office. Kucinich earned seventh place the hard way: by his abrasive,
intemperate, and confrontational populist political style, which led
to a disorderly and chaotic administration. He barely survived a
recall vote just ten months into office, then disappeared for five
weeks, reportedly recuperating from an ulcer. When he got back into
the political fray, his demagogic rhetoric and slash-and-burn
political style got him into serious trouble when he stubbornly
refused to compromise and led Cleveland into financial default in
late 1978—the first major city to default since the Great Depression.
That led also to Kucinich's defeat and exit from executive office.
Out of office, he dabbled in a Hollywoodesque spirit world and once
believed he had met actress Shirley MacLaine in a previous life,
seemingly confirming his critics' charges that he was a "nut-cake."
After that, he experienced downward mobility, losing races for
several other offices and finally ending up with a council seat; but
more recently, he climbed back up to a seat in Congress. Bad
judgment, demagoguery, and default also spelled political failure in
the eyes of twenty-five of our experts, who ranked Dennis, whom
the press called "the Menace," as seventh-worst.

No hall-of-shame list would be complete without including the

granddaddy of urban bosses and the prototype of the machine
politician: New York City's Mayor Fernando Wood (1855-58, 1860-
2). Ranked eighth in our survey, Wood was a Tammany Hall
Democrat who had ties to the criminal underworld and dabbled in
large-scale graft and vote fraud. His administration set the pattern
for the institutionalized corruption that plagued nineteenth-century
New York politics. Even the effort by Wood's biographer, Jerome
Mushkat, to present a balanced account of the first well-known boss
leaves little doubt that Wood was deeply flawed, enormously greedy
and reckless, and a political opportunist with few peers in his time.
Wood achieved little positive good as mayor and left the city with
two indelible legacies: the desire for home rule and the "boss model
for William Tweed." Our experts agreed.

Although not marked in the first-worst column by any of our

experts, Los Angeles Mayor Samuel W. Yorty (1961-73) may have
earned his ninth rank because he was condemned by the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission for alleged insensitivity to minorities and "gross
negligence" toward the largely African American Watts area, which
presumably helped trigger one of the worst urban race riots of the
decade in 1965. Riots can be costly to any politician's reputation and
can be real career-killers, as they were in the cases of Detroit's
Jerome Cavanagh and Cleveland's Carl Stokes, two promising
political high-flyers who were grounded by grim and ugly urban
riots. After the riot, Yorty barely squeezed in a mayoral reelection in
1969 via a runoff, but he was then politically grounded by a rising
black star of politics, Tom Bradley, in 1973. Yorty's career was
permanently damaged by the U.S. Senate hearing in August 1966
when liberal senators Abraham Ribicoff and Robert F. Kennedy
lambasted and pilloried Yorty for his failures in Watts. Nor did he
do well with our experts, who tagged him as one of the lessers on
the worst-list, at ninth place.

Finishing tenth is the only woman on our historical worst list,

Chicago's Mayor Jane Byrne (1979-83). Elected partly because of
an unprecedented traffic-clogging snowstorm (which she blamed on
the incumbent), she was defeated four years later in an emotionally
supercharged "ugly racial election." While in office, Byrne ran one
of the most entertaining and chaotic administrations in the city's
history. Headstrong, sharp-tongued "Calamity Jane" (as the press
tagged her) tangled endlessly with the media and her critics. Her
husband and chief adviser, known as "Rasputin in a turtleneck,"
exacerbated relations with the press by threatening to "bloody" the
noses of reporters who wrote unfavorably about Mayor Jane. He
referred to coverage of the administration as "more skunk juice from
the Chicago Tribune." Byrne soon ran her administration into the
ground and was perceived as having politically betrayed those who
elected her: reformers, blacks, some ethnics, and even women. She
had made a stormy entry into power in 1979, and made an even
stormier exit when she was defeated in the Democratic primary by
Harold Washington, who would become Chicago's first African
American mayor. Presiding over such a politically turbulent term
earned Byrne a solid and undisputed tenth-worst-mayor award in
big-city history.

Comparing the 1993 and 1985 Polls

A decade ago I conducted a survey with the same methodology, the

same questions, and a similar battery of experts. I can now report
here on how the findings of that 1985 poll (Tables 3 and 4) resemble
or differ from our most recent survey, comparing the results on the
ten-best and ten-worst questions.
The 1993 ten-best questions yielded results that were almost a
mirror reflection of the 1985 benchmark poll: the same nine mayors
appeared on both lists, maintaining an identical rank-relationship.
Only one new mayor appeared on our 1993 survey: Milwaukee's
Daniel Hoan pushed Toledo's Brand Whitlock off the ten-best list.
The only other change was the upward movement of a mayoral
rank-climber, Pittsburgh's David Lawrence, who vaulted from
eighth-best in 1985 to third place in the 1993 survey. The remaining
eight retained the same rank-relationship to one another, with La
Guardia and Johnson tying down first and second places
respectively, and Josiah Quincy solidly anchored in tenth place on
both surveys. That there was little change of mind by the experts
over an eight-year period suggests that we can have confidence in
the 1993 findings and in how the judgments of experts were
crystallizing on America's ten-best mayors. This finding for our big-
ity mayors follows an analogous and well-documented pattern seen
in the presidential polls conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.,
Murray and Blessing, and Steve Neal, which show how rank-order
has stabilized in evaluation of that group of political executives
(U.S. presidents) and that changes in subsequent polls are likely to
be small, incremental, or due to adventitiousness—such as the
appearance of new names eligible for ranking.

Chronologies of the Best

Looking more specifically at the historical periods that produced our

"best" mayors, we see that none emerged from the Civil War and
Reconstruction periods, although one did come from the early
antebellum period: a Federalist party member, Josiah Quincy I
(1823-28). The nine others cluster into three periods that can be
broadly characterized as periods of urban and national reform: the
Populist-Progressive Era produced Pingree (1890-97), Jones (1897-
901), and Johnson (1901-9), while from the War and Depression
Era came Hoan (1916-40), Frank Murphy (1930-33), and La
Guardia (1934-45). The last three we categorize as contemporary
mayors: Lawrence (1946-59), Daley (1955-76), and Bradley (1973-
3), who were notable for competent governance, sound and savvy
fiscal management, and steady stewardship; survived politically in
perilous times; and steered their cities through industrial decline,
urban unrest, and riots and racial-ethnic strife. None was a "Messiah
Mayor," in Jon Teaford's use of that term, but all did earn a more
mundane form of canonization in being listed as among the best all-
ime big-city mayors.

Distribution by City

The only city to land two mayors on the top-ten best was Detroit,
with Pingree and Murphy, while Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New
York, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Toledo got one
mayor each. The wide distribution of population sizes, and the
differences in the ages of the winner cities, suggests that neither the
age of the city nor the size had any role in producing the ten-best
mayors. Yet there was some regional grouping, for six of the ten
best were from the Midwest and from cities clustered around the
Great Lakes, where the tradition of municipal reform was very
strong. Conversely, as we shall see, the worst-mayor category
reversed that order, with six from the Northeast, only three from the
Midwest, and one from the West.

Other Factors

By party affiliation, five of the ten best were Democrats, one was a
Republican, two were independent Republicans, one was a
Federalist, one was a Socialist, and all were multiple-term
officeholders. They were a politically ambitious bunch as
demonstrated by the fact that six ran for governor and three were
successful: Pingree, Murphy, and Lawrence (Jones, Johnson, and
Bradley lost gubernatorial races). Five also considered themselves
reformers and were so labeled by their contemporaries and later by
scholars: Pingree, Jones, Johnson, La Guardia, and Murphy. With
regard to political machines, two ran traditional political
organizations (Lawrence and Daley) and two directed "reform"
political machines (Pingree and Johnson). Five were professional
politicians in the sense that they made their livings out of politics—
oan, La Guardia, Murphy, Lawrence, and Daley. Three others
were independently wealthy: Pingree owned a shoe factory; Jones
drew royalties from a patent on oil-pumping machinery; and Tom
Johnson was a steel mill owner, a traction magnate, and held the
patent for a fare box. The independence that wealth gave them
seemed to be reflected in their unconventional and maverick
politics, their espousal of radial social and economic ideas, and their
tax policies, in which all of them departed from party orthodoxy and
outraged the "old guard" of their state parties. Only La Guardia
among the professional politicians matches the political
independence of our Midwestern trio in challenges to the
conventional way of doing things.

The Ten Worst Mayors

The experts were in even greater agreement in picking the ten-worst

mayors of all time. They named in the 1993 poll the same ten
selected in the benchmark 1985 survey, although there was some
slight juggling of rank order: Chicago's Prohibition Era "Big Bill"
Thompson replaced Philadelphia's tough-cop mayor, Frank Rizzo,
for first place among the rogue mayors. Rizzo dropped to fifth place
apparently his reputation for villainy on the issue of race and civil
liberties in 1985 was diluted by the fumbling and disastrous record
of his African American successor, Wilson Goode, whose inept
handling of the MOVE crisis resulted in the fire, death, and
destruction of an African cult group in his city. (Goode did not make
our ten-worst list, but he did come in twelfth.) Other notable
scoundrels were elevated in worst-rank by our experts. Jersey City's
gritty "King of Hanky Panky," Frank Hague, shot up meteorically
from tenth place in 1985 to second in our most recent survey, a
brazen rank-jumper in both life and death. New York's let-the-good-
imes-roll mayor, Jimmy Walker, rose a notch in the low esteem of
our experts, who pegged him third worst in 1993. Boston's
irrepressible Curley was elevated from seventh to fourth, and Boss
Tweed's mayor, Oakey Hall, rose from ninth to sixth place in the
1993 survey.
The ignominy of four others diminished slightly as they slid to
the lower ranks of disesteem in the 1993 survey. Cleveland's default
mayor, Dennis Kucinich, slipped from fifth to seventh place;
Fernando Wood, America's prototype of urban bossism, lost some
tarnish as he glided from third to eight; Los Angeles' Sam Yorty
sagged from sixth to ninth; and the Windy City's "Calamity" Jane
Byrne almost slipped out of the mayoral gallery of flops with her
pirouette from eighth place to tenth. New York City took the big
prize by placing three unworthies in the rogues' gallery of mayors—
alker, Hall, and Wood. The city that was the subject of Mathias
"Paddy" Bauler's infamous mantra, "Chicago ain't ready for reform,"
placed two on the sinners' bench (Thompson and Byrne). Boston,
Cleveland, Jersey City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia had to settle
for one each in the mayoral hall of shame.

Conclusion

This examination of the "worst" and the "best" is only the first step
in a journey of discovery. We need to identify, rank, and map this
Ultima Thule, this great unknown, before we can hope to understand
where it leads. This initial effort at getting a handle on America's
"best" and "worst" is not intended as a last word on the subject. In
fact, it is actually the first word on the subject, since there is no
other scholarly effort that I know of that ranks this, the third most
important executive office in the nation (the American president and
the state governor being the other two). Like Arthur M. Schlesinger
Sr.'s pioneering expert polls ranking the American presidents in
1948 and 1962, this survey can be a benchmark for future measures
of big-city mayors. The other goal of the study is to draw attention
to the issue of leadership and stimulate active discussion on a
subject that is now mostly in the intellectual domain of public
administration and business colleges.
(C) 1999 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-271-

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