Bridges, Amy. Morning Glories: Municipal

Bridges, Amy. Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

The title of Amy Bridge's book Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest, comes from a phrase of the infamous Tammany Hall politician George Washington Plunkett who referred to the political reformers that wished to eliminate the corruption and patronage from local politics as "morning glories" who would wither and dry up, while politicians like Plunkett and Boss Tweed would continue to flourish like old oaks (1). Many of these reformers, moreover, were often openly xenophobic and anti-immigrant, hardly the proud champions of democratic pluralism that contemporary readers might like to think. The representatives of the major American urban political machines were often of immigrant backgrounds, such as the Irish of Tammany Hall (6).

University of San Diego Professor of Political Science, Bridges argues that while the Progressive movement's short shelf life may have been the case in the American East, in the Southwest, the trajectory of reform took a very different path, and the Progressive reform movement was ultimately more successful in the Southwest. There, political party machines were eradicated with a nonpartisan spirit, a civic elite of commissioners and managers rather than entrenched mayors and party politicians came to reign, and the system was competitive rather than monopolistic in nature between the different parties (1). Voters easily crossed alliances from one party to another, and publicly sponsored referendums were frequent.

Of course, today the legacies of municipal reform movements are felt everywhere in the United States, most notably in the nation's strong civil service system, based upon tests and merit rather than patronage, independent voter registration, and other things we take for granted -- but only in the Southwest were reformers truly blessed with victories at the polls (207). The value of Bridges' book is that it regionalizes American civic development, rather than suggesting American urban and suburban politics proceeds as a seamless whole. Bridges creates a historical narrative that traces the development of reform from the 19th century Progressives to the grass roots reformers of the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast to the corruption of the North, and even in contrast to the common self-image of the Southwest as characterized by 'pure' government only on small-scale suburban levels, a number of major Southwestern cities, such as San Diego, were dominated by nonpartisan mayors and city governments, the result of reformer's demand nonpartisan elections (72).

Southwest regional newspapers formed an important voice in reformist campaigns, including African-American and Spanish voices (24). The African-American Arizona Sun in Phoenix, which began as a response to critics of the leadership as disproportionately made up of whites and businessmen emerged as an early voice for desegregation and "intelligent participation in politics" (139). However, this triumph of reform came at a price, no pun intended -- one could argue that the region was essentially forced to sell its soul to industry, to escape the grip of machinist politics. It was willing to do so in cities such as Texas and San Diego as the Southwest had little economic infrastructure. The Southwest was more desirous of stimulating business expansion and investment from large corporations to secure better utility services, prisons, universities, and highways, in contrast to the North which already had built such services and institutions (207).

Bridges' own position as to the role of businessmen in municipal reform is ambivalent. On one hand, she points out that during the first half of the century businessmen played a prominent role in destabilizing the 'professional' status of many politicians who praticed 'Tammany Hall' type politics. Bridges calls the new Southwest system 'city-manager' type governance (82). However, she later concedes that this also meant that government leaders were Anglo and affluent, and drawn from the wealthier and more socially respectable spheres of society (125). Nonpartisan cities often had significantly lower turnout than partisan cities, without party machines to mobilize the masses. Non-partisan groups like the League of Women Voters were hardly neutral in their composition. They too were largely White and middle-class in membership and in terms of the issues they prioritized as important to their often complacent constituents (129).

Continued ascendancy without significant challenge meant political leaders in institutionalized reform cities had no reason to recruit diverse voters to support them, nor any reason to increase representation" (149). Reform with an anti-machinist spirit is thus not synonymous with democracy. Ironically this made the Southwest city managers not unlike the party bosses of the 19th century -- with neither legal nor popular opposition to change their ways, the current, undemocratic state of affairs could continue indefinitely, with significant minority communities eliminated from having a voice in government. The government did not represent their interests and no parties or organized interest groups advanced minority interests. Local governments continued to pursue policies like subsidizing developers, but not providing for affordable public housing (211). The late entry of the Southwest into the nation's economic expansion had led to a kind of hysterical faith in the benevolence of business. So long as politics was nonpartisan, it was fair, even if it enforced polices that eliminated many communities from benefiting from the region's wealth.

Bridges' narrative primarily unfolds as a tale told in the historian's voice, although she evidently made use of a considerable number of primary sources in her work, given the paucity of previous analysis of regional politics. Also, she includes a number of statistical overviews of the racial composition of different regions, and how this was reflected, and more often, not reflected, in the urban and suburban leadership of the community. The stated intent of the book is merely to fill a kind of gap in the history of the chronicles of the urban and suburban political reform movements, as these histories have traditionally focused on Eastern politics, when they focused on any regional distinctions at all.