On March 16, 2011, just two months before he left office, Mayor Richard M. Daley held a press conference in a vacant lot at 76th and Ashland. The event ended up illustrating many of the complexities and contradictions of his 22 years in power, the longest tenure of any Chicago mayor. The lot, which took up most of a city block, had once been home to industrial warehouses and small manufacturers, but the businesses had left and the empty buildings were razed. Like other parts of the south side, the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood had suffered for decades from high unemployment and crime.

“Why was it, during this whole debate, all right to build in the suburban areas, but there was an objection to build in the city when it came to the African-American community, Hispanic community, or the inner city?

The answer is arguably both. Yet a new biography of Daley portrays him as the figure who made Chicago a center of international commerce and culture, but largely bypasses the communities and people he ruled over with unchecked power.

Once Washington was elected, white aldermen revolted, refusing to advance any of the new mayor’s initiatives—something that hadn’t happened under a white mayor for decades before and hasn’t happened anytime since. Yet Koeneman maintains that Council Wars were simply the result of Washington’s failures as an administrator and a politician. “He did not understand—or, perhaps, did not care—how power worked in white Chicago,” Koeneman writes.

So he and his aides set up their own political armies. As Koeneman details, they employed roving bands of city workers and for-hire mercenaries in white neighborhoods, and in the growing Latino areas they unleashed the Hispanic Democratic Organization, which quickly became a potent patronage operation known for taking out independents who didn’t have jobs to trade for political support.

Other cities have debated the impact of big-box stores on wages and independent businesses—New York City still won’t let Walmart open there. Yet Koeneman dismisses what happened in Chicago as a “parochial” dispute: “Global businesses like Walmart needed to pay low wages in order to stay competitive, but labor unions still acted as if the US economy was shut off from the rest of the world.”

By Keith Koeneman (University of Chicago Press)