Politic Ditto !!! How Things Got Done In Baltimore
I have a friend, a reporter, who recently went to work for a newspaper in Philadelphia. He wrote frequently about Baltimore politics during the last six years, and is now absorbed with the infinitely more complicated machinations of Philly's elite. Asked to compare local pols to his new targets, my friend says he is now struck by the relative benevolence and civic-mindedness of Baltimore's bigwigs. Even the sleaziest ward heeler in Baltimore, with his white shoes and pinkie ring, has a heart, my friend says, but in Philly local leaders are often indistinguishable from foot soldiers for the Mob. In Baltimore, he observes, even the most ruthless political boss is mindful, in a genteel, almost Southern way, of his responsibility to the electorate, be it only the small slice of it in his district. In Philly, he says, even the most high-minded altruist is unmistakably in business for himself.

Despite its well-earned reputation for political corruption, Maryland harbors a domesticated variety of pol who deals, at his worst, in a very petty, white-collar sort of crime. In some larger cities to the north, pitched political battles are still occasionally fought to the death--punctuated by the proverbial long, dark drop to river's bottom. Even at the height of local bossism, the graft and patronage and outrageous public lies were perpetuated in a spirit of friendship and party (Democratic) solidarity. The relatively high rate of local great men jailed in recent years bears witness, perhaps, more to the amateurishness of local sleaze than its pervasiveness.

The entire modern history of local politics has been the protracted death throes of two citywide Democratic political organizations. At the turn of this century, city government was in the hands of two Irish-Catholic bosses whose control of patronage and votes, whose willful manipulation of public power for private gain, was so ingrained that even so-called reform candidates relied upon their support to win elections. When these two men died in 1928, their machines began to falter, splinter, and ultimately sputter to a stop. During those 50 years, most of the back-room figures named in the press as bosses were, in fact, mere bosslets--former lieutenants in the old organization. Only bosslets whose districts retained a degree of ethnic homogeneity exercised any real power, but their influence rarely extended far beyond their own ethnic boundaries. Jewish bosslets dominated these last remnants of the old organizations, in part because anti-Semitism enforced exactly the ethnic purity necessary. Today, even the last of the bosslets is gone. Confusion and disorganization reign, with candidates spending more and more money to prime the publicity pumps for their own cult of personality. It is only this lack of political structure that has kept Baltimore's black politicians from utilizing the electoral majority they possess. City politics await the emergence of a charismatic black leader. How and when that happens will be the story of the next 50 years.

There is a priceless 1928 photograph of two enormously fat old men seated stiffly in armchairs in the lobby of the old Rennart Hotel (now demolished) at Saratoga and Liberty streets. On the left sits John S. "Frank" Kelly, a big-boned loutish fellow with a grotesque growth protruding at the tip of his already substantial nose. Growling impatiently at the camera, to Kelly's left in a softer chair, is a rotund, squat little roughneck of a man named John J. "Sonny" Mahon (pronounced Mayin). Only months after the picture was taken both men died, so it is the rarest of the rare photos showing these recalcitrant old bosses together. When they were alive, all of city government was merely a reflection of their rivalry. Both men are legendary for their Irish pluck, charm, and industry, and both are notorious for having grown exceedingly rich at privately managing the public's business.

The system worked simply enough. It proceeded from a very practical observation of democracy in action; that is, most citizens know little and care even less about government. Kelly and Mahon knew the key to political power lay in motivating people who normally wouldn't vote to vote. They motivated people by rewarding them, frequently in advance. You could say that the bosses were in the business of doing favors, but the ultimate beneficiary of those favors were the bosses.

If they sent you a Christmas basket loaded with goodies during the holiday season, as Kelly was in the habit of doing, implied in your accepting it was a pledge of your vote next fall. If your brother landed, by the grace of Sonny Mahon, a lucrative job at the courthouse, implied in that might be the pledge of all the votes in your family (which, in Baltimore at the turn of the century, could have numbered 90 relatives in a few short rowhouse blocks). Since few voters gave public affairs much thought, and a steady job was a marvelous thing for a family to have, those implied pledges were honored willingly, openly, and often ardently. Over the years it got so that few city voters didn't feel some alliance with either Kelly or Mahon.

Once their men were in office, the bosses had more favors to hand out. Everywhere government touched a person's life, Kelly and Mahon were there with their hand out--either for more pledged votes or cash. If you wanted a license to open a tavern or a barbershop, you paid; if you wanted the ease, respectability, and prestige of a federal judgeship, you paid a lot. And power has its own momentum. In time, Kelly and Mahon were known to be in charge. They were the men to see if you wanted to get things done. The public perception of their power overflowed its actual limits, which had the effect of stretching those limits. By the time they posed, picturesque and fat like two old lions for that portrait in 1928, Kelly and Mahon's power seemed unlimited.

Kelly ran his organization from the unadorned basement of his Saratoga Street rowhouse. From that smoke-filled cellar, governors rose and fell, mayors were made and unmade, judges anointed and patronage subtly dispensed at the command of this corpulent thug, who started his career collecting garbage and grew rich collecting graft. He would stroll haughtily through Lexington Market every day handing out money to the poor, and issue commands on election day for his boys to use force if necessary to keep black voters in his district from the polls. In 1915, Kelly publicly entered into an agreement with Mahon, vowing formally at a gala coalition party to support the gubernatorial candidacy of Blair Lee. On election day, Kelly's machine coolly broke the promise and delivered a slim C. Harrington. Kelly was uncouth and illiterate, but he knew how things worked and was unscrupulous enough to exploit the knowledge. Crowds flooded the neighborhood to pay homage to Kelly the day he was buried.

Mahon was less admired publicly, but he was slightly better educated and shrewder than Kelly. He presided over the rival machine from the Rennart Hotel lobby, where he seemed perpetually ensconced in a game of pinochle. Mahon's motto (reminiscent of George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall's "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.") was, "Politics is my business and I make it pay. I would be a fool not to." He reportedly gained his first real foothold in the organization that he inherited by severely beating a ward leader and simply, by the power of his fists, taking over.

One old-time Baltimore pol remembers, as a young man, playing pinochle with Mahon at the Rennart. "He usually won, because he cheated," the pol recalls. "I caught him once, pulling an ace out of his vest pocket. I didn't say anything because I didn't think it was wise. But I never bet much money in a card game with Mahon after that."

It didn't pay to wager much in any game with Kelly or Mahon, because they were on record as men who would do anything necessary to win. The local press paid them reverential, fawning homage, portraying them as essential and colorful evils with hearts of gold. Pictures of Kelly with his famous Christmas baskets regularly popped up in local newspapers during holiday season. To the public, they must have seemed kindly old men who used their illicit power responsibly. In fact, they used it to enormous personal profit. Mahon left his family squabbling over a half-million dollars when he died, an amount substantially greater than anyone can cheat away at pinochle.

Their deaths left organizational politics in the city divided and in disarray. Kelly's number two man was a prim, professorial lawyer named Willie Curran. Curran struggled for the rest of his life to retain control over the machine he inherited, and for more than 20 years was the reigning back-room bosslet in Baltimore. But Curran never could put it all together.

The era of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal renewed public idealism and boosted its expectations of government. There was less and less tolerance for Kelly-Mahon types. The new political leaders played down patronage and payoffs, and often offered themselves as candidates for public office. While Curran became one of the most highly regarded criminal lawyers of his day, his forensic skill and surface refinement simply masked the political mold from which he came. With his monoclelike glasses perched frameless on the bridge of his nose, and his fastidious manner, Curran was always too, too precious for the tough-talking working-class voters of East Baltimore. When Curran moved out of East Baltimore to Roland Park in 1924, it just confirmed public suspicions of his snobbery. But Curran could never shake the onus of "Boss" in silk-stocking districts. He served for two years as attorney general after being appointed to fill out someone else's term, and won election to the state Senate. But both times he tried running citywide, for mayor, he lost. Each defeat dealt another serious blow to his standing as Kelly's heir apparent.

Both times Curran ran, he lost to Howard W. Jackson, a former Mahon lieutenant who served a total of 16 years as mayor, and who pieced together much of the old Mahon machine under his control. Jackson was a smooth-talking, hard-drinking thief when he first moved into City Hall, under Mahon's patronage, in 1923. He reportedly spent several hours every morning at his desk as mayor selling insurance, leaning on individuals and firms who needed his influential support. One year after taking office, Jackson awarded one-third of the city's $12 million fire insurance contract to his own firm. His undisguised drunkenness and extortion were partly protected from the public eye, because Jackson had carefully placed most of the city's lucrative bonding business with a firm (the Fidelity and Deposit Co.) partly owned by Van Lear Black, who published the Sunpapers. Enough reports of Jackson's improprieties filtered out to secure his defeat after one term, but he swore off the booze the day of his defeat (though not the boodle), and returned triumphant four years later to begin an unprecedented three complete terms.

During Jackson's reign, city politics became a shifting mosaic of alliances. Frank Kent, the Sun's political writer, noted at the time that the picture had become as muddied as the work of "a cubist artist." There were former Mahon soldiers Joseph M. Wyatt and George W. Della in South Baltimore, Ambrose Kennedy in the northeast, Patrick F. O'Malley in the north, Jack Pollack in the northwest, Tommy D'Alesandro Jr. in the southeast, William I. Norris in the east, and others with smaller followings.

While Jackson was more successful than Curran at getting himself elected, Curran actually became the more powerful political leader. Working behind the scenes had its advantages, and Curran had learned from the masters how to capitalize on them. He served as a focus for anti-Jackson political clubs, and as mayoral prerogatives alienated one special interest or another, Curran would pick up the pieces. When Jackson ran for governor in 1938, it was Curran who assembled the coalition that gave Herbert R. O'Conor a narrow victory. That must have been a particularly delicious moment for Curran.

His power had been gone for more than a decade when he died in 1951, but The Sun printed the kind of lengthy, reverential obituary it traditionally reserves for the rich and powerful. "Mr. Curran commanded the only all-weather, constantly-functioning Democratic organization attempting to operate on a cross-city scale," wrote Thomas O'Neill, a reporter with a romantic fascination for old-style bossism. O'Neill even tried to make a case for Curran being more powerful than the old bosses, noting that the phenomenal 58 percent turnout of Democratic city voters for FDR under Curran's stewardship exceeded the percentages of every other city boss in Baltimore history. But the percentage, of course, had more to do with FDR's remarkable popularity than Curran's power. In his heyday, Curran controlled enough votes in the General Assembly and in the City Council to make him the patronage king, and no doubt to rake in sizable graft.

The deathblow to Curran's power, and the event that set off the next era in city politics, came during the 1940 U.S. Senate campaign of Howard Bruce, a wealthy Baltimore County industrialist. Bruce had recruited Curran's support with a promise to spread around some of his personal cash reserves, so Curran in turn pledged substantial payoffs for political clubs who joined with him. But both Bruce and Curran had badly miscalculated post-Depression Baltimore's affection for wealthy industrialists. Shortly before the primary, Bruce paid for a poll which showed him losing badly. So he gave up. Deciding not to pour good money after bad, Bruce calmly reneged on his agreement with Curran, and left Willie to deal with the clamoring bosslets who had gathered at the Emerson Hotel to collect their dole. The most excitable and ambitious of those angry provincial leaders was James H. "Jack" Pollack, a tall, beefy ex-boxer who had shored up an efficient remnant of the old Kelly machine in his heavily Jewish Northwest Baltimore 4th District. Pollack stormed angrily from the hotel when he got the news. He withdrew his support from Bruce, and began building his own empire. Bruce lost every district in the city, and Curran, that dour Irish attorney, never regained the credibility he lost that day.

One emerging bosslet who stayed with Curran even after the Bruce debacle was Tommy D'Alesandro Jr., the dapper, gregarious leader of Little Italy. D'Alesandro had defeated his local political rival with Curran's help three years before to win a seat in Congress, so he owed a measure of loyalty to the declining Democratic leader that Pollack and others did not. During most of the 1940s, Curran could still pull enough support to remain an important factional leader, but by 1947, when Tommy wanted to run for mayor, Jack Pollack had become the most influential district Poo-Bah in the city. Curran gave D'Alesandro the cue he needed by refusing to OK the popular congressman's mayoral ambitions. Tommy split with Curran's increasingly impotent machine to join forces across the city with Pollack, and swept easily into the first of his three City Hall terms. From that day on, the new back-room bosslet of Baltimore was Jack Pollack.

Shortly after taking office, D'Alesandro prevailed on Gov. William Preston Lane to hand over authority for all state government patronage appointments in Baltimore to him and Pollack. They sealed the agreement at the Pimlico racetrack one afternoon. As Tommy left the track, he remembers seeing his old friend Curran, who had heard the news.

"I guess that means you're their boss now, Tommy," Curran said manfully.

"Yes," Tommy says he answered. "But they're still your friends, Willie."

With that, the torch, or the patronage and graft, was handed to a new generation.

Pollack was a hulking man with a wide, square face and rimless glasses. He had joined the Kelly machine as a young man, and had earned a small fortune in the Depression-Prohibition era as a bootlegger and petty criminal. A capable light-heavyweight boxer, Pollack was arrested 13 times in his youth, on charges ranging from assault to murder. He was never convicted of a serious crime, but his political connections even then raised questions about the ardor of prosecutorial efforts against him.

His brushes with violent crime lent considerable weight to the impression that Pollack was the sort of man who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. He amassed a despotic, nepotic empire of influence that was a significant force in city politics until he died in 1977. His Trenton Democratic Club on Park Heights Avenue hatched public officials like chickens, and collected the golden eggs of their dutiful service for decades. Pollack was crude, but sharp-tongued, dapper, and smart. His pedantic oratory, which was calculated to cloak his grade school education, occasionally mangled literary quotation, and presaged the extravagant excesses of Spiro T. Agnew--Pollack once labeled city Comptroller Hyman A. Pressman a "publicity-pandering, pettifogging, pompous popinjay." Throughout the later years of his life, Pollack was clearly a man trying to distance himself from the past. It wounded him to be portrayed in the local press as a two-bit thug. Criminal records from his youth mysteriously disappeared from city courthouse files soon after Pollack controlled patronage there. He wanted his children and grandchildren to be more and tried (with varying degrees of success) to make them judges and legislators until the day he died.

Pollack was the manipulator, and D'Alesandro was the vote-getter. One man thrived on patronage and power, the other on popularity and prestige. During D'Alesandro's three terms, he grew fat (he gained more than 100 pounds) on the ceremonies and perquisites of office, while Pollack grew even fatter, in a monetary sense, through a tightly organized, unchallenged network of bribery, payoffs, and patronage. A prominent city lawyer who was active politically during the Pollack-D'Alesandro years recalls:

"During D'Alesandro's administration every aspect of city government was under Pollack's influence. If you had to do business with the city of any kind, whether to open a bar or sign a contract, you first had to do business with Pollack. The odd thing was, I don't think Old Tommy had any direct hand in the graft. He seemed content to be mayor, and left the profit to Pollack."

Baltimore during the Pollack-D'Alesandro years was undergoing, with the rest of the nation, profound and irreversible change. Masses of poor blacks began migrating to Baltimore during World War II in search of wartime industrial jobs, displacing neighborhoods that had been white ethnic strongholds for generations. Racism, fueled by government incentives and the middle-class American dream of a home with a yard in a more relaxed, rural setting, started driving young white families out of the city. Their departure broke the traditional residential patterns in the city, and undermined the political structures erected to take advantage of them.

Only the city's Jewish community, which by 1940 had mostly resettled itself from East Baltimore to the outlying areas of northwest, retained the important ethnic homogeneity to support old-style political clubs. Restrictive real estate covenants barred many Jews from moving into neighborhoods elsewhere, and buttressed the already strong cultural solidarity of the community. By their own anti-Semitism, Baltimoreans paved the way for Jewish political leaders to enjoy the last gasp of bossism in Baltimore.

Two other factors combined to supplant the old political machines--civil service and television. Of all New Deal reforms, civil service had the most profound political effect. It meant that jobs that had once been a boss' to give and take were awarded strictly on the basis of merit, according to scores on an exam. A boss with no patronage is no boss. Pollack and the other remaining leaders clung doggedly to the few remaining positions that fell outside the purview of civil service--appointments to regulatory boards, judgeships, some courthouse clerkships, and some supervisory positions. But largess to support the likes of a Kelly or Mahon was no longer available. The second punch of this machine-destroying combination was television. Before the advent of the tube, only political clubs could give a candidate access to large numbers of voters, by holding rallies or distributing campaign information and cashing chits. TV could take an appealing candidate with no organizational ties and project his image and platform into every living room in the city simultaneously. All it took was money.

These social and political changes began to outpace the talents of men like Pollack and D'Alesandro. City politics had always pitted one power group against another in heated competition for the spoils of patronage and graft. This system rarely attracted men who could handle more than the routine administration of city government. Preoccupied as they were, city pols paid little heed to growing racial unrest, the city's fast-declining property tax base, persistent poverty, and, with all of this, the evident decay of downtown. Crime accelerated suburban flight, and with the migration of the city's upper middle class suburbs-ward went the small shops, department stores, and business so vital to the city's economic survival.

By the early 1950s, the waterfront and business districts were dangerous and deserted at night. Baltimore's putrid Inner Harbor was ringed by flophouses, brothels, and seedy taverns--each with its own connections to political bosslets. Faced with their own hypocritical inadequacies, Baltimore's pols promptly pointed an accusing finger at the leaders of local business and banking institutions, blaming them for the inevitable. At a chamber of commerce convention in Pittsburgh, Mayor D'Alesandro, fired by what the city's super-rich Mellon family had done to rebuild downtown, poked fun at the assembled Baltimore businessmen.

"Pittsburgh had its Mellons," Tommy said. "And Baltimore has its watermelons."

Old Tommy believes it was that rather awkward insult that triggered formation of the Greater Baltimore Committee, a group of key financial and business leaders united to begin addressing, in the absence of any coherent public policy, the deteriorating situation downtown. But the GBC, or something like it, was bound to happen anyway. The city couldn't continue to decline without cutting sharply into the profits of local businessmen. So, with Pollack and other bosslets standing hungrily by awaiting big contracts, D'Alesandro adopted the GBC's plan to simply tear down downtown and rebuild it. Exercising their considerable political muscle, Pollack and the mayor cleared a legislative path for the necessary condemnation and urban-renewal powers through the state and city legislatures, and Tommy condemned almost 30 acres of downtown real estate.

Charles Center and Hopkins Plaza, the Civic Center (now 1st Mariner Arena), and the Inner Harbor project were public-spirited efforts motivated by savvy private businessmen. For more than 20 years the GBC was the most forceful, influential, and positive factor in the city, though its impact on the electoral politics and patronage that still preoccupied the city pols remained insignificant. It has only been in the last four years, during the second mayoral administration of William Donald Schaefer, that City Hall has reclaimed its proper public responsibilities--planning and shaping the city's future.

By the end of D'Alesandro's third term, public perception of the crucial differences between traditional bossism and pressing civic responsibilities had grown. Weakened by an ill-fated run for U.S. Senate in 1958, Old Tommy began a halfhearted campaign for his fourth term, backed solidly, of course, by Pollack money and organization. But organizational politics had splintered so badly by this time that D'Alesandro's Democratic opponent, a young former FBI agent named J. Harold Grady, was backed by rival leaders within Pollack's own district. Behind Grady were Phillip H. Goodman, a Pollack protégé who commanded a substantial and well-organized 4th District machine, and Irvin Kovens, a wealthy gambler and businessman who would soon usurp Pollack as the city's most powerful back-room bosslet.

It was a race between the dinosaurs and the dynamos. Grady's campaign was the first in city history to heavily employ TV advertising--fueled by Kovens' fundraising talents and created by Kovens' adman friend Lou Rosenbush. "Sixteen years is too much," the ads said, over and over again, infuriating D'Alesandro by adding four years to his 12-year reign. Ironically, Tommy and Pollack's fate was sealed as much by their tested ability to command city patronage as the ads. Shortly before election day, Gov. J. Millard Tawes, who had won election the year before by hocking his soul to Baltimore's bosslets (through his appointments adviser George Hocker), handed down his "green bag" of political appointments. The list was loaded with Pollack-D'Alesandro choices, including Pollack's son-in-law, who was nominated to head the city's traffic court (Pollack was famous for fixing tickets), and Tommy's namesake son, who was nominated for chairman of the city elections board. The deck was too stacked for city voters, who gave D'Alesandro and Pollack the boot days later.

Harold Grady's political career was one of the fastest and most spectacular in city history, especially remarkable because the man possessed no apparent qualities to account for it. A Loyola College graduate who attended law school locally, Grady had worked for the FBI during World War II. Bureau credentials were politically valuable during the Joe McCarthy, commie-scare era, so Grady's stock rose fast when he joined the city state's attorney's office after the war. By 1956, he was the number-two man in the office. When the state's attorney left without completing his term, Grady became acting state's attorney. He ran unopposed for the office two years later, but before he had even taken the oath of office, Goodman and Kovens had talked him into running for mayor. Goodman, who ran on the ticket for City Council president, supplied the organizational backing, and Kovens put his considerable fundraising talents to work. A candidate for City Council in Pollack's district who ran with Grady and Goodman's ticket was William Donald Schaefer.

The victorious "Three-Gs" ticket of 1959 (Grady, Goodman, and Dr. R. Walter Graham, comptroller) was the first truly modern political campaign in city history. Besides being the first to heavily employ television, it was the first to make an issue of bossism. Kovens, the primary strategist, turned the ticket's relatively weak organizational backing to advantage by contrasting it with the Pollack/D'Alesandro machines, which were portrayed as old and corrupt. Kovens' own gambling connections and several close brushes with criminal prosecution were not widely known. Goodman's rival 4th District organization was younger, more aggressive, and appeared to be less mired in tradition than Pollack's. Grady's background as an FBI agent and as top city prosecutor capped the ticket's clean, outsider image. But the Three-Gs simply brought a new kind of bossism to City Hall, a quieter, more image-conscious one. It was impossible to rule city patronage or collect graft as openly as bosses had in the past, but powerful private citizens continued to exert strong influence on government jobs and contracting, and important decisions continued to be made, as always, by men who were almost completely invisible and unaccountable to the public.

Grady was, in fact, as nonpolitical as his campaign literature promised. But his independence stemmed from genuine disinterest rather than conviction. In his run for mayor, Grady was up to his ears in the same sort of back-room machinations he condemned D'Alesandro of engineering, but he never took a strong personal interest in any of it. Kovens and Goodman, who lived for politics, called the shots, and Grady fired.

So it was no wonder that Grady, after assuming the office, should demonstrate little or no interest in it. He found the work tiring and tedious, according to those who knew him then; he labored to understand the budget, but never achieved the mastery Goodman demonstrated at Board of Estimates meetings. Grady admits as much. He recalls casting around for a federal judgeship before completing the first half of his mayoral term. Failing that, he met with Gov. Tawes to ask for an appointment to the state courts. After his name found its way onto a list of eligible candidates in 1962, Grady was rescued from the drudgery by a Tawes appointment to the state Supreme Bench. In four years he had gone from private citizen to state's attorney, to mayor, to a lifetime judgeship (with periodic, unthreatening judicial elections).

Someone else profited by Grady's success, someone who wanted desperately to be mayor, but who knew he would have difficulty winning the office at the polls--Phillip H. Goodman.

There has been unproven speculation over the years since that Goodman and Kovens used Grady to win the office, and then helped push him out of it to the Supreme Bench to clear the way for Goodman. Jewish politicians in the late 1950s could count on anti-Semitism hurting them at the polls citywide. By succeeding Grady, who says all he wanted all along was a judgeship, Goodman could serve part of a term as mayor, prove himself to voters, and run for office on his own with the full advantage of incumbency. Grady and other pols contemporary with those years harrumph respectably and deny it, but it is safe to assume that there was more at work than mere chance in the swift changes from 1959 to 1963.

If Goodman actually feared running for mayor himself, his judgment was borne out in 1963 when he was defeated, incumbency and all, by Republican Theodore R. McKeldin. No better politician ever walked the streets of Baltimore than McKeldin, a big awkward man with a quick wit, a giant ego (he enjoyed handing out autographed pictures of himself), a thoroughly pragmatic political mind, and the oratorical skill to sway even the most skeptical voters. A Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, McKeldin managed to serve two terms as Baltimore's mayor and two terms as Maryland's governor. Several times during his career he was touted as a dark horse candidate for president.

McKeldin mastered the minority party art of piecing together coalitions from Democratic organizations defeated in hard-fought primaries. Earlier in the century, bosses like Kelly and Mahon had their differences; they lied to one another frequently and publicly; they stopped at nothing to beat one another; but in the end the old bosses were unswerving Democrats. Over time, power was more difficult to come by so it became more valuable. Jack Pollack was one of the first city bosslets to drop the guise of party loyalty. If his man lost in one party's primary, he'd throw his support in the general election to the other party's candidate. Power tasted the same served as an elephant or an ass. After D'Alesandro lost the 1959 Democratic primary to Kovens' Three-Gs, Pollack threw his support to McKeldin, who ran a respectable but doomed general campaign against Grady. By the time Goodman was ready to run on his own for mayor in 1936, Pollack and McKeldin had had time to lay the groundwork for success.

In 1959, Old Tommy had refused to throw his club's strength to a Republican, but in 1963, Tommy's son became a born-again Republican, joining McKeldin's ticket as a candidate for president of the City Council. Pollack even recruited the popular Democratic gadfly lawyer Hyman A. Pressman to run on the Republican ticket, for comptroller. With this polymorphous ticket, McKeldin united the remnants of those who had ruled during Old Tommy's three terms. The Sun, which was becoming more and more important politically as the machines lost power, had grown disenchanted with Goodman and Kovens in four years. Ignoring the obvious roots of McKeldin's strength, the newspaper assailed Goodman and Kovens as "bosses," and endorsed the Republicans. McKeldin squeaked into office by only 5,000 votes, and Pollack was restored.

All that changed four years later was the name of the man on top of the ticket and the name of the party. Near the end of McKeldin's term, young Tommy D'Alesandro III had found his way (with Pressman) back into the Democratic fold, and had siphoned off enough of McKeldin's old base of support to make himself mayor. For once there was even peace between Pollack and Kovens--Schaefer agreed to join D'Alesandro's ticket as a candidate for City Council president.

Young Tommy had grown up in the midst of his father's political battles, but he strove to present himself as a new politician, a liberal on social issues, an advocate of more federal urban spending, in short, a candidate concerned and articulate about big public issues instead of a provincial political leader. Young Tommy had much of his father's charisma, and had the good sense to keep Pollack and Kovens well into the background. But the bosslets still controlled non-civil service jobs at City Hall and the courthouse, and through their men in Annapolis, much, much more. D'Alesandro's administration was like a renovated townhouse with a clean, spruced-up, modern facade atop the same old dark foundation. His term was like his name--an inextricable union of present and past.

But the past cannot cruise unmolested into the future. Seething social problems, poverty and racism, had been neglected for too long by the time Young Tommy took office. In 1968, one year after he was elected, they erupted. For three days after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Baltimore burned. Six people died, and an estimated $14 million in property damage was done by mobs of grief-stricken, frustrated, and angry blacks. It took a full force of city police, National Guardsmen, and federal troops, who patrolled the riot-torn streets with fixed bayonets, to quell the disturbance. When it was over, city and state politicians were left to pick up the pieces.

"One day I just woke up and decided I would rather not put up with the hassles of being mayor anymore," D'Alesandro recalls. "When I was in office it was like war, nothing like the days when my father was mayor or in the decades before that. The late '60s were turbulent times. Every day all the different groups would line up to bring their protests to me. They would lay down out in the ceremonial office at City Hall and refuse to move. At first I enjoyed walking right out and meeting them. But you can take only so much abuse. After awhile, I used to send my aides out to deal with them. In time, I just decided that I really didn't need the troubles any more."

The growing presence of black voters in Baltimore had been a threat to the city's white bosses for most of this century. Kelly and Mahon used whatever Ku Kluxian tactics necessary to keep blacks from the polls during their years of power. All through the 1930s and 1940s, so-called black political leaders took money from white bosses to hold picnics with free booze and sandwiches for blacks on election days to keep them from voting. The history of black political gains in Baltimore had been one of outrageous compromises with whites until the late 1950s, when Carl Murphy, publisher of the Afro-American newspaper, helped push several more independent black leaders into challenging the white machines. Mrs. Verda Welcome, member of a prominent Baltimore black family, formed her own ticket in 1958 and successfully challenged Jack Pollack on his home ground. Pollack, never one to let personal convictions or prejudices of any kind stand between himself and power, responded to the challenge by integrating his own tickets. Behind Mrs. Welcome, now a state senator, came other strong and primarily independent black families--the Douglass family in Northeast Baltimore, and the Mitchell family in West Baltimore. In 1970, Parren Mitchell, a Morgan State College professor and a strong civil-rights spokesman, was elected to U.S. Congress from the west side's 7th District. At least one wealthy black, William L. "Little Willie" Adams, emerged as a Kovens-like figure supplying money and strategy behind the scenes.

Just as the riots of 1968 convicted Baltimoreans that the needs of the city's struggling black population could no longer be neglected, the emerging black electoral majority and political structure demanded the attention of white bosslets. When Young Tommy decided not to seek re-election in 1971, Kovens and other white leaders joined ranks behind City Council President Schaefer. Black support coalesced behind black city solicitor George L. Russell Jr. It was the first real head-to-head challenge by Baltimore's black politicians. Schaefer won with a comfortable 56 percent of the Democratic votes--Russell gathered 35 percent, and state Sen. Clarence M. Mitchell III, Parren's nephew, garnered 4 percent. Schaefer campaigned with machine alliances citywide, but won with a combination of factors relatively new in city politics. He relied heavily on television and advertising--utilizing the money Kovens seemed to raise effortlessly--and won endorsements from several of the new and increasingly powerful community improvement groups across the city.

A top campaign aide remembers how vital a role Kovens played in Schaefer's first mayoral campaign:

"We had so much money from Kovens during that campaign that it was almost embarrassing," the aide recalls. "It just kept coming in and coming in, for TV, radio, billboards, whatever. Toward the end I actually tried to restrain them. Kovens was incredible. If we needed something as simple as a pickup truck to deliver some signs, I'd say, `Call Mr. Kovens,' and voilà! Within minutes a pickup truck and driver would be waiting outside. If we needed a few thousand for a TV show, presto! Kovens would hand over the dough."

Schaefer's alliance with Kovens began as a partnership of convergence with Goodman, who in the 1950s was working to build a 4th District organization to rival Pollack's Trenton Democratic Club. Schaefer's original power base was the relatively small, German (Gentile) corner of the district. Schaefer needed support from the Jewish leaders to win in his heavily Jewish district, and Goodman needed every scrap of power left in his district that Pollack didn't already own. Kovens, a wealthy in-law to the super-rich Hoffberger family who had earned a fortune on his own in the installment furniture business, racetracks, casinos and land investments, was probably the most valuable anti-Pollack scrap in the 4th.

By the time Schaefer took over the mayor's office at City Hall, Kovens, who had never owned the kind of streets-up machine that had traditionally been the backbone of political power in the city, was the most influential bosslet in Baltimore. Martin Mandel, the governor, was a strong Kovens ally who had campaigned upon the same largess that Schaefer tapped for victory in 1971. Kovens exercised his power more subtly, by necessity, than past bosses. His friends frequently won appointments to sensitive and potentially lucrative state and city boards and agencies, to judgeships and important government positions. But since Kovens' friends were also Mandel's and Schaefer's, it was difficult to fully credit Kovens with control. His touch was light, elusive, but ever-present. Finally, it was his intimate friendship with Mandel that brought him to trial. Federal prosecutors charged Kovens, Mandel, and several others in 1977 with engineering a complex legislative maneuver to enhance the value of a racetrack Kovens had allegedly invested in secretly. They were convicted in federal court a year later, and almost a year after that, a federal appellate court reversed the conviction. The group, now driven from any real political power, is still waiting to see if federal prosecutors will bring them to trial again.

Even as Schaefer's political godfather was being hounded from public affairs, the mayor, now in his second term, was building a new structure of citywide support that has made him the most important political figure in the city, free, as perhaps no mayor in city history has been, of debts to back-room manipulators.

He is an indefatigable man, short, nervous, dedicated, quick to anger, and hard to cross. A bachelor, Schaefer is truly wedded to the city and to his job. He is sensitive to the city's serious social problems, wringing revenue-sharing funds out of an increasingly dry federal budget and sponsoring innovative and much-imitated programs to better living conditions throughout the city. Schaefer has taken over much of the planning role usurped by civic leaders with the GBC 20 years ago. In the last eight years, he has more and more come to embody the new spirit of Baltimore nationwide. During that time he has seen the small community groups he courted in 1969 become the most important political organizations in the city--though improvement clubs bear little or no resemblance to the old-style organizations. Schaefer has somehow even managed to recruit the support of powerful black leaders without opening up his ticket for a top citywide office to a black candidate. Schaefer has simply become the city's most conspicuous personality in a political age dominated by personality cults.

With his enormous popularity, and with the depth of his political support, Schaefer seems strong enough to stay mayor as long as he pleases. The future of the city's politics is taking shape beneath him, as most white areas of the city fall under umbrella civic organizations, and blacks continue to battle among each other for pre-eminence. Population statistics indicate that the city will eventually be dominated by black politics, but so far, black pols have been unable to take advantage of their majority. Without the patronage leverage necessary to build an old-style political machine, and without a candidate charismatic enough to break through the layers of cynicism and frustration that have hardened black voters, black leaders will be hard-pressed to mobilize them in sufficient numbers to assume the majority position in city government that is rightfully theirs.

With the infinite wisdom of a half-century's progress, it is easy to write off the Kellys and Mahons and Currans and Pollacks as thugs and crooks, which, of course, they were. But they were much more than that. They presided over the mechanics of democracy, and cannot be entirely blamed for the fact that the system in practice bore so little relationship to the system in theory.

In theory, that white-gowned saintly spectre of reality, an enlightened citizenry chooses a leader on the basis of his character, talent, and opinions. In practice, the vast majority of the citizenry is ignorant, careless, and easily influenced by any number of petty or selfish factors, be it the promise of a job, of favored treatment of some kind, or simply pressure to go along with the majority. A candidate who has one or more of these factors on his side needs only be a vertebrate and a practicing heterosexual to win office. The political machines that formed a sort of darkened, grotesque mirror of revered official forms of government for most of Baltimore history were the perfectly logical outcome of the way people actually were, not the way they should have been. The machines were the way things got done, though not always the way things ought to have gotten done. That Frank Kelly or Sonny Mahon or someone else got rich in the process was only natural; they were industrious and much-envied men who, in Plunkett's words, "Saw their opportunities and took 'em."

One reason politicians live such precarious lives today is that people expect more from them. In the days of Kelly and Mahon, government was supposed to perform relatively mundane chores with reasonable efficiency and otherwise just stay out of the way. A pol who made something on the side was just pocketing the plunder that belonged by right to the rich and powerful. Government wasn't supposed to be the moral arbiter of civilization, the enforcer of goodness, health, truth, and justice.

We have our regulatory agencies to perform those tasks today, and we expect it of them. Advocates of more limited government interference in private industry and private lives frequently forgot that it wasn't the do-gooders in government who created regulation; the agencies were the innovation of big-time bosses, who set them up for one reason: graft. You paid the regulatory board off and they left you alone. Today the same agencies and boards are under great pressure to in fact regulate the industries they are charged with. Many continue to resist that pressure heroically, and pocket the graft. But today the public is horrified and titillated by accounts of it, so reporters are pressed to probe and spy and expose the traditionalists. The end result is inept regulation and graft, instead of just graft.

Politics have become so disorganized with the decline of political organizations that public officials and affairs are all confused. Pols used to know when it was their turn to run for higher office, because some Poo-Bah or other gave them the nod. Today any charmer with a toothy smile can win one office, and go trotting off after a better one before he's even had time to botch the first. No one in politics is sure of his strength anymore, so everyone takes polls. But when the polls show you ahead or behind, to what do you owe it? Your smile? Your deodorant? Your position on the construction of I-95? The politicians of the future will all be Zen campaigners, like California's Jerry Brown, running for the sake of running rather than for the reward (the reward is the run, and vice-versa).

Government will bob haphazardly along on the crest of one mellow personality after another. We'll probably be bobbing that way until somebody rediscovers the dark truth behind Frank Kelly and Sonny Mahon; and then he'll organize.  ¶ 5:08 PM 1 comments