Morning glories

Amy Bridges

In one of his most famous remarks, George Washington Plunkitt dismissed municipal reformers as "morning glories" who "looked lovely in the mornin' and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin' forever, like fine old oaks." Although this remark rings true for the Northeast in the days when Tammany Hall ruled New York City, municipal reformers have governed the big cities of the Southwest for most of this century. Obscuring this fact and ignoring the Southwest in general, familiar accounts of municipal reform have focused on small towns and suburbs as the only locations where reformers achieved their goals. Amy Bridges redresses this neglect by tracing the reform politics and government in large Southwestern cities since 1901, thereby giving a more complete account of municipal reform. In the Southwest, municipal reformers got everything they wanted:...

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