AS CRUDE as the gesture was, history says City Council member Sheila Dixon had a point when she brandished her shoe at white male colleagues during the shouting match over redistricting. Dixon was demonstrating that political power in Baltimore is shifting to the other foot.
It's blacks' turn, all right, and they deserve it. For in the latest turn of the screw, the politics of Mobtown has come full circle. The assertion of ethnicity has once again rearranged the map of the city.
Why anyboby's surprised is the mystery. First it was the unruly mobs, "pluguglies" and "blood tubs," to name two. Then it became the political organization, later rechristened the "machine." The latest manifestation is untested, but a good guess would be mayhem.
In the mid-1800s, the mobs that terrorized the polling places were largely ethnic groups -- Irish, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Germans, each seeking political superiority over the others.
The Irish won the skirmishes and dominated Baltimore (and Maryland) politics well into the 1930s. At that juncture the Jews, later joined by the Italians, snatched politics from the Irish. Jews had not been allowed to vote in Maryland until 1826. Blacks are the new kids on the block, and in the ethnic progression are probably long overdue for a turn at sniffing the hem of power. Going strictly by the numbers, there's nobody left, nobody, that is, unless Asian-Americans take a sudden interest in powerhouse politics.
During the great waves of immigrants from the mid-1800s to the early 1920s, the political machine was the welfare organization of its day. A turkey at Christmas, an occasional bucket of coal, help finding work, walk-around money -- these were enough to tie up a family's votes for life. In the familial structure of Irish politics, the "muldoon" was the ward or district leader who could deliver the most votes through a network of children, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, in-laws, friends.
It was late in the 19th century when the fractious ethnic mobs were finally pulled together in a citywide political organization under the leadership of Baltimore's first great political boss, Isaac Freeman Rasin. The only office Rasin ever held was clerk of the court.
Rasin was joined by U.S. Sen. Arthur Pue Gorman, of Howard County, who dispensed patronage in Maryland as a reward for running Grover Cleveland's campaign for president in 1884. Together, Rasin and Freeman ran Baltimore and Maryland like manic Machiavellis, as efficiently as Tammany or Tweed.
