Following the triumphant victory of the Peorians for Council-Manager (PCM) slate in the 1953 municipal election, Peoria was, in many ways, cleaned up. Gambling, prostitution and gang-related violence became much less of the public face of the city. The city government took on a new, less corrupt arrangement.<\/p>\n
Still, among many Peorians there was a sense that the “town was down,” that something had been lost from the city both economically and culturally.\u00a0As the Saturday Evening<\/em> Post<\/em>‘s John Bartlow\u00a0<\/em>Martin observed,\u00a0“Peorians talk about corruption the way people elsewhere talk about baseball.” The residents of Peoria’s working-class “Valley” felt disempowered under the new city-manager arrangement, and two years after the PCM candidates were swept in, they were largely swept out.<\/p>\n Martin’s piece for the Saturday Evening<\/em>\u00a0Post <\/em>sorts out the winners and losers in the high tide, then ebb, of the reform movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Following the triumphant victory of the Peorians for Council-Manager (PCM) slate in the 1953 municipal election, Peoria was, in many ways, cleaned up. Gambling, prostitution and gang-related violence became much less of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,119,233,380,260,352,22,18],"tags":[100,138,104,36,127,90,126],"class_list":["post-2070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1946-52","category-1953-1962","category-2-the-battle-for-city-hall","category-3-peoria-clean-as-a-whistle","category-reform_5","category-7-reform-vs-the-players-of-n-washington","category-reform-this-town","category-sin-city","tag-gambling","tag-john-bartlow-martin","tag-pcm","tag-reform","tag-unions","tag-urban-reform","tag-whisky"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n