{"id":2070,"date":"1955-10-01T04:52:56","date_gmt":"1955-10-01T04:52:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/?p=2070"},"modified":"2014-09-05T20:04:09","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T20:04:09","slug":"the-town-that-reformed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/1955\/10\/01\/the-town-that-reformed\/","title":{"rendered":"The Town That Reformed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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<p>Still, among many Peorians there was a sense that the &#8220;town was down,&#8221; that something had been lost from the city both economically and culturally.\u00a0As the <em>Saturday Evening<\/em> <em>Post<\/em>&#8216;s John Bartlow<em>\u00a0<\/em>Martin observed,\u00a0&#8220;Peorians talk about corruption the way people elsewhere talk about baseball.&#8221; The residents of Peoria&#8217;s working-class &#8220;Valley&#8221; 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<p>Martin&#8217;s piece for the <em>Saturday Evening<\/em>\u00a0<em>Post <\/em>sorts out the winners and losers in the high tide, then ebb, of the reform movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/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":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2070"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6233,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070\/revisions\/6233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}