This is an exemplary and pioneering book. Its title alone provides a helpful preview, as it brings together disparate bodies of research on urban politics, Congress, racial and ethnic politics, and political parties. Its central argument is that for decades following the New Deal, the congressional delegations from America’s largest cities showed surprising cohesion and coordination in their legislative strategies and won substantial federal resources as a result. This coordination stemmed from cities’ political organizations and other “institutions of horizontal integration” (p. 21), and was especially remarkable given big cities’ social, racial, and economic heterogeneity. For a time, cities were more diverse than their suburban or rural counterparts and yet enjoyed more cohesive representation. That orchestrated representation is especially noteworthy on Civil Rights, as big-city delegations were unified in support of legislative efforts to dismantle segregation, even while their constituents were quite divided. Put more starkly, The Cities on the Hill argues for a reinterpretation of the sources of northern Democrats’ commitments to Civil Rights in the middle of the twentieth century. In places, Thomas K. Ogorzalek also contends that place-based differences are an important source of twentieth-century political realignment in their own right, a claim I will take up. Before doing so, I summarize the book’s key claims and situate it with respect to other recent work on related questions.

The book is an impressive demonstration of the insights that can emerge from synthetic, boundary-crossing research. Much of the recent scholarship on America’s big cities after World War II reads like tragedy, as it tells of cities lacking the capacity to address the problems wrought by deindustrialization, public divestment, and endemic racial and intergroup tensions. By coupling archival research with statistical analyses of congressional voting, the author subverts that narrative, detailing instead how cities’ congressional delegations managed to keep urban issues atop the national political agenda for the decades of the “Long New Deal.” (It is also valuable to consider this book alongside Clayton Nall’s The Road to Inequality [2018]: Given cities’ substantial congressional power just after World War II, the fact that the federal government enacted highway programs that would powerfully undermine cities economically and politically is all the more striking.)

To some extent, this more sanguine account stems from its grounding in a slightly earlier historical period than works like Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996). For Ogorzalek, the New Deal was a critical era in which intra- and intercity coordination emerged, with figures like New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia being emblematic. Cities were first movers, leaving other constituencies to react and mobilize in response. In substantiating this argument, his book provides a valuable corrective to canonical accounts of big cities as lacking the resources to address major policy challenges. By focusing almost exclusively on city-level policymaking, prior urban politics work overlooked a key way in which city leaders looked outside the city limits to solve problems within them. The segmented nature of our subfield has made it harder for us to trace such intergovernmental efforts or their impacts. In that way, Cities on the Hill provides a valuable complement to research on urban political organizations by scholars including Amy Bridges, Stephen Erie, Diane Pinderhughes, and Jessica Trounstine.

At the same time, this book also demands attention from scholars of racial and ethnic politics, as its panoramic view includes a critical puzzle about battles over Civil Rights and the representation of diverse, divided constituencies. A trove of historical and sociological scholarship details deep, sometimes violent divisions over Civil Rights and integration in American cities. And yet research on congressional voting foregrounds regional and partisan divisions, often assuming rather than explaining why many big-city Democratic representatives were unequivocal in their support for Civil Rights. Chapter 5 demonstrates that the racial liberalism of big-city Democrats during the Civil Rights era was, to an important extent, a reflection of local organizational pressures, not direct pressure from constituents. In fact, northern urban Democratic representatives would not have been nearly as unified, Ogorzalek contends, if they had been reflecting the views of their deeply divided constituents. For this point alone, the book demands serious attention and engagement.

That argument also underscores why this book merits close reading by those interested in Congress and representation. It reinforces the point that institutions and arrangements outside Congress, including party machines as well as networks of cities, can have a critical impact on behavior within it. More generally, the book asks basic questions about Congress that scholars would do well to return to more often: Under which conditions will members of Congress represent not just their constituents in a narrow sense but some broader community? And how are such communities defined and prioritized?

Perhaps because the book is intervening simultaneously in several debates, Ogorzalek sometimes misses opportunities to situate it clearly with respect to related scholarship. In particular, he might have engaged more with Richard Bensel’s Sectionalism and American Political Development (1984); at present, readers are left to assess for themselves how these two accounts of place and congressional voting differ. I think that when considered jointly, this book and Bensel’s suggest a critical transformation from congressional divisions defined in sectional or regional terms to divisions between cities and rural areas fought within the different regions of the country.

In that respect, the book’s evidence is broadly consistent with claims that the U.S. political system grew considerably more nationalized over this period, as it illustrates how cities came to act as a unified bloc within Congress. Certainly, one of this project’s foundational assumptions is that scholars should study the U.S. political system as an integrated whole, since the same actors and interests are operating at multiple levels simultaneously. To be sure, nationalization does not make place irrelevant in politics. Instead, it homogenizes political divisions so that urban representatives come to see themselves as having shared interests despite hailing from different cities. It is not that political divisions across space vanish, but instead that urban–rural political divisions are mirrored in the different sections of the country.

That said, one of the few points of skepticism I had was about Ogorzalek’s handling of the contemporary urban–rural cleavage. In its Conclusion, the book seems to reinscribe the central divisions underpinning contemporary American politics as being manifestations of that divide. For example, it contends that “if we think about the relationship between place character and the kinds of politics required to effectively manage different spaces . . . the role of urbanicity in helping to shape political conflict is compelling: liberal commitments are urban commitments” (p. 238). At different points, the author substantiates this point by arguing that the very nature of urban life demands and fosters political commitments that prize pluralism and a robust role for government intervention. But I think skepticism is warranted. As books like Jonathan Rieder’s Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (1985), Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Ryan Enos’s The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (2017), and Trounstine’s Segregation by Design illustrate, urban life can foster discord and division as surely as it can foster harmony and pluralism. Research by scholars including Marie Gottschalk, Amy Lerman, Vesla Weaver, Michael Leo Owens, and others on the politics of criminal justice undercuts this image of inherent urban pluralism as well. And while contemporary American politics can give the impression that cities’ inhabitants are more supportive of state intervention, rural areas sometimes clamor for state intervention, too: Substantial energy for the Populists in the late nineteenth century came from farmers, and the New Deal included major programs targeting rural areas. In short, I think that the relationship between places and the politics that arise from them are more contingent than this book implies on occasion.

Ogorzalek is clearly sympathetic toward cities in all their diversity and opportunity—the book itself is dedicated partly to “my fellow city-zens.” In almost all cases, it is also very attentive to the contingencies of politics, recognizing and indeed explaining how cities emerged as a coherent, forceful interest group around the time of the New Deal. But its assumption that city life fosters a pro-state, pro-pluralist orientation seems controversial at times. In making this assumption, Cities on the Hill tacks away from its careful attention elsewhere to the disconnects between mass-level attitudes and the ways in which they are represented politically. It is a rare blindspot in a book that is remarkably synthetic and thought provoking. It should command a broad readership in our discipline, and should leave an important legacy for our thinking about cities, Congress, racial politics, and political parties. I hope that it catalyzes a series of follow-up studies with the same attention to the dynamics across the levels of our federalist system, including studies of city–state and state–federal interplays, as well.

This masterful book demonstrates what many of us who study cities often suspect: Here in the United States, you cannot make sense of national politics without understanding urban politics. Though federalist, the U.S. political system is a singular whole, and cannot be studied in separate pieces.