Hesing was a Republican and a bummer who would later go to jail in the Whiskey Ring scandal, but he spoke for his constituency. He and Irish American Democratic leaders formed an alliance in 1873, which toppled Medill and the reformers. They embraced an ethnic Chicago. Although corrupt and not necessarily averse to redistributing a certain amount of income upward, they protected ethnic voters who elected them from the evangelical Republican temperance reformers. They reclaimed the police force, which had under Medill increasingly become the domain of the native-born, and they handed out the
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