Politics in Chicago took place behind the scenes, out of public view, and most people had no idea what went on back there.

That was the place where deals were cut, judgements were made, and sly plotters concocted schemes to achieve their political goals, confident the reasons for their actions would never be known.

Even mundane activities flowered behind closed doors, away from the prying eyes of onlookers who might have wanted to know about events that affected them. Some were sinister, some weren’t. But they all took place out of sight. And there were lots of them.

Nobody was taking notes, or recording discussions, or trying to preserve history in any of these situations. It’s not that instigators deliberately attempted to keep their activities secret, although some did. Often, they were simply conducting what they believed to be routine business in what they considered routine ways and never expected their actions to be revisited.

Some people might have assumed these behind the scenes shenanigans were due to the evil machinations of a few “bad apples” in politics, scoundrels who may have done things they shouldn’t have done when they thought nobody was looking. They wouldn’t have imagined that behavior to have been so commonplace and have such wide-ranging impact on the political landscape.

Even hardcore critics, who believed that politicians were all a bunch of rascals, didn’t realize how much wrangling and maneuvering went on behind the scenes.

They needed the details to be spelled out for them.