If Winning Is Everything, Is Anything Off Limits?

Mr. Edsall contributes weekly essays from Washington on politics and demographics.

Fifty-nine years ago, when I was a young reporter covering City Hall for The Baltimore Evening Sun, the Second City Council District contest was a vicious struggle for political power pitting an ascendant Black political organization against the dominant Czech machine.

It looked like time and demographics had run out for one incumbent, Clement J. Prucha, and an ally, Joseph V. Mach, in this East Baltimore district. But on Election Day 1967, the voters chose the two Czech American pols for four-year terms, alongside an African American........

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