PART ONE: That Is Not What The Historical Record Says

I have sat quietly — more or less, but mostly more (really, ask around) — in Newburgh City Council meetings for seven years.

I have watched budget presentations that obscured more than they revealed. I have listened to city managers explain away FOIL non-responses with the practiced calm of men who know the clock is on their side. I have heard developers speak in the language of community benefit while their attorneys filed the PILOT applications. I have taken notes. I have bit my lip.

Last night I stopped biting.

Mayor Torrance Harvey, in a discussion about charter reform, rambled as to how and why the council-manager form of government was created. He said that it came out of the Progressive Era. It was a response to corruption. It was a reform to prevent people with money from manipulating the government.

I shouted from my seat: “That is not what the historical record says!”

Seven years. And that’s what broke it.

I want to be precise about why, because the outburst wasn’t frustration with the mayor as a person. It was something closer to the feeling you get when you watch someone recite a lie that has been told so many times it has calcified into conventional wisdom — and you happen to know, in granular documented detail, exactly how the lie was constructed and who it was constructed to serve.

The mayor’s account of the Progressive Era municipal reform movement is the reform movement’s own account of itself. It is the version of history that the reformers wrote, funded, published, and successfully installed in civics textbooks for a century. It presents a simple moral arc: corrupt machine politicians were stealing from the public, taking kickbacks from insiders; enlightened reformers replaced them with professional administrators who served everyone equally. The council-manager form was the instrument of that improvement. It was good government.¹

What the historical record actually shows is something considerably less flattering.

The Progressive Era municipal reform movement of the 1900s and 1910s was not primarily a response to corruption. It was a response to democracy — specifically, to what democracy was producing in American cities when it was allowed to function through the mechanisms of ward-based representation and machine politics.

Those mechanisms were corrupt. We will not pretend otherwise. The machine extracted money, distributed patronage, and operated with a transactional logic that had nothing to do with textbook civic virtue. But the machine also worked — for specific people, in specific ways that the reformers found intolerable. It gave recently arrived immigrants a ladder into civic life. It traded votes for coal and jobs and help navigating naturalization. It was, in the language of political scientists Samuel Hays and James Weinstein, a system of downward accountability — responsive to constituents precisely because it needed their votes ward by ward, neighborhood by neighborhood.²

And it was producing outcomes that alarmed the business and professional classes profoundly.

The Socialist Party of America was winning municipal elections across the country. By 1912, socialists held office in 340 cities. Milwaukee had a socialist mayor. Schenectady had a socialist mayor. Eugene Debs received nearly a million votes in the 1912 presidential election — roughly six percent of the national total, a figure that looks modest until you remember that the progressive movement was watching those numbers compound election cycle by election cycle and doing the math on where they led.³

This was the actual context in which the council-manager form was developed and promoted. Not a generalized civic desire for cleaner government, but a specific class response to the demonstrated capacity of working-class and ethnic immigrant voters to elect people who represented their interests.

The reform program was elegant in its indirection. Replace ward elections with at-large elections, and you dilute the geographic concentration of immigrant and working-class votes. Replace elected executives with appointed managers, and you remove the position most responsive to democratic pressure from democratic reach entirely. Dress it in the language of efficiency, expertise, and corruption-fighting, and you make opposition to it sound like a defense of graft.

The scholars who have documented this most carefully — Hays in his landmark 1964 essay “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Weinstein in The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, and David Tyack in The One Best System (Harvard University Press, 1974), which documented the identical class project running simultaneously through public education — found consistent patterns. Reform movements were led not by ordinary citizens outraged by corruption but by chambers of commerce, real estate boards, and civic associations dominated by business elites. The reforms they implemented consistently shifted power upward — from wards to city-wide elections, from elected officials to appointed managers, from constituents to credentialed administrators. Tyack concluded that what the structural reformers wanted was to replace constituent-accountable institutions with a streamlined professional bureaucracy in which lay control was carefully filtered through a corporate board — in schools as in city halls.⁴

This is not a heterodox reading. This is the mainstream historiography. It has been available in any university library for sixty years.

This Mayor doesn’t know this. I’m confident of that, not contemptuous of it.

This Mayor believes in the council-manager form the way people believe in things they’ve never had reason to examine. It came to him as received wisdom. It fits his worldview — he is, like most contemporary Democratic elected officials, a product of a political culture that has thoroughly absorbed the Progressive Era’s equation of credentials with legitimacy and administrative expertise with democratic accountability.

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian political theorist who wrote from a Fascist prison cell in the 1930s. His central insight was that ruling classes maintain power not primarily through force but through culture — by making their own interests appear to be common sense, natural, inevitable. He called this hegemony.⁵

The Mayor teaches Social Studies at Newburgh Free Academy — civics, history, government. This is his professional domain. The council-manager form, municipal governance, the Progressive Era reforms — this is literally classroom curriculum. And yet he sat at the head of the dais and recited the textbook mythology while the person with the historiography that dismantles it sat on one of the council auditorium benches twenty feet away.

His assertions indicate that he has instead absorbed the civic mythology that American political culture provides its participants as default — the story in which Progressive Era reform was an uncomplicated good, in which the council-manager form represents a maturation beyond corruption. What disturbs me is not his innocence with regard to the scholarship. It’s the function his innocence serves.

When the Mayor recites the reform movement’s self-justification as neutral history, he is — without knowing it, without intending it — doing exactly what the system was designed to produce. The council-manager form doesn’t require its defenders to understand its origins. It only requires them to believe in its legitimacy. True believers are more useful than cynical ones, because they can’t be accused of bad faith, and because they will defend the structure with a conviction that no hired advocate could manufacture.

That is, more or less, what Gramsci meant by hegemony.

The same meeting produced another formulation worth examining carefully.

In the course of the discussion, various citizens had been coming to the mike to call for charter reform. Some of those voices represented constituents facing concrete material crises: tenants at Kenney Apartments who have been without reliable heat and hot water; homeowners in Warden Circle who have been hit with ADA compliance fines for conditions they did not create and cannot individually remedy.⁶

Mayor Harvey characterized the push for charter reform as the work of special interest groups.

He then — and this is the part that requires you to sit with it for a moment — extended that characterization to include the Kenney tenants and the Warden Circle homeowners.

Tenants without heat in winter are a special interest group.

Homeowners fined for ADA violations are a special interest group.

I want to place that formulation next to another one from the same civic apparatus: the approval by the city manager’s office of a PILOT arrangement for a developer who held positions on the IDA, the assessment review board, and was seen regularly at SEDAC — a committee whose deliberations are supposed to be closed off to the public. Yes: a 64-year property tax abatement for a private actor with an undisclosed conflict of interest, processed without apparent friction, characterized by no one in the room as a special interest request.⁷

“Special interest” is a delegitimizing term. It means: your concern is not a public concern. It means: you are a narrow group pursuing private advantage at the expense of the broader community. It is a rhetorical move designed to shrink the standing of whoever it’s applied to.

What the Mayor has revealed, by applying it to tenants without heat, is that the term in his usage doesn’t actually mean what it’s supposed to mean. It doesn’t identify narrow self-dealing. It identifies opposition. A special interest, in this frame, is anyone who creates friction for the existing governance structure. The category is defined not by the nature of the grievance but by the direction in which it points.

If tenants without heat are a special interest, and a developer’s 64-year tax abatement is not, then the question that follows is unavoidable: whose interest does the structure actually serve?

There is a harder conversation happening in these meetings, and I want to address it directly now because I think obscuring it serves no one.

Councilmember Shakur has asserted, more than once, that criticism of the council-manager structure is a proxy for opposition to Black leadership — that calls for charter reform are, at bottom, an attempt to remove Black people from positions of power. He made this assertion again last night … after I had presented two charts documenting a strong correlation between council-manager government structure and higher rates of urban renewal displacement during the 1960s, a new finding that if it holds up, will have implications across the country for this debate.⁸

I understand why the Councilmember’s assertion has traction. Newburgh’s history with white political and economic power is not abstract. The city was systematically disinvested, its neighborhoods demolished, its residents displaced, across decades of policy choices made by people who did not look like most of Newburgh’s current residents. Suspicion of reform initiatives with predominantly white citizen backing is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.

But the argument, in this case, has the structure of the problem backwards.

The charts I presented — drawn from the University of Richmond’s Renewing Inequality dataset, overlaid with municipal government form data I compiled from the ICMA for 179 cities — document a finding that is not peripheral. It is a pattern that holds across multiple analytical approaches.

The council-manager form did not protect Black communities from urban renewal. In city after city, the administrative insulation it provided — the removal of executive power from direct electoral accountability — made it easier to execute displacement programs over the objections of affected residents. The professional city manager, accountable to no ward, beholden to no ethnic constituency, credentialed in the ICMA tradition of technocratic neutrality, was structurally better positioned to process those programs than an elected mayor whose voters lived in the neighborhoods being demolished.

If Newburgh had a mayor-ward council system in the 1960s, the hillside-waterfront might have had two council members defending it, instead of at-large council members with a city manager exercising “professional expertise”. And if that were the case, would we today have a vibrantly restored hillside-waterfront with an African American community that would now be holding generational wealth, or would we still have a lawn in need of mowing?

We will never know. What is likely true:

At-large members would have sympathized.

Ward members would have fought.

This is what the structure does. It does not do it differently because a Black professional is operating it. The accountability deficit is in the architecture, not in the individual.

To defend the council-manager form in the name of Black political power is to defend the instrument that has most efficiently processed the removal of Black political power from consequential decisions. The Councilmember is protecting the machine that ran over his constituents’ predecessors, because the machine now has a Black operator.

I don’t say this to impugn his motives. I say it because the empirical record and the historical record speaks loudly and the conflation of structural critique with racial attack has to be named and refused, or it will continue to function as a shield for a governance form that has not earned protection.

………………….

I shouted in a city council meeting last night.

In seven years, I have never done that.

What came out of me last night was not anger at the Mayor. It was something more specific: the particular intolerance that accumulates when you watch an ideology defend itself with the story it wrote about itself, using someone in a position of authority as a vehicle, in a room full of people who have been damaged by that ideology and don’t have access to the counter-history that would let them name what is happening to them.

The mayor’s history lesson was not malicious. It was something more durable than malicious. It was sincere. He believes it. The structure produced a defender who would never need to be asked.

The Mayor teaches Social Studies at Newburgh Free Academy. Civics. History. Government. The Progressive Era is in his curriculum. The council-manager form is in his curriculum. He sat at that dais and taught his students’ city the wrong lesson, and he believed every word of it. And he gaveled the person who actually knows the history into silence, and threatened to have him removed from the room, in front of an audience with a need to know.

That is what hegemony looks like from the inside of a city council chamber in Newburgh, New York, in 2026.

And that is what THIS historical record says.

Michael Lebron is the founder of Newburgh Is America, an investigative journalism and civic advocacy platform.

NEXT: PART 2 — EVERYONE IS RUNNING ON GRAMSCI

FOOTNOTES

¹ The council-manager form of government was first adopted in Sumter, South Carolina in 1912 and Dayton, Ohio in 1914. The International City/County Management Association (ICMA), founded in 1914, became the primary professional body promoting and standardizing the model nationally. By 1920 it had spread to dozens of cities; by mid-century it was the dominant form of government in American municipalities. Newburgh, New York adopted its council-manager charter in 1915.

² Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55, no. 4 (October 1964): 157–169. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). Both works document the business-elite leadership of Progressive Era municipal reform and its function as a response to working-class and immigrant political power rather than a neutral improvement in governance.

³ Socialist Party electoral victories in this period are documented in James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967). Debs received 901,551 votes in 1912, approximately 6% of the popular vote, while campaigning from outside active political life. The trajectory of socialist municipal victories was a primary driver of elite reform anxiety in precisely the years the council-manager movement gained momentum.

⁴ David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). Tyack’s analysis of administrative progressivism in education runs in precise parallel to Hays’s analysis of municipal reform: the same class project, the same period, the same goal of replacing constituent-accountable local institutions with professionally administered centralized ones. Tyack’s conclusion that structural reformers sought to replace “illegitimate” lay influence with a streamlined professional bureaucracy is directly applicable to the municipal government reform movement documented by Hays and Weinstein.

⁵ Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, written 1929–1935, first published in Italian 1948–1951; English translation by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Gramsci’s concept of hegemony — the process by which ruling class interests become naturalized as common sense — is the theoretical framework underlying the argument of this series. For Gramsci, hegemony is most effective when its beneficiaries are not cynical operators but sincere believers; the intellectual who reproduces ruling class ideology without awareness of doing so is more useful to that ideology than the paid advocate.

⁶ The Kenney Apartments and The Warden Circle situations have been documented in previous NIA reporting. https://newburghisamerica.com/2026/03/01/two-crises-a-city-manager-one-way-forward/

⁷ NIA has previously documented the IDA conflicts of interest in detail, including the formal complaint filed with the New York State Comptroller. https://newburghisamerica.com/2026/02/07/the-man-who-stayed-for-the-show/ SEDAC — the Sustainable Economic Development Advisory Committee — operates under rules limiting public access to its deliberations, making the developer’s regular presence there a matter of particular concern given his positions on the IDA and assessment review board.

⁸ The full methodology and findings of this analysis will be published as part of the ongoing NIA series “What They Called Good Government.” The dataset draws on the University of Richmond’s Renewing Inequality project (Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, eds., Renewing Inequality: Family Displacements through Urban Renewal, 1950–1966, in American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers), overlaid with municipal government form data hand-coded by the author for 179 cities. The finding of a consistent council-manager displacement premium across multiple analytical approaches is original to this research. Publication of the author’s analysis establishes priority.