Political machine how does it work

But among the Democratic faithful, Kelly's greatest liability proved to be his uncompromising stand in favor of public housing and desegregated public schools. The party leadership persuaded Kelly not to seek reelection in and replaced him with a figurehead, civic leader Martin H.

The Democratic machine endured Kennelly's presence in the mayor's office for two terms but then replaced him with a party regular, Richard J. Daley, in During Daley's prolonged tenure in city hall—he was reelected five times prior to his sudden death in —the machine reached its apogee.

At a time when virtually no urban political machines survived, Daley steered the Cook County Democratic organization to one electoral triumph after another. As government workers died or retired, the machine filled their positions temporarily pending civil service exams that were never given.

A series of court decisions in the s, culminating in the Shakman decrees , severely reduced patronage by first prohibiting the politically motivated firing of government workers and, several years after Daley's death, by outlawing politically motivated hiring practices. By the s, the mighty Democratic patronage army shrank significantly, but during the Daley years civil servants who worked hard for the party at election time and precinct captains who produced healthy victory margins at the polls kept their patronage jobs and received other rewards.

Long reliant upon the electoral support from a rapidly expanding black population, the political machine's prolonged success finally wavered because of demographic changes. Daley was an avid defender of residential segregation and an opponent of affirmative-action policies in government , and his conservatism ran afoul of the civil rights and black power movements.

Daley's support among black voters dwindled in the s, and wholesale changes came following his death in Bilandic, a colorless party functionary whose inept handling of a record-setting snowstorm led Chicagoans to question whether the machine could still deliver services efficiently. Unseating Bilandic at the first opportunity, the voters opted instead for Jane Byrne, a former machine regular who campaigned as a reformer but whose chaotic and ineffectual years in office enhanced the level of dissatisfaction with city government.

Despite campaign promises to the contrary, Byrne ignored black political demands. Now almost all are gone. The big city and the political boss grew up together in America. Bossism, with all its color and corruption and human drama, was a natural and perhaps necessary accompaniment to the rapid development of cities. The new urban communities did not grow slowly and according to plan; on the contrary, huge conglomerations of people from all over the world and from widely varying backgrounds came together suddenly, and in an unplanned, unorganized fashion fumbled their way toward communal relationships and a common identity.

The political bosses emerged to cope with this chaotic change and growth. Acting out of greed, a ruthless will for mastery, and an imperfect understanding of what they were about, the bosses imposed upon these conglomerations called cities a certain feudal order and direction.

By virtually every sizable city had a political boss or was in the process of developing one. By , sixty years later, almost every urban political machine was in an advanced state of obsolescence and its boss in trouble.

The reason is not hard to find. Some of the cities kept growing and all of them kept changing, but the bosses, natural products of a specific era, could not grow or change beyond a certain point. The cities became essentially different, and as they did, the oldstyle organizations, like all organisms which cannot adapt, began to die. The dates vary from city to city. The system began earlier and died sooner in New York.

Here or there, an old-timer made one last comeback. In Chicago, the organization and its boss still survive. But exceptions aside, the late nineteenth century saw the beginning, and the middle twentieth, the end, of the Age of the Bosses. What follows is a brief history of how it began, flourished, and passed away.

Rome and Alexandria in the ancient world had probably been as polyglot, but in modern times the diversity of American cities was unique. Everywhere in the Western world, cities were growing rapidly in the late nineteenth century; but the Germans from the countryside who migrated to Hamburg and Berlin, the English who moved to Birmingham and London, and the French who flocked to Paris stayed among fellow nationals.

They might be mocked as country bumpkins and their clothes might be unfashionable, but everyone they met spoke the same language as themselves, observed the same religious and secular holidays, ate the same kind of food, voted—if they had the franchise at all—in the same elections, and shared the same sentiments and expectations. To move from farm or village to a big European city was an adventure, but one still remained within the reassuring circle of the known and the familiar.

In American cities, however, the newcomers had nothing in common with one another except their poverty and their hopes. The food, the customs, the holidays, the politics, were alien. Native Americans migrating to the cities from the countryside experienced their own kind of cultural shock: they found themselves competing not with other Americans but with recently arrived foreigners, so that despite their native birth they, too, felt displaced, strangers in their own country.

It was natural for members of each group to come together to try to find human warmth and protection in Little Italy or Cork Hill or Chinatown or Harlem. These feelings of clannish solidarity were one basis of strength for the political bosses. A man will more readily give his vote to a candidate because he is a neighbor from the old country or has some easily identifiable relationship, if only a similar name or the same religion, than because of agreement on some impersonal issue.

With so many different races and nationalities living together, however, mutual antagonisms were present, and the opportunity for hostility to flare into open violence was never far away. Ambitious, unscrupulous politicians could have exploited these antagonisms for their own political advantage, but the bosses and the political organizations which they developed did not function that way.

What lasting profit was there in attacking his religion or deriding his background? Tammany early set the pattern of cultivating every bloc and faction and making an appeal as broad-based as possible. Bosses elsewhere instinctively followed the same practice. George B. Cox, the turn-of-the-century Republican boss of Cincinnati, pasted together a coalition of Germans, Negroes, and old families like the Tafts and the Long-worths.

James M. Curley, who was mayor of Boston on and off for thirty-six years and was its closest approximation to a political boss, ran as well in the Lithuanian neighborhood of South Boston and the Italian section of East Boston as he did in the working-class Irish wards. In his last term in City Hall, he conferred minor patronage on the growing Negro community and joined the N. The bosses organized neighborhoods, smoothed out antagonisms, arranged ethnically balanced tickets, and distributed patronage in accordance with voting strength as part of their effort to win and hold power.

They blurred divisive issues and buried racial and religious hostility with blarney and buncombe. They were not aware that they were actually performing a mediating, pacifying function.

They did not realize that by trying to please as many people as possible they were helping to hold raw new cities together, providing for inexperienced citizens a common meeting ground in politics and an experience in working together that would not have been available if the cities had been governed by apolitical bureaucracies.

When William Marcy Tweed, the first and most famous of the big-city bosses, died in jail in , several hundred workingmen showed up for his funeral. The Nation wrote the following week: Let us remember that he fell without loss of reputation among the bulk of his supporters.

The odium heaped on him in the pulpits last Sunday does not exist in the lower stratum of New York society. This split in attitude toward political bosses between the impoverished many and the prosperous middle classes lingers today and still colors historical writing.

To respectable people, the boss was an exotic, even grotesque figure. They found it hard to understand why anyone would vote for him or what the sources of his popularity were. To the urban poor, those sources were self-evident. The boss ran a kind of ramshackle welfare state. He helped the unemployed find jobs, interceded in court for boys in trouble, wrote letters home to the old country for the illiterate; he provided free coal and baskets of food to tide a widow over an emergency, and organized parades, excursions to the beach, and other forms of free entertainment.

He offered bribes to the editor of the New York Times and to Nast to stop their public criticisms, but neither accepted. Boss Tweed was arrested in October and indicted shortly thereafter. He was tried in , and after a hung jury in the first trial, he was found guilty in a second trial of more than crimes including forgery and larceny.

He was sentenced to 12 years in prison. While he was in jail, Tweed was allowed to visit his family at home and take meals with them while a few guards waited at his doorstep. He seized an opportunity at one of these meals to escape in disguise across the Hudson to New Jersey, and then by boat to Florida, from there to Cuba, and finally to Spain.

With his health broken and few remaining supporters, Tweed died in jail in Political machines corruptly ran several major cities throughout the United States, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest where millions of immigrants had settled.

The machines may have provided essential services for immigrants, but their corruption destroyed good government and civil society by undermining the rule of law. By the early twentieth century, Progressive reformers had begun to target the bosses and political machines to reform city government in the United States.

An event that propelled William Tweed to a position of respect and more power in New York City was his. Which of the following emerged to seek to correct the problems created by the situation lampooned in the cartoon? Nast, Thomas. Thomas Nast Cartoons on Boss Tweed. Bill of Rights Institute. Ackerman, Kenneth D. New York: Carroll and Graf, Allswang, John M.

Bosses, Machines, and Urban Votes. Brands, H. American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, New York: Doubleday, Lynch, Dennis Tilden. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, Trachtenberg, Alan. New York: Hill and Wang, White, Richard.