Machine, Political

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MACHINE, POLITICAL

MACHINE, POLITICAL. To its critics a political machine is a corrupt urban regime ruled by a boss and his cronies. To its defenders, the machine steps in where city government has failed to provide essential services to its residents.

In New York during the 1860s, William Marcy Tweed built an organization of Democratic Party functionaries and building contractors that became known as the "Tweed Ring." The city had experienced extraordinary growth over the previous several decades, as Irish and German immigrants streamed into Manhattan. New York's infrastructure was totally unequipped to deal with this population surge. With his allies in the state legislature, Tweed engineered a new city charter that gave New York City control over its own budget. An advocate of labor unions and the Catholic Church, Tweed gained the support of immigrants, particularly the Irish—the largest foreign-born group in the city—although he was neither Catholic nor Irish. He leveraged the city heavily with municipal bonds and embarked on a massive, and very corrupt, campaign of public works to modernize the city. Although

Tweed was arrested in 1871 and cast from power, machine politics continued in New York and developed elsewhere.

The Irish and the Democratic Party would dominate this form of politics in many cities, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, until reforms in both civil service and elections over the course of the twentieth century brought about its demise. The Irish were the first immigrant group to arrive in American cities in large enough numbers to challenge the leadership of the British-descended colonial elites. Irish politicians made a populist appeal to immigrants that came after them, offering cultural tolerance and a voice in government in return for political loyalty. The Democratic Party made much greater efforts to court urban immigrants than the Republicans, so it often became a vehicle to power for local bosses.

As immigration grew from the 1880s to the 1910s, cities became very ethnically diverse and newcomers dominated some of the largest. New York was three-quarters foreign-born by 1920. The Irish clung tenaciously to the power they had won, but stinginess in handing out favors to newly arrived ethnic groups gave reformers an edge against them. Progressives struggled to centralize urban government to eliminate the ward system that divided cities into fiefdoms controlled by vassals of a machine boss. They wanted experts to expand infrastructure rationally and honestly and hoped to eliminate vice.

During the New Deal in the 1930s, when the federal government vastly expanded the social services it offered to urbanites, opponents of machine politics hoped the patronage of bosses would be eclipsed. In some cases, however, city control over distributing federal money only further entrenched a boss.

The style of urban politics developed by Boss Tweed in New York during the 1860s, died with Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago in the 1970s. In 1970, only one-third of Chicago's population was first or second-generation immigrant. But its African American population was about thirty-three percent, and these Chicagoans demanded power. The politics of race would supersede the politics of ethnicity in the postindustrial city, and declining urban populations and wealth undermined the patronage basis for new machines.