Political Machines: Monkey Wrench or People-Based Economic Development
Mention the words “political machine” and visions dance in one’s head of Tammany Hall, the Tweed Ring, serving Christmas turkeys to starving immigrant families, and the sadly corrupt, patronage-ridden, but well-meaning Spencer Tracy as Frank Skeffington (Boston’s James Michael Curley) uttering on his deathbed “The Hell I Would” putting the heartless Yankee in his place.
To those in the Policy World the Gilded Age political machine usually revolves about Irish immigrants, selling their votes to benevolent hack ward-heelers, who took their opportunities when available, and who in turn were controlled by an evil corrupt, boss-led juggernaut “grand sachem” which dominated city after city for decades on end. Machines funneled public funds to private firms for unneeded extravagances, poorly constructed infrastructure and transportation/utility franchises that sprawled the city outward for private and machine profit. Cities went bankrupt, the middle class were outraged, and good government rendered impossible. But the urban poor got turkeys for Christmas.
The reader is now warned: this history does not adhere to the conventional image of political machines.
Political machines, in different forms, exist at the time of this writing, and they only remotely resemble Gilded Age machines—and there are several variants of those. Political machines are not simply creatures of the Gilded Age; they are a consistently found type of mostly municipal-level (sometimes, county; sometimes state) policy system that has occurred throughout American urban history. The conventional perspective has layered many periods of machine history into a timeless, homogeneous, essentially stereotypical image, constructing of a machine that imperfectly describes its actual policy system at any one point in time, or any individual city’s experience. The Tweed’s machine is not Richard Daley’s Chicago machine, and New York’s Croker Tammany Hall is not Boston’s Curley, nor Boss Crump’s Memphis.
Our concern in this history is the economic development policy process which is a component of a jurisdictional policy system. My research strongly suggests that different types of machines can create different urban policy systems. If so, the Gilded Age municipal level political machine-affected policy systems presented in chapter are not necessarily going to be helpful in assessing future urban policy systems which are likely to be significantly different. In short, machine-style policy systems vary by historical time period, and any economic development policy-making during each respective time period will be a creature of the larger policy system. To the extent that the conventional image of machines and Gilded Age political systems distorts a time period’s political/policy system, we lose understanding and inject artificiality to our history. So, we must first sort out political machines by time periods and secondly, appreciate that within any time period several variants of political machines can develop.
What is a political machine? It is an organization (often semi-formal extra-legal, and behind the scenes) applied to politics led by a political class (oligarchic) whose purpose it is to acquire votes and win elections, securing in the process benefits of value to the political class and constituencies that support it. Policy outputs in a machine-affected policy system, to the extent possible, will reward voters, constituencies, attract future voters, and secure those benefits desired by the machine-dependent political class. The ultimate goal is to sustain political control of the machine. As such, an important defining characteristic of a machine is its ability to continue over periods of time, changes in leadership, and even changes in constituency/voters.
Ultimately, the core political class is the principal driver (and beneficiary) of political machines. In my definition, a single dominant mayor/boss, absent some sort of formal/semi-formal structure which permits continuity to another “boss-leader”, is not a machine. The existence of pervasive corruption does not mean the system is dominated by a machine. A political machine, as shall be shortly supported, does not have to control the entire urban policy system—it can control or dominate only one element or institution within it. If a policy system is to be considered as a “machine” policy system, the machine ought to dominate the entire policy cycle and its eventual outputs.
Except for very brief episodes, most Gilded Age municipalities[1] were not “machine” dominated policy systems. Yet, nearly every municipal policy system in the Age exhibited somewhere in its policy systems, components and institutions that were, in fact, machine controlled. The impact of machines on the various policy areas varied enormously. Economic development was very much affected by machines because mostly it was, by default or consciously plan, delegated to non-governmental, business organizations. At the same time, however, some economic development-related activities and initiatives were strongly affected, by machine influences during both approval and implementation stages of the policy cycle. A great deal of Gilded Age economic development lay outside of machine control.
It would seem to be necessary and logical to our straw man conventional image of machines that city’s develop bosses who held sufficient power over a sustained period time so to control/manage a machine, run a city, and dominate its political and policy processes. The centrality of the boss to the conventional image of the political machine may, however, be its chief weakness. City-wide bosses were rare, enjoyed very brief tenures, and seldom acted as a boss, but more as a “broker”[2]. To us machine “brokers” shared policy-making with ever-stronger mayors, independent boards and commissions, comptrollers and aggressive business organizations such as the Chamber. To the extent they controlled anything, machine brokers dominated the city councils of Big City America. If bosses infrequently exist, and/or operate as brokers, our conception, advanced in the following sections, of ward-based, city council dominant political machines is considerably strengthened.
In the next section, I will explain (1) why I believe the conventional image of Gilded Age machine and policy systems distorts our understanding; (2) offer four sometimes brief, sometimes not, descriptions of individual city machines (Philadelphia, Washington DC, New York City, and Boston) with the object being to demonstrate the variants in machines during this period; and (3) disparage the notion that machines were led by bosses who allegedly dominated the municipality’s political and policy processes. In regards to the last point, there will be exceptions, but as a general rule Gilded Age municipal policy systems were not dominated by machine bosses. Bosses will be more common in periods other than the Gilded Age.
Perhaps the chief counter-argument to my Gilded Age, ward-based, city council dominant political machines policy system would be the citywide “Boss”. Except for Tammany, machines are linked to their famous Boss. The conventional model, I think, suggests that municipal politics of this Age were dominated by bosses and machine politics. I will argue in the following sections that this is largely incorrect. Gilded Age municipalities were overwhelmingly not controlled by bosses or by ethnic-based political machines. To this end, four styles (Boss, Broker, Ward-Based, and Charismatic Mayor) of Gilded Age municipal machines suggest variation among political machines and will observe that in practice they co-existed with Businessman Mayors, Structural Reformers/Mugwumps, and even Progressive Era reformers. In this wonderful sausage-making mélange one discovers that city-wide dominant machines were relatively rare. Philadelphia will be developed in great detail as it represents the best example of a successful political machines dominating over an extended period of time, a municipal—and state– policy system. The fly in this ointment, however, is that eventually one conquered the other. Why? The State machine was victorious over the municipal boss because the two were simultaneously located not in Philadelphia the separate and autonomous policy system, but rather in the state capital where the state Republican Party was headquartered.
The Boss or the Broker: Two Rival Versions of Political Machines, Boss and Broker Share/Compete in 19th Century Philadelphia and the State of Pennsylvania
The Broker: The Republican Party controlled Washington D.C. during the Gilded Age[3]. Senator Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s first Secretary of War, quickly forged a state-level, Republican machine with a few years of the War’s end. From Washington, Simon, James and later David Cameron, along with Mathew Quay (Pittsburgh area) focused on a single purpose—controlling elections to ensure Republicans maintained state control and delivered a block of votes sufficient to exert great influence in Republican presidential selection, national elections and voting to support big Pennsylvania business. The Republican sate machine was effectively an alliance of Pennsylvania’s corporate elite and a new political class which controlled the state machine through control of both the federal government and of elections.
It was said by reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd that “John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company had done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it”.[4] The same was said of railroads. In Philadelphia, the Gas Works was a source of patronage, and Peter A. B. Widener, a city treasurer became one of the nation’s richest men, investing in suburban real estate and streetcar railways. The Pittsburgh level municipal machine incorporated the steel, oil, gas and coal corporate elites prominent in that City. A great deal of the machine’s attention and effort was focused not on making money as Tammany Hall made money, but on controlling the federal government and Presidential elections[5], often using Civil War generals as their candidates. Rhode Island, with a similar state-level Republican regime could match Pennsylvania for such control as could Ohio, under the Presidential king-maker, Mark Hanna. Maryland’s Democratic Gorman-Rasin Ring[6] was yet another example of Gilded Age state-level machines. None of the state-level “bosses”, however were included in Zink’s Twenty Bosses—but “King” James McManes is.
Philadelphia’s Gas House Boss: James McManes forged the famous Gas House Trust Philadelphia machine. Its origins lie with the purchase by the city of a privately-owned gas-powered utility in 1841. To keep it out of politics, a special board was created to hold title and manage the facility as a municipal enterprise. The Trust could issue bonds, enter into contracts and do all the good things that improperly-done constitute corruption—in other words it was an opportunity in the making. By the end of the Civil War, the Trust employed two thousand workers and was the largest potential patronage block available in the city. At the same time James McManes, a Scotch-Irish-born Protestant, former Whig turned Republican, and after 1858 life-long ward-boss of Philadelphia’s 17th Ward. In 1865 McManes became a Gas Trust director and was off to the races.
Surviving an intense scandal at the Trust, McManes became known as “the King” and by the early 1870’s was informally recognized as Philadelphia’s Boss. Supplementing the Trust with the purchase of Philadelphia’s largest street car firm, provided the Gas Trust with not only the largest patronage block in the area, but perceived control of the city as well. McManes assessed anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars per Trust and city employee to serve the machine’s needs. The 1870’s were the golden years for the Gas House Trust and during that time it was a true powerhouse machine, fitting very nicely the conventional machine image this history so vigorously disparages. Excepting, of course, that the machine was not ethnic or immigrant based and was firmly based on patronage and assessments. It also gingerly coexisted with the Cameron and Quay ruled state Republican machine[7]. McManes and the state leadership lived a tension-filled relationship, but so long as the former delivered predictable and safe votes, the latter tolerated as little decentralization in both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia[8].
In 1880, however, two flies flew into the McManes ointment-both were of his own making. The first was a break with the state machine. At the 1880 Party nomination, Cameron supported a Grant for a third term as President; McManes publically supported Garfield and provided Philadelphia’s votes to his cause. The Republican state machine had publically fractured and Ohio got the nomination. Cameron would never forget. The second problem materialized from a businessman reform coalition, the Committee of One Hundred, which cooperated with the Democratic Party (and the state Republican Party) to oust McManes. McManes after a horrific witch hunt retired to private life[9]. The state machine wasted no opportunity and established its patrimony over Philadelphia politicians—a hold it retained until 1933.
Until the 1880’s takeover by the state machine of the local machine, two rival, but independent, machines and bosses cooperated and fought. After the state takeover, the contest was primarily in local elections, and between reformer and machine. In this struggle, the Republican Party had become the machine’s organization—unlike Tammany Hall which stood apart from the Democratic Party but thoroughly shaped its patronage, its balanced ticked, and occasionally the platform of its candidates. Not so in Philadelphia—the Republican Party was the machine. That proved to be a serious problem to future business reformers who tended to be Republicans. “The recurring division within the [Philadelphia] reform movement over the issue of partisanship in local affairs suggests that many reform activists found it as difficult as the ‘average Philadelphian’ to overcome the ‘political trance [induced] by the purring cry of party regularity’ that is to resist their natural inclination to vote Republican”.[10]
All of which raises the issue of what was the Philadelphia Democratic Party up to? Unlike New York City, the Philadelphia Democratic Party, “experienced a phenomenal decline between the 1880’s and 1920’s, both in leadership strength and in grass-roots support”[11] Why? The Democrats got the blame for the 1893 Panic. So after 1894 there was a nation-wide shift away from the Democrats as the Republican Party enjoyed its Gilded Age golden years.
Secondly, as the Democrats turned to William Jennings Bryan and free silver (1896), they lost the support of Philadelphia’s socially prominent Democratic families who participated in the so-called “Jeffersonian bolt” from the Democrats. This stripped that Party of its business and old wealth leadership. Absent this leadership, the Democrats disintegrated into factional, ward-based politics, which the Republicans wasted little time in “dividing and conquering”, and finally actually forging a bipartisan agreement with prominent ward-lords. That agreement exchanged patronage and appointments to independent boards and commissions (which were, in accordance with the state constitution supposed to be bipartisan).
The net effect was the electoral collapse of Democrats in Philadelphia municipal elections. In 1891, the Democrats, for example, took 39% of the mayoral vote; by 1915, they garnered only 4%.[12] A normal two-party competitive system did not fully return until 1933. During most of the early twentieth century Philadelphia Democratic Party as a “kept organization” or, “a mere corrupt annex of the Republican Organization”.[13]
And that brings us back to the Republican Organization. How did bosses transform and then control the Republican Party and turn it into a political machine? After the collapse of the “Gas Ring” power within the Republican Party was centralized, and through Republican elected officials and appointed, the Republican Party took over Philadelphia’s government [sarcastically, Lenin could have learned from this because it is similar to his democratic centralism]. Patronage was central to power consolidation at the top in that a party boss acquired a virtual monopoly over the patronage pool that he could use to solidify personal and Organization control and discipline to reward the faithful, and “stave out those who were not”. “The administrative consolidation and centralization of authority under the new city charter of 1887 made available a large pool of patronage, and the Organization’s leadership established a monopoly over its distribution”.[14] But patronage alone did not create the Organization.
“It was also due to a number of changes in party methods, rules, recruitment, and finance implemented by state and city party leadership in a deliberate attempt to centralize power within the Republican Party.” The state party leader was first able to control the flow of policy and budgets in the state legislature. Accordingly, interest groups and corporate lobbyists dealt with him. Federal patronage also fell into this category as did support for federal legislation. When the day came that “utility monopolists” wanted street car or electric company franchises, it was the state level party leaders who made the decision and benefited (or not) from their support. This produced income for the Republican Party that it could use to finance its local operations.
Given the reality of Dillon’s law, this also meant that anyone in Philadelphia that wanted a franchise or a state contract also had to reckon with state level party bosses as well as the designated city boss—there was no bypassing the Organization. Another key element of centralized power was the selection and installation of a willing and subordinate city boss. The first such boss, David Martin, effectively became the state-level boss’s satrap and political channel. Through the city boss, the state Boss was able to extend his influence into city affairs and politics. If ever there was an American state-level “House of Cards”, this was it (although I don’t believe it threw people off the roof).
Wisely, the Organization could adopt “reforms” when it became apparent that reform was tactically necessary. Civil Service was approved, adopted, and when helpful, actually practiced. A reform in time could not only save a later Supreme Court, it could take the wind out of a reformer’s campaign. Also, party rules were changed to shape the flow of decisions and elections within the Republican Party. This is where the higher levels effectively selected the lower levels of the party organization, and even controlled who would get the party nomination in a local elections (this is again Leninist democratic centralism). The net effect was that the top party leaders selected the ward leaders, the upside-down of what formerly existed.
Suffice it to say, this Republican Organization was a political juggernaut that came awfully close to being a state-level oligarchy. Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraker concluded:
The Philadelphia Organization is upside down. It has its roots in the air, or rather like the banyon tree, it sends its roots from the center out both up and down and all around, and there lies its peculiar strength …. The Organization that rules Philadelphia is … not a mere municipal machine, but a city, State and national organization.[15]
The opportunities for personal and organization profit were so numerous that so-called “honest graft” became standard and the recourse to deep corruption became unnecessary. Efficiency and sound budgeting were another matter as padded payrolls may be legal, but far from fiscally desirable. A political machine of this nature, while it may have received its votes from immigrants, blacks and working class and rendered nominal services to them in return, was in no real way dependent on the lower classes. Immigrants and working class did not create the “need” for such a machine to exist, so the policy system that followed from its establishment by party leaders did not especially serve such needs or fulfill the various sociological functions seemingly required from a body politic. It served a variety of interests, of course, but none more so than those of the party hierarchy.
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh’s Magee-Finn machine (set up later in 1887) shared power with Quay and his Harrisburg Republicans. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were effectively one party cities and the machine exchanged patronage and public building/infrastructure construction for votes and money. In these two cities, reformers contested machine dominance and were able on occasion to oust the municipal boss for a term or two. Local chambers and local business elites also were an inconsistent opponent of the Republican machine at the municipal level—but not in national politics or state level politics.
Washington DC: Washington D.C. as a policy system seems neither fish nor fowl—through frequently is rather foul. The city does not possess an economic base of its own; its hinterland belongs to somebody else. To assert it is an industrial city, a creature of the industrial age risks furrowed eyebrows. Nevertheless, it is an American city and I’m sure that hidden in its canyons of power, there lay a policy system. In 1871, the half-built downtown and surrounding neighborhoods benefited from Congressional legislation that provided the city with a government modeled on territorial government. The President appointed a governor, and a upper chamber of the legislature (the lower being elected), and a “board of public works” with considerable powers, including the power to tax. The district was awarded a non-voting seat on the Congressional committee that administered/governed its operations. In an amazing act of hypocrisy during the Reconstruction Era, the legislation reduced the franchise of newly enfranchised Afro-Americans. On top of all this Congress authorized several new cabinet department buildings (War, State, and Navy) which would be placed in the hands of the newly authorized Bureau of Public Works.
One of the five members of the Bureau was Alexander Shepherd, a native of Washington and a former residential real estate developer. Simultaneously, he owned a number of paving and stone companies and served as board member of streetcar, railroad and banks—all with contracts and business relationships with his public works department. A friend of President Grant, he subsequently was appointed chair of the Bureau, and then Governor of the City. From the Bureau, Shepherd during the early1870’s constructed an administrative/political machine without benefit of an ethnic base or immigrant voting. As a former alderman, then chairman of the city’s Bureau of Public Works he envisioned the building of a modern city and a monumental capitol of the nation. This required, in his mind, an aggressive physical development program from which he linked with extensive patronage (complete with graft/kickbacks) system. The jobs or patronage went not to him, but to the national Republican Party.
His first project was a drainage system, requiring street leveling, extensive street paving and “views” from key monuments and structures. His plan was “to create a city with unrivaled sanitary facilities, and clean, well-paved, well-lighted thoroughfares”[16].In that when Shepherd started the project, Washington was described as a “swampy mud-hole and a physical mess of unpaved and ungraded streets, open sewers, and disorganized buildings” one can argue significant public benefit could follow from this infrastructure. What might surprise the reader is that it was ungodly expensive. But not to worry, the bond issue did not require voter approval but only Bureau of Public Works approval which could be obtained through recourse to methods and payments normally associated with political machines. “Creative accounting” in DC’s financial statements did the rest.
Upon the bond’s closing, D.C.’s debt soared, surpassed only by the total debt of seven states[17]. But the streets got paved and water/sewers installed. The city’s newspapers, however, pointedly compared Shepherd to Boss Tweed (then having his troubles displayed in court); indeed, an atmosphere of scandal pervaded the Town and the Grant Administration at the time. Shepherd came to be called “Boss Shepherd”. The Panic of 1873 hit, and Washington’s fiscal condition headed way south of the Mason-Dixon line. Congressional intervention alone saved DC from bankruptcy. Shepherd was ousted in 1874, the Board of Public Works abolished and Shepherd headed off to Mexico where he made a second fortune. There is a statute of him on Pennsylvania Avenue. Is Shepherd America’s first economic development “Boss”?[18] Whatever! Shepherd’s example suggest that a Boss, absent an electoral machine, was both possible, and augers future “bosses” hailing from obscure public bureaucracies.
New York City: The obvious centerpiece of ethnic-based machines is New York City’s Tammany Hall—and the obvious example of typical ethnic machine behavior is Boss Tweed. The Scots-Irish Tweed was a long-standing state politician, previously elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and appointed to the New York County Board of Supervisors in 1858. The latter institution was as important to the Tweed patronage machine as was Tammany. Tweed became Tammany’s Grand Sachem and assumed the “Boss” title in 1863. State constitutional charter reform provided more local control and Tweed became NYC’s Commissioner of Public Works. Other Tweed Ring leaders assumed the Commissioner of Parks and Finance Department. Infrastructure, public buildings (courthouse) and parks were how the Ring made its profits. He took over through elections (Mayor A. Oakley Hall) New York City’s government in 1869.
The scandal erupted in 1871[19] and by 1873 Tweed was in jail and the Ring broken. Tweed was arrested in 1872. Despite its contemporary image, and the extent of its graft and corruption, the Tweed Ring’s reign was surprisingly short and its fall rapid. The tale of Tweed exposes the more complex nature of machines and their policy-process—Tweed, for instance, made money for his Ring and provided little to the ethnic voter. In Tweed’s place, New York’s old (1789) Tammany Hall got its first Irish boss (Kelley) in 1872–after Boss Tweed had been convicted and sent to jail, permitting the Irish to capture the organization.
The famous Tammany ethnic machine came together after Irish John Kelley (and later Richard Croker) became Grand Sachem in the wake of Tweed’s breakup. These two bosses stacked the machine and city government with Irish and Irish proxies; that version of the Tammany machine would persist in some form through the 1950’s and early 1960’s. In the nineteenth century, Tammany was for all practical purposes an “Irish” machine. It was resistant to other non-Irish immigrants and its core leadership and focus was Irish. This worked well enough in late nineteenth century New York City where Irish were a large percentage of the voting population[20], but not so well in places like Boston and Buffalo where the Irish voter was not able to dominate city-wide elections. Tammany persisted, however, after 1900, because its boss, Charles Francis Murphy opened Tammany up to other nationalities, making Tammany for the first time a multi-ethnic machine.
Boston: Hugh O’Brien, Boston’s first Irish mayor, appeared on the scene in 1885. O’Brien, businessman and politician, and editor of Shipping and Commercial List, served four terms and was succeeded over the next fourteen years by Yankee Brahmins/politicians and businessmen including Josiah Quincy whose great grandfather can be found in Chapter 2. Boston, in other words, despite a very large Irish population, and a series of ethnic Irish ward-based machines, plus the existence of a city-wide Irish-dominated Democratic party committee was unable to establish a city-wide machine governance of Boston during the nineteenth century (or the twentieth century as well).
Interestingly, a year after O’Brien’s first election (1884), the Republican state legislature transferred control over Boston’s police force to the state itself and approved an independent municipal civil service system for Boston —beginning a micro-management by the state legislature that would continue, some would say, to the present day. The role and power of state government in Boston’s municipal policy-making, especially economic development policy-making, will also be discussed in future chapters. Also, of interest, Yankee Josiah Quincy was elected as a Democrat—with Irish votes—and his administration after the Panic of 1893 was characterized as an example of “municipal socialism” while using patronage in public works and building public baths and parks—a Progressive approach, one might surmise.[21]
Things would change dramatically after the turn of the century and the arrival of “Honey Fitz” John Fitzgerald—but that is a later chapter in our story. Late nineteenth century Boston politics was effectively fragmented: with strong, conventional Irish ward machines (such as Martin Lomasney’s 8th Ward), a city-wide Democratic Irish-led committee in a convoluted partnership with the Yankees who controlled city government and administration—themselves in alliance with the Boston Chamber of Commerce. It appeared that first generation Irish reached accommodation with the Yankees; their sons and daughters not so much.[22] Again, a single ethnic group, the Irish, constituted the almost exclusive core of the ward-based ethnic machines.
The Garden for Gilded Age Municipal Political Machines was the Political Ward, aka, the Gilded Age Neighborhood
Machines, as defined in this history, probably existed somewhere and in some form since 1789. At least two critical drivers shaped the form and behavior of most Gilded Age political machines; a simply huge influx of impoverished, most non-English-speaking immigrants superimposed on an existing fragmented, chiefly business-dominated, yet almost fledging urban policy system. By 1890 rates of foreign born were in excess of 30%[23] in most Eastern/Midwestern Big Cities. Machine politicos were among the very first pure political class found in America and these folk matched the two drivers into a productive machine. They saw their opportunities and took them. Tweed was not an immigrant; he was Scotch-Irish and of middle class roots. He entered politics early in the 1840’s. Tammany as a social/political club had been around since 1789, but committed to an immigrant-oriented, social service ally of the Democrat Party only during and after the 1837-43 Panic. The Jeffersonian, now Jacksonian fragmented policy system had been in place since the start.
The real opportunity came from the continuous (to 1920) stream of crushingly poor, mostly, non-English-speaking immigrants who, for defensive reasons alone, clustered together in the oldest neighborhoods and housing their city had to offer. With no social service system of any consequence in existence, the famous social services of the machine obviously filled a gap. In this world, a vote for a turkey or a job was no big deal—after all most had no intrinsic loyalty to a democracy and little experience with it. The key insight is that provided by immigrants clustering into more or less homogeneous neighborhoods, onto which was grafted the political demarcation of “ward”. The ward is the key to understanding Gilded Age (and pre-1920) machines. Ward-dependent machines represented what today are called neighborhoods, and the policy outputs of these machines characteristically resolved neighborhood issues and addressed “people-based” demands (bathhouses and jobs).
… the foundation of party organization was not the central committee, but the many city wards. Though central supervision by party leaders developed in some municipalities, in every major urban area the ward or legislative district remained the base of the party framework from 1870 to 1900. The nomination process began at the ward level, with the primary election nor caucus. At this neighborhood, party loyalists nominated the candidate for district alderman and elected delegates to the city convention. The convention in turn chose nominees for such offices as mayor or comptroller.[24]
Machines, in addition to social services, ombudsmen, and jobs/patronage, also opposed nativism (anti-immigrant) politicians, parties (Know Nothing), and mobs. Whenever possible, machine policy outputs went to neighborhoods and their residents. From the machine’s eye, sewers, roads, street car routes, and electrification were appreciated through the prisms of ward-boundaries and neighborhoods. Gilded Age machines were not policy neutral as the conventional machine model assumes—rather they were indifferent to middle class-style policy. To the extent, these machines attempted city-wide economic development-like “growth” policies, it was to suck from them graft, kickbacks, abusive bond issuances, and patronage opportunities. This is where the Tweed types made their fortune. And why the business community went after them. Late Gilded Age machines, fearing a fate like Tweed, made their deal with the business community, siphoning off kickbacks from municipal jobholders (and franchise/contract kickbacks—some things never change).
From our policy system perspective Gilded Age machines did pursue a distinctive approach to policy (including economic development-like policies) and, in the context of their day, could be described as neighborhood-oriented and people-serving. Whether or not they are America’s first community developers, I’ll leave to the reader’s judgment, but overlap did exist. Structurally, there was only one place control of wards could lead—not to the city-wide mayor’s office—but to the city legislatures (most cities in the 1870’s had bicameral city councils). As Jon C. Teaford asserts Gilded Age political machines dominated the city councils of Big City America.
Although the city council of the late nineteenth century may have played a more limited role in formulating policy of city-wide significance …. It survived as the voice of the neighborhoods … by which the fragments of the metropolis could win concessions and favors from the ever-more-powerful executive offices of city government. It was the channel through which constituents won exemptions or licenses and neighborhoods obtained pavements, sewers, or water mains … Aldermen of the 1880’s and 1890’s were masters of the microcosm and not overseers of the macrocosm. They were big men at the corner saloon but small fry when compared with the bankers and brokers downtown.[25]
[1] There is one exception: Pennsylvania’s Big Cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. This will be discussed below.
[2] Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph, op. cit., pp. 176-182. Teaford describes city and city and demonstrates that boss was a title often thrust upon ward leaders, but lacking real substance as a city-wide machine bosses. His description of Chicago’s William Lorimer (p. 179) supports his assertion that “no one in Chicago during the late nineteenth century could legitimately claim the title of city boss”. Lorimer, he asserts, at the height of his power could at most lay claim to eight of the city’s thirty-five wards.
[3] Republicans controlled the Presidency from 1860 to 1912 excepting only Grover Cleveland (two terms).
[4] H.D. Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (1881)
[5] From 1860 to 1932 Pennsylvania voted for Republicans in the Presidential elections
[6] See Chapter 5 in Richardson Dilworth (Ed), Cities in American Political History (Washington D.C., Sage, 2011) for a city by city description of the main outlines of politics for the major cities during this period. Freeman Rasin was an early example of the political class which was coming together in the post-Civil War. He joined Baltimore’s Democratic political club as a young man in 1864 and by the early 1870’s had become its leader. From that position he distributed patronage, mediated and controlled the ward bosses and dominated the city council—working through and with seven term mayor Ferdinand Latrobe. He was the key element in Gorman’s Maryland state organization and he remained in control until Democratic reformers ousted him in 1895. See Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 103.
[7] Peter McCaffery, When Bosses Rule Philadelphia: the Emergence of the Republic Machine 1867- 1933 (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1933); Harold Zink, City Bosses in the United States, op. cit., pp. 194-205; and Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (3rd Ed) (New York, McMillan Publishing Company, 1983), pp. 211-212.
[8] Zink summarizes McManes “bossdom”: “The greater part of the “King’s” political power came from his position in the Gas Trust, from leadership of the Seventeenth Ward, and from loyal support of influential friends, including favor at Washington at times. … The army of jobs provided the very best fuel for the political organization which “King” McManes created” Harold Zink, City Bosses in the United States, op. cit., pp. 201. On p. 203 Zink describes the 1880 break with the Republican state leadership and p. 204 describes Cameron’s ouster of McManes. In 1885, the state Republican leadership compelled a new charter on Philadelphia which reinforced dominance of the state.
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Wrap Up and Segue Way
Forming a cohesive machine on top of a chronically changing mélange of neighborhoods and wards proved an increasingly impossible task. No single boss ever emerged from Boston’s[1] (or Buffalo’s) cacophony of ward machines during the Gilded Age—or after. Boston’s Irish political dominance would be achieved in the twentieth century through charismatic Irish mayors “Honey Fitz”, James Michael Curley, and later Kevin White and Ray Flynn rather than through a city-wide ethnic political machine such as Tammany. The inability to integrate other ethnic groups into a machine put the final nail in the coffin of both very heavily Irish city machines. Tammany’s initial success was based on its ability to harness the Irish vote, and it worked for Croker, but by the turn of the century it needed an Irish Murphy to revolutionize Tammany and transform it into an almost unique (Chicago later would also accomplish this feat) multi-ethnic city-wide formal machine. The other durable machines-type, that of a state political party (example, Pennsylvania) rested more on sheer patronage and city workers supplemented by control of some ethnic wards by a centralized state political party.
So the inherent problem confronted by ward-based ethnic machines was that population movements, primarily immigration, dumped a number of diverse nationalities into the neighborhood fabric. With each passing year, more and more non-Irish moved into the neighborhoods. Each ethnic grouping or clusters of ethnics residing in a ward produced its own ward boss. Ethnic ward-based machines relatively quickly became characterized by ”a sizeable band of powerful ward and local leaders who have warred so vigorously and yet survived so stubbornly as to render impossible the single, all-powerful boss”.[2] This occurred in city after city, leaving in its wake neighborhood wards disproportionately controlled by ward machines and bosses, turning the city legislatures into forums for advancing neighborhood interests and autonomy.
The overall municipal policy system, however, was left to integrate/contend with this neighborhood-legislative tilt, linking somehow with a variety of other developing institutions such as stronger mayors, independent commissions and the comptroller, and islands of professional competence developing in fledgling municipal bureaucracies. Most Gilded Age Northern and Midwestern Big Cities were not dominated by machines and bosses—rather, no institution or policy actor dominated the process for any sustained period (Chicago’s Carter Harrison being a semi-exception). The crisis of Gilded Age municipal policy systems was that its principal actors and institutions were in continual near anarchistic conflict, with no one compellingly in charge. That policy chaos was probably the reason most commentators and historians held such little respect for the period and its fledgling governance.
Corruption alone does not define a municipality’s political/policy system as a machine government (i.e. Doc Ames). Corruption was endemic in Gilded Age municipal systems for a variety of reasons of which the ethnic ward machines were arguably only one. Its fragmented, undeveloped administrative capacity, and bi-polar political control rendered it unable to perform well, honestly, and efficiently. Surprisingly, most Gilded Age Big Cities did not form city-wide, sustained, semi-formal machines that comfortably matched the conventional machine stereotype. For example, during the Gilded Age Albany, Cleveland[3], Detroit, Chicago, New Jersey cities, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Portland (Maine), Rochester, San Francisco, Seattle, Springfield Illinois, St. Louis and Minneapolis[4] did not develop a durable, boss-led machine. Tammany and the Pennsylvania state Republican Party were the most durable machines that survived the Gilded Age—and they were two different types of machines. The municipal policy systems they affected or operated within, aside from corruption and patronage, were not similar. The various and conflicting ethnic-based ward machines/bosses also survived the Gilded Age, and continued to impact the policy bias of Big City municipal legislatures for years to come. Reform in the Big Cities would prove to be rather incomplete and uneven.
In most of our Big Cities, the default governance, to the extent it existed, fell to the “businessman” (and/or Civil War soldier),“social reform” or “structural reform” mayor—with machines maturing into semi-responsible policy participants. As the Age wore on into the Progressive period, more and more mayors became career politicians and the mayor’s office accumulated, city by city, more power and visibility, while the power of city legislatures diminished. As the cities grew, the city bureaucracy, especially comptrollers and public works departments, grew as well. The victory of early twentieth century structural reformer (see Chapter 5) meant that if machines were to achieve dominance over the city-wide, jurisdictional policy system, they had to do so by controlling the mayor’s office. Post turn of the century city-wide machines would develop, but these machines tempered their reliance on ethnic wards and mixed it with control of patronage and municipal bureaucracies (following McManes Gas Trust model).
The post-twentieth century machine policy system, then, would prove to be quite distinctive from whatever was produced by the Gilded Age’s unstable, incoherent, undeveloped mélange of institutional actors and institutions. In this systemic context, the role and the centrality of chambers of commerce not only stabilized the Gilded Age municipal policy system, but provided a reasonable proxy for what we today consider as governmental action and initiatives. No surprise then, as far as economic development goes, this Gilded Age system institutionalized, for almost seventy-five years, something that Chapter 5 will call “chamber-style economic development”.
[1] If Boston had a chance to develop a boss, it would have been Martin Lomasney, Boston’s” Mahatma”. A first generation Irish, and the subject of Lincoln Steffens commentary, Lomasney constructed a ward-based machine, and acted as boss, but never was more than first among equals, and not infrequently not even that. He was the personification of the image of what a machine and its boss should be, however—a good boss, with days of honesty and considerable character. But he was a ward boss. A boss whose Hendricks Club was the epitome of machine as social service agency. Lomasney survived so well and for so long in large measure due to his extending his ward machine benefits/services to all registered residents and all ethnic groups/races. See Leslie G. Ainley, Boston Mahatma (Boston, Bruce Humphries Publisher). Lomasney never established anything like a city-wide machine over which he was boss.
[2] Harold Zink, Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1930); see also, Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 105.
[3] Republican Robert McKisson tried to construct a patronage-driven political party in 1895 in opposition to Ohio’s state-Republican machine led by industrialist Mark Hanna. The effort failed by 1899.
[4] In Minneapolis’s case, “Doc Adams”, four term mayor, was a corrupt as they got—but he had no identifiable machine organization. San Francisco did have a machine government in the 1880’s (Christopher Augustine Buckley), but not in the 1870’s and 1890’s. A wonderful, at points entertaining summary of “bosses” is provided by Harold Zink, City Bosses in the United States: a Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1930).
[9] Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (3rd Ed), op. cit., pp. 211-211.
[10] Peter McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia: the Emergence of the Republican Machine 1867-1933 (University Park, PA, the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 186.
[11] Peter McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia:, op. cit., p. 133ff
[12] Peter McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia:, op. cit., p. 134.
[13] Peter McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia:, op. cit., p. 134.
[14] Peter McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia, op. cit., pp. 77-78.
[15] Peter McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia, op. cit., p. 98.
[16] Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (New York, Macmillan Publishing Co, 1983) quote from architect Constance M. Green, p. 214.
[17] Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America, op. cit., p. 214.
[18] Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit. pp. 100-101.
[19] There were several trials, audits, but Thomas Nast, a cartoonist from Harper’s Weekly kept the investigation ongoing and Samuel Tilden, a Bourbon Democrat and key leader of the state Democratic Party provided the political insulation and considerable legal and financial expertise to the anti-Tweed forces. He was rewarded by being elected Governor in 1874, and was the Democratic candidate for President in 1876.
[20] In 1890, the U.S. Census records that foreign born Irish totaled nearly 1.9 million in New York City.
[21] Richard Dilworth, (Ed) Cities in American Political History, Washington D.C., Sage, 2011), p. 314.
[22] See especially, Thomas O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1995). O’Connor develops exceedingly well how the Irish formed their American political culture and how that culture strongly impacted their politics and their governance once they were able to capture control of Boston’s city government in the twentieth century. We will pick this up in later chapters and consider how these cultural forces were able to meaningfully shape Boston’s politics for nearly a hundred years, but affect economic development policy-making.
[23] Raymond A. Mohl, The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age 1860-1920, (Arlington Heights Illinois, Harlan Davidson Inc., 1985), Table 4, p. 20 (cited from Bureau of Census)
[24] Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph, op. cit., p. 176.
[25] Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph, op. cit., p. 15. A great deal of my perspective on the Gilded Age machine and city councils as neighborhood representatives is drawn from Teaford’s chapter “Neighborhood Power”. This chapter is among most powerful descriptor of Gilded Age politics encountered in my research.
Ron W. Coan 