NAMES MEANT TO VILIFY

Given how commonplace boss and machine became, it is at first glance surprising that a famously “noisy but not numerous” group of elite, northeastern reformers gave these concepts currency. The classical liberal intellectuals and writers whom historians often dismiss as ineffectual Mugwumps in reality exerted disproportionate influence on Gilded Age political discussion. Although excluded from conventional political power, the liberals used their cultural authority as writers, lobbyists, and critics to force politicians to enact a national civil service law, new business regulations, and tariff reforms during the late nineteenth century. They also shaped the imagery and terminology in which urban politics were discussed for the next century.Footnote ²

The national conversation about city politics began with the Tweed Ring scandal of 1871. A small group led by New York Democrat William Tweed captured Manhattan’s government and extracted $6,312,541.37 from it (roughly a billion dollars in early twenty-first-century terms) during 1870 alone. An 1871 New York Times investigation led to the ring’s downfall, while establishing Tweed as a reference point in the annals of political corruption. The paper’s sensational but carefully assembled revelations, reprinted in newspapers around the country, set off an enormous political battle in New York that attracted national attention. Artist Thomas Nast produced his famous cartoons about the scandal for Harper’s Weekly that made Tweed into the archetypal corrupt boss.Footnote ³

The Tweed uproar prefigured modern, media-driven political scandals, but contemporaries still relied on inherited republican concepts when interpreting and responding to the controversy. The keyword, “ring,” evoked a cabal scheming for wealth and power at the expense of the public. Most opponents of Tweed—and in their own way his confederates—framed the affair in a simplistic way as a battle between a morally united public and a small band of villainous politicians.Footnote ⁴ During the 1870s and 1880s, liberal critics of urban governance began to move beyond such a simplistic framework through use of the metaphors, “political machine” and “machine politics.” A more novel and complex concept than “ring,” “machine” signified power, efficiency, complexity, and permanence. It also had class connotations. The men leading such organizations were not gentlemen who commanded deference as prescribed in republican theory. They were workers with “a familiarity with the wheels, shafts, and bands of the party machine, together with a skill in working it,” in James Bryce’s words.Footnote ⁵ The suggestions of power and efficiency embedded in the machine metaphor overstated the reach and coherence of urban party organizations during the Gilded Age. Its salience arose from its symbolic properties rather than its accuracy.Footnote ⁶

Such a class-inflected machine metaphor helped liberal reformers mobilize the upper and middle classes in support of civic reform. The charge that bosses and machines succeeded because respectable citizens ignored their civic responsibilities was central to the Mugwump critique. Depicting politicians as disreputable workers would alarm the increasingly class-conscious upper and middle ranks of urban society and make them coalesce politically. It makes sense that these claims gained currency during this period of intensified labor conflict and bourgeois fears of workers’ political power. In one of its early laments about “machine politics,” the New York Times blamed the “wealthy and leisured class” for ceding leadership through indifference. The paper looked with nostalgia to a preindustrial era with a markedly different class system when “substantial old citizens” such as “the village blacksmith and the dignified deacon” worked the polls on election day.Footnote ⁷

Liberals also popularized the term boss as a complement to machine. This label for party leaders derived from baas, a Dutch word for employer or master long used colloquially in New York. Its political sense had emerged around the Brooklyn Navy Yard as early as the 1840s, where foremen known as bosses, several of whom were Whig officeholders, used jobs at their disposal as patronage. The Tweed scandal introduced boss to the national political lexicon, eventually pairing it with machine. Amid the labor upheavals of 1877, for example, the Chicago Tribune deplored “bossism” in city politics. “The country has become familiar with the rule of Bosses,” it noted, citing Tweed and Washington’s Alexander Shepherd, as well as several Chicago figures. By the end of the 1870s, discussions of “the boss,” “bossism,” and “boss politics”—often surrounded with quotation marks indicating the concept’s novelty—were common in respectable magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s Monthly, The Independent, and the Nation.Footnote ⁸

With its working-class slang provenance, boss reinforced the derisive connotations that permeated references to machine politics. By the 1880s, urban party leaders were routinely caricatured as urban proletarians, complete with short hair, garish clothing, and other hallmarks of disrepute likely to repel middle-class voters. A pastiche of images of the Tammany operative John Morrissey in the pro-reform Puck in 1877 made these implications explicit in a manner parallel to Nast’s rendering of the Tweed Ring or the fictional Mulhooly. Puck assigned Morrissey the range of lower-class iniquity, including prison time, a career in boxing, and links to liquor and gambling. (Indeed, Morrissey was a former boxer and tough who grew wealthy from illegal gambling businesses under Tammany protection.) The cartoon reinforced these characteristics with Darwinian hints such as the apelike representation in the cartoon’s final panel. Antimachine publications counted on such depictions to alarm respectable men and women.Footnote ⁹

BOSSISM’S SPIRITED DEFENSE

Machine politicians aggressively rebutted liberal charges that they were low-class brutes, thugs, and scoundrels. They feared a loss of respectability, which would cost them the middle-class support they needed for victory as well as legitimacy. Ethnic and working-class constituents who aspired to a respectable middle-class standing would also hesitate to support disreputable politicians. Despite the common stereotype, the urban, ethnic working class frequently exhibited discontent with machine governance, especially since the consequences of machine-related abuses fell most heavily upon them. The ambivalence of middle-class and working-class urban dwellers of Irish descent toward Irish machine politicians illustrated these pressures.

Urban bosses countered negative depictions with an effort to define their own image. They offered alternate ways of discussing themselves and their methods that drew on common motifs within American political discussion. The defense they crafted rested on the assertion that politics was a respectable business and that its leading practitioners should be regarded much as any other successful entrepreneur. Public life was a pluralistic, fiercely competitive arena from which evolved men and organizations suited for leadership in tumultuous cities, in the same way that the era’s economic struggles generated captains of industry. This emphasis on conflict meshed with traditional depictions of politicians as highly masculine figures. Aggressive manliness enabled politicians to assert their will over an otherwise chaotic social order and equipped them to turn away radical threats and preserve capitalism. Bosses addressed both sides of Victorian gender ideology by claiming as well a feminine inspiration that softened their hard, masculine image. Politicians and their apologists thereby ratified the notion that they helped the urban immigrant poor in an intimate, neighborly fashion. A reputation for munificence attracted lower-class voting support, while reminding the middle-class electorate of the boss’s ability to placate and divert the poor from radical politics or labor agitation. As brokers who straddled the divisions that pervaded fractious cities, machine politicians claimed their vigorous, expert leadership was indispensable to a stable, capitalist order.Footnote ¹⁰

Richard Croker, a one-time street tough who gained wealth and power as leader of Tammany Hall during the 1880–90s, made use of every element of this defense. He insisted that his role was comparable to managing a railroad, bank, or factory. Governance of “the largest municipal constituency on the planet, except one,” he argued, “demand[ed] a combination of skill, enterprise, knowledge, resolution, and what is known as executive ability.”Footnote ¹¹ In this context, Croker famously declared that “we expect to be permitted to make a living” and that Tammany leaders were “working for their own pocket . . . all the time, every day of the week, the same as you are.”Footnote ¹²

Politicians also drew on social Darwinist rhetoric, a flexible set of terms and images that liberal critics used to denigrate bosses. The “organism” of Tammany, Croker claimed, was the “natural growth of the system of selection.” Croker’s ascent, according to authorized biographer Alfred Henry Lewis, likewise manifested Darwinian evolution. Humans were a “race of violence,” and Croker’s inherited abilities gave him advantages on the street and in a meeting hall. Thumbing his nose at gentlemanly reformers, Lewis declared that Croker’s “physical stamina and courage” made him the real “best man,” by suiting him for the “actual, physical conflict” that characterized human existence generally and politics in particular. Cincinnati’s George Cox made a similar point when he argued that “a boss is evolved—not self made. He is a product of evolution—a natural product of American political life.” “I had no ambition to become a boss,” Cox claimed. “But because of my peculiar fitness I evolved into a boss.”Footnote ¹³

Many of these justifications employed a sharply masculine tone. A profile of Philadelphia boss William Stokely declared him “a man of extraordinary physical courage” who stood strong against threats. The biographer of Tammany leader John Kelly breathlessly praised his “granite firmness.” Nearly all profiles of city politicians included reports of physical exploits as young men and references to their size, bearing, or pugilistic abilities. Lewis even recounted how Croker swam with sharks while on vacation in Florida.Footnote ¹⁴ This emphasis on physical prowess helped politicians sustain blue-collar support even as they took on middle-class personas. It also lent legitimacy to the idea that political conflict naturally produced the best leaders. The machine presented the men who ran it not as working-class toughs but as solid, respectable leaders who remained fighters in touch with early struggles and old companions. Fighting—whether boxing or gang battles—played a prominent role in Gilded Age working-class culture. Workers and immigrants recognized that politics was conflict. The labor and ethnic violence that wracked nineteenth-century cities made the notion of consensual politics absurd from their point of view. For urban, working-class men, aggressive, contentious behavior, in or out of politics, was a badge of honor and a demonstration of fitness to lead, not a dishonorable mark that rendered one unsuitable for public service.

Even as they proclaimed their manliness, urban politicians insisted upon their receptivity to feminine influences, a common rhetorical stance with cross-class appeal. Historian Daniel Czitrom noted how Big Tim Sullivan, the famed Tammany district leader, “consistently celebrated the strong guiding hand of women in his own personal development,” a celebration that “translated into a social feminism.” Sullivan counted among numerous machine politicians whom political scientist Harold Zink identified as having lost fathers early. This colorful Lower East Side politician was devoted to the mother and older sister who raised him while coping with a drunken, abusive stepfather. Sullivan often cited these feminine antecedents when expressing concern for poor constituents and support for social welfare legislation. Many urban politicians made similar claims, even when their early experiences were less harrowing.Footnote ¹⁵

From such self-proclaimed commitments came the notion—which soon became central to discussions of machine politics—that bosses used informal social-welfare networks to remain in power. Provision of informal help to needy constituents, long a staple of urban politics, became more conspicuous during the depression of the 1890s. Starting in 1893, Chicago ward boss Mike “Hinky Dink” Kenna provided food and shelter for thousands of destitute men; his daily lunches for the jobless continued into the 1920s. Sullivan inaugurated a tradition of free Christmas dinners for thousands of poor people on New York’s Lower East Side in 1894 and launched his free-shoe giveaway a few years later. James Michael Curley made a name for himself in the Roxbury section of Boston around 1900 by finding work for the unemployed and providing relief to the poor. Politicians argued that such gestures ensured voter loyalty, a point that a growing number of more detached observers made as well.Footnote ¹⁶ Journalist William Riordon built upon this well-established theme in his famous portrait in Plunkitt of Tammany Hall of the “strenuous life” of the attentive, if self-serving boss.Footnote ¹⁷

Politicians also sought lower-class support through legislation. Since patronage—jobs and favors—was scarce and a source of criticism and resentment, machine support for collective, government-based benefits increased. The best-known example came after New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911, when Tammany Hall representatives threw their energies into a broad program of factory reform. Surely there was altruism behind growing support among big-city bosses for progressive-style regulation of housing, health, and working conditions. Even so, it is worth recalling that machines such as Tammany by then competed with socialists, progressives, and municipal populists such as William Randolph Hearst for the votes of newly enfranchised Jews and Italians. Machine willingness to pursue this type of urban liberalism grew in tandem with threats from left-leaning political forces.Footnote ¹⁸

The help bosses provided—and claimed to provide—should be seen in this context. The fear of radicalism and political upheaval intensified during the 1890s and remained strong into the twentieth century. Writers on urban affairs frequently suggested that by providing assistance and establishing a close relationship with residents in poor neighborhoods, machine politicians mitigated class conflict, while undercutting challenges from socialists, labor progressives, and other radicals. When George Cox argued that a distinguishing characteristic of a party boss was the ability to “control” men, one could hear echoes of the Law and Order League that suppressed the United Labor Party movement in Cincinnati during the 1880s. Machine politicians reminded middle-class voters that their popularity with the urban working class formed a bulwark against social and economic upheaval.Footnote ¹⁹

The question of social order in cities revolved around immigrants. Nativists argued that European newcomers, particular those from southern and eastern Europe, brought radical ideas that conflicted with American faith in democracy and capitalism. Urban politicians and their apologists pointed out that machine politics helped immigrants assimilate and ensured their civic loyalty. Tammany was a “great digestive apparatus,” Richard Croker told English reform journalist William Stead. “Think of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners dumped into our city,” he declared. “Tammany looks after them for the sake of their vote.” In doing so, it “grafts them onto the Republic, makes citizens of them in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there by which so long a row could have been hoed so quickly or so well?” Tammany apologist Alfred Lewis was direct: The machine “acts as coast guard of American institutions. [It] makes captive the ignorant, the anarchistic, and the unrepublican, as he lands. It ties him hand and foot and makes him harmless.” Party organizations served as a “suppressive influence, moving for public order and to the subjection of what might be a mob spirit . . . [which] become those small first gusts of violence which unchecked conflate as riots.” Embedded in such claims was a warning to the comfortable classes: without machine politics keeping the urban poor in line, democratic and capitalist institutions were at risk.Footnote ²⁰

FROM VILIFICATION TO CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT

The self-defenses of big-city politicians stuck largely because they dovetailed with portraits of boss politics sketched by journalists, reformers, urban affairs experts, and even novelists. Often politicians cooperated with these outsiders, encouraging them to portray the machine and its leaders in sympathetic terms, as when Croker sat for interviews with reform journalists William Stead and Lincoln Steffens or when George Washington Plunkitt collaborated with Riordon. Commentators from the professional classes appreciated these opportunities to learn bosses’ perspective and mind-set, though they still deplored bossism and had no intention of vindicating it. “It is not within the province of this article to consider Tammany Hall from an ethical viewpoint,” one journalist wrote, “but to show the secret of its power, which is known to few people not directly concerned with New York politics.” Such accounts offered at least a hint of sensationalism but also purported to provide a realistic, empirical assessment of its sources.Footnote ²¹

Outright defenses of machine politics remained rare in respectable newspapers, general-circulation magazines, and academic publications. Instead, Progressive Era writers sought to supersede the moralistic denunciations of the Gilded Age liberals. By analyzing the operations and functions of machine politics, progressives tried to construct a more subtle indictment of the ill effects of machine corruption upon the urban polity. They aimed as well to devise more effective means of rendering machines superfluous. Nevertheless, in the course of presenting a fuller account that took the perspective of machine activists seriously, progressive writers made commonplace a mode of examining the causes, mind-set, and methods of machine politicians that had roots in bosses’s own self-presentation. Many articles, including those by well-known reformers such as Stead, Steffens, or Jane Addams, presented bosses as pragmatic leaders who earned constituents’ loyalty by providing needed services. If not desirable, machine politics became comprehensible as the kind of professional brokering and management that a pluralistic, contentious urban society would generate.

Fictional accounts made the same point, a sign of how widely such explanations had spread. The Honorable Peter Stirling, a popular novel by Paul Leicester Ford from 1894, told the story of a weak, ineffectual man who entered politics to help his neighbors, rose to lead a city machine, and developed into an imposing masculine figure in the process. The story climaxes with Stirling leading a contingent of immigrant workers into a battle against radicals, dramatizing the image of the boss as a force for order. As with journalism, anti-machine novels remained more common than pro-machine ones, though the urban political novels of Brand Whitlock, the American Winston Churchill, or David Graham Phillips did not repeat the unvarnished hostility to bosses evident in Solid for Mulhooly.Footnote ²²

The Progressive Era attempt to mix analysis and indictment illustrates trends in thought about urban civic life and social conditions. English editor William Stead’s interview with Croker provided a model for informed reporting from a sympathetic, yet undoubtedly antimachine perspective; as author of If Christ Came to Chicago (1894), Stead epitomized—as Croker knew—the Social Gospel linkage of bossism to vice, exploitation, and injustice.Footnote ²³ Urban affairs expert Frederic Howe reflected the tax reform, antitrust, municipal utilities, and social-service agenda of his mentor, Cleveland mayor Tom Johnson, in emphasizing bossism not as a manifestation of ethnic, working-class backwardness, but as “the natural and logical product” of the machinations of utilities and other privileged businesses. For better or worse, Lincoln Steffens provided the most familiar model for progressive antimachine writing in the McClure’s essays that he collected as Shame of the Cities (1904) and The Struggle for Self-Government (1906). Steffens produced colorful, energetic, and often perceptive journalism wrapped in vague admonitions of the public for its excessive devotion to self-interest and its lack of civic engagement. Steffens set the tone for progressive reporting on urban politics precisely because of the facility with which he interwove denunciation with information, an advance on the intemperate critiques of many Gilded Age liberals.Footnote ²⁴

Reflections on the informal services offered by ward bosses provided an entry point for social-reform progressives, whose main goal, after all, was a more inclusive, humane city achieved through the expansion of social services, the invigoration of social activism, and the mutualistic exchange of experiences and ideas between the classes. Ward politicians’ boastfulness over their makeshift help enhanced social progressives’ case against what Jane Addams denigrated as the “negative and impotent” notions of the “civic reformer,” that is, the idea that efficient, honest government could by itself achieve changes in cities’ overall political atmosphere. Addams’s “Why the Ward Boss Rules,” an account of Chicago alderman Johnny Powers, became a widely cited landmark after its publication in the Outlook in April 1898. She emphatically did not intend to rehabilitate Powers—unnamed but clearly identified—with her details of the tons of turkeys, ducks, and geese that he handed out at Christmas, his “standing account with an undertaker” for indigent funerals, and his purchase of “tickets galore for benefit entertainments given for a widow or a consumptive in peculiar distress.” Hull House workers despised the self-dramatizing Powers as man of “low ideals and corrupt practices” and on several occasions tried to replace him with a candidate who, the idealistic reformers imagined, would honestly represent the working-class, immigrant neighborhood. Rather, Addams sought to impress upon urban progressives why Powers seemed “a good man according to the standards of his constituents” (emphasis added).Footnote ²⁵

In this essay, as in many of her writings, Addams sought to construct a humanitarian agenda around recognition that modern cities were socially complex, with a multiplicity of circumstances, experiences, interests, and ethics. The dissolution of the unitary public interest into pluralism was not to be regretted. Still, bosses’ self-serving form of brokering impeded the task—inherent in Addams’s and her friend John Dewey’s vision of democracy—of broadening discussion widely so that the diversity of people might contribute toward more comprehensive understanding. In this, Addams foreshadowed proponents of urban social democracy such as Howe and Charles Beard as well as exponents of urban participatory democracy such as Boston’s Mary Parker Follett. In different ways, these urban progressives perceived pluralism not as a threat but as catalyst for a metropolitan democracy of unprecedented scope and inclusiveness.Footnote ²⁶

Addams’s use of the boss as a foil for a vision of urban democracy became clearer in a formal version of her essay “Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption,” published in the International Journal of Ethics. On the surface, Addams reverts to the ethnocentric stereotype of the manipulative boss exploiting dysfunctional, premodern ethical standards that “his various neighbors have brought with them from their home countries.” She asserted, “the Irishmen who largely teach political ethics to the others in their vicinity” developed a “get as much as possible” mind-set under English oppression. The ward’s “primitive” south Italian peasants retained a childlike admiration for the “good man,” and many were “simple enough to believe that power and wealth come only to good people.” Having absorbed a pervasive distrust of authority amid their oppression in Europe, Chicago’s Czechs and Jews could barely imagine free institutions, let alone adapt to them. Against the claims of Croker that machine politics smoothed the transition from immigrant to citizen, Addams argued that bosses reinforced those attitudes that they could exploit, rather than cultivating features of immigrant culture that would serve the immigrants themselves and enhance American society. Nonetheless, Addams insisted that immigrant susceptibility to machine manipulation was not inherent but originated in homeland circumstances that could be overcome. Moreover, Anglo-Americans had their own ethical survivals that prevented them from perceiving ethical and political issues from an immigrant or working-class perspective and that, therefore, hampered emergence of a new political ethics appropriate for a diverse, modern city. The boss might amount to a “stalking survival of village kindness,” but the Anglo-American ideal “of civic purity, of honesty of administration” was “not even concrete and human.”Footnote ²⁷ The middle-class indictment of the ward boss was also partial, the product of a political environment that reinforced narrow, group-based perspectives rather than a broad awareness of interconnectedness and patience with difference.

The urban polity contained a multitude of conditions and perspectives, Addams argued, and generated legitimately competing notions of public morality. Instead of condescending dismissal, reformers from privileged circumstances needed to open their minds to the “big, emotional ethics” of ethnic Chicago, which contained its own “possibility for a higher and wider life.” “If we would hold on to our political democracy” in the urban age, she concluded, people must seek “common ground in our human experience” and “some solidarity in our ethical conceptions.” As the Outlook editors prefaced their version of the essay, Addams intended to refute pessimism about urban democracy by demonstrating that the poor wards of Chicago offered an alternate form of “human virtue” manifested in “constant neighborly kindness instead of annual political sermons.”Footnote ²⁸

Lest any reader perceive Addams as rationalizing influence peddling, patronage, and graft, she emphasized that “the positive evils of corrupt government are bound to fall heaviest upon the poorest and least capable.” They lived amid uncollected garbage and could not afford to evade “the typhoid fever which comes from using the city’s [water] supply.” Comfortable people “may philosophize a little upon the present state of corruption,” but to Italian day-laborers for whom Powers boastfully arranged employment, “it is a choice between obeying the commands of the political boss and practical starvation.”Footnote ²⁹ The ward boss still needed to be driven from office if a new civic and social spirit were to take hold. Meanwhile, he had lessons to offer to urban affairs experts as well as to the public at large, which is why she published a general and an academic version of her essay.

URBAN PROGRESSIVISM, POLITICAL NORMS, AND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

Between the 1910s and the 1930s, urban affairs experts pushed forward the transformation of “boss” and “machine” from political epithets to political-science concepts. The generation of researchers identified with municipal progressivism sought to provide conceptual precision and empirical grounding to these loose terms. Progressives emphasized, however, that they did this to create an etiology of civic and political maladies that they hoped to remedy. Bossism was worth studying as “a distinctive product of American political conditions,” insisted Robert C. Brooks, a well-known urban politics expert. “None the less it is a product inconsistent at every point with our ideals of government and contradictory to the inclinations of every independent citizen.”Footnote ³⁰

The sense that bosses and machines undermined American democracy grew from and illustrated the progressive tendency to treat political and social science, civic engagement, and a better life for city people as bound together. Albert Shaw in the 1890s and Frank Goodnow and Charles Beard in the 1900s and 1910s all advocated an empirical, policy-oriented method that would result in practical reforms to urban government, which could then act effectively to improve social conditions. Most Progressive Era experts were more centrist than social democrats such as Beard or Frederic Howe, and they expressed Anglo-American ambivalence toward Addams and Dewey’s open-ended pluralism. Yet municipal progressives shared a mind-set and goals at odds with the ethics and practices of machine politics.

Goodnow, probably the era’s most influential urban political analyst, argued that the urban polity ought to be made effective as an “organization” or “organ” for “the satisfication of local needs,” by which he meant that the city needed to extend its presence broadly through public works and services and the regulation of enterprise and the environment. To achieve this, municipal services needed to grow larger and more professional, which led Goodnow to offer his innovative formulation of the concept of public administration. Goodnow further argued that as municipal institutions grew in size and efficiency, city governments needed an infusion of democratic values and practices, including acceptance of the ongoing scrutiny of an informed public. This formula would yield the higher stage of democracy that the urban progressives envisioned, an age in which the local public would recognize its interdependence and thus deliberate more broadly and act more comprehensively.Footnote ³¹

Machines hobbled municipal operations while encouraging fragmentary public policy and a shortsighted, self-interested political atmosphere. Their corruption spread distrust of positive government; it engendered cynicism rather than openhearted local patriotism. Machines were obviously inimical to the various progressive visions of an improved urban civic life. One of the main reasons that the era’s urban politics experts kept returning to the concepts of boss and machine and worked so hard to give these terms analytical and empirical ballast was that the concepts summed up deep-rooted patterns that stood in the way of the goal, shared by most factions of progressives, of a city that “did things—boldly, collectively, publicly,” to quote the historian Daniel Rodgers.Footnote ³²

This context explains the progressive tendency to emphasize convoluted municipal structures as antiquated bulwarks of bossism that needed to be swept away. Historians of urban government have at times overinterpreted urban structural reform as a special province of business and professional elites, with minimal relevance to working-class or social-democratic agendas.Footnote ³³ Social-reform progressives almost all agreed with those progressives who took a narrower view of social policy that better-organized municipal institutions were essential. Reformed governmental structures were prerequisites for effective public action to deal with urban social problems. Among structural reforms, home rule seemed most urgent and basic; the policy and democratic agendas of the progressives hinged upon it. “The ideal system of city government,” Goodnow asserted, would “permit most easily of the expression of the will of the municipal people and the putting into execution of that will with regard to all municipal matters.” Excessive, erratic state-level control seemed to generate bossism by inviting state and national political parties to treat cities as patronage pools, by encouraging an informal system of favor-trading, brokerage, and lobbying among overlapping jurisdictions, and by discouraging the public from regarding city politics as distinct in character and importance.Footnote ³⁴

Progressive municipal reform achieved much in terms of gaining autonomy for cities and in giving form to the strong mayor and council-manager systems, which experts came to prefer over the much-publicized commission format as vehicles for pursuing efficient and centralized yet visible and accountable municipal government. Through the mid-twentieth century, urban affairs experts celebrated these achievements, though with qualifications. In numerous cities, structural reform led not to a renaissance of civic spirit and the public sphere but to new forms of interest-group control, such as the business-dominated, Good-Government regimes of the Southwest, which were linked to the at-large, nonpartisan council-manager charters that the National Municipal League favored.Footnote ³⁵ Even worse, during the 1920s and 30s, a new generation of bosses learned to use restructured municipal systems to create durable, entrenched machines. The Pendergast machine in Kansas City operated from a city-manager charter, for example, while a commission charter sustained the Frank Hague machine in Jersey City.Footnote ³⁶

“Public ownership, civic service commissions, the short ballot, home rule, commission government, and many another device have been tried singly and in combination,” summarized urban government scholar Ernest Griffith in 1933, “but the self-seeking political machine remains with us.” Eliminating shortsighted, corrupt aspects of city politics, Griffith insisted, was only in part a question of mechanisms and structures. Reformers needed as well to consider the “fundamental situation” of American urban society: a “diversity” of ethnicity, race, class, religion, and principle so complex that “majorities can only be obtained by straddles, by catering to group rather than civic interests, by special favors, by giving laws to one group and the privilege of breaking them to another.” Ruefully, Griffith concluded, “Only a politician (in the bad sense) will do this.”Footnote ³⁷

FROM PROGRESSIVE ANALYSIS TO POLITICAL SCIENCE MODEL

The civic progressivism espoused by Goodnow and, with different emphases, by Beard left a legacy of an activist urban political science that encouraged judgment as well as analysis of bosses and machines. The Progressive Era effort to examine bossism as a political phenomenon as well as a public ethics and public policy problem led to realizations and observations that shaped subsequent efforts to study urban politics in a “realistic,” “objective,” and “scientific” way, terms used frequently after World War I. Urban politics scholars came to understand that despite their apparent similarities, machines and their bosses varied from place to place and over time. As Harold Zink elaborated in City Bosses in the United States (1930), it was hard to specify qualities common to bosses and machines but distinct from other types of politicians and political organizations. Moreover, bosses reflected social circumstances but not in simple ways. “Political machines and bosses grow out of their environment,” Zink later wrote, “and cannot be understood without a knowledge of the life and institutions of the communities in which they are found.” And yet, despite variations based on local circumstances, American machine politics, as the University of Wisconsin’s J.T. Salter remarked, revealed the “basic and universal” political principle of “personal attention and personal service,” that is, they were a form of patronage network, a political pattern that has appeared around the world across millennia.Footnote ³⁸ In sum, bossism invited sociological model-building revised and refined by case studies that examined variations. It was a classic example of a political problem susceptible to social-science analysis.

Interwar scholars realized that the slang provenance and perjorative connotations of “boss” and “machine” made it difficult to use the terms as archetypes. The University of Chicago’s Harold Gosnell, who pursued a scientistic methodology laden with surveys and voting analysis, confessed to struggling over the distinction between a conventional political party and a machine. The term “is used to convey an unfavorable impression regarding a given party organization,” he explained, and “any political faction which holds power for a considerable length of time is likely to be called a machine by the opposing forces.”Footnote ³⁹

Gosnell, a central figure in systematizing the study of urban politics, nonetheless reminded colleagues that bossism remained a civic issue even as it became a scientific one. Machines’ “preying upon the weaker economic elements,” their “twisting” of the law “to benefit special interests,” and many other defects weakened people’s faith in representative institutions and posed “a heavy and costly burden upon American democracy.” The Progressive Era assault on the machine had followed a series of distressing revelations—the most memorable being the 1895 Lexow Commission investigation of Richard Croker’s Tammany Hall—of violent, graft-ridden police departments, outrageously mismanaged municipal agencies, and influence-peddling and extortion rackets that wove together contractors and utilities interests, union-busting employers, slumlords, brothel keepers, and gangsters.Footnote ⁴⁰ New York’s Seabury investigations of 1930–32 and Kansas City’s Pendergast prosecutions of 1937–39 had analogous effects in the interwar years. Interwar journalists and scholars imputed a fascist spirit to Jersey City’s Hague, who used the facade of moralism and anticommunism to gain Catholic Church sanction for a corrupt mini-police state. Observers could dwell upon the ambiguities of Philadelphia’s Republican machine and grasp that Yankee arrogance contributed to the ethnic rancor exploited by Boston’s James Michael Curley. But only ardent supporters romanticized such iterations of bossism or saw virtue in them.Footnote ⁴¹

Interwar commentators worried that Progressive Era successes in professionalizing the municipal civil service and in regulating contractors and utilities had unintended consequences that further undermined public trust of urban government. By limiting favor-trading involving legitimate business, reform may have pushed machine politicians closer to gangsters. “The amount of protection paid runs into the staggering millions annually,” wrote the University of Chicago’s Charles Merriam of the alliance between politicians and gangsters in his city, “a sum sufficient to warrant the amplest organization and equipment, administrative, legal, financial, and political.”Footnote ⁴² Merriam recalled that while serving as a Chicago alderman in the 1910s, he regularly encountered well-connected criminals operating with impunity, abetted by the “collusion or connivance or incompetence of the police, the work of the professional ‘fixer,’ the inactivity and incompetence, or worse, of the prosecutors; the high pressure of political influence; the spineless attitudes of certain judges.” Prohibition seemed to have made this corrosive connection much worse. “Whatever may be its advantages in other respects,” observed Robert Brooks, Prohibition fostered “an enormous expansion of opportunities for crooked manipulation yielding revenues undreamed of by corruptionists in the past.”Footnote ⁴³

Years of activity as a municipal affairs expert as well as a progressive Republican alderman gave credence to Merriam’s observations. Republican William Hale Thompson, the infamously demagogic Chicago mayor, considered Merriam such a threat that in 1917 he used a scam in a primary election to oust him, thereby thwarting the political scientist’s ambitions to be Chicago’s great progressive mayor. The political scientist turned to academic institution-building at his university. Merriam depicted his career after 1920 not as a diversion into technocracy, as critics came to charge, but as the institutionalization of the University of Chicago’s vision of interdisciplinary research with a civic and urban emphasis. The university’s Local Community Research Committee, for example, supported the urban politics research of Merriam’s student Gosnell, alongside the work of Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth. Their empirically oriented, civically engaged scholarship formed the basis of the Chicago School approach to urban sociology as well as urban politics.Footnote ⁴⁴

Gosnell’s Machine Politics: Chicago Model (1937) exemplified the combination of analysis and criticism that the Chicagoans sought. In this book and other writings in the 1920s and 1930s, he documented and sought to explain machine attitudes and methods in Chicago, which persisted even as Thompson’s Republicans collapsed amid the Great Depression, providing Democrats a chance to construct “the most powerful political machine that the city has ever seen.”Footnote ⁴⁵ To Gosnell, a scientific approach meant not reductionist behaviorism or functionalism, but application of the range of statistical and qualitative methodologies to the investigation of social environments. Machine Politics used statistical analysis of voting and surveys as an empirical foundation onto which the author layered interviews, observations, and participant-observer experiences, all supported by a team of assistant researchers in the Chicago method.

Initially skeptical as to whether “relief and friendly activities” were as widespread as ward bosses insisted, Gosnell found that even before the Depression, nearly half of Chicago precinct captains reported distributing food and coal in their jurisdictions, over half said they intervened for constituents with local government and the courts, and a majority, in Plunkitt fashion, reported attending local weddings and funerals. While “not systematic and, of course, . . . not disinterested,” Gosnell stressed, social services provided by “ward heelers” were “devoid of red tape” and “embarrassing questions.” Such activities lay behind “the success of the bosses in softening class conflict.” His Chicago colleague Harold Lasswell likewise observed that the famous Chicago ward bosses “Bathhouse John” Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Kenna “act as intermediaries.” Echoing Addams, Lasswell concluded, “The foundation of the ‘boss system’ is laid in human ministering to human needs—human needs for personal help in getting a job, in getting adjusted to the new world, and in securing a career which brings its due of social recognition.”Footnote ⁴⁶

J. T. Salter, an impressionist in methodology who did not share the Chicago School’s scientistic inclinations, nonetheless arrived at parallel conclusions concerning the venerable Philadelphia Republican operation whose Depression-era collapse he described. For all its self-serving pronouncements, the Vare organization had functioned as a “human service institution” that voters supported in exchange for personal access and concrete benefits. In Philadelphia’s ethnic, working-class wards, “official government is remote” and “personal contacts count mightily and secondary appeals not at all.” The Vares also drew support from prosperous residents who were accustomed to obtaining franchises, permits, and tax exemptions through the machine.

Both Salter and Gosnell also perceived patterns in machines’ ethnic dynamics to which analysts in the late twentieth century would return. In theory, machines practiced a form of the inclusiveness that progressives such as Addams, Follett, or Howe had sought, though one dependent on brokerage between self-interested groups rather than on communication and the recognition of interconnectedness. In practice, however, machine pluralism had its limits. At the precinct level, Philadelphia and Chicago politics were fairly open to new ethnic groups, but higher positions tended to be occupied by a self-perpetuating circle drawn from ethnicities widespread in the city for several generations already. Native Protestants and Irish dominated Chicago’s Republican leadership, even though much of the party’s electorate was Scandinavian, German, and Italian. The city’s Democratic committee remained over half Irish Catholic in the mid-1930s, despite inroads made by Slavic nationalities, Jews, and others during the Anton Cermak years. In Philadelphia, division-level operatives tended to be “prototypes of their communities. In a negro division, one or both of the organization leaders are apt to be colored. The Italian, German, Irish, Jewish, and Slavic sections choose men of their own sort,” as did “highly cultured” neighborhoods. But a closer-knit, ethnically narrower group prevailed in the party’s citywide leadership.Footnote ⁴⁷

In attributing what Salter labeled the “personal service aspect” of urban machine politics not to the backward mentality of immigrant groups but to “basic and universal” political tendencies, interwar urban politics experts sought to recognize ethnic realities without reverting to nativist moralism.Footnote ⁴⁸ Progressive Era writing on the machine had often been ambivalent about immigration as a cause of bossism; Progressive Era figures such as Goodnow, Beard, and Howe were more likely than 1890s forerunners such as Albert Shaw to treat anti-immigrant sentiment as a distraction from their structural and policy priorities. Accordingly, the progressive urbanists at times simply denied “the gratifying notion that the evils of our city governments are due to the foreigners,” as Beard put it. Neither “theory nor practice,” Beard argued, supported the view “that American municipal government would have been much better if the cities had been inhabited only by ‘native’ stock.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Interwar urban politics experts continued this approach. Harvard political scientist William Bennett Munro, a prominent interwar scholar known for nativist inclinations, nonetheless stressed, “There were bosses here before the alien came,” while urban bossism was “virtually unknown” in the countries from which most immigrants originated.Footnote ⁵⁰ Cities in “virtually all the nations from which our racial stock has been drawn” provided examples of “honest, public spirited municipal governments,” explained Ernest Griffith, who speculated that bossism resulted not from any particular set of group attitudes or from imported ethical systems ill-suited to modern, urban democracy, but from the “conglomerate hodge-podge” character of American cities. Real political improvement, he suggested in a manner that echoed Addams and Howe, required an “integration of attitudes” through mechanisms for “the sharing and comparison of opinion”: “community centers, settlements, forums, roundtable groups of all kinds.”Footnote ⁵¹

Chicago School sociological concepts offered that university’s urban politics researchers a way to account for the ethnic dimension of urban politics while maintaining a tolerant stance, an attitude that Merriam termed “the liberal policy adapted to a cosmopolitan community.”Footnote ⁵² As formulated by Park, Burgess, and William I. Thomas and others, the Chicago approach hinged on classical sociological typologies such as Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft or concepts such as Émile Durkheim’s anomie. The Chicagoans directly asked whether the personalistic assistance and localist mind-set associated with bossism indeed amounted to premodern holdovers or imports, out of step with individualistic modern urbanism. Yet Chicago sociology also encouraged reflection along the lines of Addams’s guarded respect for Powers’s “village kindness.” The modern city tended to produce “impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental” relationships, in Wirth’s famous formulation. What Wirth called “the sophistication and cosmopolitanism of the urbanite”—a pluralist willingness to consider alternate ethical systems, including mutualistic ones—was a fortunate side effect of modern urbanism’s atomizing qualities.Footnote ⁵³

This interweaving of Chicago School concepts and methods and civic-progressive and liberal-pluralist concerns was also apparent in Gosnell’s renowned Negro Politicians (1935). With help from Park, the political scientist applied the range of Chicago School ideas and methods in the course of demonstrating that black politicians “took over the general pattern of behavior that was common among white politicians,” because the political environment of the city inclined everyone toward machine methods. Racism and poverty in Chicago and black voters’ attitudes toward these explained distinct features of black urban politics, not rural attitudes imported by African American migrants from the South.Footnote ⁵⁴ Gosnell thereby fused the pluralist argument that machine politics arose in response to urban people’s diverse problems and experiences with the civic progressive view that bossism was inimical to metropolitan democracy. Machines provided assistance, but only to those with the right connections, and they offered few remedies for the large questions of equity and interconnectedness presented by the arrival of African Americans in northern cities. Negro Politicians thus offered a clear example of the interwar effort to analyze bosses and machines as natural outgrowths of urbanization and its attendant heterogeneity, while not losing sight of their unhealthy qualities.

AN INDICTMENT TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

After World War II, scholars continued to develop boss and machine as analytical categories, while ignoring or repudiating the civic progressive agenda also manifest in the writings of Gosnell, Salter, and others. Scholars understood that the terms began as culturally loaded slights amid the volatile class and ethnic politics of the late 1800s. But they treated the terminology as established and made no effort to trace what was gained or lost amid the convoluted evolution of these metaphors into social-science concepts.Footnote ⁵⁵

The overriding reason for this inattention to the intellectual and political history of boss and machine is that in the immediate post–World War II years, a series of powerful writings fixed the parameters of discussion for decades. All these writings treated these terms as having analytical usefulness whatever their history. None contained more than minimal footnotes, which obscured their intellectual and political provenance. Sociologist Robert Merton’s famous structural-functional theory appeared in 1949 in the first section of Social Theory and Social Structure. Merton’s agenda was not to explain machine politics per se but to illustrate the concept of a latent function. For him, a political machine offered a good example of an institution that flourished despite violating conventional morality because it served social purposes “not adequately fulfilled by culturally approved or more conventional structures.” Given this context, Merton did not develop his model carefully. The chapter offered a few loose citations: an encyclopedia article, Steffens’s Autobiography, Arthur Bentley’s 1908 Process of Government, and a political science textbook from the 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁶

Richard Hofstadter wove his friend Merton’s theory into The Age of Reform (1955) in support of his iconoclastic case concerning Anglo-Protestant and immigrant ethics. To Hofstadter, the down-to-earth mutualism of the new ethnics suited modern urban society better than the small-town moralism of the Yankee progressives, who “stood for things that to the immigrant were altogether bizarre, like women’s rights and Sunday laws, or downright insulting, like temperance. . . . The immigrant wanted humanity, not efficiency.” In later works, Hofstadter expressed more appreciation for democratic political processes as mechanisms for peaceful conflict resolution in a divided society. Still, he continued to perceive the progressive emphasis on civic spirit as fussy and moralistic, never absorbing why progressives viewed machine-style corruption as itself a corrosive force in a democracy.Footnote ⁵⁷ Among his few citations, Hofstadter noted that he had drawn upon another social-science-minded historian, Oscar Handlin, whose The Uprooted (1951) also portrayed bossism as culturally aligned with urban ethnics. The Harvard scholar organized his book around the modernization model of immigrants as uprooted from village communities to urban society, but his deliberately informal book had no footnotes at all, though it did offer a deft genealogy of urban ethnic politics starting with the coining of “boss” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.Footnote ⁵⁸

The framework offered by Merton, Hofstadter, and Handlin of course typified post–New Deal liberal thought. Probably its most important element, anticipated by Addams and other early pluralists, involved vigorous assertion of a separate political ethos rooted in the urban, ethnic experience. Denizens and partisans of the polyglot city, Hofstadter, Handlin, and their contemporaries reveled in urban life and attitudes at the expense of the backward, narrow Anglo-American heartland. That inclination, as many historians of liberalism have observed, intertwined with the liberal rejection of radical thought after World War II. Gruff, improvisational, unideological to the point of unprincipled, machines nonetheless improved normal people’s circumstances in a way that brokered and dampened conflict. Liberal intellectuals set this consensus-generating pragmatism against the wreckage wrought by midcentury ideologues. Whatever the cause, Merton, Handlin, and Hofstadter provided the basis for a generation of ethnocultural and urban liberal interpretations that depicted bossism as a product of the “functional deficiency,” in Merton’s words, of inherited forms of municipal government. Constructive reform then became a matter of combining the Anglo progressive emphasis on professionalism with the urban, ethnic value of nonmoralizing service. The Merton-style, functionalist model of the machine lived up to the stereotype of post–New Deal liberal thought as inclined more toward a consumerist understanding of democracy rather than the civic and social view that animated the Progressive Era analysis of the machine in the first place.Footnote ⁵⁹

The functionalist model also built upon the professional and intellectual trajectory within social science that Merriam, Gosnell, and their colleagues had pursued. As historians of political science have noted, Merriam remained ambivalent, even incoherent, on the relationship between normative political analysis derived from progressivism and the scientistic mind-set he championed later. Unwilling merely to accept this contradiction, student and colleague Harold Lasswell put forth arguments for privileging objectivity and scientism. Regardless of personal or political inclinations, the political scientist should stand apart from the people and institutions under study and trace and model their behavior. Before the war, the who-gets-what-when-how behaviorism of Lasswell or his Chicago predecessor Arthur Bentley seemed too relentlessly antinormative. After 1945, political scientists were more willing to espouse the dismissal of judgment in the name of science.Footnote ⁶⁰

The result was a subtle but key change in the usage of concepts applied to urban politics, starting with pluralism. As John Higham observed, pluralism’s Progressive Era formulators intended it as a “normative social theory,” a vision of urban democracy against which practice could be assessed. By the 1950s, political scientists such as Robert Dahl sought an above-the-fray model of pluralism that would enable a nonmoralizing analysis of the boss as a broker between competing interests and subcultures. This transformation of pluralism from an “ideal” into a “condition,” Higham argued, explains the term’s subsequent rejection by intellectuals concerned with the content of public life in addition to the operations of the political system. But while Dahl’s tone fit the detached, technocratic mood of his discipline, his agenda in reality mirrored that of Merton, Hofstadter, and Handlin. All indeed judged machine politics, though to one degree or other they claimed not to do so. They did this from the perspective of professional social scientists with New Deal liberal leanings, a mind-set that inclined them toward accepting bossism’s distortions and abuses as a price worth paying for those aspects of machine politics that they admired. The astringent Bentley, by contrast, had dismissed “all the morals and all the ideas” deployed against machine politics as “useless,” a mere “symbol” for opposed interests within the urban polity.Footnote ⁶¹

By the 1980s, most urban scholars rejected functionalist and pluralist models of urban politics as reductionist in explanation and narrow in scope. Historians and political scientists called for a comprehensive approach to urban governance, with the melodrama of bosses and reformers consigned to proper proportion. When urban machine politics remained a concern, the prevalent newer approach derived from regime theories that spread within political science during the 1970s. Other scholars applied urban-power models, along with public-policy, institutionalist, neo-Marxist, and even political-language interpretations.Footnote ⁶² These later writers accused the structuralist and pluralist generation of basing their assertions on surmise, impressions, and scattered quotations from Steffens or Plunkitt. In reality, every element of the functionalist and pluralist analysis had been commonly discussed and widely accepted by urban affairs experts before World War II.

The intellectual and political context of the postwar period encouraged writers on the urban polity to build upon empirical and conceptual foundations created during the Progressive Era and the interwar period. But they dismissed as quaint, irrelevant, or wrongheaded the civic, ethical, and social insights that their predecessors felt made careful study of bosses and machines worthwhile. Social democrats such as Howe and Beard agreed with civic progressives such as Goodnow that political processes and administrative structures—what Ernest Griffith called the “correct framework”—did matter “if for nothing else than to clarify the issues and to bring the remedy within the range of popular control.” Hofstadter ridiculed such progressive “abstractions”: “citizenship, responsibility, efficiency, good government, economy, businesslike management.” Jane Addams, by contrast, accepted that an accessible municipal system with effective public services was intrinsic to a humane urban polity and an invigorated civic consciousness, though she did warn that the civic values of the Anglo-American professional class should not be preached and could not be imposed. Post-1970s scholars rejected the functionalism and liberal pluralism of Hofstadter’s generation, but they joined in dismissing good government as the preoccupation of “lonely cranks.” The fact that much-lauded devices such as city-manager charters at times provided the basis for new forms of oligarchic rule fed this suspicion among urban politics scholars of attentiveness to institutions and processes.Footnote ⁶³ By the end of the twentieth century, scholars interested in mechanisms for building a viable public sphere in a fragmentary, consumerist society came to appreciate the complexity and force of the Progressive Era debate over the structural foundations of metropolitan democracy.Footnote ⁶⁴ For the most part, historians and political scientists continued to display little patience for the civic issues that nearly all progressive observers perceived in bossism.

To Addams, Dewey, Howe, and other Progressive Era writers on the democratic possibilities of modern urban life, the hope of the city was that it could nurture new deliberative institutions and a reformulated civic idealism, appropriate for a diffuse, diverse, and conflict-ridden urban setting. They did not want to abandon the quest for a common set of interests and principles in a seemingly endless clash of self-absorbed groups, as Bentley’s and Lasswell’s version of behaviorist pluralism suggests. They wanted to reinvigorate the public sphere in new circumstances and raise the quest for the public good to a more complicated level. Despite his disillusion and drift during the 1920s and 1930s toward scientism and technocracy, Merriam never renounced these earlier goals. “To his students, Merriam still appeared the ‘Progressive,’” conceded one critic; to them, he conveyed his old-fashioned “enthusiasm for politics, for the spreading of participatory democracy, for people in general.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In this urban progressive tradition, Gosnell made clear that he found the ethics and consequences of machine politics deplorable, but he insisted machine operatives as well belonged in the discussion. Machine Politics: Chicago Model included, for example, the story of a “rough and vigorous” precinct captain who “bitterly” denounced an interviewer’s praise for settlement workers: “You innocent, well-meaning middle-class people who have never seen a hungry or moneyless family in your life, who have only a vague idea of how the political and legal and business racket is run, who don’t know the right people to talk to in evictions, or tort cases,” could not “even talk to [the poor] on their own level,” let alone “come in here and help them.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In the 1960s, political scientist Theodore Lowi, whose own writings wrestled with the tension between analytical and normative conceptualizations of liberal pluralism, introduced a new edition of Gosnell’s book by remarking that what Gosnell intended as “an indictment of machine politics” might leave present-day readers “morally uplifted.” But when confronted late in life with pluralistic, ethnocultural analyses of the emergence of the Chicago Democratic machine, Gosnell expressed doubts. What he had witnessed back in the 1930s was a public adaptation to a shift in power, not the triumph of an alternate ethos and certainly not of an invigorated democratic spirit; city voters had “little choice but to throw in their lot with the Democrats,” as that party tightened its grip on the city and its resources.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, throughout the 1960s, urban affairs experts with the most direct experience with machine politics tended to retain Gosnell’s or Salter’s unwillingness to rationalize bossism’s defects even as they recognized its strengths. Writing in a period of accelerating racial conflict, suburbanization, and deteriorating services, neither Warren Moscow in New York nor Milton Rakove in Chicago expressed much faith that machine-style brokerage could be a vehicle toward an invigorated civic life.Footnote ⁶⁸

CONCLUSION

When it appeared in 1956, academics, critics, and ordinary readers embraced Edwin O’Connor’s novel The Last Hurrah as an affectionate, true-to-life endorsement of machine politics. They found the novel’s thinly disguised account of Boston’s Curley to be a realistic portrait of a corrupt but genial boss looking after immigrant, working-class constituents in a culturally sensitive manner. The 1958 movie version starring Spencer Tracy cemented the image of the boss as an engaging rogue and machines as tools for managing the public life of cities.Footnote ⁶⁹ Reviewers lauded the book as illustrating, in the words of culture critic Howard Mumford Jones, “how American politics really operated” and especially how urban ethnic politics was “built upon personalized and family relationships.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Scholars reached the same conclusion, citing the book for its “authentic and fascinating detail about ‘inside politics.’” A “Last Hurrah thesis” developed in support of a subtheme in the novel, that the New Deal’s usurpation of social welfare robbed urban machines of their functional rationale, sending old-fashioned bossism into decline.Footnote ⁷¹

In the rush to celebrate The Last Hurrah’s realism, commentators ignored the novel’s ambiguities. A leading academic voice of New Deal liberalism happened to be a friend of O’Connor. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that those who read The Last Hurrah as a romanticized defense of bossism “misconstrued” it. The author intended a complex, melancholy critique. Beneath his kindliness, Frank Skeffington, the aging Irish mayor modeled on Curley, had been made hard, cynical, and corrupt by a career of rationalization and strategem. He was no model for Irish Americans, O’Connor implied, nor for urban civic life generally. The certainty with which his readers reached the opposite conclusion testified to the acceptance bosses and machines had earned in Americans’ civic imagination and to the currency that an archetype of boss and machine had gained among urban affairs experts.Footnote ⁷²

As the prevailing misinterpretation of O’Connor’s novel indicated, a morally complex conception of machines and the men who ran them had been lost in the revisions of the early Cold War period. The work of Richard Hofstadter and Oscar Handlin in particular aimed to subvert inherited moral judgments about bossism and corruption. They appropriated Merton’s functional explanation of the boss as part of an effort to inject a new set of norms into American civic thought that rejected overt ideological agendas and elevated the supposedly realistic, results-oriented management of public affairs. Mugwumps and progressives were impractical moralists; bosses were a model of pragmatic liberal leadership. But if one took these stereotypes too literally and combined them with Lasswell-style behaviorism, then one could lose sight altogether of the significance of Progressive Era concerns over the link between bossism and the mismanagement and discrediting of municipal institutions. That indeed happened in much of the functionalist writing on bossism in the 1960s–70s (with exceptions such as Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson, among the few academic writers in that era not to make this mistake).Footnote ⁷³

Scholarly critiques of the functional analysis of urban politics during the 1980s and 1990s helped clear the way for a new appreciation of the richness of urban civic thought during the era stretching from Reconstruction through the Great Depression.Footnote ⁷⁴ The contention that city politics during that period amounted to little more than an exchange of votes for services and benefits, interrupted occasionally by cranky, fulminating reformers, steered research away from thoughtful, imaginative treatment of the ideas and ethical concerns that coursed through big-city public life. But sharp challenges to functionalist analysis during the 1970s and 1980s, along with more recent work by labor historians, investigations of women’s activism, and explorations of democratically oriented reformism have revealed an urban civic order during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era that was flawed to be sure but that generated an array of critiques, analyses, insurgencies, and proposals.Footnote ⁷⁵

These studies in turn laid the groundwork for renewed sensitivity to the civic and ethical concerns that bossism raised during the generations after it was identified and named. The public life of American cities in the era running from the end of the Civil War through the Great Depression period featured an extensive range of ideas and debates about how to devise a democratic politics suitable to modern life. The terms boss and machine, redolent descriptors of the patronage and brokering that characterized urban politics, arose as highly contested shorthand arguments within that discourse, and it is for that reason that they have endured. And it is for that reason as well that they warrant continued attention.

Recovering the moral complexity and sophisticated civic thinking embedded in attempts to define and explain bossism and machine politics not only yields better historical scholarship, but it also helps us understand public life in the early twenty-first century. We, too, may be underestimating the political and ethical significance of contemporary consternation over political corruption and the power of inside influence, which corrode faith in the ability of public institutions and political action to achieve social-democratic and civic-republican ends. Consideration of the richly descriptive, morally evocative terms boss and machine restores to the historical record a body of civic thought that may help us address those concerns.