It's almost here - the moment we've all been waiting for Hard to believe there are only 6 weeks until election day! With a new slew The Political Machine has always been a game that gets users excited for the upcoming Spread your Ideology — Participate in Town Hall events to earn ideology points and solidify your position on hot issues with your voters.
Manage your Campaign Budget — Purchase advertisements, travel across the country to campaign, and hire operatives to enhance your PR or cripple your opponent.
Create a Candidate — Customize your own front runner and race for the White House. Participate in Interviews - Accept invitations to various talk shows across the country in order to share your opinion on issues important to the American people. Native Americans migrating to the cities from the countryside experienced their own kind of cultural shock: they found themselves competing not with other Americans but with recently arrived foreigners, so that despite their native birth they, too, felt displaced, strangers in their own country.
It was natural for members of each group to come together to try to find human warmth and protection in Little Italy or Cork Hill or Chinatown or Harlem. These feelings of clannish solidarity were one basis of strength for the political bosses. A man will more readily give his vote to a candidate because he is a neighbor from the old country or has some easily identifiable relationship, if only a similar name or the same religion, than because of agreement on some impersonal issue.
With so many different races and nationalities living together, however, mutual antagonisms were present, and the opportunity for hostility to flare into open violence was never far away. Ambitious, unscrupulous politicians could have exploited these antagonisms for their own political advantage, but the bosses and the political organizations which they developed did not function that way.
What lasting profit was there in attacking his religion or deriding his background? Tammany early set the pattern of cultivating every bloc and faction and making an appeal as broad-based as possible. Bosses elsewhere instinctively followed the same practice. George B. Cox, the turn-of-the-century Republican boss of Cincinnati, pasted together a coalition of Germans, Negroes, and old families like the Tafts and the Long-worths. James M. Curley, who was mayor of Boston on and off for thirty-six years and was its closest approximation to a political boss, ran as well in the Lithuanian neighborhood of South Boston and the Italian section of East Boston as he did in the working-class Irish wards.
In his last term in City Hall, he conferred minor patronage on the growing Negro community and joined the N. The bosses organized neighborhoods, smoothed out antagonisms, arranged ethnically balanced tickets, and distributed patronage in accordance with voting strength as part of their effort to win and hold power. They blurred divisive issues and buried racial and religious hostility with blarney and buncombe. They were not aware that they were actually performing a mediating, pacifying function.
They did not realize that by trying to please as many people as possible they were helping to hold raw new cities together, providing for inexperienced citizens a common meeting ground in politics and an experience in working together that would not have been available if the cities had been governed by apolitical bureaucracies. When William Marcy Tweed, the first and most famous of the big-city bosses, died in jail in , several hundred workingmen showed up for his funeral.
The Nation wrote the following week: Let us remember that he fell without loss of reputation among the bulk of his supporters. The odium heaped on him in the pulpits last Sunday does not exist in the lower stratum of New York society.
This split in attitude toward political bosses between the impoverished many and the prosperous middle classes lingers today and still colors historical writing. To respectable people, the boss was an exotic, even grotesque figure. They found it hard to understand why anyone would vote for him or what the sources of his popularity were. To the urban poor, those sources were self-evident.
The boss ran a kind of ramshackle welfare state. He helped the unemployed find jobs, interceded in court for boys in trouble, wrote letters home to the old country for the illiterate; he provided free coal and baskets of food to tide a widow over an emergency, and organized parades, excursions to the beach, and other forms of free entertainment. In every city, the boss had his base in the poorer, older, shabbier section of town.
As transportation improved, people were able to live farther and farther from their place of work. Population dispersed in rough concentric circles: the financially most successful lived in the outer ring, where land was plentiful and the air was clean: the middle classes lived in intermediate neighborhoods; and the poorest and the latest arrivals from Europe crowded into the now-rundown neighborhoods in the center, where rents were lowest.
The more skilled workingmen and the white-collar workers who lived in the intermediate neighborhoods generally held the balance of power between the machine and the reformers. A skillful boss could hold enough of these swing voters on the basis of ethnic loyalty or shared support of a particular issue.
At times, he might work out alliances with business leaders who found that an understanding with a boss was literally more businesslike than dependence upon the vagaries of reform. But always it was the poorest and most insecure who provided the boss with the base of his political power.
Their only strength, as Professor Richard C. Wade of the University of Chicago has observed, was in their numbers. These numbers were in most cases a curse: housing never caught up with demand, the job market was always flooded, the breadwinner had too many mouths to feed. Yet in politics such a liability could be turned into an asset. If the residents could be mobilized, their combined strength would be able to do what none could do alone. The boss system was simply the political expression of inner city life.
At a time when many newcomers to the city were seeking unskilled work, and when many families had a precarious economic footing, the ability to dispense jobs was crucial to the bosses. First, there were jobs to be filled on the city payroll. Just as vital, and far more numerous, were jobs on municipal construction projects. When the machine controlled a city, public funds were always being spent for more schools, hospitals, libraries, courthouses, and orphanages.
The growing cities had to have more sewer lines, gas lines, and waterworks, more paved streets and trolley tracks. Even if these utilities were privately owned, the managers needed the goodwill of city hall and were responsive to suggestions about whom to hire.
The payrolls of these public works projects were often padded, but to those seeking a job, it was better to be on a padded payroll than on no payroll. By contrast, the municipal reformers usually cut back on public spending, stopped projects to investigate for graft, and pruned payrolls. Middle- and upper-income taxpayers welcomed these reforms, but they were distinctly unpopular in working-class wards. Another issue that strengthened the bosses was the regulation of the sale of liquor.
During Daley's prolonged tenure in city hall—he was reelected five times prior to his sudden death in —the machine reached its apogee. At a time when virtually no urban political machines survived, Daley steered the Cook County Democratic organization to one electoral triumph after another. As government workers died or retired, the machine filled their positions temporarily pending civil service exams that were never given. A series of court decisions in the s, culminating in the Shakman decrees , severely reduced patronage by first prohibiting the politically motivated firing of government workers and, several years after Daley's death, by outlawing politically motivated hiring practices.
By the s, the mighty Democratic patronage army shrank significantly, but during the Daley years civil servants who worked hard for the party at election time and precinct captains who produced healthy victory margins at the polls kept their patronage jobs and received other rewards. Long reliant upon the electoral support from a rapidly expanding black population, the political machine's prolonged success finally wavered because of demographic changes.
Daley was an avid defender of residential segregation and an opponent of affirmative-action policies in government , and his conservatism ran afoul of the civil rights and black power movements. Daley's support among black voters dwindled in the s, and wholesale changes came following his death in Bilandic, a colorless party functionary whose inept handling of a record-setting snowstorm led Chicagoans to question whether the machine could still deliver services efficiently.
Unseating Bilandic at the first opportunity, the voters opted instead for Jane Byrne, a former machine regular who campaigned as a reformer but whose chaotic and ineffectual years in office enhanced the level of dissatisfaction with city government.
Despite campaign promises to the contrary, Byrne ignored black political demands. The election of Harold Washington as the city's first black mayor in and his subsequent reelection four years later unequivocally ended Democratic machine rule in Chicago.
Nor did the election to the mayoralty of Richard M. Daley, the eldest son of the deceased boss, indicate a resurrection of the machine in a new guise. As the younger Daley readily acknowledged, radically different demographics and the attendant alterations in the political calculus clearly made the machine politics for which Chicago became famous an anachronism by the end of the twentieth century.
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