Bosses of the City Unite! Labor Politics and Political Machine Consolidation, 1870–1910

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century – an age when the phrase “all politics is local” contained even greater truth than it does today – the distinctive institution of urban public life was the political machine. In assessing the machine's importance, some scholars have emphasized the machine's role in integrating newly arrived immigrants into the American political system, its provision of basic material goods to the impoverished, its promotion of upward mobility of immigrants, and its coordination of a socially and politically fragmented city. Other scholars have focused on the long-range effect of the political machine on American politics and policy, arguing that the cross-class coalitions built by machine politicians muted the development of a politicized working class in the United States. Some extend this causal chain, arguing that the lack of a stronger class-based politics produced in turn the relative weakness of the American welfare state compared to other Western democracies.