Urban Politics
Copyright © 1997
Karen Barker -- All Rights Reserved.
The political machine emerged in urban society in the 1900's. Its origin was influenced by two factors: the emergence of a mass electorate and industrialization. During the 1900's to the early twentieth century, immigrants from Ireland and Europe flocked the shores of the northeast in search of a better life in America. What they found was a life filled with poverty, misery and discrimination. They lived in the poorest segments in the cities, in tenements housing and slums. The government did very little to assimilate the immigrants into the society and relieve their conditions and so the urban political machines emerged in this era. It was in that era that the government extended the government male suffrage to those who did not own property and to foreign born citizens. "A new breed of enterprising politicians took advantage of the circumstance," (54) and won the electorate votes of the newly naturalized immigrants. They promised social mobility and material rewards by ethnic solidarity.
The political machines acted as the local government and was successful in centralizing power. The machine was organized in a highly hierarchical structure. It was controlled by a single party leader, the "boss" who was usually the mayor of the city. Under the party leader, there were ward leaders - Alderman - who each controlled up fifty Precinct Captains. The machine politicians formed personal relations with the voters and were deeply rooted in the immigrant wards social life. Judd and Swanstrom pointed out that, "Social and political relationships were closely connected." (55) It was the machine politician, who helped to naturalize the immigrants, found jobs for them, attended their children christening and provided the turkey at Thanksgiving and ham at Christmas to loyal supporters and wards.
Many ward leaders, were pub owners and were effective in networking within the neighborhoods and managing precinct captains. They commanded loyalty through their generosity and patronage to their supporters. The wards were rewarded high-paid administrative positions in government based upon their contribution to the machine politic, management of the precinct leaders. By what is most important, as Judd and Swanstrom pointed out, "the number of jobs available for distribution by precinct captains and ward committee members was determined by the vote on election day." (57) The precinct captains were responsible for mobilizing the voters. They were often well known within their community and were promoted if they could put together coalitions with other strong politicians outside their neighborhoods. The machine politicians were highly committed to their profession, and this may account for their success in assimilating the immigrants to American society and generating votes.
The political machine was democratic. The voters chose the precinct captains. The precinct captains choose their committeeman. The voters elected the alderman and ward leaders selected the party leaders, the machine boss. The party operated from the top down, manipulating material incentives in delivering the votes. Distinctively, the one ethnic group dominated the machines, the Irish. For example, the most successful of all the machine politicians who rose from bottom - up in the system, was James Pendergast of Kansas city and the most notorious machine was Tammany Hall in New York. Many critics of the machines will point out that the system was corrupted and cease to help the immigrants after they became successful and powerful. The arguments contested the claims that the machine centralized power 'got the job done' that they served as vehicles of upward mobility for the immigrants and they helped assimilate the immigrants into American life. Many pointed out that because the machine failed to do these things, it led to their collapse.
According to Steven Erie, the machine collapsed because it held a too centralized power. It did not serve as vehicles of upward mobility for the immigrants, although it assimilated the Irish, but stemmed their class mobility. It did not serve the interest of other ethnic groups. Erie also pointed out, that the machine began losing support and was replaced by trade unions, the expansion of the federal government and institutional reform. Erie argued that because the machine was Irish dominated, they excluded the interest of other ethnic groups, namely the Italians and the Jews - later the Hispanics and the Blacks. Moreover, it focused only on helping big businesses. He felt that the machine's centrifugal policies became too committed to the political logic that the nineteenth-century outdated.
By the mid nineteenth-century, the urban population had enormously changed. Among the Irish immigrants were the Italians, the Jews and those who fell in the minority group - the Blacks, Hispanics and Asians. "The machines governed the cities during a period of explosive growth population, services and construction." (63) The machines were criticized by the Rainbow coalition for its monopoly over socioeconomic mobility. They machine monopolized employment through patronage, licences, and franchise to facilitate Irish economic and social mobility. Judd and Swanstrom remarked that, "corruption was a basic method used by bosses to build and maintain their organization." (62) They monopolized almost every aspect of the society through the graft system. In the early reign of the political machines they had advanced not only the Irish but other immigrant groups to generate the votes. Nevertheless, as Judd and Swanstrom stated, "Once they had achieved a winning coalition, however, many machines became complacent. They continued to reward their supporters, but stopped reaching out to new groups." (64)
The machines deployed a tendency toward "ethnic particularism" and often "consistently over rewarded middle-class voters and under rewarded loyal lower-class voters." (65) The machine politicians represented a symbol of social mobility for many Irish immigrants but offered and gave little patronage to later-arriving southern and eastern European immigrants."Machines never attempted to address the collective aspirations of the ethnic groups," (67) perhaps because the demands were to enormous. Erie argued that it was the reverse. According to Erie, the supply of the changing supply of resources had changed of the role the machine to urban society. The federal government under President Roosevelt widened and improved social reforms with the introduction of the New Deal.
The government that was once weak and ineffective began offering housing reforms and health care to the population. Also, trade unions replaced the role of the precinct captains in employment: standardizing working hours and introducing health risk insurances for the working class. Also, the population demand and urbanization had changed due to industrialization. The cities became more congested and less community oriented with the influx of new immigrants. The assimilation process had changed and became more heterogenous as different ethnic groups emerged in the 1930's. Significantly, the mainstream supporters of the machines were moving out of the cities to rural areas while other ethnic and minority groups moved in.
The rise and fall of the political machine had the same contributors.
Their centralized power and their system of incentives and patronage
that had once made them powerful eventually led to their downfall.
Erie believed that the machine stayed too long in the politics
that when the Great Depression occurred in 1930's, they were economically
incapable to handle the recession. The poor Irish or the blue
collar workers suffered greatly from the depression. So the federal
government, the trade unions and reform movement could replace
the role of the machine in assimilating the immigrants, and providing
relief to urban population.
The reform movement emerged during the declining years of the political machines. As the urban machines weakened, the reform movement grew stronger. The political machines could not meet the needs of the new groups of immigrants and ethnic groups such as the Blacks and the Hispanics. The Machine became less capable to assimilate the Polish, the Italians and the minority groups because they lacked the resources to do so. By 1950's the Irish - as a group - had very little economic power, based on Erie's claimed that they stayed too long in the blue collar jobs and politic that they could not financially mobilize themselves. There are two distinct factors that influenced to the reform movement: the corruption from the machine politics and the efficiency of the municipal government.
Judd and Swanstrom traced the origin of the reform movement in the last quarter of the nineteenth century developing the cities. Their aim was to dismantle the political machines that "thrived on immigrant votes." (75) It was characteristic in being "short-lived and sporadic, lacking an organizational base or sustaining cause." (75) The reformers emerged from the upper class and well-educated middle class. They advocated the transfer of power into the "better classes" and out of the control immigrants electoral influence in the city politics.1 The reformers were influenced by the "fear of the corrupting moral influence of foreign immigrants - the so-called Great Unwashed." (76) The reformer saw the immigrant social behavior as uncouth and feared the moral corruption and cultural deterioration of America.
A newly developed mass media heightened the society's awareness to the corruption of municipal government politics and coupled with big business monopolies. The "Muckraking" sensationalist publications further heightened the middle and upper class readers of the corruption of the political, economic and social institutions. This led to the mobilization of the reform movement. "In this environment a multitude of organizations sprang up to regulate business practices, improve working conditions, impose standards on the professions, and reform government."(78) The reformers universally believed that "democratic institutions in the cities were corrupted by the machine politicians and their immigrant constituents." (79) They reformers advocated reforms in the electoral process.2 All their efforts in targeting and destroying machine politics, resulted in the undermining the democracy of the local government.
They began a strategy of creating "good government" by attempting to weaken and dismantle party control over elections. They reformers believed that the "elections were run in a corrupt fashion and that machine politicians victimized their immigrant constituents." (81) Judd and Swanstrom mentioned four levels of corruption conducted by the machine politicians to coerce the votes of immigrants.3 The reformers advocated and introduced the measures to control election fraud that institutionalized the voting process and forced the "responsibility of citizens to educate themselves and vote for the best candidates strictly on their merits, not on the basis of party loyalty." (84) They introduced the Voter's registration and literacy requirements,4 the Australian ballot5 and the Nonpartisan elections.6 The most significant effect of these measures was to reduce voting participation by immigrants and uneducated class and increased racial segregation in the South.
These reforms movements greatly transformed the character of the
urban government and institutions. The municipal government went
on a course of efficiency and economy, offering social services
to its populations. They imposed strident budgetary controls to
keep taxes and public services at low cost. The city politic was
separated from city government and the requirements for civil
service employment were set at higher standards.
Urban society became stigmatized by the extreme poverty, congestions, and corruption from the municipal government. People started moving out of the cities and into more rural areas away from the slums and the industrialized factories. Americans in the 1950's developed an anti urban attitude. The question is why did the population grow in rural regions surrounding the central cities? The improvement of transportation largely influenced this urban-rural shift: namely expansion of the railway and the afford ability of the automobile. Americans became taken up with the dream of owning their own homes, living in less dense population and the need for less governmental control. The Suburban government became autonomous, requiring less federal government aid. Central cities suffered tremendously from Suburban growth.
According to the authors of City Politics, suburbanization occurred because of changing technology and consumer choice as was mentioned above.1 The authors of the book indicate four stages of Suburban cities: the railroad and streetcar suburbs, the first automobile suburbs, the bedroom suburbs and the enclave suburbs. Each stage shows the gradual decline of the central cities. Between the authors described 1815-1918 American cities as "walking cities." Industries and commerce were located within walking distances of houses. The central cities were compacted and population density was high.
"By the 1920's suburban growth began to compete with the growth of the industrial cities." (186) With the invention of streetcars and the stream ferry service, the wealthy class began moving out of the industrialized area to fewer dense regions across the city or further uptown, and commuting to the downtown region for work and shopping purposes. However, this was an expensive commute and only those who were wealthy enough could do so. When Henry Ford made cost to own a car cheaper, "car ownership skyrocketed," by 1929. Middle income families could move out of the cities to areas out skirting the central cities. Real estates invested in the area between the rural and the urban cities, home ownership prospered for the upper-middle class. In 1930's, the Great Depression staggered the suburban development and stemmed urban population growth.
After World War II, the urban and rural developments had declined, so that the central cities became older cities and housing demands in the suburbs increased. The baby boom era pushed the federal government in supplying cheaper housing in the suburbs and enacting laws that further the decline of the central cities.2 More families were moving out of the cities and into the suburbs. The federal government made it cheaper for families of working class to buy a new house in the suburbs than rehabilitate homes in the cities. The government offered "insured home loans, cheap energy, and new efficient building technologies," that it was more economical to migrate to new neighborhoods outside the central cities. The population in the suburbs prospered while the central cities' declined tremendously. The federal government helped the declined more by making the suburbs autonomous.
Suburbs represented an enormous threat to the vitality of the central cities. The working class and the wealthy were moving out while the very poor were moving in. It was not just that the suburbs were experiencing tremendous population growth while the central cities were dying. As the authors pointed out, "they were also pulling the affluent whites out of the cities, leaving behind a segregated population made up of blacks, poor, and other minorities." (190) The central city had to provide more social services to its remaining population that put a great strain on its resources. Moreover suburban development went into the fourth stage, the enclave suburbs, that completely severed the link between the suburbs and the central cities. The suburbs became so autonomous and self-sufficient that it no longer needed the industries and commerce of the central cities. Manufacturing and wholesaling moved into the suburban areas. The federal government encouraged businesses to invest and develop central business districts nearer to suburban areas, through government subsidies, tax credits and the transportation policies of the Bureau of Public Roads.
The federal government blacklisted the central cities and as a
result, very little efforts at revitalization occurred there especially
concerning transportation.3 Central cities were associated
with the impoverished and the dependencies of the state - usually
the Blacks, new immigrants and minority groups. The Suburban walls
were set up to keep out a certain class and race of people. Moving
into the Suburbs became the American Dream and showed social mobility
and status. Because of the nature of the enclave suburbs and the
suburban dislike of urbanization, race and income, became criteria
for suburban life.
Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics, Private
Power and Public Policy, Harper Collins College Publishers,
New York: 1994. Part One, Chapter 3 and 4; Part Three, Chapter
8.
Steven Erie, Rainbow's End, Chapter 5 and 7