jan 1, 1904 - Lincoln Steffens writes The Shame of the Cities

Description:

political machines: A highly organized group of insiders that directs a political party. These complex, hierarchical party organizations, such as New York’s Tammany Hall, kept power through the strength of their political organization and their personal relationship with voters, especially working-class immigrants. Political machines were replaced by disciplined political parties usually run by professional politicians.

One of the most famous muckrakers was Lincoln Steffens, whose book The Shame of the Cities (1904), first published serially in McClure’s magazine, denounced the corruption afflicting America’s urban governments. Steffens used dramatic language to expose “swindling” politicians. He claimed, for example, that the mayor of Minneapolis had turned his city over to “outlaws.” In St. Louis, “bribery was a joke,” while Pittsburgh’s Democratic Party operated a private company that handled most of the city’s street-paving projects — at a hefty profit. Historians now believe that Steffens and other middle-class crusaders took a rather extreme view of urban politics; the reality was more complex. But charges of corruption could hardly be denied. As industrial cities grew with breathtaking speed, they posed a serious problem of governance.

When contractors sought city business, or saloonkeepers needed licenses, they turned to political machines to help them: local party bureaucracies that kept an unshakable grip on both elected and appointed public offices. A machine like New York’s Tammany Society — known by the name of its meeting place, Tammany Hall — consisted of layers of political functionaries. At the bottom were the party’s precinct captains who knew every city neighborhood and block; above them were elected ward leaders, and at the top, powerful citywide officials, who had usually started at the bottom and worked their way up. Machines dispensed jobs and patronage, arranged for urban services, and devoted their energies to staying in office, which they did, year after year, on the strength of their political clout and popularity among urban voters. For constituents, political machines acted as a rough-and-ready social service agency, providing jobs for the jobless or a helping hand for a bereaved family. Tammany ward boss George Washington Plunkitt, for example, reported that he arranged housing for families after their apartments burned, “fix[ing] them up until they get things runnin’ again.” Plunkitt was an Irishman, and so were most Tammany Hall leaders. But by the 1890s, Plunkitt’s Fifteenth District was filling up with Italians and Russian Jews. On a given day (as recorded in his diary), he might attend an Italian funeral in the afternoon and a Jewish wedding in the evening. Wherever he went, he brought gifts, listened to his constituents’ troubles, and offered a helping hand.

The favors dispensed by urban political machines came via a system of boss control that was, as Lincoln Steffens charged, corrupt. Though rural, state, and national politics were hardly immune to such problems, cities offered flagrant opportunities for bribes and kickbacks. The level of corruption, as Plunkitt observed, was greater in cities, “accordin’ to the opportunities.” When politicians made contracts for city services, some of the money ended up in their pockets. In the 1860s, William Marcy Tweed, known as Boss Tweed, had made Tammany Hall a byword for corruption, until he was brought down in 1871 by flagrant overpricing of contracts for a lavish city courthouse. Thereafter, machine corruption became more surreptitious. Plunkitt declared that he had no need for outright bribes. He favored what he called “honest graft” — the profits that came to savvy insiders who knew where and when to buy land. Plunkitt made most of his money building wharves on Manhattan’s waterfront.

Middle-class reformers condemned immigrants for supporting machines. But immigrant voters believed that few middle-class Americans cared about the plight of poor city folk like themselves. Machines were hardly perfect, but immigrants could rely on them for jobs, emergency aid, and the only public services they could hope to obtain. Journalist W. L. Riordan observed of a good ward boss, “Everybody knows where to find him, and nearly everybody goes to him for assistance of one sort or another…. He will go to the police courts to put in a good word for the ‘drunks and disorderlies’ or pay their fines…. He will attend christenings, weddings, and funerals. He will feed the hungry and help bury the dead.” Ward bosses also sponsored summer picnics as well as winter balls and fancy dinners. Astute commentators saw that bosses dominated city government because they provided for their constituents, with no condescending moral judgments
Machine-style city governments achieved some notable successes on public projects as well. They arranged (at a profit) for companies to operate streetcars, bring clean water and gaslight, and remove garbage. Nowhere in the world were there more massive public projects — aqueducts, sewage systems, bridges, and spacious parks — than in the great cities of the United States. The nature of this achievement can be grasped by comparing Chicago, Illinois, with Berlin, the capital of Germany, in 1900. At that time, Chicago’s waterworks pumped 500 million gallons of water a day, providing 139 gallons per resident; Berliners made do with 18 gallons each. Flush toilets, a rarity in Berlin, could be found in 60 percent of Chicago homes. Chicago lit its streets with electricity, while Berlin still relied mostly on gaslight. Chicago had twice as many parks as the German capital, and it had just completed an ambitious sanitation project that reversed the course of the Chicago River, carrying sewage into Lake Michigan, away from city residents.

These achievements were remarkable, because American municipal governments labored under severe political constraints. Judges did grant cities some authority: in 1897, for example, New York’s state supreme court ruled that New York City was entirely within its rights to operate a municipally owned subway. Use of private land was also subject to whatever regulations a city might impose. But, starting with an 1868 ruling in Iowa, the American legal system largely classified the city as a “corporate entity” subject to state control. In contrast to state governments, cities had a limited police power, which they could use, for example, to stop crime but not to pass more ambitious measures for public welfare. States, not cities, held most taxation power and received most public revenues. Machines and their private allies flourished, in part, because cities were starved for legitimate cash.
Money talked; powerful economic interests warped city government. Working-class residents — even those loyal to their local machines — knew that the newest electric lights and best trolley lines served affluent neighborhoods, where citizens had the most clout. Hilda Satt, a Polish immigrant who moved into a poor Chicago neighborhood in 1893, recalled garbage-strewn streets and filthy backyard privies. “The streets were paved with wooden blocks,” she later wrote, “and after a heavy rainfall the blocks would become loose and float about in the street.” She remembered that on one such occasion, local pranksters posted a sign saying, “The Mayor and the Aldermen are Invited to Swim Here.” As cities expanded, the problems of political machines became increasingly clear.

Added to timeline:

Date: