Machine Politics in American Cities

by

Jeffrey Broxmeyer

• LAST MODIFIED: 19 February 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190922481-0082

Introduction

Machine politics is an urban contribution to modern democratic theory and practice. This style of political clientelism channeled control over municipal resources into electoral dominance through the mastery of party organization. The phenomenon emerged from the historical timing of mass suffrage and urbanization in the United States roughly between the 1850s and 1950s. Machines were situated between the combustible energies of the demos, a multi-cultural assemblage of crowds, neighborhood activity, and social movements, on the one hand, and elite society, divided between longstanding fortunes grounded in mercantile wealth, landholdings, or inheritance and the newer industrial and financial capitalists. By the time of the Urban Crisis of the 1960s, most older cities and industrial towns had experienced either a personal machine (such as James Curley in Boston) or an organizational machine (like New York’s Tammany Hall or the Cook County Democrats in Illinois). Machine rule varied widely across place and time. But it was often dramatized by a cycle of booms and busts related to graft scandals, immigration patterns, and governing controversies. Electoral machines, however, proved to be a resilient and adaptable form of urban party clientelism that reconciled abstract forces of the capitalist market and modern city with intimate street-level governance. Professional politicians found ingenious ways to manage—and exploit—social conflict by drawing strength from mass suffrage, party organization, and the provision of collective goods. As a third force standing between “the people” and urban elites, machine politics incorporated some popular demands for group protection and social welfare, especially by accommodating and consolidating ethnic and religious differences. Machines also largely defused and diverted radical possibilities from below to ensure the stability of capitalist markets for labor and housing, and to enhance real-estate values. Machine politicians mounted a robust defense of private property when its legitimacy was contested by waves of populists, labor agitators, and Progressive Era social reformers. Yet, by placing their own interests of political reproduction above the needs of the business class and entrenched elites, urban machines also delimited the power of capital and privilege by channeling investment toward social needs, most notably, for public works and mass transit. The quintessential feature of machine politics was a selective redistribution of material incentives to politically connected allies through patronage jobs, public contracts, informal poor relief, and personal favors. By governing through a distinctive political logic of electoral mobilization and organizational self-aggrandizement, machine rule meant, above all, the application of practical politics to urban problems.

General Overviews

Explaining the emergence and persistence of machine politics in American cities has been a puzzle going back to the earliest development of the modern social sciences. Callow 1976 is an edited volume containing early interdisciplinary debates between historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Banfield and Wilson 1963 describes the machine as an ideal type of big city politics in the modern age. Wilson later co-authored an influential study on the “broken windows” theory of policing that should be read through the historical role of machine politics in regulating the urban social order. Brown and Halaby 1987 examines the rise and fall of urban machines over time and finds that they peaked in number between the turn of the twentieth century and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Looking back through generations of historiographic interpretations, Lessof and Connolly 2013 provides a genealogy of pejorative labels like “boss” and “machine” that were uncritically adopted by nearly all scholars. Stone 1996 “takes stock” of scholarly interpretations that were published between the 1960s and 1990s, as the mass base of political parties disappeared in American politics and machines appeared to be relics of a bygone era.

• Banfield, Edward C., and James Q. Wilson. City Politics. New York: Vintage, 1963.

  Presents machine politics as an ideal-type of party organization that is principally focused on “making and distributing income—mainly money—to those who run it and work for it.” Machines are focused on securing election outcomes and patronage but are fundamentally agnostic about issues and policy.

• Brown, M. Craig, and Charles N. Halaby. “Machine Politics in America, 1870–1945.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17.3 (Winter 1987): 587–612.

  DOI: 10.2307/204612

  A quantitative portrait of machine politics in thirty major US cities between 1870 and 1945. Most prevalent in this period were temporary “factional” machines. “Dominant” machines with centralized bureaucratic party structures were always less common but peaked by 1930. Overall, the heyday of boss rule ran from the 1920s to the 1930s with steep declines of both machine types after 1940.

• Callow, Alexander B., Jr., ed. The City Boss in America: An Interpretive Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

  An edited reader with selections on Rise of the Boss, Running the Machine, The Boss and the Immigrant, Bosses and Boodle, The Boss and the Reformer, The Modern Machine, and Decline or Change? Texts cover theoretical perspectives, interdisciplinary approaches, case studies, and primary sources, with attention to ethnic politics. Callow was an urban historian and chronicler of the Tweed Ring. See also Callow 1966 in Group Incorporation, Conflict, and Exclusion.

• Lessof, Alan, and James J. Connolly. “From Political Insult to Political Theory: The Boss, the Machine, and the Pluralist City.” Journal of Policy History 25.2 (April 2013): 139–172.

  DOI: 10.1017/S0898030613000018

  Argues that biases of elite reformers during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era heavily shaped scholarly frameworks and interpretations throughout the twentieth century. Pejorative terms used by elite opponents of machines were adopted by purportedly value-neutral social scientists. Vocabulary used to conceptualize urban politics can serve as insights into how both historical actors and scholars theorize power relations.

• Stone, Clarence. “Urban Political Machines: Taking Stock.” PS: Political Science and Politics 29.3 (September 1996): 446–450.

  DOI: 10.2307/420821

  A brief historical introduction to political machines by a leading scholar of urban politics and the principal theoretician of urban regime theory. Stone takes an even-handed approach to the legacy of machine rule by covering its contributions and shortfalls. Highly accessible for undergraduates. Use as a supplement to primary sources on an introductory syllabus.