Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

An urban political machine is a partisan organization that mobilizes its members to vote primarily through the dispersion of material incentives and other forms of preferential treatment, including favoritism based on political criteria in personnel decisions, contracting, and the administration of laws. While the degree and scope of political machines varied, both from city to city as well as over time, they were widely perceived as organizations capable of mobilizing broad swaths of the urban electorate to deliver a vote with mechanical predictability. The concatenation of historically unique pressures, including industrialization and immigration, presaged the emergence of the political machine during the early nineteenth century. By the turn of the century, newly arrived immigrants comprised on average nearly a quarter of the total population of America's 50 largest cities; in a few cases, the foreign-born population hovered near the 50 percent mark. Following on the heels of a decade of intense labor conflict and an economic downturn second only to that of the Great Depression of the 1930s, immigrant workers represented a nearly infinite supply of cheap labor, and made their appearance just as many American cities commenced a cycle of intensive growth and expansion. Most historians agree that by the dawn of the twentieth century, the political machine had become the dominant ... log in or subscribe to read full text