Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago

By Kenneth Finegold

During the Progressive Era, reform candidates in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago challenged the status quo--with strikingly different results: brief triumph in New York, sustained success in Cleveland, and utter failure in Chicago. Kenneth Finegold seeks to explain this phenomenon by analyzing the support for reform in these cities, especially the role of an emerging class of urban policy professionals in each campaign. His work offers a new way of looking at urban reform opposition to machine politics.


Drawing on original research and quantitative analysis of electoral data, Finegold identifies three distinct patterns of support for reform candidates: traditional reformers drew support from native-stock elites; municipal populists found support among stock immigrant groups and segments of the working class; and progressive candidates won the backing of coalitions made up of traditional reform and municipal populist voters. The success of these reform efforts, Finegold shows, depended on the different ways in which experts were incorporated into city politics. This book demonstrates the significance of expertise as a potential source of change in American politics and policy, and of each city's electoral and administrative organizations as mediating institutions within a national system of urban political economies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691221632

Book preview

EXPERTS AND POLITICIANS

PRINCETON STUDIES IN AMERICAN POLITICS:

HISTORICAL, INTERNATIONAL, AND

COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

SERIES EDITORS

IRA KATZNELSON, MARTIN SHEFTER, THEDA SKOCPOL

Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of

Business Unionism in the United States

by Victoria C. Hattam

The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism

by J. David Greenstone

Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia

by Colleen A. Dunlavy

Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience

by Martin Shefter

Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics

in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago

by Kenneth Finegold

EXPERTS AND POLITICIANS

REFORM CHALLENGES TO

MACHINE POLITICS IN NEW YORK,

CLEVELAND, AND CHICAGO

Kenneth Finegold

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS      PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1995 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Finegold, Kenneth, 1957–

Experts and politicians : reform challenges to machine politics in

New York, Cleveland, and Chicago / Kenneth Finegold.

p. cm. — (Princeton studies in American politics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-03734-5 (CL : acid-free paper)

eISBN 978-0-691-22163-2

1. Elections—New York (N.Y) 2. New York (N.Y)—Politics and

government—1898–1951. 3. Elections—Illinois—Chicago.

4. Chicago—Cleveland. 6. Cleveland (Ohio)—Politics and

government. 7. Populism—United States. 8. Progressivism

(United States politics) I. Title. II. Series.

JS1238.3.F56 1995

324.6’3’0973—dc20 94-22109 CIP

R0

IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER

________Robert Finegold________

APRIL 17, 1920–MARCH 31, 1989

_______________________ Contents _______________________

Acknowledgments  ix

PART I: RETHINKING REFORM  1

Chapter 1

Machine Politics and Reform Politics  3

Chapter 2

Incorporating Experts  15

PART II: NEW YORK: FROM TRADITIONAL REFORM TO PROGRESSIVISM  33

Chapter 3

Seth Low and Traditional Reform  35

Chapter 4

Hearst, McClellan, and Gaynor: Municipal Populism and the Tammany Response  45

Chapter 5

John Purroy Mitchel and the Politics of Municipal Research  54

PART III: CLEVELAND: FROM MUNICIPAL POPULISM TO PROGRESSIVISM  69

Chapter 6

McKissonism and the Muny  73

Chapter 7

Tom Johnson: Municipal Populism in Power  82

Chapter 8

Newton Baker’s Progressive Coalition  101

PART IV: CHICAGO: THE FAILURE OF PROGRESSIVISM  119

Chapter 9

Carter Harrison versus Reform  123

Chapter 10

Edward Dunne: Municipal Populism and Party Factionalism  138

Chapter 11

Busse, Merriam, and the Bureau of Public Efficiency  151

PART V: CONCLUSIONS  169

Chapter 12

Progressivism, Electoral Change, and Public Policy  171

Appendix  185

Notes  189

Bibliography  229

Index  253

Acknowledgments

H. DOUGLAS PRICE, Amy Bridges, and Sidney Verba were insightful and encouraging dissertation advisors who continued their insights and encouragement long after I had received my Ph.D. Amy Bridges deserves special thanks for convincing me that revising my dissertation into a book was worth doing and for showing me how I could do it. Larry Bennett, Donald Davis, David Hammack, Paul Kleppner, Richard L. McCormick, R. Douglas Rivers, Martin Shefter, Theda Skocpol, and Stephen Skowronek made penetrating comments. I also benefited from the opportunities to present my work at annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association, at a seminar of the Joint Center for Urban Studies, and at seminars with political science departments at the University of Chicago, Cornell, Holy Cross, Michigan, Princeton, UCLA, Vanderbilt, and Yale. Jeffrey Colen and Neil Marantz bailed me out when I needed to do something in one place and found myself in another. Tim Bartlett, Alessandra Bocco, Malcolm De-Bevoise, and Eric Schramm did fine editorial work for Princeton University Press.

Research travel was made possible by National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant No. SES-83-09537 and a Newberry Library Resident Fellowship. A V.O. Key, Jr. Fellowship of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard University and a Richard D. Irwin Fellowship allowed me to concentrate on writing for a year. Harvard’s Delancey K. Jay Prize for the best dissertation on constitutional government was also very nice. My original computations were funded by the Government Department Data Center at Harvard. Jim Lee and Brian Watts later helped me rework the data. I received enormous assistance from librarians and staff members at Harvard, Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, Rutgers, the New York Public Library, the New York County Board of Elections, the Cleveland Public Library, Case Western Reserve, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Citizens League, the Cuyahoga County Archives, the Cleveland Municipal Library, the Newberry Library, the University of Chicago, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Chicago Municipal Reference Library. Paul F. Gehl of the Newberry Library was particularly helpful. I especially thank the Newberry Library, for permission to quote and cite material from the Carter Henry Harrison Papers; the Oral History Research Office of Columbia University, for permission to quote and cite material from the memoirs of William H. Allen and Henry Bruère; the Western Reserve Historical Society, for permission to quote and cite material from the papers of Newton D. Baker, Henry E. Bourne, and Peter Witt; and the University of Chicago Archives, for permission to quote and cite material from the Charles E. Merriam Papers.

Elaine K. Swift, a loving wife and a dedicated scholar, helped me write this in many different ways. I am especially grateful for her comments on my drafts, her errands on my behalf, and her willingness to reschedule our respective cooking duties during the summer of 1993. My mother, Lillian Finegold, and my sister, Hope Alper, gave me love and encouragement throughout my work on this topic. So did my father, Robert Finegold, until his death. I miss him, and this book is dedicated to his memory.

Part I

RETHINKING REFORM

The practical politician, if asked why one area has strong

[municipal ownership] interest and another not, will inevitably

answer that in one case the boys got out and worked and in the

other they didn’t. The theorist will inevitably give his explanation

in terms of the progress of ideas, and the change in public opinion

or the social will. The facts are not comforting for either answer.

Arthur F. Bentley, "Municipal Ownership Interest Groups

in Chicago: A Study of Referendum Votes, 1902–1907"

CHAPTER 1

Machine Politics and Reform Politics

THE EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century are generally known as the Progressive Era. During this period, new patterns of politics and policy emerged at the local, state, and national levels of American government. Party or class organizations that had controlled cities were displaced by coalitions declaring their antipathy to established sources of political power. New forms of urban government, such as the commission system and the city manager, replaced the partisan mayor and the ward-based city council. Innovative public policies widened the role of city government, encroaching on functions already shared by markets, charities, and party organizations. Experts with professional training and orientations became key urban actors. At the state and national levels, partisan cleavages and governmental structures were less drastically changed, but, as in cities, new policy functions emerged and expertise became more central to the operations of government. This period, then, was one of the recurring waves of reform traced by scholars such as Samuel P. Huntington, Martin Shefter, and Ronald G. Walters.¹

What, exactly, is meant by reform? The label has often been claimed by any politician who challenges an incumbent or by proponents of any policy change. The concept becomes more meaningful if a more restrictive definition is adopted: reform is the attempt to change what is systematic about government, rather than, or in addition to, what is transitory. Thus those who seek the reform of politics do not merely wish to change the people who are in office, but the processes by which they were placed there and the institutions within which they operate. In early twentieth-century American cities, this meant above all opposition to machine politics, the manipulation of material incentives by party organizations.²

Who, it might be asked, were not reformers? Some business owners opposed reform of any sort, either because they profited from the developmental activities of machine regimes or because they were afraid change would scare away investment.³ Also outside the ranks of reform were members of the party organizations, including leaders like Charles Francis Murphy of New York and Roger Sullivan of Chicago, as well as the regulars who followed them. Blue-blooded politicians who sought office in tenuous alliance with the party organizations, such as George B. Mc-Clellan (New York) and Carter Harrison II (Chicago), were not reformers either, though their strategic decisions had important consequences for the outcome of reform in their cities.

During the Progressive Era, the ideas and techniques of reformers in separate localities were shared through the recently constructed mechanisms of professional associations; civic organizations such as the National Municipal League; and a national, muckraking periodical press. Thus diffusion occurred both vertically, among the levels of government, and horizontally, among cities or states. Even in cities that were alike in size, region, and economic base, however, reform movements led to dissimilar political outcomes. The puzzle is to explain these different reform outcomes.

The different outcomes of reform across cities cannot be explained by existing studies, most of which either provide details about a single city or draw examples from many cities to paint a picture of the reform phenomenon as a whole. Some scholars have tried to understand reform through aggregate methods using large numbers of cities as cases.⁴ But the aggregate approach may be more appropriate for explaining single outcomes like council-manager government or total expenditures than for explaining general patterns of politics and policy. A comparative case study seems more likely to capture the complex dynamics of reform within each city, and thus offers a better chance that reform outcomes can be understood. An aggregate approach, moreover, is not well-suited for studying large cities, which provide only a small set of cases.⁵ Yet it is important that reform outcomes in large cities be considered as a distinct theoretical subject, for the politics of reform in these cities was different than in cities of small or medium size.⁶

I chose to compare New York, Cleveland, and Chicago because these three large cities provide examples of different outcomes for reform. In social science terms, selecting these cities as cases maximizes the variance of the dependent variable, defined quite broadly as the city’s subsequent patterns of politics and policy. The short-run outcomes can most easily be measured by the number of elections won by reform mayoral candidates during the Progressive Era: one in Chicago, two in New York, and six in Cleveland. By long-run outcomes, I mean the extent to which reform candidates continued to challenge machine politics after the Progressive Era. Each critical period builds upon the achievements (or failures) of the last: the long-term outcomes of reform politics during the Progressive Era shaped each city’s response to the internal and external challenges of the 1930s, and the outcomes of the Progressive Era and the New Deal shaped each city’s response to the challenges of the 1960s.

In New York, a broad-based reform coalition came together and then split apart. John Purroy Mitchel was elected mayor of New York in 1913 by a coalition linking elites who had elected Seth Low in 1901 with working-class voters who had supported William Randolph Hearst in 1905 and 1909. But by 1917, Mitchel’s coalition had come undone. The immediate consequences of the reform collapse were to strengthen the Tammany Democratic machine and the Socialist opposition. The continued subordination of Jews, Italians, and Germans to Irish leaders within the Democratic machine, however, left these groups available for mobilization by Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s and 1940s.

Cleveland reformers were more radical than those who gained power in any other major city, with the possible exception of the Milwaukee Socialists. They were also among the reformers with the most sustained electoral success. Tom Johnson was elected to four two-year terms, holding office from 1901 to 1909. After an anti-reform Republican defeated Johnson and served one term, Newton Baker restored reform control with a more inclusive coalition than Johnson had constructed. The same coalition reelected Baker in 1913. In 1915, however, Peter Witt, Baker’s designated political heir, was defeated in a multicandidate election. The survival of a radical tradition, linking Johnson and Witt with Dennis Kucinich, has distinguished Cleveland politics since the Progressive Era.

Reformers in Chicago won some victories at the ward level, but their citywide success was limited due to the absence of a broad-based alliance like those achieved under Mitchel or Baker. John Peter Altgeld, running for mayor on a municipal ownership ticket after serving as governor of Illinois, finished third in 1899. Edward Dunne served one term as mayor but, like Tom Johnson, was defeated over the street railway issue. Charles Merriam’s defeat in 1911 showed that elite reformers could win support from the upper class but not from workers. After the failure of progressivism in Chicago, the Democratic organization was transformed from a collection of personal factions into the city’s legendary, centralized machine.

To explain these different outcomes, this book proposes a rethinking of urban reform opposition to party organizations. Support for reform candidates in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago during the Progressive Era followed three distinct patterns. Traditional reform candidates were supported by native-stock elites. Municipal populist candidates were supported by foreign-stock ethnic groups and by segments of the working class. Progressive candidates were supported by coalitions combining traditional reform and municipal populist voters. Whether traditional reform and municipal populist voters could be united into a progressive coalition depended on the way in which experts were incorporated into city politics.

This analysis challenges the emphasis of many historians on the ethnic or class bases of machine and reform support. According to the ethnic interpretation, seen in the work of Richard Hofstadter, the party organizations embodied the culture of, did favors for, and won support from foreign-stock nationality groups. Reformers are depicted as native-stock Americans seeking to regain control of the cities.⁷ A variant of the ethnic interpretation, put forward by Samuel P. Hays, reframes it in terms of class: reform campaigns then appear as elite efforts directed against party organizations based in the working class.⁸ These approaches suggest that the electoral alignments of early twentieth-century cities were relatively stable, subject to change only as underlying demographic variables changed. I argue, in contrast, that some reform candidates won support from foreign-stock, working-class voters instead of, or in addition to, native-stock elites, and that electoral politics was relatively fluid, with the possibility of reform alliances across class or ethnic lines. Without discarding what we have learned about the social origins of some reformers from Hofstadter, Hays, and the historians and political scientists who have followed their leads, we should pay more attention to reform as politics.

Central to the reform politics of the Progressive Era were experts, politicians, and the relationships that linked them. Understanding the different relationships of experts and politicians helps us to understand why reform efforts produced different outcomes in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago. The relationship of experts and politicians in the Progressive Era also helps us to understand the patterns of politics and policy that have characterized each of these cities since this period. More generally, this study demonstrates the significance of expertise as a potential source of change in American politics and policy, and the importance of each city’s electoral and administrative organizations as mediating institutions within a national system of urban political economies.

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

The complex of socioeconomic changes that Hays calls industrialism created new urban problems that, as viewed by reformers, were exacerbated by the practices of machine politics. Yet the improvement of transportation and communication also made it possible for reformers to share methods that promised to simultaneously solve social problems and overturn party-based regimes. Reform ideas and techniques were spread by new professional and municipal associations and by a diverse periodical press, as well as by individual reformers. City governments throughout the nation, then, faced similar challenges. In every city the resolution of these challenges served to structure future political possibilities, but city-specific factors led to different outcomes and thus to different patterns of politics in the post-reform period.

As Hays has noted, the rapid expansion of the railroads in the late nineteenth century linked every important city in the nation, with a particularly dense and complex network in the industrial Northeast. The telegraph, the telephone, and the modern printing press together produced a comparable national communication system.⁹ The most obvious effect of these changes was to create national markets, spurring industrialization. But the improvement of transportation and communication also created a national polity. Hugh Heclo has stressed the importance of political learning, a collective, relatively enduring alteration in behavior that results from experience, as a force reshaping answers to the fundamental question of what to do.¹⁰ During the Progressive Era, perhaps for the first time, political learning could take place on a national scale, as reformers in one city learned about the successes and failures of their counterparts elsewhere and altered their own strategies and tactics.¹¹ Communication among reformers from different cities was facilitated when the federal Bureau of the Census developed standardized comparative statistics of municipal expenditures and services, organized according to function.¹²

Professional associations provided a vehicle for the exchange of experience among specialists in particular policy areas. During the Progressive Era, social workers and social scientists formed new organizations, while older organizations of teachers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers were reoriented toward more aggressive strategies of professionalization.¹³ Within cities, experts learned to cooperate across professional boundaries. In Chicago, for instance, Robert H. Wiebe points out, the architect Allen B. Pond designed uniquely functional settlements for Jane Addams, who aided Margaret Haley in achieving professional status for teachers, who joined with John Fitzpatrick, progressive president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, in championing the rights of wage earners.¹⁴ Such exchanges were facilitated by citywide groups such as the City Club of New York and the Municipal League of Philadelphia.¹⁵ In 1893, these two groups took the lead in the formation of the National Municipal League, which provided regular communication about governmental organization in different cities, as well as studies of foreign approaches. The National Municipal League’s efforts were supplemented by the work of more specialized groups, such as the National Civil Service League and the National Short Ballot Organization.¹⁶

Journalists provided another means of communication among urban reform movements.¹⁷ The journalism of the Progressive Era is most famous for muckraking articles like Lincoln Steffens’s series, The Shame of the Cities, published in McClure’s. Such exposés created an awareness of urban political corruption as a shared phenomenon. In magazines like The Outlook, World’s Work, The Public, and The Independent, other writers went beyond exposure, analyzing the results of key elections, evaluating the records of reform administrations, and debating issues such as municipal ownership.¹⁸

Many of the leading urban reformers were themselves active in more than one city. In 1905 and 1909, William Randolph Hearst ran for mayor of New York on a platform of municipal ownership. His newspapers supported like-minded candidates in Chicago and other cities.¹⁹ Tom Johnson, mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909, first became active in politics by participating in Henry George’s campaigns for mayor of New York, managing George’s final campaign in 1897.²⁰ One of the most peripatetic reformers was Edward Webster Bemis, who was dismissed from the University of Chicago in what became a major academic freedom controversy; served as waterworks superintendent and tax expert for Johnson in Cleveland; and was appointed Deputy Commissioner of Water Works by New York mayor William Jay Gaynor, only to be fired for opposing the purchase of meters from a company in which Tammany politicians held shares.²¹ Louis F. Post, editor of the Single Tax journal, The Public, was also active in all three of the cities studied here.²²

The networks of professional and municipal organizations, the periodical press, and the mobility of individual reformers all contributed to the rapid diffusion of innovative forms of governmental structure. Commission government, in which elected commissioners serve collectively as a legislative body and individually as heads of departments, was first adopted by Galveston in 1901. The plan received more attention when it was put into effect in Des Moines in 1908. An investigation by President Charles Eliot of Harvard, favorable coverage by the Literary Digest and other journals, and campaigns by the League of American Municipalities helped to win adoption of the new scheme in 423 cities by 1915.²³ As complaints about the shortcomings of the commission system spread through similar channels, the council-manager plan supplanted it as the object of reformers’ enthusiasm. This plan, which vested executive power in a professional city manager chosen by appointment, was first adopted by Sumter, South Carolina, in 1912. The National Short Ballot Organization, and later the National Municipal League, actively promoted the Sumter plan. By 1921, 212 cities, including Cleveland, had council-manager charters.²⁴

The diffusion of new techniques of extragovernmental influence was equally rapid. The New York Bureau of Municipal Research, established in 1907, was the first independent organization for the study of urban government. Afterwards, research bodies were created in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and other cities. These organizations were often staffed by veterans of the New York Bureau or graduates of its Training School.²⁵ The New York Bureau received much publicity from its budget exhibit, which illustrated the types of work done by the city and showed examples of avoidable waste. Mayor Henry T. Hunt of Cincinnati, a reformer, imported a member of the New York Bureau to set up a similar exhibit explaining what his city did and why it needed a tax increase.²⁶

New policy approaches spread from city to city as well. The general zoning ordinance was invented in New York City in 1916; as of 1921, over 10 million urbanites were in zoned cities.²⁷ Junior high schools (Columbus, Georgia) and junior colleges (Fresno, California) were among the modern education programs developed in one city during the Progressive Era and imitated by others.²⁸ The Lexow Committee’s 1894 investigation of the New York police provided a model for probes into other police departments. Ways of reforming the police were communicated through professional associations and research bureaus.²⁹ Sanitation was another service reshaped by reformers during the Progressive Era. In New York, Colonel George E. Waring achieved unprecedented results through reorganization of the sanitation force, symbolized by the workers’ white uniforms. Supporters of Cleveland’s Mayor Johnson boasted that he had copied this White Wing system during his first term in office.³⁰

As a result of the rapid diffusion of governmental structures, extra-governmental techniques, and policy proposals, the content of reform initiatives in different cities was often alike. The outcome of reform attempts, however, varied greatly, from ineffective protest against the current regime in some cities to sustained control of others. In New York, the Bureau of Municipal Research helped expand the traditional reform constituency that elected Seth Low mayor in 1901 into a progressive coalition for John Purroy Mitchel in 1913. In Cleveland, the Civic League helped expand the municipal populist constituency that elected Tom Johnson mayor in 1901, 1903, 1905, and 1907 into a progressive coalition for Newton Baker in 1911 and 1913. In Chicago, Edward Dunne received municipal populist support and Charles Merriam received traditional reform support, but despite the formation of the Bureau of Public Efficiency no progressive coalition could be constructed.

These cases pose a double problem for theoretical interpretations of reform. Any explanation must make sense of the similarities among reform movements. This is the issue to which existing explanations of reform have most frequently been addressed. But these explanations must also tell us why the outcomes of reform in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago were so different.

MACHINE AND REFORM IN URBAN POLITICAL ECONOMY

Explanation of the origins and outcomes of municipal reform is a crucial problem in the emerging literature of urban political economy. Among the authors who have made important contributions to this body of work are Amy Bridges, Stephen Elkin, Stephen Erie, Ester Fuchs, Dennis Judd, Paul Kantor, Ira Katznelson, John Mollenkopf, Martin Shefter, Clarence Stone, and Todd Swanstrom.³¹ Although they disagree on many points, these authors share a conception of cities as semisovereign entities that operate with some degree of independence, yet are also part of larger economic and political structures at the state, national, and even international levels. They share also a research strategy of examining the interaction of politics and economics in cities through analysis that is comparative and historical. And, with all who study political economy in any context, they share a focus on the intersection of the economic processes of production and consumption, organized by markets, with the political processes of self-government, organized by representative institutions. One of the important findings of the urban political economy literature is that American cities have more autonomy to pursue a range of public policies than in the influential model of Paul Peterson, in which municipal governments’ unavoidable need for revenue forces them to adopt policies that facilitate economic development and prohibits policies of economic redistribution.³² Another is that cities of the South and West, such as Houston and Los Angeles, followed significantly different patterns of political development than northeastern cities like New York and Chicago, with whose histories most scholars are more familiar.³³

Central to much of the new urban political economy is the concept of regime, which was applied to city politics by Aristotle and is widely used in comparative politics and international relations. A pattern of governance that endures beyond individual leaders or electoral coalitions, a regime can be constituted through the formal institutions of a city charter or through informal arrangements of public-private cooperation. It provides a set of rules for determining, in Harold Lasswell’s classic formulation, who gets what, when, how. At the same time, it provides a moral order that defines what is good, and thus who should get what, and why.³⁴

Several of the scholars associated with the study of urban political economy have joined with urban historians to advance a new interpretation of the American political machine as the basis for one kind of urban regime. This rethinking represents a second wave of revisionism about machine politics. The earliest students of the machine were themselves reformers; for James Bryce, Moisei Ostrogorski, Lincoln Steffens, and Gustavus Myers, to analyze the machine was to demonstrate its corruption and its violation of a universal public interest.³⁵ Robert K. Merton’s functionalist analysis of the machine replaced the reform view as the standard approach within American political science.³⁶ Merton used the example of the machine to illustrate his fundamental distinction between manifest functions, intended and recognized by participants, and latent functions that were neither intended nor recognized. The patronage, graft, and electoral operations noted by reform-minded observers were the manifest functions of the machine. The latent functions of the machine, which explained its survival, were to centralize power despite the fragmentation of formal city government, and to provide personalized services (and opportunities for individual mobility) to the needy. If support for machine politics was based on the provision of services, then assumption of those services by the national government, with its superior resources, made the machines superfluous. Mertonian functionalism thus fit well with what became known as the Last Hurrah thesis, after the novel that conveyed it more vividly than any social scientist: the argument that the New Deal led to the death of the machine.³⁷

Mertonian functionalism also fit well with Hays’s revisionist analysis of reform. If the machine addressed the needs of the immigrant working-class masses, who could have opposed it except native-stock elites seeking to regain power in the cities?³⁸ In support of this interpretation, one could cite the nativistic and antidemocratic statements of reformers such as Andrew Dickson White and Woodrow Wilson as well as specific reforms, such as at-large elections and the city-manager system, that favored elite control over city governments.³⁹ Melvin Holli only partially modified this analysis with his distinction between the sort of reformers described by Hays, whom he labeled structural reformers, and social reformers like Detroit’s Hazen Pingree and Cleveland’s Tom Johnson, who sought to improve conditions for the urban masses.⁴⁰

Recent scholarship has challenged Merton’s analysis of the machine on each of its major points. First, party organizations in most cities at most times were not centralized machines at all, but loose aggregations of ward leaders or sets of antagonistic factions.⁴¹ Because centralized organizational control was the exception rather than the rule, most party organizations were incapable of performing the coordinating functions that Merton attributed to them. If party machines were functional substitutes for centralized government, as Merton suggests, then centralizing reforms should have had a negative effect on machine formation. Alan Di-Gaetano has shown, to the contrary, that formal centralization made machine formation more likely, by giving party leaders the resources they needed to subordinate ward bosses.⁴²

A second problem with Merton’s functional view of the machine is that the party organizations did not do very much to help their immigrant and working-class constituents. The new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, including Jews, Italians, and Poles, and the black immigrants from the American South, were excluded from the party organizations or placed in subordinate positions, and thus received few of the alleged benefits of machine politics.⁴³ Even for the Irish, the ethnic group that often (but not always) provided leadership for the Democratic party organizations, machine politics was of dubious value and may have actually retarded economic mobility.⁴⁴ The real beneficiaries of organizational politics were the organizations’ leaders, who exchanged franchises, contracts, and regulatory decisions for personal wealth under the arrangements that reformers denounced as graft. Both Richard Croker of New York’s Tammany Hall and Bathhouse John Coughlin of Chicago’s First Ward, for example, owned stables of racehorses. The organization leaders were thus predatory, in the specifically political sense in which Margaret Levi uses the term to refer to rulers who as much as they can, design property rights and policies meant to maximize their own personal power and wealth.⁴⁵

A third problem with Merton’s model is that the Last Hurrah thesis is wrong: the New Deal did not kill the machine. Because so many New Deal policies of social provision combined federal funding with local direction, these policies did not displace the bosses but gave them added resources. In many cities, including Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City, organizational leaders allied with the Roosevelt administration and used federal money and patronage to build centralized machines that had previously proven impossible to construct.⁴⁶ Reports of the machine’s death are, in fact, greatly exaggerated.⁴⁷ The case of New York, which for many is the paradigmatic reform city,⁴⁸ justifies such skepticism. New York party organizations were buffeted by the reform victories of the Progressive Era, by the later reform administrations of Fiorello La Guardia (1934–45) and John Lindsay (1966–73), and then by the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, which essentially placed city government under external receivership. These assaults did in fact demolish the Manhattan Democratic organization that had once been Tammany Hall. Yet the party organizations of the other four boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island) survived to play major roles in the coalition constructed by Edward Koch, the erstwhile reform Democrat who won three mayoral elections and governed the city from 1978 to 1989.⁴⁹

This rethinking of machine politics has been incorporated into the literature of urban