Bosses, Machines, and Urban Voters

John M. Allswang

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781421430737
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1986. Political machines, and the bosses who ran them, are largely a relic of the nineteenth century. A prominent feature in nineteenth-century urban politics, political machines mobilized urban voters by providing services in exchange for voters' support of a party or candidate. Allswang examines four machines and five urban bosses over the course of a century. He argues that efforts to extract a meaningful general theory from the American experience of political machines are difficult given the particularity of each city's history. A city's composition largely determined the character of its political machines. Furthermore, while political machines are often regarded as nondemocratic and corrupt, Allswang discusses the strengths of the urban machine approach—chief among those being its ability to organize voters around specific issues.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the 1986 Edition
• 1. Of City Bosses and College Graduates
• 2. William Marcy Tweed: The First Boss
• 3. Charles Francis Murphy: The Enduring Boss
• 4. Big Bill Thompson and Tony Cermak: The Rival Bosses
• 5. Richard J. Daley: The Last Boss?
• 6. Black Cities, White Machines
• Epilogue: Of Bosses and Bossing
• For Further Reading
• Index