Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

But there is a power greater even than the Boss; and that is the Machine, a creation which has reached its highest development in our own time and of which the greatest politicians speak with awe. Theodore Roosevelt, the “Big Bull Moose,” was a big politician, a glorified Boss; but he went down at Chicago in 1912 crushed by the steam roller attachment of the Machine. “For the Roller came and with great eclat it laid that turrible animile flat,” was the doggerel verdict of a newspaper of that day.

“The tremendous power of party organization has been described. It enslaves local officials, it increases the tendency to regard members of Congress as mere delegates, it keeps men of independent character out of local and national politics, it puts bad men into place, it perverts the wishes of the people, it has in some places set up a tyranny under the forms of democracy.” (Bryce, American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 612.)

The word “machine” indicates its character.

“The professional politicians (says Ostrogorski) operated, under the direction of the managers, and the wire pullers with such uniformity and with such indifference or insensibility to right and wrong, that they evoked the idea of a piece of mechanism working automatically and blindly; of a machine; the effect appeared so precisely identical, that the term “machine” was foisted on the Organization as a nick-name which it bears down to the present day.” (Democracy, p. 60.)

In this machine the voter is a very small cog; he neither devised the machine, nor can he in the least control it, nor is it constructed to serve his interests. It is organized in the interests of discipline and on the principle of obedience. In New York, for instance, an important part of the Tammany Machine is the Committee on Organization, composed of the leaders of certain wards and districts, each one of whom either holds a public office or has a valuable public contract or is in some way dependent on the Boss for his yearly income. The committee man looks after his district and is responsible to the Boss for its vote. Not by the people but by the political machines are offices filled, laws enacted, government carried on. The machine discipline though sometimes severe operates on the whole for the benefit of the politician by protecting the faithful. The efficient members of the class of professional politicians are never more than temporarily shelved. If defeated at one election they are chosen at another. If they fail to get one office, room is made for them somewhere else, and so they are made to form a class of permanent office-holders, and the power and efficiency of the political oligarchy are steadily maintained.

“The City machine makes friends with saloon keepers, with gamblers and other criminal classes, or with large financial institutions, seeking to obtain control of the vast sums expended for public improvements. This source of revenue has of late proved vastly more fruitful than the earlier and more primitive methods. By means of these various alliances a large body of pledged supporters is secured. In addition to ordinary party officers the machine employs a body of workers formerly known as ward heelers now more generally called workers, gangs, gunmen, or district leaders, some of whom are accustomed to commit various sorts of crime, such as securing fraudulent naturalization papers for foreigners, entering fictitious names on the register of voters, organizing repeaters and voting them on election day.” (Cyclopedia American Political Government, Machine, Political, 1914.)

We quote once more from Bryce, writing in 1894, as to the operation of machine rule in New York City:

“Such an organization as this, with its tentacles touching every point in a vast and amorphous city, is evidently a most potent force, especially as this force is concentrated in one hand—that of the Boss of the Hall. He is practically autocratic; and under him these thousands of officers, controlling from 120,000 to 150,000 votes, move with the precision of a machine. However, it is not only in this mechanism, which may be called a legitimate method of reaching the voters, that the strength of Tammany lies. Its control of the city government gives it endless opportunities of helping its friends, of worrying its opponents, and of enslaving the liquor-dealers. Their licenses are at its mercy, for the police can proceed against or wink at breaches of the law, according to the amount of loyalty the saloon-keeper shows to the Hall. From the contributions of the liquor interest a considerable revenue is raised; more is obtained by assessing office-holders, down to the very small ones; and perhaps most of all by blackmailing wealthy men and corporations, who find that the city authorities have so many opportunities of interfering vexatiously with their business that they prefer to buy them off and live in peace. The worst form of this extortion is the actual complicity with criminals which consists in sharing the profits of crime. A fruitful source of revenue, roughly estimated at $1,000,000 a year, is derived, when the party is supreme at Albany, from legislative blackmailing in the legislature, or, rather, from undertaking to protect the great corporations from the numerous ‘strikers,’ who threaten them there with bills. A case has been mentioned in which as much as $60,000 was demanded from a great company; and the president of another is reported to have said (1893): ‘Formerly we had to keep a man at Albany to buy off the “strikers” one by one. This year we simply paid over a lump sum to the Ring, and they looked after our interests.’ But of all their engines of power none is so elastic as their command of the administration of criminal justice. The mayor appoints the police justices, usually selecting them from certain Tammany workers, sometimes from the criminal class, not often from the legal profession. These justices are often Tammany leaders in their respective districts.” ...

“With such sources of power it is not surprising that Tammany Hall commands the majority of the lower and the foreign masses of New York, though it has never been shown to hold an absolute majority of all the voters of the city. Its local strength is exactly proportioned to the character of the local population; and though there are plenty of native Americans among the rank and file as well as among the leaders, still it is from the poorer districts, inhabited by Jews, Irish, Germans, Italians, Bohemians, that its heaviest vote comes.” (American Commonwealth, Vol. II, pp. 398-400.)