The Boss System in City Politics
In an era of sound bytes, television attack ads, political blogs, and twenty-four hour national news cycles, it can be difficult to imagine that politics once was different. For one, it was more local. In the Nineteenth Century, and through a good part of the Twentieth Century, Democrats and Republicans concentrated their efforts in the crowded wards and precincts of America's cities. Before radio, television, and the Internet, communication was largely face-to-face. Without automobiles and metropolitan mass transit systems, the average individual's life was more intensely local. People walked to work. They shopped in their neighborhoods. They socialized with others in their building, or on their block. The world in which one lived was the world that one saw every day with one's own eyes. Knowledge came from the lips of men and women with whom one was intimately acquainted. They were the people with whom Americans worked and played, argued and played; fought or loved. For millions, the city was the world. Thus, it was by necessity that the political parties applied the bulk of their energies in places like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. And it was a different kind of politics, a machine not un
He was the companion of the powerful, and the friend of the little man. The same was true in Pennsylvania where, to the discomfiture of the insurgents, he provided Quay with enough federal patronage to control the state's organization. As in earlier times, bosses were typically in league with the very corporate titans the reformers were trying to combat. It was here that would be found the political opportunities of the new age. Terribly overcrowded, excessively dirty, and lacking in decent facilities, the industrial cities of the mid-Nineteenth Century were ugly and unhealthy. Re-making the city along healthful lines also necessitates the undertaking of enormous public works projects. The deplorable conditions of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century slums had indeed been done away with to a surprising extent. Serving as conduits for valuable political information and education at a time when communication technologies were still rudimentary, so-called political bosses and their machines played a mediating role, helping constituents navigate a social landscape that was otherwise new and bewildering. fed their patronage appetites when such concessions did not interfere with his primary goals. like the new and wondrous devices that these same urban dwellers saw each day in the factories in which they worked. They were also poor immigrants coming to America in search of a better life. Matthew Quay, senator from Pennsylvania and Progressive Era political boss, exhibited many of the tendencies of the accomplished boss during this period. Equally ambitious men managed the political machines that ran the cities that contained the factories.
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