The boss system began in the Nineteenth Century as a response to the sweeping changes then occurring in American society. America was a society on the move. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the railroads joined together the two coasts and enabled, for the first time, comparatively rapid travel to the interior. Industry was developing apace. Americans were moving from the farm to the factory. A torrent of immigrants came in search of work and opportunity. A large percentage of these new Americans settle din the burgeoning cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Places like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago were centers of manufacturing and transportation. The whir of the machines, the roar of the railroads, and the hum of the telegraph were creating something different and strange – a world in which huge numbers of people jammed closely together and worked long hours as wage-earning employees. The steady rhythms of the agriculture past, of the ancestral homeland, were giving way to the promises and terrors of modern industrial society.
             "The machine form of political organization was a solution, however imperfect, to the complex problem of relating governmental power to society in general. The machine, as we shall see, rose and adapted itself in the face of the most overwhelming and complicated transitions ever undergone in any prior urban civilization." 1
             In almost no time at all, the entire scale of American society had changed. Native-born citizens, who had grown up in the countryside, or in the setting of intimate, manageable cities, found themselves suddenly the residents of teeming metropolises. 2 Many of their neighbors were immigrants. The vast majority from Europe, many of these newly-arrived Americans had lately known almost medieval conditions as rural peasants, and were thoroughly unfamiliar the workings of the modern, industrial city. They spoke little or no English. Both domestic migran...