ts and foreign transplantees were generally poor and uneducated. 3 For all of them, the urban environment was daunting and unfamiliar.
             The transformation of conditions, interests, and populations meant that politicians had to find new ways of connecting with urban voters. The machine was a way of reaching out to these urban voters, of meeting them at street-level. Previously existing political networks that had represented the old agrarian, and small town interests, gave way to a new system of urban patronage.
             "The disintegration of the old oligarchical politics of the cities was often followed by a transitional system of developmental decision making in which policies were largely by-products of highly disorganized political competition. The dominant characteristic of this political order was the weakness of city political organizations and the fluidity of local political alignments -- a pattern of politics which resembled more that of an underdeveloped polity than the (later) highly organized politics of the machine era." 4
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