1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910524677003321

Autore

Allswang John M.

Titolo

Bosses, Machines, and Urban Voters / John M. Allswang

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019

Baltimore, Maryland : , : Project Muse, , 2019

©2019

ISBN

0-8018-3323-X

1-4214-3032-0

Edizione

[Open access edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (1 PDF (unpaged).)

Collana

Hopkins open publishing encore editions

Disciplina

320.8/0973

Soggetti

Politicians - United States - History

Municipal government - United States - History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Originally published: Revised edition. Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, [1986].

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Preface to the 1986 edition -- Of city bosses and college graduates -- William Marcy Tweed: the first boss -- Charles Francis Murphy: the enduring boss -- Big Bill Thompson and Tony Cermak: the rival bosses -- Richard J. Daley: the last boss? -- Black cities, white machines -- Epilogue: Of bosses and bossing.

Sommario/riassunto

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.