Urban Political Machine in New York: Tammany Hall Essay Example

frequently did not speak much English, but more importantly, they were looking for security in the city, which could be achieved simply by giving a party your vote on Election Day7.

These machines were regularly mocked in magazine cartoons such as this one, which comments subtly on the corrupt practices that the New York political machine (Tammany Hall) used to procure votes: Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine in New York, is a fantastic example of this form of urban government in the late nineteenth and early wentieth centuries. Extremely powerful men, called “Bosses,” controlled vast amounts of land and money, while also maintaining close, valuable connections with New York’s wealthy elite6. Political machines were constantly under scrutiny from reform-minded, middle class citizens who were troubled by the political amorality of power structures like Tammany. The wealthy benefited from their operations, and the poor (most of whom were immigrants) were usually more concerned with the physical contributions Tammany made to the city, and less with its methods5.One interesting figure in Tammany was the powerful “practical politics” expert, George Washington Plunkitt.

Born in Central Park (in an area that was once not part of the park’s territory), Plunkitt went from cart driver to New York senator thanks to the opportunities provided by machine politics. Machines like Tammany were ultimately interested in only one commodity: votes. All Plunkitt had to do to get into politics was secure one single vote (out of the 3 million available in New York), then he had a following and was considered valuable to whichever organization he went to first with this information4.For Plunkitt, this organization (or ‘machine’, to a reformer) was

Tammany Hall.

While Plunkitt led an interesting and prosperous life, his well-known philosophy concerning machine politics is of greater importance. Plunkitt’s conviction that his brand of politics was both honest and supremely practical allowed him to become a millionaire in a little over a decade, and provides an example of the possibilities presented to politicians and to the public as a result of machine politics. Plunkitt was a celebrity when he was in power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.There was not a single New Yorker who didn’t know his name and his practice. Plunkitt had started out as a man of the people, going from one man to the next and securing their votes.

Everything – money, power, influence – hinged on the city’s votes, but losing elections was not necessarily devastating, especially for Tammany. The network that existed within Tammany Hall was so extensive and included so many powerful figures that Tammany men had no trouble taking care of themselves when they were not officially in power.Plunkitt stressed this feature of machine politics and thought it created a degree of political stability4. The other wonderful aspect of machine politics, according to Plunkitt, was that every man could fulfill the “political dream,” which is that any man who goes into politics expects to get something out of it, namely money, power, influence, or any combination of the three4. Plunkitt warned young, aspiring politicians who chased after this dream to not waste their time with a college education and to seek only a “following”.

Plunkitt himself was an example of a man who had used this method to succeed in politics. Once one’s position

was secured in government, Plunkitt claimed that it was fairly simple to make vast sums of money without ever jeopardizing the city’s resources. The only requirement was to make the distinction between “honest graft” and “dishonest graft”. Plunkitt saw no moral dilemma in making money through “honest graft,” because he remembered that as much as Tammany men relied on patronage, spoils, and bribery to stay on top, they still gave back to the city in ways that reform administrations never had and never did.These reform organizations were frequently elected because they could incite public outrage at the corrupt practices of the machines4.

Eventually, in the 1950s, Tammany would finally fall when Eleanor Roosevelt learned that it was responsible for her son’s defeat in the race for New York attorney general. Roosevelt led the reform committee that brought Tammany to its knees – by the 1960s, the once glorious machine had been destroyed8. The urban political machine was a force that provided stability and growth for the “out-of-control” urban populations.Cities grew at uncontrollable rates and organizations like Tammany Hall instituted public improvements and created millions of jobs for the torrential flow of immigrants into Ellis Island7.

It can even be argued that Tammany and other political machines made the transition easier for these immigrants, without whom the cities would not have been able to prosper to the extent that they did. The political machine created a type of politics that was purely practical in nature, and although it allowed for an immoral amount of corruption, the contributions it made to growth, stability, and production cannot be understated.