The AI Journal

A bartender woke George Washington Plunkitt at two in the morning to get a man out of the local jail. Plunkitt got him out and was back in bed past three. At six, fire sirens woke him again: a tenement on his turf was burning, and he spent the pre-dawn hours finding food, dry clothes and temporary lodging for six families who had lost everything they owned. By eleven that morning, four unemployed men were waiting in his front room; by early afternoon each had a job. He broke for lunch, then went to two funerals, bringing flowers to both and staying to be seen offering condolences. This was not an unusual day for the Tammany Hall district leader. It was, by his own account and those of the ward bosses who worked like him in every large American city between roughly 1870 and 1930, a normal one. Reformers of the period had a name for what Plunkitt was doing and it was not charity. It was, in his own famous phrase, “honest graft,” a term Plunkitt used to distinguish what he did, using advance knowledge of city business to profit while still delivering for the district, from simple theft from the public purse. “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” he told the reporter who recorded his views, offering the line as a description of enterprise rather than a confession. Later historians have mostly kept the reformers’ verdict rather than Plunkitt’s own framing. That verdict is accurate. It is also not the whole story of what that rota of jail, fire, unemployment and funerals was actually doing.

Robert Merton’s distinction between the manifest and latent functions of a social institution, laid out in Social Theory and Social Structure, took the political machine as one of its central illustrations, and it explains why bosses like Plunkitt kept getting re-elected by the people the machine was supposedly fleecing. The manifest function of the machine was straightforward and exactly as corrupt as the reformers said: entrench a party organisation, enrich its leaders, and convert public authority into private power. But its latent function, unintended by the machine’s own architects and unacknowledged by its critics, was to deliver immediate, personal, unbureaucratic relief to people that the formal apparatus of city and state government would not help. There was no unemployment insurance. Municipal poor relief, where it existed at all, was means-tested, moralising and designed to deter rather than assist. A destitute immigrant family burned out of a tenement at dawn had no caseworker to call. They had, if they were lucky, a district leader who owed his position to being reliably found at the scene.

That this was systematic rather than one man’s temperament is the argument of Steven Erie’s Rainbow’s End, which traces Irish-American machines across New York, Jersey City, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Albany and finds the same structure repeating: patronage jobs, municipal contracts and personal services distributed through an organisation that made political loyalty the price of access to opportunities the labour market and the local state were not otherwise offering new immigrants. This was not a single boss’s charisma but a durable institutional channel, the primary route by which an excluded population converted political participation into upward mobility, running for six decades across cities with no reason to coordinate other than facing the same problem: a population the formal economy and the formal state had no plan for. Erie’s comparison is instructive precisely where the pattern breaks: Boston and Philadelphia had Irish populations as large as New York’s or Chicago’s, yet neither city produced the same durable, centralised machine, because local party structures and state legislatures in those cities blocked the concentration of patronage control that a machine needs to run its welfare function at scale. Where the institutional conditions for a machine were absent, the informal safety net Plunkitt’s rounds represented was largely absent too, which is closer to evidence that the machine was solving a real structural problem than to evidence that a scheming boss simply willed exploitation into being.

The machine’s relationship to the welfare state that eventually replaced it was not simply adversarial, either. Terry Golway’s Machine Made traces how Tammany’s own legislative alumni, Robert Wagner and Al Smith, rose through the machine’s patronage structure into the New York State Legislature and there wrote the workers’ compensation law, the child labour restrictions and the minimum-wage provisions that followed the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911. Golway’s point, and it complicates the standard opposition between “boss” and “reformer,” is that Tammany under Charles Murphy had been pushing this legislative programme before the fire forced the issue, not merely reacting to it. The organisation built to run “honest graft” in the wards was also, through the careers it created, one of the institutional ancestors of the statutory welfare provisions that would eventually make its own emergency function unnecessary.

None of this should be mistaken for an argument that machine rule was good for democracy, and the strongest evidence against that reading comes from within the same body of scholarship this essay has been drawing on. Jessica Trounstine’s Political Monopolies in American Cities compares machines directly against the reform governments that replaced them and finds a shared, not opposing, pathology: both types of regime, once entrenched, insulated themselves from electoral competition and became less responsive to the constituencies outside their winning coalition, machines by patronage dependency and reformers by the same structural incumbency advantages under a different rhetoric. Tammany’s welfare function, moreover, ran along the lines of its own client network; ethnic groups outside the dominant coalition, and in most machine cities Black residents almost entirely, saw little of what Plunkitt’s rounds delivered. A defence of the machine’s function cannot be a defence of the machine as evenly distributed or as democratically accountable. It entrenched power and rationed access exactly as thoroughly as the “good government” administrations that followed it, only along a different membership list.

That comparison, though, is not the one that decides whether the machine’s latent function was real. The relevant alternative in 1902 was not a reform government that would later prove no more responsive; it was no institution at all, because no institution at all is what the destitute in most American cities actually had before the New Deal built a state apparatus to replace what ward bosses had been supplying piecemeal for half a century. Trounstine’s finding narrows the case for the machine to exactly what it can support: not that patronage politics was democratic, which it plainly was not, but that dismantling it without first building its replacement left a gap that took decades to fill, and that the people filling that gap in the meantime were doing something more than committing fraud on the electorate. The four men waiting in Plunkitt’s front room at eleven that morning were not being deceived into anything. The city, as it was then built, was never going to find them work at all.