Urban Machines and Municipal Reform: Late 19th and early 20th century America

Chris WattGPHY 328

Prof. MackintoshApril 13th, 2001

Beginning in the 1820s, massive transformations in American life shifted the

national focus from rural to urban and gave rise to a distinctly American phenomenon:

the urban political machine. Many scholars agree that the classic period of ‘bossism’ in

urban politics fell between the years 1880 and 1920. While political bosses were shoring

up interests and riding the strength of the immigrant vote to political and economic

success, calls for reform emerged in the urban environment. Efforts to alter the structure

of municipal government were not new by the late 19th century; reform movements in

New York ultimately brought about the dissolution of the Tammany’s Tweed ring in

1873. However, reform movements appear to have been most intense in the period to

which the political machine is classically assigned. The popular understanding of this era

is one where both movements are strongest and feeding off each other - the reformer

sermonizing from the moral high ground; the boss making shady deals in smoky saloons.

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the moral dimensions of the boss-

reform debate. The boss-reformer interpretation dominated the first round of histories

about urban politics, after the demise of the classic political machine became certain at

the beginning of World War II. Some scholars have since attempted to write urban

history along new lines, rejecting the classic duel theory for failing to explain the

complexities of American municipal government.1 However, the debate between bosses

1 For reinterpretatons, see McCaffrey, Peter “Style, Structure, and Institutionalization of Machine Politics: Philadelphia, 1867-1933. Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Winter, 1992. pp. 435-452. Brown, Craig M., Charles N. Halaby. “Machine Politics in America, 1870-1945. Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Winter, 1987. pp. 587-612. Teaford, Jon C. “New Life for an Old Subject: Investigating the Structure of Urban Rule.” American Quarterly, XXXVII, 1985, 346-356.

and reformers remains a valuable framework for discussing notions of morality and

public virtue in the rapidly growing American city in the late 19th and early 20th century.

I will begin by discussing the basic structure and function of the classical machine. Then,

I will turn the argument towards the various boss-reform discourses, and the manner in

which boss politics presented an affront to the various factions of municipal reformers

around the turn of the 20th century in American cities.

The urban political machine may be assessed from a variety of angles. First, the

classic urban machine regarded politics as business. The purpose of machine politics was

the make money. Second, the machine can be discussed in terms of its structure. While

the range and scope of this structure varied, extending in influence beyond the

municipality in some cities, while limiting control to city politics in others, the machine

was hierarchical. At the base of this hierarchy were wards: the city was divided and was

tended to within each specific ward by an alderman. Third, the machine can be assessed

in terms of its relationship with two subgroups: the business class, and the underclass.

The machine achieved its corporate goals through myriad relationships with private

businesses, banks and other organizations through which collaboration resulted in profit.

The ward system allowed the machine to purchase votes from its constituents, often new

immigrants, in exchange for various forms of aid. This presence in individual

neighbourhoods created the voting base necessary to remain in power, and thus continue

to benefit from graft.

The boss was, and remains, the popular representation of machine politics. In The

American Commonwealth, Englishman James Bryce described American municipal

politics as a conspicuous failure. His appraisal of American city politics, written in 1893,

helped to establish the image of the political boss as interested only in the material

rewards of politics. According to Bryce, the boss was the essential figure in machine

politics. Bryce writes:

An army led by a council seldom conquers: it must have a commander-in-chief, who settles disputes, decides in emergencies, inspires fear or attachment. The head of the Ring is such a commander. He dispenses places, rewards the loyal, punishes the mutinous, concocts schemes, negotiates treaties. He generally avoids publicity, preferring the substance to the pomp of power, and is all the more dangerous because he sits, like a spider, hidden in the midst of his web. He is a Boss. 2

The boss’s source of political power was his organization’s ability to control the

primaries, the nomination process, and the vote.3 Votes were garnered through the

hierarchical structure of the machine; the lowest levels extended down to the precinct or

even block level. While most classic machines used similar techniques for earning

support at the precinct or block level, the influence of the machine outside the ward and

city varied. Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, Frank Hague of New Jersey, and Richard

Croker of New York’s Tammany Hall not only dominated their local urban machines and

respective state governments, but were important figures in the national councils of the

Democratic Party.4 Tammany’s William Tweed, perhaps the most infamous of American

machine bosses, realized that his party’s finances were ultimately at the mercy of the

state legislature in Albany, where public funds could be secured. In 1867, Tweed thought

better of his aversion to elected office and was elected a member of the state senate.5 In

Cincinnati, Boss Cox’s group primarily projected power in local affairs. But that

2 Bryce, James. “The American Commonwealth.” in Urban Bosses, Machines, and Progressive Reformers. ed Stave, Bruce M. 1972, p. 33 Brownell, Blaine A., and Warren E. Stickle. “The City Boss and the Urban Political Machine” Bosses and Reformers: Urban Politics in America, 1880-1920. eds. Brownell and Stickle, 1973. p.24 ibid, p. 25 Allen, Oliver E. The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall. 1993, p. 100

machine, according to journalist Lincoln Steffens, was “most perfect thing of its kind in

the country.”6

Despite differences in size and influence, political machines had more in common

than just their access to immigrant voting blocks. According to Tarr, the typical urban

boss was a businessman “whose chief stock in trade was the goods of the political world

– influence, laws, government grants, and franchises – which he utilized to make a

private profit.”7 In A Study in Boss Politics, Tarr profiles the career of Chicago

Republican boss William Lorimer and explores the banality of graft for most politicians,

who viewed graft unencumbered by ideological constraints. Lorimer entered politics

primarily simply for material gain, “not to force his value system on voter,” Tarr asserts.8

Tarr’s take on Lorimer echoes comments concerning graft made by Tammany’s

George Washington Plunkitt, which appear in William Riordan’s profile of the ex-

senator. In 1905 Plunkitt delivered what would be known in print form as “A Series of

Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics.” According to Riordan, Plunkitt became rich

by using his official position and his political contacts to buy land that he knew he could

sell at a large profit, to “buy surplus public property for a song, and…to accept gifts and

other tokens of gratitude from recipients of his favours.” But Plunkitt avoided the “penal

code….he did not steal outright,” Riordan writes, quoting Plunkitt that, “a politician who

steals is worse than a thief. He’s a fool.” 9 Plunkitt responded to accusations of corruption

with his often quoted distinctions between honest and dishonest graft; the former is

6 Lincoln Steffens, quoted in, Miller, Zane L. “Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: A Study in Urbanization and Politics, 1880-1914.” eds. Callow, Alexander Jr. The City Boss in America. 1976. pp. 34-42.7 Tarr, Joel A. “The Urban Politician as Entrepreneur” Urban Bosses, Machines, and Progressive Reformers. p. 63 8 Tarr, Joel A. A Study in Boss Politics: William Lorimer of Chicago. p. 28-329 Riordan, William L. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. 1948, p. xv-xvi.

reprehensible, but the latter no different than “lookin’ ahead in Wall Street or in the

coffee or cotton market.” Plunkitt uses an example:

My party’s in power in the city, and its goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new part at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plans public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft.10

Graft took many forms. But for a powerful city boss, there were three primary sources of

graft: the city, the state, and the business community. There were four broad categories of

business activity that yielded graft: franchises, public contracts, public funds, and vice.

Restrictions were the most minimal, and the profits the highest, during the period of

massive city building in America. In this environment, bosses sought to control key

legislative and financial officials – from supervisors and alderman to comptroller and

mayor. This allowed them to manipulate warrants charged against the city treasury. Every

program for city improvement, be it new streets, public buildings and parks, mass transit,

or sewers, had to be financed from the state treasury, and contracts could be awarded to

favored businessmen who were expected in turn to pad their bills and pass back to the

boss sizable portions of the profit. 11

In Latent Functions of the Machine – a classic analysis that girded subsequent

objective interpretations of urban machines -- sociologist Robert Merton determines that

the boss and his machine played an integral role in economy by fulfilling demands not

adequately addressed through morally sanctioned channels.12 Merton argues that the key

10 Plunkitt, George Washington, “Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft” Plunkitt of Tammany Hall p. 4.11 Callow, Alexander B. “Bosses and Boodle.” The City Boss in America. 1976, p. 142-144.12 Merton’s analysis as “classic” McKitrick, Eric L. “The Study of Corruption” Urban Bosses, Machines, and Progressive Reformers. p. 38. originally published in 1957

structural function of the machine was to organize, centralize and maintain “scattered

fragments of power.” Consolidation of power was achieved by meeting the demands of

two subgroups: the business class and the deprived class. 13 The business class, according

to Merton, desired stability over free competition, but not if through government

intervention. Instead, an “economic czar” fulfilled these demands by providing that

which official channels could not: general prosperity free from the destabilizing effects of

democratic politics and the inefficiencies inherent in the pervasion of small businesses.

There was no relevant economic difference between legitimate and illegitimate big

business, nor were illicit “big racket” and “big crime” syndicates economically

distinguishable from big business, licit or illicit, according to Merton.14 The profit

extracted by machines for the provision of goods and services that met these demands

only became derisively labeled graft because the “how,” and in some cases, the “for

whom” – the process and consumer -- were not conventional or culturally sanctioned. But

the unsanctioned demands of these subgroups were built in to the structure of the

economy, thus so was the process for their gratification. The extraction of profit from the

provision of goods and services for businesses of varying degrees of legitimacy was

virtually inevitable because the economy demanded it, but was also labeled deviant

because the “structural context” of the economy demanded it. Merton argues that

“structure affects function and function affects structure.”15 Within the circularity of this

relationship, graft was inevitable, and so too its labeling as graft.

Merton also made important observations concerning the relationship of the

machine to neighbourhoods, and indeed, individual people. The framework bears 13 Merton, Robert K. “Latent Functions of the Machine” The City Boss in America. p. 25. originally published in 1957.14 ibid, p. 3015 ibid, p. 32

similarity to his analysis of the machine-business relationship. Merton argues that

machines more adequately met the demands of individuals than more conventional

channels. For Merton, the second primary subgroup to which the machine related was the

“deprived classes” - a group comprised, in part, by immigrants.16 The relationship

between urban machines and the immigrant population is one of the central issues in the

assessment of the boss and his machine. The prevailing wisdom maintains that the

proliferation of urban machines in American cities hinged directly on the boss’s ability to

manipulate the waves of newcomers who entered the United States and propelled

urbanization during the century of immigration, beginning around the 1820s and ending

in the 1920s. The relationship between Bosses and immigrants was reciprocal.17

While the turn towards objectivity in appraisals of urban machines has

undoubtedly done much to counter morality based arguments that the machine was

harmful to the immigrant experience, the capacity of party politics for social integration

had already been observed by the 1890’s. Henry Jones Ford writes:

The nationalizing influence continues to produce results of the greatest social value, for in co-ordinating the various elements of the population for political purposes, party organization at the same time tends to fuse them into one mass of citizenship, pervaded by a common order of ideas and sentiments, and actuated by the same class of motives. This is probably the secret of the powerful solvent influence which American civilization exerts upon the enormous deposits of alien population thrown upon this country by the torrent of emigration.18

In other words, the selfish quest by the politician for electoral support and power was

transmuted into the major force integrating the immigrant into the community.19

16 ibid, p. 2517 Cornwell Jr., Elmer E. “Bosses, Machines, Ethnic Groups” The City Boss in America. p. 124 orig. published in 1964Callow, Alexander B. “The Boss and the Immigrant” The City Boss in America. p. 9118 Henry Jones Ford, quoted in Cornwell Jr., Elmer E. “Bosses, Machines, Ethnic Groups” The City Boss in America. p. 126-127.19 Cornwell. p. 127.

In the city, machine workers initiated this process by actively seeking out newly

arrived immigrants and rendering assistance in getting the immigrant naturalized so that

he would be able to fulfill his end of the bargain in the machine loyalty and patronage

framework. Political support was purchased on the presumption that the machine would

tend to the needs of the immigrant in a new and hostile environment. Cornwell has

identified three basic immigrant needs that the alderman fulfilled on behalf of machine

leadership. The primary need was the means of physical existence: jobs, loans, rent

money, contributions of food, and so on. Secondly, immigrants required a legal buffer

against an unfamiliar state that employed an unfamiliar language. In this regard, the

alderman provided help in the event of trouble with the police or inspectors, in seeking a

pushcart license, or in other relations with the public bureaucracy. Finally, immigrants

needed the intangibles of friendship and social interaction. Social integration was

available through contact with the alderman, the hospitality of the political clubhouse,

shows of support such as the attendance of the neighbourhood boss at funerals and

weddings, and the ward outing.20 The provision of social contact opportunities for

immigrants by the urban machines was critical. Tarr has noted that the machine also

acted as a mobility vehicle. While an immigrant’s ethnicity might have been a hindrance

to success in larger society, it could also aid in his rise through the machine organization,

where the ability to generate ethnic loyalty was valued.21 Merton also notes the important

overall social function, and as we shall later see, so did eminent social reformer Jane

Addams, for whom the social influence and power of the ward boss was a particularly

high hurdle to cross in the attempt to promote the moral uplift of the urban immigrant.

20 ibid, p. 12721 Tarr, Joel A. A Study in Boss Politics: William Lorimer of Chicago. p. 75

The urban machine has suffered from the stereotypes that surround the boss.

However, more recent scholarly interpretations have removed morality from the equation

and have attempted to redress the notions of urban political machines that were fuelled by

the moral arguments of the urban reformers who contentiously coexisted with the

machine in the urban setting. The machine was an organization that welded politics and

business for personal gain, and maintained its position through complex relationships

with the business community and the neighbourhoods from which it drew its popular

support. While morally neutral interpretations have added to the understanding of urban

politics, interpretations that ignore the fundamental relationship between the boss and the

reformer dismiss the moral aspect from the debate and strip the machine narrative of its

historical context.

The reform era in American politics has been the subject of intense study,

resulting in a body of literature exceeded in American history only by that pertaining to

the Civil War.22 A number of theories emerged in the writings of post-Progressive era

scholars that attempted to identify the origins of the Progressive impulse. This debate’s

primary fault-line distinguished between ideology and action. Richard Hofstadter’s class

struggle theory argued that reform movements which began in the 1890s were primarily

the work of a relatively affluent middle-class which felt a sense of “anxiety” over the

declining middle-class position, yet retained a degree of collective moral indignation,

responsibility, and guilt concerning urban conditions and the plight of the urban poor.23

Samuel P. Hays countered the middle-class anxiety theory for its failure to accurately

explain political practice during the Progressive era, a failure that in Hays’ estimation

22 Brownell and Stickle, “The Dynamics of Urban Reform,” Bosses and Reformers. p. 79.23 Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform. 1955, pp. 8-9, 134-135.

resulted from placing undue emphasis on the descriptions of the reform process made by

reformers themselves.24 According to Hays, efforts to reform municipal government were

lead not by the middle-class as part of a crusade to save the city’s downtrodden, but by

the leading upper-class urban business groups, whose concept of city welfare would be

best realized if the business community controlled city government.25 Hays argued that it

is difficult to discuss the reform era under a single ideological rubric, and there may be

some merit in this. For example, reformer Charles Parkhurst’s vitriolic attack on

Tammany Hall differed greatly from the municipal reform instituted by social reform

mayor Hazen Pingree, who engaged in the moral rhetoric of the reformer, but did not

codify it, instead adopting machine tactics to make Detroit one of the best-paved cities in

America.26 Despite such distinctions however, certain basic moral issues emerge which

link the Gilded and Progressive Age reformers, and illustrate why the urban political

machine was anathema to both. In the 1890s, moral reform and political reform merged,

and they would remain interwoven for years.27

The dominant figure in the crusade to free New York City from the corrupt rule of

Tammany Hall was Reverend Charles Parkhurst, for whom urban morality and municipal

politics were inextricably linked. At an 1892 mass meeting at New York’s Madison

Square Gardens, Parkhurst condemned the social evil – organized gambling, open

brothels, and saloons – and focused on Tammany Hall’s connivance in the perpetuation

of these evils. His words, which succeeded in summoning support for his proposed City

24 Hays, Samuel P. “The Politics of Reform,” Bosses and Reformers. p. 158. originally published in 196425 ibid, p. 14126 Holli, Melvin G. Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics. 1969, p. 15827 Boyer, Paul S. Urban Masses and moral order in America, 1820-1920. p. 168

Vigilance League, were reproduced in Our Fight with Tammany and took on an epochal

tone.28 Parkhurst:

In its municipal life our city is thoroughly rotten. Here is an immense city reaching out arms of evangelization to every quarter of the globe; and yet every step that we take looking to the moral betterment of this city has to be taken directly in the teeth of the damnable pack of administrative bloodhounds that are fattening themselves on the ethical flesh and blood of our citizenship.29

By 1894, Parkhurst had expanded his campaign, now through his largely

Protestant and Republican ‘Committee of Seventy’, to continue the assault on political

corruption.30 The intensity of politicized moral reform in the late 1890s was also

demonstrated by William T. Stead, whose 1894 book If Christ Came to Chicago typified

the ferment of that decade’s urban moral reformism, directed against the “vulgarity and

obscenity” of the various manifestations of urban vice: the saloons, brothels, and

“gambling hells.”31 Boyer’s interpretation of Stead’s work shows that Stead, like

Parkhurst, implicated the machine in the decline of the city by attributing the

pervasiveness of what is essentially an abstraction - “social evil” - to the complicity or

oversight of the civic authority.32 For Stead, “the policeman perambulating the beat” was

the “human nexus which binds the precinct together.” Given his negative view of the

urban environment, it can be assumed that this “nexus which binds” did not do so for the

better. 33

The evangelical urban alarmism propagated by Parkhurst and Stead was perhaps

most apocalyptically expressed by the Reverend Josiah Strong, secretary of the American

28 ibid, p. 16429 Parkhurst, Charles H. “The Madison Square Pulpit’s analysis of Tammany,” Our Fight with Tammany. p. 1030 Boyer, p. 16531 Stead, Willaim T., quoted in ibid, p. 18432 ibid, p. 18433 Stead, quoted in ibid, p. 184

Home Missionary Society, in his 1885 bestseller Our Country.34 In a chapter of Our

Country, entitled “Perils – The Boss, The Machine, The Immigrant,” Strong attributed the

disintegration of morals in the city to the influx of foreign immigrants, whose cultural

transition was facilitated by the machine. For Strong, the city was “the nerve center of

our civilization” and also “the storm center” whereby immoral influences were enhanced

and “focalized” by the undesirable presence of the immigrant.35 But it was the boss who

truly exacerbated the situation by giving a political voice to the immoral immigrant,

“little acquainted with our institutions, which will act in concert and who are controlled

largely by their appetites and prejudices, constitute a very paradise for demagogues.”36

Concerning the demagogues, Strong asks:

Who are these men? The wise, the good, the learned – men who have earned the confidence of their fellow-citizens by the purity of their lives, the splendor of their talents, their probity in public trusts, their deep study of the problems of government? No; they are gamblers, saloon-keepers, pugilists, or worse, who have made a trade of controlling votes and of buying and selling offices and official acts. It has come to this, that holding a municipal office in a large city almost impeaches a man’s character.37

For Strong, the city was the touchstone for America’s future, a test through which

it would achieve fulfillment or disaster. Before redemption, however, must come purity,38

and the purity of the city was threatened by the peril of the immigrant, who was alien to

Protestant values, but not to the machine’s “Gospel of Success.”

Strong argued that the future of civilization rested on the outcome of the moral

battle in the city, and in this he presented an apocalyptic scenario. The bombast of

Parkhurst, Stead, and Strong parallels, yet obscures, the very real struggle waged in the

34 ibid, p. 13035 Strong, Josiah, “Perils – The Boss, The Machine, The Immigrant,” The Urban Boss in America. p. 15, originally published in 1885, reprinted in 189136 ibid, p. 1537 ibid, p. 1638 Callow, Alexander B., “The Rise of the Boss,” The Urban Boss in America. p. 10-11

cities by social workers such as Jane Addams, for whom the machine was a barrier that

inhibited the moral uplift of the masses.

In Why the Ward Boss Rules, Jane Addams speculated on the triadic relationship

between the social worker, the alderman, and the underclass in Chicago’s 19th ward, and

concludes that the reformer has much to learn from the ways in which the machine

politician interacted with the immigrant community. Addams observed that “(p)rimitive

people, such as the South Italian peasants who live in the Nineteenth Ward, deep down in

their hearts admire nothing so much as the good man.”39 But Addams recognized that the

standards by which the urban poor identify “good men” had little to do with the social

purity that middle-class reformers praised. For Addams, the urban machine was a

detriment to the moral uplift of the urban masses precisely because the alderman rejected

morality. He imposed no morality on the immigrant, and thus did not project a feeling of

inadequacy or estrangement on the immigrant. In his functional analysis of urban

machines, Merton argues that the services provided by the machine were very similar to

those offered by urban social workers, but differed in how they were offered. The

alderman asked no questions and exacted no compliance with legal rules of eligibility in

exchange for aid. What Merton calls “the cold, bureaucratic dispensation of limited aid”40

paled in comparison to the outsized show of good will provided by alderman, as well as

the provision of what the immigrant wanted most: a job. Jane Addams knew this. “The

Italian labourer,” writes Addams, “wants a job more than anything else, and quite simply

votes for the man who promises him one.”41

39 Addams, Jane “Why the Ward Boss Rules” Urban Bosses, Machines and Progressive Reformers p. 10, originally published in 1898.40 Merton, p. 2641 Addams, p. 11

Beyond the bureaucratic limitations that hindered the social worker’s ability to aid

the immigrant, Addams also recognized the cultural ignorance on the part of the

reformers that expanded the gulf between the social worker and the immigrant poor. She

recalled an early experience at Hull House, in which an abandoned immigrant child

passed away “in spite of every care.” Unaware, the social workers made arrangements for

a county burial. “It is doubtful,” writes Addams,

whether Hull House has ever done anything which injured it so deeply in the minds of some of its neighbours. We were only forgiven by the most indulgent on the ground that we were spinsters and could not know a mother’s heart. No one born and reared in the community could possibly have made a mistake like that.42

By contrast, she notes, the alderman recognized what is “archaic in a community of

simple people in their attitude towards death and burial,” and by seizing “upon periods of

sorrow….(t)he alderman saves the very poorest of his constituents from that awful horror

of burial by the county.”43

The alderman was integrated into the immigrant community, and this hindered

reform efforts to re-create the urban masses in the reformer’ own image. “Indeed,”

Addams asks, “what headway can the notion of civic purity, of honesty of administration,

make against this big manifestation of human friendliness, this stalking of village

kindness?”44 Much evidence supports Melvin G. Holli’s contention that a central impetus

behind municipal political reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the desire of

old-stock Americans to extirpate “lower-class vices” and “impose middle class and

patrician ideals upon the urban masses.”45

42 ibid, p. 1443 ibid, p. 1244 ibid, p. 45 ibid, p. 172

If we accept this, certain complications are resolved and the fundamental

differences between Gilded Age reformers and certain Progressive era reformers can be

more easily reconciled. The Progressive era is often defined as a programmatic response

to the urban chaos of the 1890s, a wise and ultimately more successful approach which

expanded upon the efforts of early reformers to alter the city through the clinical

management practices of experts. But for Frederic C. Howe, “in many respects a

prototypical Progressive,”46 the moral substratum of progressivism was never in doubt. In

his autobiography, he describes his intensely evangelical upbringing and its shaping

influence on his later reform career:

Physical escape from the embraces of evangelical religion did not mean moral escape. From that religion my reason was never emancipated. By it I was conformed to my generation and made to share its moral standards and ideals…Early assumptions as to virtue and vice, goodness and evil remained in my mind long after I had tried to discard them. This is, I think, the most characteristic influence of my generation.47

Historical studies of urban machines and reform show a tendency towards the

dispassionate. It may be argued that the most recent interpretations of municipal reform,

which reject the boss-reformer dialectic, owe much to the earlier interpretations of the

era, such as that of Hays, who dismissed the importance of evangelical Protestantism in

forming the values of the era’s reform participants. If middle-class morality is discounted

for the purpose of moving past the ‘classic duel’ theory, then the urban machine loses

much of its rich historical context. Protestant middle-class values placed a premium on

the notion of success, for which social purity was seen as prerequisite. As this essay has

attempted to illustrate, for many late 19th and early 20th century American municipal

46ibid, p. 19747 ibid, p. 197

reformers, the urban machine hindered the conversion of the masses and violated the

community’s purest aims by facilitating social evil.

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