For decades, history has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous
political machine, shorthand for the worst of urban politics:
graft, crime, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt
characters. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate
traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a
critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made,
historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly
dismantles these stereotypes; Tammany's corruption was real, but so
was its heretofore forgotten role in protecting marginalized and
maligned immigrants in desperate need of a political voice.
Irish immigrants arriving in New York during the nineteenth
century faced an unrelenting onslaught of hyperbolic, nativist
propaganda. They were voiceless in a city that proved, time and
again, that real power remained in the hands of the mercantile
elite, not with a crush of ragged newcomers flooding its streets.
Haunted by fresh memories of the horrific Irish potato famine in
the old country, Irish immigrants had already learned an indelible
lesson about the dire consequences of political helplessness.
Tammany Hall emerged as a distinct force to support the city's
Catholic newcomers, courting their votes while acting as a powerful
intermediary between them and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling
class. In a city that had yet to develop the social services we now
expect, Tammany often functioned as a rudimentary public welfare
system and a champion of crucial social reforms benefiting its
constituency, including workers' compensation, prohibitions against
child labor, and public pensions for widows with children. Tammany
figures also fought against attempts to limit immigration and to
strip the poor of the only power they had the vote.
While rescuing Tammany from its maligned legacy, Golway hardly
ignores Tammany's ugly underbelly, from its constituents'
participation in the bloody Draft Riots of 1863 to its rampant
cronyism. However, even under occasionally notorious leadership,
Tammany played a profound and long-ignored role in laying the
groundwork for social reform, and nurtured the careers of two of
New York's greatest political figures, Al Smith and Robert Wagner.
Despite devastating electoral defeats and countless scandals,
Tammany nonetheless created a formidable political coalition, one
that eventually made its way into the echelons of FDR s Democratic
Party and progressive New Deal agenda.
Tracing the events of a tumultuous century, Golway shows how
mainstream American government began to embrace both Tammany s
constituents and its ideals. Machine Made is a revelatory work of
revisionist history, and a rich, multifaceted portrait of roiling
New York City politics in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries."
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