Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics

Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics
Author: Terry Golway
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2014-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0871407922

“Golway’s revisionist take is a useful reminder of the unmatched ingenuity of American politics.”—Wall Street Journal History casts Tammany Hall as shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft and patronage personified by notoriously crooked characters. In his groundbreaking work Machine Made, journalist and historian Terry Golway dismantles these stereotypes, focusing on the many benefits of machine politics for marginalized immigrants. As thousands sought refuge from Ireland’s potato famine, the very question of who would be included under the protection of American democracy was at stake. Tammany’s transactional politics were at the heart of crucial social reforms—such as child labor laws, workers’ compensation, and minimum wages— and Golway demonstrates that American political history cannot be understood without Tammany’s profound contribution. Culminating in FDR’s New Deal, Machine Made reveals how Tammany Hall “changed the role of government—for the better to millions of disenfranchised recent American arrivals” (New York Observer).

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall
Author: William L. Riordon
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 85
Release: 1995-11-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101099925

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics William L. Riordan “Nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft.” This classic work offers the unblushing, unvarnished wit and wisdom of one of the most fascinating figures ever to play the American political game and win. George Washington Plunkitt rose from impoverished beginnings to become ward boss of the Fifteenth Assembly District in New York, a key player in the powerhouse political team of Tammany Hall, and, not incidentally, a millionaire. In a series of utterly frank talks given at his headquarters (Graziano’s bootblack stand outside the New York County Court House), he revealed to a sharp-eared and sympathetic reporter named William L. Riordan the secrets of political success as practiced and perfected by him and fellow Tammany Hall titans. The result is not only a volume that reveals more about our political system than does a shelfful of civics textbooks, but also an irresistible portrait of a man who would feel happily at home playing ball with today’s lobbyists and king makers, trading votes for political and financial favors. Doing for twentieth-century America what Machiavelli did for Renaissance Italy, and as entertaining as it is instructive, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall is essential reading for those who prefer twenty-twenty vision to rose-colored glasses in viewing how our government works and why. With an Introduction by Peter Quinn and a New Afterword

King of the Bowery

King of the Bowery
Author: Richard F. Welch
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2011-10-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 143843183X

King of the Bowery is the first full-length biography of Timothy D. "Big Tim" Sullivan, the archetypal Tammany Hall leader who dominated New York City politics—and much of its social life—from 1890 to 1913. A poor Irish kid from the Five Points who rose through ambition, shrewdness, and charisma to become the most powerful single politician in New York, Sullivan was quick to perceive and embrace the shifting demographics of downtown New York, recruiting Jewish and Italian newcomers to his largely Irish machine to create one of the nation's first multiethnic political organizations. Though a master of the personal, paternalistic, and corrupt politics of the late nineteenth century, Sullivan paradoxically embraced a variety of progressive causes, especially labor and women's rights, anticipating many of the policies later pursued by his early acquaintances and sometimes antagonists Al Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Drawing extensively on contemporary sources, King of the Bowery offers a rich, readable, and authoritative potrayal of Gotham on the cusp of the modern age, as refracted through the life of a man who exemplified much of it. "... a necessary book for anyone unsatisfied by the usual histories of Irish-American urban political machines. ... The Irish-American boss has rarely been awarded the careful appraisal of the kind that Welch ... gives Sullivan. ... But caveat lector: you don't have to be Irish American or a New Yorker or a Democrat to enjoy this book. All you have to be is interested in a well-told story that is also a first-rate work of history." — Peter Quinn, Commonweal

The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1904
Genre: City and town life
ISBN:

Boss Tweed

Boss Tweed
Author: Kenneth D. Ackerman
Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780786714353

A lively account of the life of a New York legend traces the rise of Boss Tweed, the corrupt party boss who controlled New York politics through a combination of corruption, bribery, and coercion until his own over-reaching destroyed him.

The Era of Good Stealings

The Era of Good Stealings
Author: Mark Wahlgren Summers
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 416
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN:

In his first book, The Plundering Generation, Mark Wahlgren Summers dealt with corruption and the breakdown of ethics in public life from 1849 to 1861. Continuing his look at the post-Civil War years he examines the effects of the war on public ethics, raising important questions about the significance of corruption for policymaking and American political thought during the years 1865 to 1877. Who, thinking of Reconstruction fails to think of corruption? The Grant administration and the Great Barbecue remain inseparable in our minds. From grafting South Carolina Republicans to plundering Tammany Hall delegates, abuses of the public trust were all the fashion. Noting the effect of corruption on national politics, during the era of Reconstruction, Summers nonetheless suggests the corruption issue may have had more important consequences than the misdeeds themselves. Indeed, the very forces that impelled corruption were the ones that defined and limited the character of reform. Official rascality raised the strongest possible argument for a scaled-down, cheap government, a professional civil service, and a retreat from Reconstruction. Without whitewashing villainy or blackguarding the liberal reformers, Summers re-examines the swindles, exposes the exaggerations and the self-interested motives of the accusers, and suggests ways in which the issue itself struck heavier blows at the way Americans governed themselves than did the acts of corruption.

Thomas Nast

Thomas Nast
Author: Fiona Deans Halloran
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0807835870

"Thomas Nast (1840-1902), the founding father of American political cartooning, is perhaps best known for his cartoons portraying political parties as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast's legacy also includes a trove of other political cartoons, his successful attack on the machine politics of Tammany Hall in 1871, and his wildly popular illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly magazine. In this thoroughgoing and lively biography, Fiona Deans Halloran interprets his work, explores his motivations and ideals, and illuminates the lasting legacy of Nast's work on American political culture"--

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire
Author: Will Hermes
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2012-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374533547

This title provides a group portrait of some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, including Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Grandmaster Flash and Bob Dylan.

Beauty in the City

Beauty in the City
Author: Robert A. Slayton
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2017-06-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1438466439

Gold Medalist, 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the US Northeast -Best Regional Non-Fiction Category Finalist for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Regional category Silver Winner, 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in the History category At the beginning of the twentieth century the Ashcan School of Art blazed onto the art scene, introducing a revolutionary vision of New York City. In contrast to the elite artists who painted the upper class bedecked in finery, in front of magnificent structures, or the progressive reformers who photographed the city as a slum, hopeless and full of despair, the Ashcan School held the unique belief that the industrial working-class city was a fit subject for great art. In Beauty in the City, Robert A. Slayton illustrates how these artists portrayed the working classes with respect and gloried in the drama of the subways and excavation sites, the office towers, and immigrant housing. Their art captured the emerging metropolis in all its facets, with its potent machinery and its class, ethnic, and gender issues. By exposing the realities of this new, modern America through their art—expressed in what they chose to draw, not in how they drew it—they created one of the great American art forms.

The Age of Acrimony

The Age of Acrimony
Author: Jon Grinspan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1635574633

A penetrating, character-filled history “in the manner of David McCullough” (WSJ), revealing the deep roots of our tormented present-day politics. Democracy was broken. Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. At the century's end, reformers finally restrained this wild system, trading away participation for civility in the process. They built a calmer, cleaner democracy, but also a more distant one. Americans' voting rates crashed and never fully recovered. This is the origin story of the “normal” politics of the 20th century. Only by exploring where that civility and restraint came from can we understand what is happening to our democracy today. The Age of Acrimony charts the rise and fall of 19th-century America's unruly politics through the lives of a remarkable father-daughter dynasty. The radical congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his fiery, Progressive daughter Florence Kelley led lives packed with drama, intimately tied to their nation's politics. Through their friendships and feuds, campaigns and crusades, Will and Florie trace the narrative of a democracy in crisis. In telling the tale of what it cost to cool our republic, historian Jon Grinspan reveals our divisive political system's enduring capacity to reinvent itself.