Payoffs Still Define Politics in Some Cities

The political scandals now rocking New York City come as a profound shock to those who believe that the political machine has been long extinct. It is almost as if a Tyrannosaurus Rex reared up from a swamp and began to rampage through the Big Apple.

The Bronx County Democratic chairman indicted last week for allegedly bribing the borough president of Queens? That same recipient of bribery, who also chaired the Queens Democratic Party, dead of a self-inflicted knife wound in the face of coming criminal accusations? City commissioners and other officials charged with turning whole municipal agencies into criminal conspiracies, with bribes and kickbacks for lucrative city contracts?

It sounds like something out of New York’s Tammany Hall of another era: a Tweed Ring of the 19th Century, when political bosses pocketed millions of dollars and turned a courthouse construction into a free-for-all for grafters; or perhaps the Tammany Hall of the late 1920s, when party bigwigs explained to skeptical investigators that they had saved fortunes from their salaries by putting their nickels and dimes into “a little tin box.”

What New York City’s scandals--and those now emerging in Chicago and Boston--really demonstrate is that, as Mark Twain might have put it, reports of the death of the political machine have been greatly exaggerated.

To be sure, they hold nothing like the clout they once held. Their power to grant favors and sway votes has been sharply limited. In modified form, however, the political machine still is, and sometimes thrives, in many eastern communities today--and for many of the same reasons that gave rise to them in the first place.

The successive waves of immigration that brought millions of new citizens to America’s cities in the last half of the 19th Century left most of these newcomers strangers in a strange land. Many could not speak the language; most had a paucity of marketable skills. The streets of Boston, New York, Chicago and other urban centers were not paved with gold. To those living in a tightly knit ethnic community, caught between the old world and the new, political power was perhaps the only source of hope for chance at something better.

No wonder many of the earliest political bosses were saloon keepers, men who held court at central neighborhood gathering places and knew, firsthand, the need of constituents for life’s most essential commodities: food, fuel, a doctor, a job.

No wonder the exchange of favors for votes became the fundamental transaction on which the power of the big city machine was built. And no wonder that the older “respectable” citizens, secure in their status through birth, education and old-boy networks, found political machines so distasteful. For machines were the way “the great unwashed” asserted the power of numbers.

No better example of this machine existed than the Democratic organization of Frank Hague, who ruled Jersey City for decades. As a child, Hague sold discarded clothing from a horse-drawn cart. As a youth, he saw politics as his one route to power. He entered Jersey City politics as a “reformer,” but once elected mayor, Hague gave and got with both hands.

What was there to give? Jobs on the city payroll for loyal party workers (there were no civil service tests for janitors or garbagemen); turkeys and food baskets for the poor on Christmas (there were no food stamps); a doctor for a sick constituent (no Medicare or Medicaid existed). Hague built a medical center that was among the nation’s most well-appointed. During a coal strike, he had a railroad’s coal cars kept in the Jersey City yards, so the poor might filch coal to survive.

What did he take? Millions of dollars in kickbacks from gambling operations and municipal contractors, and total political power as well, often enforced with beatings by his political thugs or the Jersey City police. Hague’s boast, “I am the law,” accurately described Jersey City.

Fundamentally, the power of Hague--and of bosses from Chicago’s Kelly-Nash machine to Kansas City’s Thomas J. Pendergast--rested on an ability to deliver for their voters, to get them a small foothold in a system where levers seemed in the hands of others. At the start of his legendary political career, Boston’s James Michael Curley went to jail because he took a municipal examination for an illiterate constituent. Curley later got elected alderman by boasting that such was his commitment to people.

Conventional wisdom suggests that such machines cannot survive in the modern political world, and there is much to this. Primaries dilute the machines’ ability to deliver votes. Indeed, big-city organizations often lose nominating contests because television allows dissident candidates to speak directly to the voter.

New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs mean that food and medical care and housing are often given to the voters as a matter of right, not as a matter of political connections. Civil Service tests, municipal unions and grievance procedures often make it impossible to fire city employees for rank incompetence, much less for political disloyalty. And in places like California, political reforms from early in the century have made political parties so weak that discipline of any sort is a laughable notion.

How, then, do machines survive? The same way they were created: on the still-strong insecurity of many voters. For all the increased sophistication and mobility of Americans, there are still many places where ethnic insularity and economic fear propel citizens into the arms of political organizations.

Chicago’s machine may be a pale imitation of Richard J. Daley’s day, but in a city where ethnicity defines most neighborhoods, voters still turn to ward leaders, not to faceless municipal bureaucrats, for pothole repairs, a new street light or better garbage pickups.

In a city such as New York, where municipal contracts worth about $2 billion a year are let out, the way into the labyrinth of the municipal building is still better led by a powerfully connected political leader than by an outsider who does not know the players.

Stanley M. Friedman, the indicted Bronx County leader, routinely and legally earned large sums as a lawyer representing everyone from taxi concerns to cable television bidders. And at a time when former White House aide Michael K. Deaver became a millionaire in less than a year by selling his access to power, who can be surprised that such arrangements persist at the local level?

A century ago, bosses gained political power by extracting the necessities of life from a system that millions of new Americans felt--with justification--was indifferent or hostile to their dreams. The dreams now may be different in scope--a city contract rather than a Christmas turkey--but the process is much the same. And as long as the public treasury is seen by so many as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there will be politically powerful people ready to take you to rainbow’s end . . . for a price.