Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
To meet this emergency, created primarily by conditions imposed by city
life, two types of organization have come into existence for controlling
those artificial crises that we call elections. One of these is the
organization represented by the political boss and the political
machine. The other is that represented by the independent voters’
leagues, taxpayers’ associations, and organizations like the bureaus of
municipal research.
It is an indication of the rather primitive conditions in which our
political parties were formed that they sought to govern the country on
the principle that the remedy for all sorts of administrative evils was
to “turn the rascals out,” as the popular phrase expressed it, a change
of government. The political machine and the political boss have come
into existence in the interest of party politics. The parties were
necessarily organized to capture elections. The political machine is
merely a technical device invented for the purpose of achieving this
end. The boss is the expert who runs the machine. He is as necessary to
the winning of an election as a professional coach is necessary to
success at football.
It is characteristic of the two types of organization which have grown
up for the purpose of controlling the popular vote that the first, the
political machine, is based, on the whole, on local, personal, that is
to say, primary, relationships. The second, the good-government
organizations, make their appeal to the public, and the public, as we
ordinarily understand that expression, is a group based on secondary
relationships. Members of a public are not as a rule personally
acquainted.
The political machine is, in fact, an attempt to maintain, inside the
formal administrative organization of the city, the control of a primary
group. The organizations thus built up, of which Tammany Hall is the
classic illustration, appear to be thoroughly feudal in their character.
The relations between the boss and his ward captain seem to be precisely
that, of personal loyalty on one side and personal protection on the
other, which the feudal relation implies. The virtues which such an
organization calls out are the old tribal ones of fidelity, loyalty, and
devotion to the interests of the chief and the clan. The people within
the organization, their friends and supporters, constitute a “we” group,
while the rest of the city is merely the outer world, which is not quite
alive and not quite human in the sense in which the members of the “we”
group are. We have here something approaching the conditions of
primitive society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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