An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America (review)

Connolly launches his study of urban politics in nineteenth-century America with a popular political song from the 1850s entitled, “Paddy’s Fight with the Know Nothings.” This vivid tale of woe and violence reflects familiar tensions between Irish Catholics and nativists, but it also reveals a deeper dynamic at the core of Connolly’s thoughtful analysis. The American Party expressed a nostalgic longing for moral consensus and a deep ambivalence about the pluralistic politics taking hold as industrialization and immigration advanced across the urban North. Connolly explores this contested shift from the republican ideal of a virtuous citizenry, united behind a shared moral vision and led by the “best men,” to a newer idea of politics as a marketplace of competing interest groups and politicians as skilled entrepreneurs trained to manage conflict. He demonstrates how this process played out from the antebellum period through the Progressive Era (focusing on Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and, most of all, New York) while Americans reluctantly abandoned their vision of unity for a pluralistic reality.

Big-city bosses are central to this story, and among Connolly’s most original contributions is his chapter about “Inventing the Machine.” The term machine could connote power, efficiency, and complexity, but it usually implied bosses who were unskilled operators deriving power from a manmade (hence illegitimate) source, and supporters who were mere machine fodder. For workers, the machine symbolized dehumanizing force; it was no coincidence that when Henry George ran as labor’s candidate for New York mayor in 1886, cartoons depicted him smashing the machine. As this anecdote suggests, even as Connolly describes the critical roles that bosses played in urban politics (clearly enjoying the color that they lend his narrative), he acknowledges their shortcomings as advocates for the working class (not to mention the limitations of their hypermasculine street-fighter style).

Connolly is sensitive to matters of gender in his analyses of both machine and reform politics. In his treatment of Progressive reform, he ventures beyond acknowledging the familiar contributions of female activists to argue that women like Jane Addams and the lesser-known Mary Parker Follett advocated an alternative democratic vision that earnestly solicited the perspectives of workers and immigrants. This challenge to the top-down view of Progressivism is a welcome reinterpretation.

In starting his study with a popular song, Connolly offers an early taste of his methodology. Reflecting the highbrow/lowbrow blend of Gilded Age politics, he draws his insights from contemporary political theory and sociology, from newspapers and new mass-market magazines like McClure’s, and from popular songs, dime novels, and the cartoons of Thomas Nast. The result is a narrative that moves fluidly between analyses of the era’s finest minds and vivid portraits of the scoundrels who ran city politics. Connolly is equally wide-ranging in his secondary literature, drawing on political science as well as history in framing his inquiry.

Although this material is well-trodden historical ground, Connolly breathes new life into it by bringing together a rich variety of sources, and a number of fresh insights, to forge a convincing argument about the contested shift from republicanism to pluralism. His expertise in urban and political history lends his study clear crossover appeal to students and scholars of history, political science, and urban studies. Written in an accessible style—with a clear central argument to which the author frequently returns—this book also serves as a good introduction to nineteenth-century politics and political theory.