What Bonded Immigrants to Urban Machines? The Case of Jacob Arvey and Chicago’s 24th Ward

Immigrants were at the base of America’s twentieth-century urban machines.¹ In the familiar story, “bosses,” usually of Irish extraction, met the needs of recent immigrants, shepherded them to naturalization and then to the ballot box.² To understand urban machines, we have to learn how bosses held immigrant voters’ loyalty.³

For cities that experienced consolidation of political factions into machines, this issue becomes particularly important. In those cities, competing faction leaders reduced political competition by consolidating their power into a centralized organization, exchanging autonomy for security.⁴ In managing that consolidation, leaders had to retain and transfer the loyalties of their immigrant factions to the more distant, consolidated machine. As Oscar Handlin noted in his classic work on immigration, the most successful ethnic leaders “expanded their roles beyond the little group within which they had grown to power.”⁵

This article explores that bond in the case of a Russian Jewish, Chicago ward and its leader, Jacob M. Arvey, in the era of the consolidation of that city’s powerful machine. The literature on urban machines stresses the importance for them of ethnic voters, but we lack a compelling explanation for how machines maintained immigrants’ loyalty.⁶ Clarence Stone writes that the machine had to grow resources to maintain the organization “while providing enough benefits to maintain” a loyal electorate.⁷

Scholars identify three kinds of exchanges that machines traded for votes. The first was material, bread, and jobs.⁸ The second was individually affective; machine workers offered a “localized network of intimacy” to immigrants.⁹ A third was symbolic, language and behaviors through which leaders identified with immigrants’ identity.¹⁰ This exchange model presumed immigrants were materially deprived and culturally isolated, hungry for the machine’s help, and swayed by superficial symbols. In one description of the relationship: “Poor voters mostly needed help coping: insurance against unemployment, bad health, and scrapes with the law; direction to housing; assistance with forms; and the like.”¹¹ Yet the reality of most immigrant communities was different than that caricature.

Immigrant life was communal; immigrants depended on one another and were conscious of their distinctiveness in a new land.¹² William Dean Howells praised the cooperation among Manhattan’s Lower East Side tenement residents.¹³ The historian Edward Kantowicz describes Chicago’s Poles promoting their cultural identity against outside institutions.¹⁴ Louis Wirth’s portrait of Chicago’s Jewish immigrants sees them in a self-imposed “ghetto.”¹⁵ We have given little attention to how different ethno-religious communities bonded to machines. These groups varied greatly in their values and institutions. Italian immigrant communities were “colonies,” in effect, satellites of the mother country to which most Italians planned to return.¹⁶ Poles resisted Americanization because they also envisioned a return to the homeland.¹⁷ By contrast, Eastern European Jews lacked positive identity with the countries from which they emigrated.¹⁸ Given such cultural differences, we should expect immigrant groups to bring distinct needs and expectations to exchanges with political machines. In what follows, I shall pursue that insight through the case of one immigrant ward in one machine city.

Chicago’s “House of all Peoples”

Anton Cermak used the enmities of non-Irish Chicago ethnics to build a “house of all peoples,” joining central and east European immigrants with one of several feuding Irish factions.¹⁹ His 1931 mayoral victory made his Democratic coalition dominant, but Cermak could not have accomplished this with only material incentives. Local government lacked sufficient patronage to satisfy expanding immigrant populations.

Individual affectual exchanges were an alternative to material incentives. Precinct workers have been described as proto social workers, exchanging advice for votes. However, in big-city wards, precinct workers were responsible for hundreds of voters, allowing only minimal contact. Furthermore, to focus only on interpersonal relations overlooks a cultural dimension wherein leaders connected to ethno-religious communities. Observers since Gosnell and Handlin have described politicians invoking ethnic identity and symbols to attract immigrant voters.²⁰ But the examples usually observed were superficial, wearing national colors and eating...