Download Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics AudioBook Free
A major, unusual new background of New York's most famous political machine - Tammany Hall - revealing, beyond the vice and corruption, a birthplace of intensifying urban politics. For many years, background has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous political machine, shorthand for the most detrimental of metropolitan politics: graft, criminal offenses, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt individuals. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our knowledge of a critical chapter of American political background. In Machine Made, historian and NEW YORK journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes; Tammany's corruption was real, but so was its heretofore ignored role in safeguarding marginalized and maligned immigrants in desperate need of a political voice. Irish immigrants arriving in New York during the 19th century faced an unrelenting onslaught of hyperbolic, nativist propaganda. These were voiceless in a city that demonstrated, time and again, that real power remained in the hands of the mercantile top notch, not with a crush of ragged newcomers flooding its roads. Haunted by fresh memory of the horrific Irish potato famine in the old country, Irish immigrants got already discovered an indelible lesson about the dire implications of political helplessness. Tammany Hall emerged as a distinct force to aid the city's Catholic newcomers, courting their votes while operating as a robust intermediary between them and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling school. Inside a city that got yet to build up the interpersonal services we now expect, Tammany often functioned as a rudimentary general public welfare system and a champ of crucial interpersonal reforms benefiting its constituency, including staff' settlement, prohibitions against child labor, and general public pensions for widows with children. Tammany statistics also fought against tries to limit immigration also to strip the indegent of really the only power they had - the vote.
