History of the United States II / Unit 4 USH2 0470 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Corrupt but Effective
The idea
Whether the political machines were only corrupt, or also useful, is a question the sources answer with both halves. The corruption is not in doubt. Digital History describes Tweed's courthouse, begun in eighteen sixty-one, costing several times what it should have, with contractors paid fortunes for a few days' work, and bribes and kickbacks as the boss's main source of funds. Yet the anchor says the machine solved people's immediate problems in exchange for their votes, and that for all its corruption Tammany dominated the city's politics for some eighty years, from the eighteen fifties to the nineteen thirties. The Yawp says Tammany responded to immigrant needs and worked as a kind of mutual aid society, and that the public works projects that funded its graft also built essential infrastructure and services for a fast-growing city. In nineteen oh three a journalist's book recorded the Tammany ward leader George Washington Plunkitt explaining the difference between honest and dishonest graft.
In practice
A ward boss finding a newcomer housing and work, and the same machine's contractor billing the city a fortune for a courthouse.
Where people slip
Two misreadings sit on either side. The first treats the machines as pure theft and cannot explain why immigrant voters kept them in power for generations. The second treats them as charities and ignores what the courthouse cost the city. The machines survived because they delivered services no other institution offered to newcomers, and they paid for that loyalty with public money. The anchor's own phrase for Tammany holds both halves: corrupt, but effective. The Progressive reformers of unit six set out to replace the machines with government that was honest and still delivered.
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