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The key to a political machine is patronage: holding public office implies the ability to do favors (and also the ability to profit from " does favors for the constituents, who then vote as they are told to. Sometimes this system of favors is supplemented by threats of violence or harassment toward those who attempt to step outside of it. {Link without Title} POLITICAL MACHINES IN THE UNITED STATES In the United States in the late 19th and early 20th Century , it was mainly the larger cities that had machines — Boston , Chicago , Cleveland , New York City , Philadelphia , etc. — and each city's machine was run by a "boss," a man who had the allegiance of elected officials and who knew the buttons to push to get things done. Many machines formed in cities to serve Immigrants to the U.S. in the late nineteenth century; the immigrants needed resources far faster than Legislation and construction could provide them. Political machines, in exchange for votes, provided immigrants with housing, jobs, and other services. The power of the bosses was based on their ability to help new immigrants to become established in the U.S. — securing licenses, negotiating rent, helping with Naturalization , finding jobs, etc. Some machine bosses were ruthless in their endeavor to retain power. A boss might arrange to burn a rival's business and then make sure the fire department never showed up; he could rig an election at any level from Ward leader to president (e.g., Matthew Quay and Benjamin Harrison ). The corruption of the political machines, especially Boss Tweed 's notorious Tammany Hall in New York City , eventually became too obvious for the Middle Class to ignore, and, by Theodore Roosevelt 's time, the Progressive Era was established. By the end of World War I , so many immigrants had been socialized that the machines had no real reason to exist; nevertheless, some of them remained as late as the 1960s . Some cities are accused of machine politics even today. In recent years, historians have reevaluated political machines. If machines were undemocratic, they were at least responsive. If they were corrupt, at least they were able to contain the spending demands of special interests. In ''Mayors and Money,'' a comparison of municipal government in Chicago and New York, Ester R. Fuchs credited the Chicago Democratic Machine with giving Mayor Richard J. Daley the political power to deny Unions contracts that the city could not afford and to make the state assume burdensome costs like Welfare and courts. Describing New York, Fuchs wrote, "New York got reform, but it never got good government." NOTABLE "BOSSES" AND THEIR POLITICAL MACHINES State Bosses
County Bosses
City Bosses
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