The machines are still with us. In Chicago it is run by the teachers union.
From the New Republic, August 17, 2016:
The Soul of a New Machine
Some time before the First World War my grandfather, Jack Baker, went to work for “Bathhouse John” Coughlin, the blustery Democratic boss of the infamous political machine in Chicago’s First Ward. Jack had been sent to farm an Indiana homestead, along with his brother and sister, after their mother died. There they were worked half to death, a common fate for hired-out children of the time. My grandfather and his older brother ran away, then returned for their sister, who they freed at gunpoint. But where were three homeless children to turn then? Why, to the First Ward, where Bathhouse John and his political machine would welcome them with open arms.
Coughlin was called “Bathhouse” because he reputedly got his start at the age of eleven as a masseur, or “rubber,” in a Turkish bath. He quickly grasped the economic potential inherent in such an institution, and eventually accumulated enough money to buy a brace of bathhouses. Coughlin and his partner, Mike “Hinky Dink” Kenna, also took a financial interest in—meaning they collected protection money from—saloons throughout the First Ward. Soon, the two men had a foolproof system going. Anyone out of work or down on his luck—say, a man who had fallen into the bottle—could show up at one of their saloons and find cheap lodging at one of their bathhouses. Come election day, the grateful lodger would be trotted out to the local polling place with an already-filled-in ballot hidden in his pocket. There, he would accept a clean ballot from a poll worker, slip the already-completed one into the box, and return to the bathhouse, where he’d be paid 50 cents or even a dollar for the clean ballot. The fresh ballot was then filled in by bright young lads like my grandfather, who were eager to move up the ranks of the machine, and handed back to the bathhouse legion. Then off the lads would go to another polling place, to repeat the process for as long as the polls were open.
Thanks to the largesse of the machine, my grandfather went on to serve in the Great War, taught himself to be an accountant, and ended up a useful citizen and beloved father of seven. Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink remained what they were: corrupt by almost every definition of the word, avatars of a more brutal and cutthroat American age. But from a purely electoral standpoint, they were also incredibly successful. Coughlin was elected alderman 20 consecutive times, serving 46 years before he finally died of pneumonia in 1938. Hinky Dink was in and out of the city council until 1943, three years before he moved on to one of Chicago’s graveyards, which were legendary for their strong election-day turnout.
Democrats, and America, could use men like them again.
When Barack Obama came into power in 2008 with large majorities in both houses of Congress, it was hailed as the beginning of a new and lasting era of Democratic rule. Two years later, Democrats lost six U.S. Senate seats and 63 House seats—their worst beating in the House in 72 years. They also lost 680 seats in state legislatures, an all-time record, and six governorships. The 2014 midterms were no better: Democrats lost nine more Senate seats—their worst showing since the Reagan Massacre of 1980—plus another 13 House seats, and forfeited a net of two more governors’ mansions and eleven more legislative chambers. The party was reduced to its lowest standing on the state and national levels since 1900—and is now so feeble that it cannot even force the Senate to fulfill its constitutional mandate to hold hearings for an empty seat on the Supreme Court.
How is it possible for Democrats—seemingly the natural “majority party,” on the right side of every significant demographic trend—to suffer such catastrophic losses? Explanations abound, most of which revolve around the money advantage Republicans derived from the Citizens United decision. Or the hoary, self-congratulatory fable of how Democrats martyred themselves to goodness, forsaking the white working class forever because it passed the landmark civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965. Or how the party must move to the left, or the right, or someplace closer to the center—Peoria, maybe, or Pasadena.
But there’s a more likely explanation for these Democratic disasters. While 61.6 percent of all eligible voters went to the polls in the historic presidential year of 2008, only 40.9 percent bothered to get there in 2010, and just 36.4 percent showed up in 2014, the worst midterm showing since 1942. What the Democrats are missing is not substance, but a system to enact and enforce that substance: a professional, efficient political organization consistently capable of turning out the vote, every year, in every precinct.
What they lack is a machine.
New York’s Tammany Hall, the first, mightiest, and most feared of the political machines, went online on May 12, 1789—less than two weeks after George Washington took the oath as president in the same city.
The Society of St. Tammany was named for Tamanend, a legendary chief of the Delaware who had obligingly signed much of his people’s land over to William Penn. Tammany always had a populist tinge. It was founded as a counterweight to the Society of the Cincinnati, a club started by Washington’s officers that many feared would serve as the seedbed of a hereditary American nobility. Tammany, by contrast, adopted many of the trappings of the French Revolution, with the Phrygian cap and admonitions such as “no slave nor tyrant enters” carved over the portals of its clubhouses.
The society’s first “grand sachem,” or ultimate leader, was one William Mooney, an upholsterer who entered a float into Washington’s inaugural parade up Broadway that depicted him in the act of cushioning a chair for the new president. Later, Mooney would be accused of having deserted to the British during the war, and he was driven from his grand-sachemship for looting $5,000 from the public almshouse to provide—as he put it—“trifles for Mrs. Mooney,” thereby sealing the machine’s reputation for both chicanery and self-promoting spectacle.
Yet the man who turned Tammany into a full-fledged political machine never actually joined the society: that murky intriguer, Aaron Burr. By 1799, Alexander Hamilton and his Federalists held a virtual monopoly on banking in New York, frustrating smaller businessmen who wanted to start their own banks and “tontines”—investment companies that would not only make them money, but also get around property requirements that kept even most white men from qualifying for the franchise. Burr marched a bill through the state legislature that created the Manhattan Company, which promised to slake the island’s thirst for a dependable water supply. But Burr slipped a provision into the bill that allowed the company to invest any excess funds however it desired—which was the legislation’s main purpose all along.
The upshot was that the Manhattan Company laid down a lot of water pipes that were little more than hollowed-out logs. They leaked badly and absorbed sewage, thus contributing to the city’s constant, deadly epidemics of cholera and yellow fever. But Burr’s company used the money it made from the scheme to found the Manhattan Bank (later to become Chase Manhattan, later to become JPMorgan Chase). The Hamilton banking monopoly was thus broken, and new banks and tontines proliferated, allowing financial speculation to run wild, and untold numbers of middle and working-class New Yorkers to gain the franchise for the first time. In this one coup, Burr established the defining characteristics of political machines for all the years to come: They would be first and foremost about making money, no matter the cost to the general good; they would supply significant public works, no matter how shabbily or corruptly; and they would expand the boundaries of American democracy in the face of all attempts by conservatives or reformers to contain it....
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