ABSTRACT
Many of America's big industrial cities were once governed by party machines. Party machines managed to combine two seemingly incompatible qualities: the absence of formal rules, and a disciplined organization. The rise of the urban party machines was made possible by two factors: the emergence of a mass electorate and industrialization. Some degree of machine-style politics—a style that relies on material incentives to nurture loyalty—is present in every political system. Without doubt, the urban party machines helped to assimilate millions of impoverished immigrants into a culture that was fearful of and hostile to almost every newly arriving ethnic group. Despite the many stories describing how boys from poor immigrant families rose through the ranks of local machines, the evidence supporting the idea that the machines enhanced the upward mobility of immigrants is mixed. From the 1830s to the 1920s, more than 30 million immigrants came to the United States, most of them pouring into the cities.
