Machine Made

History casts Tammany Hall as shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft, crime and patronage personified by notoriously crooked characters. In Machine Made Terry Golway dismantles these stereotypes and presents a starkly revisionist portrait, focusing on the many benefits of machine politics for marginalised and maligned American immigrants. As thousands fled the Irish potato famine and began new lives in New York, the very question of the meaning of democracy and who would be included under its protection was at stake. Tammany's transactional politics were at the heart of crucial social reforms and Golway demonstrates that American labour history cannot be understood without Tammany's profound contribution. Terry Golway s Machine Made delivers a refreshingly revisionist verdict on the Irish-dominated Democratic organization whose ring reverberated mightily in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then faded into a faint echo If Boss Tweed and Richard Croker remain the defining faces of Tammany, Mr. Golway advances a breezy and convincing case that Al Smith, Senators Robert F. Wagner and Herbert Lehman, and their mentors, Tom Foley and Charles Francis Murphy, deserve distinguished pedestals in that pantheon, too. --Sam Roberts"