July 2nd, 2025
Home | Log in!

On Top Shelf
Jenna JaxonJenna Jaxon
Fresh Pick
THE LOVE HATERS
THE LOVE HATERS

New Books This Week

Reader Games

Reviewer Application


Fall headfirst into July’s hottest stories—danger, desire, and happily-ever-afters await.

Slideshow image


Since your web browser does not support JavaScript, here is a non-JavaScript version of the image slideshow:

slideshow image
When duty to his kingdom meets desire for his enemy!


slideshow image
��a must-read thriller.��Booklist


slideshow image
Always remember when playing for keeps to look before you leap!


slideshow image
?? Lost Memories. A Mystery Baby. A Mountain Ready to Explode. ??


slideshow image
One Rodeo. Two Rivals. A Storm That Changes Everything.


slideshow image
?? A Fake Marriage. A Real Spark. A Love Worth the Scandal. ??


Machine Made by Terry Golway

Purchase

Add to Wish List


Also by Terry Golway:

Machine Made, March 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
JFK: Day By Day, October 2010
Hardcover
Let Every Nation Know, April 2006
Hardcover

Machine Made
Terry Golway

Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics

Liveright
March 2014
On Sale: February 24, 2014
400 pages
ISBN: 0871403757
EAN: 9780871403759
Kindle: B00EIMTTHG
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction History

A major, surprising new history of New York’s most famous political machine—Tammany Hall—revealing, beyond the vice and corruption, a birthplace of progressive urban politics.

For decades, history has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous political machine, shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft, crime, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt characters. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made, historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes; Tammany's corruption was real, but so was its heretofore forgotten role in protecting marginalized and maligned immigrants in desperate need of a political voice.

Irish immigrants arriving in New York during the nineteenth century faced an unrelenting onslaught of hyperbolic, nativist propaganda. They were voiceless in a city that proved, time and again, that real power remained in the hands of the mercantile elite, not with a crush of ragged newcomers flooding its streets. Haunted by fresh memories of the horrific Irish potato famine in the old country, Irish immigrants had already learned an indelible lesson about the dire consequences of political helplessness. Tammany Hall emerged as a distinct force to support the city's Catholic newcomers, courting their votes while acting as a powerful intermediary between them and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling class. In a city that had yet to develop the social services we now expect, Tammany often functioned as a rudimentary public welfare system and a champion of crucial social reforms benefiting its constituency, including workers' compensation, prohibitions against child labor, and public pensions for widows with children. Tammany figures also fought against attempts to limit immigration and to strip the poor of the only power they had—the vote.

While rescuing Tammany from its maligned legacy, Golway hardly ignores Tammany's ugly underbelly, from its constituents' participation in the bloody Draft Riots of 1863 to its rampant cronyism. However, even under occasionally notorious leadership, Tammany played a profound and long-ignored role in laying the groundwork for social reform, and nurtured the careers of two of New York's greatest political figures, Al Smith and Robert Wagner. Despite devastating electoral defeats and countless scandals, Tammany nonetheless created a formidable political coalition, one that eventually made its way into the echelons of FDR’s Democratic Party and progressive New Deal agenda.

Tracing the events of a tumultuous century, Golway shows how mainstream American government began to embrace both Tammany’s constituents and its ideals. Machine Made is a revelatory work of revisionist history, and a rich, multifaceted portrait of roiling New York City politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Comments

No comments posted.

Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!

© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net  all rights reserved Privacy Policy