The physical growth of the cities required the expansion of public services and the creation of entirely new facilities: streets, subways, elevated trains, bridges, docks, sewers, and public utilities. There was work to be done and money to be made. The professional politician—the colorful big-city boss—became a phenomenon of urban growth and bossism a national phenomenon. Though corrupt and often criminal, the boss saw to the building of the city and provided needed social services for the new residents in return for their political support. Yet not even the big-city boss could be said to rule the unruly city. The governing of America’s cities resembled more a tug-of-war than boss rule.

The most notorious of all the city bosses was William Marcy “Boss” Tweed of New York. At midcentury, Boss Tweed’s Democratic Party “machine” held sway. A machine was really no more than a political party organized at the grassroots level. Its purpose was to win elections and reward its followers, often with jobs on the city’s payroll. New York’s citywide Democratic machine, Tammany Hall, commanded an army of party functionaries. They formed a shadow government more powerful than the city’s elected officials.

As chairman of the Tammany general committee, Tweed kept the Democratic Party together and ran the city through the use of bribery and graft. “As long as I count the votes,” he shamelessly boasted, “what are you going to do about it?” The excesses of the Tweed ring soon led to a clamor for reform and cries of “Throw the rascals out.” Tweed’s rule ended in 1871. Eventually, he was tried and convicted, and later died in jail. New York was not the only city to experience bossism and corruption. The British visitor James Bryce concluded in 1888, “There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States.” More than 80 percent of the nation’s thirty largest cities experienced some form of boss rule in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. However, infighting among powerful ward bosses often meant that no single boss enjoyed exclusive power in the big cities.

Urban reformers and proponents of good government (derisively called “goo goos” by their rivals) challenged machine rule and sometimes succeeded in electing reform mayors. But the reformers rarely managed to stay in office for long. Their detractors called them “mornin’ glories,” observing that they “looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time.” The bosses enjoyed continued success largely because the urban political machine helped the cities’ immigrants and poor, who remained the bosses’ staunchest allies. “What tells in holding your district,” a Tammany ward boss observed, “is to go right down among the poor and help them in the different ways they need help. It’s philanthropy, but it’s politics, too—mighty good politics.”

The big-city boss, through the skillful orchestration of rewards, exerted powerful leverage and lined up support for his party from a broad range of constituents, from the urban poor to wealthy industrialists. In 1902, when journalist Lincoln Steffens began “The Shame of the Cities,” a series of articles exposing city corruption, he found that business leaders who fastidiously refused to mingle socially with the bosses nevertheless struck deals with them. “He is a self-righteous fraud, this big businessman,” Steffens concluded. “I found him buying boodlers [bribers] in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York.”

For all the color and flamboyance of the big-city boss, he was simply one of many actors in the drama of municipal government. Old-stock aristocrats, new professionals, saloonkeepers, pushcart peddlers, and politicians all fought for their interests in the hurly-burly of city government. They didn’t much like each other, and they sometimes fought savagely. But they learned to live with one another. Compromise and accommodation—not boss rule—best characterized big-city government by the turn of the twentieth century, although the cities’ reputation for corruption left an indelible mark on the consciousness of the American public.