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American Dictators: Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine Steven Hart. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.
Americans have long been both appalled and fascinated by the political machines that dominated cities across the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some machine bosses, such as William Marcy Tweed and Richard Daley, have become legends. While excoriated by good government reformers, bosses have been romanticized in popular art, ranging from Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key (1931) to HBO's popular television series Boardwalk Empire (2010). One reason for the ambivalence with which Americans regard the machines is the recognition that, while indisputably corrupt, they provided social services for the urban poor in an era before the advent of the welfare state. As George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall subboss immortalized in William Riordan's Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics (1905), made very clear, the life of a machine leader was strenuous indeed. On any given day, in addition to plotting electoral strategy with his lieutenants, he would be attending weddings, funerals, and neighborhood...