Political Bosses Documents

Document A: Lincoln Steffens’ “The Shame of Cities”

New advances in printing technology during the 1890s made

magazines and other publications inexpensive to print. Magazines

became available to a broader middle-class audience. Lincoln

Steffens was well known for writing magazine articles about child

labor, prisons, religion and political machines.

…politics is business. That’s what’s the matter with it… The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity... “My business is sacred,” says the business man in his heart. “Whatever prospers my business, is good; it must be. Whatever hinders it, is wrong; it must be. A bribe…is not so bad to give…not if it is necessary to my business.” "Business is business“ is not a political sentiment, but our politician has caught it…

We are pathetically proud of our democratic institutions and our republican form of government, of our grand Constitution and our just laws. We are a free and sovereign people, we govern ourselves and the government is ours. But that is the point. We are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some “party”; we let them boss the party…We cheat our government and we let our leaders loot it, and we let them…bribe...

“I know what the Boss is doing,” said a New York union workman, “but what do I care. He has raised my wages. Let him have his graft!”

It is idiotic, this devotion to a machine that is used to take our sovereignty from us. If we would leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities, and States, and nation…then, I say, the…politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it….if the demand were steady, they…would “deliver the goods.”

But do the people want good government? Tammany says they don’t. Are the people honest? Are the people better than Tammany? Are they better than the politician? Isn’t our corrupt government, after all, representative?

Source: Excerpt of a book by a muckraker, Lincoln Steffens, “The Shame of Cities”