Definition
Tammany Hall was the New York County Democratic Party organization that dominated city politics for most of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Founded in 1786 as a fraternal society, it became the canonical American political machine — trading jobs, contracts, and direct help to immigrant constituents for reliable votes at the polls.
In The Power Broker Tammany is everywhere: as the system reformers had to dislodge, as the network Robert Moses learned to navigate without ever joining, and as the durable substructure of urban politics that re-emerged whenever reform energy flagged.
Why it matters
How it works
A political machine survives by solving three problems at once: it gets its candidates onto the ballot, it gets reliable voters to the polls, and it metabolizes a steady stream of small constituent favors — a job, a permit, a coal delivery, a fixed citation — into political loyalty. Funding comes from the contracts and patronage controlled by the offices the machine wins.
The model is unsentimental and durable. Reformers can win an election, but they cannot easily replace the daily favor-economy that built the machine in the first place. That is why Tammany kept returning, and why Moses — for all his reformist roots — built his own favor-economy on top of it, distributing jobs through authorities the machine could not control.