On Rainbow's End, Volume 15

This is a good study of machine politics in the United States. Steven Erie is responding to a collection of different arguments that, combined, make up what is known as the “Rainbow Theory.” The Rainbow Theory says that urban machines actively worked to incorporate working-class immigrants like the Irish (first and foremost) and, later, Jews and Italians. By joining the machine, ethnic communities were granted jobs and services that came from a large pot of rewards. In doing so, these ethnic groups were able to move from the working class into the middle class during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As black Americans were greater integrated into urban political life during the 1960s and 1970s, they looked to the Rainbow Theory as a way that they themselves could rise into the middle class.

Erie, in this study, argues that the Rainbow Theory is bunk. Political machines really only brought Irish-Americans into the fold, and they failed at turning political power into economic advancement. In making this argument, Erie breaks with one of the main premises of the Rainbow Theory: the large pot of rewards actually wasn’t that large after all. The jobs and services that were filled by political leaders were decidedly scarce, and those that did exist mostly benefited the working class—few jobs granted within political machines moved people into the middle class.

Essentially it worked like this: in the first years of a political machine, activists sought to marshal as many voters as they could into voting for them, as they were competing in a really politically competitive environment. In the late 1850s, for instance, nascent Democratic machines may have competed with Know Nothings, Republicans, and other Democratic fashions. Once they were able to capture a majority of the electorate, they granted jobs and services to their supporters, but afterwards only increased the number of their voters if it was necessary to remain in a position of hegemony. As a result, the Irish political machines took little interest in turning Italians, Jews, and other “new immigrants” to vote. While they could have done so, they did not have enough resources to reward their own base while also granting privileges to new groups within the fold—doing so would cause the fragmentation of the machine. What few rewards were given to other ethnic groups often occurred through legislation or giving lower positions. The factor that determined the longevity of any given political machine was its ability to balance the rewards it granted with the needs to pull more people into the electorate.

I’m interested to read more competing accounts of urban machines, because it seems to be a really interesting, vibrant debate (at least, it was at the time of writing). Urban machines are largely a thing of the past now, they’ve since been replaced with largely Democratic factionalism and coalition-building over machines churning out votes and positions. Nevertheless, I found this to be an illuminating study on a subject I didn’t know much about.