City job patronage was the mechanism that powered the Tammany machine

Evidence

The wheels of the Tammany war machine might be greased with money, but the machine was pulled by men, the men who voted Democratic themselves, the men who rounded up newly arrived immigrants and brought them in to be registered Democratic, the men who during election campaigns rang doorbells and distributed literature to those immigrants and to their own friends and neighbors and on Election Day shepherded them to the polls to vote Democratic. And the most succulent of the carrots that lured these men forward, that kept their shoulders braced against the ropes that pulled the Tammany machine, was the carrot of jobs, jobs for themselves, jobs for their wives, jobs for their sons. The only source of jobs on the scale required was the city itself. So the jobs Tammany had to control in order to control the city were the city’s jobs—positions as policemen, firemen, sanitation workers, court clerks, process servers, building inspectors, secretaries, clerks. There were, in 1914, 50,000 city employees and this meant 50,000 men and women who owed their pay checks—and whose families owed the food and shelter those pay checks bought—not to merit but to the ward boss. Patronage was the coinage of power in New York City. And reforms of the civil service such as Moses was to propose were therefore daggers thrust at the heart of Tammany Hall. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 298

IN SETTING OUT to reform New York City’s civil service, Bob Moses was setting out to break into the plunderhouse of politics. … The wheels of the Tammany war machine might be greased with money, but the machine was pulled by men, the men who voted Democratic themselves, the men who rounded up newly arrived immigrants and brought them in to be registered Democratic, the men who during election campaigns rang doorbells and distributed literature to those immigrants and to their own friends and neighbors and on Election Day shepherded them to the polls to vote Democratic. And the most succulent of the carrots that lured these men forward, that kept their shoulders braced against the ropes that pulled the Tammany machine, was the carrot of jobs, jobs for themselves, jobs for their wives, jobs for their sons. The only source of jobs on the scale required was the city itself. So the jobs Tammany had to control in order to control the city were the city’s jobs—positions as policemen, firemen, sanitation workers, court clerks, process servers, building inspectors, secretaries, clerks. There were, in 1914, 50,000 city employees and this meant 50,000 men and women who owed their pay checks—and whose families owed the food and shelter those pay checks bought—not to merit but to the ward boss. Patronage was the coinage of power in New York City. And reforms of the civil service such as Moses was to propose were therefore daggers thrust at the heart of Tammany Hall. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 297

Categorization

• XREF: This is the classic machine-politics dynamic also dissected in Plunkitt of Tammany Hall and in critiques of ‘the boss system’ — ties to the reader’s recurring interest in how patronage and graft organize institutions. — connects to: Tammany district bosses ran their wards as personal patronage fiefdoms — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 507
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 298; Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 297

Broader Connections

• Tammany district bosses ran their wards as personal patronage fiefdoms #corroborates (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 507