Political machines crushed good-government reformers efficiently using patronage power
Evidence
So great a nuisance did he make of himself that in 1918 Tammany Hall decided it had to crush him. It did so with efficiency. At the age of thirty, with the grading papers for his system being used as scrap paper, the Central Park shelters and great highways unbuilt, Robert Moses, Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, honors man at Oxford, lover of the Good, the True and the Beautiful, was out of work and, with a wife and two small daughters to support, was standing on a line in the Cleveland, Ohio, City Hall, applying for a minor municipal job—a job which, incidentally, he didn’t get. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 38
Categorization
- APHORISMS: A sharp, transferable vignette: touted merit and credentials cannot protect an idealist who lacks political power.
- XREF: connects to: Robber barons fused corrupt legislative power with personal wealth to control resources. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 650; Rank-and-file reform movements could not overcome orthodox regional party machines — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 458; Bureaucratic inertia and lax enforcement can quietly sabotage reform from within — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 359 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Rank-and-file reform movements could not overcome orthodox regional party machines
#corroborates(0.90) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 458 - Political patronage threatened to erode civil service stability and guarantees
#expands(0.85) - Bureaucratic inertia and lax enforcement can quietly sabotage reform from within
#corroborates(0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 359 - Authoritarian regime stability ultimately rests on informal patronage networks brokered by ethnic elites
#corroborates(0.75) — Johan Brosché and Hanne Fjelde and Kristine Höglund, Electoral violence and the legacy of…, 22