Tammany government was driven by greed, not will to help

Evidence

The will to help was not the force that drove that government. That force was greed. During the fifteen years in which Red Mike Hylan and then Beau James Walker had been Chief Magistrate of America’s greatest city, the Tammany leaders who served under them had seemed motivated primarily by the desire to siphon the city’s vast resources into a vast trough on which they could batten. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1448

Categorization

• SHARE: A single memorable paragraph that distills Caro’s core thesis about New York machine politics — worth sharing with a friend into urban history.
• XREF: connects to: Tammany district bosses ran their wards as personal patronage fiefdoms — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 507; Social welfare legislation was adopted by Tammany as good politics — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 566; Tammany refined stealing from corruption into ‘honest graft.’ — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3025 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Tammany refined stealing from corruption into ‘honest graft.’ #expands (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3025
• Moses equated the new anti-Tammany coalition with old Tammany corruption #corroborates (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1586