When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia

Author : Peter McCaffery
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2010-11-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780271040578

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When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia by Peter McCaffery Pdf

In 1903, Muckraker Lincoln Steffens brought the city of Philadelphia lasting notoriety as "the most corrupt and the most contented" urban center in the nation. Famous for its colorful "feudal barons," from "King James" McManes and his "Gas Ring" to "Iz" Durham and "Sunny Jim" McNichol, Philadelphia offers the historian a classic case of the duel between bosses and reformers for control of the American city. But, strangely enough, Philadelphia's Republican machine has not been subject to critical examination until now. When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia challenges conventional wisdom on the political machine, which has it that party bosses controlled Philadelphia as early as the 1850s and maintained that control, with little change, until the Great Depression. According to Peter McCaffery, however, all bosses were not alike, and political power came only gradually over time. McManes's "Gas Ring" in the 1870s was not as powerful as the well-oiled machine ushered in by Matt Quay in the late 1880s. Through a careful analysis of city records, McCaffery identifies the beneficiaries of the emerging Republican Organization, which sections of the local electorate supported it, and why. He concludes that genuine boss rule did not emerge as the dominant institution in Philadelphia politics until just before the turn of the century. McCaffery considers the function that the machine filled in the life of the city. Did it ultimately serve its supporters and the community as a whole, as Steffens and recent commentators have suggested? No, says McCaffery. The romantic image of the boss as "good guy" of the urban drama is wholly undeserved.

Author : Daniel Amsterdam
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2016-04-22
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780812248104

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Roaring Metropolis by Daniel Amsterdam Pdf

Roaring Metropolis reconstructs the ideas and activism of urban capitalists in the early twentieth century as they advocated extensive government spending on an array of social programs. Focusing on Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, the book traces businessmen's quest to build cities and nurture an urban citizenry friendly to capitalism.

Author : James H. Adams
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2015-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498508698

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Urban Reform and Sexual Vice in Progressive-Era Philadelphia by James H. Adams Pdf

This book examines the intersection and interplay between Progressive-Era rhetoric regarding commercialized vice and the realities of prostitution in early-twentieth-century Philadelphia. Arguing that any study of commercial sexual vice in a historical context is difficult given the paucity of evidence, this work instead focuses on reformers’ construction of a cultural view of prostitution, which Adams argues was based more upon their perceptions of the trade than on reality itself. Looking at the urban core of the city, Progressive reformers saw vice, immorality, and decay—but as they frequently had little face-to-face interaction with prostitutes plying their trade, they were forced to construct culturally fueled archetypes to explain what they believed they saw. Ultimately, reformers in Philadelphia were battling against a rhetorical creation of their own design, and any study of anti-vice reform in the early twentieth century tells us more about the relationship between activists and the government than it does about vice itself.

Author : James A. Kehl
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 1981-02-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780822976295

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Boss Rule in the Gilded Age by James A. Kehl Pdf

Matt Quay was called “the ablest politician this country has ever produced.” He served as a United States senator representing Pennsylvania from 1887 to 1904. His career as a Republican Party boss, however, spanned nearly half a century, during which numerous governors and one president owed their election success to his political skills. James A. Kehl was given the first public access to Quay's own papers, and herein presents the inside story of this controversial man who was considered a political Robin Hood for his alleged bribe-taking, misappropriations of funds, and concern for the underprivileged-yet he emerged as the most powerful member of the Republican Party in his state.

Author : John Morrison McLarnon
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Delaware County (Pa.)
ISBN : 0874138140

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Ruling Suburbia by John Morrison McLarnon Pdf

Ruling Suburbia chronicles the history of the Republican machine that has dominated the political life of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, since 1875, and of the career of John J. McClure, who controlled the machine from 1907 until 1965.

Author : James Wolfinger
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2016-06-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501704222

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Running the Rails by James Wolfinger Pdf

Philadelphia exploded in violence in 1910. The general strike that year was a notable point, but not a unique one, in a generations-long history of conflict between the workers and management at one of the nation’s largest privately owned transit systems. In Running the Rails, James Wolfinger uses the history of Philadelphia’s sprawling public transportation system to explore how labor relations shifted from the 1880s to the 1960s. As transit workers adapted to fast-paced technological innovation to keep the city’s people and commerce on the move, management sought to limit its employees’ rights. Raw violence, welfare capitalism, race-baiting, and smear campaigns against unions were among the strategies managers used to control the company’s labor force and enhance corporate profits, often at the expense of the workers’ and the city’s well-being. Public service workers and their unions come under frequent attack for being a "special interest" or a hindrance to the smooth functioning of society. This book offers readers a different, historically grounded way of thinking about the people who keep their cities running. Working in public transit is a difficult job now, as it was a century ago. The benefits and decent wages Philadelphia public transit workers secured—advances that were hard-won and well deserved—came as a result of fighting for decades against their exploitation. Given capital’s great power in American society and management's enduring quest to control its workforce, it is remarkable to see how much Philadelphia’s transit workers achieved.

Author : Arthur H. Mitchell
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2017-03-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9781476627267

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Fighting Irish in the American Civil War and the Invasion of Mexico by Arthur H. Mitchell Pdf

As mid-19th century America erupted in violence with the invasion of Mexico and the outbreak of the Civil War, Irish immigrants joined the fray in large numbers, on both sides. They sometimes were disruptive elements. In Mexico, a body of Irish artillerymen defected to the other side. During the Civil War, Patrick Cleburne stirred controversy in the Confederacy when he proposed enlisting slaves in exchange for their freedom. The New York draft riots, a violent insurrection by a predominantly Irish mob, raged for three days before Federal troops restored order. Despite turmoil and contention, the Irish soldiers who fought in the Union army contributed significantly to the preservation of the United States. This collection of essays examines the involvement of Irish men and women in America's conflicts from 1840 to 1865.

Author : Andrew Heath
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2019-02-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812295818

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In Union There Is Strength by Andrew Heath Pdf

In the 1840s, Philadelphia was poised to join the ranks of the world's great cities, as its population grew, its manufacturing prospered, and its railroads reached outward to the West. Yet epidemics of riot, disease, and labor conflict led some to wonder whether growth would lead to disintegration. As slavery and territorial conquest forced Americans to ponder a similar looming disunion at the national level, Philadelphians searched for ways to hold their city together across internal social and sectional divisions—a project of consolidation that reshaped their city into the boundaries we know today. A bold new interpretation of a crucial period in Philadelphia's history, In Union There Is Strength examines the social and spatial reconstruction of an American city in the decades on either side of the American Civil War. Andrew Heath follows Philadelphia's fortunes over the course of forty years as industrialization, immigration, and natural population growth turned a Jacksonian-era port with a population of two hundred thousand into a Gilded Age metropolis containing nearly a million people. Heath focuses on the utopian socialists, civic boosters, and municipal reformers who argued that the path to urban greatness lay in the harmonious consolidation of jarring interests rather than in the atomistic individualism we have often associated with the nineteenth-century metropolis. Their rival visions drew them into debates about the reach of local government, the design of urban space, the character of civic life, the power of corporations, and the relations between labor and capital—and ultimately became entangled with the question of national union itself. In tracing these links between city-making and nation-making in the mid-nineteenth century, In Union There Is Strength shows how its titular rallying cry inspired creative, contradictory, and fiercely contested ideas about how to design, build, and live in a metropolis.

Author : Catherine E. Rymph
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2006-05-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807876978

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Republican Women by Catherine E. Rymph Pdf

In the wake of the Nineteenth Amendment, Republican women set out to forge a place for themselves within the Grand Old Party. As Catherine Rymph explains, their often conflicting efforts over the subsequent decades would leave a mark on both conservative politics and American feminism. Part of an emerging body of work on women's participation in partisan politics, Republican Women explores the dilemmas confronting progressive, conservative, and moderate Republican women as they sought to achieve a voice for themselves within the GOP. Rymph first examines women's grassroots organizing for the party in the decades following the initiation of women's suffrage. She then traces Marion Martin's efforts from 1938 to 1946 to shape the National Federation of Women's Republican Clubs, the party's increasing dependence on the work of women at the grassroots in the postwar years, and the eventual mobilization of many of these women behind Barry Goldwater, in defiance of party leaders. From the flux of the party's post-Goldwater years emerged two groups of women on a collision course: a group of party insiders calling themselves feminists challenged supporters of independent Republican Phyllis Schlafly's growing movement opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. Their battles over the meanings of gender, power, and Republicanism continued earlier struggles even as they helped shape the party's fundamental transformation in the Reagan years.

Author : Wendy J. Schiller,Charles Stewart III
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2014-12-21
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780691163178

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Electing the Senate by Wendy J. Schiller,Charles Stewart III Pdf

How U.S. senators were chosen prior to the Seventeenth Amendment—and the consequences of Constitutional reform From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people—instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators. This radically changed in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving the public a direct vote. Electing the Senate investigates the electoral connections among constituents, state legislators, political parties, and U.S. senators during the age of indirect elections. Wendy Schiller and Charles Stewart find that even though parties controlled the partisan affiliation of the winning candidate for Senate, they had much less control over the universe of candidates who competed for votes in Senate elections and the parties did not always succeed in resolving internal conflict among their rank and file. Party politics, money, and personal ambition dominated the election process, in a system originally designed to insulate the Senate from public pressure. Electing the Senate uses an original data set of all the roll call votes cast by state legislators for U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 and all state legislators who served during this time. Newspaper and biographical accounts uncover vivid stories of the political maneuvering, corruption, and partisanship—played out by elite political actors, from elected officials, to party machine bosses, to wealthy business owners—that dominated the indirect Senate elections process. Electing the Senate raises important questions about the effectiveness of Constitutional reforms, such as the Seventeenth Amendment, that promised to produce a more responsive and accountable government.

Author : Sarah F. Anzia
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2013-12-03
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780226086958

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Timing & Turnout by Sarah F. Anzia Pdf

Public policy in the United States is the product of decisions made by more than 500,000 elected officials, and the vast majority of those officials are elected on days other than Election Day. And because far fewer voters turn out for off-cycle elections, that means the majority of officials in America are elected by a politically motivated minority of Americans. Sarah F. Anzia is the first to systemically address the effects of election timing on political outcomes, and her findings are eye-opening. The low turnout for off-cycle elections, Anzia argues, increases the influence of organized interest groups like teachers’ unions and municipal workers. While such groups tend to vote at high rates regardless of when the election is held, the low turnout in off-cycle years enhances the effectiveness of their mobilization efforts and makes them a proportionately larger bloc. Throughout American history, the issue of election timing has been a contentious one. Anzia’s book traces efforts by interest groups and political parties to change the timing of elections to their advantage, resulting in the electoral structures we have today. Ultimately, what might seem at first glance to be mundane matters of scheduling are better understood as tactics designed to distribute political power, determining who has an advantage in the electoral process and who will control government at the municipal, county, and state levels.

Author : J. Gilberto Quezada
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2001-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1585441538

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Border Boss by J. Gilberto Quezada Pdf

On January 1, 1937, Manuel B. Bravo was sworn in as county judge of Zapata County, a post he would hold for twenty years. In Border Boss: Manuel B. Bravo and Zapata County, J. Gilberto Quezada delineates Bravo’s political career in the Democratic Party and examines his role in some of the important issues of his day, especially Falcon Dam. During Bravo’s years in office, he worked and corresponded with many Texas and national politicians, including James Allred, Lloyd Bentsen, Kika de la Garza, Ralph Yarborough, and, most prominently, Lyndon Johnson. The association between Bravo and Johnson began with the special Senate election of 1941 and is reflected in the more than fifty letters between the two in Bravo's personal papers. In Johnson's 1948 Senate runoff against Coke Stevenson, voting irregularities were alleged in Zapata County when the election returns from Precinct No. 3 were reported missing. Quezada analyzes the Bravo papers for any evidence that Bravo and Johnson had arranged the disappearance and offers possible alternative explanations. From the 1930s to the 1950s Zapata County was one of six South Texas counties where the Tejano majority dominated local politics and held most public offices. Bravo became known as one of the "Mexican bosses" of South Texas, but Quezada draws a more nuanced picture of bossism than has been presented previously, analyzing the role of influential leading families but looking as well at the degree of economic integration into the state and nation as factors in how bossism developed. Those interested in Mexican-American studies and politics and bossism in South Texas will appreciate the window onto South Texas politics and Tejano culture this biography gives.

Author : Andrew R. Murphy,John Smolenski
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 439 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2019-01-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781978801783

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The Worlds of William Penn by Andrew R. Murphy,John Smolenski Pdf

William Penn was an instrumental and controversial figure in the early modern transatlantic world, known both as a leader in the movement for religious toleration in England and as a founder of two American colonies, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As such, his career was marked by controversy and contention in both England and America. This volume looks at William Penn with fresh eyes, bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines to assess his multifaceted life and career. Contributors analyze the worlds that shaped Penn and the worlds that he shaped: Irish, English, American, Quaker, and imperial. The eighteen chapters in The Worlds of William Penn shed critical new light on Penn’s life and legacy, examining his early and often-overlooked time in Ireland; the literary, political, and theological legacies of his public career during the Restoration and after the 1688 Revolution; his role as proprietor of Pennsylvania; his religious leadership in the Quaker movement, and as a loyal lieutenant to George Fox, and his important role in the broader British imperial project. Coinciding with the 300th anniversary of Penn’s death the time is right for this examination of Penn’s importance both in his own time and to the ongoing campaign for political and religious liberty

Author : John F. Bauman,Edward K. Muller
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2006-10-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780822973058

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Before Renaissance by John F. Bauman,Edward K. Muller Pdf

Before Renaissance examines a half-century epoch during which planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh. Planning emerged from the concerns of progressive reformers and businessmen over the social and physical problems of the city. In the Steel City enlightened planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Frederick Bigger pioneered the practical approach to reordering the chaotic urban-industrial landscape. In the face of obstacles that included the embedded tradition of privatism, rugged topography, inherited built environment, and chronic political fragmentation, they established a tradition of modern planning in Pittsburgh. Over the years a mélange of other distinguished local and national figures joined in the planning dialogue, among them the park founder Edward Bigelow, political bosses Christopher Magee and William Flinn, mayors George Guthrie and William Magee, industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Howard Heinz, financier Richard King Mellon, and planning luminaries Charles Mulford Robinson, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and Pittsburgh’s Frederick Bigger. The famed alliance of Richard King Mellon and Mayor David Lawrence, which heralded the Renaissance, owed a great debt to Pittsburgh’s prior planning experience. John Bauman and Edward Muller recount the city’s long tradition of public/private partnerships as an important factor in the pursuit of orderly and stable urban growth. Before Renaissance provides insights into the major themes, benchmarks, successes, and limitations that marked the formative days of urban planning. It defines Pittsburgh’s key role in the vanguard of the national movement and reveals the individuals and processes that impacted the physical shape and form of a city for generations to come.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2024-06-02
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9780271040912

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Philadelphia's Progressive Orphanage: The Carson Valley School by Anonim Pdf