American Dictators: Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine StevenHart. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Abstract

American Dictators: Frank Hague, Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine Steven Hart. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.Americans have long been both appalled and fascinated by the political machines that dominated cities across the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some machine bosses, such as William Marcy Tweed and Richard Daley, have become legends. While excoriated by good government reformers, bosses have been romanticized in popular art, ranging from Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key (1931) to HBO's popular television series Boardwalk Empire (2010). One reason for the ambivalence with which Americans regard the machines is the recognition that, while indisputably corrupt, they provided social services for the urban poor in an era before the advent of the welfare state. As George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall subboss immortalized in William Riordan's Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics (1905), made very clear, the life of a machine leader was strenuous indeed. On any given day, in addition to plotting electoral strategy with his lieutenants, he would be attending weddings, funerals, and neighborhood fairs, assisting constituents displaced by fires, bailing some out of jail, and fixing others up with jobs. The classic machine politician was the human face of government.Steven Hart, a journalist and freelance writer, provides a highly readable account of two famous New Jersey political bosses in his American Dictators. Enoch L. Nucky Johnson was the ruler of Atlantic City from 1911 to 1941. A bon vivant who enjoyed the nightlife of his city and who mixed socially with the celebrated gangsters of his day, Johnson was the original of the character played by Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire. Frank Hague was a rough-hewn Irish politician, who served as mayor of Jersey City from 1917 to 1947. His machine was one of the most disciplined and authoritarian in the nation. Although Johnson was a Republican and Hague was a Democrat, they shared an instinct for power and, on at least one occasion, probably cooperated in electing a governor. Between them, they illustrate the often idiosyncratic nature of bossism in America.A key thesis for Hart is that there was no one model for a political machine. Johnson ran what Hart calls a top-down regime; his power was built on his connections to the Republican-dominated state legislature. …