Order and Its Discontents

Abstract

John M. Allswang. Bosses, Machines and Urban Voters: An American Symbiosis. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977.157 + ix pp. Paul Boyer. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.387 + xvi pp. William A. BuIIough. The Blind Boss and His City Christopher Augustine Buckley and Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 347 + xvi pp. Lyle W. Dorsett. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977.134 + x pp. The city has attracted attention from a variety of new perspectives, but two older themes continue to manifest considerable vitality: bossism and reform. Both of these phenomena deal, in their very different ways, with the same problem: organization, control and order in a new, bewildering and rapidly changing urban environment. There is, of course, more to both topics than just this, but the need to bring order to what has often appeared a danger- ously undisciplined society has been a recurring theme in American history, one which acquired a new urgency in the city. The contradictions and tensions which, since the nation's earliest days, have characterized the American approach to the question of authority, have rendered quite taxing the task of those who would order and control those about them, and have shaped the way they approached it. The same tensions may be seen in the works of recent historians dealing with the reformer and the boss, predis- posing them to a negative view of the former and a more positive one of the latter.