Urbanism and the National Party Organizations

Abstract

Scountry was the hope of developing an autonomous system of urban politics entirely divorced from shifting tides and sentiments on the national political scene. From the perspective of urban reform, such a separation was necessary to prevent local elections from turning on national issues and personalities that were quite irrelevant to the needs and problems of the municipality itself. Moreover, there was a widespread conviction that Tammany and a great many other corrupt city machines had been able to strengthen their power by trading on the loyalties of the voter to a national political party of which they were the local representatives. This effort to isolate urban from national politics took the direction of separating the date of local and national elections, or a more drastic remedy banishing national party labels from municipal ballots altogether. On the surface at least the efforts of reformers to effect a separation between local and national politics have met with considerable success. It has today become common practice to hold municipal elections on a different date from national contests. Across the country, but particularly in the West and Mid-West, such elections have become increasingly non-partisan in legal form. As a recent study of nonpartisanship points out: During the half-century which has passed since the development of the nonpartisan ballot in the United States the abolition of the party label in local elections has been extended to almost two-thirds of American cities 65,000,000 citizens. 1 And yet, as Eugene Lee and a variety of other observers indicate, the nonpartisan ballot does not prevent the persistence of strong national party identifications in local elections. Freeman, for example, argues that institutional devices are not likely to abolish a local two party system in a city where attitudes toward the two major national parties are strongly structured and the relations between national and local party organizations are durable and persistent. 2 The evidence he cites on the experience of Massachusetts, as well as that presented by Lee for California,3 and Williams and Adrian for Michigan,4 would suggest that national party alignments remain highly durable and on occasion even decisive factors in urban politics.