The Passing of the Bosses By RICHARD H. ROVERE New
York JAMES MICHAEL CURLEY, who would steal anything that wasn't nailed down in the Common- wealth of Massachusetts and yet was much loved by the poor people of Boston and by some of the rich, died a while back, and, as anyone might have pre- dicted, the newspapers filled up immediately with e.ssaYs on the passing of the old-time political bosses. I have written a couple of such obituary notices myself (the most recent being thirteen Years ago, the subject then being Peter James .McGuinness, of Brooklyn), and heaven knows nOW many I have read. The recent election, which saw Tammany Hall collapse for the twenty- seventh time in forty-three years, was the occa- sion for a great many. And I am sure that Journalists in the future will not be deprived of this rich source of inspiration for elegiac prose. • The political bosses and the professional poli- ticians are going to be with us a bit longer, but it cannot be denied that they are, in a general Way, in decline. Or at least they aren't what they used to be; a professional American politician today is a different' breed of cat from that of fiftY or even twenty-five years 'ago—perhaps so different that he ought to be given another name. OP to the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Politician was almost by definition a man whose Main concern was the influence he wielded in his community, meaning generally his city or c°1inty and in some .cases his State. It mattered very little to him who ran the federal govern- Ment; he had practically nothing to do with Washington and rather disliked the place. (\Vashington?' my friend McGuinness used to saY. when I asked him why he didn't give himself a turn or two in Congress, 'Washington is for Chumps. Ya think I'd go there and let some McCooey or McQuade walk off with what I got here?) Messenger-boy types were sent to Wash- ington, often as punishment. (Even today, there IS a Congressman from a district near where I who is said to be there only because he got into some woman trouble at home.) But then the New Deal came to power and a process set in Which a noted political scientist, E E. Schaff- Schneider, has called 'the nationalisation of American politics.' Welfare activities, formerly a function of local government and sometimes a private function of the political bosses, became federal.. Federal agencies proliferated, federal Jobs became more numerous and more desirable, federal power more worth cultivating. More People found themselves paying taxes to the federal government. There was more litigation in federal courts. CI don't like things in federal courts,' McGuinness would 'say. 'Most of them Judges I never even met.') The war, of course, gave another great spurt to nationalisation or federalisation. The trend has never been reversed.
It is not only such grubby affairs as jobs and doles that have turned attention to Washington, Which to the professional politician once seemed as small a part of his world as the United Nations h today. The American people have over the years acquired more and more interest in ideas and policies that have a national or inter- national relevance. Senator McCarthy illustrated this perfectly. In an earlier day, no demagogue could have won a following by talking about foreign policy or personnel in the State Depart- ment. No one would have given a hoot. Our demagogues were all local figures—they shared the wealth in the South, helped the aged in Cali- fornia, kept the Jews and Catholics in their places in Indiana. McCarthy was the first demagogue with a truly national following, just as Eisen- hower (if we exclude the odd case of Woodrow Wilson on his second run) was the first President elected because he was thought to be particu- larly qualified in world affairs.
The politicians like Curley and McGuinness (though not, as it happened, these two), began to lose their grip when politics became national- ised, and there have been other developments, some of them not very closely related to nationalisation, that have further weakened them. There has been vastly more social mobility in the past twenty years than ever before and a great deal more geographical mobility. When people change classes, they are likely to change politics and, whether they change or not, to become less dependent on politicians. The old municipal basses cultivated the immigrant hordes and drew much of their strength from them. There are now no more immigrants. The bosses functioned best with the great urban masses; today, though, there are suburban as well as urban masses, and the middle-sized cities have been gaining in importance at the expense of the great ones. At the same time, there has been a movement away from the farms and toward the urbs and suburbs and exurbs, and on the farms a mechanisation and collectivisation that, to- gether with the increased ease of movement, have given the country people more common interests with the townsmen. The old-style agrarian poli- tician, too, has been losing his grip.
The recent elections reflected a good deal of this. The type we are accustomed to thinking of as the professionals fared badly. In New York. Tammany Hall, which is simply a pet name for the Democratic machine in the city, took one of its worst beatings. In California, the Republican professionals, who had had things their own way for some time, lost to the Democrats—though there it could be argued that the Democrats were , in fact more professional than the Republicans. Anyway, all across the country, the 'machines.' by which we mean the seemingly entrenched politicians, demonstrated once more that they aren't what they used to be. This, of course, does not mean the end of machines or of pro- fessionalism; it means only the birth and develop- ment of machines of a new sort and of a new concept of professionalism. In some future article, I should like to deal with this aspect of American politics.
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