Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The City Where Crime Is Play
A new administration has taken the reins in New York. This administration was elected on a constructive platform. It gained power through the most sweeping reform victory in the history of New York. It is pledged to efficiency, and it is not likely to fail in its pledges.
But there is another kind of service to which the new ad ministration is not definitely pledged. This service is not less vital than efficiency, and is more human. It is the development in New York of those elements of home life which, in a great city, can only be provided through public enterprise.
It will be easier for the new administration to establish efficiency than to establish human contact. But it will be easier for it to remain in power through establishing human contact than merely through establishing efficiency.
What is Tammany Hall - the type of politics represented by Tammany Hall? We know what Tammany Hall is from the standpoint of city government, but what is Tammany Hall from the standpoint of the common man, woman and child? Tam many Hall does not succeed because it is wicked. The weakest thing about Tammany Hall is its wickedness. The weakest thing about good government in New York has always been its lack of human contact, and of distinctive social policy.
Tammany Hall, looked at through the personal eyes of the wage-earning masses, is a social and human resource.
Scientific views about government, and lofty civic ideals, are recent acquisitions, and only a minority have ever attained them in New York City. But everyone is human; everyone is social. Everyone needs a local, personal and human connection with the city government. Tammany, through its district organiza tion, provides this local and human bond. Tammany uses its power to exploit the city, but this is a fact which does not mean much to the plain man, who first of all requires the human and the social.
Tammany Hall is a means through which our sumptuary laws, in?exible and often out of relation to the people's need, are made adjustable to the neighborhood and racial peculiari ties of New York. It may be that Tammany, while mitigating the severity of law, also extorts blackmail, but the mass of those who are loyal to Tammany Hall are more interested in the mitiga tion than in the blackmail.
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