Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

George Washington Plunkitt's Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics is a masterpiece of Americana artfully recorded by Plunkitt's "Boswell," the newspaperman William Riordon. When this book was first published in 1905, Plunkitt (1842-1924) was ward boss of the Fifteenth Assembly District and one of the powers of Tammany Hall when Tammany was supreme. Boasting of his singular talent for getting the very most out of politics through "honest graft" ("I seen my opportunities and I took 'em") , Plunkitt provides in this irresistible little volume a wonderfully frank and funny analysis of the Tammany machine and the ways to succeed in big-city politics. Both the general reader and the serious student of American political mores will delight in the revelations to be round in such enlightening chapters as "Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft," "The Curse of Civil Service Reform," "Reformers Only Mornin' Glories," "Brooklynites Natural-Born Hayseeds," "'Tammany Leaders Not Bookworms," "Tamman

Terrence J. McDonald is professor of history at the University of Michigan. His book, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860 to 1906, won the 1987 Allan M. Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association and the 1988 J. S. Holliday Award from the California Historical Society. He is a member of the board of editors of the Journal of Urban History and Studies in American Political development, and he has published essays in those journals as well as in Social History, Historical Methods, the History Teacher, and Reviews in American History. His research on George Washington Plunkitt is part of an ongoing project on the image of the urban political machine and American liberalism entitled "Inventing Urban Politics: The City and the State in American Political Development, 1880-1980."