Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

William L Riordon

ISBN 10: 0525471189 / ISBN 13: 9780525471189

Published by Penguin Books Ltd, 1963

About this Item

This classic work presents the candid wit and wisdom of George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924), a longtime state senator from New York who represented the Fifteenth Assembly District and was especially powerful in New York City. Plunkitt was part of the city's Tammany Hall organization and a cynical practitioner of what today is generally known as machine politics, a patronage-based system in which politicians openly exercise power for personal gain. Plunkitt defined dishonest graft as working solely for one's own interests, as opposed to honest graft, which involves the interests of one's party and state as well as individual benefits. An enthusiastic party man, he believed in appointments, patronage, spoils, and all the corrupt practices that were curtailed by the civil service law, regarding them as both the rewards and cause of patriotism. Modern readers will find his strikingly modern-sounding motivations and justifications both entertaining and instructive.

Seller Inventory # CIN0525471189A

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication Date: 1963
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525471189
• ISBN 13: 9780525471189
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Fair

About this title

Synopsis

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

About the Author

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."