Elusive Unity

James J. Connolly is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University and the author of The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925.

• Introduction: The Problem of Pluralism in Antebellum American Politics1. Explaining Tweed: The Limits of Consensual Politics2. Inventing the Machine: Liberal Reform and the Social Analysis of Urban Politics3. Labor's Republic Lost: The Workingmen's Insurgency and Class Politics in the Gilded Age City4. The Feminine Challenge: Clubwomen and Urban Politics5. In Defense of Professional Politics6. Progressivism and Pluralism7. The Problem with the Public: Lincoln Steffens and Municipal ReformEpilogue: The Last Hurrah and the Vindication of Machine PoliticsNotesBibliography: Selected Primary SourcesIndex

A welcome voice has been added to recent conversations regarding the nature of American democracy across the nineteenth century's transition from a rural world smothered in smug notions of demographic homogeneity to a morass of roiling urban cauldrons confounded by ethnic heterogeneity.... Connolly has demonstrated admirable resolve in his research and analysis, creating a thoughtful set of insights into the elusive concept of pluralistic democracy.- Thomas J. Jablonsky (Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era) Connolly has devoted a lifetime to the study of urban political culture in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In the current work, he examines the cultural meanings given for the existence of urban bosses and political machines from their rise in the Civil War US to the 1950s.... The topic is a complex one, and Connolly manages it in chapters focused on specific groups, such as good government reformers, settlement house reformers, journalists, and machine apologists.... Intellectually stimulating [and]... highly recommended.(Choice) Connolly reminds us in this thoughtful reconsideration of machine politics [that] Americans' chronic disaffection with American politics and government reflects both a lingering romantic reverence for republican ideals and a determination to nurture a more open, inclusive political order.- Roger Biles (Indiana Magazine of History) This book covers the hunt for a moral consensus well, and its appreciation for how the city bosses adapted their image in the 1890s and how far social scientists besotted with pluralist theory bought into it as the reality is a discernment long overdue.... The thoughtful conclusion Connolly comes to would apply to civic movements in general, and most likely to machines in places ungraced by such misread and meritorious novels as The Last Hurrah. Scholars of boss politics or urbna reform should not let Connolly's book elude them.- Mark Wahlgren Summers (American Historical Review)