The Philadelphia machine isn't the best. It isn't sound, and I doubt if it would stand in New York or Chicago. The
enduring strength of the typical American political machine is that it is a natural growth-a sucker, but deep-rooted in
the people. The New Yorkers vote for Tammany Hall. The Philadelphians do not vote; they are disfranchised, and their
disfranchisement is one anchor of the foundation of the Philadelphia organization.
This is no figure of speech. The honest citizens of Philadelphia have no more rights at the polls than the negroes
down South. Nor do they fight very hard for this basic privilege. You can arouse their Republican ire by talking about
the black Republican votes lost in the Southern States by white Democratic intimidation, but if you remind the average
Philadelphian that he is in the same position, he will look startled, then say, "That's so, that's literally true, only
I never thought of it in just that way." And it is literally true.
The machine controls the whole process of voting, and practices fraud at every stage. The assessor's list is the
voting list, and the assessor is the machine's man... The assessor pads the list with the names of dead dogs, children,
and non-existent persons. One newspaper printed the picture of a dog, another that of a little four-year-old negro boy,
down on such a list. A ring orator in a speech resenting sneers at his ward as "low down" reminded his hearers that that
was the ward of Independence Hall, and naming over signers of the Declaration of Independence, he closed his highest
flight of eloquence with the statement that "these men, the fathers of American liberty, voted down here once. And," he
added, with a catching grin, "they vote here yet." Rudolph Blankenburg, a persistent fighter for the right and the use
of the right to vote (and, by the way, an immigrant), sent out just before one election a registered letter to each
voter on the rolls of a certain selected division. Sixty-three per cent were returned marked "not at," "removed,"
"deceased," etc. From one four-story house where forty-four voters were addressed, eighteen letters came back
undelivered; from another of forty-eight voters, came back forty-one letters; from another sixty-one out of sixty-two;
from another, forty-four out of forty-seven. Six houses in one division were assessed at one hundred and seventy-two
voters, more than the votes cast in the previous election in any one of two hundred entire divisions.
The repeating is done boldly, for the machine controls the election officers, often choosing them from among the
fraudulent names; and when no one appears to serve, assigning the heeler ready for the expected vacancy. The police are
forbidden by law to stand within thirty feet of the polls, but they are at the box and they are there to see that the
machine's orders are obeyed and that repeaters whom they help to furnish are permitted to vote without "intimidation" on
the names they, the police, have supplied...
Source: Lincoln Steffens, "Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented" in McClure's Magazine
Vol. 21 No. 3 (July 1903), 251.
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