15,697
edits
Changes
no edit summary
Pushing back against earlier conclusions regarding municipal government, Bridges identifies three tropes that she finds questionable. First, ethnicity in the Antebellum age mattered less than historians have argued. Sean Wilentz might even agree with this conclusion because by the 1850s because Irish and German immigrants participated together in 1850 strikes. Then again, he might also disagree since he went to great lengths to illustrate the nativism that affected many journeymen and the labor movement itself.
Second, historians often conflate the development of machine politics with the arrival of immigrants. Bridges suggest that the origins of machine politics began earlier, <>Blockquote>“to understand the institutional arrangements we associate with machine politics, we must look further back in American urban history than the arrival of the immigrants or the ascent of the Irish to political power.” (5)</blockquote> [
Her primary point is that “personal loyalty/personal deference, aspects of machine politics began well before among patrician leadership.”
