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Her primary point is that “personal loyalty/personal deference, aspects of machine politics began well before among patrician leadership.”
Finally, machine politics itself formed out of historical context the result of “inheritance and transformation, compromise, inadvertence, and conflict.” (5) Therefore, historians have failed to weigh on the contending or countervailing forces at work. In this way, Bridges argues machine politics did not institutionalize “a particular set of values.”
Like Wilentz, Bridges identifies the broad economic changes of antebellum New York City that helped to create the foundation for machine politics. For example, Bridges to notes the growing hostility between masters and journeymen, employers and employee, however, she also explores the effects of the upper classes retreat from public life. The proliferation of city agencies and the professionalization of the police and fire departments gradually removed authority from the city’s upper classes. Volunteer fire departments once featured relative class diversity, but before their professionalization, they had become predominantly working class [wilentz notes this as well].
