Key questions:What was the political machine and what did they do for a city?Controlled the political party of a city. Offered services to citizens in return for political and financial support (basically gave things to people that voted in their preference). Organized like a pyramid, base was made up of local precinct workers and captains that gained local voting support for their "machine," ward boss worked to secure the votes of all the voting districts, top of the pyramid was the city boss who controlled all political party activities. All three positions worked together to gaurantee the success of the machine.Tell me about Boss Tweed and the Tweed Ring.Became head of the NYC Democratic political machine in 1868. For two years he led the Tweed Ring (made up of corrupt officials) in defrauding the city.An example of their graft is when building the New York County Courthouse, the political machine charged 13 million dollars for the contruction of it, however, the actual contruction cost was only 3 million, so they took the extra 10 million and put it in their own pockets.What caused all this corruption in government?They became more and more corrupt because the loyalty of a certain number of voters wasn't enough to carry an election. They started with election fraud where one person would use many fake names to cast extra votes for their machine. Once elected, machines could take advantage of many oppourtunities of graft (the usage of a political influence to receive personal gain). Graft consisted of putting a worker in a position in which they owed the machine for a service, whereupon the machine would request, for example a contruction worker, to add extra labor and material costs to the bill. The machine would take all the extra money charged and would also "kick-back" a portion of the cash to the worker who falsely added the costs. The machines would basically charge extra money from the taxpayers than they needed, and would keep whatever was leftover.What laws came about to reform government?Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland and William Mckinley were all presidents during the late 1800's. Were they a reform president or a status quo president?
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