Marx Sees Decline of Machine Domination in City Politics

"The days of machine rule are numbered," says F. Morstein Marx, assistant professor of Government, sounding the death knell of boss government in an article in the current issue of the Alumni Bulletin.

"In extending distributive justice to the underdog, boss government built its cadres of loyalists," Marx said in explanation of this American phenomenon. Its specialty has been "competitive modulation between individual clients and agencies vested with formal authority." The economic basis of Boss government has been "in the privilege market and the control of placement opportunities."

Even before the entrance of formalized government work in the field of social security and relief problems, the machine was at best a palliative. "It worked by hook or by crook. Its rehabilitative influence was accidental rather than purposeful; being essentially a means to an organizational end, it met despondency in a haphazard way, coping with immediate aspects as they presented themselves."

One of the things that has paved the way for the decline of boss rule has been the advent of necessity as a directing power recently become a major factor in American life. Professionalism in social services and trained personnel became a serious problem. Further, the machine was unable to carry on its former ward beneficence in periods of prolonged economics crises.

"Although the Social Security Board is explicitly barred from imposing standards of its own upon the state and local appointive power, the Board is instructed to direct its attention to the proper enforcement of the law." Thus the Board will have more and more to do with each unit of government listed under the social security program run by experts and this is "rat poison for the machine."

Machine rule has not only lost its adjustment function, but also has suffered from a changed temperament of the times, "Marx continues. This "changed temperament" is the "rapid evaporation of non-interventionist illusions of government" and the "Conservationist tendencies supplanting the carefree indifference toward social squandering."

Marx concluded, "Machine rule values the crowd, but not the mass fundamentally a minority government, it cannot cope with a mobilized citizenry. It is ineffectual in ideological struggles. Its days are numbered."