Is “boss” a real political title, like mayor, or is it just honorary? Where bosses elected officials, or were they just influential civilians? Are there still political figures known as "Boss (something-or-other)? Judging from what I’ve picked up from reading (not to mention, The Dukes of Hazzard…), they were just barely more legitimate than mobsters.
Possibly helpful: Political boss - Wikipedia
Given that it defines the control exercised by bosses as “de facto,” I’m concluding that the term is not official like mayor or governor.
Bosses were not elected government officials, but they usually were the elected chairman of their local party committee.
Naturally, they had many unseemly methods for ensuring that they would remain in that position for a long time.
According to the Wiki article of the archetypical boss, Boss Tweed,
So they could occupy elected positions, but that would not be the real source of their political power.
Speaking of Boss Hogg, just how widespread was the southern/rural practice of there beiing a local “boss” throughout much of the old South? The basic picture I have is a quasi-feudal system where almost every rural county had a “boss” (usually the guy who everyone was in hock to). If you’ve ever read A Dozen Tough Jobs by Howard Waldrop, that gives a pretty good fictional account of the concept.
The political boss in most cities did not have to be elected to a government post, though they were usually the head of the party in that city.
Also, Boss Tweed was not the only leader of Tammany Hall – just the most famous. But it ran NYC politics basically from 1850 to 1950, and the bosses who succeeded Tweed were much more corrupt than he was. Tweed was too blatant and stole from the public; people like John Kelly, Richard Croker, and Charles Murphy made fortunes from kickbacks and shakedowns instead of raiding the treasury.
The big city bosses slowly moved toward legitimacy. They still made money by giving city contracts to cronies, but corruption became less of a problem. The O’Connell machine in Albany is a case in point – it kept the Democrats in power and gave city contracts to those who contributed to the party. O’Connell was succeeded by Erastus Corning, who was mayor for 41 years. Corning also ran an insurance company, which got all the city’s insurance business, for some reason. But he is one of the few mayors who also ran the machine.
The political boss emerged in a world very different from today’s.
Government was originally envisioned to be as small as possible and to provide necessities for the people but otherwise to stay out of their way. This is now associated with conservatism, but at the time was a wildly radical notion, if one compared American government to the monarchies in Europe.
This worked in small towns and farming communities but began to break down once hundreds of thousands of immigrants swelled the size of cities. Cities had virtually no services of any kind. It wasn’t just the lack of welfare and social services in all their forms, but fire, police, water, sewers, transportation and other services we consider municipal necessities had to slowly evolve into things that a city would provide.
In the interim, a cold logic also evolved. If a political party could provide the necessities that the poor required, from jobs to food to coal, then they could fairly ask them to vote for the candidates of that party. Secret ballots were in the future. Everyone knew how you voted. That made enforcement extremely effective.
Broadly-based popular parties began to take over governments from the small class of wealthy and increasingly patrician men that had run them since the Revolution. Naturally, the upper classes hated and reviled the parties and their supporters. Newspapers were frankly partisan, so they reflected these divisions. Advances in printing allowed for the creation of the penny press, newspapers cheap enough for even the poor, so that newspapers were also no longer the propaganda arms of the rich. This set the scene for the battles that continued throughout the 19th century.
While the good that parties did was very real, the graft and corruption was equally pervasive. All those services that cities now had to provide, the water system, the sewer system, the trolley and later subways systems, cost many millions of dollars in an era when $100 a year would give you a comfortable life. Of course those in power stole as much money as they could fit in their pockets. They would have stolen more but the rich fought them every step of the way in order to become richer. Morally there wasn’t a side to choose from.
Since every community had government, village, town, city, county, state, every community had both demands and opportunities to grab power, control jobs, skim off graft, and provide for their citizens. The exact power and control of the boss varied from time to time and place to place, but the logic was always the same. Some bosses enriched themselves, some enjoyed the power more and lived more simply. But the power to get things done has been a temptation throughout history. The U.S. just democratized it.
Starting in the late 19th century, anti-boss forces finally got their act together. The Progressive Party was the national exponent of the initiative, the recall, the referendum. The city manager was proposed to take politics away from the mayor and give operational control of a city to a purportedly neutral expert. Goo-goos - Good Government supporters - rose from the educated and wealthier classes to form rival political organizations to break the power of the boss system. The abuses were so public by this point in the first part of the 20th century that they scored victories everywhere. The victories were usually short-lived, with the bosses regaining control - it’s hard to run a big city without graft - but they usually had to clean up the worst parts of their corruptions.
Bossism has never completely gone away, but the circumstances that allowed it to live have radically changed. Governments provide services. Ballots are secret. Jobs are plentiful. Voters are more educated. Voting blocks are smaller and scattered, harder to join together in coherent support. Cities are much more reliant on state and federal money so they have less power and more watchdogs.
The smaller the state, city, county, or community, as well as the more homogeneous, the easier it is for a boss to surface and take control. That’s why bossism, stereotypically a symbol of big northeastern cities at the turn of the previous century, became a stereotypical symbol of small southern counties later on. People have short memories and always like to point at the shortcomings of others.
Some bosses were certainly monsters. Others were saviors of those who otherwise would have starved in the streets. Most were somewhere in between. The notion of a boss is ubiquitous in history. Every time and culture had them. They were almost always from the nobility, the army, or the very wealthy until the U.S. allowed any boy to grow up with dreams of being the Boss one day.
And Bruce Springsteen did.
Sorry. Wrong story. But close. The logic is almost the same.