Jason Carr
HIST 5302
October 5, 1998

Miller, Zane L.  "Bosses, Machines, and the American Urban Future."

     This article is about the changing perception of the nature of the city, and that
perception's effect on the urban political process.  Miller uses conflicting assessments of the
phenomenon  of bosses as a framework on which to hang his study.  The much-maligned Boss is
actually only one manifestation of a political organization, one that is common in American
Urban history.
     Sources for the article are varied and occasionally personal: Miller notes that his other
works provide clues to his development of boss-related ideas, and that his activist role in civic
politics informed his opinion in important ways.  In addition, Miller relies on early sociological
studies of urban development, and seminal works of revisionist American urban history.
     The author's thesis is that changing perceptions of the city's nature affect its political (and
even geographical) structure.  He starts out by offering contentious, classical, interpretations of
the boss's relationship to his city.  Citing several bosses (e.g. Crump in Memphis, Tweed in New
York) whose power was not built in cookie-cutter boss fashion, Miller offers instead that the
local bosses were non-conforming because they , functionally speaking, a product of their local
urban environments.  Bosses and their machines were political expedients, aimed at a successful
election.  The bosses were brokers as much as power-mongers. Using this definition, bosses or
boss-like machines were present in other periods outside the most commonly-discussed. 
      The author concludes that the latest manifestation of city-perception, the "community of
limited liability" wherein individual citizens compose the unit of measure and action, has passed
on and is now replaced with a newer and stronger politea of impatience and fear of political
scarcity. Our understanding of the longstanding and variable nature of powerful political
organizations will assist us in our search for a discourse with which to address our current urban
problems.
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