¹ Lyle W. Dorsett, The Pendergast Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 6.

² Roger Biles, “Edward J. Kelly: New Deal Machine Builder,” in The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition, ed. P. M. Green and M. G. Holli (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 1987), 111–25; Rita Werner Gordon, “The Change in the Political Alignment of Chicago’s Negroes During the New Deal,” The Journal of American History 56, no. 3 (1969): 584–603; Jill Quadagno and Madonna Harrington Meyer, “Organized Labor, State Structures, and Social Policy Development: A Case Study of Old Age Assistance in Ohio, 1916-1940,” Social Problems 36, no. 2 (1989): 181–96; Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Bruce M. Stave, The New Deal and the Last Hurrah: Pittsburgh Machine Politics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970).

³ Stanley High, “The W.P.A.: Politician’s Playground,” Current History (1916-1940) 50, no. 3 (1939): 23–62.

⁴ See Donald S. Howard, The WPA and Federal Relief Policy (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1943).

⁵ Price Fishback and Shawn Kantor, New Deal Studies (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2018).

⁶ Harvey Boulay and Alan DiGaetano, “Why Did Political Machines Disappear?” Journal of Urban History 12, no. 1 (1985): 25–49; Rebecca Menes, “The Effect of Patronage Politics on City Government in American Cities, 1900-1910,” NBER Working Paper Series (1999); Jessica Trounstine, Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

⁷ Price Fishback, “How Successful Was the New Deal? The Microeconomic Impact of New Deal Spending and Lending Policies in the 1930s,” Journal of Economic Literature 55, no. 4 (2017): 1435–85.

⁸ Steven P. Erie, Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840-1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Michael Lewis, “No Relief from Politics: Machine Bosses and Civil Works,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1994): 210–26.

⁹ Gavin Wright, 1974. “The Political Economy of New Deal Spending: An Econometric Analysis,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 56, no. 1 (1974): 30–38; Fishback, “Impact of New Deal”.

¹⁰ Susan C. Stokes, “Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 3 (2005): 315–25. One of the challenges for client-patron relationships is that both sides can renege unless there is an accountability mechanism, or unless both sides assume the relationship will go on indefinitely. Machines essentially had no way of verifying whether or not the New Dealers had reneged, and thus could not hold them accountable.

¹¹ Olle Folke, Shigeo Hirano, and James M. Snyder, “Patronage and Elections in U.S. States,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 3 (2011): 567–85; Trounstine, Political Monopolies.

¹² Stephanie Ternullo, “The Electoral Effects of Social Policy: Expanding Old-Age Assistance, 1932-1940,” The Journal of Politics 84, no. 1 (January 2022): 226–41. Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

¹³ David R. Mayhew, Placing Parties in American Politics: Organization, Electoral Settings, and Government Activity in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

¹⁴ Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

¹⁵ For a chart of machine prevalence from 1870-1950, see: M. Craig Brown and Charles N. Halaby, “Machine Politics in America, 1870-1945,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 3 (1987), 587–612. In Placing Parties, pg. 330, Mayhew argues that the 1950s and 60s were a “golden age of sorts for American local organization” but that by the 1970s, machines and other strong local parties were “largely losing out to candidate organizations that introduced capital-intensive campaigns.”

¹⁶ Brown and Halaby, “Machine Politics in America.”

¹⁷ Boulay and DiGaetano, “Did Political Machines Disappear?”; Craig M. Brown and Barbara D. Warner, “Immigrants, Urban Politics, and Policing in 1900,” American Sociological Review 57, no. 3 (1992): 293–305.

¹⁸ Harold F. Gosnell, “The Political Party versus the Political Machine,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 169, no. 1 (1933): 21–28; Stave, Pittsburgh Machine Politics. This produced what Susan Stokes refers to as “perverse accountability,” in which politicians must hold voters accountable for their ballot, rather than the reverse.

¹⁹ Thomas M. Guterbock, Machine Politics in Transition: Party and Community in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, 4th ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

²⁰ Raymond E. Wolfinger, “Why Political Machines Have Not Withered Away and Other Revisionist Thoughts,” The Journal of Politics 34, no. 2 (1972): 365–98; Harold Zink, Government of Cities in the United States (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939).

²¹ Erie, Rainbow’s End; Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).

²² James C. Scott, “Corruption, Machine Politics, and Political Change.” The American Political Science Review 63, no. 4 (1969): 1144.

²³ The Depression then posed further challenges to those machines that still existed: their resources were dwindling, client demands swelled, and Southern and Eastern European immigrants and their children—who machines had previously sought to keep politically apathetic—were realizing their political power. This threw off machines' ability to maintain the central balance at the heart of patronage politics: having sufficient resources to reward just enough voters to maintain a minimal winning coalition. See Erie, Rainbow’s End.

²⁴ See Mayhew, Placing Parties.

²⁵ During the early years of FDR’s administration, local control was a consequence of the scale and urgency of the emergency; but it persisted because of lobbying both from Southern Congressmen who feared that expanding the federal government’s reach would topple the White supremacist order of the day, and from northern Representatives and cities who did not want the federal government interfering in their patronage systems. See Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Jill S. Quadagno, “Welfare Capitalism and the Social Security Act of 1935,” American Sociological Review 49, no. 5 (1984): 632–47. Kimberley S. Johnson, “The Color Line and the State,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Suzanne Mettler, Richard Valelly, and Robert Lieberman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 121–58; Desmond King, “Forceful Federalism against American Racial Inequality,” Government and Opposition 52, no. 2 (2017): 356–82.

²⁶ WPA relief rolls were typically double the size of a city’s public sector employment, see Erie, Rainbow’s End, 130-31. See also: Lewis, “No Relief from Politics.”

²⁷ Josephine Chapin Brown, Public Relief, 1929-1939 (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1940).

²⁸ Although it relied on existing institutional materials to accomplish its goals, FERA marked a departure from Hoover-era relief policies under the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in two key ways: it offered grants rather loans to states, and attempted to draw a “bright line” between public and private spending that forbade any FERA funds from being administered by private agencies, see Brown, Public Relief,150. As will be discussed later, this line was difficult to draw in practice but the attempt and the changes it fostered were a consequential departure from prior policies, see Elisabeth S. Clemens, Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

²⁹ Ronald E. Marcello, “The Selection of North Carolina’s WPA Chief, 1935: A Dispute Over Political Patronage,” The North Carolina Historical Review 52, no. 1 (1975): 59–76; James T. Patterson, “The New Deal and the States,” The American Historical Review 73, no. 1 (1967): 70–84.

³⁰ As quoted in Patterson, “New Deal and States,” 82. Truman to Farley, August 28, 1936, Democratic National Committee Files, Box 5, Missouri, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

³¹ As quoted in Brown, Public Relief, 172. FER Act of 1933, Public No. 15, Seventy-third Congress, section 3(b).

³² As quoted in Brown, Public Relief, 210. Roosevelt to Hopkins, March 16, 1935 in FERA Monthly Report (March 1935), 18.

³³ Edwin Amenta, et al., “Bring Back the WPA: Work, Relief, and the Origins of American Social Policy in Welfare Reform,” Studies in American Political Development 12, no. 1 (1998): 1–56; David Joseph Maurer, “Public Relief Programs and Policies in Ohio, 1929-1939” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 1962).

³⁴ Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth. McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

³⁵ Much like with other locally administered programs, FERA administration became a mechanism for reproducing racial inequalities, see Amenta et al., “Bring Back the WPA”; Brown, Public Relief; Federal Works Agency, Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935-1943 (Washington, DC, 1946).

³⁶ Federal Works Agency, WPA Program.

³⁷ Philip Harvey, “Learning from the New Deal,” The Review of Black Political Economy 39, no. 1 (2012): 87–105.

³⁸ Lewis, “No Relief from Politics.”

³⁹ Lorena A. Hickok, One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression, ed. Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 163.

⁴⁰ Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Representatives' affiliation with political machines influenced not just the level at which they wanted decisions about New Deal administration to be made, but also their general support for expansive social spending, see Amenta et al., “Bring Back the WPA”; Edwin Amenta and Drew Halfmann, “Wage Wars: Institutional Politics, WPA Wages, and the Struggle for US Social Policy,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 4 (2000): 506–28.

⁴¹ Federal Works Agency, WPA Program.

⁴² Howard, Federal Relief Policy, 144.

⁴³ This changed in 1939, when the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act (ERA) for the WPA included a provision that local relief agencies could now only refer applicants to the WPA, which would have the final authority of certifying their neediness. Prior to this, the WPA had resisted being the one responsible for certifying workers, but Congress sought a greater degree of national uniformity, see Ibid, 361.

⁴⁴ Ibid, 599.

⁴⁵ Ibid, 596–99.

⁴⁶ Price V. Fishback, Shawn Kantor, and John Joseph Wallis, “Can the New Deal’s Three Rs Be Rehabilitated? A Program-by-Program, County-by-County Analysis,” Explorations in Economic History 40, no. 3 (2003): 278–307; John J. Wallis, Price V. Fishback, and Shawn E. Kantor, “Politics, Relief, and Reform. Roosevelt’s Efforts to Control Corruption and Political Manipulation during the New Deal,” in Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History, ed. Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 343–72.

⁴⁷ For example, in his study of the CWA, Lewis argues that because of Hopkins anti-patronage stance, the entire federal government shared that stance, see Lewis, “No Relief from Politics.”

⁴⁸ Patterson, “New Deal and States,” 83.

⁴⁹ Hopkins attempted to subvert Senatorial control over state-wide administrators by exploiting a loophole which allowed administrators from FERA to carry over to the WPA without Senate approval.

⁵⁰ Elias Huzar, “Legislative Control over Administration: Congress and the W. P. A.,” The American Political Science Review 36, no. 1 (1942): 51–67; Arthur W. Macmahon, John D. Millett, and Gladys Ogden, The Administration of Federal Work Relief (Chicago: Published for the Committee on Public Administration of the Social Science Research Council by Public Administration Service, 1941); Ronald E. Marcello, “The Politics of Relief: The North Carolina WPA and the Tar Heel Elections of 1936,” The North Carolina Historical Review 68, no. 1 (1991): 17–37.

⁵¹ Marcello, “Politics of Relief.”

⁵² James E. Sargent, “Woodrum’s Economy Bloc: The Attack on Roosevelt’s WPA, 1937-1939,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 93, no. 2 (1985): 175–207.

⁵³ As quoted in Howard, Federal Relief Policy, 103. Woodrum was, by this point, quite opposed to most New Deal programs, but according to Howard, he was not alone in thinking this way about Senate confirmation. As Howard writes, “Officials who have served in both organizations have declared that requiring Senate confirmation of certain appointments marked the real beginning of political pressures upon the administration of federal relief,” see Ibid, 114.

⁵⁴ Brown, Public Relief; Howard, Federal Relief Policy.

⁵⁵ Erie, Rainbow’s End, 131.

⁵⁶ Howard, Federal Relief Policy; Patterson, “New Deal and States.”

⁵⁷ High, “Politician’s Playground,” 23. Other journalistic accounts at the time also recognized the crucial political role of Senate confirmation (e.g., Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, “The Guffey: Biography of a Boss, New Style,” The Saturday Evening Post, March 26, 1938, 5-7 and 98-102; Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, “The Guffey: The Capture of Pennsylvania.” The Saturday Evening Post, April 16, 1938, 16-17 and 98-103).

⁵⁸ Alsop and Kintner, “Biography of a Boss,” 98.

⁵⁹ As urban machines began to decline and then disappear entirely in the post-WWII era, scholars wondered whether this might be due, in part, to the New Deal itself. The intuition for this claim was rooted in the functionalist account of machine politics: given that machines were often judged immoral by many segments of the public, they must have persisted because they fulfilled some function not being taken care of by other political organizations. See Robert K. Merton, “Some Functions of the Political Machine,” in Social Theory and Social Structure, Revised ed., (New York: Free Press, 1957), 72–82. If that function was to provide for the basic material needs of the public (perhaps in a uniquely personalistic fashion, as Merton claims), then the New Deal would have undermined the need for a machine by directly incorporating citizens into a world of federally-funded social welfare. Even Wolfinger, who insists that machines did not fall by the wayside in the years after the New Deal, recognizes that the federal government’s intervention in social welfare provision indeed undermined the appeal of urban machines. Mayhew’s conclusion is that the New Deal strengthened machines in the short-run (via work relief programs) but undermined them in the long-run, by creating a direct link to welfare that did not run through the local party organization. See Wolfinger, “Revisionist Thoughts”; Mayhew, Placing Parties.

⁶⁰ Katznelson argues that federal funds during a time of scarcity were essential to keeping machines in power and cementing “leader-follower” ties, see Katznelson, City Trenches, 125.

⁶¹ Erie, Rainbow’s End, 137.

⁶² Stave, Pittsburgh Machine Politics.

⁶³ Dorsett, Pendergast Machine; Lyle W. Dorsett, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977); Gordon, “Change in the Political Alignment.”

⁶⁴ Dorsett, Pendergast Machine; Erie, Rainbow’s End; Mayhew, Placing Parties.

⁶⁵ Erie, Rainbow’s End.

⁶⁶ Campbell Gibson, Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States (Washington, DC: Population Division, US Bureau of the Census, 1998); Trounstine, Political Monopolies.

⁶⁷ Boulay and DiGaetano, “Did Political Machines Disappear?”; Trounstine, Political Monopolies; Menes, “Effect of Patronage Politics.”

⁶⁸ Dorsett, Franklin D. Roosevelt; Charles H. Trout, Boston, the Great Depression, and the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

⁶⁹ From Trout, Boston, 42, “James Michael…adroitly pieced together the city’s best-run organization. Circumventing the majority of Democratic ward leaders, Curley relied on his own precinct captains …Paid off with positions at City Hall, Curley’s workers were devoted.”

⁷⁰ Dorsett, Franklin D. Roosevelt; Erie, Rainbow’s End.

⁷¹ Fishback and Kantor, New Deal Studies. U.S. Office of Government Reports, County Reports of Estimated Federal Expenditures March 4, 1933– June 30, 1939, Statistical Section Report, no. 10 (1940); U.S. Office of Government Reports, Direct and Cooperative Loans and Expenditures of the Federal Government for Fiscal Years 1933 through 1939, Statistical Section Report, no. 9 (1940).

⁷² Enid Baird and John Melville Lynch, Public and Private Aid in 116 Urban Areas, 1929-38: With Supplement for 1939 and 1940 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Public Assistance, Social Security Board, 1942).

⁷³ See, for example, J. F. Couch and P. M. Williams, “New Deal or Same Old Shuffle? The Distribution of New Deal Dollars Across Alabama,” Economics & Politics 11, no. 2 (1999): 213–23; Robert K. Fleck, “The Value of the Vote: A Model and Test of the Effects of Turnout on Distributive Policy,” Economic Inquiry 37, no. 4 (1999): 609–23; Wright, “Economy of New Deal Spending.”

⁷⁴ Susan C. Stokes, et al., Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

⁷⁵ Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder Jr, “Party Control of State Government and the Distribution of Public Expenditures,” The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 108, no. 4 (2006): 547–69. Steven J. Balla, et al., “Partisanship, Blame Avoidance, and the Distribution of Legislative Pork,” American Journal of Political Science 46, no. 3 (2002): 515–25. Kenneth N. Bickers and Robert M. Stein, “The Congressional Pork Barrel in a Republican Era,” The Journal of Politics 62, no. 4 (2000): 1070–86. Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins, “Electoral Politics as a Redistributive Game,” The Journal of Politics 48, no. 2 (1986): 370–89. Steven D. Levitt and James M. Snyder Jr., “Political Parties and the Distribution of Federal Outlays,” American Journal of Political Science 39, no. 4 (1995): 958–80.

⁷⁶ Bickers and Stein, “The Congressional Pork Barrel”; Michael C. Herron and Brett A. Theodos, “Government Redistribution in the Shadow of Legislative Elections: A Study of the Illinois Member Initiative Grants Program,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2004): 287–311; Robert M. Stein and Kenneth N. Bickers, “Congressional Elections and the Pork Barrel,” The Journal of Politics 56, no. 2 (1994): 377–99; Wright, “Economy of New Deal Spending.”

⁷⁷ Christopher R. Berry, Barry C. Burden, and William G. Howell, “The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 4 (2010): 783–99; Valentino Larcinese, Leonzio Rizzo, and Cecilia Testa, “Allocating the U.S. Federal Budget to the States: The Impact of the President,” The Journal of Politics 68, no. 2 (2006): 447–56.

⁷⁸ Ansolabehere and Snyder, “Party Control of State Government.”

⁷⁹ Berry, Burden, and Howell, “Distribution of Federal Spending”; Larcinese, Rizzo, and Testa, “Impact of the President.”

⁸⁰ See Stephen Ansolabehere, Alan Gerber, and Jim Snyder, “Equal Votes, Equal Money: Court-Ordered Redistricting and Public Expenditures in the American States,” American Political Science Review 96, no. 4 (2002): 767–77. To calculate this, we measured each county’s number of Congressional Representatives based on areal weights linking historic county and Congressional District boundaries, see: Andreas Ferrara, Patrick Testa, and Liyang Zhou, “New Area- and Population-Based Geographic Crosswalks for U.S. Counties and Congressional Districts, 1790-2020,” SSRN Working Paper. More specifically, we used the weights to calculate the area of each county that fell in each intersecting district, and then calculated the portion of that district covered by that county. We then aggregated by county for a county-level count of Representatives, divided population, and normalized this measure at the state-level per Ansolabehere, Gerber, and Snyder.

⁸¹ Fishback, Kantor, and Wallis, “New Deal’s Three R’s”; Wallis, Fishback, and Kantor, “Politics, Relief, and Reform.”

⁸² Given that the Census is collected only decennially, we have used linear interpolation to estimate the demographic measures for election years between censuses. Where linear interpolation was necessary, we followed the Census' recommended method of estimation, which uses a weighted average of the two decennial years to estimate the population in the intervening, see U.S. Census Bureau, Methodology for the Intercensal Population and Housing Unit Estimates: 2000 to 2010, (Washington, DC: Census Bureau, 2012), https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/technical-documentation/methodology/intercensal/2000-2010-intercensal-estimates-methodology.pdf.

⁸³ Alberto Abadie, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller, “Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 105, no. 490 (2010): 493–505.

⁸⁴ Alberto Abadie, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller, “Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 2 (2015): 496.

⁸⁵ Howard, Federal Relief Policy.

⁸⁶ Fishback, Kantor, and Wallis, “New Deal’s Three R’s.”

⁸⁷ Wright, “Economy of New Deal Spending.”

⁸⁸ As Erie writes: “The New Deal coalition also strengthened a new generation of Irish machines being built in cities such as Chicago and Pittsburgh.” See also: Dorsett, Franklin D. Roosevelt; Schickler, Racial Realignment.

⁸⁹ Alsop and Kintner, “Biography of a Boss”; Alsop and Kintner, “The Capture of Pennsylvania.”

⁹⁰ Alsop and Kintner, “The Capture of Pennsylvania,” 17.

⁹¹ Schickler, Racial Realignment.

⁹² Alsop and Kintner, “Biography of a Boss”; Alsop and Kintner, “The Capture of Pennsylvania.”

⁹³ Gordon, “Change in the Political Alignment.” See also: Richard Keiser, Subordination or Empowerment?: African-American Leadership and the Struggle for Urban Political Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

⁹⁴ Henderson, “Political Changes in Chicago.”

⁹⁵ Gordon, “Change in the Political Alignment.”

⁹⁶ Dorsett, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

⁹⁷ Dorsett, Pendergast Machine.

⁹⁸ Trounstine, Political Monopolies.

⁹⁹ Mayhew, Placing Parties.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid, 321.

¹⁰¹ Ternullo, “Electoral Effects.”