“It is the insolent disregard of public welfare, the deliberate exclusion of intelligent and honest men from office, the refusal to reason about public policy, the shameless corruption of its leaders, its organized methods of deception, bribery, and blackmail with public jobbery and frauds upon the tax-payers, that make machine politics so despicable in the estimation of the public conscience.” (_Idem_, p. 268.)
All nominations for public office to be voted on by the people are made by a machine whatever may be the party in whose name they are made. This is true not only of the high offices, such as president, governor, senator, etc., but also of such lower offices as mayor, judges of the state courts, state senators and assemblymen. Sometimes these nominations are made at primaries which are carried by the boss through the local organizations; or at political conventions also controlled by the machine. The details of the secret manipulations under the recent primary laws have not yet been and may never be published and exposed; but those of the old political conventions were laid bare in a book published in 1899 by Senator Breen, an experienced politician of New York. He there describes the power of the bosses and the subserviency of the masses.
“There is scarcely a place on earth (says Breen) where one can see so fully the extremes of sycophancy to which human nature will descend as one does in a political convention in the City of New York.... I blush to record the fact that the convention which I attended (and the same may be said of every political convention in this city even at the present day) was composed of as spineless a lot of creatures as ever prostrated themselves before a throne, or crouched in the presence of autocratic power. Subserviency was shown not only to the local leader or deputy boss himself, but to the understrappers, who were supposed to have his ear. Not able to get into the immediate presence of the leader, persons well dressed and apparently prosperous, as well as those who were ill conditioned, fawned upon forbidding looking beings who were supposed to be close to the leader, and whose intelligence was limited to understanding orders and obeying them....