Plunkitt of Tammany Hall
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics was written by William L. Riordan in 1905.
TODO: write!
Reading Notes
Classically, this is a propagandist work. Plunkitt presented a neat picture of 'honest graft' that makes himself and Tammany Hall look good. It works as propaganda because it fits with what we want to believe about politics, and discusses the real problems of poverty in a frank manner. Ultimately though, it doesn't fit with the antidemocratic, covert, and violent schemes that actually reinforced machine politics.
The contemporaries that corroborated this report had immediate incentives (i.e., for reporters, an incentive for a big scoop; for city politicians, a positive spin on their politics; for poverty advocates, an incentive to highlight the potential political power if programs were created to help the poor) that should make readers doubt rather than trust.