No, Brer Fox, don't throw me in the Roxbury briar patch!

I am trying to be grateful to the kind souls who sent me books from my Amazon wish list, but whoever sent me The Boston Irish: A Political History must have known that his gift amounted to first-degree drug trafficking through the public mails. I remain, as ever, a slave to my obsessions:

"I think that there's got to be in every ward somebody that any bloke can come to—no matter what he's done—and get help," Martin Lomasney is reported to have told the writer and social critic Lincoln Steffens in the course of his research into the plight of American cities. "Help, you understand," said the ward boss, emphasizing the particularistic nature of the ethnic philosophy, "none of your law and justice, but help."

The ethic of the Boston machine was "Justice is for strangers" with an Irish accent; this much we knew already. What I hadn't known before reading O'Connor's book is that the story of Boston politics offers further support for my theory that the federal government is responsible for every bad thing that happens, ever:

In the past, the lifeblood of any political organization had been the ability of the boss to deliver the greatest number of favors—jobs, cash, housing, medical care, legal assistance—in the shortest amount of time, to the greatest number of friends and supporters. With the passage of New Deal legislation such as social security, unemployment insurance, and workmen's compensation, followed after World War II by the wide-ranging benefits of the GI Bill, including temporary employment, housing loans, professional training, and educational benefits, there was little reason for anyone to go to the local ward boss for help...

...which, insofar as help from a ward boss came with responsibilities and help from Uncle Sam never does, was bad.

I understand that Blagojevich season is hardly the time to take a stand in favor of municipal machines, but it's perfectly consistent to endorse the system without endorsing its every manifestation. After all, John Lydon loved a Manchester/Arsenal brawl as much as anyone when he was coming up and yet regards the modern culture of football hooliganism as dangerous and destructive. The difference? Modern brawlers use weapons. If the switch from fists to knives can be the Godfather of Punk's deal-breaker, then surely I can make a deal-breaker of the difference between honest and dishonest graft.

The punchline of my Beantown-centric reading list, of course, is that it has made me more pro-immigration than I can possibly admit among respectable paleocons. Take this for an iron law: Where immigrants are, there shall urban machines develop.

*I don't mean to suggest that machines had no power after the New Deal. They were, for example, effective at nixing urban renewal programs that threatened their neighborhoods in the late 60's: "It was hardly a coincidence that Mayor Collins and Edward Logue scheduled no major urban renewal projects for the larger and more heavily populated wards with strong representations in the city council—certainly not for the Italian districts of East Boston or the North End, with councillors Freddie Langone and Chris Ianella on the alert. Plans for extensive urban renewal in Irish South Boston were called off in the face of bitter opposition from city councillors Bill Foley and Johnny Kerrigan against professional reformers and idealistic do-gooders who went into working-class neighborhoods and tried to tell people how to live, how to fix up their homes, and how to run their schools."