This classic work presents the candid wit and wisdom of George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924), a longtime state senator from New York who represented the Fifteenth Assembly District and was especially powerful in New York City. Plunkitt was part of the city's Tammany Hall organization and a cynical practitioner of what today is generally known as "machine politics," a patronage-based system in which politicians openly exercise power for personal gain....
As a reporter for the “New York Evening Post” during the time of New York’s Tammany Hall Machine, William L. Riordan compiled and published this work in 1905 from a series of articles he wrote on George Washington Plunkitt, the millionaire ward boss of New York’s 15th District. Plunkitt is best remembered as a streetwise politician who practiced what he called “honest graft”, or what is otherwise known today as “machine politics”. Of the Tammany Hall bosses, he alone spoke candidly and on the...
