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This unique text assesses the state of patronage in the United States today through detailed case studies of large scale patronage operations in Chicago, in the state of Illinois, and in suburban Nassau County in Long Island, New York. Freedman examines how these patronage systems operated and managed to persist long after patronage was supposed to have ended. She also details how reformers working through the courts have affected these systems and altered the practice of patronage. The cases shed light on contemporary party politics and the activities of political machines.

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• Preface
• 1 From the Beginning
• 2 Doing Battle with the Patronage Army
• 3 The State of Patronage: Indiana, Wisconsin, and Illinois
• 4 The Last Political Machine
• 5 Patronage After Rutan: Is the Party Over?
• Notes
• Index

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CHOICE Review

Freedman's study of patronage in the US is both interesting and informative as it takes the reader inside the political machines of Daley's Chicago, Koch's New York, Thompson's Illinois, and the Republican Party of Nassau County. Drawing from a multitude of published and unpublished sources, Freedman adds considerably to a relatively sparse collection of works which focus primarily on the political machines of the sixties and earlier. (See Martin and Susan Tolchin's To The Victor (1971), and David R. Mayhew's Placing Parties in American Plitics (CH, Jan'87). By book's end, however, the analysis has become a polemic against the practice of patronage as Freeman strives at every turn to refute Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion in the 1990 Rutan case, which declared politically based hiring unconstitutional. Scalia predicted that, by accelerating the disintegration of political parties, the ruling would have "disastrous consequences" for the political system. Freedman disagrees and further warns that although Rutan and other factors have contributed to the decline of patronage, pronouncements of its death are premature. She concludes by calling for additional reform to "reduce the patronage army to a few platoons." General; undergraduate; graduate; faculty. A. C. Titus; University of Nevada, Las Vegas