Boss Tweed near the height of his plundering was cornered by reporters and accused of defrauding the public. "What are you going to do about it?" he said. Lincoln Steffens called this "the most humiliating challenge ever issued by the One Man to the Many," which was arguable, but it colored everything that urban scholars later wrote about civic re-form. Steffens was characteristically gloomy about what, exactly, would be done: "Reform with us," he observed, "is usually revolt, not government, and is soon over." In 1871 a re-form revolt toppled the boss of bosses from power; similar spasms toppled his Tammany heirs four times between 1894 and 1933. Yet Tammany always emerged stronger, better managed, because nothing much seemed to get done under reform administrations. Tweed and the boss crowd were portrayed as frothing monkeys and birds of prey, but the worst of the reformers were effete, priggish, Protestant, patrician, reaching backward to an edenic state of governance-pre-immigrant, Yankee-pure-that probably never existed and could not exist. The bosses called them "Goo-Goos," "YMCA types," "silk hats and silk socks and nothing in between." The masses wanted tangibles; the reformers gave them ideology. The reformers often were more interested in legislating morality-shutting saloons, jailing prostitutes-than in improving conditions, though the message was couched in high concern. Put "good men" in place of the monkeys and vultures, the theory went, and presto, you'd have a new age in governance. Sincerity, of course, did not translate to intelligent action.

Still, cycles of reform and reaction were as regular as the seasons, a law of political life. Nationally, the Populist Party, born in 1892 of agrarian unrest, decried the "vast conspiracy against mankind" represented by "capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts," and the "millionaire's club" that was the U.S. Senate in the Gilded Age (and still is). The "people's party" demanded fair wages, government ownership of utilities, corporate regulation-the first national progressive platform. Four years later, the people got William McKinley, the robber baron's president. McKinley's manager, the Ohio senator and boss Mark Hanna, pioneered the modern campaign of the mass corporate shakedown, raising an unprecedented $7 million (some $150 million today). En revanche, there was Theodore Roosevelt, whose "Square Deal" balanced business and regulation, and, as a result, set the federal government on course to its modern shape.

Roosevelt's playbook in this uphill fight was written in the cities, where by 1900 the most effective reformers, not surprisingly, had harnessed bossism to the cause. The so-called reform bosses, notably in Cleveland and Detroit, used the powers of the machine to regulate or purchase outright the franchises and utilities and public transit that had produced such lucrative graft. They established unemployment relief, workplace safety, the eight-hour day, fair taxation. The convictions embodied in the Square Deal, the New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal, the Great Society-the structures that made the bosses irrelevant-were all born, to some degree, out of the Democratic rank-and-file of the urban machines. The reform bosses had reformed themselves out of existence.