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The Church and the Political Machine

The Church and the Political Machine

Last updated on: January 29, 2026 at 11:08 am by William Droel

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The Church and the Political Machine 2026-01-29T11:08:36-06:00 William Droel

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The Catholic church and the political machine had a symbiotic relationship in Chicago and elsewhere for many years. So argues Dominic Pacyga in his latest book: Clout City (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Chicago politics was “a mixture of the sacred and the profane, a combination of cultural and religious roots and more worldly pursuits,” he writes. “Chicago is a secular, capitalist city, but one with a religious core.” Pacyga includes synagogues and Jewish organizations on the religious side. Both the machine and the church/synagogue were compassionate alternatives to the Protestant establishment, popularly called downtown or big corporate.

Within his timeframe, 1870 to 2023, Pacyga profiles many of the key actors in the machine, most of whom were Democrats. The machine’s efficient years were 1930-1965 when it was largely associated with Richard J Daley (1902-1976), who served 21 years as Chicago mayor and 23 years as the party’s chair in the county. His son Richard M Daley, now in his mid-80s, subsequently served 22 years as mayor.

The machine was hierarchical. The boss relied on faithful commissioners to oversee city services. With rare exceptions the boss also controlled the city council. The council member (called the alderman in Chicago lingo) was paired with a ward committee person. The next level (covering maybe four to a dozen blocks) was the responsibility of a precinct captain, whose day job was often with the city.

The machine had a practical communitarian mindset in contrast to society’s dominant philosophy of individual achievement. A collective mentality was nurtured, in part, by ethnic and religious culture, says Pacyga. He uses De La Salle High School in Chicago’s near southside as an example. It was “a political incubator” for machine politicians, Pacyga details. Five mayors including the Daley’s graduated from De La Salle. Plus, the school educated two county presidents and “countless other politicians, judges and city officials [and] numerous businesspeople, police officers, firefighters and a host of city workers.” That high school stressed order, hierarchy and loyalty. It “encouraged Catholic attitudes toward fairness, duty and sin, often in deep contrast to the rampant individualism and unbridled capitalism” of Chicago.

Of course, the machine had corruption. However, neighborhood people overlooked it, as long as the community at large benefited from jobs, emergency assistance, license considerations, snow removal, trash collection, fire and police protection. The machine “existed side by side with an approach to political governance that derived from and centered on the communalism of Chicago’s immigrant and working-class communities.”

A similar description of New York’s machine, called Tammany Hall, is found in Terry Golway’s Machine Made (W.W. Norton, 2014). Again, political corruption was taken for granted. But for New York’s immigrants, especially those from Ireland, Tammany was able “to mediate the capriciousness of laissez-faire capitalism.” It delivered jobs and social services to working families in a respectful manner, untainted by paternal noblesse oblige.

As in Chicago, the New York machine relied implicitly on a foundation in the Catholic experience. Golway devotes several pages to Archbishop John Hughes (1797-1864), describing him as “aggressive and political to his very marrow.” Hughes, originally from Ireland, explained the feeling of Irish and other immigrants: For the first five days of my life, I was “on social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire. Then I was baptized as a Catholic and became a second-class citizen.”

In time the machine model of urban politics disintegrated, Pacyga says. The corruption became too enriching for too few while service delivery declined. Further, the post-1960s reform movement within the Democratic Party drew its leaders into elite circles. They associated with tech barons and favored focus groups over the word on the street. The Democrats supported several cultural causes foreign to the Catholic sensibility. Suburbanization was the big factor in the machine’s decline. As immigrants left the city, they took on aspirations of the upper-class. Their Catholicism, if it remained at all, was like the individualism of evangelicals.

Nowadays, does a local politician or a pastor have any influence on one’s difficulties with health insurance or with internet providers or with immigration policies or employment opportunities? Does the notion of community have any traction in a society where the sum of striving individuals is the ethical norm? Is a government or church model based on services in any way compelling to today’s young adults? Should there be a new machine and what form would it take?

Droel edits a printed newsletter on faith and work: INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

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