Electoral Capitalism

Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer has made an important original contribution to our understanding of Gilded Age America. As a political scientist he has dug deeply into the emergence of what he calls electoral capitalism, “a category of entrepreneurship in which the capture of public office and the accumulation of private wealth are mutually reinforcing endeavors” (p. 6). Broxmeyer's focus on the nation's largest and most politically contested state, paralleled by the emergence of New York City as the national center of finance and capital accumulation, allows him to demonstrate how politics begat wealth. The book's first chapter offers a fresh analysis of how William M. Tweed and his allies used four savings banks chartered by the state to transform political power into economic capital. Tammany Hall sustained them with money from city deposits, Catholic charities, and the earnings of poor working people. Tweed and other Tammany Hall leaders financed an array

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