The gentle reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleveland era.

An incisive study of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts from 1880 to the turn of the century, this book focuses on the responses of the party’s articulate leadership in and around Boston to a broad array of city, state, and national issues. Geoffrey Blodgett examines how and why several incongruous groups, Irish as well as Yankee, formed a delicate coalition within the party to advance a program of conservative, or “gentle,” reform. Framed against the background of local ethnic tension and a rising tide of national party crisis, this case study in political failure portrays a group of energetic but bewildered men who became the casualties, not the heralds, of reform. PREFACE CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE. 1884 CHAPTER TWO. THE MUGWUMP MIND CHAPTER THREE. THE VICTORS AND THE SPOILS CHAPTER FOUR. THE TARIFF AND THE YOUNG DEMOCRATS CHAPTER FIVE. THE STATE: EFFORTS AT REFORM CHAPTER SIX. THE CITY: EFFORTS AT COOPERATION CHAPTER SEVEN. THE NATION: EFFORTS AT CONTROL CHAPTER EIGHT. 1896 CHAPTER NINE. MAYOR QUINCY'S BOSTON CHAPTER TEN. AFTERMATH SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY NOTES INDEX