The O'Connell Machine, Forty-Two Years of One-Party Albany

In the early nineteen twenties, Daniel P. O'Connell and his brothers seized control of Albany's Democratic Party from a Republican machine that had run the city for decades. What they built in its place was among the longest-lived urban political machines in American history.

The mechanics were straightforward: patronage, loyalty, and the ward organization. Every city job, every county contract, every permit that moved through Albany city government was connected to the machine. You supported the organization, and the organization took care of you.

You crossed it, and things became difficult. O'Connell never held high office himself. He ran the machine from behind the scenes for decades, the permanent chairman of Albany County Democrats, the real authority behind whatever official sat in the mayor's chair.

The figure he eventually elevated to that chair was Erastus Corning the Second, great-grandson of the railroad baron who had built New York Central. Corning was elected mayor in nineteen forty-one and held the office for over forty-one years, until his death in May of nineteen eighty-three. He won eleven consecutive four-year terms.

No mayor of any large American city served longer. One historian described Corning's tenure as long on years and short on accomplishments. Others noted that Albany under the machine was orderly, stable in its fashion, and deeply resistant to the urban renewal disruptions that wrecked other northeastern cities.

O'Connell himself died in nineteen seventy-seven, after more than fifty years at the center of Albany's political life. The machine lasted, in one form or another, into the early nineteen eighties, making it a specimen of American municipal politics that historians still study.