A Political Machine in Practice Lesson

This is a lesson for A Political Machine in Practice.

National Curriculum Standards:

Learners will understand mechanisms by which governments meet the needs and wants of citizens, regulate territory, manage conflict, establish order and security, and balance competing conceptions of a just society.

Specific Objective:

Students will be able to understand how a political machine worked by actually becoming one and trying to resolve several cases for the people.

Materials:

Worksheet provided.

Lesson:

In this lesson, students get to understand how political machines worked by actually becoming one! (There is no better way to learn how crooks work than by being a crook yourself). Divide the class in pairs and tell them that they are the city boss of New York (Boss Tweed) sitting at the top of a political machine. Tell them that they’ll try to be as corrupt as possible in making certain decisions.

When you go over the worksheet, you may want to mention that Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall paid $13 million for a construction job, when it actually cost $3. Where did the rest go to??? And there were all kinds of shady things going on.

Political Machine Activity

For this activity, students will be a city boss standing at the top of the pyramid of a political machine. They are therefore going to try to be as corrupt as possible in order for them to understand how political machines worked.

These are their two main goals:

1.     To remain in power by becoming reelected (they want to win the favor of many ignorant immigrants who don’t know much about what’s going on but have many needs)

2.     Pocket as much money as possible whether it comes from a person or government funds.

An editable 5-page Word doc