Word: committeemen
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...target has been the 10,000 city hall patronage jobs awarded to the city's 50 ward committeemen on the basis of their performance at the polls. The more votes they bring out, the more jobs they get for friends. When public scolding, sarcasm and humiliation did not force committeemen into line, Calamity Jane, as her detractors also call her, fired or demoted their friends outright. But the younger Daley refused to knuckle under and has emerged as the biggest threat to her drive for total power...
...convention, which will conduct a nonbinding "beauty contest," and two weeks ago, he was able to run about even with Reagan in one of the first county gatherings.) In Illinois, party leaders in both houses of the legislature, the state G.O.P. finance committee chairman and most G.O.P. state central committeemen have signed on for the Connally campaign...
...regular Democratic ward organizations are the engines which use that fuel to keep the machine running strong. They are the base the machine rests on. The city is broken into 50 wards, each with its own boss, the ward committeeman, who is elected in the party's mayoral primary. Committeemen choose the man who will run for alderman or for the state legislature from their area--subject to Daley's approval naturally--and they often pick themselves. Since Democrats usually win the general election, the main battle is during the primaries, and to keep control of the party, the machine...
...churchmen have been special targets for abuse. New York's Reverend Samuel Seabury once tried to argue the case for Loyalism in his Letters of a Westchester Farmer ("If I must be enslaved, let it be by a KING at least, and not by a parcel of upstart, lawless Committeemen. If I must be devoured, let me be devoured by the jaws of a lion, and not gnawed to death by rats and vermine"). Instead of being devoured, he was kidnaped and imprisoned for a month by a marauding band of Connecticut Patriots...
What was said about the influence of the aristocrats and the old members applies equally well to the committee, especially as the two loci of power tend to overlap. In both societies the effectiveness of individual committeemen varies enormously from individual to individual. But it must be conceded that the committee is far more important at the co-op than in the longhouse. The reason for this is that the latter consists of many families, each of which is a unit of production and consumption, while at the co-op house all cooking is done on one hearth and everyone...