There were two principal differences between political parties in the European style, and the American political machines of the period you're interested in. The first was that, in the Europe of the 19th century, the franchise was frequently fairly restricted, and those who had the right to vote were often required to pass wealth or property qualifications – in Britain it was long necessary to control property or possess the freehold on a property worth at least 40 shillings a year in rent. This was intended to ensure that voters had a stake in their society, with the idea that this investment would make them more careful with their vote and hence that radical or revolutionary political movements would find it much harder to establish a foothold. In contrast, the US, certainly from the 1850s, offered the vote to all adult white males, irrespective of wealth and, for the most part of tax-paying status. The second difference was in part a consequence of the first, but also of the nature of the way the US population grew via mass immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries: vast numbers of immigrant votes were available, and recent immigrants often had relatively slender ties, and felt relatively little loyalty, to the political institutions of their new country; they also tended to live far more marginal lives, and devoted far more of their attentions to the business of merely surviving, and eventually prospering, in the US than did the wealthy and established voters based in European countries with older and more socially and geographically stable populations.

Because there were vast numbers of new immigrants to New York, and because those people came from a many different regions, countries and ethnic and religious backgrounds, families arriving in, say, Manhattan might have relatively few people they could turn to for help in finding accommodation and jobs and very probably knew and cared little or nothing about the national political platforms of the Democrats and the Republicans. Rather, the relationship between Tammany Hall – the name given to the Manhattan, and eventually the entire New York Democratic political machine – and its immigrant voters was far more nakedly transactional than the equivalent relationships that existed between European political parties and their voters.

It was common practice for immigrants arriving in New York to be met at the docks by Tammany "block leaders", politicians who each ran a small district of Manhattan and who helped with any legal niceties, and offered assistance in finding apartments and jobs — a hand of friendship that naturally produced a pay–off at election time and resulted in the Hall itself acquiring the Irish Catholic affiliations that characterised it well into the twentieth century. Once an immigrant family was tentatively established in New York, they would know the local Tammany leader by sight and know they could turn to him for assistance in extremis. By the 1890s, the most committed and successful machine district leaders were on duty virtually 24 hours a day, providing a range of services that would have humbled a modern bureaucracy.

Thus, George Washington Plunkitt – a famous Tammany sage and for years the powerful boss of Hell’s Kitchen, a slum district on the Upper West Side – once talked a reporter through his working day. It typically began, he said, only two hours after he had retired to bed at midnight, with a knock on the door and a request to bail out a bartender arrested for violating the excise law. Having called at the police station, the boss was up again at 6am, awakened by the noise of fire engines passing his house. Dressing quickly and following the engines — fires, Plunkitt explained, were great vote–getters — he found several tenants who had been burned out, took them to a hotel, supplied them with food and clothing, and arranged temporary accommodation. By 8.30am he was in court, where he prevailed upon the magistrate to discharge four drunks and paid fines on behalf of another two. At 9 he was advancing the rent for a poor family so far in arrears they were about to be thrown into the street; at 11 he was at home, arranging jobs for four men who had called on him for help. At 3 in the afternoon, he attended the funeral of an Italian constituent, and in the early evening a Jewish ceremony at the synagogue. Around 7pm he visited district headquarters to hear the reports of his district captains; at 8 he was buying drinks for constituents at a church fair; at 9 he was listening to complaints from pedlars and buying tickets for a church excursion, and at 10.30pm he looked in on a Jewish wedding, "having previously sent a handsome wedding present to the bride." At midnight he went back to bed and the entire cycle began again.

"What tells in holding your grip on your district," Plunkitt said,

is to go right down among the poor families, and help them in the different ways they need help. I’ve got a regular system for this. If there’s a fire in Ninth, Tenth, or Eleventh Avenue, for example, any hour of the day or night, I’m usually there with some of my election district captains at the same time as the fire engines. If a family is burned out, I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help at about the time they were dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up till they get things running again. It’s philanthropy, but it’s politics, too – mighty good politics.

Who can tell how many votes one of these fires bring me? The poor are the most grateful people in the world, and, let me tell you, they have more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in theirs.

If there’s a family in my district in want, I know it before the charitable societies do, and me and my men are first on the ground. I have a special corps to look up such cases. The consequence is that the poor look up to George W. Plunkitt as a father, come to him in trouble – and don’t forget him on election day.

Similarly, Big Tim Sullivan, probably the most famous of the Tammany leaders at the turn of the 20th century, was known to rise at dawn to lead gangs of the unemployed uptown to find labouring jobs on public works, and served a vast annual Christmas dinner to as many as 5,000 Bowery bums, on one occasion spending $7,000 to set out a spread comprising 10,000 pounds of turkey together with hams, stuffing, potatoes, 500 loaves of bread, 5,000 pies, 200 gallons of coffee and a hundred kegs of beer. In the summer months he organised elaborate clambakes and chowders in Harlem River Park or on Long Island. These day–long celebrations typically included ‘a clam fritter breakfast, amateur track and field competitions, fish and chicken dinner, beer, band music and dancing, and a late–night return with torchlight parade and fireworks. Sideshow entertainments ran the gamut from impromptu prize fights to pickup baseball games to pie–eating contests to the awarding of a barrel of flour to the couple with the largest family.’ The chowders served a two–fold purpose, cementing the Sullivan clan’s reputation among the tenement poor while providing Big Tim and his cronies with an excuse to shake down businessmen and saloon–keepers along the Bowery — each of whom was expected to buy sheaves of $5 tickets.