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The tolerance of the party bosses toward immigrants was above all strategic. Boss Tweed of New York started off politically as a nativist, yet eventually spent the rest of his career courting immigrants, if only because he had no choice. In exchange for votes, he provided immigrants with jobs, loans, and services. Similarly, John Powers became Chicago's most powerful boss between 1896 and 1921 by “taking care” of his Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, Jewish, and Slavic constituencies. In addition to providing employment and community facilities, Powers attended every variety of ethnic wedding, picnic, or parade. His skill at “working” funerals for political gain earned him the nickname “The Mourner.”

The corruption practiced by the new machine bosses was staggering. Bribery, extortion, and vote buying were routine practices. In New York City, Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall embezzled as much as $200 million between 1865 and 1871 alone. In 1898, the Chicago newspaper L'Italia quoted John Powers as saying, “I can buy the Italian vote with a glass of beer and a compliment” and “It is known that two years ago I bought the Italian vote for fifty cents each; well this year I will buy it for twenty-five cents each.” But however sordid, the politics of the urban machine had positive aspects as well. In a pre-New Deal era, the ward bosses often provided desperately needed social services. More fundamentally, the symbiotic relationship between the bosses and immigrants served to integrate and lift previously excluded ethnic groups, particularly the Irish and Italians.16

The triumphal story of America's westward expansion was also of course a story of Native American contraction; the immigrants’ gain was the natives’ loss. As Americans marched west, they did not follow the formula of strategic tolerance and incorporation that the ancient Persians, Romans, or Mongols had pursued with their conquered peoples. Unfortunately for America's natives, the United States was in a unique position for an expanding, conquering power. It had another source of population growth, offering greater numbers and technologically superior skills. Americans, it seemed, had no use for a well-honed arrowhead. Such is the brutal reality of selective, strategic tolerance. Even as the United States welcomed the huddled masses of Europe, the indigenous tribes of America were decimated, cordoned off, and displaced.

Natives were not the only ones excluded from the benefits of America's strategic tolerance. Women could not vote and were almost totally excluded from positions of economic or political power (although the United States suffered no relative disadvantage, because women were similarly excluded elsewhere). In the Western states toward the end of the century, Chinese immigrants were subject to bigotry, discrimination, and physical attacks. Most glaringly, the United States did not abolish slavery until 1865, thirty years after Great Britain, and even after its postwar Reconstruction, the United States remained a deeply racist society.

Nevertheless, nineteenth-century American society had three crucial features that made it wide open to people of remarkably diverse backgrounds. Its religious pluralism was so freewheeling that it not only permitted newcomers to worship as they pleased but continually sparked brand-new faiths. (By the twentieth century, the United States boasted at least five “homegrown” religions with major followings: Christian Science, Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Pentecostalism.) Its democratic system of government was capable, both despite and because of its corruption, of giving newcomers some actual political influence, at least at the local level. And its rollicking free market sucked up labor, rewarded mechanical skill, and provided undreamt-of opportunities to the enterprising. Other nineteenth-century nations might offer bits or pieces of these three advantages; none had all three to the same extent as America.

Thus