Traditional reform, municipal populism, and progressivism: challenges to machine politics in early-twentieth-century New York City

Support for reform candidates followed three distinct patterns, identified as traditional reform, municipal populist, and progressive. Whether traditional-reform and municipal-populist voters could be brought together to form a progressive coalition depended on the way experts were incorporated into city politics. The coalition that elected John Purroy Mitchel mayor of New York in 1913 combined traditional-reform voters who had previously supported Seth Low with municipal-populist voters who had previously supported William Randolph Hearst, but tensions between business interests and the experts who helped to construct Mitchel's coalition contributed to the fragmentation of the progressive coalition in the election of 1917.