American Experiment (198 page)

At the base of the pyramid lived and toiled the millions of industrial workers. “Assimilate” quickly or “face a quiet but sure extermination,” the
Scientific American
had warned the “ruder” laborers of Europe in 1869. “Forget your past, your customs, and your ideals,” a guidebook for immigrant Jews advised in the 1890s. “Do not take a moment’s rest. Run, do, work.” A Yiddish poet struck back at the “clock in the workshop” that urged him to labor and still labor on:

The tick of the clock is the boss in his anger.

The face of the clock has the eyes of the foe.

The clock—I shudder—Dost hear how it draws me?

It calls me “Machine” and it cries to me “Sew”!

About two in the morning of a summer’s day around the turn of the century, a Tammany district leader was awakened by the ringing of his doorbell: it was a bartender asking him to walk down to the police station and bail out a saloon-keeper who had run afoul of the law. The leader did so, got back to bed around three, only to be awakened again at six by fire engines. He followed the engines to the fire, met there with several of his district captains, took several burned-out tenants to a hotel, found them food, clothes, and temporary quarters.

After breakfast the leader repaired to the police court, where he found six of his people charged with drunkenness. He persuaded the judge to release four of them, and paid the fines of the other two. Half an hour later, at the municipal district court, he instructed one of his captains to represent a widow who was being dispossessed, and he paid the rent of a poor family also facing eviction, handing them a dollar for food. When he returned home at eleven
A.M.
he found three men who said they were looking for work. He found them jobs with the subway, the Consolidated Gas Company, and on the road, and he fixed things up for a fourth man who had been sacked by the Metropolitan Railway Company for neglect of duty.

The leader had only an hour for lunch before attending the funeral of an Italian constituent over by the ferry, and then rushing to the funeral of a Jewish voter. He made himself quietly conspicuous at both rites. Later he attended Hebrew confirmation ceremonies at a synagogue.

After dinner the leader presided over an hour-long meeting of his election district captains. Each reported on the political situation in his district, constituents in trouble and needing help, their attitude toward the party and its candidates. Then the leader visited a church fair, bought chances on everything, kissed the babies, jollied their mothers, and walked the fathers around the corner for a drink. Back at the clubhouse he bought tickets to a local baseball game, promised a subscription for a new church bell, and told a group of pushcart peddlers complaining about police persecution that he would go to the precinct station in the morning and see about it. Later in the evening he attended a Jewish wedding reception and dance, and got to bed by midnight.

The name of this Tammany Hall leader was George Washington Plunkitt and he would attain a special niche in American history not because his activities were unusual—on the contrary, this sort of thing was what he and scores of others did day after day—but because he was unusually candid
about his activities, remarkably perceptive about the political world he lived in, and had a reporter friend, William L. Riordon, who carefully listened to him. To some, Plunkitt seemed almost a caricature, but allowing for a little blarney and a measure of exaggeration, the picture that emerged of him was true-to-life and important. Plunkitt was a leader in one of the most enduring power structures in American history.

Tammany as an organization was well over a century old by the time it reached its zenith in the 1890s. It had long since shed its old role as primarily a patriotic and philanthropic society. As political parties became more highly organized during the century, Tammany had turned into the power center of the Manhattan Democracy. Just as its sachems had championed the right to vote for the propertyless during earlier years, now the district leaders saw to it that immigrants and the rest of the poor had the practical right to vote. Tammany was unique in its longevity, not its organization. Similar “machines” existed in most of the big industrializing cities—some Republican, as in Philadelphia; some less centralized, as in Chicago; some less polyglot in membership, as in Detroit; but all with the same essential grass-roots structure and function.

That structure, in scores of cities across the nation, embraced a ward-and-precinct organization of party activists who might hold patronage or other jobs but made party business their main business. The party was organized in near-military fashion, with committeemen reporting to district captains, the captains to the district leader, and that leader to the boss or bosses of the whole organization. Typically the committeemen had deep and enduring roots in their neighborhoods. They formed a durable cadre that continued through the decades even while the top bosses came and went. Control at the top might be in the hands of one boss or a collectivity, but in either event the core of the organization was grass-roots leadership.

The formal function of the party machine was to help nominate and elect officeholders across the whole range of government, from the most local office to the President of the United States. Its informal functions included diverse activities all designed to ensure its continued influence. The burden of its business was dispensing the kind of assistance to constituents to which the Plunkitts devoted so much of their time. Not only were there turkeys at Christmas, and legal aid and help with authorities, but splendid treats—excursions up the river with bands playing, St. Patrick’s Day parades, picnics, ball, sports events. Plunkitt had his own baseball team, and a glee club for the young folks. Catering to polyglot immigrant neighborhoods, the organization usually played no ethnic favorites, at least among whites. And the aid was usually specific, concrete, practical.

“I think that there s got to be in every ward somebody that any bloke can come to—no matter what he’s done—and get help,” Boston ward leader Martin Lomasney said to Lincoln Steffens.
“Help, you understand; none of your law and justice, but help.”
Perhaps the party bosses’ greatest achievement was to meet people’s basic needs of food and shelter without robbing them of their equal need for self-esteem.

But the city parties were more than welfare-dispensing machines. “As part of the developing relationship between bosses and immigrants, the political machine became an avenue of advance—and, quite possibly, of ‘Americanization’—for many citizens with foreign names,” according to Charles Glaab and A. Theodore Brown. “The machine offered more than labor jobs in public or utility construction. For the brighter and more ambitious young men, there were clerical and other white collar positions in the machine itself; such positions represented for many the first step toward middle class respectability.” The Horatio Alger ideal was not unknown in the precincts.

In the process of helping people, the bosses performed another function, even to a perverse degree—they united a fragmented governmental system and made it perform. The organizations turned the checks and balances upside down. If state constitutions, like the national, were ingeniously designed to divide local, county, and state power through separate electoral arrangements, the bosses with their grip on the nominating and electing mechanism at every level could make mayors and state legislators and county officials and governors work together. If city charters cleverly diked off executive and legislative and judicial power at the local level, the bosses often chose the aldermen, municipal judges, mayors, and—civil service laws to the contrary notwithstanding—administrative officials, and hence could make government perform.

This capacity to unite government was even more important for the organization’s key role, in the big industrial cities, in helping businessmen gain contracts, franchises, and other grants from government, to avoid regulation, to get the right streets and bridges built, to subdue and stabilize the often anarchical world around them. The corporations, wrote Robert Merton, wanted the security of the “economic czar” who controlled, regulated, and organized competition, provided that his decisions were not subject to public scrutiny and control. Often the protected activities of business merged into the underworld of gambling, prostitution, liquor, outright crime. Operating in a political shadowland, the bosses often were able to provide business, legitimate or not, with the quiet help it needed.

Arrayed against the bosses in most of the big cities were the lords of reform. The conflict between these two sets of leaders provided most of the drama and much of the importance of political activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was in many respects a conflict of ideologies—a clash between value systems, ethnic groups, class outlooks, power systems.

The reform movement in the big cities was essentially a bourgeois phenomenon, rooted in middle-class fears of urban disorder, immigrant ways, family disruption. A powerful rural myth of almost Jeffersonian dimensions persisted. Common to many of these reformers, according to Paul Boyer, “was the conviction—explicit or implicit—that the city, although obviously different from the village in its external, physical aspects, should nevertheless replicate the moral order of the village.” Still responding to the old genteel, mugwump, independent thrust in the two major parties, as indignant as ever over the excesses of party spoils and patronage, still clinging to the
Nation
and
Harper’s Weekly
and other journals of reformist tendencies, the reformers viewed the bosses as representing all they disliked in politics—corruption, manipulation, links with the underworld, and ties with monopolistic, favor-seeking businessmen.

Much earlier, a regiment of reformers had clashed with the most powerful and corrupt of bosses—and the reformers had won such a glorious battle that the victory colored their thoughts and tactics ever after. Their target and ultimate victim was William Magear Tweed, Jr. Of Scottish descent, son of a New York City chairmaker who invested in a small brush factory, Tweed by the age of twenty-one had learned bookkeeping, clerked in a mercantile office, become a member of the brush firm—and married the daughter of the principal owner. A good-natured, strapping young man of sober habits, he found his main recreation in running Americus Engine Company, Number 6, which with its emblem of a snarling red tiger became one of the best-known fire companies under the leadership of its dashing chief in his red flannel shirt and white firecoat.

New York City fire companies were intensely clannish, convivial, and political. With the loyal backing of his seventy-five fire-fighters, Tweed moved easily into Manhattan’s political world, won election as alderman, and joined the common council that came to be known as “The Forty Thieves.” It was also a school of practical politics and political moneymaking. Tireless and single-minded, Tweed broadened his influence in Tammany, occupied a variety of offices and controlled others, and made money out of every opportunity—kickbacks, city contracts, huge commissions from the Erie Railroad and other corporations, building a $12 million courthouse of which $8 million was graft. This was big business: the
ultimate take of Tweed and his ring probably was measured in the upper eight figures.

It was the story of a young man’s ambition, enterprise, rise to riches—and thorough corruption. As reformism rose during the Grant years,
Harper’s Weekly
and the
New York Times
launched a long and tenacious campaign against the ring. Thomas Nast’s merciless caricatures in
Harper’s
converted the amiable, portly young man into a coarse, vicious-looking criminal, sinister of face and fat of belly. The cartoonists pictured him as William the Conqueror crushing the Constitution, as a crocodile, as a Roman emperor watching the Tammany tiger feasting on women’s bodies in the Colosseum—and most typically, as a bloated dictator with the face of an Irish Fagin.

“What are you going to do about it?” Tweed liked to taunt his foes. A mass meeting of outraged citizens in Cooper Union, a committee of seventy reformers, revelations from dissident members of the ring itself, and prosecution brought Tweed and his cronies down in the short space of five months. He died in jail at the age of fifty-five. It was a glorious victory for reform, but it did not last long. Reformers found that the “tentacles of the octopus” remained intact even after the head was cut off, as the Plunkitts survived in the wards and precincts. Later Tammany leaders—the Crokers and Murphys and the rest—benefited from Tweed’s downfall. They learned that they must discipline the organization, limit their greed, and share their take with their people in the old egalitarian spirit of Tammany.

Thus was set the pattern, in scores of cities, of boss control interrupted by bursts of reformism. Some of the machines were more honest and benign, some less so; the bosses were far more diverse in religion, ethnic background, civic virtue, education, appearance, and speech than the caricature of the Irish immigrant grafter would allow. But typically the organization persisted, and the reformers moved off to other interests. The perceptive Plunkitt observed this phenomenon:

“College professors and philosophers who go up in a balloon to think,” he said from his pulpit, a bootblack stand, “are always discussin’ the question: ‘Why Reform Administrations Never Succeed Themselves.’ ... I can’t tell just how many of these movements I’ve seen started in New York during my forty years in politics, but I can tell you how many have lasted more than a few years—none. There have been reform committees of fifty, of sixty, of seventy, of one hundred and all sorts of numbers that started out to do up the regular political organizations. They were mornin’ glories—looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks.”

The reason for the fading mornin’ glories? Politics, Plunkitt explained,
was a business—as much a “regular business as the grocery or dry-goods or the drug business.” He had been learning it for forty-five years, ever since he had made himself useful around the Hall at age twelve. How could businessmen turn to politics all at once and make a success of it? “It is just as if I went up to Columbia University and started to teach Greek.”