Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (16 page)

The Republican cutter arrived at the
Cuba
first, allowing Murphy to tell the startled former prisoners that the president of the United States was pleased to welcome them to their new home. A furious O’Gorman soon burst into the cabin and demanded to speak to the Irishmen on behalf of the city of New York. Murphy, O’Gorman, and their aides began to scuffle, verbally and otherwise, to the astonishment and disgust of their audience. Somebody warned the exiles against “Tammany tricksters.” In the end, the bewildered Irishmen told both parties to leave—they’d make their own arrangements. They arrived in Manhattan the following day in a nonpartisan Cunard tugboat. Three thousand people, including Boss Tweed, greeted them at their hotel.
²

The Republicans might have won the race for first impressions, but Tweed had power the Republicans couldn’t match. He raised more than $25,000 and announced that Tammany would honor the new arrivals with a fine parade, with the aldermen and assistant aldermen and the Irish emigrant societies and, in the parade’s final group, a unit of black citizens. This final touch inspired the
New York Times
to wonder why any black New Yorker would participate in a parade of Tammany Irish. “Let them remember the Colored Orphan Asylum,” the editors said, referring to the infamous torching of an orphanage during the antidraft riots. Tammany had had nothing to do with the atrocious assault, although rioting Irish-Americans certainly were to blame.
³

Two of the exiles who marched with Tammany, Tweed, the aldermen, the Irish organizations, and “the colored societies” would go on to become conspicuous political figures in the transatlantic Irish community. Rossa was the driving force behind a campaign of terrorism exported from New York to London in the 1880s, when Irish and Irish-American nationalists bombed Scotland Yard, Parliament, and the London underground rail system. John Devoy became the chief organizer of Irish-American nationalist politics from the 1870s until his death in Atlantic City in 1928, shifting his alliances between Republicans and Tammany Democrats as he sought to win American political support for Irish independence movements. During the last quarter-century of his life, Devoy was aligned with a prominent Tammany judge, Daniel Cohalan, who helped him raise money for a rebellion in Dublin in 1916.

The political maneuvering between O’Gorman and Murphy on board the
Cuba
was noteworthy because it showed that both major political parties actively competed for the Irish-American vote in New York even as late as 1871, when Boss Tweed and Tammany were thought to have had complete influence over the Irish. “As for the Irish, they have gone in a drove—as they always do—for the regular Democratic ticket,” wrote the
New York Times
in 1856. “They will probably never do anything else, as long as they remain Irish, and it takes at least two generations to convert them into Americans.”
⁴

Relations between Tammany and the Irish, however, were far more complicated than the
Times
realized. The relationship was subject to constant negotiation, and voters were not afraid to walk away from the bargaining table when Tammany overindulged in shady practices or was unable to deliver promised services. The
Irish World
newspaper complained in 1874 that the “Republican Party has treated the negroes as
men
; the Democratic party has treated the Irish as
niggers
.”
⁵

Earning and keeping the Irish vote was more than simply a matter of naturalizing immigrants and sending them on their way into the alien streets of New York. It required constant attention. Tweed organized picnics for children, made sure that the Catholic Church was taken care of in state charitable appropriations, and gave voice to the Irish community’s aspirations for the land they left behind. For critics, these were empty gestures, the worst sort of politics. After all, the picnics did not provide a solution to childhood poverty; charitable contributions simply stabilized an unjust society; and parades did nothing to bring about revolution in Ireland.

Still, these were signs of respect, if not affection. And the Irish noticed.

. . .

The arrival of the five Irish exiles in early 1871 marked the beginning of the most tumultuous year in Tammany’s history. Riots, murderous violence, and shocking allegations of extraordinary corruption would, by year’s end, reveal yet again the extent of the Irish-American community’s alienation from mainstream society and would forever link Tammany with the grossest sort of political chicanery.

The beginning of the end for Tweed began to unfold even as the boss looked absolutely unassailable. Tweed and his allies continued to put the finishing touches on their schemes to control the city’s budget. They put into place another official entity, the Board of Audit, consisting of Mayor Hall, Comptroller Richard Connolly, and Tweed himself. The board unilaterally decided to collect all outstanding bills that were payable to the county Board of Supervisors, a move that seemed like a good-government reform. After all, what could be more businesslike than collecting payments for outstanding bills? The collections ran into the tens of millions, especially after Tweed and his coconspirators added a 50 percent markup, which was divided among Tweed, Connolly, Hall, Tammany strategist Peter Sweeny, and lower-echelon clerks who knew about the payment padding.

The great raid on the public treasury was underway. Tweed and his friends raked in millions as they took their cuts from inflated bills for public-works projects, including construction of a grand new courthouse on Chambers Street, just behind City Hall, and the continued construction of Central Park. The city borrowed tens of millions, rather than raise taxes, to finance its construction projects. Holders of city bonds, including some of the great financial institutions of Europe, had little reason to suspect that the city’s books were cooked. Debts owed by New York—both the city and New York County—rose from $36 million in 1869 to $73 million in 1871. Money raised from bond issues paid contractors, who then paid off the politicians, including the man who supervised the city’s finances, Comptroller Connolly.
⁶

The involvement of Tweed and his allies—collectively known as “the Ring”—in the city’s finances was hardly a secret. The
New York
Times
regularly called attention to the probability of corruption, making up in invective what it lacked in solid evidence. New York’s reformers finally were beginning to understand how Tweed had hoodwinked them with the new city charter. A group of civic elites met in Cooper Union in the spring of 1871 to hear orations from the likes of onetime abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, who, along with other speakers, waxed indignant over Tammany’s leaders and voters. Tammany could not have chosen better enemies—Beecher represented all that Tammany’s core constituency, the Irish, resented about reformers, and, in any case, the reformers took no action other than to applaud the fine words they heard from the podium. Several days later, the New York Council of the Union League, another reform-minded civic organization, passed a resolution that, among other things, deplored the “ruffianism” of Tammany.
⁷

Tweed might have smiled over all this indignation. As usual, Tammany’s critics appeared to be foaming at the mouth, making charges with no hard evidence, and doing nothing but strengthening the bonds between the organization and its voters. Tammany’s friends in the press, many of them bought off, offered a very different picture of the boss. A piece in the
New York Sun,
with more than a little exaggeration, dubbed him a “model public officer” in an article that recounted the boss’s quick work in resolving a drainage issue deemed to be a public health hazard on the East Side. But the criticisms were taking their toll in other centers of power: Bondholders were becoming increasingly worried about the size of the city’s debt and its ability to make good on those debts. The
Times
claimed that bond issues were among “the means by which our Tammany politicians . . . get their customary ‘rake.’ ”
⁸

On July 8, 1871, the
Times
published a fascinating but not especially sensational story about enormous rents the city was paying for facilities linked to Tweed and his friends—including a portion of Tammany Hall. The facilities were said to be armories. In fact, they were nothing of the kind, especially not the upper floor of Tammany Hall, for which Tweed charged the city a rental fee of $36,000 a year. The boss apparently added a zero to the market-rate rental for such a facility.

The
Times
story was a good deal more serious than the usual windy condemnations of Tammany’s methods. The paper had hard facts, thanks to the efforts of a shocked city auditor, Matthew O’Rourke, who provided the
Times
with figures he had copied from the city’s books. The story stated unequivocally that money from the high rents was “divided among the thieves of the Ring and the miserable tools who provide their dirty work.” Among those who read the story with interest was a former Tweed ally, Jimmy O’Brien, the onetime sheriff known for flooding voting places on Election Day with tough-looking “assistants” who kept an eye on Tammany’s foes. He had fallen afoul of the boss several years earlier and lost his lucrative job as a result. O’Brien, too, had incriminating documents, and they told a story that went far beyond inflated rents for nonexistent armories. O’Brien was soon on his way to the
Times
newsroom.
⁹

. . .

Tweed and Tammany had other matters to worry about as the city’s political class absorbed the
Times
’s accusations. A story about overpriced leases certainly was damaging, but it was hardly a death blow. Tammany could shrug it off, perhaps even buy off the
Times.
(An offer was made; George Jones, owner of the
Times,
turned down millions.)

The more immediate problem was a looming anniversary—July 12. For Protestant Irishmen in the United States and in Ireland, July 12 was a day to celebrate supremacy over Irish Catholics with parades, songs, revelry, and, if the occasion demanded it, violence. These celebrations reminded the Protestant Irish of the heady days of July 12, 1690, when King William’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne ensured the future of a Protestant monarchy in Britain. Irish Protestants who belonged to the Orange Order—an anti-Catholic fraternity named in honor of William of Orange—annually commemorated the battle with parades and music designed to remind Irish Catholics that while they had numbers, Protestants had power.
¹⁰

Of course, the ancient battle meant little to most Americans who weren’t Irish. America was the New World, a place where the rivalries and bitterness of the Old World were left behind—or so the narrative had it. Irish Catholics regularly were reminded that their Old World loyalty to the pope made them less American, less capable of living up to the republican ideals of the nation’s antimonarchist founders. Irish Protestants, however, were free to march through the city’s streets on July 12 to celebrate a military victory by a long-dead British king.

The city’s Irish Catholics had a difficult time understanding why authorities allowed this display of religious supremacy to take place, especially in a city where, it was said, Tammany Hall was under the thumb of Irish-Catholic voters (or vice versa). During the parade in 1870, violence between Catholic protesters and Protestant marchers had led to the deaths of five people. The
New York Tribune
pointed an accusatory finger at Tammany Hall and Tweed, asserting that they represented the “ruffians who have committed this crime.” Other newspapers echoed the
Tribune
, blaming Irish Catholics and Tammany for the riot. The city’s Irish newspapers, on the other hand, lashed out at the marchers as un-American, literally. The
Irish-American
newspaper charged (without providing evidence) that the British government had helped to found and finance Orange lodges in New York, so it was the Protestant Orangeman, not the Catholic Irishman, whose loyalty to the United States and republican institutions was suspect.
¹¹

As another July 12 approached, city officials had reason to believe that the violence of the previous year could be repeated. Irish-Catholic objections to the parade inspired ringing denunciations in the city’s secular press. Letters to the editors of the
Times,
the
Sun
, the
Herald
, and other newspapers warned of Jesuit conspiracies to deny native-born Americans of their liberties, efforts that required vigorous opposition from “one grand Vigilance Committee” that should “take this matter into their own hands. It should have been done long ago.” The threats of violence, the assertions of Catholic conspiracies, the accusation of a plot against republican liberties—all would have sounded frighteningly familiar to the city’s Irish Catholics. Pro-Orange factions circulated a broadside that insisted that the “claims of Roman Catholicism are incompatible with civil and religious liberty,” an almost word-for-word adaptation of the arguments used against Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Emancipation movement of the late 1820s.
¹²

Irish Catholics countered that they, in fact, were the defenders of American ideals, and their intolerant opponents were the real threats to republicanism and democracy. An Irish-American interviewed by the
New York Herald
argued that the Orangemen were not a religious faction but “Englishmen,” and it was the duty of “American citizens” to “put them down.”
¹³

Tweed understood how close to the edge the city was. But there was a solution—the parade’s organizers had applied for a required permit, as any group would have. What if the permit were taken away? Tweed couldn’t do that, but Police Superintendent James Kelso certainly could. The boss and the mayor persuaded him that allowing a march down the West Side and into Greenwich Village would lead to bloodshed and disorder, perhaps even a radical coup against the governing order. Kelso got the message.