Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (2 page)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Tammany Hall! No wonder two of the city’s radio stations, WOR and WNYC, chose to cover the speeches via a live hookup.

The governor, wearing a bow tie and sporting a ribbon on his left lapel, seemed pleased to be there. He opened his remarks with a salute to Tammany’s ceremonial leader, John R. Voorhis, who was about to turn a hundred years old. Voorhis was a small man, bent with age, but not hard to spot: he was the only man in the room wearing a silk top hat. Governor Roosevelt lifted his chin and smiled that wonderful smile as he told of shaking hands with Voorhis when he was a youngster, four decades earlier. Voorhis, Roosevelt slyly noted, “was already approaching old age” when they met all those years ago. The Tammany crowd loved it.

Roosevelt moved on to his main theme, the growing gap between rich and poor in the 1920s. With the assistance of friendly political figures, monopolies and huge corporations were placing wealth and property “in the hands of a few” while ordinary citizens were becoming “serfs,” Roosevelt said. This was not the sort of rhetoric that young State Senator Roosevelt had used during his short stint as an anti-Tammany reformer in Albany two decades earlier. Much had changed since those early days, not least Roosevelt’s opinion of the men with whom he shared a stage on this Fourth of July. Turning to Al Smith, the pride of Tammany, Roosevelt said, “The fight against business-controlled government at Albany has been made by Al and me for the last ten years, and with all my efforts I am going to keep that fight going on.”

It was quite a show all right. Smith was next to speak, and as Roosevelt carefully moved away from the podium to make way for his predecessor, his legs locked in steel braces, the 69th Regimental Band broke into a rendition of Smith’s campaign song, “The Sidewalks of New York.”

Smith, his thin gray hair parted in the middle, a ceremonial Tammany apron around his neck and falling down to his thickening waistline, gave a fiery speech against Prohibition, warning of further assaults on the pleasures of ordinary people. Imagine, he said, a day when “you may find yourself unable to stand at Forty-Second Street and Broadway and smoke a cigar.” Most in the crowd no doubt found this unthinkable, but Smith insisted it was possible.
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It might have seemed on that July morning in 1929 that Tammany had friends in all the right places, that its future never looked brighter. Men such as Al Smith and Robert Wagner—the “Tammany Twins,” as a skeptical press corps once dubbed them—already had written and passed sweeping social reforms that made life for families like their own just a little easier, less exposed to the cruelties of the marketplace. And they were still in the prime of life. Now, a onetime foe, Franklin Roosevelt, was pressing the flesh with them, joking with them, speaking their language. And people thought he might be president one day.

Yes, it was a Fourth of July like no other.

But Tammany’s bright future barely lasted a decade. By 1943, the Tammany Hall edifice was little more than a museum to past glory. The power that once resided there was gone. The building was sold; the organization moved to rented office space uptown.

. . .

Tammany Hall has an unenviable place in American memory. It remains, long after it ceased to be a power in New York politics, a symbol of all that was wrong with urban government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its leaders are remembered as sleazy, unprincipled crooks who shook down the decent and indecent alike in pursuit of an illicit buck. The ordinary people who gave Tammany its power generally have been treated no more sympathetically, depicted as ignorant tools of a conspiracy organized not to bring about political change but to plunder the public treasury for the benefit of well-connected politicians and their friends.

The story of Tammany is linked indelibly to the story of New York’s Irish-American community, although native-born Americans founded the society long before the Irish arrived in great numbers. Tammany already was the dominant faction in the city’s Democratic Party when tens of thousands of starving Irish arrived during the Great Famine years of the 1840s and ’50s. As these impoverished rural people reorganized their lives in a great and alien city, they saw Tammany as an ally—an ally who did not judge their poverty, their religion, their culture. And so the narratives of Tammany and Irish America became one.

That narrative is generally told as a true-crime story, a tale of larceny on a grand scale. Tammany, at its worst, certainly was guilty of many of the charges arrayed against it. But the accusations of political and moral corruption were often linked to a profound bigotry rooted in a transatlantic, Anglo-Protestant analysis of Irish character defects, not least of them being their stubborn adhesion to the venal institution known as the Roman Catholic Church. Tammany’s critics in New York might not have been aware of it, but the Irish had heard it all before: They were poor because they were lazy, they were lazy because they were Catholic, they were Catholic because they were Irish, and no more needed to be said. This was the transatlantic consensus about Irish Catholics, and it was preached from the finest pulpits and most polite salons in London and uptown Manhattan.

There is little question that Tammany displayed a contempt for law and process that enraged reformers and that continues to define its image in memory and history. Men like Richard Croker, an Irish immigrant and onetime gang leader, grew wealthy from graft extorted from contractors, office-seekers, and the merchants of vice as Tammany’s boss in the late nineteenth century. Croker and his better-known predecessor, William M. Tweed, remain the florid faces of Tammany Hall in popular imagery and academic history.

They were hardly the only faces of Tammany Hall—just the most familiar. For the family of young Al Smith, the face of Tammany Hall belonged to saloonkeeper Tom Foley, a local power broker who lived near the Smiths’ apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A large man with an even larger presence in his neighborhood, Foley held annual picnics for families who shared the uncertainties and deprivations of a society that believed government had no role to play in mediating the excesses of property and capital. Foley knew that for families like the Smiths, packed into crowded tenements and living on the smallest of margins, there was no safety net, no rainy-day fund, no government agency to hear their appeals for assistance. There was only the local Tammany ward heeler, invariably described in the press as a henchman, a tool of evil political bosses and their corrupt machine.

They were men like Tom Foley, left fatherless at the age of thirteen and forced to quit school and find work as a blacksmith, eventually working his way into the liquor trade, which led inevitably to smoke-wreathed conversations with Tammany operatives for whom the saloon was a listening post, a village green, a meeting hall, and a private confessional. It was Tom Foley who helped take care of the Smith family after Al, too, lost his father as a young boy. Foley gave Al a patronage job in the city’s court system after Smith showed his mettle as a hard worker for Foley’s Tammany allies. Reformers loathed this blatant abuse of the public payroll; they demanded higher standards and civil-service tests for potential government employees in order to prevent Tammany saloonkeepers like Tom Foley from handing out jobs to grade-school dropouts like Al Smith.

From the moment they landed in Lower Manhattan, the Irish embraced what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called the “possibilities of politics.” Their enthusiasm for the hard work of organization as well as the grand spectacle of political performance has been attributed to their command of the English language—although many immigrants arrived in New York speaking only the Irish language—and to their supposed gregariousness—although the Irishman who led Tammany from 1902 to 1924, Charles Francis Murphy, earned the well-deserved nickname of “Silent Charlie” for his closed-mouth style of leadership. Murphy and many other Irish leaders of Tammany achieved their rarefied status in politics not by slapping backs and pouring pints but by devoting themselves to the unglamorous work of forging relationships, listening to constituents, and providing services. They managed their districts, talked to their neighbors, took care of those who needed help, and made sure that voters—
their
voters, to be sure—went to the polls. As a young Tammany leader in Manhattan’s grimy Gas House District on the East Side, Charlie Murphy sent cards to voters he knew personally if they hadn’t shown up at the polls by late afternoon on Election Day.
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Such work required painstaking attention to detail. More than anything else, however, it required an enthusiasm for politics and a keen appreciation of human nature. The founders of the republic believed that democracy required dispassionate analysis and objective disinterest from the electorate. Tammany’s Irish leaders knew that victory required public spectacle and passionate self-interest. George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany district leader, state senator, and serial jobholder, argued that it was the promise of a job that turned ordinary citizens into patriots. Anarchists, he concluded, were former patriots who had been denied government jobs because they couldn’t pass the reform movement’s civil-service tests.
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For the Irish of Tammany and for their supporters, politics was theater, not a solemn civic obligation; politics appealed to self-interest, not to dispassionate analysis. In writing about civic reformer Seth Low, one of Tammany’s most vociferous critics in the early twentieth century, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens conceded that Low, a one-term mayor of New York City, was not a likable person. “A politician can say ‘no’ and make a friend, where Mr. Low will lose one by saying ‘yes,’” wrote Steffens, who regarded Low as a champion of disinterested, apolitical municipal administration. Steffens argued that Low’s cold personality, personal unpopularity, and inability to command the loyalty of allies should not matter. “Why should anybody like him?” Steffens wondered.
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Tammany, in its own fashion, prepared the way for modern liberalism as its network of block captains and district leaders encouraged the poor to look to accessible political figures to mediate the capriciousness of laissez-faire capitalism and the contempt of moral reformers. Of course, Tammany did so with the understanding that a favor granted was a favor earned. Tammany’s unapologetic embrace of interest, the eagerness with which it traded jobs for votes, and the tactics it employed to enforce discipline flew in the face of elite perceptions of how democracy ought to work. An influential journal,
The Outlook
, complained that Tammany Hall “is not only un-American in its methods, but it is distinctly un-American in its ideals,” in part because Tammany was a symbol of “the broad distinction between what may be called Anglo-Saxon ideals of character and public service, and the Celtic ideals of character and public service.”
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This, in the view of many of Tammany’s critics, was an important distinction—the difference between Anglo-Saxon ideals and Celtic ideals. While several recent historians have theorized that Irish-Americans in New York and elsewhere desperately sought entry into a world of white privilege, the city’s Irish community and its antagonists in the reform movement saw themselves engaged in a bitter cultural conflict rooted in sharp differences based on race, national origin, religion, and even physical appearance. The
Freeman’s Journal,
an Irish-American weekly newspaper published primarily for pro-Tammany readers, condemned those who claimed “an Anglo-Saxon divine right to domination in a land of such various and inextricably mixed races as ours.” Tammany’s self-appointed role as an advocate for immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a direct challenge to the political and cultural hegemony of the city’s traditional elites—people such as civic reformer Joseph A. Choate, a lawyer and onetime U.S. ambassador to Great Britain.
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During a speech in Carnegie Hall in 1906, Choate announced that, after consulting the works of Charles Darwin, he had decided that Tammany’s slate of judicial candidates that year constituted a “mongrel ticket.” He went on to warn his audience that those mongrels, if elected, would serve on the bench until 1920, when his listeners would be “celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock.”
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For Tammany and for its foes, the struggle for political and cultural power—indeed, the larger conflict over the meaning of Americanism—was at its heart a battle between the political machine’s mongrels and the descendants of the
Mayflower
. An anonymous Tammany critic published a broadside arguing that at the nation’s founding, “to be an American was to belong to the very highest type of manhood.” But after waves of immigrants, the pamphleteer complained, the nation was home to “stunted illiterate interlopers” intent on stealing “our ballot birthright.”
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This was a battle that Tammany’s Irish voters recognized as a variation on a conflict that, to a greater or lesser extent, drove them out of their native land. Ireland’s Catholic majority had long been engaged in cultural and political conflict with an Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling class that viewed the island’s conquered masses as victims of moral failings and character flaws that encouraged vice, laziness, and dependence and rendered them unworthy of liberty.

During the height of the catastrophic potato failure in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, the British official in charge of relief efforts, Sir Charles Trevelyan, complained that the “great evil with which we have to contend [is] not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.” In New York, political reformers concluded that the ignorant masses who insisted on voting for Tammany were perverse indeed, motivated not by disinterested love of country but by cynical calculation. The editors of
Littell’s Living Age
, a New York–based magazine, printed a letter signed by “An American,” which complained that the “chief ambition of the Irish in America appears to be to get offices and gain a livelihood at the expense of the taxpayers.” In other words, the Irish were looking for a handout.
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