Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (20 page)

To oppose the friendless Havemeyer, Tammany ran an utterly respectable diamond merchant named William Wickham. Morrissey and other Tammany figures pounded away at the city’s inaction in the face of the deepening economic crisis, leading the
Times
to complain that “Tammany orators have been spreading Communistic ideas during the campaign,” which the paper’s editors feared would lead to greater “demands by the unemployed on the City authorities for work.” For Gilded Age reformers in New York and elsewhere, such demands carried with them a whiff of the sort of radicalism that had overtaken the coalfields in Pennsylvania and the municipal offices in Chicago. New York’s civic elites shared the Gilded Age reform agenda of low taxation, limited government, and, increasingly, a brooding skepticism about the virtues of popular democracy.
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John Kelly’s Tammany, however, was not a People’s Party and surely not a part of the Molly Maguires conspiracy. In supporting Wickham for mayor and the very eminent Samuel J. Tilden as its candidate for governor in 1874, Tammany managed to be both a stabilizing force and an advocate for the alienated and unemployed. It proved to be a shrewd combination. Both of Tammany’s men were elected, unseating the two Republican-reform candidates whose twin victories in 1872 had seemed to signal a return to the rule of true Americans in New York.

. . .

After Tilden took over as governor, his ally Kelly quietly became a power in state politics. He was not afraid to remind the new governor that Tammany’s wishes ought to be respected. In May 1875, he instructed Tilden not to sign several pieces of legislation until they spoke in person about the bills’ merits. And he continued to exhibit a post-Tweed obsession with the cost of government, a trait not always associated with Tammany bosses. Kelly once sent an urgent telegram to an ally in Albany, insisting that a prospective bridge project—a potential source of patronage and employment—should be funded in a “clearly comprehensible” way. Otherwise, he added, “we will be censured. It would be very improper to give unlimited power to spend money.”
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Kelly became Tilden’s political and personal confidante as the new governor struggled with persistent hard times. Public discontent was not restricted to New York City—upstate farmers, like farmers around the country, were struggling with debt as credit dried up and crop prices fell. “May God spare you,” Kelly wrote to Tilden. “Most men would have become disheartened at the many repulses.”
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But early on in Tilden’s tenure, a political observer writing in the
New York Times
predicted trouble between the two. Kelly, the anonymous writer asserted, wanted the governor to remove incumbent New York City Comptroller Andrew Green, who had succeeded the infamous Slippery Dick Connolly as keeper of the city’s finances during the Tweed scandal. Green steadfastly refused to go along with demands for increased public-works spending to create work for the city’s jobless, contending that it was more important to keep taxes low. Kelly was nearly as skeptical of government spending as Green was, but, unlike the comptroller—who was appointed, not elected—Kelly’s power ultimately rested on voter approval. And many of Tammany’s voters were either jobless or living on the margins. The
Times
saw a bitter fight in the making, arguing that Tilden had the support of “honest” men and taxpayers, while mere “politicians . . . wish the Kelly people success.”
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Tilden, who had power over key city appointments thanks to post-Tweed limitations on home rule, refused to support a bill to remove Green. Just as the
Times
had predicted, Kelly broke with Tilden on the eve of the governor’s presidential campaign in 1876. Tilden went on to win the Democratic nomination but lost the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, despite winning the most popular votes. The Tilden–Hayes election was one of the closest and most controversial in U.S. history—the counting of contested votes in Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina went on for weeks, until a special commission awarded all the outstanding electoral votes to Hayes. Democrats were outraged, but they extracted a promise from Republicans to remove federal troops from the South and let the former Confederate states run their own affairs—which meant the return of white supremacy in the region. Tilden, who had given up his gubernatorial reelection bid to run for president, was a mere spectator to these machinations. Broken in spirit, he left New York for Europe to brood over his loss.

. . .

Even as Tilden crossed the Atlantic, one of his most controversial actions as governor was about to dominate political debate in New York and around the nation. In early 1875, Tilden had asked twelve prominent citizens, including journalist E. L. Godkin, to serve on a commission to study the problems of urban governance. The Commission to Devise a Plan for the Government of Cities in the State of New York, which the press mercifully shortened to the Tilden Commission, began its deliberations in the long shadow of the Tweed scandals and in the midst of continued concerns over Irish-Catholic political influence in the city. In northern cities brimming with newcomers from Europe, powerful voices were beginning to argue that the problems of urban government could be resolved if the vote were restricted to those who owned property or paid taxes. “Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice—it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic coast, an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf [of Mexico], and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific,” asserted Boston’s Charles Francis Adams Jr., grandson of John Quincy Adams. Elites like Adams saw power slipping from their hands into the grasp of strangers—Irish, Africans, Chinese—whose votes threatened not just the political status quo but the nation’s culture and self-image as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation.
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Property qualifications, of course, had been all but eliminated in most states during the exuberant age of Andrew Jackson, but critics like Charles Adams and others were prepared to declare Jacksonian democracy a failed experiment. Famed historian Francis Parkman dismissed the “flattering illusion that one man is essentially about as good as another” and argued that in the hands of immigrants, the right to vote led to nothing but “mischief.” The New York Citizens Association, a reform group of prominent citizens founded by Peter Cooper, joined the debate, asserting that “it is not safe to place the execution of the laws in the hands of the classes against which they are principally enforced.”
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Critics of universal male suffrage realized that their position seemed at odds with the American narrative of democratic progress. “Thirty or forty years ago it was considered the rankest heresy to doubt that a government based on universal suffrage was the wisest and best that could be devised,” wrote reformer Jonathan Baxter Harrison in the
Atlantic Monthly
. “Such is not now the case.” Complaints about the expansion of voting rights, Harrison added, could be heard “at the top of our society, among some of the most intelligent, the most thoughtful, and the most patriotic men.”
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To justify new limits on the franchise, at least at the municipal level, civic elites argued that cities—where the bulk of the immigrant poor lived—were not subject to the same rules as state and national governments. As creations of the state, cities were more like private corporations and so should be governed, as private corporations were, by stockholders, in this case, property owners and taxpayers. Yale University President Theodore Dwight Woolsey captured the reformers’ argument in a phrase: “None who do not own property should vote for representatives who lay taxes on property.” Such a measure, he eagerly noted, would mean that “the mass of city proletarians ought to be excluded from the polls where tax levying councilmen or officers are elected.”
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The Tilden Commission’s members already were inclined to view Tammany’s voters as the source of New York’s various political ills. Godkin, through his journalism, was on record about the unworthiness of Irish-Catholic voters. Other commission members included lawyer Simon Sterne, who had delivered a lecture against universal suffrage in London in 1865; Republican lawyer William Evarts, a future U.S. senator, attorney general, and secretary of state; and Edward Cooper, son of suffrage critic and longtime reformer Peter Cooper. They were not interested in investigating the causes of poor governance in New York City because they already knew what was wrong—the poor man’s vote counted the same as the rich man’s.

The Tilden Commission announced its findings in March 1877. Not surprisingly, the commissioners concluded that universal male suffrage was not, in fact, such a good idea after all. They proposed the passage of a state constitutional amendment limiting the popular vote in local elections to taxpayers who owned property valued at more than $500 or who paid an annual rent of $250 or more. Those taxpayers would choose a new board of finance that would oversee the city’s treasury, leaving other elected officials with little control over how the city spent its money.
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One of the commissioners, Sterne, argued that his fellow civic elites had an “almost solemn duty” to take away the votes of the poor. At least one historian recently estimated that the measure would have denied suffrage rights to half of the city’s three hundred thousand male voters.
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The
Irish World
newspaper greeted the commission’s recommendations with a one-word headline: “Disfranchisement.” In an Irish context, “disfranchisement” was fixed to a very particular memory. After Daniel O’Connell’s election in 1828, the British increased the property threshold for voting rights in Ireland (with O’Connell’s reluctant approval) from forty shillings to ten pounds, thus disenfranchising tens of thousands of poor Irish freeholders whose support for O’Connell so disturbed the social and political order in the United Kingdom.
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Elite opinion hailed the commission’s work. Business and trade groups, including the city’s Chamber of Commerce, supported the measure, as did an ambitious young Republican named Theodore Roosevelt. Some New Yorkers saw a similarity between their plight, as hostages to the votes of the poor and immigrants, and that of Southern whites, faced with the new reality of black men in political and civic life. “[White Southerners] have . . . an ignorant class to deal with, as we have here,” wrote the weekly financial journal
Commercial and Financial Chronicle
. The problem, in both cases, was the power of suffrage.
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A Republican majority in the state legislature passed the proposed amendment in 1877, but that was not the final word. A constitutional amendment in New York required passage by two consecutive legislative sessions, and legislative elections were scheduled for the fall of 1877.

The interval between votes allowed Tammany to stand and fight. It had no choice, really, for the amendment was intended to deprive Tammany of its power by stripping its chief supporters of their votes. As Tammany organized a massive campaign against the amendment in the fall of 1877, and as Kelly shrewdly reasserted power over the state Democratic Party, Tammany’s language and arguments underwent a conspicuous change. Rather than revisit the usual themes of anti-Catholic or anti-Irish grievances (although there was some of that as well), Tammany organizers deployed the language of class warfare to whip up opposition to the amendment. The Swallowtail Democrats must have cringed when they heard speakers denouncing the amendment as a plan to create “an oligarchy of wealth.”
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The city’s newspapers objected to Tammany’s interpretation of the proposed restrictions. The
New York
Tribune
attacked Tammany for telling the poor that the amendment would turn over government to “an oligarchy of landlords and bond-holders.” The paper held up for special scorn “tipsy statesmen” who “discuss politics over their gin and bitters.” John Kelly’s cross-class coalition, which had allowed the Swallowtails to mingle with the Five Pointers (or their slightly more upwardly mobile friends) at Tammany Hall, began to fray as Tammany’s rhetoric became more confrontational. Many, but not all, Swallowtails left Tammany and started a new faction, Irving Hall.
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Tammany may have downplayed ethnic and religious grievances during the fight over suffrage, but supporters of the restrictions did not. The
Times
complained that Tammany’s control over the city’s treasury relied upon “the mass vote of the ignorant and the vicious, and upon the support gained by political hints dropped in front of Roman Catholic altars.” The roster of those who supported the Tilden Commission’s proposed reordering of the electorate—Republican reformers, hostile newspaper editors, and civic moralists—once again resembled the Anglo-Protestant oligarchy that had rendered Irish Catholics powerless in Ireland.
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Tammany successfully transformed the legislative elections of 1877 in New York City into a partial referendum on the Tilden Commission—not just its recommendation, but its very makeup, comprising as it did longtime critics of universal suffrage as well as prominent Republicans like William Evarts, who had no small stake in suppressing the reliably Democratic vote in the city.

The city’s press was nearly unanimous in its support for candidates who promised to vote for the amendment. “The evils of municipal misgovernment are so great,” wrote the
Evening Post,
“that citizens who bear the burden may demand a chance to give an opinion on any carefully and intelligently contrived measure of relief.” The
Times
published a piece entitled “Facts for Working Men” which argued that “demagogues raise the cry” of disenfranchisement, but these “professional politicians and idlers” truly did not have the interests of “the working men” at heart.
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Tammany’s voters disagreed. As Election Day neared, the
Irish-American
newspaper denounced the plan as “an attempt to confer exclusive privileges upon the few who are fortunate in owning property.” Thousands turned up at a Tammany rally on October 29 to add their voices in opposition to the proposed amendment. As Tammany’s sachems, ward heelers, and constituents filed into the Hall’s meeting room from busy Fourteenth Street, they saw a huge banner hanging from the rafters: “The Republicans say let the property, not the man, vote.” The opening speaker, Augustus Schell, immediately launched into an attack on the suffrage amendment, accusing Tammany’s foes of trying to “rob” the poor of their right to vote.
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