Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (21 page)

The Hall passed a resolution charging that the wealthy sought to seize control of popular politics and thwart the will of the people—including men who had so recently fought for the Union cause. Any party that supported such a scheme, Tammany’s resolution stated, deserved “eternal infamy.”
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The heated rhetoric and mass mobilization worked. Tammany’s candidates won sixteen of twenty-one State Assembly seats from the city, leaving just two in Republican hands and three associated with Irving Hall, the dissident Democratic faction. Kelly could not help himself as he delivered a chip-on-the-shoulder victory speech to Tammany stalwarts after the votes were counted on Election Night. Mocking critics who called on voters to dispatch Tammany to the political hereafter, Kelly asked: “Try to drive Tammany Hall out of this community?” The idea was ridiculous. “Why, you might as well try to drive out the government.” For Kelly, for the hundreds of political operatives in the city’s immigrant neighborhoods, and for thousands of immigrants whose votes meant the difference between holding power and being powerless, Tammany was indistinguishable from government itself. For John Kelly, that association was a source of pride. For reformers, that was precisely the problem.
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When the Tilden Commission’s amendment came up for a second vote in the spring of 1878, it failed miserably. Tammany Democrats did not control the legislature—Republicans did—but supporters of the amendment were more than capable of interpreting the previous fall’s election returns, however skeptical they were of the democratic process in New York City. The movement to limit the franchise to the city’s wealthy came to an abrupt end.

Abrupt, but not unlamented. The
Times
still was complaining about universal suffrage in 1880, as Tammany Hall prepared to support an Irish-Catholic immigrant for mayor. The paper noted, correctly, that the Democratic Party in the South engaged in “cheating and intimidating the ignorant negro voters,” but in the North, the party counted on “the adhesion of voters beside whom the negro is an educated, virtuous, and law-abiding citizen.” The Democrats, the paper asserted, could succeed nationally only by repressing “the vote of the plantation negro” while protecting “the vote of the citizen who is not the negro’s peer from the slums of New York.”
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Several years later, a Protestant clergyman named Joseph Hartwell published a thirty-page pamphlet entitled
Romanism in Politics: What It Costs—Tammany Hall the Stronghold of Rome
. In the course of complaints about Jesuits and “imported voters” ruining “the United States of Protestant America,” the minister argued that the city needed “leaders” like “a William of Orange,” the man in whose name the Orange Day parade took place in 1871.
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That was just the sort of thing the city’s Irish-Catholic voters feared most.

. . .

As the city’s two Democratic factions—Tammany Hall and Irving Hall—prepared for the 1880 mayoral campaign, both understood that their divisions would surely lead to electoral disaster. But finding a candidate who would please both the aging Swallowtails of Irving Hall, who equated civic virtue with wealth, and John Kelly, who understood that Tammany’s power required access to patronage, seemed impossible. The two factions went through the motions of compiling separate wish lists of candidates to succeed reform-minded Mayor Edward Cooper, who, in the manner of many reformers, decided that he had had enough of practical politics after just two years in office.

Kelly no doubt recognized many of the names on Irving Hall’s list, and it is easy to imagine this stubborn, battle-scarred veteran grunting at his desk in Tammany Hall as he glanced through names of earnest reformers from uptown, men with little practical experience in governing a city of multiple tongues, faiths, interests, and agendas. One name on the list, however, would have prompted a smile, if Honest John were so inclined. If not a smile, then surely a sparkle in his eyes.

Victory.

Somewhere on Irving Hall’s list of acceptable mayoral candidates was the name of William Russell Grace, respectable business leader and philanthropist. Curiously, he was not a member of Irving Hall, nor had he been particularly active in civic affairs until this very year, when he tried to persuade the national Democratic Party to nominate a friend of his, Judge Calvin Pratt, for the presidency. It was not a particularly effective campaign, but Grace’s political acumen didn’t matter to the Swallowtails. He was wealthy, and that suggested civic virtue.

But he was Catholic. And an Irish immigrant. New York had never before elected an Irish-Catholic mayor. The very idea seemed absurd in many sections of elite opinion—the readers of
Harper’s Weekly
and
Puck
continued to chuckle over cartoons featuring outlandish caricatures of Irish-Americans and Catholic bishops. Kelly nevertheless sensed the arrival of a moment when there were more of “us” than there were of “them.” While immigration from Ireland had slowed since the peak Famine years, about 17 percent of New York’s 1.2 million people had been born in Ireland, a figure that does not include the native-born adult male children and grandchildren of immigrants. Perhaps with that demographic reality in mind, Grace received the support of both Democratic factions, but it was hard to know which one was more bewildered—Irving Hall, which put forward Grace’s name without knowing much about him, or Tammany Hall, which had to poach an Irish-Catholic candidate from the swells at Irving Hall.

To be sure, William R. Grace was not a typical immigrant from Ireland. He made a fortune after starting a shipping firm, W. R. Grace & Company, in South America. When he finally settled in New York, he took up residence with the city’s uptown elites. He was a wealthy man, a devout Catholic, and a confidante of the city’s Catholic archbishop, Cardinal John McCloskey. Through His Eminence, he had had some dealings with the cardinal’s nephew-by-marriage—Honest John Kelly.

If Grace’s life story represented a new chapter of the Irish-Catholic narrative in America, some parts of it would have sounded familiar to the Irish who lived south of Fourteenth Street. Born in what is now County Laois in the Irish midlands in 1832, Grace was old enough to remember Daniel O’Connell and some of his younger allies who agitated against British rule in Ireland in the 1830s and early ’40s. “His earnest, devoted [and] intelligent patriotism has ever been held in reverence by me,” Grace wrote of O’Connell many years later.
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He also was old enough to retain firsthand memories of the Famine. While the Grace family did not suffer as so many others did, evidence of the catastrophe was all around them. Gaunt men worked on a road adjacent to the Grace family’s farm, others worked on the property itself. Grace’s father owned his own land and leased two other large plots, but as death and disease took hold of the Irish countryside, the family left their land and moved to Dublin, where young Grace attended school—but not for long. He ran away to sea in 1846 at the age of fourteen, fleeing a country where mass death and exile were only just beginning.

All these years later, the wealthy William R. Grace certainly had more in common with Swallowtail Democrats than he did with Tammany’s legions. His credentials as a businessman and philanthropist should have impressed elite opinion-makers who saw wealth as evidence of political independence and disinterest. But Grace’s religion mattered a good deal more than his political independence and his uptown respectability. The election turned on a single issue: the would-be mayor’s Catholicism.

During the course of an ugly campaign even by nineteenth-century standards, newspapers and reformers questioned Grace’s citizenship, his true loyalty, and his general fitness for office. At a late October meeting of anti-Tammany forces in Cooper Union, Elihu Root—future U.S. senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, and Nobel Peace Prize–winner—warned listeners that Grace’s election threatened the “fundamental principle of our Republic that Church and State shall be separate. . . . ” After Root’s speech, two Protestant ministers, the Reverend Stephen H. Tyng Jr. and the Reverend John P. Newman, delivered speeches on behalf of Grace’s opponent, a Republican named William Dowd, with Tyng conjuring the ghost of Archbishop John Hughes in arguing that Grace, as a Catholic, would undermine public schools just as Hughes had, while Newman suggested that New York under Catholic rule was doomed to suffer the fate of Spain, a nation kept illiterate under the rule of Catholics.

Another speaker, Lawson N. Fuller, built on the clerics’ arguments, noting: “The Irish and Germans and the Scandinavians are placed in the public schools, have the dirt washed off them, and are turned out refined American citizens. They lose their identity as they should.” Immigrants like the would-be mayor could become American, in Fuller’s view, only by transforming their identity and shedding their Old World customs.

Faced with the possibility that New York might elect an immigrant from Ireland as its first Catholic mayor, the
Tribune
questioned the legality of Grace’s naturalization in 1867, at a time when Tammany under Tweed was churning out naturalized citizens with assembly-line efficiency. The paper was forced to back down when the Grace campaign produced proper documentation, but editors remained unconvinced and continued to question the candidate’s citizenship. It was a commentary on the city’s Democrats, the
Tribune
’s editors wrote, that they were “running a man for Mayor of the greatest city on the Continent about whom old and well-informed residents ask whether he is even a citizen!”
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As the election neared, the anti-Catholic hysteria grew even more shrill. The
New York Herald
declared: “This is a Protestant country and the American people are a Protestant people.” The
Tribune
dragged up a decade-old accusation that Grace had made a fortune by taking out large insurance policies on ships he knew were not seaworthy.
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On the Sunday before Election Day, the city’s most-prominent Protestant preachers urged their congregations to stop Grace and the papal conspiracy he represented. “The Roman hierarchy,” declared Reverend W. F. Hatfield of Washington Square Methodist Church, “should be dealt such a blow at this time that its encroaching power in this city will be destroyed.” Reverend Newman told his congregation in the Central Methodist Episcopal Church on Fourteenth Street that they ought to oppose “the Democratic candidate for Mayor.” The congregants burst into applause, to the satisfaction, no doubt, of a prominent Republican seated in the front pew—former president Ulysses S. Grant.
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Later that night, as Grant and his fellow worshippers reflected on the day’s sermons warning against the influence of priests in politics, a crowd of some seven hundred Jews assembled in a hall on Third Street on the Lower East Side to denounce the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic assaults on Grace. A series of prominent speakers, including former judge Albert Cardozo, warned that if Grace were rejected on religious grounds, Jews could expect the same sort of treatment. Cardozo was not a perfect spokesman, for he was aligned with Tammany and had been forced to resign his judgeship several years earlier in the aftermath of the Tweed investigation. But his point and the point of other speakers was clear—the vitriol directed at Grace because of his religion was, in Cardozo’s words, “contrary to the spirit of this country and its institutions.”
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Tens of thousands of Jews were moving into Tammany territory on the Lower East Side, transforming entire neighborhoods. The 4th Assembly district, which bordered the East River north of the great bridge under construction between Manhattan and Brooklyn, was on its way to becoming overwhelmingly Jewish. Within its one hundred sixty-six acres lived more than seventy thousand people, making it one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city. It was also the home turf of John Ahearn, one of Tammany’s best-known district leaders. As Orchard Street became crowded with pushcarts, and as the sights and sounds outside the tenement houses changed in ways that would have shocked the old immigrants from County Cork, Ahearn and his Irish allies held court in the local Tammany clubhouse every Monday and Thursday night to hear the complaints and pleas of immigrants not far removed from the shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe. “To where besides the Tammany clubhouse could a white-bearded, eighty-year-old patriarch go for assistance. . . . Unable to speak or write a word of English, he would seek out our Irish leader,” recalled Louis Eisenstein, the son of Jewish immigrants who grew up in Ahearn’s district and who later became a prominent Tammany figure himself. Ahearn and Tammany received their thanks on Election Day.
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Candidate Grace might have won over some of the new immigrants south of Fourteenth Street, but many people above that traditional dividing line still had a hard time conceiving of a Catholic in City Hall. On the morning of Election Day, the
New York Times
made one final assault. Under the headline “Reasons for Rejecting Grace,” the paper’s editors argued that Grace was a mere puppet of Kelly, as incapable of independent action as Tammany’s voters were. Grace, the paper reminded readers, was “a comparatively unknown man, an Irish Catholic . . . whose record in private business is covered with suspicion.” Voters had a choice not between a Democrat and a Republican, or a Tammany man and an anti-Tammany man, but between “an Irish Catholic” and “an American Protestant with a long and honorable record.” The commentary didn’t even mention Grace’s opponent by name. It didn’t matter. He was, after all, an American Protestant.
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While the votes were being counted hours later, it seemed clear that the righteous pronouncements of clergymen and journalists alike had helped turn the tide in William Dowd’s favor. When the early returns were reported back to Tammany, Kelly, the brooding puppetmaster, found himself facing yet another catastrophe. Dowd had a significant lead. Kelly’s gamble apparently had failed; New York was not ready to elect a Catholic chief magistrate. As Kelly and his advisers kept mournful watch over the returns in Tammany Hall, Grace slipped into bed in his townhouse on Thirty-Third Street, presuming he had lost.