Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (24 page)

Richard Croker grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of antebellum New York, in a neighborhood where leadership required powerful fists and a willingness to put them to use. He came to the attention of Tammany’s local talent scouts not through his subtle understanding of the Federalist Papers, nor for his facility with the English language. He was brought into politics because he packed a mighty punch, as Tammany learned when young Croker pummeled a noted street fighter, Dickie Lynch, at a favorite Tammany picnic ground called Jones Wood on Manhattan’s East Side. Croker was elected to the Board of Aldermen in 1868 and was put to efficient use in the early 1870s as one of Tammany’s more dependable “repeaters”—that is, someone who could be counted on to cast multiple ballots on Election Day.

As he matured, other attributes recommended him to people like Honest John Kelly. Croker was a tireless worker, and his loyalty was beyond question. Kelly promoted him within the organization even after Croker was linked to the murder of a Tammany critic in 1874. (The trial ended in a hung jury, although it seemed likely that Croker was not guilty.) Croker repaid the boss during Kelly’s final months of life, visiting him frequently and offering comfort at a time when Tammany was alienated from the White House and City Hall. Lonely and broken, the dying Kelly could at least take some comfort in Croker’s presence. And Croker eagerly absorbed the lessons Kelly chose to pass on as his life, and his control over Tammany, slipped away.

Croker inherited an organization that had survived serious challenges to its dominance from other Democratic factions through hard discipline and artful maneuver. But as he settled into Honest John’s old office in the Hall, Croker was confronted with two new threats to Tammany’s dominance.

Assessing one of those threats required just a short walk south from Tammany Hall, where the old neighborhoods south of Fourteenth Street were changing in ways Croker’s fellow County Cork natives barely recognized. Pogroms and poverty were driving Russian Jews and southern Italians across the Atlantic to the crowded cities where the Irish had settled four decades earlier. Those who had viewed the Irish as a threat to the nation’s political and cultural heritage were equally swift to condemn this new invasion. The
New York Tribune,
which gave voice to anxieties about Irish teachers in the public schools in the 1850s, soon warned of an invasion of “pauper Jews.” New native groups with names such as the Loyal Men of American Liberty and the United Order of Native Americans recruited thousands in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest to defend pure Anglo-Saxon Americanism. Members of a national organization, the American Protective Association, took an oath promising that they would avoid hiring Catholics and would never vote for one.
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Tammany’s power base of the Lower East Side, the home of tens of thousands of Irish immigrants in the middle of the nineteenth century, was well on its way to becoming the center of Jewish life in the United States. New York was home to about sixty thousand Jews in 1870. That figure grew to nearly three hundred thousand over the next thirty years, with most settling in the wards south of Fourteenth Street. The newcomers from Central and Eastern Europe brought with them traditions, culture, and customs that were very different from those of the German Jews familiar to Tammany’s Irish leaders.

Italians were a minute presence in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century. By the mid-1880s, the Italian-born population grew to about twelve thousand. Within two decades, the Italian-American population—including first- and second-generation Italians—reached a quarter of a million.

All the while, the number of Irish-born New Yorkers declined, from 295,000 in 1890 to 275,000 in 1900. That number, which obviously did not include the children and grandchildren of immigrants, was destined to grow smaller as emigration from Ireland slowed—in part because the island’s population was half of what it had been in 1840. There were fewer Irish leaving because so many already had left. As Richard Croker took over Tammany, it was clear that the face of immigrant New York was changing, drastically. The young, single Italian men who settled near the old Five Points neighborhood, the Yiddish-speaking families who patronized the pushcarts of Hester Street—this was the
new
New York. Its narratives were different from the Irish narrative; its attitudes toward politics and political authority were formed in the shtetls of Russia and the olive groves of Calabria. Tammany’s Irish-born leader faced the task of adapting to the needs of this new population or risk losing the newcomers to the other new threat to Tammany’s power—organized labor.
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Even as John Kelly’s body was being placed in a crypt in the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street, New York’s labor movement was preparing to mount an independent mayoral campaign in the 1886 election, directly challenging Tammany’s claim on working-class loyalties. The number of labor unions in the city had skyrocketed from about a dozen to more than two hundred in just four years (1882 to 1886), a reflection of growing national discontent with the Gilded Age’s excesses. Workers by the hundreds of thousands across the country walked off their jobs in the early 1880s to demand better working conditions and higher wages, leading to accusations that immigrant socialists and anarchists were to blame for union militancy. But discontent was evident among newcomer and native-born alike. Two hundred thousand workers struck the giant Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific Railroads, owned by New York’s Jay Gould. Textile workers, miners, even cowboys in Texas walked off their jobs rather than submit to the status quo. Industrialists hired strikebreakers and private detectives to subvert the unions, leading Gould to boast that he could hire half the working class to kill the other half.

In New York, the city’s largest union, the Central Labor Union, reached across the Atlantic to borrow a controversial new tactic from the Irish Land League. The league had captured the attention of the transatlantic world in the early 1880s when it embarked on a campaign of social and economic ostracism against landlords and their agents. The tactic contributed a new word to the English language when the Irish Land League targeted an unpopular land agent in County Mayo named Charles Boycott.

The CLU quickly organized its own boycotts against employers and products, including a brewer who fired four workers without cause and a shoemaking shop where twenty-five unionized workers—all young women—were dismissed. The boycotting campaign worked so successfully that New York’s courts outlawed the practice, arguing that it was an unconstitutional conspiracy. More than a hundred workers were indicted in New York for organizing boycotts, a development cheered in many of the city’s newspapers. A
New York Times
headline insisted that “Boycotting Must Go” because “An American Community Will Not Tolerate It.”
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Labor’s favorite son in New York was the radical economist Henry George, a brilliant and irascible voice of protest against the inequalities of the Gilded Age. As the mayoral nominee of a new, union-backed party called the United Labor Party, George posed a very real threat to Tammany’s alliance with the city’s Irish-American working class, for he was something of a folk hero thanks to his sensational coverage of Ireland’s land war in the early 1880s in the
Irish World
newspaper. British authorities arrested George twice during his assignment in Ireland, transforming him from a mere observer of the agitation to a martyr for the cause of oppressed Ireland—a transformation that only increased his popularity in New York City’s Irish community. But George’s appeal in New York went beyond Old World grievances and spoke to a rising sentiment among Irish-Americans and other working-class groups that the Gilded Age was a rigged game, that the promise of New World success was giving way to Old World privilege, decadence, and social stratification.

. . .

Henry George was neither Irish nor Catholic; indeed, he was descended from an Anglo-Protestant evangelical tradition that did not always see eye-to-eye with Irish-Catholic culture. He was new to New York in the early 1880s, having moved from San Francisco, where he wrote in relative obscurity for years. But George was no newcomer to Irish and Irish-American politics. Even before Patrick Ford sent him to Ireland to cover the land war, George had taken a keen interest in the cause of the Irish peasantry. Unlike so many other Anglo-Protestant evangelicals, George viewed Irish poverty not as a reflection of papal superstition or congenital laziness but as the inevitable result of oppression and injustice.

In 1879, shortly after completing the book that made him famous,
Progress and Poverty
, George wrote an essay examining the inequities of landlordism in Ireland. The work captured Ford’s attention, and through Ford’s promotional efforts, George came to the attention of Irish-Americans like Father Edward McGlynn, the forty-nine-year-old son of Irish immigrants and pastor of St. Stephen’s Church on Manhattan’s East Side.

McGlynn was not a child of poverty. Although his father died young, he was a prosperous contractor who was able to provide for his wife and ten children even after his death. But as a priest working in a poor parish on the East Side, McGlynn bore witness to the reality of Gilded Age capitalism. He wrote of a “never-ending procession of men, women, and children” who came to his door “begging not so much for alms as for employment; not asking for food, but for my influence and letters of recommendation, and personally appealing to me to obtain for them an opportunity for working for their daily bread.” Why was it, he asked himself, that the “poor shall be constantly becoming poorer in all our large cities. . . . ”
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He found his answers in George’s book, which advocated a single tax on property and which, more generally, assailed the age’s inequitable distribution of wealth. McGlynn met George in 1882, and the two men became fast friends and correspondents. McGlynn was not shy about preaching from the gospel according to George, earning a reputation as a radical priest and, among his parishioners, the nickname
soggarth aroon
(Irish for “precious priest”). The sobriquet spoke of the bond between McGlynn and his poor flock—it also was evidence of the persistence not just of Irish tradition but of the Irish language itself in Gilded Age New York.

Richard Croker was canny enough to recognize the power of Henry George’s message as the mayoral election of 1886 neared. Croker needed a candidate who could speak to labor’s concerns while not alienating the party’s dwindling but still-powerful Swallowtails, shaken as they were by the startling increase in strikes and boycotts in New York and, even worse, a bomb blast in Chicago’s Haymarket Square that killed nearly a dozen people during a confrontation between workers and police on May 4, 1886. A split between Tammany and the party’s business elites surely would lead to victory by either George, a true radical capable of inciting further labor trouble in the city, or—perhaps just as bad—the unpredictable Theodore Roosevelt, who returned to politics after a brief retirement following the death of his wife, Alice, in 1884. Roosevelt had the backing of the Republican Party and most of Wall Street as both recoiled over the possibility of Henry George as mayor.

In his first major test as Tammany’s new leader, Croker found a middle ground that was becoming a defining characteristic of the organization and its Irish-American leadership. His choice for the Democratic mayoral nomination was former congressman Abram Hewitt, a Tammany man who moved in circles that were beyond the reach of the rough-and-tumble Croker and Tammany’s rank and file. He was related by marriage to the impeccable Cooper family, he was wealthy, and he was a fixture in Gilded Age society.

Hewitt was not, however, entirely out of touch with the issues that had propelled Henry George from obscure economist to legitimate mayoral candidate in just a few years. Hewitt didn’t necessarily regard unions as the vanguard of communism. His support for unions was limited, to be sure—there would be no effective union presence in the iron foundries that were the source of his wealth. But he urged his fellow industrialists to accept the legitimacy of craft unions, at least those that were limited in size and ambition, and to consider profit-sharing schemes with their workers. Hewitt practiced some of what he preached—his plants did not shut down or slow down when times were hard, so his workers were spared mass layoffs and salary cuts.

The
New York Times
could not conceal its relief when Croker threw his support behind Hewitt’s mayoral candidacy during a mass meeting at Tammany in early October. Beneath a headline reading “Tammany Takes the Lead,” the newspaper cast aside its practiced skepticism of the organization’s motives to quote approvingly the words of the irrepressible orator William Bourke Cockran, so often dismissed as just another of Tammany’s windbags. Hewitt, Cockran pointedly noted, was a friend of working people—after all, five thousand people worked for Hewitt, and they never had cause to go on strike.
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Whether or not Hewitt truly was a benevolent capitalist was beside the point. In portraying its candidate as a friend of labor as well as a successful industrialist, Tammany sought to acknowledge the grievances of its working-class constituents and to steer them away from the dangerous Henry George. Like the Catholic Association of Daniel O’Connell’s day, Tammany Hall did not reach for the unattainable, for the perfect. The graveyards of Ireland were filled with dreamers. The Irish leaders of Tammany Hall were not about to make that same mistake.

Father McGlynn was not so cautious, publicly proclaiming his support for George in the mayoral campaign. His superior, Archbishop Michael Corrigan, was mortified. “I have read with great regret a printed circular in which you and several others call a political mass meeting to be held in this city,” Corrigan wrote to McGlynn, referring to a planned George rally in late October. “As Your bishop, I now forbid you in the most positive manner to attend the proposed meeting.” McGlynn ignored the archbishop and eventually was excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
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