Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (25 page)

Hewitt ran as the candidate of a united Democratic Party, but his victory over George was uncomfortably close. He polled 90,552 votes to George’s 68,110, with Roosevelt taking 60,435 in a highly competitive race that some historians believe Tammany stole. But the usual press guardians of the electoral process did not utter a peep about any alleged underhanded Tammany tactics.

George’s extraordinary showing, accomplished without an established party mechanism and despite the vocal opposition of the city’s civic, religious, and intellectual elites, seemed to signal a new kind of class-based politics in New York, and perhaps even throughout the United States. In London, Friedrich Engels took time from editing the works of his late partner, Karl Marx, to hail the turnout for George as “epochmaking.” The city’s vested interests understood that Hewitt’s victory was a close-run thing, and, ironically, they had Tammany to thank for George’s defeat. (Hewitt served just a single two-year term, losing Tammany’s backing when he proved to be a latter-day nativist. “America should be governed by Americans,” he declared. The immigrant boss Croker lost little time in replacing him with a protégé, Hugh Grant, son of Irish immigrants.)
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In the days and weeks after George’s close call, Richard Croker did not spend his time awaiting thanks from the city’s leading editors, merchants, and bankers for keeping a radical out of City Hall. Instead, he buried himself inside a story narrated in numbers—the number of votes Tammany won, and didn’t win, in its traditional strongholds; the number of votes George won in districts that were home to the city’s newcomers, especially Jewish voters whom George had actively courted. For a practiced professional like Croker, the tedious columns of numbers from Election Day told fascinating stories that eluded so many amateurs in his business. They told him about the shocking defection of Catholic voters to Henry George—historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace estimate that five-sixths of George’s support came from Catholics who clearly paid little heed to the preferences of their spiritual leader, Archbishop Corrigan. And they told him a story about organization—Tammany’s own area of expertise. The George campaign, through the efforts of the city’s labor movement and Patrick Ford’s
Irish World
newspaper, had organized clubs that served as clearinghouses and gathering spots for George’s army of supporters. Croker saw the results, and responded in kind.
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The saloons that had served Tammany so well as a source of intelligence and a place for back-room dealmaking gave way to a well-organized network of respectable clubhouses in each of the city’s Assembly districts. In keeping with Tammany tradition, the clubs often took their names from Native American lore, such as the Delaware Club on East Seventy-First Street (which was led by a child of the Famine, Thomas J. Dunn, for many years) and the Narragansett Club on West Fifty-Fourth Street (whose most famous member was the Tammany philosopher George Washington Plunkitt).

Clubhouses became the physical articulation of Tammany’s ad-hoc ideology of service and social welfare. The clubhouse system strengthened the role of district leaders such as John Ahearn and Thomas Foley on the Lower East Side and Thomas McManus in the Hell’s Kitchen section of the West Side. The network over which they presided was remarkably similar to the system of Liberal Clubs that Thomas Wyse had founded in Ireland after the Catholic Emancipation campaign in the late 1820s. Wyse described the clubs as part of a “well-digested system of political tactics, emanating from a single point, and extending in circle upon circle, until it shall embrace the entire nation.” The clubs, in Wyse’s view, were necessary because the passions of mass meetings and campaigns were soon spent and forgotten. A permanent network, he argued, was required to win and hold political power.
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The clubhouse system in New York allowed Tammany to achieve undisputed dominance over Democratic Party politics. The strong challenges from dissident Democrats were crushed by 1890, in part thanks to the powerful influence of the clubhouses, which served as providers of social services, employment, judicial review, and entertainment throughout the city. The clubhouse was where those in need of coal, a meal, a job, or a political favor met with district leaders, who were the public and often highly popular faces of Tammany Hall.

“Thousands of new citizens and soon-to-be citizens found an impersonal government translated and interpreted here by the personal touch,” wrote Tammany operative Louis Eisenstein, whose mostly Jewish neighbors were introduced to New York culture and politics in the clubhouse of the John F. Ahearn Association on Grand Street and East Broadway on the Lower East Side. “The harshness of life in an unfamiliar New World was cushioned for newcomers who could not fill out citizenship papers or meet excessive rent payments and for those in need of jobs or peddlers’ licenses.”

Of course, these were not entirely philanthropic enterprises. The clubhouse did not represent a branch of municipal government—for government did not provide many constituent-based services at the turn of the twentieth century—but the Democratic Party under the control of Tammany Hall. Favors and services, then, were designed to win the loyalty of those who needed them. This transactional republic continued to infuriate reformers and journalists who saw Tammany not as a supplier of necessary services but as an exploiter of need. But Tammany figures such as Eisenstein asked a pertinent question: “At the turn of the century . . . who else offered aid? Certainly not the stiff, aloof Republicans, [while] the Socialists were too busy preparing for the brave new world of the future to bother with the immediate needs of the present.” So families like Eisenstein’s turned to Tammany to intervene on their behalf.
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Clubs and Tammany-aligned political associations fostered a sense of community and common purpose in neighborhoods that were home to newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as older immigrant or first-generation Irish-Americans. For example, the Ahearn Association sponsored an annual cruise that took thousands of families from the Lower East Side to bucolic picnic grounds on the banks of the Hudson River. The
New York Times
described the event on July 31, 1893, as the “biggest pleasure party that ever left this city by way of water,” noting that some twenty thousand people took part. They started boarding six barges and two steamboats at eight o’clock in the morning, and by eleven o’clock, “they were still coming, married men and women with their whole brood, like young ducklings, along with them, young men and young women, girls of all ages, sizes and descriptions, and the multitudinous, copper-lunged east-side small boy.”
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The cruise and picnic certainly enhanced John Ahearn’s popularity and emphasized Tammany’s commitment to spectacle and service, but his success on the Lower East Side—and the success of other midlevel Tammany figures elsewhere—was not simply a matter of bread and circus. As a state senator at the dawn of the Progressive Era, Ahearn supported public pensions for teachers, firefighters, and police officers, and he wrote legislation making it easier for mothers to keep dependent children when their fathers died, disappeared, or were otherwise unable to provide for their families. He represented a district that changed from predominantly Irish to predominantly Jewish during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but his role and that of his political club remained the same. George Washington Plunkitt noted that Ahearn was as likely to be found in the district’s synagogues as he was in his own Catholic parish. Tammany’s opponents were simply incapable of this sort of outreach. But for Tammany, it was all in a night’s work—and the payoff came when voters went to the polls, where they cast their ballots not so much on the merits of individual candidates but in gratitude for the services provided by their local district leader or one of his subordinates.

“As a district leader, Ahearn exemplified to a high degree the Tammany type in his intense and constant playing of the political game and his devotion to the intimate personal needs of the men and women in his district,” the
New York Times
wrote upon Ahearn’s death in 1920.
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It was the transactional nature of Tammany politics—in which the right to vote became, in part, a means to an end rather than an exercise in civic virtue—that appalled reformers and spurred them to embrace civil-service reform as a way to limit the power of political parties over government hiring. Tammany, not surprisingly, embraced a more pragmatic approach to mass politics. The vote was all many of these people had—and they were unafraid to use it to gain access to power. Those who led reform movements—middle-class professionals, journalists, Protestant clergy—already had access and were unlikely to regard a job in the Public Works Department as some kind of reward. Such notable anti-Tammany critics as E. L. Godkin, Richard Watson Gilder (editor of
Century Magazine
), and George William Curtis (writer, editor, and advocate of civil-service reform) were well situated to spend their time thinking about the ways in which men like themselves could better govern New York. Tammany’s constituents did not have such luxuries; if Tammany required their support, Tammany would have to find them work, or contracts, or other kinds of incentives.

“Does the college graduate who talks politics in evening dress at Carnegie Hall . . . know how many votes a ton of coal will bring in?” asked a member of the Bowery’s famed Sullivan clan, “Little Tim” Sullivan, cousin of Tammany fixture “Big Tim” Sullivan.
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For Gilded Age reformers, Tammany Hall symbolized more than just bad or inefficient government—it symbolized irredeemably evil government. “According to the opposition, the first requisite for admission into Tammany Hall is that you must be a sinner,” noted Tammany’s Thomas F. Grady. Indeed, Tammany represented a close approximation to the reform movement’s former foe, Southern slavery. Arguing in favor of civil-service reform in 1897, one of the age’s great reformers, Carl Schurz, asserted that the struggle over civil service reminded him of “the struggle against slavery.” Just as the “virtue and wisdom of the American people . . . wiped out the blot of slavery . . . so they will surely at least sweep away the barbarism and corruption of the spoils system.” Schurz warned the governor of New York, Frank S. Black, that if he supported a Tammany-backed civil-service bill, which critics saw as an attempt to thwart genuine reform, he would be remembered as “the Buchanan of New York”—a reference, of course, to President James Buchanan and his listless leadership during the pre–Civil War violence in Kansas.
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Three decades earlier, when slavery was very much a fresh memory, Thomas Nast drew an image that explicitly linked Tammany to the enslavement of its ignorant followers. Tweed’s picture showed an apelike Irishman chained to a post, watched over by one of Tweed’s trusted aides, Peter Sweeny. In smaller images surrounding the main picture, Nast depicted Tammany operatives wielding cat-o’-nine-tails as they drove Irishmen to the polls. Nast titled the image “The Slave Drivers.”
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If there was a new slave power lurking in Gilded Age New York, however, it was not based in politically connected saloons or in the local political clubhouse—at least not in the view of Tammany’s constituents. Instead, it was based in the well-appointed salons of the reform movement, where hostile forces were believed to be plotting to take away the votes, pleasures, and power of the poor through disenfranchisement, temperance, Sabbatarianism, and civil-service reform.

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While Tammany certainly did not have a systematic solution for the problems that faced so many of its constituents, it was hardly blind to their plight. In their own way, Tammany leaders believed that with every job placement, every whispered word to a judge, and even with every drink consumed on Sunday, they were providing no small amount of relief to those who needed it most. But they did not act alone.

Beginning in the 1870s with the arrival of large numbers of Irish-Catholic nuns in New York, Tammany funded the city’s growing network of Catholic orphanages, asylums, homes for unwed mothers, and other social services that were constructed in defiance of the worthiness-based criteria established by allegedly nonsectarian charities that nevertheless were imbued with evangelical Anglo-Protestant values. The growth of these government-funded Catholic social service institutions introduced new actors in the city’s ongoing political and cultural debate about how best to care for the immigrant poor.

The Children’s Law of 1875 required that poor children in need of institutional care be housed in institutions reflecting their religious upbringing, with the city required to pay for the care. The Sisters of Mercy lobbied judges to remand destitute children to their institutions, rather than to non-Catholic private charities. Their efforts were a huge success—a Mercy-run institution for poor boys received $77,000 in city funds in 1880 to look after the welfare of nearly a thousand orphaned or neglected children. But the fledgling alliance between Tammany’s male chieftains and the Irish nuns who cared for the Catholic poor was not simply about funding separatism and building institutional empires. Catholic-run institutions insisted on keeping families together—the nuns viewed their services as a temporary remedy for severe distress, not as an opportunity to reorder their clients’ values and belief system.
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This approach defied the practices of Anglo-Protestant charities, including the Children’s Aid Society, which sought to remove children not only from the homes of the poor but, in many cases, from the city altogether. It also contrasted with the approach of some government institutions, such as the state Board of Charities, which were beyond the control of Tammany politicians. The board echoed the transatlantic Anglo-Protestant critique of poverty as evidence of character flaws, particularly when the poor were Irish and Catholic.

In its annual report in 1877, the Board of Charities blamed most “cases of pauperism” on “idleness, improvidence, drunkenness, or other forms of vicious indulgence, which are frequently, if not universally, hereditary in character.” Because these problems were hereditary, the board argued, “the sooner [families] can be separated and broken up, the better it will be for the children and for society at large.”
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