Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (26 page)

Irish-Catholic nuns, empowered with funds from Tammany and other political allies, believed in keeping families together—and away from Protestant influence. Irish political power helped provide the funds for the nuns to carry out their charitable work, which many of New York’s civic elites believed was little more than just another handout. Even a charitable woman like Josephine Shaw Lowell, founder of the Charity Organization Society, believed that the provision of services to the poor only encouraged pauperism and other moral defects associated with the city’s immigrant wards.

Mrs. Lowell and her organization bitterly opposed the efforts of another organization, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC), to place children temporarily in institutions, many of them operated by Catholic charities, rather than in homes with new, adoptive parents. Not coincidentally, the head of the SPCC was a well-connected lawyer and Tammany ally, Elbridge Gerry, and the SPCC secretary, William Barry, was a noted Tammany operative in the 26th Assembly district. Mrs. Lowell’s supporters successfully blocked a Tammany bill, introduced by John F. Ahearn, that would have allowed the SPCC to disburse public funds to needy mothers after their children were returned home from the society’s care.

Critics, ever wary of Tammany’s motives, argued that the society should not have such broad power over taxpayer money. But the reformers, aligned with an anti-Catholic organization called the National League for the Protection of American Institutions, were rebuffed during a state constitutional convention in 1894, when they sought to ban religious charities from receiving public money.

The NLPAI’s president, Reverend James M. King of the Methodist Episcopal Church, complained to the convention that Catholic charitable institutions in the city received $1.1 million in public funds in 1893, while other religious charities received $178,000. Reverend King was followed by a spokesman for the American Patriotic League, who told the convention, according to a news report, that “it was impossible to be a good Catholic and a good citizen at the same time.” (Both men spoke on July 11, 1894, the day before the anti-Catholic holiday of July 12, a coincidence that Tammany’s Irish-Catholic politicians could not have failed to notice.) Thanks to a coalition of Catholics and Jews, among others, efforts to ban state funding of religious charitable institutions failed.
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. . .

The conflict between reformers and Tammany politicians during the Gilded Age was not simply a battle between the advocates of good government and the forces of corruption. It was, at its most elemental level, a fight over the meaning of democracy and tolerance in a rapidly changing city, an ideological struggle over the role of government in a modern industrial life, and a debate over the very construction of Americanism in a cosmopolitan, global city. While the reform movement created new “nonpartisan” organizations, including the Citizens Union and the City Reform Club, and continued to draw its members from among the city’s Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites (including many Protestant clergymen, who often complained about the political influence of Catholic priests), Tammany reached out to its new neighbors on the Lower East Side and sought to build a more representative civic order.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Hall’s roster of state legislators included not just those with such names as Hugh Dolan and Thomas McManus, but also Edward Rothstein (12th Assembly district), Emanuel Cahn (28th AD), Gotthardt Litthauer (30th AD), Milton Goldsmith (31st AD), and Julius Rosen (32nd AD). Among its aldermen in 1903 were Moritz Tolk (8th district), Leopold Harburger (10th district), Frederick Richter (15th district), and Philip Harnischfeger (39th district). Five of the six new members inducted into Tammany Hall on February 1, 1897, were Simon H. Stern, Edgar Levy, Nathan Straus, Randolph Guggenheimer, and Herbert Merzbach. Several years later, the organization’s propaganda arm,
The Tammany Times
, celebrated the promising career of a young new member named Benjamin Goldberger, who had been appointed secretary to Tammany Congressman (and future governor) William Sulzer. Goldberger came to the organization’s attention after having organized impressive rallies to support Alfred Dreyfus in 1894, when he was eighteen years old.
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The Union League, home to so many reformers and avowed Tammany enemies, including Thomas Nast, formally barred Jews from membership in 1893.

Tammany was slower to bring in Italian immigrants, many of whom were single men who were far less likely than the Irish to file for naturalization and thus be granted the right to vote. Only 10 percent of Irish immigrants had not become citizens in 1900, but more than 50 percent of Italian immigrants had yet to be naturalized. Whether Tammany was purposely negligent or whether many Italians simply resisted the idea of changing their citizenship is difficult to assess. To the average district leader or block captain, however, all that mattered was turnout, or the lack thereof, on Election Day.
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For all its outreach to new immigrant communities and voting blocs, few would argue that Tammany under Richard Croker was a model political organization. As Croker installed allies in government, his personal fortunes grew accordingly. He owned stock in companies that did business with the city, including the Manhattan Elevated Railroad Company and the U.S. Fidelity and Casualty Company. Tammany itself tapped into the resources of railroad magnates, contractors, and others who wished to get in on the riches to be had in a city that was growing in every way possible. Officeholders were expected to kick back a portion of their salaries to the organization in exchange for its support. The purveyors of vice, especially in and around the Bowery, had little to fear from Tammany or the police—they were paid to look the other way as brothels and pool halls operated openly in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Suffice it to say that at a time when writer Jacob Riis was exploring the terrible living conditions of the poor in his classic book
How the Other Half Lives
, Tammany had no broad solution to the problems of poverty and inequality during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century.

Still, as New York became ever more divided between old native-stock Anglo-Saxon Protestants and the immigrant-stock masses concentrated downtown, Tammany stood its ground on protection of immigrants’ rights and on access to the ballot box—regardless of race. During Croker’s tenure as Tammany boss, the organization’s Irish-American leaders actively solicited the votes of African-Americans and sponsored black-run local political organizations, even as their fellow Democrats in the South were presiding over the disenfranchisement of blacks. The
New York Times
noted in 1894 that seven “colored men” were “holders of lucrative positions in this city under Tammany.”
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The presence of a few African-Americans in a city workforce numbering about twelve thousand cannot be taken as evidence of Tammany’s forward thinking on race, especially given the organization’s past association with racists like Fernando Wood. But it does indicate Tammany’s desire to extend its reach to the city’s traditionally Republican black community—and this at a time when Jim Crow laws were being passed in Southern states. The
New York Times
noted in 1893 that the Tammany organization in Manhattan’s 8th Assembly district in Greenwich Village paid “great attention” to the “colored voters . . . and the work has borne fruit.” Presiding over this outreach was district leader Barney Martin, regularly excoriated in the press and among reformers for his dubious dealings as a saloonkeeper.
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Tammany was rarely given credit for these efforts at inclusion. Perhaps its critics saw little to praise—either because they regarded the organization’s efforts as little more than self-interest (which it surely was) or because they were not so keen on further diversifying the city’s electorate. Tammany’s position, in any case, was clear. In a propaganda pamphlet, Tammany’s leaders asserted that they believed “there is nothing more dangerous to our country than the indifference of a large class of our citizens who neglect to vote on public questions.”

Tammany’s critics, however, saw politics as a solemn duty that ought to be left to the enlightened few who regarded themselves as public-spirited guardians of civic order and morals. “It would be a great gain if our people could be made to understand distinctly that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness involves, to be sure, the right to good-government, but not the right to take part, either immediately or indirectly, in the management of the state,” wrote the
New York Times
. Tammany could not have disagreed more profoundly.
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. . .

The success of Henry George’s 1886 campaign, the disciplined mobilization of labor unions with a large Irish-Catholic presence, and ongoing Irish-American agitation for social justice in Ireland combined to keep Tammany moving ever so slightly to the left through the final years of the nineteenth century. Tammany successfully sought alliances with leaders of the Central Labor Union and other unions, so by the turn of the twentieth century, Tammany members were among the leaders of unions representing such trades as granite cutters, plasterers, and paperhangers. While the alliance between Tammany and labor was never a perfect fit, Richard Croker was careful to bear in mind the new militancy of his working-class constituents. In late January 1889, as the city prepared for a strike against streetcar companies, Croker advised his protégé, Mayor Hugh Grant, to consider the plight of workers, who offered to take a reduction in their daily pay of between $1.60 and $2 if their workload were reduced.
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“There is no doubt in my mind that their request is reasonable as their hours are very long with small pay while their employers are drawing large dividends from their labor,” Croker wrote. The strike, led by an Irish-American organizer named James Magee, ended in defeat for the union, but Tammany’s refusal to denounce the strike was a sharp contrast to the condemnations issued in the press. The
Times
charged that the strike was “frivolous” and “silly,” and that the “foolish” strikers deserved no sympathy from the public.
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If Croker’s Tammany did not have the big answers to the poverty and exploitation of Gilded Age New York, it at least cultivated a new generation of elected officials who were searching for solutions. In 1893, Tammany sent to Albany several assemblymen who reflected the organization’s tentative forays into a more ideological form of politics. Among them were Meyer Joseph Stein of the 20th Assembly district, who supported pensions for public school teachers, Philip Wissig of the 8th district, a native of Germany who wrote legislation regulating the type of manufacturing that could take place in tenement houses, and, most notably, “Big Tim” Sullivan of the 2nd district, who introduced bills regulating the price of gas and lowering the fees that pawnbrokers charged their customers. The state legislative manual for 1893 noted that Sullivan, a child of Irish immigrants and Five Points poverty, authored “some of the greatest and most-important legislation” of the previous session.
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These were men whose backgrounds provided them with firsthand knowledge of conditions in the city’s immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, and who were challenging the traditional American narrative of rugged individualism and laissez-faire economics that bore little relation to life on the Lower East Side. Thomas Dunn, who was born in Famine Ireland in 1850 and emigrated to New York when he was ten years old, was Croker’s handpicked choice as Tammany’s district leader in the 20th Assembly district, covering the East Side from Fifty-Ninth Street to Seventy-Third Street. More comfortable behind the scenes, Dunn gave a rare interview to the
New York Times
in 1893, not long after taking charge of the district. The neighborhood, Dunn explained, was “solidly Democratic because it . . . is largely a working people’s district. We have little of the brownstone element.”
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Dunn cultivated his constituents with clambakes and excursions to the wilds of Queens County, which attracted such disparate Tammany officials as State Senator Jacob Cantor, Congressman William Sulzer, and, inevitably, indefatigable State Senator George Washington Plunkitt. Fifteen hundred members of Dunn’s political club attended his outing in College Point in 1893 and were entertained by sack races, a baseball game between married men and single men, and a football match between the Irish and the Germans (the Irish won—there were no reports of irregularities). A club member named Michael Conroy brought home mixed results. He won one of the day’s foot races. That was the good news. The not-so-good news? The race was reserved for “fat men.”
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These were community-building exercises as well as party-building events. What’s more, with the Irish and the Germans mixing it up on the playing field, in the presence of Jewish, German, and Irish politicians, the club’s outings were experiments in toleration and ethnic cooperation at a time of tremendous demographic change in New York. Tammany’s own brand of laissez-faire government, applied not to economics but to cultural policy, was born on the playing fields of College Point and other bucolic venues, where the city’s ethnic and religious groups—white ethnic and religious groups, to be sure—learned to live and let live, and where they came to understand that the imposition of one group’s rules could infringe on the values of another group’s.

Dunn, a stonecutter from County Tipperary who made good in business and devoted countless hours to the care and feeding of his constituents, saw voters not as slaves or as ignorant foreigners but as fellow citizens capable of making informed choices. He told the
Times
: “We have a most-intelligent class of voters” in the district—a characterization that Tammany’s critics found laughable. The
Times
, suitably impressed, went on to describe Dunn as “one of the most liberal leaders in Tammany Hall.”
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