Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (27 page)

The Dunn club’s successful outing to College Point, with its melting pot of politicians and voters and fun and games, took place just as a coalition of anti-Tammany forces saw an opportunity to overthrow the organization. And they took it.

. . .

It began with a sermon. Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst was a scholarly Presbyterian minister with a handsome goatee, thinning hair, and round spectacles. His name was virtually unknown beyond his congregation in Madison Square Church, a few blocks but many psychic miles from Tammany Hall’s headquarters on Fourteenth Street. He was not a native New Yorker; his formative years were spent in New England, where he worked on a farm and in a grocery store before attending college and moving to the city in 1880.

As Parkhurst strode to the pulpit on the morning of February 14, 1892, New York was the fastest-growing city in the Western World, on the verge of jumping the East River and becoming even more sprawling, even more chaotic, even more symbolic of the age’s achievements and inequities. It was also, undeniably, a place that trafficked in vice—in the sale of women’s bodies, in games of chance that inevitably exploited the desperate, in secret payments made to those who wrote and upheld the city’s laws and regulations.

In his sermon on that Sunday morning, Parkhurst departed from his usual biblical themes to denounce Tammany Hall, the mayor, and anybody else who held power in the city. “They are a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot,” Parkhurst thundered. The city was, in his words, a “Tammany-debauched town.” At least one member of his congregation must have been thrilled: Thomas C. Platt, boss of the Republican Party in New York.
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The Parkhurst sermon, followed by a sensational investigation of the city’s underworld, was a turning point in the reform movement’s battle with Richard Croker’s Tammany. Under the leadership of State Senator Clarence Lexow, an upstate Republican, the state put together a full-scale investigation of city government. The Lexow Commission’s hearings shed light on the unseemly connections between the city’s police force and Croker’s Tammany, although the outrage heaped upon Tammany may not have been proportionate to the commission’s actual findings. The commission’s associate counsel, a reformer named Frank Moss, announced his shocking discovery that some political figures wrote letters on behalf of men seeking appointment to the city’s police department.

Moss told members of the nonpartisan Good Government Club that he had access to a thousand letters containing testimonials to police candidates who failed the required exam. Of that figure, Moss said, 123 were written on Tammany letterhead. Moss found this an astonishingly high figure. Croker might well have wondered who in the world wrote the remaining 877.

The Parkhurst crusade against prostitution, gambling, drinking, and other forms of corruption came amid renewed doubts in the transatlantic Anglo-Protestant world about the Irish capacity for self-government, or the capacity of Irish-ruled cities like New York to govern themselves without strict oversight at the state level. A Canadian writer, Goldwin Smith, described the baneful effect of the Irish in both Britain and the United States. The Irishman, he wrote in the British journal
The Nineteenth Century
, “uses his vote as a shillelagh . . . his fatal influence threatens with ruin every Anglo-Saxon polity and Anglo-Saxon civilization throughout the world.” As evidence, he took note of the Irish influence over American politics: “The [Irish-Catholic] aptitude for municipal self-government . . . has been displayed to the full satisfaction of the taxpayer and of all decent cities in the Irish-ridden cities of the Union.”
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Similar sentiments were expressed in Britain and New York as home rule, albeit in two very different forms, became a political controversy on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century. The Irish in Ireland sought home rule—that is, a limited form of self-government within the British Empire as an alternative to outright independence, which many deemed unachievable. The Tammany Irish in New York City fought an ongoing battle with predominantly Anglo-Protestant Republicans from upstate over Albany’s power to intervene in local decisionmaking. In both cases, critics argued that granting home rule—to Ireland, and to Irish-dominated New York City—would lead inevitably to corruption and sectarian Catholic rule, and then to the end of liberty itself.

In the British periodical
Fortnightly,
journalist T. W. Russell argued against self-government for Ireland by pointing to “two cities wholly under the control of the Irish population in America,” New York and Boston. He described New York as “a disgrace to the United States” as a result of “the Irish vote.” Only the “good sense of the Anglo-Saxon race” protected American liberties from the ravages of universal suffrage and Irish rule. Those who favored home rule for Ireland had no choice, he argued, but to consider what had become of New York and other Irish-dominated cities in America. Americans understood the flaws inherent in the Irish character, wrote Sydney Brooks in
The Monthly Review,
a British journal, which was why New York “has not even a semblance of Home Rule.”
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Those arguments echoed the thoughts of home-rule opponents in New York who insisted that the state should limit the city’s power over expenditures and appointments. The
New York Times
argued that home rule could not work in New York because it was “anything but an American city” thanks to of its high proportion of immigrants. Giving New Yorkers “absolute home rule,” the paper continued, “would be to deprive Americans by birth and descent of the small share they yet retain in the control of [city] affairs.”
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It surely did not pass without notice on either side of the Atlantic that the Irish home-rule movement was financed in part by the New York Irish, who themselves were not to be trusted with home rule for the city they dominated. Tammany, for example, raised more than $18,000 for the Irish home-rule movement in early 1886, including about $1,200 from the predominantly Jewish 8th Assembly district, led by a Tammany operative named Moritz Herzberg.
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As these critiques of the Irish capacity for self-government were under discussion, James Bryce, a British writer, member of Parliament, and future ambassador to the United States, published a long study of American politics called
The American Commonwealth
. It was greeted with raptures of praise from New York’s Anglo-Protestant reformers, who found in a single phrase from the massive text everything they had been saying and thinking for decades, ever since Tammany Hall had become a vehicle for the empowerment of foreign immigrants. “There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States,” Bryce wrote. For elite urban reformers at the turn of the twentieth century,
The American Commonwealth
was a foundational document in their narrative of corrupt political bosses who presided over urban misgovernment based on the support of unthinking immigrant-stock voters. (Bryce’s observations about growing economic inequality in the United States did not receive similar attention from his elite readers.)
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Bryce was invited to speak before reform organizations such as the City Club, where he was welcomed not as a mere foreigner but rather a “valued instructor” in American politics. In his preface to the first volume of his work, Bryce acknowledged the guidance and contributions of a veritable who’s who of New York reformers: Theodore Roosevelt, Seth Low (the president of Columbia University and future reform mayor of New York), E. L. Godkin of
The Nation
, Henry Villard of the
New York Evening Post
, and Andrew D. White, the Cornell University president who had complained about city governments ruled by the votes of “illiterate peasants, freshly raked from Irish bogs, or Bohemian mines, or Italian robber nests.” There is no evidence that Bryce received input from the “illiterate peasants” who actually ran the nation’s municipal governments, but then again, they operated in very different social circles.
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A more polemical variation on Bryce’s observations about American municipal government, written by Protestant clergyman Joseph Hartwell, asserted that the “government of New York City is an unbroken reign of the worst element of imported voters” and urged “the descendants of the Pilgrim fathers” to resist Jesuit-inspired corruption. Bryce’s somewhat more subdued condemnation of political bosses and machines appeared just as the Parnell-led home-rule movement in Ireland was reaching a climax—in the end, it failed—and helped set the stage for Reverend Parkhurst’s exposé of Tammany’s links to the city’s vice industry.
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Critics saw a continuum of interest, style, and corruption in Irish political figures, whether they were based in Ireland or in the United States. During the land agitation in Ireland in the 1880s, the
New York Times
charged that some Tammany figures wished to bring Charles Parnell across the Atlantic as Tammany’s new boss. “With Parnell at the helm, it was claimed that Tammany would be invincible,” the
Times
reported, clearly referring to a group of terrorists known as “the Invincibles” who hacked two British officials to death in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1881.
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In 1914, a critic of home rule in Ireland asserted that Croker’s successor as Tammany boss, Charles Francis Murphy, might return to his father’s native land to take over a proposed new home-rule government in Ireland. If that happened, the critic vowed, “Charley Murphy will be beaten back to his American stronghold.” A British periodical,
The Academy
, argued against home rule for Ireland by asking whether the English people were prepared “to hand over” Ireland to a “party of political rowdies whose exchequer is periodically reimbursed by contributions from the ‘hard-earned’ dollars of New York ‘corner-boys’ and Chicago ‘bar-tenders’?”
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If Anglo-Americans were dubious about the ability of the Irish to rule themselves, the Tammany Irish were equally disdainful of American and British claims that they were suited to rule other people. As American nationalists like Theodore Roosevelt, Albert Beveridge, and many others advocated overseas expansion as part of the Progressive Era’s mission to bring Anglo-Saxon civilization to races deemed barbaric or undeveloped, Tammany leaders, no doubt drawing on the Irish narrative of oppression and defeat, argued that there was nothing progressive about imperialism. “Let me explain what I mean by anti-imperialism,” said Richard Croker in 1900. “It means opposition to the fashion of shooting down everybody who doesn’t speak English. It seems to be the fashion nowadays when a people don’t speak English to organize an army and send troops to shoot them down.”
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Croker’s fellow Irish immigrant, Tammany Congressman William Bourke Cockran, protested American expansion in Cuba and the Philippines at an anti-imperialism rally in Manhattan’s Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street in 1899. Imperialism, he said, “is a policy which, from its material point of view, is a policy of folly, and from its moral point of view, a policy of infamy.” He wondered aloud why it was that “any person who gives out an interview in New York favoring imperialism . . . will find his remarks paraded in all the London newspapers and terms of encomium showered on his head.” Cockran saw American expansion as an extension of an Anglo-Saxon imperial project founded in London and put to ruthless use in the land of his birth. He later became involved in Irish nationalist politics and was an outspoken critic of British colonialism, no doubt to the dismay of his friend and frequent correspondent, Winston Churchill.
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. . .

Reverend Parkhurst’s sermon and his subsequent secret investigation of New York’s nightlife, which included lurid descriptions of a “dance of nature” performed by five naked prostitutes, linked Tammany to crimes of the flesh, not simply to offenses against the public treasury. In another homily, Parkhurst complained about gambling houses operating just a short distance from his church, including one “furnished with roulette . . . in which there were counted forty-eight young men.” The police, he said, were aware of illicit gambling but did nothing about it.

Several months later, the press reported that betting on the outcome of the 1894 mayoral campaign was active “at the downtown exchanges.” One financier at the New York Stock Exchange publicly announced that he had wagered $5,000 on the reform movement, whose platform, of course, included promises to close down gambling. The press spotted another intrepid Wall Streeter who made his way around the Stock Exchange floor, “stopping at every group to bet $1,000 or $500” on the reform movement’s chances. Tens of thousands were wagered openly on the reform movement’s antivice campaign. Reverend Parkhurst managed to contain his shock.
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Regardless of the apparent hypocrisy, Parkhurst’s crusade had struck a chord, and Tammany paid a price. Croker temporarily relinquished control over Tammany and traveled to Europe, ostensibly to regain his health. Reformers rallied around the candidacy of William Strong, an Ohio-born bank president. Reverend Parkhurst was among Strong’s most vocal supporters, announcing at a pro-Strong rally that “this is not a political campaign. It is simply a warfare between that which is right and that which is wrong.”
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Thanks to the Parkhurst revelations, Strong captured the mayoralty and Republicans seized control of the Board of Aldermen and won a majority (seventeen) of the city’s thirty Assembly races. Tammany’s humiliation was complete, and there was no shortage of satisfaction among its opponents. Reverend Robert MacArthur, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church on West Fifty-Seventh Street, used his Thanksgiving Day sermon to express his gratitude that with a new administration in City Hall, the flag of the United States would henceforth be protected from “improper association . . . with the little green rag that represents no nation. Ireland has no flag, only the British flag; the green flag represents religious bigotry on one side, national disloyalty on the other.” MacArthur had special reason to give thanks in 1894—in his Thanksgiving homily a year earlier, he had called for an “uprising of the people” to create “America for the Americans.”
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