Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (28 page)

Tammany’s legions had warned that if Strong captured City Hall, the taps of New York’s saloons would run dry on the only day most workers had off—Sunday. It may have sounded like a demagogic appeal to the worst instincts of Tammany’s voters. It also happened to be prophecy. The new mayor appointed a stalwart moral crusader, former assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt, as one of the city’s three police commissioners. Roosevelt was candid enough to concede that he “knew nothing of police management,” but those who regularly chastised Tammany for appointing unqualified people to high office welcomed Roosevelt’s new career path. “For a man of his years, his record has been remarkable,” raved the
New York Times
, taking note of Roosevelt’s Harvard education.
⁴⁵

Among the causes that received his ardent attention as police commissioner was Sunday drinking, a reflection of Roosevelt’s intimate and tragic knowledge of the perils of drink—his brother Elliott, a terrible alcoholic, died at the age of thirty-four in 1894. (He left behind a daughter, Eleanor Roosevelt, whose mother had died two years earlier.) Roosevelt zealously cracked down on workingman’s saloons that sold alcohol on Sunday despite state laws prohibiting such sales. Roosevelt’s boss, Mayor Strong, apparently was not prepared for his new commissioner’s enthusiasm: “I found that the Dutchman whom I had appointed meant to turn all New Yorkers into Puritans.”
⁴⁶

Not surprisingly, saloon owners and patrons resented the Dutchman and his Puritan crusade. U.S. Senator David Hill, a Tammany man, took note of the hypocrisy of Roosevelt’s crusade. Liquor sales—and even, according to one judge, soda sales—may have been illegal in saloons on Sunday, but private clubs were exempt from the restriction. “A glass of beer with a few crackers in a humble restaurant is just as much of a poor man’s lunch or meal on Sunday as is Mr. Roosevelt’s elaborate champagne dinner at the Union League Club on the same day,” Senator Hill noted.
⁴⁷

Tammany’s criticism only seemed to inspire Roosevelt to new heights of zeal. Albany Republicans were delighted to give him a new tool—a state law creating new restrictions on alcohol consumption, and not just on Sunday. Saloonkeepers were banned from offering free lunches to customers and, curiously, from offering drinks to Indians. (Perhaps the upstate lawmakers read too much into the proliferation of Tammany clubs named for Native American tribes.) More ominously, the new law, authored by Republican Senator John Raines, raised the excise tax on the average workingman’s saloon from $75 a year to $800. The fee applied to private clubs as well as to downtown grog shops, but most antialcohol crusaders believed the huge tax increase would disproportionately affect the city’s saloon culture, connected so intimately with Tammany Hall.

Hotels were given exemptions from the new restrictions, leading to the sort of evasions that the Irish had turned into an art form during the height of anti-Catholic legislation in Ireland. Saloons controlled by the family of Tammany operative Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan on the Bowery became “hotels,” although it would be a brave customer indeed who might consider renting one of the closet-size spaces added to the second floor of Sullivan’s places and, soon, to hundreds of other saloons.

The war on drink did nothing to persuade the city’s working classes that reformers were anything more than busybodies. Tammany was always happy to accept the reform movement’s gift of silver-plated hypocrisy. In his last great struggle with reformers before quitting as Tammany boss for a second and final time, Richard Croker confronted longtime nemesis Frank Moss, an associate of Reverend Parkhurst and an indefatigable attorney on retainer to the reform movement. Moss, acting as lead counsel for another Republican-led state legislative investigation of Tammany, the Mazet Committee, probed Croker’s extensive private business dealings to show how he manipulated politics to benefit his own finances.

Wasn’t it true, Moss asked, that Tammany-appointed officials hired an auctioneering firm in which Croker had an interest? “Yes, sir,” replied Croker, dressed for his grilling in a black frock coat and a black ascot tie. And wasn’t it also true that judges whom Croker handpicked for the bench handed out patronage to the real estate firm of Meyer & Croker? “We at least expect [the judges] will be friendly to us,” Croker replied.

“Then you are working for your own pocket, are you not?” Moss asked.

“All the time,” Croker responded. “Same as you.”

Many in the crowded hearing room were aghast. Croker had publicly admitted that he was not, in fact, a disinterested citizen engaged in political work solely for the sake of the public good. Moss himself could hardly believe his ears, asking Croker to restate his view of how politics worked. Croker obliged: “We win and we expect everyone to stand by us,” he said.
⁴⁸

Croker’s acknowledgment that he was working for his pocket became a rallying cry for a generation of anti-Tammany candidates and advocates. During state legislative elections in 1899, city Republicans distributed thousands of campaign postcards bearing a distorted version of Croker’s now-infamous quote. “I am working for my pocket all the time,” the cards read. It did not occur to Croker’s critics that the second part of his answer to Moss—“same as you”—very likely resonated just as loudly in Tammany’s strongholds as the first phrase did in the city’s brownstone districts and newsrooms. At a time when reformers seemed intent on preventing the poor from enjoying a beer on their only day off, Croker’s defiance of one of the city’s most ardent reformers gave public voice to the Irish community’s grievances and alienation—even though Moss was absolutely right about the unsavory connections between Croker’s private dealings and the city’s treasury.

. . .

Police Commissioner Roosevelt’s campaign against Sunday drinking became a laughingstock, but as it did, another threat to Tammany, on a far larger scale, loomed: the expansion of New York City from Manhattan and a portion of today’s Bronx (then known simply as “the annexed district”) into the gigantic, five-borough City of Greater New York. The merger of the independent city of Brooklyn and the rural counties of Queens and Richmond (Staten Island) with Manhattan and the Bronx created at its birth on January 1, 1898, a city of nearly three and a half million people (compared with just under two million in Tammany’s stronghold of Manhattan). The majority of these new New York City residents had no history with Tammany Hall and no loyalty to the organization’s vast army of neighborhood operatives, and that was no coincidence. A top city Republican, Edward Lauterbach, took note of Tammany’s opposition to the consolidation bill, which was rammed through the legislature by state Republican boss Thomas Platt. Tammany leaders understood, Lauterbach said, that, “in a city of 3.5 million souls . . . the power of Tammany Hall . . . will be absolutely annihilated.”
⁴⁹

The test of Lauterbach’s assertion came in the fall of 1897, when city voters were to choose a mayor for the new metropolis. The reform movement nominated former Brooklyn mayor and Columbia University president Seth Low as the candidate of the new Citizens Union Party, whose founding principle was the “separation of municipal from state and national politics.” Low was the quintessential disinterested, nonpartisan candidate, at least in the view of reformers and the new muckraking journalists who believed that politics should have nothing to do with running city government.
⁵⁰

The wealthy Low personified the transatlantic ideal of the true amateur, a person devoted to civic affairs in the same way that Britain’s gentlemen athletes were devoted to sport—not as a way to make a living but as a hobby. Low got his start in public life as a volunteer for charity organizations in Brooklyn, and he shared with those private, elite-led institutions a moralistic understanding of government’s role in ameliorating the needs of its least-served citizens. As Albany put together a new charter for the expanded city of New York, Low, a member of the charter commission, wrote and pushed through a regulation banning the city from providing outdoor relief to the poor, a measure he had put into place when he was mayor of Brooklyn. That provision included a ban on the free distribution of coal, one of the many tricks Tammany used to fool voters into believing that it had their interests at heart.

To oppose Low, Tammany chose an obscure jurist named Robert Van Wyck, figuring that he would offend nobody and would pose no threat to Tammany’s lucrative alliances with private companies eager to bid on city franchises. From his listening post in Britain, James Bryce, now considered the sage of American urban government, followed the mayoral campaign closely, noting with approval that Low conducted his campaign as a struggle between “good and evil.”
⁵¹

A spokesman for Tammany Hall summed up the stakes in slightly different language. As he addressed a rollicking meeting of about three hundred Democrats in Harlem, the organization’s candidate for Manhattan district attorney, Asa Bird Gardiner, recounted what he saw as the various broken promises of Mayor Strong’s reform administration. The Police and Fire Departments were demoralized, he said, and the reformers had found no evidence of the widespread corruption they alleged (he prudently made no reference to the corruption that the Lexow Commission had indeed found). “Now don’t you forget that,” he said to growing cheers, “and when any of these people talk to you about reform, tell them, as I do, ‘To hell with reform!’ ”
⁵²

The networks Tammany put into place under Croker paid dividends when voters went to the polls to choose between Low and Van Wyck. The clubhouse picnics and cruises, the nights spent attending to the problems of constituents hailing from Odessa, Naples, Budapest, Warsaw—and perhaps even a few from Dublin—proved a formidable match against a reform movement seemingly obsessed with changing the behavior of the city’s immigrants and immigrant-stock working class. The inoffensive Robert Van Wyck defeated the reformers without making a single speech in public. For many New Yorkers, Gardiner had said it all.

NINE

AN ADMIRABLE ORGANIZATION?

N
early every night in the mid-1890s, a lone figure stood under a gas lamp on the corner of Second Avenue and East Twentieth Street, waiting to engage in quiet conversation with neighborhood residents. Charlie Murphy, a solidly built man verging on middle age who grew up not far from this corner of Manhattan’s Gas House District, would have been well known to many passersby. He owned a saloon just a few steps away from his listening post, a place that catered to the neighborhood’s laborers and dockworkers. He also was a local baseball hero, a gum-chewing catcher on a barnstorming team that had toured upstate New York and caught the attention of professional teams. But by late 1892, Charlie Murphy was known best as a district leader for Tammany Hall, an important neighborhood link to the power and patronage of the city’s dominant Democratic Party organization. Tammany’s local clubhouse, the Anawanda Club, was based one floor above Murphy’s saloon.
¹

In several important ways, Charlie Murphy seemed ill-suited to the job of Tammany ward heeler. Nicknamed “Silent Charlie,” he was quiet and reserved in a line of work that seemed to require ebullience and a proverbial gleam in the eye. He was as puritanical as any moral reformer—vice, especially prostitution, offended him—but some of his fellow district leaders and other Tammany colleagues were deeply entangled with illicit rackets. Murphy prized loyalty and discipline, but as a young man he had served as campaign manager for an anti-Tammany Assembly candidate. Although he owned four saloons, he was at most a moderate drinker, hardly the image of a beer-guzzling, back-slapping Irish politico. “Charley Murphy takes a glass of wine at dinner sometimes, but he don’t go beyond that,” noted Tammany sachem George Washington Plunkitt, a contemporary of Murphy’s.
²

Despite these apparent handicaps, Murphy was a young man on the rise in Richard Croker’s organization in the late 1880s and the 1890s. He may have been taciturn and temperate, but he also knew how to get people to the polls, and that talent mattered more than anything else in a political organization whose power rested not on claims to moral or cultural authority but on the perception of mass public approval and the reality of loyal voter turnout. Like other district leaders, Murphy developed a personal loyalty among his constituents in the 18th Assembly district—when they went to the polls, they voted the straight Democratic ticket not necessarily because of the candidates’ merits but because of the connection they made with Tammany’s local operatives.

Charles Francis Murphy was a political professional, or, to put it another way, he was a professional politician. He had no other hobbies except golf, no other interests outside of his family. Perhaps because he was quiet by nature, Murphy developed the invaluable political gift of listening, and he was known for the attention he devoted to the observations, reports, and complaints of constituents and colleagues alike. “His long suit is asking questions,” a journalist wrote in the
New York Times
. “He is an insatiable interrogator.” Colleagues understood that Silent Charlie did not issue homilies or public pronouncements. He collected intelligence and acted accordingly, and quietly.
³