Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (33 page)

On a more fundamental level, however, Murphy’s prominence at the 1912 convention symbolized the rise of the Irish urban vote in a party dominated by dusty-dry prairie populists like Bryan—known as “The Great Commoner”—and aloof reformers like Wilson. On those rare occasions when he opened his mouth, Murphy spoke for urban residents—Irish, Italians, Jews, among others—who had transformed politics in many cities but who were relatively voiceless in the national party. He also stood against the strident populism of Bryan, whose famed “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896 condemned the monied interests of the East. Murphy sought cooperation, not confrontation, with Democratic-leaning captains of industry, including streetcar magnate Thomas Fortune Ryan and financiers J. P. Morgan and August Belmont. Ryan and Belmont were delegates to the convention.

Ideology aside, in Murphy’s view there was one simple and undeniable fact about Bryan that made him clearly unacceptable at the 1912 convention. His inability to translate his populist message to a national audience had resulted in three crushing defeats. More to the point for Murphy, Bryan lost New York in all three campaigns. If Bryan appeared at the top of the ticket again in 1912, he could bring down the party’s candidates for governor and the state legislature, leading to Republican victories and the end of Tammany’s post-Triangle reform agenda.

Murphy put Tammany’s national clout to the test early and often in 1912, aligning with other urban bosses to secure the election of New York’s Alton B. Parker as the convention’s temporary chairman, over Bryan’s fierce objections. Parker had lost to fellow New Yorker Theodore Roosevelt in the 1904 presidential election. He also was a Wall Street lawyer, symbolizing Bryan’s association of the eastern wing of the party with the nation’s bankers and financiers.

Bryan fired back at Tammany and Murphy within minutes of the convention’s opening prayer, during which the Roman Catholic bishop of Baltimore, Cardinal James Gibbons, reminded delegates that they were “brothers of the same family.” Bryan, a devout Christian fundamentalist, made it clear that his idea of brotherly love did not extend to Tammany and its choice of Parker as temporary chairman. As delegates settled into their seats in the oppressive convention hall, Bryan urged them to rise up against their brothers from New York. The Democratic Party, he said, was “true to the people,” and Tammany “cannot frighten it with your Ryans nor buy it with your Belmonts.”
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The reference to Ryan, a delegate from his native Virginia, and Belmont, a delegate from New York, set the stage for a family squabble over the parameters and meaning of Progressivism in the Democratic Party of 1912. Bryan elaborated on his criticism in newspaper interviews, charging that Tammany’s men—the “Belmont–Ryan–Murphy crowd”—were representatives of the same “predatory Wall Street interests” he had been railing about for fifteen years. Asked about this characterization, Murphy told reporters that Bryan had “a right to say what he chooses.” As for himself, he added, characteristically: “I have a right to be silent.”
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On the night of June 28, 1912, with the convention three days old and growing more tense with each passing hour, Bryan again appeared on the armory stage to give what the
New York Times
called “the most sensational speech of his life”—even greater, in the correspondent’s view, than the “Cross of Gold” keynote address sixteen years earlier. Bryan certainly was in fine form, snarling and scowling as he accused Belmont, Ryan, and Morgan of plotting to purchase the Democratic nomination for the candidate of their choice. Simmering with rage and passion, returning to the biblical imagery of the speech that made him famous, the Great Commoner proclaimed: “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off. And if it is necessary to cut off Morgan and Ryan and Belmont to save the Democratic body politic, then cut them off.” He proposed a resolution demanding that Belmont and Ryan be expelled from the convention, and that the party renounce any candidate they supported. “Pandemonium,” a reporter noted, “does not describe the scene that followed.” After heated objections from Virginia’s delegates, who argued that Ryan was a duly elected fellow delegate who could not simply be compelled to leave, Bryan withdrew his request for expulsion, but he insisted on a roll-call vote on his proposal to condemn the three men and all they stood for.
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The chair called the roll, and state after state—Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas—cast all or nearly all of its votes in favor of Bryan’s resolution. Belmont, a longtime party stalwart whose father was chairman of the Democratic National Committee in the 1870s, was seated near Murphy on the convention floor, no doubt grinding his teeth as the “yea” votes piled up. When New York was called, Charles Murphy betrayed not a hint of annoyance. With a smile, he turned to Belmont and said, “August, listen and hear yourself vote yourself out of the convention.” Murphy then cast all ninety of New York’s votes—including Belmont’s—in favor of Bryan’s condemnation of the three businessmen associated with Tammany. Murphy was not about to add to the crosses of martyrdom that Bryan carried with such evident enthusiasm. If Bryan were looking for another cause around which to rally his aggrieved brethren, Murphy wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
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A Bryan boom never developed, but Murphy’s own candidate, Champ Clark, was outmaneuvered when Bryan threw his support to Wilson, sealing victory for the New Jersey governor, who was perceived to be the enemy of immigrant-based urban bosses and the hordes at their command. (For his effort, Bryan would be named Secretary of State under Wilson, but critics found nothing distasteful about this apparent bargain.) Murphy offered no resistance as the Wilson surge unfolded during the convention’s forty-ninth ballot. Chattering delegates in the cavernous hall grew quiet when the roll call reached New York and “Silent Charlie” Murphy rose to cast the state’s ballots. Murphy seemed startled as conversations came to a halt around him on the convention floor, and delegates shushed those who were unaware of the moment at hand. “New York,” Murphy announced, “casts 90 votes for Woodrow Wilson.” The hall erupted. Delegates from Texas took off their hats to salute the New Yorkers.
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Wilson won the nomination and went on to win a three-way election, besting the Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft, and former president Theodore Roosevelt, who hoped to win disaffected Republicans and Democrats to an independent line, the Progressive Party. On Inauguration Day the following March, Wilson and his wife spent the afternoon reviewing the traditional parade in honor of the new president. A familiar figure—bespectacled, paunchy, and dignified—led the Tammany delegation. Wilson turned to his wife and pointed toward the line of march. “That’s Charlie Murphy,” said the new president.
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Wilson’s followers in New York, including William Gibbs McAdoo (his treasury secretary and future son-in-law) and Franklin Roosevelt (soon to be named assistant secretary of the navy), also were watching Murphy. Both saw the Tammany boss as an obstacle to their ambitions in New York. Roosevelt, in fact, had appeared at a gathering of dissident upstate Democrats in the Hotel Astor in Manhattan shortly after the Baltimore convention. He must have been delighted to hear fellow upstater Thomas Mott Osborne deliver a speech worthy of Bryan at his vituperative best. Osborne, who saw himself as the defender of the party’s progressive purity, expressed the hope that New York Democrats would one day turn to worthy candidates like Franklin Roosevelt for high office. But such hopes were useless, he said, as long as the party had “stupid, ignorant, and arrogant” leaders like Charlie Murphy.
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. . .

For a “stupid leader,” Charlie Murphy had a pretty good autumn in 1912. Tammany and the Democratic Party swept the state elections that year, leaving him with absolute control over state politics and government, thanks especially to the election of longtime Tammany Congressman William Sulzer as governor in place of the ineffective John Alden Dix and the promotion of Al Smith to speaker of the State Assembly. Sulzer was not one of Murphy’s young lions, but he was an interesting choice all the same. He was popular with the city’s growing Jewish population, he had a taste for dramatic outfits and gestures, and he was best known for his facility with words—lots of words.

With Tammany fully in control of state government, its commitment to social justice and reform would be put to the test as the Factory Investigating Commission’s recommendations and other reforms made their way through the legislative pipeline. Expectations for authentic change were high, and Tammany delivered. In a single, remarkable legislative session of less than five months in early 1913, the Tammany-controlled New York legislature put into place a series of reforms that laid the groundwork for a new and robust role for state government—not only in regulating the workplace but also in providing a social safety net, particularly for women and children.

The legislature approved a new mandatory workers’ compensation bill (introduced by Charles Murphy’s son-in-law, James Foley, but vetoed by Governor Sulzer), prohibited the use of child labor in dangerous trades, limited the workday for railroad workers to ten hours, established a minimum wage of $2 a day for workers on state canals, required employers to allow workers at least one day off for every seven, created state-supported college scholarships for poor high school students, strengthened government regulation of workplace safety and of public utilities, and gave the state Labor Department new powers to enforce labor laws. Consumer advocate Florence Kelley called the legislature’s accomplishments “extraordinarily radical.” Many of these reforms had been discussed or proposed in earlier years, but they were not enacted until Tammany’s new generation—the Smiths, the Wagners, the Foleys—dominated the legislature. And that was just the beginning.
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An inspired legislature went on to approve the construction of new hydroelectric plants that the state, rather than the private sector, would own and operate. Tammany’s Jimmy Walker introduced legislation that tightened government regulation of the fire-insurance industry. Assembly Majority Leader Aaron Levy, who became the state’s highest-ranking Jewish politician when Smith moved from majority leader to speaker, authored legislation that forced the New York Stock Exchange to incorporate, making it subject to the state’s banking regulations. Tammany legislators also proposed measures to regulate stock speculation, including a bill that forced brokers to provide transaction information to buyers. But Sulzer blocked a Tammany bill that would have doubled the tax on stock transfers, a measure that gave further evidence of an ideology at the core of Tammany’s political machinations.

Critics were astonished. The editors of
The Outlook
, a constant Tammany foe, complained that the “character of the Legislature [in 1913] was lower than the New York average, which is none too high,” and yet, despite the presence of Tammany leaders in both houses, lawmakers managed to pass progressive measures that were “in advance of any similar State in the Union.” The editors were bewildered. It had not occurred to them that leaders such as Smith, Wagner, and even Silent Charlie Murphy might believe in something other than avarice.
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Jeremiah Mahoney, a member of Murphy’s war board, said that he and other Tammany politicians supported social-welfare legislation because they remembered “the days of adversity” when they were children growing up in Manhattan. Mahoney’s father, a police officer, died at a young age, leaving six children and a widow to struggle along in a $25-a-month walk-up on Third Avenue. Mahoney went to work in a hardware factory when he was fourteen years old to help his mother pay for rent and food. Later, while working as a stock boy, he met another poor but ambitious young man—Robert Wagner, his future law partner. Even in his old age, when he had achieved a degree of affluence, Mahoney insisted that he and other Tammany figures never forgot the struggles of their youth and that they had acted accordingly once they were in public life.
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In 1915, the Civic League, one of the many good-government reform groups that opposed Tammany, published a pamphlet celebrating “five years of moral victories” in Albany. Included among those victories were a ban on Sunday baseball games, restrictions on racetrack gambling, and opposition to Tammany-backed legislation that would have allowed Jewish peddlers to conduct business on Sundays. The Civic League joined with religion-based organizations such as the New York Sabbath Committee, composed mainly of Protestant clergy, in a years-long crusade to prevent any baseball—amateur or professional—from being played on Sunday. A Tammany judge named Francis X. McQuade fought equally long against the prohibition. “Can you conceive of a law which would make your son a criminal just because he batted a baseball in an open lot on a Sunday afternoon?” he asked.
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The Civic League and its religious allies regarded such laws as critical in keeping the Sabbath pure, a virtue they regarded as exceptionally American. One critic said that allowing baseball on Sunday would mark the beginning of “the Germanization of the American Sunday.” (Baseball eventually was allowed on Sunday; Judge McQuade went on to become club treasurer of the New York Giants baseball team, a World Series rival of the New York Yankees, owned by former Tammany congressman Jacob Ruppert.)
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The Civic League’s summary of the reform movement’s victories included no mention of the social-welfare and workplace-safety measures that Tammany had implemented after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. For some self-styled progressives, reforms such as workers’ compensation and pensions for struggling families meant nothing if unaccompanied by moral reform as well. The contempt of such reformers for Tammany left them blind to the achievements of Smith, Wagner, and the new urban liberalism they represented.

. . .

The historic legislative session of 1913, remembered in the decades that followed as a landmark in New York politics, took place in the shadow of a forgotten but critical drama that unfolded in Albany even as Wagner and Smith corralled the votes needed to create a new social compact between the state and its citizens. Governor William Sulzer, so long a reliable Tammany man, declared war on Murphy and the organization almost immediately after he took the oath of office, inspiring a raft of headlines and dramatic prose that dominated the front pages of the city’s newspapers in the spring and summer of 1913. Sulzer was a persnickety sort, a gruff tobacco-spitter who made some of Tammany’s district leaders seem as polished and decorous as their Civic League antagonists. He also harbored ambitions, and he surely noticed that Woodrow Wilson had been elected governor of New Jersey in 1910 with the support of his state’s Democratic machine but then gained national prominence by turning on the machine as soon as he was elected.