Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (4 page)

Tammany societies were established throughout the new nation, but none had the staying power of New York’s. The New York society included another sainted figure from the continent’s past, Christopher Columbus, as part of its formal name. In 1792, members of the Society of St. Tammany or Columbian Order led New York’s celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s transatlantic voyage, incorporating the Italian sea captain into a pantheon of democratic heroes that included Thomas Paine, the Marquis de Lafayette, and George Washington, all of whom were toasted during the society’s celebrations. Eventually, however, members of the society, the public, journalists, and historians dropped the reference to Columbus, and the organization became known simply as the Tammany Society. Their meeting place was called, naturally, Tammany Hall.
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One of the society’s founders, an artisan named William Mooney, envisioned the organization as a fraternal club dedicated to “the true and genuine principles of republicanism,” a counterweight to organizations harboring aristocratic pretensions. Mooney and the society’s founders adopted symbols and language from native Americans who, in their imagination, were the true repositories of equality and egalitarianism. The Tammany Society’s “grand sachem” presided over a council of lesser elders, called “sachems,” while rank-and-file members were known as “braves.” The society’s headquarters was known informally as “the Wigwam,” a reference that would continue into the twentieth century.
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It was Aaron Burr, a Mooney associate, who helped transform the organization into a political machine. Tammany members acted as agents of the Democratic-Republican Party in 1800, supporting Thomas Jefferson in that year’s closely contested presidential election.

When the Tammany Society applied for a charter from the state of New York in 1805, it described its mission as “affording relief to the indigent and the distressed.” Critics pointed out that politics was no place for a state-chartered charity, leading the Tammany Society to establish a separate political organization, the General Committee of the Democratic-Republican Party (later shortened to the Democratic Party), with smaller committees established through the city’s wards. The general committee became better known by its meeting place, Tammany Hall.
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For the better part of the next century and a half, the Tammany Society and Tammany Hall technically were separate organizations housed in the same building, but the separation was, for the most part, a fiction. The political operation was open to all voters wishing to register in the party, while the society’s membership was much more exclusive. The society’s leaders controlled the party’s general committee and regulated access to its building, barring competing factions. The society’s leader, the grand sachem, eventually became little more than a ceremonial figure. The real political power rested in the party’s boss, selected by the party’s general committee.

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Tammany’s feud with New York’s Governor Clinton made for colorful political battles, but it was a far more substantial issue that allowed Tammany to become the dominant political faction in New York City beginning in the 1820s, when the nation moved to broaden democracy with new voting rights for white males. As the self-conscious voice of the common man, Tammany successfully supported measures to expand the right to vote beyond a minority of white male property owners. That radical notion did not meet with universal approval. One critic dismissed Tammany as a “noisy rabble.” A skeptical writer wondered whether Tammany had thought through its support for expanding suffrage. “Would you admit the populace, the patroon’s footman, to vote?” he asked. Tammany had a ready answer for that query.
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New York dropped most property-owning requirements for suffrage in 1821 and ended them entirely by 1826, meaning that virtually all white males over the age of twenty-one could vote. Black adult males could, too, provided they owned property. Tammany threw a party to celebrate the occasion. A new, exuberant, and chaotic democratic spirit transformed political culture throughout the infant republic, bringing an end to the long line of Virginia planters and New England aristocrats who dominated the presidency from George Washington to John Quincy Adams. Tammany was part of this new democratic age, incorporating into its evolving ideology a deep suspicion of economic monopolies that symbolized concentrated wealth and power.

In the end, however, Tammany never did support Thomas Addis Emmet for elected office. But when he died in late 1827 at the age of sixty-five, many of the men who broke up the Tammany meeting in 1817 returned to the Hall for a much more restrained occasion, a public memorial for the lawyer-immigrant attended by “naturalized citizens of Irish birth and parentage.” Dr. MacNeven, who had been among the leaders of the attempted Irish coup, delivered a heartfelt eulogy to his fellow rebel and exile. “Twenty years ago, as several here will remember, strong prejudices against the emigrants from Ireland prevailed widely through this city, and even reached some of the best men in the community,” MacNeven said. But that was all over, he announced. Through his embrace of American republicanism, equality, and liberty, Thomas Addis Emmet had helped to change New York’s views of the Irish.
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Time would show that MacNeven’s assessment was far too optimistic. But Tammany’s leaders, at least, had begun to put aside their doubts about the newcomers in their midst, if only because they could add and so understood that the Irish formed a sizable and growing bloc of votes. In 1828, Tammany took full advantage of the expanded rolls of voters, turning out huge numbers to benefit the presidential candidacy of a man who came to symbolize the new democratic age: Andrew Jackson, the son of Irish immigrants.

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Many working men in New York did not see Tammany as its leaders wished they would. Tammany celebrated the birth anniversary of the great republican rabble-rouser Thomas Paine every year with a fine festival of drinking. But for an emerging political faction known as the Workingmen’s Party, Tammany was not nearly radical enough. Tammany responded to growing signs of worker discontent with legislation abolishing debtors’ prisons, but the city remained a roiling, rollicking test case of just how far Jacksonian democracy would go. A partial answer was given in 1836 when Tammany’s leaders barred the doors of their meeting hall to workers protesting a crackdown on fledgling union organizing.

A leader of the workingmen’s movement, Irish native Mike Walsh, threw down the gauntlet during a speech in the Hall in 1841. Walsh, a journalist who published
The Subterranean
, a newspaper designed to stir up labor agitation, had to shout over cheers and jeers as he told Tammany’s leaders: “I wish you to distinctly understand me when I tell you that Tammany Hall belongs to us—we are the only honest, virtuous portion of the Democratic Party, and I wish you also to distinctly understand that we are determined to keep possession of it until you are able to dispossess us.”
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Walsh and the workingmen’s movement represented a serious challenge to the social and political status quo in New York, a challenge that inspired Tammany to bring on a tough former riverboat gambler named Isaiah Ryders to recruit gang members who could match Walsh’s muscle on Election Day. But another struggle for power, this one three thousand miles away, captured the attention of the city’s Irish community even as Tammany fought for political supremacy in the narrow lanes of downtown New York.

A charismatic middle-class lawyer named Daniel O’Connell was rallying Ireland’s Catholic population as no political leader had ever done before, to the astonishment of the island’s Protestant-only civil leaders. His goal was the removal of the test oath from British politics—the very same barrier to Catholic participation in government that New York had so recently abolished. He called it “Catholic emancipation.”

New York’s Irish-Catholic immigrants mobilized in support of the O’Connell campaign, for they well remembered the grievances of the land they had left behind. How could they have forgotten, when the grievances were not all that different in New York? Dr. MacNeven founded a group called the Association of the Friends of Ireland, which dispatched two hundred pounds to O’Connell’s Dublin headquarters in early 1829.
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Members of another emigrant society, the O’Connellite Association of New York, opened their meetings with toasts that spoke to their insistence that they could be both Irish and American—they drank to the president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, and to the emerging hero of the Irish diaspora, Daniel O’Connell.
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For the Irish in New York, politics always was a transatlantic enterprise.

TWO

MASS POLITICS

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hrewd and pragmatic, Daniel O’Connell was a prototype for future generations of Tammany Hall politicians—except that, unlike the greatest Tammany boss of all, Charlie Murphy, nobody would ever call Daniel O’Connell “silent.” Indeed, he was garrulous in two languages, Irish and English, and his voice boomed like a foghorn in either tongue. He addressed mass meetings of hundreds of thousands and could make himself heard. Or so it was said. His voice was so powerful, one farmer said, “You could hear it a mile off as if it were coming from honey.”
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O’Connell was curly haired, stocky, and larger than life, with a gift for demagoguery and an appreciation for public spectacle. He rose well before dawn and retired late at night, balancing a prosperous law practice in the southern Irish province of Munster with a boisterous family life—he and his wife were parents of five children—and an exhausting public career. He dominated Irish politics from the early 1820s to the late 1840s, presiding over a complex, highly disciplined organization that capitalized on the cultural and political alienation of the island’s majority population. For generations of Irish emigrants to the United States, their political touchstone, their point of reference, their political hero, was not George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or even Andrew Jackson. For them, Daniel O’Connell was their liberator, the embodiment of a political culture that embraced popular mobilization, public spectacle, intense solidarity, and defiance of an established order.

Joseph Tumulty, an Irish-American attorney who served as President Woodrow Wilson’s private secretary, wrote that he was inspired to pursue politics in part because of stories he heard in his father’s grocery store in Jersey City, where his Irish-American neighbors gathered to talk politics. Tumulty wrote that his old uncle, an Irish immigrant named Jimmie Kelter, regularly recounted stories of attending the House of Commons and hearing Daniel O’Connell “denounce England’s attitude of injustice. . . . ” Tumulty was a native-born American, but through the memories of his immigrant relatives and neighbors, his political consciousness was rooted in the Irish political experience in the homeland.
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Daniel O’Connell was born in 1775 in the western reaches of County Kerry, where his family managed to hold onto its land through careful evasion of Britain’s punitive laws against Catholics. O’Connell attended a Catholic Church–run college in France and witnessed firsthand the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution. Particularly frightening for the devout young Irishman was the revolution’s harsh anticlerical, anti-Church rhetoric. As violence mounted near the University of Douay, where O’Connell and his brother were studying, a menacing-looking Frenchman spotted O’Connell and several other students wandering off campus. “Voilà les jeunes Jesuits!” the Frenchman shouted. (“There are the young Jesuits!”) O’Connell and his companions raced back to the safety of the university. Months later, the revolutionary government shut down the university, and O’Connell left France on January 21, 1793—the day King Louis XVI was beheaded. Of his time in France, O’Connell later recalled: “I was always in terror lest the scoundrels cut our throats.”
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The violence left an indelible impression on the young Irishman. The causes he would later embrace were carefully calibrated to manage expectations and avoid deadly confrontations. His place in European history rests on his ability to achieve dramatic social and political change through peaceful, constitutional methods and shrewd dealmaking.

In 1823 O’Connell formed his first mass-based organization, the Catholic Association, to agitate for Catholic Emancipation, the right of Catholics to occupy elected and high appointed offices in Ireland and throughout the United Kingdom through abolition of the test oath. For the vast majority of Ireland’s Catholics—who made up 80 percent of the island’s more than six million people—the right to hold a seat in the House of Commons or an administrative post in Dublin meant very little, but O’Connell brilliantly framed the issue as a symbol of mass Catholic exclusion and Protestant oppression. The Catholic Association, he vowed, would deal with “practical and not abstract questions,” including the “many grievances under which the poor and unprotected Catholic peasant smarted.”
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