Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (40 page)

Several days before Murphy died, a dogged reporter from the
New York Times
, Richard Barry, turned up at Tammany Hall in a seemingly quixotic effort to persuade the boss to sit for a long interview—it would be his first ever. Murphy seemed intrigued, but, not surprisingly, refused to commit himself. The negotiating sessions at least allowed Barry to sneak in a few questions, including one that took note of the changed ethnic character of Tammany Hall. The organization, Barry noted, seemed less Irish than it had been under Richard Croker. What did Murphy think? “I haven’t kept track,” Murphy replied. Did Murphy believe Tammany would retain its Irishness as a new generation of leaders came to power? “I don’t know,” Murphy replied.
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He was Silent Charlie to the very end.

. . .

Al Smith moved ahead with his presidential campaign without the man who had made it possible. Others stepped in to fill the void on the Smith campaign—Joseph Proskauer, Belle Moskowitz, and, mostly for show, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, two years removed from learning that he would never again have the use of his legs. Murphy had arranged for Roosevelt to play a prominent role in Smith’s campaign, and FDR was more than eager. He personally contacted noted political expert Babe Ruth and asked the Yankee slugger to endorse Smith. Ruth was impressed by Roosevelt’s description of Smith’s rise from poverty. “No poor boy can go too high in this world to suit me,” Ruth wrote. The Babe gave Smith his blessing.
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The Democratic Party’s divisions were deep and bitter as delegates arrived in Madison Square Garden on Thursday, June 24, for the convention’s opening session. The early summer air was wet and hot—Al Smith spent a portion of the day swimming off Long Island, seemingly aloof from the proceedings in the Garden. The battle between Smith and McAdoo figured to be epic, but it was a proposed plank in the convention’s platform that dominated early back-room politicking. Smith’s allies and other Democrats, most prominently a U.S. senator from Alabama, Oscar Underwood, were pushing a proposal to condemn the Ku Klux Klan by name in the party’s platform. McAdoo, a native of Georgia, and his allies, including William Jennings Bryan, were bitterly opposed. But before the convention voted on the proposal, there was the small matter of placing the names of candidates in nomination. This chore required leather lungs, an athlete’s stamina, a saint’s patience, and an alligator’s skin. Smith chose Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man who had rarely been seen in public since the summer of 1921, when he contracted polio.

At around noon on June 26, 1924, the boisterous crowd in the Garden’s rafters grew silent as Franklin Roosevelt began to make his way from his seat with the New York delegation to the speaker’s podium, clutching the arm of his son, James, with his left hand and leaning on a crutch in his right hand. As he neared the podium, he took a second crutch from James and propelled himself forward on his own. Sweating profusely, he threw back his head and smiled as he faced the crowd. Nobody noticed how tightly he gripped the podium, how hard it was to keep from toppling over. And then he began, his wonderful, resonant tenor voice filling the hall with praise for a Tammany man, a Roman Catholic, an unabashed drinker, a graduate of the sidewalks of New York. Never, of course, referring to his infirmity or his own courageous struggle to reach this dramatic moment, Roosevelt described Smith as the “guiding hand” behind reforms ranging from stronger workplace regulations to pensions for widowed mothers, workers’ compensation, conservation, and rural health programs. “That is progressive!” he said.

“He is,” Roosevelt said of Smith, “the ‘Happy Warrior’ of the political battlefield.” The delegates roared their approval. Roosevelt actually hated the Happy Warrior line—a reference to a poem by William Wordsworth—but Smith aide Joseph Proskauer pulled rank and insisted that it remain. It remains the best-remembered line of the speech.
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Roosevelt spoke for thirty-four minutes. When he finished, the roar in the Garden was fantastic—cheers, sirens, music from not one but several bands. The name of an Irish-Catholic Tammany man had been officially placed in nomination as a potential candidate for president of the United States by a well-born Protestant reformer. Only in New York.

. . .

Al Smith stood for cities, immigrants, saloons, hyphenated Americans, religious diversity, and new ideas about government’s role in society—issues that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan in the South and inspired the pseudoscience of the eugenics movement in the North. As the convention’s nominating speeches wrapped up, Smith’s allies declared political war on their colleagues from the South—and, it turned out, no small number from other regions of the country—when they pressed their demand that the convention officially condemn the KKK by name in its platform. Senator Underwood of Alabama, a dark-horse contender for the nomination if either Smith or McAdoo faltered, introduced a plank that declared “the organization known as the Ku Klux Klan” to be “un-American.” The Klan denounced Underwood as “the Jew, jug, and Jesuit candidate”—the “jug” reference meant to disparage Underwood’s opposition to Prohibition
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Underwood joined with Tammany and other allies in refusing to accept a compromise. They pushed the issue to a vote, stirring passions and fury the likes of which few conventions had ever witnessed. As the galleries crammed with Tammany supporters alternately cheered and jeered, speaker after speaker rose to support the anti-Klan plank or to defend the Klan as a relatively harmless organization with a few bad actors. Many tried a middle ground. Tammany remained steadfast: The party had to call out the Klan by name.

After hours of debate, the final speaker on the subject was called to the podium. He was the ghost of conventions past, William Jennings Bryan, and he rose in righteous indignation to silence the rambunctious voices of a new Democratic Party, with their bands playing “The Sidewalks of New York,” as if to herald a new age of an urban, ethnic, non-Protestant democracy. He demanded an end to the assault on the Klan, arguing against further debate over “three little words.” He addressed his fellow Democrats as “Christians,” asking them to “stop fighting” and recognize that “we can exterminate Ku Kluxism better by recognizing their honesty and teaching them that they are wrong.”
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The anti-Klan plank came up for a vote just before midnight on June 28. As police worked the chaotic floor, trying to keep order and to keep fellow Democrats from each other’s throats, the roll call proceeded. In the end, after more than two hours of voting, the effort to condemn the Klan by name failed by a single vote. More than half of the votes against the plank came from states in the Midwest and West.

The anti-Klan forces, including Tammany’s New York, at least had made a statement: Their candidate, Al Smith, stood against the forces of intolerance. His main opponent, William Gibbs McAdoo, had the support not only of those who refused to condemn the Klan but also of the Klan itself.

The balloting for president began on June 30 and would continue for 103 ballots over the next week. There had never been such a contentious convention. This was more than politics; this was a cultural war carried out by sweating men in suits (there were women delegates, though no prominent women speakers) arguing passionately over the future of their party and of their country.

In the midst of the endless roll calls, William Jennings Bryan once again took center stage, asking for time to address the convention and explain his vote. He held the floor for an hour, extolling the virtues of the party’s great leaders—Josephus Daniels of North Carolina, Samuel L. Ralston of Indiana, Thomas J. Walsh of Montana (the convention’s presiding officer), and a university president from Florida named A. A. Murphee, whose name inspired audible questions of “Who?” from the delegates on the floor. Bryan did not name Al Smith. But he announced that he would support William Gibbs McAdoo—the architect, he said, of the party’s “progressive convention” and “progressive platform.” Smith’s delegates and the Tammany men in the hall hissed and hollered as Bryan made what proved to be his last convention speech. He took the measure of the Smith delegates, the Tammany types, Catholics most of them, city dwellers, drinkers—the sort of people who played baseball on a Sunday and drank beer afterward in spite of the laws of the Sabbath. “You do not represent the future of this country,” he thundered. Bryan would never discover how wrong he was. He died a year later.
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The balloting continued after Bryan left the stage—and it continued, and it continued, until the exhausted combatants agreed on a compromise candidate: John Davis of West Virginia, who was nominated on the 103rd ballot. The party left New York bitterly divided, so it came as little surprise that incumbent Calvin Coolidge steamrolled Davis in the general election. But from the ashes of the debacle in the Garden and defeat at the polls rose the beginnings of a new Democratic Party—a party born on the sidewalks of New York in 1924.

. . .

In the four years between Smith’s defeat in Madison Square Garden and the 1928 Democratic National Convention in Houston, his administration in Albany continued to bring together downtown and uptown as no other governor had ever done before. He approved the ambitious and costly plans of Robert Moses to build state parks from Montauk Point to the Adirondacks to Niagara Falls, and to construct a network of highways, parkways, tunnels, and bridges that reimagined New York’s transportation network for the twentieth century. To win public support for the bond issues required to build state parks, Smith mobilized Tammany’s “us against them” rhetoric, portraying opponents as wealthy elites with access to sprawling golf courses (Charlie Murphy might have smiled, quietly, in his grave) who wished to restrict access to open space for everyone else. Moses, with his Yale pedigree and his PhD from Columbia University, served as Smith’s able liaison to groups such as the Citizens Union, whose members rarely met an Ivy Leaguer they didn’t love.

Smith’s vision of a more expansive state government was financed through borrowing—in some cases, through considerable borrowing. Smith put his personal popularity on the line in 1925 as he urged voters to pass a $100 million bond issue to pay for construction of mental-health facilities, schools, prisons, and other public-works projects. The state’s workers’ compensation program and the Labor Department were strengthened, new resources were devoted to public-health facilities, and state support for schools continued to increase—from $7 million a year in Smith’s first year in office to $70 million in 1928.

Smith did not see the need to apologize for the higher cost of government. In fact, he was proud of the salary raises granted to everyone “from the governor himself down to the woman who cleans the Capitol. . . . The office boy who got three dollars a week before [World War I] now gets twelve,” Smith wrote in 1929. But Smith was hardly a spendthrift. His demands for efficiency led to a drastic reorganization of state government, including the elimination of redundant or overlapping agencies, centralization, and greater accountability. He considered administrative reorganization—a good-government issue if ever there was one—to be his greatest achievement, and a model for the nation. That allowed him to cut state taxes by 25 percent in 1924, even as the state continued to expand its services to children, the poor, the disabled, and even the imprisoned.
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Behind the scenes, as New York continued to defy the conservative mood in Calvin Coolidge’s Washington, Smith’s allies prepared the groundwork for another effort to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The governor’s popularity remained strong in the North, but formidable obstacles remained—the divisions of the 1924 convention continued to roil the nation as well as the party. Thousands of hooded Klansmen paraded in Washington in August 1925 to display their power as well as their opposition to the new forces in the Democratic Party. The Klan’s imperial wizard, Hiram Wesley Evans, announced that the Klan opposed the granting of “political power to any Roman Catholic”—the reference to Smith was clear—because they were aliens of dubious loyalty. Evans saw the Democratic Party split between the “native, American-minded, Protestant, ‘Dry,’” and the “Catholic, boss-ruled ‘wet’ . . . Eastern Democracy, with priests instead of conscience.”
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Those sentiments were not restricted to Klan members or white supremacists in the South. They existed not only in Smith’s home state but also in the very city he so loved. Reverend Edwin D. Bailey, pastor of the Prospect Heights Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, warned his congregation that the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion now rules at Albany and is headed for Washington.” Describing Smith as a “Roman Catholic Tammanyite Governor,” the cleric argued that “with a Roman Catholic president in power, Rome will become the winner and America will be run by Rome.”
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The persistence of anti-Catholicism and reflexive anti-Tammany sentiments made the tireless efforts of a certain Protestant advocate for Smith all the more important. For in the years between 1924 and 1928, Franklin Roosevelt continued to play a critical role as a bridge between Smith and the broader Democratic Party, which was still trying to stitch together the bloody wounds suffered in Madison Square Garden.

Roosevelt and his devoted aide Louis Howe no doubt saw opportunity for themselves in their work on Smith’s behalf. Howe saw FDR occupying Al Smith’s office some day, perhaps as early as 1932, and the White House shortly thereafter, never mind the man’s shriveled legs. And Roosevelt himself placed no limits on his ambition—he did not accept and would never accept his disability as a bar to higher office. In the field of presidential politics, Roman Catholicism was a disability. But polio? Not a chance.

Roosevelt kept in touch with Democrats from around the nation, trying to assure skeptics that Smith was not the man portrayed in anti-Catholic jeremiads and other hostile outlets. (A book prepared for the 1928 campaign bore the unsubtle title
Al Smith’s Tammany Hall: Champion Political Vampire.
) After a visit to Hyde Park from a top-ranking Democrat from Utah, Roosevelt assured Smith that if he wanted that state’s delegates, “you can have them . . . in 1928.” What’s more, FDR said, his informant was certain that Smith would carry Utah in the general election. With that optimistic assessment, FDR turned to local politics, urging Smith to accept the recommendation made by a local Democratic county committee for a treasurer candidate in upstate Cattaraugus County. The irony was not lost on the onetime reformer who turned up his nose at the subject of political patronage. “I smile a little,” Roosevelt wrote, “at my earnest pleadings with you to be regular.” Smith, too, may have smiled a little at the thought of the great reformer Roosevelt begging a Tammany man to follow the party line, to be regular, to be a solid man.
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