Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (44 page)

The city’s press corps quickly hailed Al Smith as the city’s savior. “The excited citizenry,” wrote Arthur Krock in the
New York Times
, “hoped that this means the former Governor will lead a reform movement against Tammany at the Mayoralty election next year.” A nonpartisan committee of civic elites, including the head of the city’s Young Republican clubs, announced its intention to draft Smith as a mayoral candidate in 1933.
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Tammany and its boss, Curry, took Smith’s suggestions in the spirit in which they were offered—as a stinging criticism of the organization’s ethical and political drift back in time to the bad old days. A year later, Al Smith, the Happy Warrior himself, was booed at a Tammany Hall dinner.

THIRTEEN

LEGACIES

I
t was another Independence Day at Tammany Hall in the Great Depression year of 1937.

As usual, the sachems spared nothing to celebrate the occasion, although the ceremonies and speeches took place on Monday, July 5, to avoid conflict with more sacred observances on Sunday. The streets near Union Square were awash in red, white, and blue as Tammany’s stalwarts by the hundreds strode past subway entrances along Fourteenth Street that could get them to the far reaches of Canarsie in Brooklyn and Parkchester in the Bronx. Many Tammany voters already had made that journey and not returned, and now they were beyond the reach of the precinct captain, the district leader, and the Hall itself.

But even as Tammany’s influence began to wane, on this festive morning it could take credit for producing the greatest federal legislator of the Depression era, U.S. Senator Robert Wagner. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal owed much to the vision and hard work of the German immigrant who had caught Charles Murphy’s eye a generation earlier. As he took his place of honor on the banner-bedecked speakers’ platform, Robert Wagner had to his credit two of the New Deal’s signature reforms, the National Labor Relations Act (more commonly known as the Wagner Act), which gave unions greater collective bargaining powers, and the Social Security Act, for which he was a leading sponsor and advocate. There was more to come. In just a few months, Congress would pass the Wagner-Steagall Act, which created a federal housing agency and authorized the payment of housing subsidies to the poor. Never before had the federal government intervened so aggressively in the nation’s housing market on behalf of the poor.

Al Smith might have been Tammany’s favorite son, its martyr for the cause of political pluralism, but it was Robert Wagner who created the organization’s greatest legislative legacy on a national level. Drawing on his experience in a Tammany-controlled state legislature, he wrote or sponsored milestone social-welfare laws that, for the first time, provided a national safety net for struggling families like his own. As an adult, Wagner looked back with little sentimentality at a childhood spent in a basement apartment in the heavily German neighborhood of Yorkville on the Upper East Side. “My boyhood was a pretty rough passage,” he once recalled. All six Wagner children were sent to work at a young age to supplement their father’s $5-a-week job as a janitor. Many Americans, he once told economist Leon Keyserling, his friend and aide, believed that anyone with character and determination could overcome difficult circumstances with hard work. “Leon,” he said, “that’s bunk. For every one who rises to the top, a thousand are destroyed.”
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Wagner’s role as one of the New Deal’s leading liberals was defined on a single day, June 19, 1935, when the Senate passed the Social Security Act and the House passed the Wagner Act. The latter legislation rightly bore his name, because Wagner tirelessly championed the bill despite Franklin Roosevelt’s initial opposition and then his studied neutrality. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, who would have been familiar with Roosevelt’s opaque political style, asserted that FDR “never lifted a finger” to win support for the pro-union bill. It was Wagner himself, calling on every trick he had learned as a young Tammany legislator, who singlehandedly won the bill’s passage. “There would never have been a Wagner Act or anything like it at any time if the Senator had not spent himself in this cause to a degree which almost defies description,” recalled Keyserling.
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Wagner’s success in the Senate surely was a high point of Tammany’s history, the natural conclusion of a process that began with a fire in a factory building in Greenwich Village in 1911, the capstone of narratives shared by men and women born in tenements during the Gilded Age who challenged the political, economic, and cultural assumptions of the nation’s elites. Robert Wagner’s contributions to the nation’s new political order perhaps were not as dramatic as Al Smith’s triumph at the 1928 Democratic National Convention or Tammany’s fight against the Ku Klux Klan in 1924. But the laws he wrote and sponsored in the 1930s were milestones in American history, an overturning of the myth that a nation of rugged individuals needed nothing except a free market to ensure material success. The Wagner Act, Social Security, and the housing act were triumphs of a less-individualistic nation, a reflection of the values Wagner found in the political clubhouses and union halls of New York.

As the 1930s progressed, Wagner continued to advocate for new measures to broaden the era’s commitment to social justice. He sponsored a strong antilynching bill (which FDR opposed, leading to its failure) and a special visa program designed to help twenty thousand Jewish children flee the Hitler regime in his native Germany (despite Wagner’s efforts, the latter measure never made it to the Senate floor). His record of achievement was extraordinary, but even his failures were important—he could not singlehandedly stop the lynching of African-Americans or allow young Jews to escape Hitler, but by raising his voice on behalf of the oppressed, Robert Wagner earned a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s greatest senators.

And he never saw a reason to deny his Tammany roots.

. . .

Dressed in a dark double-breasted suit on a humid summer morning, Robert Wagner was seated with his fellow U.S. senator and Tammany colleague Royal Copeland, who looked far more comfortable in a light suit, his jacket unbuttoned. Wagner slouched in his seat, while Copeland, an older man with round glasses and just the right amount of gray to suggest wisdom but not incapacity, sat erect, a picture of dignity. Wagner and Copeland may have been colleagues and longtime acquaintances, but they had very different views about their fellow New Yorker in the White House. Copeland had spoken out bitterly against FDR at Tammany’s July 4 ceremony a year earlier, suggesting that the president—who was on his way to a smashing reelection victory in 1936—was becoming too powerful. This year, Copeland returned to that theme when he was called on to speak. Without mentioning the president by name, Copeland warned his audience of the power of unaccountable leaders. “We want no dictator in government, in industry, in social or community life,” he said.

Wagner had no such foreboding thoughts to share. Instead, he focused his attention on the institution that had welcomed a hardworking immigrant into its innermost councils, an institution that still promoted and supported him, even amid the organization’s divisions, feuds, and desperation.

Wagner’s subject was Tammany Hall. Tellingly, his verbs were in the past tense, making his speech sound more like a eulogy than a call to arms. But it was noteworthy all the same, for it came from a senator who was well on his way to becoming a Capitol Hill legend.

Thirty years earlier, Wagner said, New York was a “backward and benighted state in social and welfare legislation. It forgot the lost souls tied day and night to the factory bench. But about that time, a small group from Tammany Hall were elected to serve in Albany. We remembered these lost souls and guided them to an earthly salvation. We passed law after law and made New York the shining mark for the world to emulate.

“Tammany Hall,” Wagner continued, “may justly claim the title of the cradle of modern liberalism in America.”

Wagner did not elaborate on his own role in passing law after law. When he returned to his seat as fifteen hundred Tammany supporters cheered, State Supreme Court Justice Salvatore Cotillo, a fellow Tammany member who had served in Albany with Wagner, reminded the audience that Tammany’s legislative legacy was the work of three men: Wagner, Al Smith, and James Foley, Charlie Murphy’s son-in-law.
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Wagner’s uplifting account of Tammany’s history no doubt straightened the shoulders of stalwarts who remembered the glory days and who believed, despite an accumulation of evidence, that Tammany still had much to offer New York and the nation—much more than the dirge of a bagpipe, the sentimental lament of a fiddle, and the quiet murmuring of a wake. But their numbers were few, and getting fewer.

. . .

In the eight years that passed between the opening of the new Tammany Hall in 1929 and Robert Wagner’s elegiacal tribute to the Tammany of yesteryear in 1937, the catastrophic Depression, changing demographics, population shifts, frayed alliances, and a disastrous split in the Democratic Party had combined to sap Tammany of its power, vitality, and ingenuity. Measured in raw politics, Tammany’s influence clearly was in decline in 1937—its power base was shrinking, its leaders were divided, and its old allies were alienated or actively working against it. There was a new power in town, and his name was Fiorello La Guardia, a Yiddish-speaking Italian-Jewish Episcopalian son of immigrants with a rumpled everyman’s demeanor and a sharp political intelligence that Tammany could only admire. He captured City Hall in 1933 with just 40 percent of the vote, but during the course of a memorable first term, he created an energetic new coalition of Italians, Jews, mainstream reformers, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others who decided that Tammany did not have the answers to the questions the Great Depression posed. The chubby little man had a ferocious way of speaking and acting—he physically confronted a group of Tammany supporters on Election Day in 1933, calling them “thugs”—which made him unlike any reformer who had ever challenged Tammany. One of his biographers, Thomas Kessner, noted that the multilingual La Guardia “could campaign in five languages and on a hundred ancestral hatreds.” Robert Moses, the master planner who owed his career to Tammany’s Al Smith, sided with La Guardia and noted that the new mayor was capable of “exploiting racial and religious prejudices” in a way that surpassed the skills of “the bosses he despised and derided.”
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Tammany had no response to the riddle of Fiorello La Guardia, for he was not in the starchy tradition of the blue-blooded reformers upon whom the organization had feasted in the past. He was, in a sense, a mirror image of Al Smith. He commanded the respect of professionals and experts, and he was a first-rate political showman who understood that urban politics was more than an exercise in bloodless, disinterested, decisionmaking. He read the comics over the radio during a newspaper strike; he showed up at fires and helped with rescues; he refused to move into the mayor’s official residence, Gracie Mansion, preferring the comforts of his family’s small East Harlem apartment; and he happily posed for pictures in an array of costumes—from his bathrobe (showing his down-home nature) to a grocer’s white overalls (to promote a federal food-stamp program). Such theatrics would have struck Seth Low, John Purroy Mitchel, and other one-term reform mayors as well beneath their precious dignity.
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In 1937, La Guardia was poised to do something no reformer had ever done in New York: win reelection to a second term as mayor. Some Tammany members, desperate to retake control of City Hall and its patronage, held out hope that Robert Wagner would put aside his Senate career and challenge the organization’s most effective antagonist in the coming election. Just days after his Independence Day speech, however, Wagner announced that he would remain in the Senate. He and La Guardia had worked together on the federal housing bill. The Tammany senator and the reformist mayor shared a deep-seated belief in the new politics of the New Deal, and neither had an interest in unseating the other.

The prospect of another four years of passionate hostility from City Hall was almost too much for Tammany to bear. But, even worse, La Guardia was only one of many ailments threatening the organization’s very existence.

Tammany’s power base, Manhattan, was declining when compared with the outer boroughs. Brooklyn was home to 2.6 million people, some eight hundred thousand more than Manhattan. Politicians respected numbers, so Brooklyn rightly became the center of political calculus in New York. But even smaller sections of the city could lay claim to a piece of Tammany’s former power. The Bronx, so recently a bucolic afterthought in municipal affairs, had passed the million mark, thanks to the addition of 125,000 people since 1930. And now, with President Roosevelt’s friend Ed Flynn considered the city’s most influential Democrat, the Bronx had a firm grip on the ladle of New Deal patronage. Tammany Hall waited in quiet desperation at the far end of the table, hoping for a drop that never seemed to fall.