Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (45 page)

The Great Depression left Tammany bereft of ideas, although it was hardly alone in that regard, as the Hoover White House demonstrated. But as the city’s private sector collapsed, tax revenue dried up, and banks demanded severe cuts in public spending, Tammany’s leaders assured each other that this, too, would pass. But it only became worse after Jimmy Walker quit and a new Tammany administration took its place under Mayor O’Brien’s equally feckless leadership. City Comptroller Charles Berry, a Tammany man, resisted calls to reduce the city’s workforce in the face of burgeoning budget deficits, arguing that “any program which eliminates some city employees from the payroll . . . will of course increase the number of unemployed.” Finally, though, as creditors hounded City Hall, Tammany let loose the dogs of austerity, but only after they were trained to follow the scent of teachers, hospital workers, clerks, and other city employees who had few ties to the organization. Reliably green-hued agencies, such as the Fire Department, faced the tamer beast of unpaid furloughs. The firefighters fought back in court and won.
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It is a rare political organization that can impose cutbacks in public spending and yet maintain popular support. Tammany was not one of them. Immigrant-stock voters had backed Tammany for many reasons other than a share of the spoils of office, but patronage certainly was critical in the care and feeding of its constituents. When spending cuts were ordered, Tammany made enemies of those who believed that a city job served as a buffer between their families and a breadline.

La Guardia took advantage of the anger, building his own personal political machine by appealing to the new New Yorkers, primarily Jews and Italians who may have voted for Tammany in the past but who embraced an alternative to the status quo at a time when breadlines snaked around city blocks and jobless men were living in shanties on the Great Lawn in Central Park. In New York in 1937, the number of Italian-born residents stood at about 440,000—double the number of Irish-born residents. Even more numerous were the Central and Eastern Europeans who had poured into the city before the immigration restrictions of 1924 effectively cut off the flood tide. Some 442,000 city residents were born in Russia, 237,000 were from Germany, and 238,000 were from Poland. Many of these Central and Eastern Europeans were Jews, and, when combined with native-born coreligionists, New York’s Jewish population was nearly two million in the late 1930s.
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Jews and Italians had helped to swell the number of registered voters in New York by more than 40 percent in the 1920s, a quiet political revolution that demanded Tammany’s attention. The organization’s leaders were quick to recognize the growing power of Jewish voters, but they remained slow in reaching out to their fellow Catholics from Italy. When drawing up political boundaries, Tammany strategists often dispersed Italian neighborhoods, diluting their voting strength. It wasn’t until 1931 that Tammany had its first Italian-American district leader, Albert Marinelli, and he won election to the post only after two of his allies suggested that the Irish incumbent’s health would fare poorly if he remained in office.

Despite Tammany’s neglect, Italians eagerly joined the Jews in supporting Tammany candidates such as Al Smith in the late 1920s. But as the Depression took its toll on the city’s treasury and morale, the new immigrants and their children looked elsewhere for answers. Their search did not require a trip to the local political clubhouse or a ticket for the district leader’s picnic. Families in the 1930s huddled around their radio consoles and heard for themselves the confident tones of their president and the energetic civic sermons of their mayor. These politicians and others spoke directly to the people, without the filter of a party organization. Mass culture erased old boundaries; radio, film, and other forms of entertainment made Tammany’s spectacles less spectacular. “New Yorkers today do not sit on the front stoop . . . They do not think of themselves as residents of a particular group of blocks,” lamented former congressman Herbert Claiborne Pell in a 1938 letter to Tammany’s Jeremiah Mahoney. “This leaves the district captain working on a practically non-existent group.”
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Events, personalities, demographics, and even some Tammany politicians like Mahoney were draining the organization of its vaunted power. In the years to come, journalists and historians would credit Tammany’s decline in the 1930s to the New Deal, which replaced the smoke-filled clubhouse with professional bureaucrats, and to La Guardia, who sprayed Tammany with multilingual invective in the organization’s old neighborhoods. What’s more, Roosevelt put Flynn and La Guardia—not Tammany’s bosses—in charge of federal funds for the massive public-works projects of the Depression era: the ambitious Triborough Bridge, one of the biggest projects of the 1930s; a new central post office in Flynn’s Bronx; a new courthouse in Jamaica, Queens; a new ferry terminal on Ellis Island. Federal money built a new highway on Manhattan’s East Side and expanded an airport in Queens. Tammany didn’t get a piece of that action, either. The highway would be named in honor of Roosevelt; the airport bore La Guardia’s name.

Roosevelt and La Guardia certainly were important factors in Tammany’s fall from power in the 1930s. But they were not the only reasons for the organization’s decline—after all, Tammany had managed to survive the hostility of presidents and mayors in the past. It faltered this time because of larger changes in the city’s population and culture, because of a succession of weak leaders, and because Ed Flynn and Jeremiah Mahoney—both of them protégés of Charlie Murphy—decided that Tammany’s mission was finished.

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It began with Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to run a third-party Democrat in the 1933 New York City mayoral campaign rather than support the incompetent leadership of Tammany Mayor John O’Brien, who was so slavish to the organization that when he was asked about the identity of his new police commissioner, he replied, “I don’t know. They haven’t told me yet.” O’Brien was a decent man but an embarrassment, not the man to lead the city during the hardest of hard times. Roosevelt decided he had to go.
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The White House dispatched the trusty Flynn and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, James Farley, to New York to challenge Tammany with an entity called the Recovery Party, whose candidate was Flynn’s friend and the former acting mayor, Joseph McKee. The resulting split between Tammany’s O’Brien and the Recovery Party’s McKee led to La Guardia’s election as a Republican. For Tammany, La Guardia’s triumph was not just a loss but a humiliation: O’Brien mustered just 27 percent of the vote (compared with the 63 percent he had won in the special election of 1932) and finished dead last. Many embittered Tammany members blamed Roosevelt and Flynn for the electoral catastrophe, accusing both of betraying their party and turning over the city to the enemy.

Many, but not all. More realistic Tammany members recognized the odor of rot in their new building. They argued that Tammany had lost its way since the glory days of the 1920s, that it had failed to adapt to the unprecedented circumstances of the Depression and the city’s new demographics. A longtime Tammany member, James Hoey—the Al Smith supporter who had forwarded information to the Roosevelt campaign in 1932—shocked the city’s political order when he announced in late 1933 that the time had come for a “complete reorganization” of Tammany “under new leadership.” Otherwise, he warned, “a new Democratic organization . . . will have to be set up in this city”—no idle threat after the Recovery Party campaign split the party. Hoey spoke with no small authority, for not only were his Tammany credentials impeccable but the Roosevelt administration had just appointed him to the key patronage post of collector of internal revenue for Lower Manhattan—a reward for his work on FDR’s behalf during the 1932 campaign. Tammany’s Executive Committee took the hint, firing its bungling leader, John Curry, and replacing him with James J. Dooling, a dapper forty-one-year-old described by Jeremiah Mahoney as “a nice boy with practically no ability.”
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Dooling took over the organization at a time when its power was diminished and its influence profound. There was no contradiction between these two developments—indeed, the organization’s loss of power was partly the result of its broad influence. Tammany no longer had a monopoly on stagecraft, organization, ethnic appeals, and populist rhetoric, for those trusty tools had been adapted for use by the most skillful reformer Tammany had ever faced, La Guardia. Under the mayor’s leadership, the city’s reformers finally realized how wrong they were to take their cues from the vaunted British writer James Bryce, who regarded American urban politics as the last refuge of the unschooled and unworthy. Tammany had long argued that voters—even those who spoke little or no English, even those unfamiliar with the political traditions of the Pilgrim fathers—were capable of determining and acting in their own best interests. In La Guardia, reformers finally had a candidate who could match Tammany’s belief that voters need not take dictation from those who thought they knew best. The mayor, unlike so many of those who challenged Tammany in the past, reveled in his image as a political street-fighter: “I can out-demagogue any candidate I have met yet,” he said. He was right. The reform movement finally had found a demagogue of their own.
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Tammany’s influence was more than a matter of style and speech, more than gestures and symbols. Its leaders during the first quarter of the twentieth century had stripped the Progressive movement of its obsession with virtue and character, creating a model for New Deal reforms that fed the hungry because they were hungry, not because they were deemed worthy of assistance. No wonder, then, that Franklin Roosevelt insisted that the New Deal was a national version of the social-welfare measures signed into law in New York by Tammany’s Al Smith in the 1920s.
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And that made the behavior of Smith, Senator Royal Copeland, and new Tammany boss James Dooling all the more puzzling in the critical year of 1937. Not long after Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, when he condemned the “incompetence” of the nation’s “money-changers”—rhetoric few would have expected to hear from State Senator Franklin Roosevelt in 1911—Smith turned against him with a bitterness that suggested more than mere politics was involved. Robert Wagner, watching from afar as his onetime “Tammany Twin” aligned with the right-wing Liberty League, privately complained that Smith had fallen under the influence of rich business leaders now that he was living among them on Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park. After publicly supporting Republican Alf Landon’s doomed campaign against FDR in 1936, Smith was determined to embarrass the president in his own state in the 1937 mayoral race. He persuaded Tammany boss Dooling to back Copeland, whose loathing of Roosevelt matched Smith’s, as the Democratic mayoral candidate against La Guardia. Dooling was among those who blamed Roosevelt for splitting the party and allowing La Guardia to win in 1933. He eagerly followed Smith’s advice and announced his support for Copeland.

Tammany, however, no longer had the power to dictate the Democratic Party’s choice for citywide office. Democrats who supported Roosevelt turned, tellingly, to another Tammany man, Jeremiah Mahoney, to rally behind President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Mahoney, widely admired in the city’s Jewish community for attempting to organize a boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, entered the mayoral race with relish. Tammany had fallen on hard times, he believed, and needed new leadership. “I would like to see a return to the days when Mr. Murphy was alive,” Mahoney later told Claiborne Pell. “Then we did things more intelligently.” Days after Mahoney entered the race, James Dooling died of apoplexy at the age of forty-four, and Tammany was leaderless again.
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The mayoral primary election of 1937 was a pivotal moment in Tammany’s history, for it became a referendum not only on the New Deal but also on the new Democratic Party that Tammany itself had done so much to bring about. Royal Copeland campaigned as the voice of reaction, articulating the personal bitterness of his most prominent supporter, Al Smith. Mahoney campaigned as an avid New Dealer and an unabashed supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. “I will work in harmony with this administration because I am in sympathy with its objectives,” he declared. During a rally at a Jewish senior citizens’ home in Brooklyn, a supporter introduced Mahoney as “a friend of the greatest president of the United States.” Mahoney linked arms with his running mates and danced while a cantor performed a song written in the candidate’s honor. That was Tammany politics. Royal Copeland, the endorsed candidate of Tammany Hall, also entered the Republican primary to challenge La Guardia. He promised to lower taxes.
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Of the many humiliations heaped upon Tammany in Depression-era New York, none was as embarrassing as the mayoral primary of 1937, although its significance has been lost to history. Tammany’s Jeremiah Mahoney, running explicitly against the “inept, selfish, and false” leaders of his own organization and as a proud New Dealer, defeated Tammany’s Copeland in a landslide. Years later, Mahoney still relished the beating he delivered to the organization that had, in another era, under other leadership, provided him with his start in politics. “I had every reactionary in the Democratic Party in New York against me, and I beat Tammany Hall and the whole gang by one hundred and eighty-five thousand,” he recalled with obvious pleasure.
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Mahoney went on to lose the general election to Fiorello La Guardia in a battle of two candidates who saw themselves as New Dealers. Ideologically, there was not a great deal of difference between Mahoney, product of Tammany Hall, and the organization’s most effective foe, a man Mahoney later considered a friend. La Guardia’s reelection was a political milestone for two reasons—first, he became the first anti-Tammany reform mayor to win a second term, and, second, the Tammany member who opposed him had no substantive argument to make against him. Mahoney tried, halfheartedly, to make hay of La Guardia’s endorsement by the Communist Party. It went nowhere. La Guardia won, garnering 1.3 million votes to Mahoney’s 889,000.