Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (18 page)

An unlikely reformer rose to challenge Tweed’s State Senate seat: Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, one of the Irish exiles who had arrived in New York earlier in the year. Rossa, of course, had been in New York less than a year, so his candidacy might have inspired cries of fraud from critics who regularly complained about the speed with which Tammany naturalized the city’s immigrants. But Rossa ran as an anti-Tammany candidate. Reformers chose to overlook his quick path to citizenship. The
Times
criticized “groundless” charges that Rossa was not a citizen and so was ineligible for election.
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Rossa was handed what must have seemed like a clinching argument on October 28, about a week before Election Day, when Boss Tweed was placed under arrest by a fellow Tammany man, Matthew Brennan, a onetime comptroller whom Tweed had disposed of in order to put the more reliable Richard Connolly in charge of the city’s books. Brennan, now a sheriff thanks to Tweed’s support, informed the boss of his arrest, accepted a $1 million bond for Tweed’s bail, and departed. It was all so very civilized.

But days later, Tweed defeated Rossa to win reelection to the State Senate. Rossa charged that Tammany stole the election, but if it did, it was small comfort. Elsewhere the organization was routed from power—an anti-Tammany slate of Democrats called Apollo Hall captured every one of the fifteen aldermanic contests, and four of five State Senate races (all except Tweed’s district). The reform Democrats and a resurgent Republican Party combined to win fourteen of twenty-one State Assembly seats—Samuel Tilden was among the victorious anti-Tammany Assembly candidates. Defeat at the polls led to further embarrassments: Connolly was arrested, Mayor Hall was charged with corruption (although, in the end, never convicted), and Peter Sweeny, the grand strategist of Tammany Hall, fled the country. By year’s end, members of the General Committee of Tammany Hall understood that their boss had become a pariah, even if he remained popular with his constituents. They voted to remove Tweed as grand sachem and expelled him from the society. His coconspirators suffered the same fate. In Tweed’s place, Tammany chose John Kelly, an Irish-Catholic son of immigrants, to salvage what remained of the organization’s reputation.

The disgraced Tweed was found guilty on corruption charges in 1873 and died in prison in 1878 at the age of fifty-five. Before his death, Tweed testified before a special committee of the Board of Aldermen, publicly admitting to his crimes but assailing his critics when he believed they were simply posturing.

If he thought his confession would rescue his reputation, he could not have been more wrong. He remains, in popular image, the face of urban corruption—the face, indeed, of the institution he made famous, Tammany Hall.

His departure, however, marked a turning point in the organization’s history.

SIX

TAMMANY’S IRISH RECONSTRUCTION

H
e was called “Honest John,” and by all accounts the title was not given as an ironic joke. Quiet, shrewd, and deeply religious, John Kelly was a natural choice to lead Tammany Hall’s rescue mission after the fall of Tweed. Not that Kelly’s assignment would be easy, for the Tweed scandals promised to be—and, in fact, turned out to be—a burden that Tammany would never be able to shed. The organization was in utter disarray, and Tweed’s formidable figure continued to cast a bleak shadow over its headquarters. Even after he was arrested and expelled, Tweed didn’t go away—although he tried his best. Granted occasional opportunities to venture out of Ludlow Street Prison, where he awaited a new trial on corruption charges, Tweed managed to escape his guards (and his own family, whom he was visiting) in late 1875. He fled to New Jersey, then to Cuba, and then to Spain, but it was all in vain. American authorities tracked him down a year after his flight, and Spanish officials were happy to turn him over to U.S. custody. He returned to prison and shortly afterward began to tell his side of the story to the aldermanic committee.

So, even after his fall, Tweed remained in the news, a target of ridicule and contempt, while Honest John Kelly sought to persuade New Yorkers that Tammany Hall had learned its lessons and no longer served as a power base for a corrupt few. But doing so required more than simply asserting Tammany’s honesty in long-winded speeches. It required dramatic action. Kelly, a shrewd politician, understood that symbolic gestures would never satisfy Tammany’s ferocious critics. He needed the assistance of the very men who drove Tweed from power.

To a certain sort of political moralist, to a certain kind of crusading journalist, Tammany Hall and, indeed, popular democracy itself were beyond redemption. Tammany-style politics attracted all sorts of disreputable types, people such as John Morrissey, an athlete and horse-racing enthusiast who used his celebrity to win election to Congress in 1866. The
New York Tribune
wondered: “How can a decent citizen vote for a prize-fighter and gambling-house keeper” like Morrissey?
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Even worse were the legions of neighborhood politicians inevitably referred to as “henchmen” in anti-Tammany newspapers. The lowest life form of all was the voter: ignorant, alien, dependent on government, and susceptible to Tammany’s cynical manipulation. In American cities, wrote the reformer Andrew D. White, “a crowd of illiterate peasants, freshly raked from Irish bogs, or Bohemian mines, or Italian robber nests, may exercise virtual control.” The results were all too plain, in White’s view. As a rule, voters were “not alive even to their own most direct interests.” It is not clear how White, writing from his perch in Ithaca, New York, where he served as president of Cornell University, was able to ascertain the best interests of illiterate peasants. But, like so many reformers, he was certain that he knew what was best for them, even if
they
didn’t.
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Even before the Tweed scandal, reformers were beginning to talk about the need for men of property to rescue democracy from the ignorant and the poor—people who had no appreciation of the burden of taxation. In 1867, a group of civic-minded business leaders and reformers called the New York Citizens Association proposed the creation of a new City Council consisting of men who owned property valued at more than $20,000. Voting would be restricted to property owners whose holdings were worth more than $5,000. Reformers like Peter Cooper believed this was the only way to attract a better sort of person to politics.

He spoke for many, including the poet of the common man, Walt Whitman, who warned of the “appalling dangers of universal suffrage.” White and other reformers made the argument that city government had nothing to do with politics. It became a familiar argument—there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage—but many civic reformers in the Gilded Age were not concerned simply with the efficient delivery of services. They despised politics, at least at the municipal level—where, not coincidentally, the poor and immigrants outnumbered and generally outvoted the more privileged. Cities in Europe, White argued, were corporations governed in businesslike fashion, while in the United States, local government was hostage to mass politics. The result? A city where “the vote of a single tenement house, managed by a professional politician, will neutralize the vote of an entire street of well-to-do citizens.” Tammany would not have disputed that assessment. Indeed, it would have considered White’s complaint a point of pride.
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. . .

But not all of the city’s mercantile elites shared the pessimistic views of Whitman and White. Rather than withdraw to the comfort of mere criticism or engage in the difficult work of sustaining a new faction within the Democratic Party, they chose to work with John Kelly in rebuilding Tammany. They included the likes of attorney Samuel Tilden and financier August Belmont, who had joined Tammany in the late 1850s, along with industrialist Abram Hewitt, Charles O’Conor (a prominent lawyer who prosecuted Tweed), and former governor Horatio Seymour, who had enjoyed Tammany’s backing but who joined the Committee of Seventy to oppose Tweed’s power grabs. Tilden, Belmont, and O’Conor were elected to serve on Tammany’s governing body.

For John Kelly, a child born to Irish-Catholic immigrants in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, this alliance with some of the city’s most privileged men was no small coup. The new boss was a boxer of some renown as a youth and a volunteer firefighter—hardly the sort of person who generally did business with Tilden and Belmont. But Kelly understood that Tammany could redeem itself only if it were purged of the excesses of the Tweed era, and only if members of the city’s business community were invested, literally and figuratively, in municipal government.

For their part, business leaders and reformers like Tilden understood that they could exercise control over Tammany—and thus, over city politics—only if they acknowledged the power of the organization’s most fervent constituency, Irish Catholics. So Kelly became the first in Tammany’s long line of Irish-Catholic bosses, and men of privilege like Tilden and his colleagues were, in essence, given the keys to Tammany’s headquarters.

The joining together of uptown and downtown, of the interests of the few and the interests of the many, was bound to get complicated. For the moment, however, Kelly had little time to think about how he might keep together this unlikely coalition. Tammany Hall may have been rescued from disgrace, but it still had powerful enemies. As a political leader, Kelly’s job was to make sure those enemies—Anglo-Protestant reformers, dissident Democrats, upstate Republicans—were kept away from the levers of power.

. . .

At an early age, John Kelly learned a fundamental reality of life in the immigrant slums of New York: Fathers often died young, and when they did, their widows and children were on their own. Kelly’s immigrant father died when John was eight, in 1830. He later took a job as an office boy in the newsroom of the
New York Herald
to help support his family, putting an end to his formal education but not to his ambition. He learned the mason’s trade and opened his own business while in his early twenties. He must have been a diligent worker, for he expanded his business quickly, but he was not entirely consumed with work. He found time for Shakespeare, and in the evenings he took to the stage as the leading man in amateur productions of the bard’s tragedies. Young men with a gift for public speech-making invariably caught the eye of Tammany, and John Kelly was soon on his way to a life in politics. He was elected an alderman in his early thirties, and was sent to Congress in the Know Nothing year of 1854. There he gained notoriety for his speech in defense of Catholic liberties and loyalty. Later he became sheriff, a job known to make poor men rich because they were entitled to keep fees they collected. Kelly collected debts against the city with great efficiency, and he moved his family uptown in 1860 after only two years on the job.

That happy family was shattered in 1866 when Kelly’s wife and young son died of tuberculosis, leaving him a widower with two daughters to raise. He quit politics, at least for a short time—in part because he had doubts about Tweed’s leadership, in part because his own health was poor. He must have made his reservations about Tweed known, for in 1868 a group of reformers paid him a visit and urged him to run against Tammany’s candidate for mayor, Abraham Oakey Hall. Kelly found the prospect intriguing, agreed to enter the race as the anti-Tammany candidate, but then had second thoughts. He withdrew from the race and sailed to Europe with his daughters. It was, politically speaking, an opportune departure. Kelly was out of the country while Tweed and company had their way with the city’s treasury. He returned just as “the Ring” collapsed. He might have been a Tammany man, but nobody could say that Honest John Kelly was a mere stand-in for the disgraced Tweed.

Almost nobody, that is. The
New York Times
, reveling in the role it had played in bringing down Tweed and Tammany, saw Kelly’s succession not as a turning point but as more of the same. Kelly, with his beard and stocky physique and past associations with fire companies, was nothing more than a slightly smaller version of the man now in Ludlow Street Prison. Although the paper at first praised Kelly for bringing in reformers and ridding the organization of Tweed’s allies, editors quickly changed their minds. The newspaper, no doubt echoing the thoughts of the city’s reformers, objected to the tough Irish-American politicians who, they said, had Kelly’s ear. “A revolution that left such men . . . at the helm” was hardly a change for the better, the paper argued.
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. . .

Kelly’s first order of business, once he consolidated his power with the help and acquiescence of people such as Tilden, was to impose Catholic-style organization and discipline within Tammany’s disorderly ranks. He was familiar with the institution, for not only was he a churchgoing Catholic, but his second wife, whom he had married in 1876, was the niece of Dagger John Hughes’s successor, Cardinal John McCloskey. The union did little to dim criticism that Tammany served as an adjunct of the Catholic Church—or vice versa. The satirical magazine
Puck
portrayed Kelly in the robes of a clergyman and the pope as a scheming Tammany politico.
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