Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (22 page)

Late returns—too late for some of the morning papers, which proclaimed Dowd the winner—changed Grace’s fortunes, and those of Tammany. New York elected its first Irish-Catholic immigrant mayor by about three thousand votes, a shockingly thin margin. By contrast, Tammany’s previous victorious mayoral candidate, William Wickham, had won the 1874 election by nearly thirty-five thousand votes.

It was a victory all the same, and in the Irish neighborhoods of downtown New York, the election of a Famine immigrant who prospered in the New World was greeted with political hosannas.

SEVEN

CHALLENGING THE GILDED AGE

O
n a hot October evening in 1881, John Kelly and hundreds of supporters poured into Tammany Hall from the dancing shadows of gas-lit Fourteenth Street to announce a formal alliance between Tammany and a new independent civic organization called the Anti-Monopoly League. It was a highly unlikely combination, but then again, Kelly was no stranger to reconciling seemingly disparate interest groups. He had rescued Tammany after Tweed’s downfall by joining together uptown and downtown, Fifth Avenue and the Bowery. If he could manage that, there was no reason to think he couldn’t manage what might seem an even more audacious scheme: bringing together reform-minded businessmen and ward politicians in common pursuit of a traditional Tammany position—opposition to monopolies.

Civic organizations generally were the gathering places of reformers and civic elites who saw in Tammany everything that they despised about partisan politics. Tammany embraced transactional politics, the notion that voters—even those born elsewhere with only the vaguest understanding of American politics—had a keen sense of their own interest and would act accordingly. The independent civic organizations sought to uphold the ideal of a republic of disinterest, a place where the best men were empowered to identify the common good and proceed without having to step into the gutter of partisan politics. The Irish sang songs about neighborhood politics, like this ditty entitled “Two Aldermen from Tyrone.”

We are two solid men and well known in the state

Our political influence, sure it is great;

In the Seventh and Tenth Wards we are first candidates,

And our names in the paper in big letters you will see.
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Members of reform organizations were not inclined to compose music to celebrate their involvement in politics, but if they did, the resulting dirge would have done little to lift the spirits of most voters. Mark Twain spoke for many of these self-consciously independent reformers when he complained that most American voters were like sheep: “We wait to see how the drove is going, and then we go with the drove.”
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So it surely was with some trepidation that members of the Anti-Monopoly League filed into raucous Tammany Hall on this October evening. The league was part of a growing national reaction to the depredations of the age’s robber barons, men like Tweed’s old business partner Jay Gould, who swallowed up railroads and then moved into communications through a hostile takeover of Western Union, the nation’s largest telegraph company. The league’s leaders were, by and large, independent wholesalers who rightly feared the power of monopoly control over transportation and, with Gould’s takeover of Western Union, of information. The wholesalers had to get their goods to market, and increasingly they needed access to information about prices, markets, and orders. They had no interest in seeing these resources in the hands of a few.

Among the league’s most prominent members was none other than Lawson N. Fuller, who had spoken during William Grace’s mayoral campaign about the need to rinse immigrant children of their Old World ways. Fuller and other prominent league members saw their organization as an instrument to oppose “public corruption and corporate aggression.” They were aghast when one of the league’s founders, an upstate wholesaler named F. B. Thurber, proposed an alliance with John Kelly’s Tammany, but Thurber proved to be persuasive.

Tammany’s willingness to march into the Gilded Age’s class politics no doubt caught many by surprise, including the antimonopolists themselves. As he addressed his new allies in Tammany Hall, Thurber acknowledged that many of his fellow antimonopolists had warned him that Tammany had no real interest in challenging the power of great corporate titans like Gould, John D. Rockefeller, the Vanderbilt family, and others. Rather, Thurber said, his friends believed Tammany was interested merely in power, not principle. With Kelly’s supporters roaring their approval, Thurber announced that he rejected the doubts of other antimonopolists: “I say all honor to Tammany Hall.”
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Thurber surely liked what he heard from Tammany’s stage. Kelly himself spoke for half an hour, accusing both parties—Democrats as well as Republicans—of refusing to confront the growth of business monopolies because “they were frightened by the great power wielded by the corporations.” He called on Democrats locally and nationally to support only those candidates who pledged “to legislate for the whole people . . . and not for the corporations which have come into power within the last few years.”
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Of course, the dewy-eyed antimonopoly advocates, unaccustomed as they were to the flexibility of practical politics, might well have missed the broad rhetorical wink Kelly delivered during his stem-winder. Despite Kelly’s populist rhetoric, Tammany certainly was not about to storm the barricades of capitalism, nor was it about to cut ties to aldermen and state legislators who took into account the needs and wants of railroad moguls and captains of industry. Nevertheless, Kelly’s speech signaled what the
New York Times
called a “new war cry” for Tammany. Long before Theodore Roosevelt busted his first trust, Tammany Hall at least was sounding the alarm about the power of huge corporations at a time when the era’s robber barons were transforming Manhattan into the corporate headquarters of the Gilded Age.
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Tammany’s alliance with antimonopoly reformers came just months after the organization elected one of the city’s wealthiest men, Grace, as mayor. Grace was no Rockefeller in terms of cash value and cultural power, but neither was he a critic of the era’s growing inequality between rich and poor. Not long after taking the oath of office as the city’s top elected official, Grace visited the elite Lotus Club, where he reassured some of the city’s leading citizens that although he was Catholic, he did not bear the marks of the Antichrist. He won them over completely when he successfully challenged Tammany’s control over the city’s street-cleaning department, long a source of patronage for Tammany and of complaints from business leaders. Grace’s actions led to a break with Kelly within weeks of the new mayor taking office. Not long thereafter, Kelly moved Tammany into an alliance with the antimonopolists. Grace, for his part, encouraged the growth of yet another dissident Democratic faction, called the County Democracy, which he believed could “unite all the Conservative elements” of the Democratic Party.
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Kelly’s critique of corporate power might have surprised his former allies among the Swallowtails, but the signs of a transformation had been evident years earlier. The
Times
noticed a change of emphasis as early as 1877, when it complained that Kelly, then the city’s comptroller, was “not an advocate of reducing salaries” for city workers. Taxpayers, the paper concluded, “can expect no quarter at [Kelly’s] hands.”
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They were not alone. Jay Gould, accustomed to favorable treatment from Tweed’s Tammany, found out that there was more than a little bite in John Kelly’s populist bark. After Gould consolidated his hold on Manhattan’s elevated railways in the early 1880s, he doubled the price of a ride to ten cents, although the fare during rush hours remained at five cents. Gould’s unpopularity and his unchallenged grip on the city’s rail system made him a natural target for Tammany’s new antimonopoly mission. A Kelly-controlled state convention in 1882 denounced the fare hikes and committed Tammany to bringing prices back down to five cents at all times, an aggressive assertion of government prerogative at the height of the Gilded Age. In early 1883, Tammany legislators in the State Assembly and State Senate helped to pass a bill requiring a rollback of fares, despite the heated objections of the powerful Gould and dozens of his fellow capitalist buccaneers. Among those who supported the bill was an eager young Republican assemblyman with a droopy mustache, Theodore Roosevelt. With his Harvard degree and polish, Roosevelt was portrayed in the
New York World
as “chief of the dudes” who inhabited the well-born Republican caucus in the State Assembly. He had little but contempt for bills that he believed set class against class, but, like members of the Anti-Monopoly League, he was alarmed as the era’s great industrialists grew more powerful and seemingly unaccountable.
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The fare-rollback bill then went to the desk of Grover Cleveland, freshly elected as New York’s governor after gaining a reputation as an antimachine mayor of Buffalo. Cleveland was an emerging hero of reformers—including dissident Republicans dubbed “mugwumps” (a word derived from the Algonquian language, roughly meaning a sanctimonious big shot)—who saw him as a bastion of the sort of nonpartisan, disinterested government they longed to achieve. They also saw him as a defender of the unregulated marketplace, a critical position at a time of economic unrest. Belief in the transatlantic dogma of laissez-faire economics was so ingrained in American politics and society that the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francis Walker, wrote that it was “not . . . the test of economic orthodoxy, merely. It was used to decide whether a man was an economist at all.”
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As if to prove his free-market bona fides, Cleveland promptly and forcefully vetoed the Tammany fare rollback, arguing that it violated the state constitution’s protections of private property. Kelly could not round up the broader support he needed to override the veto—Roosevelt, for his part, reversed his position and refused to override, announcing that he was ashamed of his previous vote—and so the bill failed. Another populist bill, this one designed to legislate a twelve-hour day for overworked railway conductors, also passed with Tammany’s support but fell victim to another Cleveland veto. Mugwumps and conservative Democrats were mightily impressed. There was talk of Cleveland as a presidential candidate-in-waiting.

Tammany and the governor were hardly allies to begin with (even though Kelly offered Cleveland his nominal support in the 1882 gubernatorial race). But after the veto of the fare rollback and other measures, they were implacable enemies. Most observers at the time attributed the feud to the governor’s stalwart defense of the public payroll against Kelly’s raids. But the conflict was much more complicated. Cleveland was a conspicuous defender of the economic status quo. And while Tammany may not have posed a radical threat to the laissez-faire economics of the 1880s, Kelly’s army of district leaders and other hyperlocal operatives encouraged constituents to look to politicians—to the shadow government that was Tammany Hall—as mediators and advocates who could soften the blows of the free-market economy. Men such as George Washington Plunkitt, who made himself available to his constituents at any time, day or night, and Barney Martin, a Famine immigrant whose saloon on West Twenty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue served as an informal job-placement center and political clubhouse, were hardly rabble-rousers or radicals. In their own way, however, they subverted the Gilded Age consensus that government ought to play little or no role in the marketplace—the very dogma that had guided British policymakers in Ireland during the Famine. Every time they found a job for an unemployed immigrant, every time they arranged for a delivery of coal to a struggling widow, they did more than win a vote. Wittingly or not, they challenged the transatlantic Anglo-Protestant culture of rugged individualism and minimalist government. And they offered a sharp contrast to the Swallowtail Democrat or liberal reformer obsessed with low taxation and the morality of the marketplace.

While Tammany’s alliance with the Anti-Monopoly League never developed into a true political partnership, individual Tammany members continued to sound the alarm over concentrated wealth throughout the 1880s. State Senator Thomas Grady, known (and often mocked) as Tammany’s best orator, consistently voted in favor of antimonopoly laws and regulations during Cleveland’s tenure as governor, leading Cleveland to demand that Tammany withdraw its support for his reelection. (Kelly did, reluctantly.) In an exhaustive analysis of the legislature’s voting records, the Anti-Monopoly League found that Grady had cast more votes in support of antimonopoly positions in 1883 than any other senator save two (out of twenty-eight). While Cleveland was winning admirers for his opposition to Tammany’s supposed depredations, the Anti-Monopoly League declared that the eminently respectable Chauncey Depew—Yale graduate, Skull and Bones member, and general counsel of the New York Central Railroad—“has probably done more than any other man in this state to corrupt legislation.” Depew, a Republican, went on to become a two-term U.S. senator at the turn of the twentieth century. In his memoirs, Depew wrote that Cleveland had “more political courage . . . than almost any man who ever held great responsible positions.” He “defied Tammany Hall.”
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