Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (32 page)

In their place, Murphy increasingly relied on Al Smith, Robert Wagner, Jeremiah Mahoney, James Foley (who married Murphy’s stepdaughter), and other, lesser-known figures in New York government. Dubbed the “war board,” these young politicians met regularly, sometimes as often as once a week, to plot legislative strategy, kick around new ideas, and strengthen Tammany’s commitment to social reform. “We told [Murphy] that a political party had to become an instrument to serve the people,” Mahoney recalled. “We made the party into a liberal progressive party. ”
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The war board certainly did not invent the new liberalism that was taking hold in many cities with immigrant-based populations, nor did these pragmatic politicians spend a good deal of time studying social problems that most of them knew about from personal experience. But they embraced and implemented the new politics of social change, and they set the stage for Smith’s four terms as governor, during which New York gained a reputation for efficient, progressive government—with a Tammany man in charge, no less.

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For Tammany, the key moment in this transformation was not the Triangle fire but the opening of the state legislature on January 3, 1911, when the Democratic caucus in the State Senate chose Robert Wagner to become the body’s new majority leader. The same day, Al Smith was named the State Assembly’s majority leader (second in command to the speaker). Both moves came at Murphy’s direction.

The choice of Smith was not particularly controversial. Smith, who stood about five feet, eight inches, with an impressive nose and long neck, was a popular young man of thirty-seven known for his hard work and his loyalty to the organization that promoted him from the streets of the Lower East Side to the corridors of power in Albany. His was the story of so many other Tammany figures—his father died young, forcing Al to quit school at the age of fourteen to help support his Irish-immigrant mother and his younger sister. Smith went to work at the Fulton Fish Market, enduring long hours, hard labor, and overpowering smells to make up for the social safety net that simply didn’t exist for families like his. Eventually he came to the attention of Tammany district leader Tom Foley, who found him a patronage job in the court system and put him to work for the organization. In 1903, Smith was elected to the State Assembly, where he found himself rubbing shoulders with better-educated, more worldly colleagues who looked askance at the grade-school dropout with an accent that spoke of hard times on the streets of New York. Smith decided to educate himself in his new profession, and he set a precedent in Albany by reading the contents of every piece of legislation to cross his desk. Charlie Murphy approved of the young man, and in 1911 Smith became not only the Assembly’s majority leader but chairman of the body’s powerful Ways and Means Committee. Through Charlie Murphy, Smith had absolute power over the Assembly’s legislative agenda. People noticed.

And they took even greater notice when Murphy chose Wagner, a cerebral, mild-mannered German immigrant from Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, to lead the State Senate. By all rights, by hallowed tradition, the Senate’s top post should have gone to Thomas Grady, Tammany’s old warhorse who had labored without complaint as Senate minority leader for more than a decade when Republicans controlled the body. Members of the majority party—in this case, the Democrats—chose the majority leader, but Murphy’s power over the caucus was such that he basically told his fellow Democrats how they should vote. Grady was a throwback to the Tammany of the nineteenth century, the Tammany that Murphy now saw as part of another era. Murphy once said that political parties could not remain static; they had to adapt or they died. Grady represented the past. Wagner, who at age thirty-three was even younger than Smith, represented change. Wagner shared a boardinghouse with Smith—the press called the two of them the “Tammany Twins,” but they were not very much alike save in their politics and, not coincidentally, in their hardscrabble childhoods. Although Wagner’s family had been intact, he and his siblings were sent to work as teenagers to help pay the bills. Wagner, unlike Smith, could afford the luxury of college and law school, giving him a polish Smith would never have—that was part of Smith’s appeal—and adding gravitas to the new power dynamic in Albany.

Through Wagner and Smith, Charlie Murphy’s control over Albany was enormous, for the new governor, John Alden Dix, was also a Tammany ally. The anti-Tammany Civic League noted with anxiety that “Murphy was in the saddle and Tammany controlled everything in sight.” So when flames ripped through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory two months after the ascension of Wagner and Smith, Tammany had in place the mechanism, the will, and the power to respond to the public’s outrage—and the outrage of its young leaders. Wagner and Smith were named chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the state Factory Investigating Commission (FIC) appointed in the fire’s aftermath. No investigative body in the history of New York politics was given more sweeping powers than the FIC—it issued subpoenas, demanded access to private property (such as factories), hired staff without regard to patronage or politics, conducted public hearings, and sought alliances with advocacy groups, labor unions, and other interested organizations.

Joining the two Tammany politicians who chaired the FIC were social reformers, good-government advocates, and elite professionals who, by tradition and instinct, generally opposed anything that smacked of urban machine politics. Commission member Frances Perkins already had signaled her support—indeed, her enthusiasm—for Tammany politicians she saw as potential allies. Joining her were the likes of union leader Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor; Abram Elkus, a brilliant lawyer and Woodrow Wilson’s future ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; Mary Dreier, a union and suffrage activist; and Belle Israels Moskowitz, a social reformer who would go on to become Al Smith’s most trusted and cherished adviser. This combination of experts, reformers, and political professionals did more than shed light on appalling conditions in factories around the state. It recommended and saw through to passage more than two dozen bills that expanded the FIC’s mandate to include the first steps toward comprehensive social-welfare reform in New York.
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The Factory Investigating Commission’s voluminous reports became the foundational document for an alliance between Tammany and pragmatic reformers who were more concerned with practical problems than with saving souls. That alliance required reformers to accept Tammany’s terms of engagement with the poor and the alienated, terms that were best articulated by Charlie Murphy’s predecessor, Richard Croker, during a long interview with a British journalist, W. T. Stead, in 1897. “If we go down in the gutter,” Croker said, “it is because there are men in the gutter, and you have to go down where they are if you are going to do anything with them.”
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Some reformers could not help but notice how Tammany figures—not just Smith and Wagner but also more complicated characters such as the Bowery’s Big Tim Sullivan and West Side leader Thomas McManus—did more than simply advocate for the poor and downtrodden. They were engaged in the lives of the people they represented. They understood their problems, in part because so many Tammany figures were not far removed from the experience of tenement life, the catastrophic loss of a parent (usually a father), and the sense of powerlessness that was partner to poverty. Not long after Frances Perkins arrived in New York in 1910, she went to work in Hartley House, a settlement house on the West Side. She soon found herself dealing with the case of a young boy who was arrested, sent to the infamous “Tombs” jail, and was awaiting trial for an unspecified crime. The boy provided the sole support for his widowed mother and two younger sisters, so the family faced the prospect of economic ruin if the boy were sent to prison. Perkins’s settlement-house colleagues, trained in the protocols of professional reform, began an investigation into the family’s background before offering assistance. They concluded, in Perkins’s words, “that the mother was somewhat less than worthy” of help. Worthiness was the deciding criterion, not only for the settlement-house workers but also for the larger private charities imbued with Anglo-Protestant anxieties about the character of the poor.

Tammany’s George Washington Plunkitt said that when residents in his district were burned out of their homes, he personally took care of finding them clothes and temporary shelter, rather than refer them to private charities. Those organizations, he said, “would investigate their case . . . and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation.”
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Startled and angry at her colleagues’ decision, Perkins recalled hearing about the work of the local Tammany leader, Thomas McManus, and his clubhouse, which was nearby on Ninth Avenue. Unannounced and unknown to McManus, Perkins showed up at the clubhouse one day, to the surprise of some low-level Tammany operatives gathered in the club’s main room, talking politics. Clouds of tobacco smoke clung to the ceilings, and every now and then one of the McManus team made use of one of the spittoons scattered around the room. When Perkins asked to see McManus, she was ushered into the boss’s office without hesitation or even a question.
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McManus was known not by his first name but as “The” McManus. Everybody, including the newspapers, referred to him that way. The title was a testament to the resiliency of Gaelic culture in the streets of New York, for in preconquest Ireland, the chieftains of great tribes were known as “The O’Neill” or “The O’Donnell,” or, in this case, “The McManus.” Thomas McManus, a plain-speaking, middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a dashing Van Dyck beard, became a power in Tammany Hall in the early twentieth century. Perkins found him surrounded by petitioners, but he put aside his other business when this earnest young woman entered his office. She told him she was there on behalf of a boy who was in trouble. McManus asked whether he lived in the district (the 15th Assembly district). He did. He asked whether Perkins lived in the district. She did. McManus took down the boy’s name and told Perkins to return to the club the following afternoon.

She did. The boy, McManus told her, would be released from the Tombs at six o’clock that evening.

“I don’t know how he did it,” Perkins later said of The McManus’s actions. “I’m sure it was irregular.” But she concluded that the result, not the process, was what mattered.

Not everybody in the Progressive movement was so open-minded. Perkins once told several of her fellow reformers that if she had the right to vote—this was before passage of women’s suffrage—she would be a Democrat.

Her colleagues were shocked that she would consider supporting an organization like Tammany Hall. “Well,” said one, “look at the scum of the earth they have.”

TEN

MURPHY’S LAW

S
traw hats were all the rage on a humid June day in Baltimore as the nation’s Democrats filed into the city’s Fifth Regiment Armory for their 1912 national convention. All eyes were on Charles F. Murphy and the eighty-nine New York delegates he controlled as they made their way into a furnace posing as a convention hall. The minute they left the relative comfort of the street for the discomfort of the armory, hats came off, and ties were loosened, and jackets were tossed aside.

This was to be Charlie Murphy’s debut as a national political figure, the boss of the largest delegation at the convention and the Democratic leader of a state that had become a political colossus. Democrats had chosen a New Yorker as their presidential nominee in five of the previous nine elections. (What’s more, New Yorker Horace Greeley ran as a Liberal Republican in 1872, and another New Yorker, Theodore Roosevelt, won the 1904 presidential election.) New York’s forty-five electoral votes were by far the largest prize in the forthcoming presidential election. Pennsylvania was a distant second with thirty-eight electoral votes, while California had just eleven and Florida had six. As the most powerful leader of the most powerful state in the union, Charles Francis Murphy was a good deal more than the boss of a local political machine. Writing from Baltimore as the convention opened, a
New York
Telegram
journalist noted: “Mr. Murphy is a bigger factor here . . . than any Tammany Hall leader has ever been in a National Convention.”
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Superficially, Murphy’s prominence was all about pure political power. He commanded a large bloc of votes, and he made it clear that he was prepared to use his stature—and his votes—to achieve a single practical goal: Block any move to nominate perennial candidate William Jennings Bryan, the rabble-rousing voice of the party’s rural populists who had lost the presidential contests of 1896, 1900, and 1908. While Bryan was not a formal candidate in 1912, he harbored hopes for the nomination because neither of the two leading contenders, House Speaker James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark of Missouri and Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, commanded even a simple majority of delegates, never mind the two-thirds required for nomination. Murphy saw the possibility of a rush to Bryan and was determined to crush it. His control over the state’s delegates was absolute because, under state party rules, the delegation voted as a unit. So whichever candidate the majority supported—and Murphy controlled the majority, through their affiliation or alliance with Tammany—would receive all of New York’s votes. New York’s pro-Wilson delegates, including Franklin Roosevelt, could only grumble about Murphy’s power.