Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (42 page)

In a larger sense, though, the prospect of a presidential campaign between two New York governors, Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, represented an absolute triumph for Tammany Hall, however uncomfortable it was bound to make Flynn and many others. Such a contest would showcase a new kind of politics in the Democratic Party—a politics that embraced cities, immigrants, ethnicity, pluralism, and the lunch-bucket liberalism that Charlie Murphy and his protégés had implemented in Albany during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Few issues of ideology separated Smith and Roosevelt. The looming contest between the two would inevitably focus on personality and electability, not the sort of fundamental differences that had separated Smith and McAdoo in 1924. Whatever else Flynn might have feared as he contemplated a presidential campaign between two of his friends, he might have taken comfort in knowing that the prospective candidates were fellow New Yorkers who had come of age during the height of Charles Murphy’s influence over Albany and who had helped to transform the Democrats from the party of William Jennings Bryan and the Ku Klux Klan to a party that included urban Catholics and Jews (as well as Southern racists, to be sure). The Democratic Party was beginning to resemble Tammany Hall—urban bosses in Jersey City, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Kansas City were important national players who represented the children and grandchildren of immigrants, and many of these bosses shared the urban liberal agenda of greater regulation and stronger social-welfare measures that Al Smith had helped implement in New York.

Smith and Roosevelt were hardly the only New Yorkers who were key parts of the new Democratic Party. Robert Wagner, Smith’s old friend from their days together in Albany, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1926 and was about to make his mark as one of the nation’s most important lawmakers. Herbert Lehman, vice chairman of Tammany Hall’s finance committee, was elected as FDR’s lieutenant governor in 1928, becoming the first Jew elected to statewide office in New York. He, too, would go on to become a politician of national renown.

All four helped to implement the urban liberal agenda that transformed New York politics in the twentieth century. So, in that sense, Ed Flynn might have felt some satisfaction as he contemplated the prospect of his two friends running against each other for president in 1932, for they represented the new, pluralistic Democratic Party created, in part, by Tammany Hall. Although Flynn was not a member of Tammany—as a Bronx resident, he was ineligible for membership in a group that ostensibly controlled only the Democratic Party of Manhattan—he served as an adjunct of the organization through his friendships and his enduring affection for Charles Murphy.

None of this, however, made his life easier as he considered what might happen in 1932.

. . .

Ed Flynn had been a frequent visitor to the Executive Mansion during the Smith years, and on one occasion he was dispatched to the mansion’s reception area to stall the very powerful and very dry Josephus Daniels of North Carolina, onetime secretary of the navy, who apparently had shown up early for an appointment with Smith while the governor and his aides were fortifying themselves for another long day of work in Albany. Daniels’s devotion to temperance was so passionate that he purged naval bases, officers’ quarters, and all the ships at sea of anything stronger than cough medicine even before passage of Prohibition in 1920.

Smith told Flynn to keep Daniels at bay while he and his aides frantically removed highball glasses, beer mugs, and other signs of Tammany-style deliberations from the governor’s office. (Smith no doubt was less concerned about evidence of copious tobacco consumption—after all, there was no law against smoke-filled rooms, and besides, Daniels was from North Carolina.) After a decent interval, Flynn led Daniels up the main stairway to Smith’s second-floor office, where Prohibition had been restored.

Smith’s humiliating defeat in 1928 made him something of a secular martyr among many Irish-Catholic New Yorkers, and Smith himself was not averse to viewing his defeat as a rejection of his religion, not his politics or his gravel-voiced, unapologetically urban persona. Many others agreed, although it seemed fair to note that Hoover’s victory was as much a referendum on the Republican-led prosperity of the Roaring Twenties as it was on Smith’s faith. Still, for Smith’s many admirers, he was a victim of mindless bigotry, no longer a happy warrior but a wounded warrior whose scars required careful attention, respect, and that all-important virtue, loyalty.

As Franklin Roosevelt began to sketch out his plans for 1932, it fell to Flynn to deal with the delicate issue of Alfred E. Smith. The former governor had said he would not return to public life, and he seemed to be thriving as president of the Empire State Building Corporation, which was putting up the world’s tallest building in a city of breadlines and shantytowns. Nevertheless, FDR felt obliged to let Smith know of his plans, and, just as important, he wanted to find out once and for all whether Smith had ambitions of his own. Roosevelt sent Flynn to see Smith before the 1932 campaign began in earnest, but the secretary of state was none too happy about it. “I hated to find myself in the position of a mediator in what had become a serious personal issue,” Flynn wrote. But he was the obvious choice to have a candid talk with the former governor.
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When they met, Smith insisted again that he was through with politics. Family members had lost money in the stock-market crash. He had debts of his own. The Depression had taken its toll on him just as it had on so many other Americans. According to Flynn’s account, Smith ruled out another presidential bid, freeing Flynn of any lingering obligations or guilt. Flynn committed himself—and his Bronx County organization—to Roosevelt’s fledgling campaign.

And then everything changed. As the Depression grew worse in 1931, it became clear that Hoover and his fellow Republicans were on the verge of a historic defeat in 1932. Smith, by no means over his loss in 1928, saw a chance at redemption. As Smith’s biographer, Robert Slayton, noted, the former governor still regarded Roosevelt as a pleasant but overmatched dilettante. Smith’s most trusted aide, Belle Moskowitz, put it more bluntly. She told Roosevelt supporter Felix Frankfurter, “Many of us feel that the party needs a well-equipped candidate, able to lead.” Refusing to even mention Roosevelt’s name, she said that the “candidate . . . leading the field” did not offer “that kind of promise.”
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Al Smith announced in February 1932 that he would accept the party’s nomination for president if it were offered, but he would not campaign for it. Tammany quickly lined up behind him, even though Smith and the organization’s new leader, Irish immigrant John Curry, were not particularly close. Flynn kept the Bronx in Roosevelt’s column, a critical victory for the governor’s campaign. New York City’s Democrats were forced to choose sides between two New York Democrats: Smith and Roosevelt. The old Smith coalition of reformers and regulars broke apart, with hard feelings on both sides.

Sam Rosenman, a lawyer and assemblyman who had been close to Smith in the 1920s, and Smith’s old friend Frances Perkins, who served as FDR’s labor commissioner, sided with Roosevelt. Belle Moskowitz and master planner Robert Moses stayed at Smith’s side. (This lineup was not particularly surprising, given that Rosenman and Perkins worked for FDR, while Moskowitz and Moses were pointedly dismissed from their posts after Roosevelt’s election.) Meanwhile, Flynn and the Bronx were with FDR; Tammany and the city’s three other Democratic organizations (Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island) sided with Smith.

The split between friends and allies caused no small amount of anguish in New York. James J. Hoey, a onetime Democratic state chairman and state legislator, and a longtime friend of Smith’s, poured out his heart when Louis Howe asked him to endorse FDR. “You can understand my situation,” he told Howe. “I have been so closely associated for more than a quarter of a century with Governor Smith that I do not feel as though I could take a stand in opposition to him publicly.”

The key word, as Howe surely knew, was
publicly
. Hoey continued: “You know my sentiments, and I am doing everything I can in my own way to help the cause in which you are interested.” Hoey, a middle-aged bachelor with thinning hair and a fleshy double chin, apparently helped the Roosevelt cause by serving as an informant for FDR in Smith’s camp. In a “personal and confidential” letter to FDR’s campaign manager, James Farley, Hoey reported on developments inside the six-member delegation from the Panama Canal Zone—information he received from the Smith camp. While one letter does not make a conspiracy, it does suggest that there may have been others, and it certainly demonstrates that Hoey was in touch with FDR’s campaign even though he remained publicly loyal to Smith. Hoey’s covert work on FDR’s behalf would not go unrewarded.
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Hoey may have felt obliged to stand by Smith in public, but he was among a number of New York politicians growing alienated from Tammany’s leadership. Ever since that glorious July 4 ceremony in 1929 when Governor Roosevelt himself had presided over the opening of the new Tammany Hall, the news had been all bad for the organization. A Tammany judge, Joseph F. Crater, disappeared in the midst of an investigation of malfeasance on the bench. (He was never found.) There was talk of renewed ties between Tammany figures and the city’s underworld. Mayor Walker’s love of the city’s nightlife grew stale after the stock market crashed and the press reported fresh allegations of corruption in City Hall and in the city’s judiciary. Roosevelt had little choice but to respond to a growing public outcry against Walker, leading to his appointment of an anti-Tammany judge, Samuel Seabury—the man who couldn’t bring himself to vote for Al Smith’s nomination as governor in 1918—to investigate city government. Seabury was a Tammany foe from central casting: He had the austere bearing of a cleric—perhaps not surprising, given that he was the descendant of an Anglican bishop—and he was utterly convinced of his own moral purity. And he was not wrong about Tammany’s failings in the post-Murphy era.

The Tammany that had nurtured Al Smith and Robert Wagner, the Tammany that had won over Frances Perkins and Herbert Lehman, the Tammany that had led New York into a golden age of practical reform—that Tammany was slipping into the pages of history. In its place was an organization returning to stereotype, adrift ideologically and ethically with no new Al Smiths, no new Robert Wagners, to provide energy and ideas. Ironically, it was Jimmy Walker, soon to become a symbol of new Tammany excesses, who had seen trouble on the horizon years earlier, when Charlie Murphy was laid to rest. “The brains of Tammany Hall,” Walker said, “lie in Calvary Cemetery.”
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. . .

As the presidential campaign unfolded in the early months of 1932, it became clear that there would be no sentimental ending to the relationship between the two leading candidates, one the son of the Lower East Side and the other a scion of one of New York’s great families. Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt were determined to fight to the end for the party’s nomination, to the distress of colleagues who believed the two New York governors ought to stand aside for the good of the party. William Gibbs McAdoo, at peace with the realization that he would never follow in the steps of his father-in-law, Woodrow Wilson, was among those who saw House Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas as an alternative to the battling New Yorkers.

“Unless the Democratic Party is willing to keep out of the Tammany mess in New York . . . by uniting on a man like Garner . . . I see nothing but another defeat ahead of us,” McAdoo told Joseph Tumulty, the Jersey City politician who was Wilson’s personal secretary. “The Smith and Roosevelt contest is bound to have the most-hurtful reactions.”
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The 1932 Democratic National Convention in Chicago Stadium was not as contentious as the brutal affair in Madison Square Garden had been in 1924, but it had all the elements of a political civil war within the New York delegation and among urban Irish Catholics who were among the party’s most reliable voters. Some believed passionately that Smith should have another chance, others believed just as firmly that Smith, through no fault of his own, would only lead the party to another disaster in November. The two New York governors, both of whom had won their offices with the help and support of Tammany Hall, took their fight to the convention floor in Chicago, where Roosevelt held a large but not insurmountable lead in the delegate count.

Leading the Roosevelt effort, along with the inevitable Louis Howe, were two New York Irish-Catholic politicians—Ed Flynn and a promising operative from rural Rockland County, James Farley—both of whom represented the Tammany tradition, even though they were not and never had been Tammany members. (Farley shared with his urban compatriots a common narrative. His grandparents were Famine immigrants and his father died in 1898 when Jim was nine years old, leaving behind a wife and five sons.) Farley had Smith’s ebullience, Flynn had Charlie Murphy’s quiet shrewdness. Farley was the glad-hander, ward heeler of the nation. Flynn was the strategist, the back-room deal-cutter.

While Farley managed Roosevelt’s floor effort at the convention, Flynn worked behind the scenes with the likes of Senator Huey Long of Louisiana and Senator Cordell Hull of Tennessee to counter Al Smith’s stop-Roosevelt strategy. As the maneuvering and jockeying were underway in Chicago’s hotel rooms, Flynn received a message from Smith’s manager, Joseph Proskauer. The former governor wanted to have a word with him.

It promised to be an awkward conversation. As Flynn entered Smith’s room, conversation ceased and Smith’s aides abruptly left. Just the two of them remained, two onetime allies, two men set on course for this day, for this time, by Silent Charlie Murphy.

“Ed,” Smith said, “you are not representing the people of Bronx County in your support of Roosevelt. You know the people of Bronx County want you to support me.”

Flynn conceded that Smith probably was right. But he had committed himself and his fellow delegates to Roosevelt months earlier, when Smith was not a candidate. It would be wrong, Flynn said, for his delegates to ditch FDR now simply because Smith was in the race. The two former allies continued to talk, and sometimes emotion got the better of them. Nearly twenty years later, Flynn recalled the conversation as “painful,” because his friendship with Smith “had been much longer and more intimate than my friendship with Roosevelt.”