Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (43 page)

But neither man gave ground. They shook hands, and Flynn left the room. Smith’s closing handshake, he noticed, was not as firm, not as friendly, as it once had been.
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Franklin Roosevelt was nominated for president on the convention’s fourth ballot, after John Garner, the prospective compromise candidate, agreed to serve as FDR’s vice president in a back-room maneuver engineered just as Roosevelt seemed to be losing momentum. Garner brought with him the Texas and California delegations, which had been pledged to him. It was left to McAdoo, chairman of the Golden State delegation, to deliver the dramatic news of his state’s switch from Garner to Roosevelt. As the man who fought Al Smith for 103 ballots back in 1924 rose to announce California’s vote, Tammany delegates let him have it. Fairly or not, they remembered McAdoo as the Klan’s man in 1924, as the self-styled progressive who could not summon the moral outrage to condemn the Ku Klux Klan but who saw no reason to disguise his contempt for Tammany. Boos cascaded from the rafters and from the floor itself as McAdoo tried to make himself heard. Finally, he said, “I don’t care what the galleries think. California casts her forty-four votes for Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt!” Vengeance was never served so coldly, and with such effect. It was all over for Tammany Hall’s Al Smith. Texas followed, and the rout for Roosevelt was on.
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As Roosevelt clinched the nomination, there was no motion from the vanquished candidate’s forces to make the nomination unanimous, as tradition dictated. Al Smith simply couldn’t allow it. He left Chicago that night, even as Roosevelt made his way from New York to Chicago to accept the nomination in person—something no candidate had ever done before.

For Al Smith, Chicago closed the curtain on his ambitions and on his leading role in American politics. The man he had regarded as an understudy was now a star.

. . .

As a band struck up Franklin Roosevelt’s boisterous campaign song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and the nominee promised to deliver a new deal to the American people, another New Yorker left Chicago with dashed hopes, as just as Al Smith did. Samuel Seabury, the man Roosevelt had put in charge of investigating the Tammany administration of Mayor Jimmy Walker, had made the journey to Chicago for purposes that remained murky, even for veteran political observers. Although a practitioner of the “disinterested” school of politics and government, Seabury had always worn his ambitions on his well-tailored sleeve. He won several judicial races earlier in his career with Tammany’s backing, and in 1916 he earned Tammany’s nominal support to be a sacrificial-lamb candidate against incumbent Governor Charles Whitman, whom Charlie Murphy deemed to be unbeatable. And so he was.

In the weeks leading to the Chicago convention, Democratic delegates around the country opened their mailboxes to find complimentary copies of a new Seabury biography portraying him as the avenging angel of clean, disinterested, politics-free government. This publicity stunt, carried out in the middle of an election year, did not go unnoticed, and when Seabury showed up in Chicago with no apparent purpose, reporters speculated that he was there as a shadow candidate, just waiting to be asked in case divided Democrats needed an alternative to Roosevelt and Smith. Reporters were not alone in their suspicions. Years later, Ed Flynn charged that Seabury had hoped to thwart Roosevelt’s presidential ambitions with his investigation of Tammany (and of Flynn—Seabury conducted a thorough review of Flynn’s personal finances) and grab the nomination for himself.
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Whatever Seabury’s motives, Tammany certainly had provided him with plenty of material as he looked into allegations of graft and judicial misconduct in Jimmy Walker’s New York. The sheriff of New York County—a job once held by Honest John Kelly and the more honest Al Smith—was found to have accumulated nearly $400,000 in savings over seven years in a job that paid about $12,000 a year. Asked to explain himself, the sheriff referred to a tin box in his house that seemed to magically multiply currency. Seabury also revealed that the city had awarded a bus contract to a company that owned no buses but that had provided Mayor Walker with a personal line of credit. And a judge who had more than half a million dollars in savings told Seabury that he had taken out a large loan to help feed, clothe, and house no fewer than thirty-four relatives who were in his care.

As the Seabury investigation produced headline after headline detailing the Walker administration’s lax ethics, attention turned to Franklin Roosevelt and the political dilemma he faced in his home state. He had the power to remove Walker as mayor, but if he did so, he was bound to further alienate Tammany supporters who had opposed his nomination. On the other hand, if he didn’t act swiftly and decisively, Republicans surely would play the Tammany card in the general election, as they had done, unsuccessfully, during his gubernatorial reelection in 1930.

The Walker question—and the larger issue of FDR’s relationship with Tammany Hall—had hung over Roosevelt’s campaign in the buildup to the 1932 convention. Seabury’s much-anticipated report arrived in the governor’s mansion on a spring night in 1932, when Roosevelt was huddled with journalist and historian Claude Bowers. Bowers later wrote that Roosevelt was not nearly as outraged with Walker as Seabury was. The governor glanced through the findings and, according to Bowers, “expressed his opinion of the judge in language not printable.” Although Walker admitted to accepting nearly $250,000 from a friend who invested his own money on the mayor’s behalf, FDR did not seem convinced that he deserved removal, as Seabury recommended. “Never has a governor been asked to remove an elective officer on such evidence,” Roosevelt said, according to Bowers.
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FDR stalled for time as he prepared for the Chicago convention, forwarding the report to Walker and asking him to respond to the charges. Walker responded, in a fashion, by delivering a defiant speech at the convention in favor of Smith’s nomination. Weeks later, as pressure on candidate Roosevelt increased, Walker was summoned to Albany to undergo questioning by the governor himself. An explosive encounter seemed just days away as Roosevelt wrestled with an extraordinary dilemma. His election as president was nearly certain, but a misstep in his handling of Walker—and, by extension, Tammany Hall—could prove damaging. While the governor deliberated, Al Smith stepped in, taking aside his onetime colleague in Albany, Walker. With the national press watching Roosevelt’s every move, Smith told Walker, “Jim, you’re through.” Walker announced his resignation on September 1, 1932. He soon set sail for Europe, telling reporters that he wanted to “get away from desks and telephones.”
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. . .

As Jimmy Walker watched the skyline of the city he loved disappear into the horizon from the good ship
Conte Grande
, the question for the Tammany he left behind was this: How would it respond not only to the Seabury investigation but to all of the challenges it faced—from the financial emergency of the Depression to Franklin Roosevelt’s imminent election as president?

The burden of setting Tammany Hall on a new course, or not, fell to a mild-mannered native of County Fermanagh, John Curry, who took over the organization in 1929 after Murphy’s successor, George Olvany, resigned. A neatly dressed fifty-nine-year-old with thinning hair and a steel-gray mustache who was raised, improbably enough, on a farm on Manhattan’s West Side, Curry served as a Tammany district leader during Murphy’s glory years. After the organization’s Executive Committee named him as the new boss in 1929, Curry promised that he would “carry out the politics in which I grew up.” The man clearly was not paying attention, for he grew up at a time when Tammany scrupulously avoided the gross mistakes of its past, a time when it could attract men like Franklin Roosevelt’s impeccable lieutenant governor, Herbert Lehman, son of a German-Jewish immigrant who founded the banking giant Lehman Brothers. Lehman entered civic life in part because he saw Al Smith as the model of a new kind of politics—tolerant, progressive, and urban. He saw the Ku Klux Klan’s attacks on Smith in 1924 and 1928 as an assault not simply on Catholics but also on Jews like himself and all those who were deemed something less than authentically American. Lehman not only supported Smith, he also supported Tammany, joining the organization in the 1920s and serving as vice chairman of its finance committee.
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John Curry took over Tammany Hall as the organization’s core constituents, his fellow Irish-Americans, continued their dispersal from the tenements of the Lower East Side to the more bucolic neighborhoods of the upper Bronx and western Queens. The number of immigrants, Irish and non-Irish, was in decline citywide, thanks to the lingering effects of the immigration restrictions of 1924. Curry would be called upon to make critical decisions about the organization’s future, including its relationships with Roosevelt, Lehman, and Walker’s successor in City Hall. Each of his decisions turned out to be disastrous, an almost willful rejection of the wisdom of his predecessors. Those decisions contributed as much to the organization’s downfall as the more familiar narrative of New York’s changing demographics and the advent of New Deal social programs. Some of the city’s most prominent Irish politicians soon concluded that Tammany had outlived its usefulness—because, in the end, it had accomplished its mission.

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By law, the president of the Board of Aldermen became acting mayor when an incumbent left office early. So after Jimmy Walker resigned in 1932, the mantle of leadership fell to Joseph McKee, a former Latin and Greek teacher from the Bronx who was close to Ed Flynn, a fellow Fordham Law graduate. McKee had abandoned teaching for politics about a dozen years earlier, when he turned to a local Democratic district leader to help the destitute family of a dying friend. Help arrived, and a grateful McKee soon gave up education to become a neighborhood politician, the kind of person who came to the aid of families in need. In appearance, he was not unlike Walker—he was a good-looking man with well-groomed brown hair and a boyish face that made him seem younger than his forty-four years. But the resemblance ended there, as he made clear in his first act as mayor: He cut his own annual pay from $40,000 to $25,000.

McKee spent the next few months attempting to adjust the city’s treasury to the Depression’s grim realities. He demanded millions of dollars in budget savings, and for his effort Tammany’s men on the city’s Board of Estimate—a quasi-legislative body consisting of the mayor, city comptroller, president of the Board of Aldermen, and the five borough presidents—diluted his budget-making powers. He complained about personnel costs but could not persuade Tammany to cut the city’s payroll, which had doubled since 1918.

Unhappy with the new austerity in City Hall and still fuming over Walker’s resignation, Tammany and its allies in the boroughs called for a special election to replace Walker on a more permanent basis. The Tammany candidate, John O’Brien, an undistinguished but likable jurist, won easily with John Curry’s support.

Curry looked to extend his influence by blocking the nomination of Lieutenant Governor Lehman to succeed FDR as governor, even though Lehman had been a Tammany member. Curry apparently saw Lehman as a threat, a Tammany man who might be inclined to show off his independence once in power. Curry even concocted a scheme of political musical chairs, proposing to nominate Senator Robert Wagner for governor and to ship Lehman to Washington to take Wagner’s place in the Senate. (Had Curry’s plan worked, Wagner would not have been in the Senate to champion New Deal legislation, a chilling thought.) Al Smith intervened on Lehman’s behalf, in essence telling Curry to fall in line or else. He did, sullenly.

The election of 1932 could have been a milestone in the rehabilitation and revitalization of Tammany Hall. Its embrace of pluralistic politics, its rejection of moralistic crusades like Prohibition, and its support for social welfare and government regulation were on the verge of transforming national politics. But its new leaders were petty and small, and its best people kept their distance.

All of that was put aside, however, on November 8, 1932, when the United States chose Franklin D. Roosevelt as its new president, a man who had been something of an auxiliary Tammany member during the Smith years. State voters elected Herbert Lehman, a card-carrying member of the organization, as governor. Another Tammany member, Robert Wagner, was reelected to a second term in the U.S. Senate. In the city, the newly elected mayor, O’Brien, owed his career to Tammany.

The scene inside Tammany’s ballroom was one of quiet jubilation. The new governor was gracious enough to stop by and mingle with Curry in a private room before heading uptown to congratulate the new president at his headquarters in the Biltmore Hotel. Senator Wagner stopped by as well, posing for a picture with Lehman and Curry before heading to his own headquarters. Mayor-elect O’Brien arrived and was ushered to the stage along with his wife and their five children, perhaps reminding the city that it was no longer in the hands of the philandering Walker. Tammany had seen few nights like this one. All of the pieces necessary for power and influence were in place—all the way to the White House. The lights outside the organization’s new building brightened a city that otherwise had little to celebrate on that fall night. For when Tammany loyalists awoke the following morning, they returned to everyday life in a city where unemployment was nearly 25 percent; where fathers, mothers, and children lined up at dawn for bread; where the grandchildren of the Irish Famine wondered if, or when, the landlord might come to put them out on the street. Yes, these were hard times. But for one night anyway, Tammany could cheer.

It was, to be sure, a last hurrah.

A few weeks after the election, Al Smith appeared in front of Samuel Seabury as the long investigation of city government and Tammany drew to a close. Smith delivered a breathtaking lecture on the need to reform municipal government, leaving Seabury uncharacteristically speechless. The simultaneous existence of the city’s five boroughs as five individual counties was inefficient and led to bloated payrolls, Smith said. Judges ought to be appointed by the mayor rather than nominated by political bosses. The City Council should be expanded to a two-house legislature to better serve as a check on mayoral power.