Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (47 page)

The Hall was well and truly gone.

And so it died. With it, for better or for worse, perished a culture of extreme local politics, of a block-by-block, building-by-building organization, of methods that were irregular—as Frances Perkins so delicately put it—but responsive all the same. The Irish came to New York believing that the rules of politics were written to keep them powerless, as they had been in Ireland. When they saw the same class in New York observing the same rules, speaking the words of reform that sounded more like demands to conform, they saw no reason to turn their backs on politicians who recognized their opportunities and seized them, no reason to stand in judgment of rogues like Jimmy Walker and George Washington Plunkitt.

Once installed in power, the Irish in New York looked to government as a friend in need, a provider of last (or perhaps first) resort, as an advocate in a system constructed by others but now in their hands. They saw how power worked in Ireland. They knew that without power they might be left to starve in the name of abstract ideology. When they attained power in New York, they knew what to do with it—they made certain that they would not starve again, and that those who might allow it would be denied the power to do so.

It was an imperfect institution, Tammany, often egregiously so. Its alliances with gangsters and other crooked operators deserves history’s rebuke. But after it was done and the Irish scattered to the suburbs, corruption and crooked deals did not disappear from municipal government. Mayors and lesser officials still paid attention to the needs of banking, real estate, and other interests, just as surely as Charles Murphy took care to look after the fortunes of the businessmen who befriended him over dinner at Delmonico’s or who bought a fistful of tickets to John Ahearn’s clambakes.

But the machine’s absence left a void in New York, still a city of immigrants, and now, in the twenty-first century, many of these newcomers live in shadows that Tammany would have found unacceptable. Tens of thousands of immigrants without proper papers, without citizenship, unable to vote? Tammany’s ward heelers would have seen them not as outcasts but as potential allies—and voters—and would have acted accordingly.

Gone, too, is the sense of participation, the connection among a block, an apartment house, a district, and those who represent them. Tammany provided spectacle, and while some of it may have been a screen for unsavory dealmaking, the chowders and the cruises and the festivals made Tammany’s immigrant-stock constituents feel like New Yorkers—and Americans.

. . .

On a midwinter evening in early 1973, twenty members of the Anawanda Club trudged up two flights of well-worn stairs to spend one last night in Charlie Murphy’s old political clubhouse. Some came with extra cash, because the club was auctioning off its last few possessions, with proceeds to be split among the club’s sixty-three remaining members.
²³

The old men in the crowd spoke of other days, when the club sponsored an annual beefsteak dinner and the local politicians stopped by to shake hands and chew the political fat. It was a different neighborhood now, better in many ways. The old Gas House District had given way to dozens of low-rise brick apartment buildings put up in the 1940s to house World War II veterans and their families. They were decent people, hardworking and ambitious. But they didn’t have the same connection to the neighborhood, the old men complained. The schoolteacher with a two-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town, or the cop with the nice three-bedroom deal in Peter Cooper Village—as the apartment complexes were called—knew nothing about the old days, about the silent figure who took care of his voters under a gas lamp on Second Avenue. They saw no reason to come out on cold nights to talk politics in a second-floor clubhouse above a gin mill.

One of the few younger people in the crowd walked away with the club’s poker chips for a bid of $2. An old-timer won a small bidding war for the club’s grandfather clock. A minor city official paid $200, the highest amount bid on any object, for the rights to a six-foot portrait of Charles Francis Murphy.

What’s the use? one of the old-timers said. He was answering a visitor’s question—Why not keep the club going? Nobody cared anymore. Who, besides the holdouts in the room, knew that grand old Tammany Hall was just a few blocks to the south, unnoticed and forgotten? It was a new era. Time to move on.

As the auction ran out of steam, the oldtimers cast sideways glances when an eager young man plunked down ten bucks and said he wanted one of the club’s pool tables. Then he put down a fiver and claimed the club’s heavy old safe.

He then realized his problem: There was no way he was getting the table and the safe down those stairs. Not by himself.

The old ones knew what would happen next: He’d ask for help. And he’d get it.

No questions asked.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
his book is the outgrowth of my doctoral research at Rutgers University. It was my pleasure and honor to work with four distinguished scholars and writers, John Whiteclay Chambers II, my dissertation director, Warren Kimball, David Greenberg, and Mark Edward Lender. My colleagues at Kean University were tremendously supportive. Thanks to Dr. Dawood Farahi, Kean’s president, Audrey Kelly, Matt Caruso, Erin Alghandoor, Joey Moran, Karen Harris, and the entire History Department, especially Christopher Bellitto.

There surely is a special place in the afterlife reserved for those who staff archives and special collections. My thanks to all who assisted me, especially Brendan Dolan at the Archives of Irish America at New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House, Alan Delozier at Seton Hall University’s Monsignor Field Archives and Special Collections Center, Scott Taylor at Georgetown University Library, and the staffs of the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the New York State Library and Archives, the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York, the American Irish Historical Society, the Library of Congress, and the National Library of Ireland.

I am indebted to historians and writers who have tried to complicate and broaden our understanding of Tammany Hall and of Irish-American politics, including J. Joseph Huthmacher, John Buenker, Nancy Joan Weiss, Kenneth Ackerman, Leo Hershkowitz, Edward Levine, Kerby Miller, Francis Barry, Richard Welch, Mary C. Kelly, Thomas Fleming, and Jay Dolan. A word of gratitude, too, for the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, with whom I had several memorable conversations about Tammany history during the 1990s.

My debt to Peter Quinn is beyond words. Thanks, too, to Arthur Carter and Peter Kaplan for their friendship.

My editor, Katie Adams, has an extraordinary eye and remarkable patience. My thanks to Bob Weil, publishing director of Liveright, for his confidence and support. I’m grateful to copyeditor Kathleen Brandes, and to the publicity and marketing staff at W. W. Norton.

My agent, John Wright, could not be a better friend.

My wife, Eileen Duggan, and our children, Kate and Conor, now know more about Tammany Hall than they ever thought possible. Talk about patience!

NOTES

I
NTRODUCTION

1.
New York Times
, July 5, 1929.

2. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), p. 224.

3. William L. Riordon
, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics
(New York: Signet, 1995), pp. 25–26.

4. Lincoln Steffens,
The Shame of the Cities
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), p. 201.

5.
The Outlook
, February 21, 1903.

6. See, among others, Noel Ignatiev,
How the Irish Became White
(New York: Routledge, 1995);
Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register
, July 8, 1854.

7.
New York Times
, October 24, 1906.

8. Undated broadside, New-York Historical Society Broadside Collection.

9. Cecil Woodham-Smith,
The Great Hunger
(London: H. Hamilton, 1962), p. 156;
Littell’s Living Age
, vol. 171, No. 2211 (November 6, 1886).

10. The figure comes from Robert James Scally,
The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 13.

11. See Sterling Stuckey,
Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Deborah Gray White,
Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); John Thornton,
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

12. John Byrne to William Bourke Cockran, October 20, 1898, William Bourke Cockran Papers, Box 1, New York Public Library. (Cockran’s name appears in some sources as Cochran, perhaps because the latter is a more familiar spelling.) Ironically, it was Richard Croker, the Irish immigrant head of Tammany, who blocked the appointment of Byrne’s friend, a judge named Daly. See undated memo in Edwin Kilroe Papers, Box 20, Columbia University Special Collections. Cockran broke with Croker over the Daly nonappointment.

13. Allen Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds.,
The Diaries of George Templeton Strong
, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 348.

14. Scally,
The End of Hidden Ireland
, p. 14.

One:
“T
AMMANY
H
ALL
B
ELONGS TO
U
S
”

1. Descriptions of the events in Tammany Hall on April 24, 1817, can be found in the
New York Evening Post
, April 25 and 26, 1817.

2. Fergus O’Ferrall,
Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy
,
1820–30
(Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985), p. 190.

3. Drawn from a firsthand account published anonymously in the
New York Evening Post
, April 26, 1817.

4. Lyman H. Butterfield, ed.,
Adams Family Correspondence
, vol. II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 229–30.

5. Tammany Hall’s early years are covered in Oliver E. Allen,
The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993); Jerome Mushkat,
Tammany: The Evolution of a Political Machine, 1789–1865
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971); Gustavus Myers,
The History of Tammany Hall
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991; reprint of 1901 edition); and M. A. Werner,
Tammany Hall
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).

6. Werner,
Tammany Hall
, p. 10.

7. Gustavus Myers,
The History of Tammany Hall
, p. 23. (Myers, a noted journalist and socialist activist, published the book himself because he could not find a publisher. A revised edition was published by Boni and Liveright in 1917.)

8.
Examiner,
April 23, 1814; Myers,
The History of Tammany Hall
, p. 69.

9.
New York
Evening Post
, November 21, 1827; Thomas Addis Emmet,
A Memoir of Thomas Addis and Robert Emmet
(New York: Emmet Press, 1905), p. 490.

10. Werner,
Tammany Hall
, p. 46.

11. A receipt for the contribution from New York is contained in a letter from O’Connell’s Catholic Association to James McNevin, January 30, 1829, Daniel O’Connell Papers, MS 5242, National Library of Ireland. The recipient most likely was William James MacNeven.

12.
United States Catholic Miscellany
, April 11, 1829.

Two:
M
ASS
P
OLITICS

1. Robert Kee,
Ireland: A History
(London: Fakenham Press, 1980), p. 75.