Machine Made: Irish America, Tammany Hall and the Creation Of

[2012] Terrence Golway ALL RIGHTS RESERVED MACHINE MADE: IRISH AMERICA, TAMMANY HALL AND THE CREATION OF MODERN NEW YORK POLITICS by TERRENCE GOLWAY A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History written under the direction of John Whiteclay Chambers II and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey [May, 2012] ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Machine Made: Irish America, Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern New York Politics By TERRENCE GOLWAY Dissertation Director: John Whiteclay Chambers II Although Tammany Hall was founded as a social club just after the American Revolution, it exists in memory as the quintessential American political machine, run by and for Irish-American political operatives more concerned with power than ideas. This dissertation seeks to re-interpret Tammany in the context of a transatlantic Irish experience of hunger, dislocation, and alienation. Irish immigrants brought with them distinct political narratives which were incorporated into Tammany Hall’s pragmatic but progressive ideology during the first quarter of the 20th Century. These political narratives, centered on the experience of powerlessness and oppression in Ireland and inextricably linked to Catholicism, led Irish immigrants to regard reformers in New York as American versions of their traditional enemies, the well-born Anglo-Protestant. The Irish arrived in New York with an understanding of the power of mass politics thanks to Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s. Few studies of Tammany Hall attempt to link O’Connell’s mobilization of the Irish peasantry to Tammany’s ability to turn out the vote, especially after the Famine exodus of 1845-52. ii Likewise, the critical role of John Hughes, the first Catholic archbishop of New York and a native of Ireland, remains outside the story of Irish-American politics, despite the key role he played in organizing the Irish vote behind transatlantic grievances. This dissertation seeks to show how a particularly Irish experience in both Ireland and New York helped to mobilize a new kind of politics which emphasized cultural pluralism, populist rhetoric, and practical solutions to social injustice. A child of a Famine immigrant, Charles Francis Murphy, transformed Tammany into a force for social change during the Progressive Era. Murphy’s forgotten role in nurturing politicians such as Alfred E. Smith and Robert Wagner has been forgotten, but this dissertation will show that his embrace of change helped set the stage for the rise of Franklin Roosevelt and the implementation of the New Deal. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract Page ii Introduction Page 1 Chapter 1: From a Land Beyond the Waves Page 12 Chapter 2: New York’s First Irish Political Boss Page 51 Chapter 3: A Great Hunger Page 81 Chapter 4: ‘Our Political Influence, Sure it is Great’ Page 118 Chapter 5: Reconstruction Page 149 Chapter 6: An Admirable Organization? Page 188 Chapter 7: Partners for Progress Page 232 Conclusion Page 268 Bibliography Page 275 Curriculum Vita Page 292 iv 1 INTRODUCTION Thousands of New Yorkers hurry by an ornate, three-story brick building on the corner of East 17th Street and Park Avenue South in Manhattan every day, with few if any pausing to look up at fading letters carved into concrete above the building’s main entrance. There is nothing, except those ignored words on the building’s facade, to indicate that this building was once the epicenter of New York politics and government. The men – and a few women – who streamed into the building’s arched doorways for political meetings are remembered only as abstractions, as anonymous political hacks whose depredations inspired civic-minded progressives to reform state and municipal government in New York. The words on the building’s 17th Street façade read, “Society of St. Tammany or Columbian Order,” along with a date, 1928, indicating when the building opened. That very year, a member of the Society, a grade-school dropout who flouted the national prohibition against alcohol consumption and who challenged the nation’s self-image as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, became the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States. His name, of course, was Alfred E. Smith, a four-term Governor of New York, the first non- Protestant to win a major party’s presidential nomination, and the product of a political institution known not by its formal name but by the building in which it met, Tammany Hall. It has been a half-century since Tammany Hall ceased to exist as a power in New York politics. The building on Union Square hasn’t been used for a political meeting since the late 1940s, when the failing Tammany society sold the property to pay expenses. Today, the old main meeting room serves as a theater for a professional acting company, a nice if unintended piece of 2 irony, for many of the politicians who inhabited the Hall were nothing if not theatric. 1 But the passage of years and loss of influence have not dimmed Tammany Hall’s power to conjure images of a certain style of politics – corrupt, autocratic, parochial, and cynical, a politics devoid of ideas and ideals. There is no shortage of pejorative images attached to Tammany: Daniel Rodgers, in his history of the Progressive movement, contrasted “the stink of Tammany Hall” to the perfumed scent of urban civic reformers. Similarly, journalist M.R. Werner’s history of Tammany, a book regularly cited in academic and popular studies of New York politics, is unrelenting in its descriptions of the Hall’s leaders and crimes, asserting that “Tammany Hall has been the most pathological case [of corruption] in American government almost since its foundation three weeks after the adoption of the Constitution of the United States.” Even Dr. Seuss offered a negative opinion of Tammany. In a drawing in November, 1941, the artist drew his famed cat in the hat dressed as a disheveled Tammany tiger, with a brown derby on his head, a cigar dangling from his left hand, and his right arm draped around an overflowing garbage can. “Today’s the big day, folks,” the caption reads. “Vote early and often.” 2 The people who gave Tammany its power – whether or not they voted early or late, often or just once -- generally are treated no more sympathetically. Warren Sloat’s chronicle of the Rev. Charles Parkhurst’s famous anti-vice crusade in the 1890s referred to Tammany’s core constituents as “greasy men with bumpy noses and bull-necked men in baggy trousers.” 3 Sloat’s description of the immigrant-stock working people who supported Tammany is harsher than 1 As of 2010, the Union Square Theater occupied Tammany’s main meeting room. Al Smith, Tammany’s most- famous member, was an aspiring actor before he entered politics See Robert Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York: Free Press, 2001. Another notable Tammany product, New York City Mayor James Walker, also considered a career in show business, and, in fact, wrote a popular song, “Will You Love Me in September as You Did in May?” 2 Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2000), p. 135; W. R. Werner, Tammany Hall (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. viii. The Seuss cartoon is reproduced in several venues, including Joseph M. Bessette and John J. Pitney, Jr., American Government and Politics: Deliberation, Democracy and Citizenship (Stamford, Ct.: Cengage Learning, 2010), pg. 305. 3 Warren Sloat, A Battle for the Sour of New York, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002), p. 82. 3 most, but not outlandishly so. The New York Times asserted in 1917 that Tammany “thrived on the unthinking obedience given by dependents who looked to patronage for a living.” 4 Historians have tended to echo the reformers’ characterization of Tammany voters as mere pawns of the Hall’s nefarious designs. Political scientist Elmer E. Cornwell, Jr. asserted that political machines like Tammany depended on a “docile mass base” of “manipulable” immigrant-stock voters who were “insecure” and “confused.” 5 Tammany’s unenviable place in popular memory extends far beyond the borders its home base of Manhattan. For example, in 2009 a correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent described the Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, as an “angry, vindictive, manipulative, secretive, power-abusing Tammany Hall tribalist.” 6 A 2009 article in The New York Times on Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff for President Barack Obama, described a cleavage in the White House between policy-driven intellectuals, dubbed the “Aspen Institute” wing, and hard-boiled political operatives, referred to as “Tammany Hall.” Emanuel, it was noted, was the “undisputed boss” of the Tammany Hall wing. 7 The title was not necessarily given as a compliment, for the piece described Emanuel as a profane, two-fisted politico better known for smashing heads (figuratively speaking) than creating enlightened public policy. Journalist and former presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan described Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign in New York in 2000 as “too cynical for the place that gave birth to Tammany Hall.” 8 4 The New York Times, October 28, 1917. 5 Elmer E. Cornwell, Jr. “Bosses, Machines, and Ethnic Groups,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 353 (May, 1964), pp 27-30. 6 Quoted in The Guardian, May 12, 2009. 7 The New York Times, August 16, 2009. 8 Peggy Noonan, The Case Against Hillary Clinton (New York: Regan Books, 2000), pg. 180. 4 What is notable about these passages is the authors’ assumption that readers will understand the references to Tammany, even though Tammany disappeared from New York’s civic life in the early 1960s.

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