Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (17 page)

On July 10, with the parade due to step off in less than forty-eight hours, Kelso issued an order to his officers granting them power to keep the streets clear and to prevent any public processions on July 12. Mayor Hall, after consultations with Tweed and other Tammany figures, issued a letter to the Orangemen declaring that he found it “singular” that they would wish to celebrate “a foreign event occurring nearly two hundred years ago, and with which American citizens cannot actively sympathize.”
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Kelso’s directive, known as General Order no. 57, immediately inspired an uproar among Irish Protestants as well as the city’s business community and some of New York’s leading newspapers. The
Times
complained that the city “is absolutely in the hands of Irish Catholics,” while the
Tribune
contended that the police superintendent, the mayor, and Tammany Hall had surrendered “to the mob.”
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Inside the high-ceilinged halls of the city’s Produce Exchange, where businessmen traded and speculated on the price of grain and other foodstuff, well-dressed men lined up to sign a petition protesting the parade ban. One respectable-looking businessman approached Superintendent Kelso at Police Headquarters.

“Did you issue that order, Mr. Superintendent?” the visitor asked.

“Yes, sir,” Kelso replied.

“Well, God damn you, Sir, you deserve to be shot.”
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Kelso’s men quickly intervened, and no shots were fired. But throughout the city, invective only slightly less passionate was directed at both the superintendent and the mayor. Governor John Hoffman could not help but note that powerful New Yorkers saw the Orange parade as a matter of civil rights—and a test of who controlled the city’s streets. The
New York Tribune
reported gravely that, in “the palaces of the Protestant aristocracy, in the little by-streets where Methodists congregate, all day sad hearts were brooding over what they naturally consider a blow at religious liberty.” Hoffman rushed down the Hudson from Albany to Manhattan on July 11 and met immediately with Tweed and Hall. The meetings did not go well. As the bells of New York chimed midnight and July 12 officially began, Hoffman countermanded the city’s order and declared that the Orangemen would be free to parade through the streets of New York. Several regiments of state militia were ordered to assemble in the city’s armories in preparation for the day’s festivities.
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Some two hundred marchers, protected by five hundred militia and police officers, assembled on Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Ninth Street that morning. Officers spread word of armed men roaming the rooftops of nearby buildings, waiting for the parade to pass by. Ambulances were deployed behind the marchers and their protective screen of troops and police, just in case.

As the marchers assembled into tidy lines for the journey downtown, one of the parade’s organizers reminded them that the parade commemorated a “conquest over all our enemies.” Those enemies—the city’s Irish Catholics—were beginning to gather by the scores in nearby streets. American flags and banners bearing a likeness of King William himself flapped lazily in the languid summer breeze. The march’s fife-and-drum corps played only American music rather than traditional Protestant Irish tunes designed to intimidate Catholics. The message was unmistakable: The Orangemen were the true Americans, and the American tradition of liberty included the Protestant victory over Catholics won on July 12, 1690, on the banks of the River Boyne.
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Catholic spectators on nearby rooftops and in the streets disagreed. As the march began, one leather-lunged dissenter called the Orangemen “infernal Englishmen.” It wasn’t long before brickbats began to fly, indiscriminately hitting marchers as well as troops. The Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard led the way forward. One of the young men in the unit’s ranks was the city’s most famous political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, a German immigrant who despised Tweed, Tammany, and the Irish who supported them. As he and other militiamen tried to clear a path for the parade, a shot or two rang out, adding to the chaos, but nobody was hit—at least one discharge was likely accidental. As the main body of Orangemen moved toward Twenty-Sixth Street—just a few blocks from the parade’s starting point—panicked troops opened fire on what they believed to be snipers in a tenement apartment house. The parade came under a furious counterattack from Catholic protesters, who picked off troops with well-aimed stones. The march continued.
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As the Orangemen reached Twenty-Third Street, where the column was supposed to turn east, troops from the 84th Regiment fired a fusillade into the waiting crowd. Mounted police charged into the crowds, cracking skulls. The streets quickly were covered with bodies, cobblestones, and shards of broken glass.

In no more than a few minutes, scores of people were dead or injured. The official tally found that sixty-two civilians were killed and a hundred wounded. Twenty-eight of the dead and forty-two of the wounded were natives of Ireland. Three militiamen and two police officers also were killed. Newspaper accounts of the violence described the sight of blood, brain matter, and chunks of flesh in the streets, in the nearby shops, and on windowsills. Amazingly, the parade continued.

In the Irish-American weeklies, the violence of July 12, 1871, was portrayed as yet another outrage perpetrated on Irish Catholics by Protestants and their enablers in positions of political and cultural authority. The
Irish World
newspaper reversed the lead rules separating its columns, creating a black, mourning effect on its pages. The paper condemned what it called “the Hoffman massacre,” blaming the governor for caving in to Protestant prejudice. The paper’s illustrations clearly were designed to portray the violence as part of a continuing narrative of transatlantic oppression of Irish Catholics. One drawing showed a triumphant Orangeman carrying a banner reading “King William” and stepping past two dead children and a grieving mother. Another depicted soldiers firing their muskets point-blank at a crowd of unarmed civilians, an image guaranteed to play on folk memories of one-sided rebellions in Ireland. The
Irish World
’s editor called the violence “the most atrocious murder ever done by official authority” in New York history.
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The city’s mainstream press, however, had a very different reaction, with very different illustrations. The
New York Observer
said the violence was carried out “in the interest of Romanism,” while the
New York Sun
referred to Irish Catholics as “barbarous assailants.” Thomas Nast offered his interpretation in
Harper’s Weekly
two weeks later. He drew the feminine figure Columbia with her right hand carrying a whip (labeled “law”) and her left hand on the throat of an apelike Irishman. The caption read: “Bravo! Bravo!” For the rest of the summer—indeed, for the rest of his career—Nast continued his depiction of Irish Catholics as thuggish, drunken apes whose religious and political leaders posed a violent threat to the city’s social and civic order.
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The intensity of anti-Catholic, anti-Irish commentary from the likes of Nast and the city’s newspapers showed that nativism had not disappeared or become less respectable. A police official named Henry Smith even expressed regret that more civilians weren’t killed. The
New York Tribune
referred to the violence as “the Tammany riot,” asserting that such “frightful scenes” would continue as long as Tammany “depends for its existence upon the votes of the ignorant and vicious.” A letter published in the
New York Herald
argued that the city was “governed too much by foreign influence. This should not be. Let Americans govern America. Let the offices be held by American-born citizens.” A Presbyterian minister named David Gregg hailed the militiamen who fired on the Catholic crowds as “American patriots,” telling members of his congregation that if they had been on Eighth Avenue that afternoon, they would have heard “rifles . . . ringing out salutes to religious freedom, and proclaiming death to religious tyranny and prejudice.”
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For Irish Catholics raised on a narrative of grievance and violent oppression at the hands of Protestant enemies, efforts to justify and even celebrate the Orange Day killings showed that they remained vulnerable despite their growing political clout. For some, the memory of the carnage never faded—half a century later, as he approached his final days, Tammany fixture George Washington Plunkitt often told stories of witnessing the massacre and caring for the wounded and dying as they lay in the street. The
Times
campaign against Tammany and Tweed, along with Nast’s offensive caricatures, furthered the notion of a growing political backlash against the influence of the city’s immigrant-based institutions. In an editorial entitled “The Church of Aggression,” the
Times
warned that Catholics had gained “a political power that is dangerous to our future” and were seeking “the control of our schools and our charities.”
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As the city recovered from the shock of more political violence in its streets, the
Times
delivered another blow to Tweed—and to his Irish-Catholic allies.

. . .

On July 22, 1871, the
New York Times
published a long, sensational account of monumental corruption in city government. Tweed’s onetime ally Jimmy O’Brien had slipped copies of the city’s books to the newspaper’s top editors. The books told a story of theft that even Tweed’s harshest critics could not have imagined. There was enough material in the books for a series of stories, and that’s precisely how the
Times
presented its revelations. Day after day in late July brought new tales of incredible fraud—nearly $3 million for furniture and half a million for carpets to outfit the new courthouse behind City Hall, hundreds of thousands of dollars for “repairs” and “alterations” paid to a firm with ties to Tweed. A carpenter named George Miller received more than $350,000 for a month’s work. By way of comparison, total construction costs for the new Tammany Hall building in the mid-1860s came to about $300,000, and that sum was considered extravagant.
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Within days of the disclosures, the city found itself locked out of the bond market. Financial houses made it clear that the city’s political leadership would have to change before New York could once again borrow money. Some of the city’s most respected citizens banded together to form a group that called itself the Committee of Seventy. Disgusted with the results of mass politics, the committee set out to cleanse city government of the likes of Tweed and Tammany, who owed their power to the votes of immigrants and their children. The committee drew its inspiration in part from the goading words of E. L. Godkin, editor of
The Nation
, a self-conscious voice of reform politics. Godkin blamed the city’s plight on the “ignorant Irish voting element”—an interesting charge, considering that Godkin himself was an Irish immigrant. But he was a Protestant, and he surely believed he had nothing in common with the “ignorant” Irish-Catholic voters who were ruining the city. It was time, he said, for the city’s better elements to make their voices heard, for “the Anglo-Saxon race” was not inclined to stand idly by while it was “robbed.”
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The committee agreed, although it stayed away from Godkin’s charged language. The group’s seventy self-appointed reformers issued a special plea to New Yorkers who presumably shared Godkin’s disgust. “At least one-third of the best classes of our people are habitually absent from the polls,” the committee announced in late September. It was time they took an interest in civic affairs, the committee stated, because the “forces of evil” were “active, crafty and resolute.”
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Actually, not all of the committee’s enemies were so resolute. “Slippery Dick” Connolly, Tweed’s ally, surrendered to pressure from reformers and agreed to appoint Andrew Green, a friend of Democratic Party state chairman Samuel Tilden, as his assistant in the comptroller’s office. Tilden made it clear that Green would henceforth make all key decisions, and that Connolly, the elected comptroller, would function as little more than a figurehead. Connolly went along with the plan, hoping that playing nice with Tilden and his friends might serve him well as the crisis worsened. At this critical juncture, men like Tilden began to dismantle the city’s elected government, replacing it with reliable fellow elites like Green, who could be trusted to restore the city’s credit and to purify City Hall of patronage and politics.

As Tilden and the Committee of Seventy made their move, Thomas Nast created a series of vivid pictures in
Harper’s Weekly
that played off the revelations in the
Times
and captured the sentiments of those like Godkin who believed that the city could no longer cater to the interests of Irish-Catholic voters. In late September, Nast upped the ante with a crude though vivid cartoon showing bishops as alligators preparing to attack innocent American children on the shores of New York. In the background was a rendering of Tammany Hall made to look like St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, with a banner showing an Irish harp flying from a flagpole. From a cliff above the beach, Boss Tweed and his friends hurled young children down toward the bishop-alligators.

Just as offensive, although not as crude, was an essay that accompanied Nast’s drawing. In it, journalist Eugene Lawrence dragged up school controversies of the past—an issue that seemed to belong to another era—to argue against the presence of Catholics on school boards and other elected bodies. In Lawrence’s view, the Catholic presence in city politics had led to the city’s “treasury rifled; our credit shaken . . . our schools decaying, our teachers cowering before their Catholic masters. . . . the interests of the city neglected, its honorable reputation gone.”
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As Nast continued his crusade and the city’s print outlets followed the
Times
’s lead in demanding drastic changes in city government, Tweed and his fellow state legislators were in the midst of a brutal reelection campaign. To the astonishment of his growing number of critics, Tweed retained his hold on the city’s Democratic machine and on his mostly Irish constituents. He drew cheers when he appeared in Tammany Hall for a campaign rally in late September and condemned the “vilifications” and “malignant attacks appearing in the daily papers.” Reformers could only shake their heads in disgust, concluding, as Godkin did, that Tammany’s ignorant voters were a blight on democracy. It did not seem to occur to them that Tweed’s supporters saw him as a necessary ally at a time when the city’s opinion-makers and would-be leaders were turning to the pages of
Harper’s Weekly
for Thomas Nast’s latest portrayal of the Irish menace.
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