Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (19 page)

Like John Hughes, Kelly decided that the organization he led had too many moving parts, too many freelancers handing out patronage and favors, too many dissidents who felt free to challenge the organization’s hold on the Democratic Party. Tammany, in fact, needed a pope; Kelly was prepared to bring his flock into line.

Methodically, he stripped the power of patronage from the organization’s equivalent of parish priests, its low-level operatives who looked after a block, a building, a ward, or a State Assembly district. These anonymous workers were the eyes and ears of the organization, the men who knew faces and names and, most important, situations—who needed help paying the rent, whose son couldn’t make bail, whose widow had fallen on hard times. They had grown accustomed to handing out patronage on their own, without coordinating with Tammany Hall.

These local power brokers were known generically as ward heelers, a term of uncertain origin but one that was not necessarily meant as a compliment—although perhaps it was meant as one in the neighborhoods they served. Irish-American historian Daniel Cassidy noted that the word
heeler
may have been derived from the Irish word
elitheoir
, meaning an advocate or petitioner. Kelly was content to have the ward heelers act as advocates, but he was determined to keep control of Tammany’s patronage out of their hands. Power was centralized in Tammany Hall itself, where Kelly could be found at all hours of the day or night.
⁶

Kelly closely monitored the efforts and loyalty of the organization’s midlevel leaders at the Assembly district and ward level. Each Assembly district, which was the basic unit of political geography, had its own leader who presided over a series of committees in each ward, which was a smaller political unit. Wards were further subdivided into election districts, and each ED had a leader as well. For example, the 1st Assembly district, which ran from the tip of Manhattan and north along the East River to Canal Street, contained four wards (the First, Second, Third, and Fifth Wards) and twenty-four election districts. Local leaders at the ward, election district, and block level reported to Assembly district leaders, who were members of Tammany’s Executive Committee, answerable directly to Kelly. Four thousand members of Tammany Hall’s General Committee, its basic unit of governance, were chosen by enrolled Democrats in party primary elections, which the Hall’s Executive Committee did its best to control.
⁷

John Kelly expected order from this vast apparatus. Leaders who did not turn out the vote were unceremoniously removed. Trustworthy, competent district leaders were placed in charge of distributing jobs—the precise number was determined in Tammany Hall and was based on performance on Election Day—and some were invited to join Kelly’s inner circle of advisers.

Journalist William L. Riordon captured a sense of how this all worked in his compilation of the sayings of longtime Tammany fixture George Washington Plunkitt, published in the early twentieth century. Riordon tagged along with Plunkitt, who was a district leader, on a day that began with a knock on the door at 2 a.m.—a local bartender had been arrested and needed bail money—and ended at midnight after a late-night appearance at a wedding. Hours earlier, at 7 p.m., Plunkitt had met at district headquarters with his election district captains. “Each captain,” Riordon wrote, “submitted a list of all the voters in his district, reported on their attitude toward Tammany, suggested who might be won over and how they could be won, told who were in need, and who were in trouble of any kind and the best way to reach them.” Plunkitt took notes, issued his orders, and moved on to a church fair, where he bought ice cream for the local children.
⁸

Such a sprawling organization required money—for campaigns, for influence, and for administration. Tammany’s foes generally had unlimited access to private wealth, but Tammany’s key supporters were hardly in a position to underwrite their political protectors. Kelly put into practice the adage that to whom much is given, much is expected. Those who were given his blessing and Tammany’s nomination were expected to contribute a portion of their earnings to the organization’s campaign treasury. Kelly didn’t invent political kickbacks, but, as with everything else he did as boss, he made sure the flow of money from candidates and officeholders was steady and systematic.

John Kelly, it has been said, inherited a mob and transformed it into an army. He needed every soldier he could find, for enemies from within and without the Democratic Party were gathered around him, emboldened and determined. These enemies included reformers who refused to follow Tilden inside the belly of the beast, Republicans in Albany who were preparing to reassert control over the city, ferociously independent German organizations that steered clear of Irish-dominated Tammany, and a succession of Democratic factions that sought to replace Tammany as the city’s legitimate party apparatus.

Discipline and loyalty were not the only weapons in Kelly’s arsenal. He and Tammany both were remarkably patient, calculating that their most dangerous antagonists would soon give up the prosaic business of political organization and return to the sidelines, where they could observe, criticize, lecture, and otherwise congratulate themselves on their righteous purity.

. . .

Tammany’s experiment in cross-class collaboration seemed doomed to failure early on, as the organization continued to perform penance for Tweed’s sins. Kelly and Tilden were unable to unite the party for the national and local elections of 1872, leading to a splintering of the Democratic vote and yet another battering at the polls. Republicans had nominated the chairman of the Committee of Seventy, William Havemeyer, a sixty-seven-year-old banker and two-time mayor who once upon a time was a Tammany Democrat and the man who thwarted the Know Nothing James Harper’s reelection bid in 1845. As Election Day approached, Havemeyer’s supporters staged a rally on Wall Street to show off the candidate’s business support. “The Stock Exchange and Gold Exchange were almost deserted by their members, and transactions in stocks during the period of the meeting were materially lessened,” the
Times
noted approvingly.
⁹

Voters dealt Tammany another seemingly lethal defeat, electing not only Havemeyer but also a Republican governor, John Adams Dix. The GOP’s presidential candidate, incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, won the state even though a New Yorker, Horace Greeley, opposed him. Republicans retained control of the state legislature and dominated the state’s congressional caucus. For all of Kelly’s vaunted discipline and for all of Tilden’s eminent respectability, Tammany seemed destined for irrelevancy in the closing months of 1872, as Dix and Havemeyer prepared to take office. Patrick Ford, editor of the increasingly influential
Irish World
newspaper, told readers that Tammany was pummeled in the elections of 1872 because they were “identified with” Catholicism. The
New York Times
surveyed the results of 1872 and rejoiced that the city would no longer “be tyrannized” by “our esteemed friends from the Emerald Isle. This is going to be an American city once more—not simply a larger kind of Dublin.”
¹⁰

Just over a year had passed since armed troops opened fire on the city’s “esteemed friends from the Emerald Isle.” The government of the city and the state were now in the hands of hostile forces. It was John Kelly’s task to win back power, or see Tammany fade into irrelevance.

. . .

Despite the stereotype of Tammany as a free-spending raider of the public treasury, John Kelly shared with reformers a profound skepticism of government spending and debt. The Tweed scandals left a legacy of fiscal conservatism both within and outside the organization. Kelly noted in a letter in 1875 that the people had little faith “in the present management of our Governmental finances.” Samuel Tilden, Kelly’s partner in the reconstruction of Tammany, spoke for his fellow Swallowtail Democrats—named for the formal clothes they wore—when he told Kelly that the nation needed to return to the Jeffersonian idea of small, limited government. “What the country now needs, in order to save it, is a revival of the Jefferson democracy,” Tilden told Kelly. “He [Jefferson] repressed the meddling of government in the concerns of private business. . . . The reformatory work of Mr. Jefferson in 1800 must now be repeated.”
¹¹

Kelly’s leadership of Tammany was contingent on his ability to please the likes of Tilden, Belmont, and the other Swallowtails who were interested in low taxation, efficient government services, and reductions in the city’s debt, while not losing sight of the expectations of his fellow Irish-Americans who looked to Tammany as a friend in need when times were tough. Upstate Republicans sought to make Kelly’s task more difficult in the spring of 1873 when they imposed a new city charter designed to dilute the city’s ability to govern itself. The mayor’s office was weakened, and the Board of Assistant Aldermen—a rich source of elective office patronage—was abolished. A new one-house City Council would have only limited power over the city’s budget. The new source of financial power was the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, an unelected body. Local politics, the backbone of Tammany rule, was watered down in a provision calling for the election of six council members on an at-large basis, meaning they would be selected citywide, not from individual wards—the heart of Tammany’s organizational strength. If the right sort of people were elected citywide, they could function as a check on Tammany’s ward-based power in the new council.

The reformers’ narrative of urban corruption, ignorant immigrants, and scheming Democratic bosses—in other words, the Tweed narrative—began to fall apart not long after passage of the new city charter. A new series of political scandals shocked the nation, but this time the villains were associated with Republicans, specifically, the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, and big businesses. The Crédit Mobilier bribery scheme implicated high-ranking Republicans, members of Congress, and one of the era’s corporate titans, the Union Pacific Railroad. New York Republicans could no longer assume the moral high ground on the subject of government efficiency and disinterest. Indeed, the scandal rivaled anything Tweed cooked up while plotting with Sweeny and Connolly in Tammany Hall—although, of the era’s many notorious malefactors, Tweed was one of the few who went to prison.

As Republicans and big business went on the defensive, Mayor Havemeyer made good on his campaign promise to reform the city’s finances, slashing spending on public-works projects even after the city’s economy collapsed in the wake of the Panic of 1873, one of the nineteenth century’s worst recessions. Brought on by reckless speculation in railroad stocks and the collapse of the Philadelphia-based financial firm of Jay Cooke & Company, the recession led to the closing of thousands of factories, banks, and businesses, in turn leading to a national unemployment rate of nearly 20 percent. In New York conditions were even more dire: About a quarter of the city’s workforce was unemployed. Jobless men wandered the city’s streets, sleeping under streetlights and huddling together in public parks during the long northern winters. “On some days,” the
New York Times
noted, “the main thoroughfares seem absolutely blockaded with beggars in all sorts of disguises. . . . Here and there one meets a petitioner who might be a highway man if the night were dark and the street unfrequented.”
¹²

Hard times persisted, month after month, year after year, through the mid-1870s. Workers throughout the country became more restive as government and business leaders stood aside to let market forces play out without interference. In Chicago, outraged voters elected a mayor and a majority of City Council candidates who ran on an independent People’s Party line, threatening the city’s political order. Labor unrest in the coalfields of northeastern Pennsylvania, blamed on an Irish secret society called the Molly Maguires, led to violent strikes, murders, and the mass execution of ten miners on a single date in 1877.

In New York, Tammany’s constituents joined in calls for more active government intervention on behalf of the unemployed, staging huge protests in Tompkins Square Park to demand a loosening of the city’s purse strings. Mayor Havemeyer urged the poor to do as his father did—save their money rather than spend their nights in “beer shops and theaters.” The press supported the mayor’s tough stand, arguing, as editors had in Fernando Wood’s day, that government had no business interfering in the natural law of the marketplace.
¹³

The police broke up the Tompkins Square rallies, to the mayor’s delight, but his political problems were only just beginning. The number of families receiving a rudimentary form of public assistance from the city increased fivefold, from five thousand to twenty-five thousand, in less than a year. The mayor nevertheless concluded that the important issue was not deprivation but the city’s balance sheet. He ordered a suspension of so-called outdoor relief, that is, small cash payments to impoverished families—a move that, combined with the mayor’s cuts to public-works projects, deepened the discontent in the city’s immigrant wards.

When Havemeyer ran for reelection in 1874, he fought a lonely battle. The reform movement that seemed so ascendant just two years earlier had tired of the boring business of governance. The Committee of Seventy simply disbanded, abandoning its former chairman in the midst of his campaign. Members dispersed to the more rewarding pursuits of commerce or the righteous purity of civic associations. Meanwhile, former congressman John Morrissey, an emerging power in Tammany, gave voice to the anger and frustration of the unemployed, charging that the mayor’s austerity program was costing the city between thirty and forty thousand jobs. Morrissey was an Irish immigrant who made a fortune as one of the founders of a racetrack and spa in the upstate town of Saratoga Springs, but he never lost the hard edge of a onetime prizefighter. When another politician made a derogatory remark about John Kelly in a barroom, Morrissey reverted to his former profession, leaving his antagonist with a swollen nose and two black eyes. “Those who are skilled in such affairs say he will not be able to appear in public for some days,” the
New York Times
reported.
¹⁴