Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (23 page)

. . .

The conflict between the governor and Tammany became the dominant story of the 1884 presidential election as Grover Cleveland emerged as a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination. As the national Democrats assembled for their convention in Chicago in the summer of 1884, Kelly mobilized Tammany’s two best orators, a young Irish immigrant named William Bourke Cockran and the organization’s reigning master of the spoken word, Thomas Grady, to assail Cleveland with every combination of epithets they could wring from the English language. They did so with enthusiasm. Addressing his fellow Democrats from the convention stage, Grady portrayed Cleveland as an enemy of labor and a friend of monopolies, a charge that once again reflected Tammany’s leftward movement in the 1880s. Grady conjured the ghost of Cleveland’s veto of the five-cent fare, telling delegates unfamiliar with the issue why it was important. “It meant that when the workingman on Sunday takes his wife and his two or three children to the elevated railroad depot to go from . . . the tenement district to the suburbs, there to have the only holiday vouchsafed him during the week, he should pay twenty cents instead of forty cents,” he said. As Cleveland supporters heckled in the aisles, Grady predicted that Cleveland would lose his home state “not because of any Irish question, not because of any Catholic question, but because of this anti-monopoly question.”
¹¹

Cockran followed Grady with a display of irony and wit that would one day capture the attention of his future friend and oratorical protégé, Winston S. Churchill. Cockran, a well-educated lawyer and patron of the arts, portrayed himself as a friend of Cleveland. “Gentlemen, there is no person in this hall who feels more kindly to [Cleveland],” he insisted, adding that he was, in fact, so “warm a friend” of the governor that he did not wish Cleveland’s “promotion to an office for which I do not believe he has the mental qualifications.” Continuing to assess his dear friend Cleveland, he told delegates: “We have been told that the mantle of Tilden has fallen upon the shoulders of Cleveland. Gentlemen, when the mantle that fits the shoulders of a giant falls on those of a dwarf, the result is disastrous to the dwarf.”
¹²

Cockran’s irony was not lost on a Cleveland supporter from Wisconsin, who sought to silence the Tammany orator with points of order and appeals to the convention chairman. When the delegate, retired Union general Edward Bragg, got his chance to deliver a riposte to Grady and Cockran, he uttered a line that history has remembered fondly. The young men of Wisconsin, Bragg said, loved and respected Grover Cleveland, “not only for himself, for his character, for his integrity and judgment and iron will, but they love him most for the enemies he has made.” The line stung. Grady, seated with his fellow delegates, bellowed from the floor: “Mr. Chairman, on behalf of his enemies I reciprocate that sentiment, and we are proud of the compliment.” Grady was ruled out of order by the convention chair and by most historical accounts that view Bragg’s indignant putdown as a direct hit on the corrupt machinations of evil Tammany. Rarely is it noted, however, that Grady’s argument (less so Cockran’s) was based not on religious or ethnic appeals but on social justice, with Tammany’s spokesman serving as the voice, however flawed, of New York’s workers and the fledgling critics of the Gilded Age’s economic order.
¹³

During the weeks after Cleveland’s nomination, New York buzzed with rumors that Kelly and Tammany might support former governor and congressman Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, who mounted a quixotic third-party presidential campaign as the candidate of the Greenback and Anti-Monopoly Parties. Butler, a onetime Union general and an avowed opponent of slavery, was widely despised in Brahmin Boston as an economic rabble-rouser because he supported greater regulation of business and the implementation of a federal income tax. He was popular with the Irish in Boston and in New York, although he was not Irish himself, suggesting that issues beyond ethnicity factored into Irish-American voting patterns.

Kelly gave some thought to bolting the party, but eventually he fell in line and announced Tammany’s support for Cleveland in early September. But Tammany did little to get out the vote for Cleveland, and it nearly cost him the presidency. He defeated Republican James Blaine thanks to New York’s thirty-six electoral votes—but he won those votes by a margin of just 1,149 popular votes in his home state.

For Kelly and Tammany, the elections of 1884 proved a double catastrophe. Not only was Cleveland promoted to the White House, but their onetime friend, now an open and adamant enemy, William R. Grace, captured a new two-year term as mayor on the County Democracy ticket. Tammany and John Kelly faced a daunting prospect: Democrats were in power all right, but not Tammany Democrats. And, despite their rhetoric, Tammany’s foes were not above engaging in the sort of bare-knuckle politics they themselves had so often criticized.

. . .

The presence of Tammany enemies in both the White House and City Hall meant that patronage, that disreputable practice of using access to power as a means to provide work for political operatives and favors to constituents, would dry up, and that critics like Cleveland and Grace would hire their allies and call it a merit system.

For Irish-Americans in New York, however, the scramble for political offices was becoming less important than the economic disparities of the Gilded Age. As great palaces rose along upper Fifth Avenue and Central Park to house the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, and the Morgans, the tenements below Fourteenth Street grew more crowded. Labor unrest in the late 1870s led to deep concerns among New York’s wealthy about their own safety and that of the social order they represented. The shadows of the draft riot and the Orange Day riot were never far from the city’s collective memory—it was no coincidence that some of the city’s wealthiest families, including the notoriously anti-Catholic Harpers, helped to fund a new armory on Park Avenue on the Upper East Side.

A bold new Irish-American critique of the era’s inequities was apparent in the conspicuously Gaelic leadership of the Knights of Labor, the country’s largest labor union, and in Irish-American support for a new antilandlord campaign in Ireland. With the energy and danger of anti-Catholic nativists seemingly spent by the early 1880s, the city’s Irish community could afford to discuss the ends, rather than simply the means, of holding political power. New York became the center of political activity and debate in the transatlantic Irish world. Patrick Ford, editor of the
Irish World,
and John Devoy, head of the Irish nationalist movement in New York, mobilized the Irish community behind radical land-reform efforts in Ireland championed by Michael Davitt, a onetime Irish rebel, and Charles Stewart Parnell, an austere Anglo-Protestant member of the House of Commons whose mother had been born in the United States.

Their challenge to the power of landlords inspired a social revolution in Ireland with implications for Irish-American industrial workers in New York, as Ford frequently pointed out in the pages of the
Irish World
, which added the title
Industrial Liberator
to its masthead at around this time. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Devoy, Ford, Davitt, and Parnell built support among Irish-Americans for aggressive antilandlord agitation in Ireland. They reached a consensus on the radical idea of land redistribution and peasant ownership of the land on which they worked—ideas that challenged the very structure of British rule in Ireland. Patrick Ford sent economist Henry George to Ireland to witness the antilandlord campaign and to frame the agitation as part of a wider Atlantic-world struggle between labor and capital. Ford’s newspaper employed a columnist who wrote under the pen name of “Transatlantic.”
¹⁴

Parnell traveled to New York in early 1880 to raise funds and, with the help of Kelly and several Irish-dominated labor unions, he founded a new antilandlord organization in New York called the American Land League. The league borrowed its organizational strategy from Tammany, establishing a strong, centralized leadership and points of contact at the ward level in New York. Within a year, the league had raised more than $500,000 (in 1882 dollars) to fund Parnell’s antilandlord campaign in Ireland. Tammany continued to raise funds and hold mass meetings on Parnell’s behalf throughout the decade, leading the
Times
to note that the Hall was “outdoing itself . . . in behalf of the Parnell fund.”
¹⁵

The mass support for Parnell showed that the Irish community in New York was prepared for a radical new departure in achieving social justice—and demonstrated yet again its deep and continued connection to Ireland. Teachers in St. James Parochial School on the Lower East Side introduced students to a poem entitled “The Song of the Shirt,” by a socially conscious English poet named Thomas Hood. Many decades later, one of those students at St. James, Alfred E. Smith, would recall the poem’s sympathy for exploited women working in the needle trades.

With fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread—

Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!

John Kelly, sensing the growing discontent among Tammany’s key voting bloc, ramped up his own populist rhetoric. New York, he said, was governed “by the railroads, rich corporations, and great monopolies,” leaving Tammany Hall as “the only rallying point around which the masses may concentrate for the perpetuation of democratic principles.”
¹⁶

Tammany, however, had competition on its left. The Central Labor Union, one of the city’s most important organizations of workers in the late nineteenth century, was founded after several New York unions came together to advocate for land reform in Ireland. Catholic social thought in the United States also was beginning to move to the left during this time of labor strife and management suppression of workers’ movements. Despite the presence of a new archconservative bishop, Michael Corrigan, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Catholic prelates like Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, and Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore urged the American Church to take up the cause of its working-class flock.
¹⁷

With Catholics in prominent positions in the labor movement, the liberal prelates argued, it was imperative that the Church understand the conditions that had led to worker discontent. Corrigan and other bishops pushed for a formal Vatican condemnation of the heavily Catholic Knights of Labor and of Henry George’s agitations in Ireland, but Gibbons successfully argued against such a statement, especially at a time when “land grabbers are stealing thousands of acres of land with impunity.” The voice of American laissez-faire liberalism,
The Nation
’s E. L. Godkin, condemned the cardinal’s sympathy for working-class discontent, accusing the prelate of “partaking freely of the labor beverage.”
¹⁸

Tammany and the Catholic Church both adjusted their ideological bearings as their core voters and believers moved to the left in the mid-1880s. But John Kelly no longer was strong enough to keep a firm hand on the tiller. The double defeats of 1884 had left him a broken man, physically as well as politically. Once a constant presence in Tammany Hall, he now rarely left his apartment on West Sixty-Ninth Street, leaving the daily business of running the machine in the hands of an Irish immigrant and onetime gang leader named Richard Croker.

Like Tweed and Kelly, Croker sported a full beard and a physique that did not invite challenge. As an up-and-coming Tammany leader, he exercised his right to vote seventeen times in a single day during an election for constable in 1865. Nobody said a word.

As Kelly began to fail, Croker left little doubt about where he stood in the matter of succession. He set up shop in Kelly’s office, behind Kelly’s desk, in Kelly’s chair, while the old boss spent his final days in his uptown apartment. Tammany sachems who might have entertained ideas of somebody other than Richard Croker as the organization’s next boss took one glance at the menacing figure in Kelly’s old chair and returned to their districts to think other thoughts. Kelly died on June 1, 1886, after a long and debilitating illness. On the day of his funeral, June 5, thousands gathered outside his home to pay tribute to the man who had rescued Tammany and then transformed it. A reporter noted that the mourners included any number of high and low city officials, but most impressive was the turnout of working men. These “hard-fisted laboring men,” the reporter noted, “never asked for more than a mere living and . . . had obtained that through Mr. Kelly’s influence and power. These men exhibited more honest grief over Mr. Kelly’s death than was displayed by all in the rest of the crowds.”
¹⁹

The following day, Richard Croker took up residence behind a desk that was no longer Honest John’s. Now it was Richard Croker’s desk. There was no further discussion. Tammany now had its first immigrant boss.

EIGHT

TO HELL WITH REFORM

R
ichard Croker’s parents made the journey from Ireland to New York in 1846, the second year of the Famine and the third year of young Richard’s life. They were not the typical starving exiles from the Emerald Isle, for they were Protestants, and Croker’s father was the scion of an old landholding family. But Eyre Coote Croker, a veterinary surgeon and a blacksmith, had fallen on hard times just as so many poorer Catholic tenant farmers had when the potato failed. Croker packed up his family and sailed to New York to start anew. They settled for a time in a shantytown along the western edge of Central Park, where it was not uncommon to hear Irish spoken, but they eventually moved south to East Twenty-Sixth Street, near the gas plants that would give their name to the neighborhood, the Gas House District.