Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (29 page)

Murphy’s political acumen and authentic generosity during the infamous Blizzard of 1888 also marked him as a man of influence in local politics. The historic storm dumped three feet of snow on the city, brought down live electrical wires, and left the city short of supplies, with the poor left to shoulder a disproportionate share of the suffering. Murphy, performing the role expected of a Tammany operative on behalf of his constituents, raised nearly $1,500 in charitable contributions to alleviate conditions in the Gas House District, a sum that accounted for more than a quarter of Tammany’s total fundraising effort for the entire city. Murphy delivered the money to one of the neighborhood’s civic pillars, St. George’s Episcopal Church in the affluent Stuyvesant Square section near Gramercy Park. Reverend George Rainsford, pastor of St. George’s, was so appreciative of Murphy’s efforts that he singled out the young Irish-Catholic politico in a sermon. “If Tammany had more leaders like Charles F. Murphy, it would be an admirable organization,” he told his congregation.
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Murphy became Tammany’s leader in 1902, after Richard Croker retired and sailed to England in the aftermath of yet another Tammany disaster born of greedy overreach and outright criminality. The Van Wyck administration proved to be just as bad as reformers had feared—not unlike his predecessor, A. Oakey Hall, during the late 1860s, Van Wyck was happy to preside over civic ceremonies while turning a blind eye to the worst aspects of Tammany. The Tammany police chief, William Devery, ignored justified outrage about police cooperation with the vice industry. Croker, dictating patronage and policy despite spending a good deal of his time in England, withdrew the organization’s support for a judge, Joseph Daly, who refused to appoint a fellow Tammany man as his clerk.

In Croker’s view, Daly, who was up for reelection in 1898, had committed an unforgivable sin. “Justice Daly was elected by Tammany Hall after he was discovered by Tammany Hall, and Tammany Hall had a right to expect proper consideration at his hands,” the boss explained. That was the Tammany code in a nutshell, and Croker would have had little reason to think that he was revealing some hidden secret about the organization’s modus operandi. But in 1898 the Republican Party in New York nominated Theodore Roosevelt, fresh from his heroics on San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War, for governor, and he turned Croker’s words into a campaign rallying cry. “My object was to make the people understand that it was Croker, and not the nominal [Democratic] candidate, who was my real opponent, that the choice lay between Crokerism and myself,” Roosevelt later wrote. Crokerism suffered a resounding defeat, and Theodore Roosevelt became a national figure, a symbol of the new progressive politics that Republicans, Democrats, and reformers alike would embrace during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
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Progressives such as Roosevelt and, later, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, stood for change—change in the relationship between the government and the economy, change in the nation’s political system, change in the character and culture of the poor and working classes in the nation’s cities. Roosevelt-style progressivism was viewed as the enemy of Crokerism, of the political machines that dominated many of the nation’s cities. But Tammany and Crokerism were not one and the same. Charles Murphy would see to that.

Before he could do so, however, Murphy had to repair Tammany’s reputation, no small task. Tammany’s constituents may have been able to live with Croker’s private shakedowns of the rich, but when the boss and his allies sought personal gain from their relationship with an ice company, they knew they would be paying the bill. In those days before refrigeration, ice was a precious commodity, and Tammany sought to cash in with a deal that would have allowed a single supplier, American Ice Company, access to city-operated docks and, thus, monopoly control over this household staple. As an expression of its gratitude, the company provided various officials, including Mayor Van Wyck, with shares of company stock. Details of the Ice Trust scheme were revealed during a legislative investigation of city government, and it resonated with the city’s poor far more than any good-government crusade. Tammany, after all, had expended endless hours in righteous denunciation of monopolies, a position that voters accepted as genuine and, indeed, progressive. The scheme exposed Croker as a hypocrite and, in this case at least, as no friend of the poor, who would be forced to pay higher prices for monopoly-supplied ice. Charlie Murphy served as a commissioner with the Department of Docks and Ferries, which ran the docks at the time of the Ice Trust scandal, and was called before investigators to answer questions about his involvement in the scheme. There is little indication that he received Ice Trust bribes, but there’s no question that his work on the docks—the gateway to New York’s markets—benefited contractors aligned with Tammany.

Adding to the Ice Trust scandal was the seemingly innocuous death of one of Tammany’s longtime operatives, Murray Hall, a poker-playing, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking member of the General Committee. Hall worked closely with his local district leader, Barney Martin, who found him amusing if a bit short-tempered. He was less than five feet tall, a shabby dresser, and known for driving a hard bargain when he and his wife, who was considerably larger, went to the local marketplace in Greenwich Village. He was a neighborhood character, with a dingy bowler hat and a little black dog whose bark, neighbors said, was as loud as a passing elevated train. Odd though he was, his neighbors in the Village respected him as a Tammany man, and Tammany’s men respected him as a diligent worker.

Murray Hall battled cancer for several years but refused to see a doctor, preferring instead to consult a vast collection of medical books in his apartment on Sixth Avenue. Finally, in early December 1900, he sent for a physician, Dr. John A. Burke, who thought it odd that Hall refused to take off his shirt for an examination. Hall simply told him he was feeling better and really didn’t require an exam. His condition worsened as the year turned, leading to another house call from a different physician. Too weak to protest, Murray Hall allowed Dr. William Gallagher to examine him. He made two discoveries: Murray Hall was a woman, and she was about to die of breast cancer.

Murray Hall had lived as a man for forty years. Not for a moment had her Tammany colleagues suspected her deception. “Why, he’d line up to the bar and take his whiskey like any veteran and didn’t make faces over it, either,” recalled one of Hall’s longtime friends, Joseph Young, a Tammany district leader. Barney Martin, who was Hall’s closest Tammany ally, could barely process the shocking news. “She’s dead, the poor fellow,” Martin said when he learned of Hall’s death and deception. Tammany’s men were not alone in their shock: Minnie Hall, the twenty-one-year-old adopted daughter of Murray Hall, learned the truth about her “father” only after Murray’s death.

The city’s newspapers had a field day with the secret life of a Tammany henchwoman—it was a scandal the likes of which New York had not seen before. Republicans were bemused. Abraham Gruber, a Republican lawyer, announced his support for a bill requiring that “captains in Tammany Hall politics must wear whiskers.” Republican State Senator John Raines had a hard time summoning up sympathy for the dead woman. It was no wonder, he complained to Senator Martin, that Tammany rolled up such large majorities in the city “when you can dress up the women to vote.”
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The scandals of Croker’s final years were too much, even for Tammany’s supporters. Seth Low, running for mayor again in 1901 with the combined support of the Citizens Union and the Republican Party, made a special effort to appeal to traditional Tammany constituencies, especially in heavily Jewish neighborhoods that tended to vote Democratic but were not as culturally connected to Tammany as the Irish were. Low and his allies on what was called the Fusion ticket—a combination of independent reformers and Republicans—shrewdly dropped traditional reform platitudes, including those concerning the sacredness of Sunday, and focused instead on the spread of vice and the revelations of Croker’s corruption. Rather than sermonize, Low told his audiences that “this fight is your fight,” implicitly giving voters credit for recognizing their interest in good government. The anti-Tammany press picked up on this kinder, gentler face of reform:
The Outlook
, a weekly periodical, noted that it was “a common blunder, but an egregious one, to imagine that virtue is to be assumed in the brownstone . . . and vice in the tenement house,” and it went on to praise the anti-Tammany campaign for making that point. In a sense, the change of emphasis in the reform movement’s rhetoric marked a cultural (if not political) victory for Tammany. Until the Low campaign of 1901, reformers had addressed their remarks to each other—rarely if ever taking their message directly to voters so many regarded as part of the problem. Low’s approach worked because it owed much to Tammany’s populism.
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The result was another massive repudiation for Tammany, with the Fusion ticket sweeping nearly all municipal offices, including the mayoralty. Low, in his victory speech, demonstrated no small amount of political savvy in declaring that the election’s outcome was a vindication of universal suffrage. A quarter-century earlier, reformers had made no secret of their contempt for universal suffrage; now, a reformer’s reformer saw wisdom in the will of the people.

As he prepared to take over City Hall, Low continued to remind his fellow elites of the demographic reality of Greater New York. A week before his inauguration, he addressed the annual banquet of the city’s New England Society in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The mayor-elect allowed other speakers to wax poetic about the enduring virtues of the Puritans and Pilgrims, from whom many in the audience were descended—or at least said they were. Low chose to speak about the other New York, the one far from the flowers and flags of the great hotel’s banquet hall. “I want to remind you that when the votes were counted on election day . . . the greatest gains for good government . . . came from the east side,” Low said, referring to the city’s immigrant districts. Labor, he added, was “so intelligent,” and so was “the American political system that gives to every man his vote.” These were sentiments not often heard in the presence of the city’s Pilgrims and Puritans.
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Once again, Tammany’s foes delighted in the organization’s inevitable demise and began planning its burial. Thousands gathered outside the Metropolitan Opera House for mock funeral ceremonies, during which an effigy of Richard Croker was cremated with all solemn ceremony. Mark Twain delivered a sarcastic eulogy. “Tammany is dead, and there is wailing in the land,” he said. “We shall miss so many familiar faces.”
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Croker left in a hurry. His successor, Lewis Nixon, resigned after four months on the job. (Nixon was not exactly from the rough-and-tumble school of politics—
The Nation
magazine observed that placing Nixon at the head of Tammany was “as absurd as the appointment of a New England deacon to the command of a pirate ship.”) A trio of leaders was appointed to take Nixon’s place, but the job was too complicated for three people. After several months of confusion and lethargy, one of the three emerged as the new boss—Charles Francis Murphy. After his election, the commissioner—as Murphy preferred to be called—told a reporter, “I won’t do much talking,” but he promised he would be at Tammany Hall every day, an implicit contrast to Croker, who ruled Tammany from across the Atlantic during his final few years as boss. “There is,” Murphy added, “plenty of work to be done.”
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. . .

Born in 1858 in the Gas House District, which extended from Fourteenth Street to Twenty-Eighth Street on the East Side, Charles Francis Murphy personified a stereotypical Irish-American success story in politics. His parents were Irish immigrants—his father fled during the Famine in 1848—and they lived in one of the district’s many tenement houses that surrounded Stuyvesant Square’s island of affluence. One of nine children, young Charlie dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, taking a succession of jobs near the East River waterfront before becoming a horsecar driver in the late 1870s. He opened his first saloon in 1880 and soon had enough money to open three more. Murphy’s two older brothers already were active in city politics, so Charlie followed their path. His reputation as an athlete—he was not only a good baseball player but also a fine oarsman—and his involvement in the saloon trade allowed Murphy to rise quickly in local politics, to the chagrin of critics who saw Tammany’s embrace of sporting men, like the future owner of the New York Yankees, Congressman Jacob Ruppert, and saloon owners as insults to the memory of the nation’s founders.

When Tammany bestowed a congressional nomination on Big Tim Sullivan, a product of Five Points poverty who gained local fame when he slugged a prizefighter accused of wife-beating, the
New York Times
fulminated that “anywhere outside a Tammany barroom it would be supposed that Sullivan could be elected to Congress only in a district inhabited by the very scum of the earth.” Sullivan, the paper charged, was “simply not fit to be at large in a civilized community.” Perhaps, but Big Tim Sullivan wasn’t asking to be admitted to civilized society. He was running for Congress.
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Despite Murphy’s slender academic credentials, tenement upbringing, athletic interests, and saloon ownership, he quickly earned a reputation for running a clean operation in the Gas House District. “One thing that I learned from . . . Charles F. Murphy of Tammany Hall was a firm belief in the strength of clean government,” wrote Edward Flynn, who took over the Bronx Democratic Party at Murphy’s behest in 1922 and went on to become a key adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Mr. Murphy did not believe that politics should have anything to do with either gambling or prostitution. He further believed that politicians should have very little or nothing to do with the Police Department or the school system.”
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