Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (30 page)

Flynn’s testimony on Murphy’s behalf spoke to the very different ways in which progressive reformers and Tammany liberals defined clean government. For progressives, whether they were Republicans who admired Theodore Roosevelt, Democrats who saw Woodrow Wilson as an ideal reformer, or independents forever in search of a nonpartisan hero to deliver them from grimy politics, clean government meant government devoid of patronage, interest, and politics itself. The model, at least at the municipal level, was an apolitical commission-style government implemented in Galveston, Texas, in 1900. Commission governments limited the role of mayors and emphasized the professional expertise, not the political connections, of elected commissioners. For Flynn and his mentor Murphy, clean government meant an end to Tammany’s lucrative involvement in gambling, prostitution, and outright bribery. But it did not preclude politics and patronage, and it certainly did not preclude the awarding of contracts to politically connected companies, such as the trucking and contracting firm that one of Murphy’s two brothers owned (and in which Charlie was thought to have an interest—a silent interest, of course). Nor did it include support for the Progressive Era’s moral and cultural crusades—ranging from temperance legislation to laws barring baseball games on Sunday.

Other high-ranking Tammany figures in the 1890s, including Croker himself, were involved in the very activities that so offended Murphy. But after Murphy took over the Gas House District in 1892, vice was shut down in his jurisdiction. Journalist Arthur Krock recalled that Murphy “would have nothing to do with what he considered immoral things. He was a devout Catholic family man. He would not take money from a whore or a criminal.” Not long after taking over as Tammany’s sole leader, Murphy replaced a district leader, Martin Engel, who was known for his ties to prostitution and gambling rackets, with an ally of his own, Florence Sullivan (a cousin of Big Tim Sullivan, the Bowery leader). He then ordered an end to Tammany’s involvement with the neighborhood’s vice trade. Florence Sullivan surely was the right man for the job, for he was more than six feet tall and just as menacing as Big Tim. Florence Sullivan and a few well-chosen friends shut down the brothels using methods they chose to keep to themselves. The police were not notified.
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Murphy surprised in other ways as well. He relied on the advice of confidantes who hardly fit the stereotype of Tammany henchmen—James Gerard, a Columbia University graduate and future U.S. ambassador to Germany, served as Tammany’s campaign chairman under Murphy, and Francis O’Donnell, an accountant and former assemblyman whom Murphy named as the organization’s all-important treasurer. (O’Donnell’s appointment, the
New York Times
declared, “marked the passing for all time of Richard Croker as a potent factor in the organization.”) Years later, when Tammany’s Jimmy Walker became majority leader of the state Senate, he prudently contacted the boss to ask about the organization’s patronage requirements.

“You’re the leader, aren’t you, Senator Jim?” Murphy asked.

A startled Walker answered in the affirmative.

“Use your own judgment,” Murphy said. “If it’s good, you’ll be an asset to the party. If it isn’t, well, the sooner we find it out, the better.”
¹⁴

Murphy’s tenure at the helm of Tammany was the longest in the organization’s history, from 1902 until his death in 1924. He was boss during one of the most tumultuous and contested periods of New York history, a time during which muckrakers, reform groups like the Citizens Union, and emerging national figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrayed themselves against Tammany in the name of Progressivism. But during Murphy’s long tenure, the narrative of reformer versus boss became much more complicated. Tammany responded aggressively to discontent with laissez-faire capitalism, protected immigrant culture and identity from those who demanded conformity with middle-class definitions of Americanism, and continued to develop a pluralistic counterpoint to the nation’s self-image as a Protestant, Anglo-Saxon nation of rugged individuals. Journalist Lincoln Steffens, no friend of machine politics, conceded that “Tammany kindness is real kindness, and will go far. . . . ”
¹⁵

That kindness was delivered in the most personal way possible. Charlie Murphy was on his way home from a banquet on a freezing winter night in 1914 when he came upon a roaring tenement fire on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Third Avenue, just a few minutes’ walk from his home on Seventeenth Street. A hundred or so tenants shivered in the street while firefighters tried to save what they could. Murphy halted his ride home, arranged for a local restaurant to open so the displaced residents could warm up with coffee and hot food, and demanded that the police and nearby residents force their way into locked-up local shops to get clothes and other supplies. Dozens of residents were directed to Murphy’s own home, where they obtained temporary shelter. Murphy paid for the supplies and food out of his own pocket.
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But few saw this side of Murphy. He was viewed, and portrayed, as simply the latest in a long line of disreputable bosses for whom politics simply was a route to illicit riches. In 1912, the young reformer Franklin Roosevelt announced that “C. F. Murphy and his kind must, like the noxious weed, be plucked out.” Roosevelt, a state senator who was seeking to carve out a reputation as a reformer just like his cousin Theodore, saw Murphy as an easy—and obvious—target for his righteous outrage. Eventually, however, he would come to view C. F. Murphy very differently.
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. . .

Seth Low may have had the best of intentions upon entering City Hall on a wave of anti-Tammany disgust, but as he prepared for reelection in 1903, history did not augur well for a repeat of the reform movement’s stunning victory in 1901. New York politics was littered with examples of reform administrations that did not earn a second term—a tribute to Tammany’s resilience but also testimony to the inability of reformers to understand the concerns of voters. Tammany’s George Washington Plunkitt famously described reform movements as “mornin’ glories”—they “looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine sturdy oaks.”
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If reformers seemed will-o’-the-wisp, perhaps that was because of their tenuous connection to the people whose interests they claimed to represent. Of the 2,312 members of the New York Reform Club in 1902, the vast majority, some 1,842, lived more than thirty miles from downtown Manhattan.
¹⁹

The distance between reformers and the bulk of the city’s population was measured in more than just miles. Simply put, many reformers did not understand the everyday concerns of voters, or, if they did, they dismissed them as parochial and unworthy of a disinterested, reform-minded government. Richard Welling, who cofounded the New York Reform Club with Theodore Roosevelt in the 1880s, looked back on the reform movement’s attempts to win the support of labor leaders in the late nineteenth century with some frustration. In a speech in 1942, he noted that the club had sought to educate the labor leaders in “Tammany misrule” in the 1880s, but the effort to create a cross-class reform movement ultimately failed. “It was a tremendous blow to find all these men preoccupied with wage questions,” he noted with evident frustration. “As Bryce has said, the conspicuous example of failure of democracy is the misgovernment of American cities.”
²⁰

Welling’s dismissal of “wage questions”—that is, the demands of workers for better pay—was as telling as his reference to James Bryce, the British aristocrat and celebrated observer of American politics. Welling could not understand why working men were more concerned with their wages than with grand proposals for more efficient municipal government—this was not his idea of how disinterested citizens ought to behave. And so he turned to the wisdom of Bryce to explain it all: American cities were poorly run because men who worried about their wages voted accordingly, paying no regard to the purer virtues of republican democracy.

Groups like the New York Reform Club were contemptuous of the sort of politics practiced at the street and tenement level, so they had little understanding of why “wage questions” might seem more important than, say, ballot reform or temperance legislation. But Tammany leaders such as Barbara Porges lived with the people for whom she advocated, and she could report back to Charlie Murphy with firsthand observations of the concerns in her district.

Barbara Porges was the boss of the 2nd Assembly district on the Lower East Side, a Tammany operative who was working the tenements of Orchard Street long before women were granted the right to vote. Her special cause was the neighborhood peddlers, most of them Jewish, who sold their wares from pushcarts. She virtually adopted some of the district’s lost souls, including a peddler known only by the product he sold: “Onions.” When Onions contracted tuberculosis, Porges raised money—from neighbors, from strangers, from anyone who would contribute—to pay for his fare to the drier air of Colorado. Porges’s husband, Max, was a two-term alderman at the turn of the twentieth century, but it was Barbara Porges who ran the district for thirty years.

In 1918, as Porges patrolled the pushcart paradise of Orchard Street, she was approached by an elderly woman with tears in her eyes—she owned a pushcart, she said, but the police insisted that she move away from a nearby corner. Surely Porges could help her. But the cops were right—the old woman had set up shop on the wrong side of the street. “Look the other way,” Porges told the police. They did.

“I am a practical politician,” she explained. “I’ve lived and worked [on the Lower East Side] since 1876 and I have used the tried and true Tammany methods.” She later added: “I can’t make a speech, but I get to the individual, and I get the vote.”
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Delivering kindness with the expectation of winning a vote was not how disinterested government and virtuous politics were supposed to work. The new reform groups in New York shared with Lincoln Steffens and his fellow muckrakers a belief that municipal government was too important to be left to professional politicians—so many of them Irish Catholics—and that campaigns and elections produced only inefficiency and corruption. Power was best left to disinterested professionals who, in Steffens’s words, believed in “the New York theory that municipal government is business, not politics, and that a business man who would manage the city as he would a business corporation would solve for us all our problems.”
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Charlie Murphy might have concurred with Steffens’s assertion that running a government was indeed a business, but he would have turned Steffens’s logic against him. If running city government were a business, it should be handled by political professionals, not amateurs like Seth Low, a Steffens favorite. For all his undoubtedly genuine praise for immigrants and workers, when it came to filling his administration Low turned not to the Lower East Side but to his fellow civic and social elites. A third of his forty-six appointments to the city Board of Education, for example, were listed in the
Social Register
.
²³

As his commissioner of charities, Low chose a Philadelphia-born professional reformer named Homer Folks, who supported the reform movement’s vain effort to ban government aid to private child-welfare charities at the state Constitutional Convention of 1894. More successfully, he lobbied against state legislation in 1897 that would have given destitute mothers a public pension to help them keep their families together. The bill was written by Tammany’s John Ahearn.
²⁴

Murphy’s first test of leadership came in the mayoral election of 1903, when Seth Low sought to achieve something no reformer had yet managed—win a second term as mayor. Murphy demonstrated a touch for the unexpected that left his allies and his antagonists—especially the mayor—astonished. He extended Tammany’s endorsement to Low’s two running mates, Comptroller Edward M. Grout and Board of Aldermen President Charles F. Fornes, both of whom had run successfully on Low’s anti-Tammany Fusion ticket in 1901. The two men were delighted to accept Murphy’s offer, leading to cries of outrage from the mayor’s allies. The president of the Citizens Union dispatched a letter to Grout expressing his disbelief, noting that, during the 1901 campaign, Grout “had not hesitated to denounce Tammany Hall from the platform in fearless and scathing terms.” But that was then and this was 1903, and Tammany was offering its hand. Things changed.
²⁵

Low and his allies in the Citizens Union tossed both Grout and Fornes off the Fusion ticket just weeks before the election. With Tammany’s foes now confused and demoralized, Murphy’s candidate for mayor, the very respectable George McClellan, son and namesake of the Civil War general and a longtime Tammany member, easily defeated Low. Murphy monitored the results in Tammany Hall’s famed long room, home to the organization’s Executive Committee, as district leaders returned from polling places with their results. Although the outcome was clear early on, Murphy’s men reported their returns in precise detail. One district leader, John T. Oakley of the 14th district, told Murphy that the vote for McClellan in his district was 2,614—exactly twenty-six votes fewer than he had anticipated. Everybody in the room noticed that McClellan won Murphy’s home district with nearly 75 percent of the vote (by comparison, his overall percentage was about 53 percent citywide). It was that sort of level of detail, that sort of careful gathering of intelligence, that made Murphy a political legend and that, in the end, no reform movement could match.
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But there was one Tammany foe who had no need for legions of district leaders and precinct captains, because he was able to get out his message on a scale that even Tammany had to admire. William Randolph Hearst, owner of two popular New York newspapers, the
American
and the
Evening-Journal
, spoke to hundreds of thousands of readers—and potential voters—every day. His newspapers featured crime stories and a full page of comics, including one strip printed in color,
The Yellow Kid
. The kid’s hue gave rise to the sort of reporting that critics said was a Hearst trademark—yellow journalism.