Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (34 page)

Sulzer’s actions were hardly subtle. He ordered an investigation of state highway contracts, a particular area of vulnerability for Charlie Murphy himself, since his family business, New York Contracting and Trucking Company, certainly benefited from Tammany’s clout. Murphy sought to limit the damage by urging Sulzer to appoint a close friend and business associate, James Gaffney, as superintendent of highways. Sulzer refused.

The governor’s assertions of independence from Tammany, made both publicly and privately to the state’s politically independent reformers, were hardly the act of a man grateful to the organization that had supported him throughout his career. Without Tammany, there was no Governor Sulzer. But others had made similar calculations before and lived to tell the tale. William R. Grace, George McClellan, and even the sitting mayor of New York, William Jay Gaynor, prospered despite their defiance of Tammany’s leadership. Sulzer concluded that he could do the same.

In early spring of 1913, Sulzer announced his unequivocal support for a bill authorizing direct primary elections, meaning that party nominations for elected offices from top to bottom would be contested on the ballot, not in conventions or in the back rooms of party clubhouses. Individuals seeking party nominations would be required to file petitions with a minimum number of signatures in order to qualify for the primary ballot. Party funds could not be used to support any candidate who qualified for a primary. All of this was designed as a direct assault on the power of bosses like Murphy, who often handpicked top officials—including Sulzer himself—as the party’s candidates.

Direct primaries were a critical part of the reform movement’s bipartisan agenda, and they had been discussed—to no avail—for several years in New York. But Sulzer was determined to succeed where others had failed, in part, it was whispered, because he sought to dethrone Charlie Murphy and take his place as the head of the Democratic Party of New York.

Tammany, in the midst of other things, offered up a compromise bill that made it slightly easier for independent candidates to petition for a spot on the ballot. That was as far as Murphy was willing to go. Sulzer vetoed the bill and announced that he would brook no compromise as he launched vitriolic attacks on anyone who opposed him. At one point, he delivered a characteristically bombastic speech in which he referred to his opponents as “unmitigated scoundrels,” focusing particular attention on one of them: Charlie Murphy. “One boss in the great State of New York [is] defying the people, spurning their petitions, trampling their rights, laughing in their faces, and like Tweed in his day brazenly and audaciously saying, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ . . . Shall it go forth from one end of the country to the other that Mr. Murphy doth feed upon something, forsooth, that he has grown so great that he has more power, that he has more influence than all the other ten millions of people in the State of New York?”
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Sulzer’s audience in the State Capitol burst into wild applause; among those in attendance, direct from Washington, DC, where he had just assumed duties as assistant secretary of the navy, was former state senator Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sulzer chose to picture Murphy as the sole obstacle to his bill, but that simply wasn’t true. Republicans in the legislature were opposed as well, which is why Sulzer referred to the Republican leader in the State Senate, Elon R. Brown, as “an old fossil of the Paleozoic age” and a “poor fellow wholly irresponsible and in his dotage.” The governor predicted that his bill would pass. If it didn’t, he said, “I don’t know anything about politics.”
¹⁵

He was right about the last part. The Republican old fossil joined hands with Tammany’s Murphy to crush Sulzer’s proposal, although they hardly had to twist the arms of legislators. Sulzer managed to alienate all but a few upstate Democrats with his outrageous rhetoric, serial insults, and absolute refusal to compromise.

Then came the whirlwind. Murphy decided that Sulzer had to go. That meant impeachment, which required allegations of criminal conduct. A Tammany-led legislative committee was empaneled to find whatever it could. What it found would have been enough to impeach a bishop, never mind an abrasive, uncompromising, and increasingly unsavory governor. William Sulzer, the committee announced, had not reported thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in 1912, funneling the money to a private account where the cash was used to buy railroad stock. He used other campaign money to speculate on Wall Street while his legislative colleagues debated measures calling for greater regulation of the stock market.

The evidence was clear enough. Sulzer was brought before the Assembly, impeached, and then convicted after a relatively dignified trial in the State Senate. Lieutenant Governor Martin Glynn, a longtime journalist with a reputation as a thoughtful progressive, became the state’s first Irish-Catholic chief executive when Sulzer left Albany in disgrace. The press was divided on the drama, with most city papers conceding that Sulzer was guilty as charged, but the anti-Tammany
Evening Post
asserted that whatever Sulzer’s offenses, he was “an angel of light compared to Murphy.” Impeaching and removing Sulzer for financial shenanigans, just a few years after George Washington Plunkitt famously coined the term
honest graft
to describe how he and other Tammany operatives made small fortunes off government service, seemed like a breathtaking exercise in hypocrisy.
¹⁶

Perhaps it was. But Sulzer was hardly a pure innocent, and his refusal to compromise on an issue near and dear to Murphy’s heart was an outright betrayal of the man who had helped make him governor. And Sulzer played politics just as harshly as Murphy did—he threatened to pull patronage from legislators who opposed his direct-primary bill, and he wielded his veto promiscuously to punish his enemies in the legislature, regardless of the legislation’s merits.

Nevertheless, the spectacle did not reflect well on Murphy and Tammany, offering the organization’s opponents an opening in New York City’s municipal elections and in annual State Assembly elections held just months after Sulzer’s removal. The city’s reformers, showing a new appreciation for the realities of multicultural politics, rallied behind a young Irish Catholic with a revered last name and direct connections to the Wilson White House, a formidable combination. His name was John Purroy Mitchel, and if the reform movement could have put together a dream candidate who could appeal to high-minded civic elites as well as Tammany’s core constituents, he surely fit the bill. His grandfather was the famed Irish journalist John Mitchel, known for his pro-Southern views during the Civil War and for his fiery polemic,
The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)
, which accused the British government of deliberately starving the Irish during the Famine—a book that remains in print 150 years after publication.

John Purroy Mitchel inherited his grandfather’s charisma and quarrelsome disposition, but not his religion—the elder Mitchel was a Protestant, but, through intermarriage, his grandson was a Catholic. John Purroy Mitchel was not, however, a Paddy from the Gas House District. He attended Fordham Preparatory School, a prestigious Jesuit institution, and earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia College and a law degree from New York Law School. Mitchel quickly earned a reputation as a young reformer in a hurry—one of many in New York in the early twentieth century. He hurled himself into New York politics before he was 30, and won election as president of the city’s Board of Aldermen on a reform ticket in 1909. It was an impressive feat, considering that Tammany captured the mayoralty that year. Mitchel soon became a Woodrow Wilson man, and Wilson’s men had their eyes on him and on the unsettled situation in New York after Sulzer’s impeachment. Colonel Edward M. House, a key adviser to Wilson, noted in his diary that he and Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo had a “keen desire to revamp New York City and State,” and that would require taking on Tammany.
¹⁷

The first step in the revamping project was the appointment of John Purroy Mitchel as collector of customs for the Port of New York, the most-coveted federal patronage job in the city, with the holder regarded as the eyes and ears of the White House in New York. The press speculated that the White House had even bigger plans for Mitchel, plans that the young man did nothing to discourage. On the very day of his appointment as collector, he told reporters that his new job would be no obstacle if he chose to challenge Tammany in the 1913 mayoral election, just a few months away. “Tammany is afraid that the Wilson Democrats are concocting a scheme to retire Charles F. Murphy from the leadership of the organization by grooming Mr. Mitchel for the Mayoralty race,” the
New York Times
reported. And so they were. Mitchel performed the duties of collector for several months before announcing his candidacy for mayor on an independent ticket.
¹⁸

The Mitchel campaign, which brought together Republicans, dissident Democrats, and independents who supported the new Progressive Party, was directed at Murphy personally, and it was conducted with a level of venom that would have done the candidate’s grandfather proud. Mitchel rarely mentioned his opponent, Edward McCall, a perfectly honorable chairman of the state Public Service Commission, but when he did, he accused him of being little more than a puppet of Murphy. “Tammany Hall is doomed,” he told an audience in the Bronx, “but I shall not rest until I have driven Charles F. Murphy out of political life.” Voters, given their first chance to pass judgment on the impeachment of Governor Sulzer, delivered a landslide for Mitchel, who became the city’s youngest mayor at the age of thirty-four.
¹⁹

Tammany’s rout was so complete that even Murphy’s own assembly district, which had been as reliably pro-Tammany as any district in Manhattan, went for Mitchel. Tammany’s core voters joined with Tammany’s core critics in concluding that Murphy abused his power when he ordered Sulzer’s removal. Sulzer himself added to Murphy’s humiliations by winning a seat in the State Assembly on the Progressive Party line, which cut deeply into Tammany’s vote in Manhattan’s Jewish neighborhoods. Meanwhile, more than three dozen Democrats who voted for Sulzer’s impeachment lost their reelection bids. Tammany’s foes celebrated with characteristically over-the-top rhetoric, pitting their goodness against Tammany’s evils. “A medieval organization, brutal, tyrannical and selfish, operating through an arrogant head, can never again control the destinies of this city,” declared Mitchel’s campaign manager, Robert Adamson. Mitchel’s win, he said, along with anti-Tammany victories throughout the city, would “sweep the Tammany of today into the waste heap.” A front-page headline in the
New York Tribune
echoed the postelection conventional wisdom: “Patronage Gone, Murphy Must Go.”
²⁰

Reporters descended on Murphy outside Tammany Hall just after noon on the day after the Mitchel rout. His expression gave away nothing. Mayor-elect Mitchel and Assemblyman-elect Sulzer had vowed that Murphy and his organization would soon be consigned to history. What, the reporters asked, did the boss think of that?

“Tammany Hall is still here,” he said, cryptic as ever.
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. . .

Frances Perkins once observed that John Purroy Mitchel might have fared better with Tammany had he expressed even the slightest nostalgia for the land of his grandfather’s birth. The “heart of Tammany,” she said, “was devoted to Ireland in those days.” Mitchel, however, was a decidedly unsentimental man. Tammany respected his grandfather, who had spent his life raging at the British, but had no use for the grandson, who seemed as aloof and puritanical as any WASP reformer.
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Although Perkins didn’t mention it, Tammany’s Irish-American leaders had good reason to be devoted to Ireland during and immediately after Mitchel’s mayoralty. When the nations of Europe marched off to war in late summer of 1914, Irish rebels in Dublin and New York immediately went to work on a complicated transatlantic plot to overthrow British rule in Ireland while Britain was preoccupied with fighting Germany and its allies. With the United States neutral in the Great War (or, as it became known, World War I), New York became the center of a plot involving American money, German arms, and Irish guerrillas. Irish rebel leaders regularly communicated with a Tammany judge, Daniel Cohalan, and an aging exile journalist, John Devoy, who persuaded German diplomats in the United States to cooperate with the planned rebellion. Cohalan and Devoy kept Berlin abreast of Dublin’s plans through the German Consulate in New York, an act made possible only because President Wilson refused to commit the United States to either side in the war.

Tammany as a whole tended to matters close to home while Europeans slaughtered each other on the battlefields of northern France. And while Wilson’s neutrality was popular, his lectures against what he called “hyphenated Americanism” surely won him few friends in Tammany. The press noted that Wilson studiously ignored Murphy before and after a speech in New York’s Biltmore Hotel when he condemned the “alien sympathies” of those “who loved other countries better than they loved America.”
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Five months after Wilson’s speech, on Easter Monday of 1916, a small group of Irish rebels attacked several buildings in Dublin, including the city’s General Post Office, and managed to hold off the British for five days. German aid, arranged through Tammany’s Cohalan and his ally Devoy, was paltry and ineffective. The rebellion was crushed. But the futility of the Easter Rising gave way to a narrative of martyrdom as the British executed the rebellion’s leaders—many of them poets, writers, and labor leaders—one by one. The firing squads finally were called off, not coincidentally, just before a New York native named Eamon de Valera was scheduled to be shot for leading one of the rebellion’s command posts. De Valera, sent to Ireland as a child by his widowed Irish-born mother, was spared in part because the British believed it would be foolish to alienate American public opinion while the war’s outcome was hanging in the balance.