Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (35 page)

Assessing the full extent of Tammany’s contribution to the Easter Rebellion and to Ireland’s subsequent war of independence, fought from 1919 to 1921, is nearly impossible—indeed, it may not have existed, at least in a formal way. There is no question that Cohalan, a longtime Tammany member, served as a covert agent for the rebels in 1916. Another Tammany judge, Victor Dowling, was a member of a New York organization,
Clan na Gael
, aligned with Ireland’s paramilitary force, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Both men were close to Murphy, but it is difficult to know whether they told Murphy about their activities or whether they decided it best to keep the boss in the dark. There is, however, a piece of tantalizing evidence that Tammany’s role in financing Ireland’s revolution may have been substantial.

In 1919, the Irish again rose against the British, only this time they were far more successful. The head of the Irish revolutionary government was none other than Eamon de Valera, the very symbol of transatlantic Irish politics. A wanted man in Ireland, he evaded British authorities and sailed to New York, the city of his birth, to raise money for the rebels. During a rally at City Hall on January 18, 1920, de Valera announced a campaign to raise $10 million for the cause in Ireland. Forty thousand New Yorkers volunteered to raise the funds through bond sales. Only Tammany Hall could summon that kind of manpower.

De Valera went on to raise about $6 million, only some of which made its way to Ireland before Britain and the Irish rebels called a truce in 1921. The leader of the Irish rebel army, Michael Collins, led the peace negotiations and signed a compromise treaty after British Prime Minister David Lloyd George threatened to bring renewed war to Ireland. The Irish did not receive complete independence but rather a form of self-government within the British Empire called dominion rule. A portion of the island—six counties in what became Northern Ireland—remained part of the United Kingdom. It was a bitter compromise, one that divided the Irish people between those who were willing to take what they could get and those who held out for perfection in the form of a wholly independent Irish republic.

The legend of Tammany Hall was invoked as Irish political leaders debated the treaty in their parliament,
Dail Eireann
, in early 1921
.
Michael Collins angrily denounced a parliamentary move by the treaty’s opponents, led by de Valera. “We will have no Tammany Hall methods here,” Collins said. “Whether you are for the Treaty or whether you are against it, fight without Tammany Hall methods.”
²⁴

Another rebel-turned-politician who had just returned from New York, Harry Boland, responded to the Tammany reference. Looking at his onetime friend and comrade, Boland said he presumed Collins’s remark was intended for him, for he was organizing opposition to the treaty. “I will say this, that I don’t know anything about Tammany Hall except this, that if [Collins] had a little training in Tammany Hall, and reserved some of his bullying for Lloyd George, we would not be in the position we are in today.”

Boland later told a reporter, “Between you and me, Tammany Hall has given more aid to the [rebel] cause than any other single body.” Tammany certainly did not advertise this sort of fundraising, but if Charles Murphy, son of a Famine immigrant, either gave his assent to the secret transfer of Tammany funds to the Irish rebels or looked the other way while others did, it surely would add another layer to the transatlantic nature of Irish-American politics—and to the murky narrative of Tammany’s finances.
²⁵

Several months after the treaty debate in Dublin, Murphy made private inquiries about the fate of John J. McKeown, an Irish prisoner of war sentenced to death by a British court martial, even as other prisoners were released. The McKeown case threatened to disrupt the fragile peace process between Ireland and Britain, and while the prisoner had no apparent American connections, Murphy asked Tammany Congressman William Bourke Cockran to see whether he could intervene on behalf “of the unfortunate man.” Cockran was skeptical that any American intervention would help, but, in any case, McKeown was freed weeks later.
²⁶

As Tammany and the Irish in America used their political clout on behalf of Ireland’s rebels, many British observers—and their kindred spirits in upper-class New York—could hardly contain their rage. Writing in the
Westminster Review
, journalist J. Cottle Green bemoaned the state of the American republic in a piece entitled “Deterioration of Some American People.” Cottle complained that the American experiment was far removed from the days of the “British Pilgrim fathers.” Proof of this decline, he wrote, was evident in the large number of “political hangers-on” who “play upon the Irish and other ignorant elements . . . with the object of obtaining money, of creating hatred, stirring up discord and revolutionary feeling towards the mother country, and of subsidizing outrages and midnight murder in Ireland.”
²⁷

For most Tammany voters and for the organization’s Irish leaders, the term
mother country
had a very different meaning than it did for Anglo-American readers of the
Westminster Review
. The writer, however, seemed to be unaware of this. Tammany was not.

. . .

Despite the catastrophe in New York City and in Assembly races throughout the state in 1913, Tammany forged ahead with reform during a special lame-duck legislative session in Albany in December. The
N
ew York Times
warned that William Sulzer’s successor, Martin Glynn, supported “radical” new laws, including what the
Times
called a “liberal workmen’s compensation” bill, a direct-primary bill that was more acceptable to Murphy than the Sulzer version, and a call for a new state constitutional convention in 1915. All these reforms easily passed the legislature, which Tammany still dominated until the new one convened. One Tammany ally, John H. McCooey, said that a chastened Murphy was prepared to “give the people all they want and perhaps a bit more.” But if Murphy sought simply to please voters in the aftermath of his greatest defeat, he failed miserably. In the fall of 1914, Charles Whitman, a conservative Republican who sought to dismantle much of what the legislature had achieved in 1913, easily defeated Glynn’s attempt to win a term in his own right, while another Republican, James Wadsworth, won the state’s first popular election for a U.S. Senate seat. The twin losses added to the string of Tammany disasters under Murphy.
²⁸

Most observers agreed that Tammany continued to pay a price for the impeachment of William Sulzer. But there was another factor at work. Glynn was the first Roman Catholic to become governor of New York, and a Democratic official watching the state on behalf of the White House, Thomas D. McCarthy, detected clear evidence of anti-Catholic bias against Glynn. In a memo to Colonel House, President Wilson’s top adviser, McCarthy took note of the activities of a Protestant supremacist organization called the Guardians of Liberty, which actively campaigned against Glynn in portions of upstate New York. After examining the vote in Erie County and several other reliably Democratic upstate counties, McCarthy told House that Glynn “may have lost many votes because he was a Catholic” and that Senate candidate James Gerard, a Murphy ally who also served as Wilson’s ambassador to Germany, “suffered greatly by the injection of the religious issue,” even though he was not Catholic.
²⁹

Out of power and out of favor, Tammany Hall might have reconsidered its priorities in light of the catastrophes of 1913 and 1914. Murphy had allowed his young men to support sweeping changes in New York’s social contract, and, along the way, they alienated some of the organization’s old guard and vested interests. James J. Martin, an aging ally of Richard Croker and the man Theodore Roosevelt replaced as police commissioner, publicly complained about Murphy’s “stupid leadership.” But when Republicans sought to roll back the achievements of 1913 during Governor Whitman’s first term and, especially, during the GOP-controlled Constitutional Convention in 1915, Murphy’s young men fought to preserve their hard-won victories.

Al Smith became the star of the Constitutional Convention in opposition, arguing forcefully and successfully against a measure that sought to repeal laws granting privileges to a single “class of individuals,” such as widows, disabled workers, and children. The measure was the work of the Republican Party’s state chairman, William Barnes, a ripsnorting upstate conservative who embarrassed his more moderate downstate brethren. His proposed amendment would have wiped out all of the Tammany-backed social-welfare legislation passed since the Triangle fire, legislation that had won Tammany no rewards from voters. A soulless, irredeemable political organization might well have concluded that there was no point in resisting the repeal of these measures. Instead, Smith, Wagner, and other Tammany delegates worked with moderate Republicans to mount an offensive against the Barnes proposal. Smith was chosen as the voice of opposition on the convention floor, and with his unmistakable Lower East Side accent, theatrical presence, and palpable sincerity, he dismantled the Barnes plank piece by piece.
³⁰

“The great curse in poverty lies in the utter hopelessness that goes with it,” Smith said. “Having that in mind, I ask you, is it wise, is it prudent . . . to reduce that basic law to the same sharp level of the caveman’s claw?” Barnes’s proposal failed, not simply because Tammany’s delegates opposed it, but because men like Smith were capable of making common cause with moderate Republicans, including the convention’s distinguished chairman, Elihu Root, a Nobel Peace Prize–winner and former secretary of state and war. It was all for naught, however, for voters rejected the new constitution in a statewide referendum.
³¹

The convention may have failed, but for Tammany the proceedings provided a stage for its rising star, Smith, and for its continued embrace of social change. Smith, in fact, did not simply defend Tammany’s reforms at the convention but sought, vainly, to expand on them. He introduced a proposal to establish a minimum wage, and even though it was doomed to failure, it nevertheless was a sign that he, and his sponsors at Tammany, were committed to more aggressive government regulation of the marketplace.

So, despite the electoral disasters, Tammany still was alive, and Murphy still was very much in charge, when Mayor Mitchel sought reelection in 1917 after a term that featured first-rate efficiency and third-rate politics. Aloof from working-class voters, he drew heated criticism when he sought to appoint two members of the Rockefeller Foundation to the city Board of Education. Tammany regrouped behind a redheaded Brooklyn judge named John Hylan, a favorite of publisher William Randolph Hearst; he campaigned as the enemy of special interests and as a staunch advocate for a city-owned (rather than privately owned) subway line. It was a wartime campaign, for the United States had entered the European conflict in April on the Allied side. Mayor Mitchel seized on the war as a campaign issue, questioning the loyalty of Tammany’s Robert Wagner, a German immigrant, accusing Hylan and his patron Hearst of harboring pro-German sympathies, and reminding voters of Judge Cohalan’s dealings with the German consulate before the United States declared war on Germany and its allies. “I will make this a fight against Hearst, Hylan, and the Hohenzollerns,” he said, linking the two New Yorkers with the German ruling family. He also promised to take the fight to “Murphy, Cohalan . . . and all the Tammany brood.”
³²

His inflammatory rhetoric did him no honor (although Hearst certainly was skeptical of the war effort). Hylan won with less than 50 percent of the vote, while Mitchel himself had a hard time outpolling a Socialist Party candidate for second place.

Mitchel’s loss stunned his progressive allies, but Murphy had a simple explanation for Tammany’s revival. Hylan and Tammany, he said, “are progressive and in accordance with the world-wide progressive tendencies of the day.” Those words stung, for it was Mitchel—certainly not Hylan—who was perceived as the great young progressive reformer of New York, at least among the uptown and Washington crowd. Embittered by his loss, Mitchel swore off politics for the military, joining the infant air service and winning a commission as a major. He died in 1918 when he fell out of his airplane over Louisiana on a training mission.
³³

Murphy and Tammany had one more step to take before their improbable comeback was complete. A gubernatorial election loomed in 1918, and if Tammany could knock off the two-term incumbent, Charles Whitman, the losses of 1913 and 1914 would become simply bad memories. But Murphy had a critical decision to make. Al Smith, now president of the Board of Aldermen, had emerged as an obvious candidate for statewide office. Smith not only commanded the affections of Tammany’s base but he had earned the respect of reformers, the press, and even Republicans. No less an establishment figure than Elihu Root described Smith as “the best informed” delegate at the Constitutional Convention of 1915.
³⁴

As the political calendar turned and the campaign season of 1918 beckoned, Charlie Murphy hesitated. He had no problem with Smith’s record and no doubt about Smith’s loyalty. But Murphy was in the business of winning elections, and Smith presented a considerable problem—he was Catholic, and a Catholic had yet to win election to the state’s highest office. The recently defeated Martin Glynn had stirred up Protestant supremacy even in Democratic bastions like Erie County when he ran for a term of his own in 1914, and now, four years later, a growing Prohibition movement upstate promised even more trouble for any Tammany candidate, particularly one as enthusiastically “wet” as Al Smith.

So Charlie Murphy hesitated. There was yet another wild card to consider in 1918—the women’s vote. Murphy originally opposed women’s suffrage, despite the presence of Barbara Porges on Tammany’s General Committee, but as he and Tammany recognized reality if not justice, New York passed a pro-suffrage referendum allowing women to vote in state and local elections in 1917. The measure succeeded thanks to a strong pro-ratification vote in Tammany’s strongholds in Manhattan, allowing New York to become one of only two states east of the Mississippi (Michigan was the other) to allow women equal voting rights with men in state and local elections.