Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (36 page)

Was New York ready for an Irish-Catholic governor? An Irish-Catholic governor who opposed the growing Prohibition movement and who had opposed women’s suffrage while he was speaker of the Assembly? Charlie Murphy was not looking simply to make a statement in 1918 or to carry out some sort of quixotic crusade, as so many reformers were pleased to do. Like any political professional, he wanted to win. And, by all rights, he had to—losing three straight gubernatorial elections to Charles Whitman, who was hardly the second coming of Theodore Roosevelt, might at long last be his undoing.

Ironically, some reformers were absolutely positive about their choice for governor. And their choice was Al Smith. They were, by and large, veterans of the Factory Investigating Commission: Frances Perkins, the consumer lobbyist; Abram Elkus, newly returned to New York after his stint as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; social reformers Henry Moskowitz and his bride, Belle Moskowitz. They saw Smith as a man who shared their values and, perhaps even more important, knew how to translate those values into practical legislation.

Murphy, on the other hand, saw Smith as an Irish-Catholic anti-temperance Tammany pol with an accent the likes of which nobody in the villages of Onondaga County had ever heard before. As Murphy deliberated, journalist Edward Staats Luther, a political reporter, decided to offer the boss some unsolicited advice. Smith could win, Luther said. New York was prepared to elect a Catholic as governor. The boss gestured to one of his advisers. “Come on in here,” he said, “and listen to a man named Luther trying to convince a man named Murphy that a Catholic can be elected governor of New York State.”
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Luther’s thesis may or may not have influenced Murphy. But in the end, he decided that the time was right. Smith won his blessing and was nominated by virtual acclamation at the Democratic State Convention in Saratoga Springs. The lone holdout was a self-styled reform Democrat and perennial candidate for judicial office, Samuel Seabury, who was entitled to half a vote at the convention. He cast that vote against Smith—the only vote Smith did not receive. “Mr. Smith is the best representative of the worst element of the Democratic Party,” Seabury sniffed.
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Seabury’s fellow reformers had a different view. They organized an independent citizens’ committee to elect their favorite Tammany man. The extra effort was absolutely necessary: Smith beat Whitman by about fifteen thousand votes out of nearly two million cast in the 1918 election. The victory was Smith’s for sure, but it was Murphy’s as well. Tammany men had been elected governor before, but no Irish-Catholic Tammany man had ever gone so far—and he did so, for that matter, with the support of reformers and the city’s press.

The victory also belonged to the
new
New York—the New York of tenement houses and gas house districts and saloons and pushcarts, the New York of widows who kept their families together with the help of taxpayers, the New York of ambitious schoolchildren who received college scholarships from the state, the New York of disabled workers and their families who no longer were left to fend for themselves. It was a victory for Catholics who did not believe it was sinful to have a drink or play baseball on Sunday. It was a victory for Jews who sought a fair share of political power. It was a victory for reformers like Frances Perkins and Belle Moskowitz, who recognized long before many of their male counterparts did that Charlie Murphy’s Tammany was on the right side of history, even if their methods were, as Perkins put it, “irregular.” It was, after all, an irregular world—and Tammany knew it.

Not long after his election, Smith made a familiar journey to Charlie Murphy’s vacation home in Good Ground, Long Island, a beach town known today as Hampton Bays. Power had been good to Murphy—his full-time residence on Seventeenth Street was near fashionable Stuyvesant Square, and his estate on Long Island included a nine-hole golf course, allowing Murphy the freedom to indulge in his only hobby. The governor-elect, that ultimate product of the sidewalks of New York, did not trek out to the wilds of the Hamptons simply to walk the fairways with the boss. Rather, Murphy wished to have a clear and candid conversation with his protégé.

“I shall be asking you for things, Al,” Murphy said. “But I want to say this to you. You understand these things better than I do. If I ever ask you to do anything which you think would impair your record as a great governor, just tell me so and that will be the end of it.”
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Murphy had never said anything like that to any of the other mayors and governors who had won high office with his support. But Murphy had bigger plans for Al Smith.

. . .

Charlie Murphy’s resurrection was not just a matter of luck. He changed the conversation about his future and that of Tammany with the election of Hylan as mayor and, especially, Smith as governor, and he was content to see his name fade from headlines as Tammany continued to support liberal social and political change in New York. Smith took to Albany the experts, advocates, and good-government reformers who only a generation earlier had seen Tammany as the representation not simply of bad government but of evil. Belle Moskowitz, Smith’s closest adviser; Robert Moses, the brilliant planner and builder; and Frances Perkins, his labor commissioner, did not come to Smith via Charlie Murphy. But Al Smith trusted them, and Charlie Murphy trusted Al Smith.

Murphy also encouraged other Tammany figures, especially the voluble Congressman William Bourke Cockran, to engage in political debates that were far removed from Tammany’s home turf on Manhattan’s East Side. In 1920, Cockran became a national spokesman for global disarmament following the catastrophe of World War I, arguing that “the world must disarm or the world must starve.” The issue caught Murphy’s attention—no doubt to the surprise of those who saw him as little more than a political puppetmaster—and he and Cockran exchanged a series of letters and phone calls about the issue in the early 1920s. Tammany’s delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1920 pressed fellow Democrats to pass a Cockran-authored plank pledging the party to achieving world peace through disarmament. The measure failed, but Murphy continued to endorse it, in spite of opposition within his own party. “We took the stand that disarmament was the transcendent issue of the world and not alone of this country,” said Murphy, months after the 1920 convention. The
New York Times
saw a certain logic to Murphy’s position, noting acidly that Tammany already was “responsible for the oldest disarmament measure” in the nation, Sullivan’s Law.
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Tammany’s commitment to progressive social and political reforms reached its high point of articulation at the Democratic State Convention in 1922, when Smith was renominated for governor after having failed to win reelection in 1920. Smith’s reemergence was not exactly preordained, for Murphy was said to have been considering William Randolph Hearst for the nomination. Smith would have none of that—Hearst’s newspapers had accused Smith of colluding with the dairy industry in keeping milk prices high, leading to the deaths of children. Hearst launched the smear campaign after Smith refused to appoint the publisher’s allies as state judges, which led Smith to challenge Hearst to a public debate in Carnegie Hall. The publisher failed to show; Smith debated an empty chair.

Smith not only won the gubernatorial nomination in 1922 but also blocked Murphy’s compromise plan to nominate Hearst for the U.S. Senate. Smith told his mentor that if Hearst ran for the Senate, Tammany would have to find another candidate for governor. Murphy backed Smith. Hearst’s political ambitions were done, once and for all.

While the Smith–Hearst drama unfolded behind closed doors, the Democratic State Convention’s temporary chairman, State Senator Jimmy Walker, opened the proceedings with a gleeful attack on incumbent Governor Nathan Miller for his opposition to an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage for women workers. The platform, written by Jeremiah Mahoney, supported public ownership of bus lines, penal reform, state control over the distribution of hydroelectric power, a continuation of rent regulations put in place during World War I, income-tax exemptions for those earning less than $5,000 a year, and restoration of powers taken away from the state Labor Department during Miller’s tenure. One plank did not make it into the final document—a clause that called for stricter government regulation of the New York Stock Exchange. Mahoney desperately wanted it included, but it was removed at the request of Joseph Proskauer, a Wall Street lawyer and key Smith adviser. Mahoney later argued that the plank foreshadowed the New Deal’s creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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During the 1922 campaign, Smith and Tammany portrayed Miller and the Republicans as reactionaries determined to reverse the progressive reforms that they had fought for and delivered during the previous decade. Their arguments found an audience; Smith captured 1.4 million votes in the fall of 1922 to win a second two-year term as governor. It was the biggest landslide in state history. He went on to serve as governor until 1929; on his watch, New York became a model of progressive government even while Washington turned to the right under successive Republican administrations.

Charles Francis Murphy saw in Al Smith a chance to show the nation that a poor Irish-Catholic child of the Lower East Side was as good as any other American. Not long after Smith returned to Albany as governor in 1923, Murphy began quiet discussions with other Democrats about the possibility of Al Smith as a candidate for president of the United States. Those discussions were well underway on the morning of April 25, 1924, when Murphy died after collapsing in his home on Seventeenth Street, not far from the tenement in which he was born. He was buried three days later. Sixty thousand people stood on Fifth Avenue as his casket was taken from St. Patrick’s Cathedral to a waiting hearse for a trip to Calvary Cemetery.
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Tammany would never again have a leader with Murphy’s vision and his eye for political talent. But many of the politicians whom Murphy sponsored and mentored continued to influence New York politics and culture through the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. And at least one former enemy came to realize that the quiet man from the Gas House District was more than a cartoon figure from a Thomas Nast illustration. “In Mr. Murphy’s death, the New York City Democratic organization has lost probably the strongest and wisest leader it has had in generations. . . . He was a genius who kept harmony and at the same time recognized that the world moved on. It is well to remember that he has helped accomplish much in the way of progressive legislation and social welfare in our state.” So said Franklin D. Roosevelt, just four months before he braced himself at a podium in Madison Square Garden to nominate a Tammany man for the office of president of the United States.

ELEVEN

FRANK AND AL

L
ess than a week after he lost his bid for a second term as New York governor, a disappointed but philosophical Al Smith wrote a short note to another New York Democrat who had suffered a historic defeat in the election of November 2, 1920—Franklin D. Roosevelt, the party’s vice-presidential candidate that year. “Maybe it is for the best,” Smith wrote of his dispiriting loss. “I do not know what I would be able to accomplish here in the next two years standing alone by myself.” With Warren G. Harding pledging a return to normalcy after Woodrow Wilson’s tumultuous two terms as president, Republicans nationwide swept Democrats from power in 1920—across the Hudson River in New Jersey, only a single Democrat was left standing in a General Assembly of sixty members. “The people of this country, in no uncertain terms, gave responsibility to the Republican party,” Smith wrote. “Probably it is but right that they not be handicapped to even the slightest degree.”

The following day, no doubt before Smith’s letter from Albany arrived, an equally reflective FDR echoed his friend’s sentiments. “Now that the smoke has cleared away it all seems in many ways for the better,” FDR wrote to Smith. It is hard to imagine, however, that either of these ambitious men really believed that the electoral disaster somehow was “for the better.” In the prime of their careers, they had suffered an ignominious defeat and now faced a highly uncertain future, as Roosevelt acknowledged in his letter to Smith. The two of them, he conceded, “will in all probability not run for state office” again.

While Smith seemed to believe, at least in this moment of despair, that his fellow Democrats should stand aside while Republicans pursued an agenda that was hostile to everything for which he stood, Roosevelt was of quite a different mind. He wanted to build a viable, effective opposition to the new Republican regime, noting that New York voters would return to the polls in two years for a new round of state elections. He told Smith that the two of them ought to meet soon to begin rebuilding their party north of the Bronx, in a region where a heavily Republican vote doomed Smith’s reelection effort and delivered New York into Harding’s column despite the presence of FDR on the national Democratic ticket. “I feel that you and I have about as broad an insight into the affairs of upstate as any other two people,” Roosevelt wrote. He promised to get in touch with Smith again, “after I come back from a little shooting trip.”
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