Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (38 page)

Albany boss Daniel O’Connell, namesake of but no relation to the Irish statesman, once said that State Senator Roosevelt “didn’t like poor people. He was a patronizing son of a bitch.” He eagerly sought to identify himself as a high-minded progressive and friend of the muckrakers, with all their disdain for the messy dealmaking of local government. With great moral righteousness, he publicly blocked a state-funded project in his Dutchess County district because he considered the work unnecessary, a mere piece of political patronage. Tammany’s Big Tim Sullivan was aghast. “Frank,” he said, “you ought to have your head examined.”
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Roosevelt’s journey from aloof political reformer to emphatic advocate for the jobless and hopeless was, to be sure, a long one, and it is worth recalling that it took place during a time when Tammany politicians in his home state wrote, defended, and then expanded sweeping changes in government’s relationship with its citizens and the private economy. In 1911, FDR had wanted no part of the push for a fifty-four-hour-workweek bill, for which Tammany figures Tim Sullivan and The McManus had fought so hard (and which Murphy initially opposed). “No, no,” Roosevelt told Frances Perkins when his future labor secretary had asked for his support. “More important things. More important things.”
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One of those “more important things” in 1911 included a well-publicized campaign to defeat Murphy’s handpicked candidate for one of New York’s two U.S. Senate seats, William “Blue-Eyed Billy” Sheehan, a lawyer with a less-than-spotless record as a Democratic leader in Buffalo. Legislators still selected U.S. senators in New York in 1911—ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, which allowed for popular elections for the U.S. Senate, was still two years away. (New York’s Tammany-controlled legislature ratified the amendment in January 1913. The measure was sponsored by Tammany’s Wagner in the Senate and Tammany’s Aaron Levy in the Assembly.) With Democrats firmly in charge of the legislature, there was no question that the next U.S. senator from New York would be a Democrat—and, given Murphy’s extensive influence over the party and individual legislators, it seemed evident that he need only identify his choice and direct his fellow Democrats to vote accordingly.

Franklin Roosevelt had other ideas. A brand-new senator with a revered last name and limitless ambition, Roosevelt eagerly assumed the role of defender of civic purity and scourge of Tammany Hall as he rallied dissident Democrats against Murphy’s presumed choice. This earned him the admiration of contemporary newspapers and of future historians—one of the latter insisted that FDR was a “champion of Progressivism” in part because of his opposition to Tammany in Albany. Never mind that FDR was all but absent from the truly progressive battle to legislate fewer hours for women and children in New York, a battle that the enemies of traditional Progressivism—Sullivan, McManus, and other urban ethnic politicians—fought and won.
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Roosevelt reveled in the attention he received during the weeks-long standoff over Sheehan, as ballot after ballot passed with no candidate getting the required 101 votes for appointment. “There is nothing I love as much as a good fight,” he told reporters. “I never had as much fun in my life as I am having right now.” The fun went on from midwinter into early spring, when Murphy abruptly switched his support from Sheehan to a judge with an impeccable record, James A. O’Gorman. Roosevelt wanted to keep fighting, but his fellow dissidents lost their appetite after it became obvious that Murphy had played them. O’Gorman, while as pure as any civic reformer, was a Tammany man through and through, and much closer to Murphy than Sheehan ever was. Observers suggested that Murphy had backed Sheehan at first simply out of a personal obligation and that he was more than happy to switch to O’Gorman. The
New York Times
proclaimed Murphy as the “victor” in the long standoff.
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FDR continued to occupy himself with “more important things”—as he had put it during his conversation with Frances Perkins—while his colleagues in the legislature grappled with the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. He assured reformers of his support for their efforts to regulate the behavior of urban immigrants who wished to attend baseball games or operate their businesses on Sunday. Reflecting the opinions of his rural upstate district and the anxieties of urban progressives, he supported the Anti-Saloon League’s efforts to limit alcoholic beverages. Years later, however, when he was running for governor of New York, FDR chose not to emphasize his battle with Murphy or his support for reformers’ cultural causes during his brief time in the legislature. Instead, he portrayed himself as a leader in the fight for a fifty-four-hour workweek, noting that it was “the most radical thing that had ever been talked about.” Louis Howe also claimed that FDR was responsible for Tim Sullivan’s returning to the Senate to cast the decisive vote in favor of the bill, even though Perkins, an eyewitness, mentions nothing about her future boss’s role in the dramatic vote.
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Efforts to position Roosevelt as an advocate for the fifty-four-hour workweek indicated how much New York’s political landscape changed during Smith’s tenure as governor in the 1920s. FDR changed as well. In 1922, not long after being confined to a wheelchair, he wrote a letter to Smith that showed how far he had come as a politician and as a human being since he so rudely dismissed Perkins and her cause in 1911. “You, in your whole public career, have shown a true understanding of the needs and desires of the average American man, woman and child,” Roosevelt told Smith. “You have in your legislative career and your term as Governor, consistently aided changes in laws and in administration aimed to meet new conditions and a higher standard of living. Your attitude has been one of belief in progress, and you have not opposed measures of relief and improvement merely because they were new. In other words, you have been essentially human, for it is human to want to better conditions and to seek new things. That point of view is what has made America.”
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The Franklin Roosevelt of 1911 would not—could not—have written such a letter, certainly not to a politician who was the pride and joy of Tammany Hall. The concerns of the “average American man, woman and child” were not his concerns, as his attitude toward workplace reform showed. During the eleven years that separated his confrontation with Perkins over the workweek bill and this 1922 letter to Smith, Franklin Roosevelt had grown to appreciate the practical, human concerns of the ethnic machine politicians and their constituents, and had moved away from the abstract moral politics of the well-born civic reformer. Roosevelt’s legendary ability as president to connect with voters, especially urban ethnics, would not have been possible had he continued to emulate the pinched Progressivism of his idol Woodrow Wilson, the ardent foe of hyphenated identity politics, or the high-minded detachment of elite reformers like Seth Low and John Purroy Mitchel.

Tammany, in fact, provided Roosevelt with parables about the use of power—parables he later preached from the Oval Office.

In 1938, during a discussion with Perkins about the possibility of easing immigration restrictions imposed over Tammany’s fierce objections in 1924, Roosevelt invoked the memory of one of Perkins’s favorite legislators. “Tim Sullivan used to say that the America of the future would be made out of the people who had come over in steerage and who knew in their own hearts and lives the difference between being despised and being accepted and liked,” the president said. “Poor old Tim Sullivan never understood . . . modern politics, but he was right about the human heart.”
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Perkins wrote that FDR’s remark about Sullivan, who was involved in all kinds of shady enterprises on the Bowery despite Murphy’s disapproval, showed that Roosevelt had “learned” something about politics “from the rough Tammany politicians” for whom he had had nothing but contempt early in his career. As president, Roosevelt recalled that Al Smith’s favorite method for settling a problem was by “sitting around a table” and hashing out the details. During the Democratic National Convention in 1944, when FDR was sending mixed signals about keeping Henry Wallace as his vice president, he conjured a memory from Tammany’s glory days. He asked two young aides if they had ever heard of Charlie Murphy. They hadn’t. FDR explained to them how Murphy kept his own counsel at key moments, how he got away with insisting that conventions, not bosses, chose candidates. “Charlie,” a nostalgic Roosevelt said, “was a wise man.”
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Franklin Roosevelt certainly did not emerge from New York politics during the Progressive Era and the Jazz Age without learning something—about politics, and about human nature—from the street-level Irish-American politicians who had been such a presence in New York during his formative years. The prominent advisory roles that Edward Flynn and James Farley played during FDR’s years as governor and president show that he came to understand and appreciate the Irish-American style of practical, grass-roots politics, even as he attracted traditional progressives such as Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Josephus Daniels, and others who would have been hard-pressed to imagine working alongside Tammany types when Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. What’s more, Roosevelt developed a memorable working relationship with Tammany’s Robert Wagner during the New Deal. Wagner possessed the practical skills necessary to get legislation passed, skills he learned as a protégé of Charles Murphy. “The New Deal,” recalled a colleague of Wagner’s, “owed as much to Robert Wagner as to Franklin Roosevelt.”
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Roosevelt’s willingness to work with Tammany figures during the 1920s could be seen as a necessary but unappetizing calculation that he made because he could not advance his career without Charlie Murphy’s support. Murphy, after all, thwarted FDR’s attempt to win the party’s U.S. Senate nomination in 1914 when he shrewdly backed Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to Germany and longtime Tammany member James W. Gerard for the post. With Tammany’s organizational support, Gerard crushed FDR in the state’s first primary election for a U.S. Senate nomination, although Gerard then lost to Republican Charles W. Wadsworth in the general election. Some observers have asserted that FDR eventually “learned to use” the bosses he once opposed, an assertion that would seem to defy the evidence. If FDR figured out how to “use” Charles Murphy, it’s hard to see how it benefited him.
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FDR’s surprising rapprochement with Murphy began on July 4, 1917, when Roosevelt delivered one of the two traditional “long talks” at Tammany’s annual Independence Day commemoration. Roosevelt was not the only onetime Tammany critic invited to address the organization—fellow keynoter Charles S. Thomas, a senator from Colorado, once complained that the Democratic Party would prosper only “by a negation of the things for which Tammany stands.” But now both Thomas and Roosevelt found themselves exchanging pleasantries with the likes of Thomas McManus and John Ahearn, the very symbols of what Senator Thomas had described as the Democratic Party’s “degeneracy.”
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Roosevelt and Murphy were seated together—no coincidence—and both were dressed similarly in straw hats, bow ties, and light summer suits, although the buttons on Murphy’s jacket were working a good deal harder than those on Roosevelt’s. Around his shoulders Murphy wore a symbolic gold chain of office, making him look more like a lord mayor in Ireland than a leader of the party of the people. Reporters noted that Murphy and Roosevelt seemed to enjoy each other’s company as they sat through a welcoming address—luckily, not another “long talk”—from Tammany’s eighty-seven-year-old ceremonial leader, Grand Sachem John R. Voorhis. When it was Roosevelt’s turn at the podium, he displayed the charm and bonhomie that had been so absent in his dealings with his colleagues from Tammany five years earlier. He fairly winked at his listeners as he said, slyly, “I am not entirely a stranger to Tammany Hall.” He was, he said, invited to the event by an unnamed Tammany man, who told him that “if Tammany could stand to have him, he could stand it to come.” The audience got a good laugh
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If Roosevelt’s unlikely appearance at Tammany Hall was simply a political calculation rather than evidence of a genuine change of heart, his timing was curiously poor and politically perilous. For on that Independence Day in 1917, Charles Francis Murphy, the bane of good-government groups, the Hearst newspapers, and progressives throughout the nation, appeared to be yesterday’s man. Newspapers had been speculating for several years that he was on his way out after Tammany continued to suffer voters’ retribution in the aftermath of the Sulzer impeachment. Murphy was never so vulnerable and Tammany rarely so demoralized as when FDR paid his first visit to the Hall on July 4, 1917. If his appearance at Murphy’s side that day was all about calculation and ambition, FDR seemingly was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong people.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible that FDR was in the process of a more profound change of heart toward the bête noire of his famous cousin, his own former self, and so many of his progressive allies in Woodrow Wilson’s Washington. FDR’s actions after 1917 certainly suggest that he finally realized that, whatever its past flaws, Tammany was on the right side of reform and progressive change, and that Smith and Wagner represented the better angels of the machine’s nature. He certainly no longer acted as though Tammany were the enemy, although he supported John Purroy Mitchel’s anti-Tammany reelection bid in 1917. He did not recoil in horror when The McManus urged him to run for governor in 1918 (FDR declined the invitation) or when State Senator Jimmy Walker told him that it was “always a pleasure” to hear talk of Roosevelt’s future in New York politics.
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FDR publicly endorsed Al Smith’s candidacy for governor in 1918 in a warm, personal letter in which he offered to speak on Smith’s behalf in New York City in the waning days of the campaign. Smith, in a “Dear Frank” letter of reply, told Roosevelt that his endorsement “made quite a hit with all the men around me,” a fair number of whom, it seems safe to say, were Tammany men.
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