Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (39 page)

The burgeoning relationship between FDR and Murphy’s Tammany continued to mature in 1920, when FDR seconded Smith’s favorite-son nomination for president and Murphy approved the party’s choice of FDR as its vice-presidential candidate. Murphy certainly was not trying to rid the state of Roosevelt, for he was shrewd enough to know that Republican boss Thomas Platt had tried that strategy with another troublesome Roosevelt in 1900, and it did not work as planned. After his defeat in 1920, FDR worked diligently on behalf of Smith’s presidential bids in both 1924 and 1928, when liberal publications such as
The Nation
wondered whether a Catholic politician raised by the Tammany tiger truly could be progressive. “Governor Smith is personally, ecclesiastically, aggressively, irreconcilably Wet, and is ineradicably Tammany-branded, with all the inferences and implications and objectionable consequences which naturally follow from such views and associations,” wrote James Cannon Jr. in
The Nation
in July 1928.
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Though more in the tradition of
The Nation
’s sort of Democrat, Roosevelt offered no apologies for his support for his fellow New Yorker whose faith, affiliations, and culture so disturbed some of the magazine’s writers and readers. In fact, in a small book released during the 1928 campaign, Roosevelt argued that Smith was “on the side of the progressives in the fields of legislation and of constitutional law” and that he “made it clear that he based actions on fundamentals and not on temporary expediency.”
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This crucial change in Roosevelt’s political development is treated as little more than a footnote in many biographies, granted far less importance than his stint in the Department of the Navy during the Wilson years. One Roosevelt biographer, Kenneth S. Davis, has argued that FDR’s fights with Tammany were consistent with his “liberal-progressive stance,” a view that endorses the notion that Tammany and progressive politics were irreconcilable—despite all that Tammany achieved during Roosevelt’s formative years in politics.
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In fact, when Roosevelt made his peace with Tammany during Woodrow Wilson’s second term, it was not the peace of equally exhausted combatants, each willing to concede the other’s points in the interest of ceasing hostilities. FDR’s appearance at Charles Murphy’s side on July 4, 1917, was a victory for Murphy and for the urban liberalism and cultural pluralism that he and Tammany represented in the second decade of the twentieth century. Roosevelt, in the end, came to Tammany. Tammany did not come to him.

That journey shattered the standard narrative that pitted Anglo-Protestant reformers against Irish political bosses and their henchmen. And it moved Roosevelt closer to Tammany’s vision of Progressivism, which Big Tim Sullivan summed up when he said, “I never ask a hungry man about his past. I feed him not because he is good, but because he needs food.” Traditional reformers, immersed in Anglo-Protestant notions of worthiness rather than simple need, sought to change character and culture as part of a contractlike relationship with the poor and distressed. Tammany, by contrast, fed people simply because they needed food. Ward heelers asked no questions and demanded no behavioral changes of those who required a meal, a job, a favor. The entitlement programs of the New Deal, then, had more in common with Tim Sullivan’s methods of amelioration than they did with charities and settlement houses that saw the poor as clients rather than as neighbors. No wonder that some progressives did not recognize their agenda in Franklin Roosevelt’s programs.
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. . .

Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to work with, rather than against, the pragmatic Irish-American machine politicians against whom he had campaigned as a young man was an important turning point in his career. But he would not have had the trust of Tammany or any urban machines had he not jettisoned Progressive Era anxieties over the culture and beliefs of urban immigrants, meaning Catholics and Jews. Those issues remained very much part of the nation’s conversation after World War I and FDR’s return to New York. The concerns of progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, who feared for the nation’s future because of declining birthrates among Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were played out in politics and culture during the Jazz Age, with Tammany serving as a symbol of the power of the new dangerous classes—urban immigrants with alien beliefs and uncertain loyalties, at least in the eyes of many on all sides of the political spectrum.

The Ku Klux Klan, prohibitionists, and the eugenicist movement viewed immigrants and their immediate descendants as a source of social disruption, and the immigrants’ advocates, symbolized by Tammany Hall, as a wellspring of corruption. “In the city of New York and elsewhere in the United States,” wrote Madison Grant in
The Passing of the Great Race
, a famous lament for the end of Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, “there is a native American aristocracy resting upon layer after layer of immigrants of lower races.” Those “lower” races, Grant predicted, would inevitably dominate political power because democracy rewarded “the average man” rather than “the man qualified by birth, education and integrity.”
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Tammany surely encouraged the process that so depressed the likes of Grant, whose dour reflections on the American condition helped inspire the eugenics movement of the 1920s. Again, Tammany was hardly a flawless agent of assimilation, but its leaders did embrace a form of ethnic diversity among its elected officials. Tammany promoted promising Jewish politicians such as Aaron Levy, and while it was less enthusiastic about Italian newcomers—in part because many were migrants who did not settle down as voters—Salvatore Cotillo, an Italian immigrant, won election to the State Assembly from East Harlem in 1912 with Tammany’s support. He later became the first Italian immigrant elected to the State Senate, and, like Al Smith and Robert Wagner, became a force for progressive social-welfare measures, earning not just Tammany’s blessing but also the support of organizations like the Citizens Union.
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Tammany resisted the Progressive Era’s assertion that there was only one acceptable American identity, one that was stripped clean of Old World practices and customs. Instead, its leaders embraced hyphenated Americanism at a time when Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted on 100 percent Americanism. Indeed, Irish-American activists in New York noted that progressive concerns about hyphenated identities apparently did not apply to those who spoke favorably about Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American virtues.
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Tammany was equally adamant in opposing neonativist moves to restrict immigration in the early 1920s. Congressman William Bourke Cockran, who occasionally strayed from the Tammany reservation but who also served as the organization’s grand sachem from 1905 to 1908, was among the most passionate opponents of immigration restriction in the years following World War I. In a letter to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of America in 1921, Cockran called immigration restriction “a renunciation and an abandonment of the policy which has made this country . . . the greatest agency for civilization in the history of mankind.” Restriction supporters, he said, “appealed to that peculiar but sinister spirit of hate and distrust that seems to be sweeping over the world.” Responding to critics who complained that immigrants were slow to learn English, Cockran wrote, “Personally, I deem it much more important that a man should be able to work effectively, even though he cannot speak our language, than be fluent in several languages but inefficient in industry.”
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Cockran was dead when Congress began to consider the National Origins Act of 1924, designed to cut back immigration to 1890 levels and create a racialized quota system that radically curtailed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and outright banned newcomers from other areas, including Japan and China. Following on the heels of Prohibition and embodying the spirit of the eugenicist movement, the act was another battle in the era’s war on immigrants, their sources of protection and power, their culture, and their places of residence—cities.

New York, once a bastion of nativist and Know Nothing sentiment, became a lonely voice on behalf of tolerance and pluralism as a vote on the bill neared. On March 8, 1924, three thousand New Yorkers jammed into Carnegie Hall to witness a remarkable coming together of reformers, independents, and Tammany Hall members unanimous in their passionate opposition to the proposed restrictions. Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of the city’s most prominent Jewish leaders and an outspoken critic of Tammany, shared the Carnegie stage with Congressman John Carew, a Tammany ally, and longtime Tammany members Thomas Churchill and Salvatore Cotillo, both now judges. “Those in Washington who are in favor of the bill,” Churchill said, “don’t know and don’t want the Jew, Italian, Frenchman or Slav. They won’t have brunettes. They want blondes.”
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The city’s congressional delegation—from reformers Fiorello La Guardia and Emanuel Celler to Tammany’s Royal Copeland, Christopher Sullivan, and John O’Connor—stood firm against the tide of neonativism. Their resistance was in vain: Immigration restriction overwhelmingly passed both houses of Congress. The new law was a demographic time bomb for Tammany and other urban political organizations that were just beginning to assert their power in national politics.

Tammany and Irish-American politicians in general had no time for the cultural anxieties of Anglo-Saxon Protestants who saw immigration as a threat to what the law’s sponsor, Indiana Congressman Albert Johnson, called “real Americanization.” Edward Flynn, the son of Irish immigrants, saw Anglo-Saxon supremacy as an idea whose time had passed. “It seems to me that we can never have a complete settlement of world conditions until the Anglo-Saxon begins to realize that he is not of a superior race but that all races are equal,” Flynn told Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943, at the height of World War II. “Certainly, we are today fighting against the ideology of Hitler in which he sets forth the Aryans as superior people to all others. We do not seem to be consistent when we fight against this doctrine and on the other hand do nothing to try to bring about a better understanding” between the races.
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Some racists saw Tammany as a threat to the racial status quo because it embraced pluralism and inclusion. In 1928, the KKK’s newspaper,
Fellowship Forum
, printed a picture of a black public official in New York, Ferdinand Morton, standing near his secretary, a white woman who, the paper asserted, was “assigned to him . . . by a Tammany Hall administration.”

Morton, a Harvard University graduate, was the head of Tammany’s United Colored Democracy at the time. The picture should “nauseate any Anglo-Saxon,” the paper argued, adding that Morton was one of three civil-service commissioners—the others, the paper noted, were a Catholic and a Jew—who passed judgment over “the moral, mental, and physical qualifications of each and every person seeking employment in the Tammanyized city government. No white man or woman can possibly enter the civil service of New York City until this triumvirate approves. What chance for poor Protestants to ever get their names on any city payroll?” The implications were clear. From the Klan’s perspective, a “Tammanyized” government was one that was blind to Anglo-Saxon racial and religious hierarchies.
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Tammany was not, to be sure, ahead of its times in reaching out to African Americans, many of whom voted Republican—the party of Lincoln. Still, Tammany did make some inroads within the city’s black community beginning in the 1920s, supporting the breakthrough candidacy of Henri W. Shields, who became the nation’s first black Democrat to win a seat in a state legislature when he was elected to the state Assembly in 1922.

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In early April 1924, Al Smith received a letter from former president Woodrow Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, the son of a grocer and product of Jersey City’s Irish-American politics. Wilson had just died, and Tumulty wanted Smith to know that the former president had been thinking about him in his final days. Wilson, Tumulty told Smith, spoke favorably “of everything you are seeking to do, and, I might say to you frankly, I felt while talking with him that he was a most responsive audience.”
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Left unstated was the full extent of Wilson’s enthusiasm for Smith. For as Wilson lay dying, Smith was preparing to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 1924. His main opponent was an ambitious U.S. senator from California determined to return the spirit of Wilsonian Progressivism to the White House. He was William Gibbs McAdoo, Wilson’s son-in-law.

The Democratic National Convention was scheduled for New York’s Madison Square Garden, and if Charlie Murphy had his way, Al Smith would complete his remarkable journey from the Lower East Side to the highest reaches of American politics in front of a hometown crowd. No Catholic had ever won a major-party presidential nomination, but Charlie Murphy believed the time was right. Other city bosses were on board, prepared to take the Democratic Party away from the drawling populists and the elite progressives who had dominated it for so long. The party’s base, they believed, had shifted—its voters lived in cities, cultivated hyphenated identities, and worshipped God in ways that would not have met the approval of Puritans and Pilgrims, not to mention the evangelicals who rallied behind the crusades of William Jennings Bryan. As Tumulty sent his note to Smith in early April, the New York governor already was ahead in the early delegate count, with 123 committed delegates—including all of New York’s ninety delegates, thanks to Mister Murphy—compared with McAdoo’s sixty-five.

At eleven o’clock on the morning of April 25, 1924, Al Smith took a telephone call in his Albany office from General Charles W. Berry, commander of the New York National Guard. Berry had bad news: Charlie Murphy was dead at the age of sixty-five.

Word soon spread to the press corps, and reporters descended on Smith’s second-floor office in the Capitol building for comment. The governor broke down, twice, as he tried to compose a tribute to his mentor. “It’s awful,” he said, making no effort to hide his tears. “No one had a better friend and no man could have had such a friend as he was to me.” Smith, dressed in a black top hat and tails, led the funeral procession up the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral three days later.
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