Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (41 page)

Some of Smith’s supporters in Tammany were eager to confront critics in hostile regions of the country—even advocating a national organization based on the Tammany model. But FDR delivered a blunt warning against these ham-handed tactics. “I am convinced that some of your friends are, without your knowledge and consent, giving you aggressive publicity in the south and west, where such publicity is at the present time harmful,” Roosevelt told Smith in late 1926. Smith’s allies, he added, were “giving the old McAdoo crowd and the Know Nothings a reason to organize against you.”

“I know perfectly well that you, as you read this letter, say to yourself quite honestly that you are not a candidate for 1928 and you can’t be bothered with trying to control your fool friends,” Roosevelt continued. “Nevertheless, you will be a candidate in 1928 whether you like it or not and I want to see you as strong a candidate as it is honestly possible to make you when the convention meets.”
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He was right. Smith was a strong candidate in 1928, so strong, in fact, that would-be opponents like McAdoo ceded the field to him. He captured the party’s nomination on the first ballot on the night of June 28, 1928, becoming the first Roman Catholic to win a major party’s presidential nomination. As he did in 1924, Franklin Roosevelt placed Smith’s name in nomination, even reprising his description of Smith as the Happy Warrior. Smith, his family, and close advisors were in Albany for the historic occasion, listening to Roosevelt and the roll call thanks to the magical new medium of radio. When the roll call ended and victory was secure, there were tears in the eyes of Alfred E. Smith, who learned about life and politics on the sidewalks of New York.

At long last, Charlie Murphy’s most famous protégé, the best-loved son of Tammany Hall, was a candidate for president of the United States. A headline in the
New York Times
summed up this remarkable moment: “Alfred E. Smith’s Rise from the City Streets Unparalleled in American History.” So it was. Other presidential candidates had been born in humble circumstances. None had been born in a New York City tenement. Other presidents had come of age in cities. None had grown up in any place remotely like the Lower East Side. Other candidates started careers at a young age. None wrapped fish as a teenager to help pay the family bills.
⁵⁰

In his seconding speech for Smith, former Boston mayor Andrew J. Peters described himself as “a direct descendant of those who were among the earliest settlers of this country.” He knew of no better way of celebrating his Pilgrim ancestors, he said, than to recognize Al Smith as the “best proof of democracy and its promise for the future.”
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But large segments of American society profoundly disagreed, even ostensibly progressive journals such as
The Nation
, which withheld its endorsement from Smith in 1928 despite the editors’ acknowledgment that he was “a symbol of tolerance in American life.” For them, but not for Roosevelt, what mattered more than tolerance was Smith’s unforgivable association with Tammany. “He is still the Tammany sachem who glories in that office and believes in that accursed institution against which stand charged a century of corruption, misgovernment, and uncalled-for human misery in the city of New York,” the editors wrote.
The Nation
, like so many elite critics of Tammany, was incapable of perceiving Tammany’s transformation during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Rather than cite the progressive achievements of Smith’s years as governor,
The Nation
chose to summon through implication the ghost of Boss Tweed and other Tammany sinners to assail Smith’s integrity.
⁵²

Reviled by the Right and abandoned by the Left—ironically, for some of the same reasons (temperance, Tammany, and the pope)—Al Smith never had a chance in the 1928 presidential election. Republican-led prosperity, which soon proved to be an illusion, certainly contributed to Herbert Hoover’s resounding victory, but for many of Al Smith’s supporters, the Happy Warrior was the victim of nativist bigotry from East to West, North to South. Smith even lost New York, his home state, by more than a hundred thousand votes—upstate nativists and antisaloon advocates came out in droves to keep the wet Catholic out of the White House.

The anti-Smith voters in New York nearly succeeded in keeping Franklin Roosevelt out of Albany as well. FDR was a reluctant warrior in 1928. Howe didn’t think the time was right to run for governor, and neither did Eleanor Roosevelt, but Smith and his allies persuaded him on the eve of the state nominating convention. Tammany’s Jimmy Walker, now the mayor of New York, placed his friend Frank’s name in nomination. FDR won the race by about twenty-five thousand votes out of a total of more than four million cast. He risked much by coming to Smith’s defense in the campaign’s closing stages, lashing out at virulent anti-Catholic pamphlets circulating around the nation, particularly in the South. “I have seen circulars that were so unfit for publication that the people who wrote them and printed them and paid for them ought not to be put in jail, but ought to be put on the first ship and sent away from the United States,” he told his audience. Roosevelt’s anger was genuine, and it might well have cost him votes upstate.
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The wounds inflicted on Smith and his supporters took years to heal, if they ever did. Two days after the election, Woodrow Wilson’s former aide, Joseph Tumulty, who had become friendly with many Tammany figures and had spoken at Tammany rallies, crossed paths with a friend’s son on a street in Washington. The son was holding two pictures of Al Smith, saying that he “was going to place them in his room for memory’s sake. The boy did not know it,” Tumulty wrote, “but his remark left me with a gulp in my throat.”

More than a decade later, Tumulty revisited the insults, slanders, and lies that were heaped upon Smith because he dared believe that a Catholic from an urban slum was qualified to be president of the United States. In a letter to Maryland Senator Millard Tydings, Tumulty summoned the memories of Smith’s defeat as he sought to ensure than anybody who had had a hand in the campaign of hate was frozen out of the federal government. “The memories of the campaign of 1928 with its ugliness, its meanness, and its intolerance will live with me until the day I die,” Tumulty wrote. “From every nook and cranny of the lower political world every contemptible means were resorted to . . . to destroy the man you and I supported, Governor Smith. No man who played a part in that campaign or subscribed to its maintenance is entitled to the smallest consideration at the hands of this administration.”
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Even Smith’s beloved wife, Katie, was the subject of scorn. The Republican Party circulated a pamphlet entitled
Mrs. Herbert Hoover: American Through and Through
, which implied that the daughter of Irish immigrants was something other than American, while a prominent Republican National committeewoman asked, with undisguised contempt, “Could you imagine Mrs. Smith in the White House?”
⁵⁵

From Smith’s defeat and humiliation, however, came signs of the changes sweeping the nation and the Democratic Party. The new Democratic Party of urban residents and immigrant-stock constituents was created not in 1932, when FDR won the presidency, but in Smith’s failed campaign of 1928. Smith captured a majority of votes in the nation’s twelve largest cities; Republicans had won those cities four years earlier by 1.6 million votes. White ethnic neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and other major industrial cities saw large increases in the Democratic column as Jews, Italians, and Poles joined with the Irish in supporting a candidate who was, in spirit and in fact, one of them. The political realignment associated with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the creation of the New Deal owed much to the personal narrative of Alfred E. Smith, a sachem of Tammany Hall. “Before the Roosevelt Revolution,” wrote political scientist Samuel Lubell, “there was an Al Smith Revolution.”
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It was Irish America’s revolution, too, a revolution rooted in a transatlantic Irish narrative of hunger, powerlessness, and grievance; a revolution that created a more pluralistic, activist political culture in New York; a revolution achieved under the auspices of the nation’s most famous political machine, Tammany Hall, and guided by a silent saloonkeeper whose father had escaped death and starvation in nineteenth-century Ireland.

TWELVE

THE BATTLE OF TWO GOVERNORS

O
n a late November evening in 1930 not long after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reelected governor of New York in a historic landslide, one of Charlie Murphy’s protégés was summoned to dinner at the Executive Mansion on Eagle Street in Albany. Edward J. Flynn, the thirty-eight-year-old son of Irish immigrants, was the powerful Democratic Party boss of the Bronx—he took over the party there in 1922, at Murphy’s behest, and restored order to an organization that was threatening to break apart because of feuds, rivalries, and uncertain leadership. He and Roosevelt got to know each other during the long Democratic National Convention in 1924, and they struck up a friendship that was not nearly as unlikely as the relationships Roosevelt had forged with some of Tammany’s less-polished characters. Flynn, a graduate of Fordham Law School who may well have been born wearing a suit and tie, was not among the rowdy New Yorkers who hooted and hollered while William Jennings Bryan tried to explain away the Ku Klux Klan. He was cultivated, reserved, and studious, uncomfortable in the company of backslappers. “I was not an ‘easy mixer,’ indeed, [I] found it quite difficult to move about with facility among strange people,” Flynn wrote.
¹

Roosevelt called him “Eddie.” There is no indication that Flynn called his new friend “Frank.”

Flynn followed FDR to Albany in 1929, serving as the new governor’s secretary of state. The title sounded impressive, but the duties were fairly prosaic. Flynn functioned as a political hunter and gatherer, stalking the state for information and gossip under the guise of overseeing fishing licenses and racehorses. At least, that’s how Flynn interpreted his job. His predecessor as secretary of state had had a more grandiose vision of his duties, but Robert Moses was a more grandiose character. Al Smith had pleaded with FDR to retain Moses as secretary of state, but, after weeks of nonanswers, the new governor delivered his verdict: Moses would be fired—sort of. He continued to serve as the czar of the state park system, but not as an all-purpose adviser. “He rubs me the wrong way,” FDR said of Moses. And so Franklin Roosevelt dismissed a man with impeccable reformer credentials and Ivy League degrees, replacing him with one of Charlie Murphy’s men.
²

In 1930, Republicans sought to capitalize on Flynn’s presence in FDR’s inner circle, circulating a campaign leaflet charging that “Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, once the avowed enemy of Tammany . . . is now the champion of the organization of the infamous Tweed.”
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The world of politics surely was turned upside down.

. . .

Ed Flynn’s dinner in the Executive Mansion on that November evening in 1930 was an intimate affair—the party was limited to Flynn, Governor Roosevelt, and the governor’s chain-smoking, gnomish personal assistant, Louis Howe, a onetime journalist who had devoted his life to furthering FDR’s ambitions. The three men made polite conversation while dinner was served on a small table in front of one of the mansion’s several fine fireplaces. After the meal was finished and the plates taken away, the three men retired to the library, where the governor got down to business.

“Eddie,” Roosevelt said, turning his attention to his secretary of state, “my reason for asking you to stay overnight is that I believe I can be nominated for the Presidency in 1932 on the Democratic ticket.”
⁴

Flynn could not have been shocked, for the newspapers had been filled with speculation that another Roosevelt might be on his way to the White House, especially after FDR won reelection by three-quarters of a million votes in 1930. But there was much more to the FDR presidential boom than his landslide victory. The nation’s economy was slumping and on its way to a catastrophic depression following the stock market crash of 1929. Times were bad enough in 1930—the national jobless rate was just under 9 percent—but they were about to get much worse, as unemployment reached 16 percent in 1931 and 24 percent in 1932. Banks failed, businesses closed, and hope disappeared from city streets and rural villages. Herbert Hoover, elected to the White House in a landslide over Al Smith in 1928, looked absolutely beatable as Roosevelt confided his ambitions to Flynn and Howe.

Roosevelt’s announcement complicated Flynn’s life, because FDR was not the only friend of his who was considered presidential material. Al Smith, whom Flynn had known longer than he’d known Roosevelt, was not finished with politics—or at least few Democrats believed that he was. The press referred to him as a potential candidate in 1932 despite the former governor’s insistence that he was content to remain out of public life. Like so many New Yorkers, Flynn had a special place in his heart for Smith, the kid from the Fulton Fish Market who had risen to become a national figure.