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The Forgotten Virtues of Tammany Hall

By TERRY GOLWAYJAN. 17, 2014


DURING last summers contentious primary campaign, Bill de
Blasio managed to get himself selected as his partys
candidate for mayor of New York without the support of the
Democratic Partys once-powerful county organizations.
Historically, thats quite an achievement. Even Ed Koch, the
man who helped put a stake in the heart of Tammany Hall in
the early 1960s, had the tacit backing of machines in
Brooklyn and the Bronx when he captured the mayoralty in
1977.
Political machines clearly arent what they used to be. But
last falls designation of the old Tammany Hall headquarters
on Union Square as a city landmark is a reminder of just how
powerful the nations most famous machine was, and why it
remains a presence in political conversations.
Tammany Hall shorthand for the faction that controlled Manhattans Democratic
Party for most of a 150-year period has a well-deserved place in the annals of
urban misgovernment in the United States. It stole elections, it intimidated political
antagonists, and it shook down contractors and vendors. It produced the very face
of political corruption, William M. Tweed, known to friend and foe as Boss. And it
was at best indifferent to the grievances of African-Americans and, later, Hispanics
in New York.
But theres more to the story. Tammany Halls leaders delivered social services at a
time when City Hall and Albany did not. They massaged justice at a time when the
poor did not have access to public defenders. And they found jobs for the
unemployed when the alternative was hunger and illness.
Barbara Porges, a Tammany district leader years before women won the right to
vote, prided herself on knowing the names and predicaments of peddlers who
worked on Orchard Street in the heart of her district. When one of them, an onion
seller, contracted tuberculosis, Ms. Porges raised money to send him to a drier
climate. Nobody saw reason to ask how this was achieved.
For generations of immigrants and their children in Manhattan, the face of
government was the face of the local Tammany ward heeler. And it was a friendly
face. This was something entirely new for Russian Jews, Southern Italians and, to be
sure, the Irish who dominated the machine. Their experience with politics in the old
country was not quite so amiable.

For Tammany, power rested on voter turnout. And turnout was a function of
relentless outreach and tireless service. The legendary Tammany leader George
Washington Plunkitt the man who coined the phrase honest graft met with
constituents and lesser Tammany officials in his district several times a week to find
out who was happy with Tammanys services and who required some special
attention.
Another notable Tammany district leader who worked his way up from poverty,
Jeremiah T. Mahoney, once insisted that he and other Tammany colleagues never
forgot the dire circumstances of their impoverished childhoods amid the splendor of
late 19th-century Manhattan. Those memories, he argued, led Tammany to support
progressive reforms like workers compensation, the beginning of minimum-wage
laws, the federal income tax, public pensions for widows and children, greater
government regulation of the workplace and private property, and other laws that
helped set the stage for the New Deal in the 1930s. The Tammany machines two
greatest advocates for social reform were Mahoneys law partner, Senator Robert F.
Wagner, and the four-time governor Alfred E. Smith.
At the same time, Tammany resisted the reform movements impulse to impose an
evangelical Anglo-Protestant morality on the Catholics and Jews who made up the
bulk of New Yorks poor. Many private charities in the early 20th century were
obsessed with dividing the poor into those considered worthy of help and those
whose personal lives disqualified them for assistance.
Tammany figures, many of them descended from survivors of the potato famine in
the mid-19th century, made no attempt to investigate the claims of those who
sought their help. One of the machines legendary scoundrels, Big Tim Sullivan,
explained how he approached those who sought a free meal in his clubhouse: I
never ask a hungry man about his past. I feed him not because he is good, but
because he needs food.
Yes, many Tammany figures, including Sullivan, were corrupt. But its hard not to
detect more than a little bigotry in the rhetoric of the machines foes. Andrew D.
White, president of Cornell University and one of the late 19th centurys mostcelebrated reformers, once complained that under Tammany and its imitators, a
crowd of illiterate peasants, freshly raked from Irish bogs, or Bohemian mines, or
Italian robber nests, exercised virtual control over New York and other cities
packed with immigrants.
Indeed they did, thanks to Tammanys embrace of an early form of multiculturalism.
Tammanys Irish leaders were quick to incorporate Jews into their clubhouses
(Herbert Lehman, the first Jew elected governor of New York, was vice chairman of
Tammanys finance committee in the mid-1920s), and while it was hardly ahead of
its times on race relations, it encouraged black participation at a time when fellow
Democrats in the South suppressed voting rights.

Tammany Hall certainly was guilty of many of the offenses arraigned against it. But
those flaws should not overshadow Tammanys undoubted virtues. The machine
succeeded not simply because it could round up votes. It succeeded because it was
unafraid of the grunt work of retail politics and because it rarely lost touch with its
voters.
Terry Golway is the author of the forthcoming book Machine Made: Tammany Hall
and the Creation of Modern American Politics.

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