TAMMANY HALL AND PROGRESSIVISM: A BENEVOLENT TIGER?

Brendan Mannion

HIST 318: Modernist New York

Dr. Barbara Lorenzkowski

December 9, 2015

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York City

witnessed the most unprecedented immigration in its history. By 1905, four out of five

New Yorkers were either the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves.1 These

newcomers overwhelmingly came from rural village backgrounds who were propelled

into the epitome of an urban metropolis, in which they would have seen more people

walking the streets of New York in an hour than they would have seen previously in their

entire lives.2 The cherished ideal of America as the land of opportunity and wealth was

inevitably tempered by the reality of these poor, illiterate immigrants having to navigate

their way through the unsanitary, crowded tenements and dangerous streets of Lower

Manhattan. An anonymous Italian immigrant supposedly claimed, “I came to America

because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here I found out…the

streets weren’t paved in gold…they weren’t paved at all and I was expected to pave

them.”3 The waves of immigrants fell under the influence of the powerful Democratic

political “machine” that ran New York City, known by the name of its headquarters,

Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall organized these new arrivals into voting blocks which

1 “The Power and the People (Part 4)” in New York: A Documentary Film, directed by Ric Burns, aired November 17, 1999, Youtube,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urgO53m-qSE.

2 Pete Hamill in Irish New York: A New Look at Tammany Hall and its Legacy, City University of New York Lecture Series, 2009, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVy702gf84.

3 Paul Lunde, Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World’s Most Successful Industry (London: DK, 2004), 119.

4 Ibid.

2

3

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comprised political districts, each with its own “boss”.4 These “bosses” were to ensure

that their districts voted for candidates selected by Tammany Hall.5 In exchange for votes

at election time, immigrants were provided with basic amenities in times of need as well

as desperately needed work.6 Tammany Hall also frequently accelerated the

naturalization process, offered protection and even provided entertainment.7 However,

Tammany was already synonymous with corruption, graft and as a protector of vice in

the city by the time this “second wave” of immigrants, mostly Italians and Jews, arrived

between 1885 and 1920.8 The Irish who came before them in the wake of the Great

Famine in Ireland during the eighteen-forties, were by then largely able to integrate into

the bureaucracy of the city and pursue a higher form of social mobility.9 The Irish

comprised the highest number of the machine’s followers and were the first beneficiaries

of its patronage system.10 Street gangs employed by the organization, performed raids on

ballot boxes during elections and there were even thefts of ballots.11 The most famous

political cartoonist at the time, Thomas Nast, lambasted Tammany Hall as a predatory

tiger that was killing democracy and intimidating New York City.12 The “Tammany

Tiger” representation stuck and would prove enduringly popular into the next century.

Yet, in 1917, another political cartoon depicted the Tammany Tiger in a much less

4 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid; 121.9 Ibid; Thomas M. Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants: The Progressive Years, (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 86-90. 10 Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, 90. 11 Lunde, Organized Crime, 120. 12 Mark Bryant, “Publish and be Damned,” History Today 56, no. 2 (February 2006): 57. Academic Search Complete. Accession Number: 19669076.

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threatening guise alongside a woman, celebrating their mutually beneficial victory of

finally securing women’s suffrage in the state of New York, leading Tammany to another

victory in the polls.13 This clearly demonstrates that Tammany Hall was significantly

invested in more than just pure self-interest politics and were influential in passing what

was then deemed “progressive” legislation. Though Tammany Hall was undoubtedly

corrupt throughout its history, it is often overlooked in its efforts to push unprecedented

reform laws that affected the working-class, immigrants, and marginalized groups such as

women.14 Tammany Hall provided services and opportunities to these groups which

otherwise would have been largely unavailable or much less accessible at the time.

Tammany’s virtual dominance of the political scene in New York City for nearly a

century was due to the understanding that the average immigrant cared more about

immediate concerns such as food on the table and basic housing than any broader social

or political “issue”.15 The middle-class reformers’ efforts were too fractured and coloured

with a form of Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural superiority to ever be effective enough to

counter the perceived pestilence that Tammany represented.16 Not until the nineteen-

13 “The Lady and the Tiger”, November 7, 1917, Senate Collection, Center for

Legislative Archives, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/running-for-office/.

14 Terry Golway in Irish New York: A New Look at Tammany Hall and its Legacy, City University of New York Lecture Series, 2009, Youtube,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVy702gf84.

15 Richard Welch in ibid. 14

15

16 J. Joseph Huthmacher, “Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49, no. 2 (September 1962): 234-35, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1888628; Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889-1913,” The Journal of American History 78, no.2 (September 1991): 542, 545, 558,

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thirties with the ascension of mayor Fiorello La Guardia and his platform to “clean up”

the city, and more significantly, the New Deal reforms of President Franklin D. Roosevelt

that finally established official, basic social welfare legislation, was Tammany’s

influence effectively eroded.17

Tammany Hall’s headquarters during its heyday was located near Union Square at

141 East 14th Street in the infamous Lower East Side. Perhaps the most distinctive feature

stood at the top of the building where there was an imposing statue of St. Tammany or

Chief Tamanend, the semi-mythological American Indian tribal chief that gave the

society its name. The monumental history of New York City up to 1898 undertaken by

Michael Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows details the building’s function to “democratize”

entertainment for the lower classes, which endured as a significant preoccupation of

Tammany’s “populist” politics:

“The Tammany Society kept only one room for itself, renting the rest to entertainment impresarios: Dan Bryant’s Minstrels, a German theater company, classical concerts and opera. The basement-in the French mode-offered the Café Ausant, where one could see tableaux vivant, gymnastic exhibitions, pantomimes, and Punch and Judy shows. There

was also a bar, a bazaar, a Ladies’ Café, and an oyster saloon. All this-with the exception of Bryant’s-was open from seven till midnight for a combination price of fifty cents”.18

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2079533; S.J. Mennell, “Prohibition: A Sociological View,” Journal of American Studies 3, no. 2 (December 1969): 166-68, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27552891. 17

Terry Golway in Irish New York: A New Look at Tammany Hall and its Legacy, City University of New York Lecture Series, 2009, Youtube,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVy702gf84; Arthur Mann, introduction to William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, xxi.

18 Michael Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),<http://www.myilibrary.com?ID=47017> (November 19, 2015), 995.

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The Lady and the Tiger. Illustration by Clifford K. Berryman, Senate Collection, Center for Legislative Archives (Washington D.C., 1917).

The identification of corrupt Tammany Hall politics with the saloon and bawdy

entertainment was seized upon by the burgeoning temperance movement and later,

prohibitionists, as a further argument in favour of banning alcohol.19 Prohibition would

not only supposedly put an end to the country’s rampant alcoholism problem, but also

“democratize” government and curb “Big Business”.20 By breaking the power of the

political bosses based in saloons, the lives of the lower classes would improve and

immigrants would be “Americanized”.21 Besides the almost absurd naiveté inherent in the

Prohibition movement, it was also an attempt to superimpose idealized Anglo-Saxon

19

Mennell, “Prohibition”, 165. 20 Ibid; 166.21 Ibid.

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Protestant moral values on the urban, immigrant “hordes” that were overtaking the

country.22 Alcohol, vice, and political corruption were all conveniently bundled together

with the inferiority of the lower-class immigrant. The majority of Tammany’s core

constituents could never identify with these social “issues” or values. Tammany and other

organizations like it were doing much more for them in practical terms than the middle-

class reformers, who seemed to be operating on a different utopian plane and who could

barely mask their condescension.23 The “noble experiment” of Prohibition which lasted

from 1920 to 1933 proved a disaster, especially in urban areas with large immigrant

populations like New York.24 Tammany’s power and consolidation over the city only

increased, flouting the law and drinking became even more fashionable, and corrupt

Mayor Jimmy Walker, himself a product of the Tammany machine, became a ne’er-do-

well celebrity.25

22 Ibid; 168. 23 J.J. Huthmacher, “Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform,” 235. 24 Mennell, “Prohibition,” 171-73. 25 Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb, Tigers of Tammany (New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 284-85.

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The Tammany Tiger Loose-“What are you going to do about it?” Illustration by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, November 11, 1871.

Even though Prohibition may have been a succinctly middle-class endeavour, the

common understanding of the Progressive Era is too often dictated by the notion that it

was the middle-class reformers, untainted by corruption and imbued with idealism, that

successfully pursued social reform laws out of pity on the behalf of the ignorant, “great

unwashed”.26 This is problematic considering that many typically Progressive reforms

received substantially more support in melting-pot districts than they did in middle-class

constituencies.27 A flurry of progressive laws governing workmen’s compensation,

widows’ pensions, wages and hours legislation, factory safety legislation, and tenement

laws were enacted not only through the efforts of middle-class lobbyists but

26 Huthmacher, “Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform,” 234.27 Ibid; 235.

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instrumentally through the lower class.28 Tammany Hall, regardless of its ultimate

motives, served as the conduit that finally allowed such laws to be passed in the state

legislature.29 Perhaps there is no greater evidence of this than the laws passed in the wake

of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire in 1911.30 The New York State legislature

established the Factory Investigating Commission which secured passage of over fifty

labour laws during the next four years, providing a model factory code that was widely

copied in other states.31 The most active and prominent members of the Commission

were State Senator Robert F. Wagner and Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith, who were both

products of the Tammany political machine.32 Both men were protégés of Tammany Hall

leader, Charles Francis Murphy.33 In 1913 alone, the state legislature which was under his

control passed laws improving sanitary conditions in the workplace, a law that ratified the

federal income tax, stricter regulations over the New York Stock Exchange, and despite

opposition, scheduled a public referendum on women’s suffrage.34 President Franklin D.

Roosevelt even claimed in the nineteen-thirties that nothing his administration did in the

New Deal was actually “new”, because Al Smith who eventually became governor of

New York in the nineteen-twenties had already set the precedent.35

28 Ibid; 238. 29

Welch and Golway in Irish New York; Czitrom in “Underworlds and Underdogs,” 553-55. 30

Huthmacher, “Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform,” 238.31 Ibid.32 Ibid. 33

Golway in Irish New York.34 Ibid.35 Ibid.

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Tammany Hall and 14th St. West, Photograph by Irving Underhill, c.1914. Library of Congress.

Another leading figure who trumped the convenient generalization that Tammany

was purely a self-gratifying organization with total disregard for the welfare of its

constituents was Timothy Daniel Sullivan, more commonly known as “Big Tim”

Sullivan. Sullivan was colloquially called the “King of the Bowery”. Sullivan was a

child of Irish immigrants escaping the Great Famine of the eighteen-forties.36 He grew up

in the notorious poverty-stricken, crime-infested Five Points area of Manhattan.37 During

his primary school years, Sullivan quickly learned the important role that Tammany Hall

district leaders played in the community. An oft-repeated story of Sullivan recounted how

he went to school one winter with his shoes completely broken down and his Irish teacher

36 Welch in Irish New York; Czitrom in “Underworlds and Underdogs,” 539. 37 Ibid;---540.

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directed him to the local Tammany district leader who gave him a chit for a new pair of

shoes.38 When Sullivan later became a power broker in city politics, one of his many

popular initiatives was distributing shoes to the needy during the Christmas season.39

Sullivan also initiated a Tammany tradition of holding large Christmas Eve “feasts”,

aptly described as “blow-outs”, in which Tammany officials personally served turkey

dinner and alcohol to poor citizens of the Bowery, most of whom had helped elect the

Sullivan organization. The finishing touch at these extravagant events was entertainment

from vaudeville celebrities. These activities sponsored by Sullivan ensured continued

support from his districts, particularly because they were much more attractive than any

official charitable drive organized by the city.40 Sullivan started out as a leader of

newspaper boys in the city and then eventually opened his own saloons, thereby starting

his initiation into Tammany politics.41 Sullivan also established a reputation for being a

“kingpin” of vice in the Lower East Side, particularly the Bowery district. He was a

protector of illegal gambling and had connections with various organized crime groups.

One infamous Irish gang he employed when he started out was called the Whyos.42 He

also did not hesitate to use the then-burgeoning Jewish and Italian street gangs as repeat

voters during elections.43 By 1901, he was also accused of being involved in organized

prostitution which was widespread in the Bowery and Tenderloin districts. Though there

is no evidence to suggest that Sullivan was directly involved, many of his subordinates

38 Welch in Irish New York. 39 Ibid.

40 New York Times, Dec. 25, 1897, p. 2. 40

41 Welch in Irish New York. 42 Ibid.43 Ibid.

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definitely were.44 Despite this, Sullivan was able to maintain support so successfully

because he was more acquainted with the realities of working-class demand. He could

deliver various services, including those that would have been deemed “progressive”, to

them more efficiently than the moralistic reformers. Perhaps more importantly, people

were drawn to him because he himself came from “the gutter” and his constituents

identified with him because he appeared to share their worldview and values. Sullivan

made large investments in movie-houses, vaudeville theatres and cheap nickelodeons

which were growing in popularity among the working class.45 In doing so he solidified

his opposition to the unpopular Sunday “blue laws” which prohibited vaudeville shows

and movies on Sundays on “immoral” grounds.46 This further endeared him to the

immigrant working classes. Sullivan claimed in 1907 that, “the best way to ruin a large

cosmopolitan city like ours, which virtually lives off our visiting strangers, is to enforce

or keep on the statute books such blue laws which don’t belong to our age.”47 In the final

years of his life, Sullivan played an integral part in passing social welfare legislation,

most significantly a law in 1912 that limited the working hours per week to fifty-four for

around four hundred thousand women working in New York factories.48 Sullivan also

promoted woman suffrage as an extension of his “politics of inclusion” when it came to

voting, although he would not live to see it enacted in New York in 1917.49 Sullivan

severely deteriorated psychologically beginning in 1912, possibly as a result of

contracting tertiary syphilis.50 On August 31, 1913, after his male nurses fell asleep

44 Ibid; Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs,” 550. 45 Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs,” 552. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid; 554; Welch in Irish New York. 49 Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs,” 555.50 Ibid; 558; Welch in Irish New York.

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during an all-night card game, Sullivan escaped their supervision and was run over by a

train the same night.51 As many as seventy-five thousand people lined the Bowery to

watch “Big Tim’s” funeral procession, described as one of the largest in the city’s

history.52 It was also noted by the New York Sun for its remarkable social diversity:

“There were statesmen and prizefighters, judges, actors, men of affairs, police officials,

women splendidly gowned and scrubwomen, panhandlers and philanthropists- never was

there a more heterogeneous gathering.”53 This large and varied last show of respect

refuted any assertion by Sullivan’s enemies that he was merely the associate of

The Bowery, New York. Photograph by Detroit Publishing Co; c. 1900. Library of Congress. criminals.54 It was a lasting testament to a man who represented not only the corrupt side

51 Ibid.52 Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs,” 558.53 New York Sun, Sept. 16, 1913, p. 4.54

Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs,” 558.

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of Tammany, but more importantly its broader potential for benefiting the social welfare

of many in the city and the ability to take constructive action to actually attain it.

The historiographical understanding of the Progressive Era in American history is

overshadowed by the notion that it was the Anglo-Saxon conservative reformers who

paved the way for social welfare legislation and that the political machines who

controlled the inner cities were only concerned with “spoils politics” and self-interest. A

closer examination of Tammany Hall reveals that though it was undoubtedly corrupt and

morally dubious, it was also more often than not a leading voice for the working class,

women, and ethnic minorities. Tammany Hall was instrumental in passing pioneering

progressive legislation in the state of New York and also stood as a bastion of social

mobility and protection for the underclass who was constantly stereotyped by the elite as

being ignorant and uncivilized.55 The urban working class voted for Tammany time and

again because it represented their shared experience as opposed to the parties of the

middle-class reformers who relied on “muckraking” journalism and religious idealism to

delineate the ills of society from a comfortable vantage point.56 For those who lived in the

“gutter” of New York City, Tammany Hall was a very necessary institution which

offered the most consistently practical form of aid well until the New Deal of the

nineteen-thirties.57

Bibliography

Bryant, Mark. “Publish and Be Damned.” History Today 56, no. 2 (February 2006): 56-7.Academic Search Complete. Accession Number: 19669076.

55 Ibid.56 Huthmacher, “Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform,” 235. 57 Golway in Irish New York.

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“The Power and the People (Part 4)” in New York: A Documentary Film. Directed by Ric Burns. Aired November 17, 1999.Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=urgO53m-qSE. 113 minutes.

Connable, Alfred, and Edward Silberfarb. Tigers of Tammany: Nine men who ran New York. New York, Chicago and San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.

Czitrom, Daniel. “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889-1913.” The Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (September 1991): 536-58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2079533.

Golway, Terry. Irish New York: A New Look at Tammany Hall and its Legacy. City University of New York Lecture Series. 2009.Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVy702gf84. 92 minutes.

Hamill, Pete. ------.

Henderson, Thomas M. Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants: The Progressive Years. New York: Arno Press, 1976.

Huthmacher, J. Joseph. “Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49, no.2 (September 1962): 231-41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1888628 .

Lunde, Paul. Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World’s Most Successful Industry.London: DK Publishing Inc., 2004.

Mann, Arthur. Introduction to Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, vii-xxii. William L. Riordon. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963.

Mennell, S. J. “Prohibition: A Sociological View.” Journal of American Studies 3, no.2 (December 1969): 159-75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27552891.

Wallace, Michael, and Edwin G. Burrows. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998; iLibrary, 2015. <http://www.myilibrary.com?ID=47017>.

Welch, Richard. Irish New York: A New Look at Tammany Hall and its Legacy. City University of New York Lecture Series. 2009.Youtube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVy702gf84. 92 minutes.

Senate Collection, Center for Legislative Archives. “The Lady and the Tiger.” November 7, 1917. http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/running-for-office/.

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