The infamous, graft-ridden New York machine did a lot of good.
For an organization carted off to the political graveyard decades ago, Tammany Hall had a pretty lively year in 2024. It was a poor scribbler indeed who did not think to summon Tammany’s ghost while detailing the alleged crimes of Mayor Eric Adams and his top advisors, now put on hold and awaiting a post-mayoral-election review by Trump’s Justice Department.
Tammany Hall has long been a reliable journalistic and historical reference point for minds content to retell hand-me-down tales of municipal depravity, secure in the knowledge that by doing so there will be no demands for corrections or revisions. Tammany Hall — the name comes from the meeting place for a private society that controlled Manhattan’s Democratic Party — cannot sue for defamation. And besides, who would object to overly broad characterizations of a historically vilified political machine, never mind that it managed to exist for nearly a century-and-a-half with the approval of significant portions of New York’s voting public?
But the deceased organization that many have invoked to represent the spirit of corruption past in fact produced two of the most influential and admired New York politicians of the last century: Al Smith, quite possibly the state’s greatest governor and a presidential candidate in 1928, and Robert Wagner, a longtime U.S. senator who helped write some of the New Deal’s most significant laws. Both men were proud proteges of longtime Tammany boss Charles Francis Murphy, the bete noire of reformers in the early 20th century and, not coincidentally, the most effective and longest-serving leader in the machine’s history, running it from 1902 until his death in 1924.
The Tammany of journalistic stereotype does not account for the likes of Smith and Wagner and a remarkable legislative record in the second and third decades of the 20th century. Tammany Hall could just as easily be associated with progressive reform as it is with egregious graft.
Yes, it’s complicated.
Let’s start by noting that Tammany certainly did have some dubious characters and sinister moments. But as the righteous and the pure dwell upon these flaws, let them also recall that once upon a time the Democratic Party was the home of arch-segregationists, Klansmen and dusty demagogues. Not every Democrat, of course, fit that description, and eventually the party evolved. The same could be said about Tammany. Except that it isn’t.
Tammany Hall could just as easily be associated with progressive reform as it is with egregious graft.
Oh, some have tried. In the 1960s, political historians J.J. Huthmacher at Rutgers University and John Buenker at the University of Wisconsin sought to direct attention to the ways in which Tammany and other machines provided informal social services at a time when Washington remained in the thrall of laissez-faire economic dogma. Their insights, alas, never did penetrate enough classrooms and newsrooms, perhaps because the thought of ham-handed politicos leading the charge for progressive social change was simply too complex for delicate minds to process.
And so, while the depredations of Tammany are so well known that the public has not demanded specifics, its achievements are known but to a few. For example, in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, the Tammany-dominated state Legislature approved measures creating a workers’ compensation fund, requiring employers to give workers one day off per week, setting a minimum wage for state canal workers, limiting the work week to 54 hours for women, limiting the workday for railroad workers to 10 hours, banning child labor in dangerous trades and creating a state college scholarship fund for needy children. Tammany lawmakers, led by the young Wagner in the state Senate and Smith in the state Assembly, got these measures through despite strong opposition from factory owners (and even from Murphy). Famed consumer advocate Florence Kelley called these reforms “extraordinarily radical.” It’s a phrase that isn’t always uttered in the same sentence as Tammany Hall.
Later, after Smith was elected governor in 1918, he and his allies in Tammany pushed for public ownership of bus lines, state control over hydropower, a continuation of rent control measures passed during World War I, income tax exemptions for workers making less than $5,000 a year and more power for the state Labor Department. A noted lawyer and jurist named Jeremiah Mahoney said he and his Tammany colleagues “made the [Democratic] party into a liberal, progressive party” in the 1920s.
As he looked back at the social welfare measures passed in Albany during the first quarter of the 20th century, Robert Wagner declared that Tammany Hall was the “cradle of modern liberalism in America.” This, from the greatest legislator of the New Deal era — the man who helped bring you Social Security, federal support for public housing and the right to unionize. And it is worth remembering, as historians Hutchmacher and Buenker noted a half-century ago, that Tammany’s clubhouses and local ward heelers provided a rudimentary (and, to be sure, not exactly philanthropic) form of social services for New York’s needy long before government abandoned the dogma of laissez-faire.
But as the spate of references earlier this year showed, Tammany cannot escape its association with a corpulent crook by the name William Tweed and his merry ring of co-conspirators, including Richard Connolly, the corrupt city comptroller better known by his nickname, “Slippery Dick.” (What, you thought Richard Nixon was the original?) The Tammany of Boss Tweed collapsed when its corruption was brought to light in 1871, and rightly so. The boss himself died in prison. Slippery Dick lived up to his nickname, escaping the justice system by fleeing to Europe. Their ally A. Oakey Hall became the first New York mayor ever indicted — underinformed news organizations inaccurately named Adams as City Hall’s original sinner last summer.
The corruption associated with Tweed took place just after the Civil War. He and Tammany have been performing penance ever since, for there is hardly a high school or college U.S. history textbook in circulation today that does not contain a Thomas Nast cartoon of the fleshy boss in prison stripes, a humiliation that more ambitious Gilded Age scam artists like Jay Gould and Jim Fisk seem to have avoided.
Tammany cannot escape its association with a corpulent crook by the name William Tweed and his merry ring of co-conspirators. The Tammany of Boss Tweed collapsed when its corruption was brought to light in 1871, and rightly so. The boss himself died in prison.
The persistence of Tweed’s Tammany as the archetype of political corruption may be inevitable. But a better understanding of the nation’s most famous political machine ought to account for the Tammany of Smith and Wagner and the converts they made along the way — most prominently Frances Perkins, an earnest social reformer who worked with Smith and Wagner after the Triangle fire and went on to become Franklin Roosevelt’s labor secretary. The Smith-Wagner iteration of Tammany earned the respect of the gimlet-eyed muckraker Lincoln Steffens, who once observed that “Tammany kindness is real kindness, and will go far.” Steffens won fame as a dogged critic of urban politics in the early 20th century, so his generous words for Tammany would seem as unlikely as an MSNBC host’s insistence that Donald Trump might have a point about … well, anything.
The kindness that Steffens referenced was indeed real, even if critics viewed the delivery of holiday turkeys, new shoes and piles of coal to the poor as part of a cynical bread-and-circus formula deployed by an otherwise self-serving criminal enterprise. But those gestures were only part of Tammany’s street-level relationship with its constituents, who tended to be poor and working class, generally immigrants or their children. For these New Yorkers, the local Tammany district leader was a valuable connection to government and civic life, combining the roles of social worker, ombudsman, advocate and human resources director. When he served as Tammany’s district leader in the old Gashouse District, now dominated by Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, Murphy regularly positioned himself under a lamp post on the corner of Second Avenue and 20th Street to hear directly from constituents. Murphy was nobody’s idea of a reformer — he was thought to be a silent partner in his brother’s contracting and trucking firm, which somehow managed to win more than a few lucrative government contracts. But even his fiercest critic would concede that he was no out-of-touch elitist, even if his home in the Hamptons featured a nine-hole golf course.
Murphy’s Tammany prospered because it lived up to a formula articulated by his predecessor, the undoubtedly corrupt Richard Croker. Addressing critics who said the machine engaged in gutter politics, Croker said, “If we go down in the gutter, it is because there are men in the gutter, and you have to go down where they are if you are going to do anything with them.” Tammany, at its best, never condescended, never judged and always met its constituents where they were.
The persistence of Tweed’s Tammany as the archetype of political corruption may be inevitable. But a better understanding of the nation’s most famous political machine ought to account for Tammany’s street-level relationship with its constituents, who tended to be poor and working class. For these New Yorkers, the local Tammany district leader was a valuable connection to government and civic life.
Louis Eisenstein, a Tammany operative on the Lower East Side from 1917 until early the 1960s, recalled seeing his Jewish neighbors beat a path to John F. Ahearn Association near Grand Street, a Tammany club where complaints, pleas for help and questions about procedures were heard and adjudicated, however informally. “Thousands of new citizens and soon-to-be citizens found an impersonal government translated and interpreted here by the personal touch,” Eisenstein wrote of the Ahearn club. “The harshness of life in an unfamiliar New World was cushioned for newcomers who could not fill out citizenship papers or meet excessive rent payments and for those in need of jobs or peddlers’ licenses.”
That sort of constituent service obviously was not systematic, but that doesn’t mean Tammany didn’t have a broader understanding of the larger forces which often battered their constituents and their families. That understanding was born of experience: Many of Tammany’s much-maligned ward heelers and political hacks were reared in the Dickensian world of Gilded Age New York. So they knew whereof they reformed. In explaining why he supported a bill to limit the workweek for women to 54 hours, Assemblyman Tim Sullivan, the boss of the Bowery, explained: “I seen me sister go out to work when she was only fourteen … we ought to help these gals by giving ’em a law which will prevent ’em from being broken down while they’re still young.”
So the next time somebody compares some current municipal outrage to the excesses of Tammany Hall, it might be worth pausing a moment, taking a deep breath, and uttering the following two words:
If only.