Tammany Hall

TAMMANY HALL

TAMMANY HALL. Founded in May 1789 by William Mooney, the Society of Saint Tammany originally began as a fraternal organization that met to discuss politics at Martling's Tavern in New York City. Enthusiastically pro-French and anti-British, the Tammany Society became identified with Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. By 1812 the society boasted some 1,500 members and moved into the first Tammany Hall at the corner of Frankfurt and Nassau streets. In the "labyrinth

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of wheels within wheels" that characterized New York politics in the early nineteenth century, Tammany was the essential cog in the city's Democratic wheel, and carried New York for Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren in the elections of 1828 and 1832.

The adoption by the state legislature in 1826 of universal white male suffrage and the arrival each year of thousands of immigrants changed the character of New York City and of its politics. Despite some early xenophobia, the Tammany leaders rejected the nativism of the Know-Nothing Party. Realizing the usefulness of the newcomers, they led them to the polls as soon as they were eligible to vote; in turn, the new voters looked to the local Democratic district leader as a source of jobs and assistance in dealing with the intricacies of the burgeoning city bureaucracy. Upon the election of Fernando Wood as mayor in 1854, city hall became and remained a Tammany fiefdom.

With the elevation of William Marcy Tweed to grand sachem of the Tammany Society in 1863, Tammany became the prototype of the corrupt city machine, and for a time its power extended to the state capital after Tweed succeeded in electing his own candidate, John Hoffman, governor. The corruption of the Tweed Ring was all pervasive. Tweed and his associates pocketed some $9 million, padding the bills for the construction of the infamous Tweed Courthouse in City Hall Park. The estimated amounts they took in graft, outright theft, real estate mortgages, tax reductions for the rich, and sale of jobs range from $20 million to $200 million. Tweed ended his spectacular career in jail, following an exposé of the ring by the New York Times and Harper's Weekly, whose famous cartoonist, Thomas Nast, lashed out at the boss week after week, depicting him in prison stripes and Tammany as a rapacious tiger devouring the city. "Honest" John Kelly turned Tammany into an efficient, autocratic organization that for several generations dominated New York City politics from clubhouse to city hall.

Kelly's successor as Tammany leader was Richard Croker, who was somewhat more in the Tweed mold; he took advantage of the smooth-running Kelly machine to indulge his taste for thoroughbred horses, fine wines, and high living. Croker initiated the alliance between Tammany and big business, but Charles Francis Murphy, his successor, perfected it. Contractors with Tammany connections built the skyscrapers, the railroad stations, and the docks. A taciturn former saloonkeeper who had been docks commissioner during the administration of Mayor Robert A. Van Wyck, Murphy realized that the old ways were no longer appropriate. He set about developing the so-called New Tammany, which, when it found it was to its advantage, supported social legislation; sponsored a group of bright young men like Alfred E. Smith and Robert Wagner Sr. for political office; and maintained control of the city by its old methods. Murphy died in 1924 without realizing his dream of seeing one of his young men, Al Smith, nominated for the presidency. Murphy was the last of the powerful Tammany bosses. His successors were men of little vision, whose laxity led to the Seabury investigation of the magistrates courts and of the city government.

In 1932, Mayor James J. Walker was brought up on corruption charges before Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt but resigned before he was removed from office. In retaliation the Tammany leaders refused to support Roosevelt's bid for the Democratic nomination for president, and tried to prevent Herbert H. Lehman, Roosevelt's choice as his successor, from obtaining the gubernatorial nomination. As a result, the Roosevelt faction funneled federal patronage to New York City through the reform mayor, Fiorello La Guardia (a nominal Republican). The social legislation of the New Deal helped to lessen the hold of the old-time district leaders on the poor, who now could obtain government assistance as a right instead of a favor. Absorption of most municipal jobs into civil service and adoption of more stringent immigration laws undercut the power base of the city machines. In the 1960s the New York County Democratic Committee dropped the name Tammany; and the Tammany Society, which had been forced for financial reasons to sell the last Tammany Hall on Union Square, faded from the New York scene.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Callow, Alexander B., Jr. The Tweed Ring. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Mandelbaum, Seymour J. Boss Tweed's New York. New York: Wiley, 1965.

Moscow, Warren. The Last of the Big-Time Bosses: The Life and Times of Carmine De Sapio and the Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall. New York: Stein and Day, 1971.

Mushkat, Jerome. Tammany: The Evolution of a Political Machine, 1789–1865. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1971.

Catherine O'Dea / a. g.

See also Civil Service ; Corruption, Political ; Democratic Party ; Machine, Political ; Rings, Political ; Tammany Societies ; Tweed Ring .