Tammany Hall

• 1. Introduction

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  Tammany Hall loomed over New York City politics for nearly two centuries, a machine so powerful that its name became shorthand for corruption across the entire country. Founded on the 12th of May, 1789, as a fraternal social club, it ended its days in 1967 as a hollowed-out relic, dissolved after decades of scandal, prosecution, and shifting demographics had stripped it of everything that once made it formidable. How did a club for "pure Americans" transform into the most durable and controversial political organization in American history? How did it survive the fall of Boss Tweed, the prosecution of Lucky Luciano's allies, and the crusades of reformers from Theodore Roosevelt to Fiorello La Guardia? And what did it actually deliver to the millions of New Yorkers who kept voting for its candidates generation after generation?

• 2. From Wigwam to Machine

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  William Mooney, a Nassau Street upholsterer, held the title of first Grand Sachem of the Tammany Society, but it was wealthy merchant John Pintard who wrote the constitution and gave the organization its founding purpose. Pintard declared the Society to be a political institution founded on a strong republican basis whose democratic principles would serve to correct the aristocracy of the city. The Society dressed itself in Native American symbolism, calling its meeting hall a "wigwam" and taking the name "Tammany" from Tamanend, a Lenape chief of the late seventeenth century who had become a folk hero particularly around Philadelphia. In 1790, the Society assisted the federal government in securing a peace treaty with the Muscogee at the request of President George Washington.

  Aaron Burr transformed Tammany from a social club into a genuine political weapon. By 1798, Burr saw the Society as a means of countering the Society of the Cincinnati, dominated by supporters of Alexander Hamilton. He used Tammany alongside his Manhattan Company as a campaign asset during the 1800 presidential election, and some historians believe that without Tammany support, John Adams might have won re-election. Burr's fall after killing Hamilton left a vacuum, and Matthew L. Davis filled it in 1805 with the organizational innovations that turned Tammany into a machine: a state charitable charter, a General Committee that played kingmaker in city politics, and a ward-level investigatory committee that tracked political friends and foes for the organization's leadership.

  Corruption appeared almost immediately. In 1808, the New York Common Council found multiple officials guilty of embezzlement and other abuses. City comptroller Benjamin Romaine was removed from office for using his authority to acquire land without payment. Davis responded with a public relations maneuver, reinterring the remains of thirteen Revolutionary War soldiers who had died in British prison ships. At a ceremony on the 13th of April, 1808, symbolic coffins were sailed to Brooklyn. The state voted to provide $1,000 for a monument, pocketed the money, and the monument was not built until 1867.

• 3. Building the Immigrant Base

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  In the 1840s, over 130,000 Irish immigrants arrived in New York City fleeing the Great Famine, joining scores of thousands of fellow countrymen who had arrived in prior decades. By 1855, Irish immigrants composed 34 percent of the city's voter population. Tammany had originally been dedicated to representing "pure" Americans and for years dismissed or marginalized Irish and German New Yorkers. On the 24th of April, 1817, immigrant discontent exploded into a huge riot during a Tammany general committee session.

  The 1821 voting reforms that enfranchised all white men made acceptance of immigrants a political necessity. Tammany's response was comprehensive: it provided patronage employment, job referrals, legal aid, food, shelter, employment insurance, citizenship and naturalization services, and other extralegal help to new arrivals. In exchange, immigrants pledged their votes. The arrangement was transactional and, for many recipients, genuinely life-saving.

  George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany figure whose activities became legendary, captured this welfare function in vivid detail. According to one account, during a single day he assisted fire victims, secured the release of six drunks, paid the rent of a poor family and gave them food money, found jobs for four people, attended two constituent funerals, attended a Bar Mitzvah, and attended a Jewish couple's wedding. Whether or not this particular day happened precisely as described, it illustrated how Tammany positioned itself as the one institution that actually showed up when ordinary New Yorkers needed help. By 1854, with the election of Fernando Wood as the first mayor to ascend through the Tammany machine, the organization had translated this social work into near-total control of New York City Democratic politics.

• 4. Boss Tweed's Empire

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  William M. Tweed took control as grand sachem in 1858 and over the next decade built a system of graft that his biographer Kenneth D. Ackerman described as "an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box." Tweed's real power came not from his elected position in the state senate but from appointed offices that gave him access to city funds and contractors. He embezzled directly from public works programs and extracted money through racketeering and protection schemes.

  Under his domination, New York City urbanized the Upper East and Upper West Sides of Manhattan, construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began, land was set aside for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and social services expanded to levels previously unknown in the city. Beginning in 1869, Tweed proteges John T. Hoffman and A. Oakey Hall served simultaneously as governor and mayor, extending his reach into practically every aspect of city and state governance. The state debt doubled from $50 million to $113 million over two years.

  Tweed's fall began on the 21st of January, 1871, when county auditor James Watson was fatally injured in a sleigh accident. Watson kept the ring's financial records. He died one week later, and Watson's successor handed the accounts to former New York sheriff James O'Brien, who passed them to The New York Times. Harper's Weekly joined the assault, with editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast proving particularly effective among the large portion of the Tammany base that could not read. At a mass meeting on the 4th of September at Cooper Union, a committee of seventy prominent reformers was appointed to examine the ring's misdeeds. Tammany candidates were defeated in the 1871 city elections. Samuel J. Tilden, who had served on the Committee of Seventy, rode the scandal to the governorship and narrowly lost the contested presidential election of 1876. Tweed himself was arrested in 1872, convicted, escaped, was recaptured, and died in Ludlow Street Jail in 1878.

• 5. Reformers and Croker's Reach

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  Richard Croker succeeded to the leadership of Tammany in 1886 and extended its power in ways that Tweed never managed, eventually controlling both the New York City government and the state legislature in Albany by 1892. Croker developed a new revenue stream in which businesses paid Tammany directly rather than bribing individual officeholders, with payments then distributed as needed. Republican boss Thomas C. Platt adopted similar methods, and the two men essentially divided control of New York State between them.

  In the 1886 mayoral race, Tammany faced a direct challenge from the United Labor Party and its candidate Henry George, who had been convinced to run after Tammany covertly offered him a congressional seat to stay out. Croker allied with the anti-Tammany Swallowtail faction to nominate Abram Hewitt, son-in-law of Peter Cooper and a man with an impeccable reputation. Hewitt defeated both George and a Republican challenger who was then a former state assemblyman named Theodore Roosevelt.

  Croker learned from the United Labor Party's organizing methods. He established political clubhouses in each Assembly district, replacing the saloons as the organizational hub and drawing in women and children through family excursions and picnics. Applicants for patronage jobs simply had to volunteer at their local club. The system attracted middle-class ethnic voters who would have been repelled by the cruder arrangements of the Tweed era.

  Three successive state investigations in the 1890s chipped away at Croker's standing. The 1894 Lexow Committee, convened after undercover investigations into prostitution and police corruption by Charles Henry Parkhurst and John Erving, sent Croker into self-imposed European exile. A Committee of Seventy that included J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and Elihu Root backed William L. Strong for mayor, and Strong won handily. The final investigation, launched in 1899 at the urging of newly elected governor Theodore Roosevelt, probed Croker's corporate alliances and produced memorable testimony from Croker himself and police chief Bill Devery.

• 6. Murphy, Respectability, and Decline

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  Charles Francis Murphy led Tammany from 1902 until his death in 1924 and brought the organization its closest approach to genuine respectability. Murphy sponsored working-class reform movements through Al Smith, who served as governor between 1919 and 1928, and Robert F. Wagner. He advised Tammany politicians to avoid involvement in gambling, prostitution, the police department, or the public school system. Murphy's tenure culminated in the nomination of Al Smith for president of the United States at the 1928 Democratic National Convention.

  After Murphy died, George Washington Olvany, the first Tammany boss to have received a college education, exercised loose control and allowed familiar corruption to return under Mayor Jimmy Walker. The 1929 stock market crash, press attention on organized crime during Prohibition, and a series of judicial scandals weakened the organization further. In August 1930, state judge and Upper West Side Tammany leader Joseph Force Crater disappeared. Investigations led by Samuel Seabury produced dismissals of Tammany judges and officials, indictments of Tammany figures, and ultimately the resignation of Walker himself.

  Fiorello La Guardia, elected mayor in 1933 with the implicit support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, delivered the organization's most sustained battering. La Guardia reorganized city government with non-partisan officials. In 1936, he led adoption of a new city charter mandating proportional representation for the City Council and abolishing the ward system that had been the foundation of machine politics since 1686. By 1939, roughly three-quarters of city positions required civil service examinations, compared to only about half in 1933. La Guardia defeated Jeremiah T. Mahoney in 1937 to become the first anti-Tammany mayor to win re-election, and won again in 1941.

  Special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, appointed in 1935, obtained the conviction of mob figure Lucky Luciano, a strong Tammany ally. In 1939, Dewey prosecuted and convicted longtime Tammany leader Jimmy Hines on bribery charges. Dewey won three terms as Governor of New York from 1943 through 1954 and presidential nominations in 1944 and 1948 on the strength of these prosecutions.

• 7. The Last Boss

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  Carmine DeSapio became Tammany's first Italian-American boss and tried to rehabilitate its image through a posture of openness that none of his predecessors had attempted. Unlike prior bosses, DeSapio publicized his political decisions and promoted himself as a transparent reformer. He diversified Tammany membership and leadership to include non-white and non-Catholic politicians. In 1953, he engineered the election of Robert F. Wagner Jr. as mayor, and in 1954 he blocked Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.'s campaign for governor while securing the nomination for W. Averell Harriman.

  DeSapio's ties to Frank Costello proved impossible to escape. Costello was convicted of tax evasion in 1954 and continued to influence Tammany officials from prison. After an assassination attempt on Costello in 1957, he conceded authority over organized crime to Vito Genovese, leaving DeSapio without a patron. In 1958, defeats for Harriman and DeSapio's preferred Senate candidate permanently damaged his reform image.

  When Mayor Wagner ran for re-election in 1961, he did so by denouncing DeSapio and Tammany machine politics. Eleanor Roosevelt, former governor Herbert H. Lehman, and Thomas K. Finletter formed the New York Committee for Democratic Voters and helped oust DeSapio from his post as Greenwich Village district leader, a position he had held for two decades. DeSapio ran again for district leader in 1963 and 1965 and lost both times to Ed Koch, leader of the Village Independent Democrats. By 1967, Tammany Hall had ceased to exist, nearly 178 years after its incorporation on the 12th of May, 1789.