Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was an American political organization founded in 1786 and incorporated on May 12, 1789, as the Tammany Society. It became the main local political machine of the Democratic Party and played a major role in controlling New York City and New York state politics. Though initially an independent social organization, at its peak, Tammany Hall became synonymous with the New York County Democratic Party.
At its founding, the Society of St. Tammany was a social fraternal organization and one branch of a network of Tammany societies throughout the new United States of America. Politically, its members were Jeffersonian republicans opposed to the Manhattan aristocracy. As the immigrant population of New York grew, Tammany Hall became an important social and political organization, for Irish Catholic immigrants in particular. Following the 1854 mayoral election and the resulting mayoralty of Fernando Wood, Tammany Hall controlled Democratic Party nominations and political patronage in Manhattan for over a century through its organized network of loyal, well-rewarded, and largely Irish Catholic district and precinct leaders. It also gained support from the New York City business community for its efficient, if corrupt, solutions to problems.
At its peak, Tammany Hall also played a major role in state and national politics, particularly during the Gilded Age, when New York was sharply contested as a swing state, and it hosted the 1868 Democratic National Convention. Its positions typically represented the interests of its immigrant, ethnic, and Catholic voter base, in addition to the personal interests of its leadership. Prominent members or associates of Tammany included Aaron Burr, Martin Van Buren, Fernando Wood, Jimmy Walker, Robert F. Wagner, and Al Smith.
The Tammany Hall organization was also a frequent vehicle for political graft, most famously during the leadership of William M. Tweed, whose 1873 conviction for embezzlement gave the organization its national reputation for corruption. In the following decades, many reformist New York politicians developed national reputations opposing or criticizing Tammany influence, including Samuel J. Tilden, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, Thomas E. Dewey, Jacob Javits, and Ed Koch.
Tammany Hall declined during the twentieth century, following the 1898 consolidation of greater New York City, which forced it to compete directly with other local organizations, and decades of sustained opposition from reform activists and changing demographics in Manhattan. It was dissolved in 1967.
Contents
History
Background
Before 1898, New York City was coterminous with the island of Manhattan and New York County. As the population center of New York state, one of the largest states in the new United States of America, in addition to its status as a commercial center for the continent, struggles for control of city, county, state, and national offices were fierce.
The 1686 charter divided the city into six wards and established a Common Council consisting of an alderman and assistant alderman from each ward. Until 1938, wards were the smallest political units in New York City and the building block of its political organizations.
Under the 1686 charter, the mayor of New York City was appointed by the state government. In 1821, the Common Council was given authority to elect the mayor until, in 1834, the state constitution was amended to require the election of the mayor by direct popular vote.
Early history
The Tammany Society was founded in New York City (at the time coterminous with both the island of Manhattan and New York County) on May 12, 1789, as a club for "pure Americans" and one branch of a wider network of Tammany Societies, the first of which had been formed in Philadelphia in 1772. The name "Tammany" came from Tamanend, a chief of the Lenape in the late seventeenth century who had become a folk hero and symbol of America, particularly in the area around Philadelphia. The Society adopted many Native American words and customs, including referring to their meeting hall as a "wigwam" and their leader as a "grand sachem".
The first Grand Sachem of the Tammany Society was William Mooney, a Nassau Street upholsterer. Although Mooney held the nominal leadership role, wealthy merchant and philanthropist John Pintard established the Society's constitution and its various Native American titles. Pintard declared the Society to be "[a] political institution founded on a strong republican basis whose democratic principles will serve in some measure to correct the aristocracy of our city." In 1790, the Society assisted the federal government in procuring a peace treaty with the Muscogee at the request of President George Washington.
Although many of its earliest civic activities were not explicitly political, the Tammany Society attracted supporters of Governor George Clinton and U.S. secretary of state Thomas Jefferson. At the time, New York state politics were divided between the Clintons, the Schuyler family (including U.S. treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton), and the Livingston family. In 1793, the Society hosted Edmond-Charles Genêt, the controversial representative of the French First Republic to the United States.
By 1798, the Society had grown increasingly political and supportive of the Jeffersonian republican cause. One of the city's leading politicians, Aaron Burr, saw Tammany as an opportunity to counter the Society of the Cincinnati, a fraternal organization largely populated by supporters of Alexander Hamilton and the Schuyler family. Through Burr's influence, Tammany emerged as the center of Jeffersonian politics in New York City. Burr used the Society, along with his own Manhattan Company, as a campaign asset during the 1800 presidential election. Some historians believe that without Tammany support, President John Adams might have won re-election. However, Burr alienated many supporters by opposing Jefferson in the contingent election in the United States House of Representatives, after the electoral college vote resulted in a tie between Burr and Jefferson.
Ascent and corruption (1834–1867)
During its domination by the Albany Regency, the Society also began to accept immigrants as members. DeWitt Clinton had gained political support by appointing immigrants to patronage positions, while Tammany had originally been dedicated to representing "pure" Americans. For many years, this meant that the Society dismissed or marginalized Irish and German New Yorkers. On April 24, 1817, immigrant discontent led to a huge riot during a Tammany general committee session. Following the 1821 voting reforms, however, acceptance became a political necessity. Tammany eventually came to depend on Irish immigration as its source of viability.
In the 1840s, over 130,000 Irish immigrants arrived in New York City to escape the Great Famine, arriving in poverty and joining scores of thousands of their fellow countrymen who had arrived over the prior decades. By 1855, 34 percent of the city's voter population was composed of Irish immigrants. By providing these new arrivals with patronage employment, job referrals, legal aid, food, shelter, employment insurance, and other extralegal services, including citizenship and naturalization services, Tammany secured the lifelong support of the large and growing Irish population, which would form the majority of its electoral base for the next century. In exchange for these services, the Tammany political machine harvested Irish immigrant votes.
By 1854, the support Tammany Hall received from immigrants would firmly establish the organization as the leader of New York City's political scene. With the election of Fernando Wood, the first person to be supported by the Tammany Hall machine, as mayor in 1854, Tammany would proceed to dominate the political arena until the mayoralty of Fiorello La Guardia.
During the 1834 elections, the first in which the popular vote elected the mayor, both Tammany and the Whigs, from their headquarters at the Masonic Hall, battled in the streets for votes and engaged in voter intimidation. Voter intimidation efforts and the collapse of the American economy in the Panic of 1837 led to the rise of political gangs, who used violence and threats of violence to secure political power within the city. During the 1840s, competing political gangs fought for physical territory in a struggle to control the Tammany Society and the city. Isaiah Rynders, a Tammany leader from the sixth ward and member of the General Committee, coordinated campaigns of violence against Tammany opponents (including the growing nativist movement) and rival factions. Many of the gang leaders coordinated their activities from saloons, which became a target of prohibitionists and reformers.
Tweed ring (1867–1873)
After Wood's departure from Tammany Hall in 1858, he was succeeded as grand sachem by William M. Tweed. Over the next decade, Tweed consolidated control over city and state politics considerably while enriching himself beyond any of his predecessors. "Boss" Tweed's rule came to exemplify the corruption of urban political machines and boss rule prior to the Gilded Age, and his conviction for embezzlement was a rallying point for political reform.
Although Tweed was elected to the state senate, his real power came from appointed positions in various branches of the city government. These appointees gave Tweed access to city funds and contractors, thereby controlling public works programs, from which he embezzled funds directly and through more complex racketeering and protection schemes. He also used these programs to provide jobs for the immigrants, especially Irish laborers, who provided Tammany's electoral base. According to Tweed biographer Kenneth D. Ackerman:
It's hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed's system. ... The Tweed ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box. Its frauds had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing and organization.
Under Tweed's 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, orphanages and almshouses were constructed, and social services expanded to unprecedented levels. Beginning in 1869, John T. Hoffman and A. Oakey Hall, both Tweed proteges, served as governor of the state and mayor of the city, respectively. Through their explicit involvement or implicit permission, Tweed was able to expand his operations into practically every aspect of city and state governance. All of this activity also enriched Tweed and elevated him and his allies to the city's wealthy elite, many of whom also engaged in the graft and corruption. Some elites tolerated the Tweed ring because of Tammany's ability to control the immigrant population, but this reputation was undermined by the sectarian Orange Riots of 1870 and 1871. Following the riots, Harper's Weekly and The New York Times, which was the city's only Republican newspaper, began intensified targeted public campaigns against Tweed. The Harper's campaign was particularly effective in undermining Tweed among illiterate New Yorkers, who made up a large majority of the Tammany base, through the work of editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast.
Reform era (1872–1888)
In response to the Tweed allegations, Tammany elected John Kelly, the former county sheriff, as grand sachem. Kelly was not implicated in the Tweed ring, had a reputation for honesty, and was a devout Catholic related by marriage to archbishop of New York John McCloskey. He removed Tweed associates from the Society and tightened the grand sachem's authority over the Tammany hierarchy. Tammany rebounded rapidly, winning back control of city government in the 1874 elections.
In 1886, Kelly was succeeded by his top lieutenant, Richard Croker. In the mayoral election that year, the United Labor Party, an alliance of labor unions, and its nominee Henry George threatened Tammany's status as the representatives of the urban working class. George initially hesitated to run but was convinced to do so after Tammany covertly offered him a seat in Congress to stay out of the mayoral race. To counter George's appeal, Croker allied with the anti-Tammany "Swallowtail" faction to nominate Abram Hewitt for mayor. Hewitt, the leader of the Swallowtails, was the son-in-law of Peter Cooper and had an impeccable reputation; his nomination effectively reunified the Democratic elite with Tammany. Hewitt went on to defeat George and Republican former state assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt.
Following the 1886 campaign, Croker adopted several United Labor Party innovations, in particular the use of political clubhouses. Because Tammany's ward heelers controlled the city's saloons, the new party had organized via "neighborhood meetings, streetcorner rallies, campaign clubs, Assembly District organizations, and trade legions–an entire political counterculture". Croker established the clubhouses, with one in each Assembly district, to take the place of the saloons and involved women and children by sponsoring family excursions and picnics. Under Croker, Tammany appeared more respectable and less obviously connected to saloons and gangs, and the clubhouses created a more efficient framework for patronage distribution; applicants simply had to volunteer at their local club. The clubs attracted a strong membership of middle-class ethnic voters.
Corruption, investigations, and consolidation (1888–1898)
In 1888, Tammany abandoned Hewitt, who had alienated the city's Irish population through his nativism and decision not to review a St. Patrick's Day parade and alienated Tammany by granting fewer patronage jobs than expected. Tammany endorsed Hugh J. Grant, who became the first New York-born Irish American mayor. Although Hewitt ran an efficient government, Croker viewed Hewitt as being too self-righteous and did not grant Croker the patronage jobs he was expecting from a mayor. Grant and Croker established a vast patronage network, which continued under Grant's successor, Thomas Francis Gilroy, and included essentially the entire city workforce. By 1890, Croker had unprecedented and uncontested control within New York City.
Croker also developed a new stream of income from the business community. Instead of bribing individual officeholders, businesses paid Tammany directly. The payments were then distributed as necessary. By 1892, Tammany controlled the state legislature in Albany as well. Through his influence in Albany, Croker was careful to maintain a pro-business climate of laissez-faire and low taxes, while mending fences with labor through legislation which addressed union concerns. Republican boss Thomas C. Platt adopted similar methods, meaning that the two men essentially controlled the state between them.
During the 1890s, Tammany once again faced public scrutiny. In a series of three investigations, each supported by Republican boss Thomas C. Platt, the Republican state legislature held public hearings into Tammany corruption. The first of these, in 1890, was chaired by Jacob Sloat Fassett. Although the committee revealed potential bribes involving Croker's hotel business, its hearings resulted in no indictments. Republicans lost the legislative elections in 1890, and Fassett lost his campaign for governor in 1891.
In 1894, a special committee of the state senate, chaired by Clarence Lexow, focused on corruption within the New York City Police Department. This committee was convened after Charles Henry Parkhurst and John Erving conducted undercover investigations into prostitution and corruption and preached against the police and Tammany Hall. As a result of the Lexow investigations, Croker remained in a self-imposed European exile until 1898 and another Committee of Seventy was formed which included Hewitt, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and Elihu Root, some of the city's richest and most respectable men. In the 1894 election, they supported millionaire dry goods merchant William L. Strong for mayor and forced Tammany's initial candidate, department store magnate Nathan Straus, to withdraw for fear of social ostracization. Strong won the election handily over Hugh J. Grant, whose record as mayor was tarnished by the police investigation, and Republicans swept the state election as well.
Consolidated city and declining influence (1898–1932)
From 1898 to 1945, New York City politics revolved around the conflict between the political machines and reformers. In quiet times, the machines had the advantage of their core of solid supporters, and they exercised control of city and borough affairs and played a major role in the state legislature. In times of crisis, however, particularly the Great Depression, reformers took control of key offices, notably the mayor's office. The reformers were never unified; they operated through a complex network of independent civic organizations, each focused on its own particular agenda. Their membership generally consisted of civic-minded, educated middle-class men and women, usually with expert skills in a profession or business, who deeply distrusted the machines as corrupt.
Rather than establishing one citywide Democratic machine, separate organizations flourished in each of the boroughs, with Tammany Hall remaining the most prominent of the five. The other machines had similar structures to Tammany, with local clubs and a single boss. Republican local organizations were much weaker, but they played key roles in forming reform coalitions. Most of the time they looked to Albany and Washington for their sphere of influence.
In 1901, Seth Low defeated Van Wyck, whose administration was tarnished by the ice trust scandal, and Croker resigned as boss. His chosen successor, Lewis Nixon of Staten Island, resigned within months as well, explaining "I find that I cannot retain my self-respect and remain the leader of the Tammany organization."
From 1902 until his death in 1924, Tammany was led by Charles Francis Murphy, with Timothy Sullivan leading the organization in the Bowery and serving for many of the early years as their spokesman in the legislature and Congress. Murphy's tenure restored some degree of respectability to Tammany and extended its influence in national politics, culminating in the nomination of Al Smith for president of the United States at the 1928 Democratic National Convention. Murphy sponsored a number of working class reform movements through Smith, who served as governor between 1919 and 1928, and Robert F. Wagner. According to Edward J. Flynn, Murphy advised Tammany politicians to avoid involvement in gambling, prostitution, the police department, or the public school system.
La Guardia reforms (1933–1945)
In 1932, the Tammany machine suffered a further setback when Roosevelt was elected president of the United States. Curry and Brooklyn boss John H. McCooey had joined supported Al Smith at the 1932 Democratic National Convention, and Roosevelt and James Farley stripped Tammany of its federal patronage privileges in favor of Flynn. Roosevelt also recruited Joseph V. McKee to run for mayor against the Tammany candidate, John P. O'Brien, in 1933. After withdrawing his support for McKee, Roosevelt complied in the election of Republican and Fusion nominee Fiorello La Guardia, effectively removing even more patronage from Tammany control.
As mayor, LaGuardia reorganized the city government with non-partisan officials and sought to develop a clean and honest city government. When Tammany alderman Alford Williams died in December 1933, the Board of Aldermen defied leadership to elect a La Guardia ally as his successor. The shock from these defections caused Tammany ally Augustus Pierce to collapse and die of a heart attack in the aldermanic chambers. When McCooey died less than a week later, Curry was left with few allies in the city, state, or federal government.
In 1936, La Guardia successfully led the adoption of a new city charter which mandated proportional representation method of electing members of the City Council, thereby abolishing the ward system which formed the basis of political machine organizations in the city, and subordinated the new 26-member City Council to the Board of Estimate. La Guardia filled the city's appointive offices, and the power of Tammany Hall was reduced to a shadow of its former grandeur. La Guardia also greatly increased the number of city jobs subject to civil service examinations. Roughly three-quarters of city positions required job seekers to take an exam in 1939, compared to only about half in 1933. In 1937, La Guardia defeated Jeremiah T. Mahoney to become the first anti-Tammany mayor to win re-election He was re-elected again in 1941. His long reform tenure weakened Tammany in a way that previous reform mayors had not.
During Prohibition, the traditional street gangs Tammany Hall had relied on were replaced by modern organized crime syndicates enriched by bootlegging. Tammany came to depend on criminal bosses, such as Arnold Rothstein, to maintain some measure of street control. Rothstein's murder in 1928 weakened Tammany.
Final years (1945–1967)
In 1941 and 1945, Frank Costello and Tammany Hall supported Brooklyn District Attorney William O'Dwyer for mayor. He lost the 1941 election to La Guardia but won in 1945. O'Dwyer was reelected in 1949, but the following year, a national bribery and gambling scandal implicated O'Dwyer, Costello, and the New York City Police Department. The scandal led to the resignations of hundreds of officers accused of protecting gambling operations and the replacement of all 336 members of the plainclothes division of the New York City Police Department. O'Dwyer resigned on the pretense of an appointment as U.S. ambassador to Mexico by President Harry S. Truman. In the meantime, young lawyers and other reform-minded Democrats founded the Lexington Democratic Club on the Upper East Side in 1949, after being denied access to Tammany Hall politics by the old guard.
The police scandal contributed to the establishment of the Kefauver Committee, a United States Senate investigation into organized crime. Though the hearings did not directly impact Tammany, they reinforced its apparent connection to organized crime. O'Dwyer returned to testify but was unable to offer a persuasive explanation for his visit to Costello's apartment in 1941, when he first sought Tammany support in his campaign for mayor. Following the conviction of a close association on bribery charges, O'Dwyer resigned as ambassador.
Tammany never fully recovered from scandals of the O'Dwyer administration, but it staged a small comeback under the leadership of Carmine DeSapio, its first Italian-American boss, who reestablished boss rule. Unlike his predecessors, however, DeSapio publicly promoted himself as a transparent reformer and made his political decisions known to the press. DeSapio also diversified Tammany membership and leadership, including non-white and non-Catholic politicians. In 1953, he successfully engineered the election of Robert F. Wagner Jr. as mayor over incumbent Vincent Impellitteri, elevating him to the status of kingmaker. In 1954, he supported W. Averell Harriman for the nomination for governor over Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. After convincing Roosevelt to accept a nomination for attorney general as a consolation prize, DeSapio successfully blocked his election while securing election for Harriman.
Despite these electoral successes, DeSapio could not escape his close ties with Costello, who was convicted of tax evasion in 1954. During DeSapio's reign, Costello continued to influence Tammany officials from prison. Following an assassination attempt in 1957, Costello conceded authority over organized crime to Vito Genovese, leaving DeSapio without a patron. In 1958, DeSapio's reform image and political standing were permanently compromised after Harriman and Frank Hogan, his preferred candidate for United States Senate, were defeated by Republicans in an otherwise extremely strong year for the national Democratic Party.
Legacy
Like other urban political machines, Tammany served as a rudimentary public welfare system in the era before the New Deal by providing poor and immigrant New Yorkers with extralegal services. According to one legendary claim, during the course of a single day, Tammany figure George Washington Plunkitt assisted the victims of a house fire, secured the release of six drunks, paid the rent of a poor family and gave them money for food, secured employment for four individuals, attended the funerals of two constituents, attended a Bar Mitzvah, and attended the wedding of a Jewish couple from his ward.
Tammany Hall also served as a social integrator for immigrants by familiarizing them with American society and its political institutions and by assisting them in becoming naturalized citizens. One example was the naturalization process organized by William M. Tweed. Under Tweed's regime, "naturalization committees" were established, made up primarily of Tammany politicians and employees. Their duties consisted of filling out paperwork, providing witnesses, and lending immigrants money for the fees required to become citizens. Judges and other city officials were bribed and otherwise compelled to go along with the workings of these committees. In exchange for all these benefits, immigrants assured Tammany Hall they would vote for their candidates.
List of Tammany Hall bosses
It can be difficult to identify a single leader of the Tammany organization, as the Tammany Society and its political machine operated as separate but coordinated entities. In many periods, the public face and spokesperson of the organization may not have wielded actual political power commensurate with prior leaders. During certain periods of transition or instability, power was shared between two or more individuals.
Headquarters
Early locations
In its very early days, the Tammany Society met in the back rooms of various taverns, most often in Barden's Tavern on Broadway, near Bowling Green. These back rooms served as unofficial campaign headquarters on election days. In 1791, the society opened a museum designed to collect artifacts relating to the events and history of the United States. Originally presented in an upper room of City Hall, it moved to the Merchant's Exchange when that proved to be too small. The museum was unsuccessful, and the Society severed its connections with it in 1795.In 1798, the Society moved to more permanent and spacious quarters in the "Long Room" of Martling's Tavern, at Nassau Street and Spruce Street, near where New York City Hall is today. The Tammany Society controlled the space, which it dubbed "The Wigwam", and let other responsible political organizations it approved of use the room for meetings. This space became commonly known as "Tammany Hall".
Their new headquarters had limitations as well as advantages. In 1812, Tammany moved again, to a new five-story, $55,000 building it built at the corner of Nassau and Frankfort, just a few blocks away. The new Tammany Hall had a large room that could accommodate up to 2,000 people for political and social events, and the rest of the building was run as a hotel. The Society was to remain there for 55 years.
14th Street headquarters (1868–1927)
By the 1860s, under William M. Tweed, Tammany had greater influence and wealth, so new headquarters was deemed desirable. The cornerstone for a new headquarters was laid on July 14, 1867, at 141 East 14th Street, between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue. The building at Nassau and Frankfort was sold to Charles Dana and his friends, who relocated The New York Sun newspaper to that location.
When Tammany leaders found that they needed $25,000 more in funds, a meeting was held, at which $175,000 was immediately pledged. The new building was completed in 1868. According to Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, the new headquarters "merged politics and entertainment, already stylistically similar" into one building.
The Tammany Society kept only one room for itself, renting the rest to entertainment impresarios: Don 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' Cafe, 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.
The building had an auditorium big enough to hold public meetings, and a smaller one that became Tony Pastor's Music Hall, which was used as an early venue for the early development of vaudeville. The structure was topped off by a large-than-life statue of Saint Tammany.
44 Union Square (1927–1943)
In 1927 the building on 14th Street was sold, to make way for the new tower being added to the Consolidated Edison Building. The Society's new building at 44 Union Square, a few blocks north at the corner with East 17th Street, was finished and occupied by 1929. When Tammany started to lose its political influence, and its all-important access to graft, it could no longer afford to maintain the 17th Street building, and in 1943 it was bought by a local affiliate of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Tammany left, and its leaders moved to the National Democratic Club on Madison Avenue at East 37th Street, and the Society's collection of memorabilia went into a warehouse in the Bronx.
The building at 44 Union Square housed the New York Film Academy and the Union Square Theatre, and retail stores at street level, until a complete renovation of the building began in 2016. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it in October 2013. The renovation, which included a gutting of the interior and the installation of a glass-domed roof, was substantially completed by July 2020.