The Irish Road to the White House

The story of how the Irish rose to the top of American politics.

To one degree or another, the Irish-American political machine, wherever it took root, was built on the same enduring search for security that followed the trauma of the Famine and its consequences. What William Kennedy wrote about the political machine the Irish built in Albany could just as easily apply to Honest John’s machine in New York or Hinky Dink Kenna’s organization in Chicago’s First Ward: “There was only one crime and that was going hungry. They would never let that happen again.”

Tammany and its brethren were often accused of employing a strategy of “bread and circuses” to woo and hold ignorant immigrant voters. There’s truth to that charge as long as the strategy is given its due. The bread was often badly needed, and frequently no one else was going to provide it. And the circuses were more than mere circuses. All those parades, clambakes, beefsteak dinners, Fourth of July boat rides, beer rackets – which reformers loathed and looked down on – brought light, color and enjoyment to slum dwellers whose opportunities for such things were limited at best. These entertainments were also touchstones in process of acculturation that brought immigrants of different backgrounds together to celebrate as one community. The machine was designed to meet ad-hoc needs. It never spawned think tanks or academic affiliates. Beyond George Washington Plunkitt’s rants, it nurtured no writers or philosophers. It had little interest in national monetary policy or the country’s foreign relations.

The machine was parochial, profoundly so, as grass roots as it was possible to get, infiltrating each neighborhood, linking every block and tenement to the Hall with multiple connecting lines, attentive to the here-and-now needs of the immigrant voters who shaped and sustained it. Amid the debates over the gold standard and the free coinage of silver, which animated much of the national political debates of the 1890s, Tammany boss Richard Croker remarked dismissively, “I’m in favor of all kinds of money. The more the better.”

“The abstract ideas of political honesty and efficiency played no part in the scheme of things,” one Tammany veteran wrote of the Hall. “Politics was not discussed in terms of principles, platforms, or ideas. A leader was either a good man or a bad man. A good man took care of his constituents, supplied them…with jobs; he paid rents and prevented evictions. If he didn’t live up to these standards, he was a bad man…and was not destined to last very long…”

The truth behind Tammany Hall’s rich and complex history of electoral success as opposed to the black legend of Tammany as the incarnation of everything evil and reprehensible in American urban politics was perhaps never better framed than by Boss Charles Francis Murphy. “When Tammany can elect its candidate so often in a city of 6,000,000 inhabitants,” Murphy told the New York World, “in a city of intelligence, in a city dotted all over by the church spire and the school house, it seems silly to use the time-worn campaign cry that there is nothing good but everything corrupt in Tammany.”

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