The Irish Road to the White House

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

Al Smith’s outstanding legislative record and achievements as governor brought him national attention. Murphy was soon convinced that putting a loyal Tammany man, a Catholic no less, in the White House – a notion that a few years before would have been unthinkable – was now eminently achievable. Smith shared his ambition. He believed very deeply that the urban immigrant community he represented and took pride in was ready to assume its rightful place in the country’s democratic equation.

However premature or naïve such confidence may have been, Murphy didn’t live to see the result. He died suddenly in 1924, shortly before the Democrats met in New York for their convention. Smith went ahead with his bid for the nomination. After a bitter deadlock that lasted a record 103 ballots, the convention settled on a compromise candidate. More ominous was the failure of the convention to adopt a plank strongly condemning a reborn and widely influential Ku Klux Klan.

Four years later, in 1928, Smith secured the nomination. Given the high-octane prosperity of the “Roaring Twenties,” which was then at its height, any Democratic candidate would have an uphill battle. But Smith wasn’t any candidate, and the heights he faced weren’t so much steep as un-scalable. The Party itself was deeply fractured. While many urban ethnics like Smith saw Prohibition as a nativist power play by rural Protestant America, as grossly unfair as it was unrealistic and unenforceable, a large part of the agrarian populist wing was devoted to it.

The weight of economic good times gave the Republicans an advantage that under the best of circumstances would have been difficult to overcome. But in combination with a widespread, vocal, often hateful revival of old-time suspicions about Catholic loyalties, Smith’s indelible identity as an Irish pol and his classic “New Yawk” accent – available for the first time to millions of voters via radio – didn’t endear him to rural Americans and helped generate a Republican landslide of historic proportions.

In the aftermath, Murphy’s machine seemed to come apart. Smith grew bitter and resentful toward his successor as governor, Franklin Roosevelt, and drifted away from the Democratic Party. Another of Murphy’s protégés was the brilliant, witty, debonair Jimmy Walker, perhaps the most naturally talented politician Tammany ever produced. His combination of New York street smarts, intellectual wattage, Irish charm and jazz-age sophistication made “Beau James” one of the most popular mayors in the city’s history. Unfortunately for Walker, however, he was elected mayor the year after Murphy died.

“The brains of Tammany now lie in Calvary Cemetery,” lamented Walker after Murphy’s death. Worse, Tammany’s conscience lay there, too. Walker’s charm couldn’t cover the fact that the corruption Murphy had worked so hard to contain if not eradicate was once again out of control, and as the cold realities of the Depression set in, the public rapidly lost its tolerance for Jimmy’s fast and easy ways. The revelations made by the Seabury investigation and a public hearing in front of Governor Roosevelt in Albany led to Walker’s resignation as mayor in 1932.

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Nster.com