Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (10 page)

The Great Famine and its aftermath produced other long-term changes to New York’s civic life. By the opening decade of the twentieth century, as men born in the shadow of Famine exile assumed positions of power in City Hall and in Albany, New York’s civic leadership was vastly different from the elite-led structure of the early nineteenth century. Famine exiles helped to create a political culture that was more populist and more representative of the city, a culture personified by immigrant and immigrant-stock political figures who rose to prominence through Tammany in the Progressive Era and who helped pass groundbreaking social legislation that challenged and then defeated the laissez-faire approach used by British authorities while Ireland starved.
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There is no question that the Famine cast a long shadow over the New York Irish. Memories of hunger and want were regularly invoked in New York’s Irish-American weekly newspapers. Editors published poems and stories that reminded readers of all they had suffered during the Famine, creating a memory that surely was passed from immigrant parent to native-born child into the twentieth century. In 1887, as the transatlantic Anglo-Protestant world celebrated Queen Victoria’s fiftieth anniversary on the throne, thousands of Irish New Yorkers gathered in Cooper Union to remember victims of the Famine. The great hall was decorated in black bunting and other symbols of mourning as speakers denounced Victoria as a symbol of British neglect during Ireland’s catastrophe. Speaking of those who died of hunger and disease, the event’s chairman said, “It is our duty tonight to remember who they were, and how they died, and recall the despotism that either extirpated them or drove them into famine’s graves.”
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Many years later, the Irish in Ireland took note of the persistence of Famine memories in places like New York. “The Irish in America live in 1846,” noted T. P. O’Connor, an Irish member of the House of Commons, in 1918. Mothers and grandmothers, O’Connor asserted, kept alive memories of the Famine and its injustice, so that “there is only one permanent factor in the minds of men of Irish blood [in America] and that is the famine and emigration of 1846.”
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Al Smith’s mother left Ireland just before the famine, so she would not have experienced the catastrophe firsthand. But Smith developed a view of political power that challenged the assumptions of the transatlantic free-trader who believed the government had no role to play in ameliorating the inequities of the market. There were, Smith said, two distinct approaches to the use of state power. “One group believes that the Constitution and statute law is intended only for the protection of property and money,” he said. “The other group believes that law in a democracy is not a divine principle but exists for the greatest good to the greatest number and for meeting the needs of present day society . . . That is the theory I hold. . . . ”
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It is hard, however, to find evidence of Famine memories in the rhetoric of mainstream political leaders like Smith and his mentor, Charles Murphy (whose father fled the Famine in 1848), or even politicians who were Famine immigrants themselves, including a Tammany lawyer and judge named Richard O’Gorman. No Tammany politician of note followed the course of two of the city’s most-noted Irish immigrant journalists, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, who wrote about his father’s agonizing death by starvation in Skibbereen, County Cork, and John Mitchel, who wrote a fiery polemic accusing the British of deliberately starving the Irish.

Murphy, Smith, O’Gorman, and other Tammany figures never drew on an explicit memory of starvation or oppression to explain a vote, a point of view, or a policy position. But public silence does not necessarily indicate the absence of a personal narrative or memory. After all, Murphy, Smith, and other Tammany politicians in the early twentieth century also were silent about their impoverished childhoods in New York, although their backgrounds certainly influenced their support for such progressive reforms as workers’ compensation, minimum wage, and pensions. These conspicuous silences may suggest that the memory of deprivation—whether through a lack of food in Ireland or a lack of resources on the Lower East Side—was simply too painful and best left unspoken.
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Contemporary observers of the Famine-era immigrants understood that the experience of loss and the humiliation of exile were bound to affect the immigrants’ worldview. In an editorial bearing the headline “Ireland in America,” the
New York Times
took note that the Irish who had come to the city since the Famine were different from those who had come earlier. Previous immigrants, the paper said, retained affection for the land they left behind. The Famine immigrants, however, had no warm memories to keep them company in their new land. “When men are driven away by unjust laws—by starvation and the fear of death—when they are forced to snatch their wives and children and take them three thousand miles across the sea to save them from the jaws of famine, while they see plenty and luxury all around them—their memories of home become motives of hatred, and will feed the fires which time cannot quench.”
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Time surely did not quench the fires that burned in New York’s Irish community. Colonel Michael Corcoran, a Famine immigrant from County Donegal and commanding officer of the famed 69th Regiment, New York Volunteers, refused to allow his men to march in a parade honoring the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1860. The prince was the son of Queen Victoria, often referred to as “the Famine queen” in Irish folklore. (Corcoran was court-martialed for his defiance but was allowed to return to duty after the Civil War began.) Thomas Francis Meagher, who took command of the 69th after Corcoran died in 1863, referred to the Irish as a “famine-exterminated race” during a lecture in New York in 1868, prompting a prolonged ovation. Irish-American journalist Patrick Ford, a Famine immigrant who founded the influential
Irish World
newspaper in New York in 1870, frequently called on Famine memories to mobilize the Irish community’s support for trade unions, radical politics, and anticolonialism. Ford’s coverage of a famine in India in 1877, for example, linked the Irish and Indians as victims of British imperialism. “Ireland and India—what a similarity in their destinies,” he wrote. “And both their destinies brought about by the robber oligarchy of Great Britain!”
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Ford’s anti-British sentiments were not unusual in post-Famine Irish-American culture, but his reference to a “robber oligarchy” reflected a broader critique of power among the New York Irish. References to victimization, exploitation, and social injustice rooted in the Famine became commonplace in the
Irish World
and in Irish-dominated trade unions during the Gilded Age and into the Progressive Era. Leonora O’Reilly, a founder of the Women’s Trade Union League and the daughter of Irish immigrants, noted in 1910 that a critic of hers had never been “face to face with hunger or eviction.”
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By the early twentieth century, this Irish populist critique of social and economic inequality, rooted in firsthand experience rather than abstract theory, was a vital part of Irish-American political consciousness. Even the well-off and utterly respectable Tammany Congressman William Bourke Cockran emerged as a critic of monopoly power and the abuses of big business in the late Gilded Age and the early Progressive Era. “It is high time that the people awoke to this fact that the speculator is abroad in the land, that ingenious men . . . are seizing control of all the institutions of trade and commerce,” he said.
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The place of hunger in Irish-American memory has been invoked or teased out of some rather unlikely cultural artifacts, demonstrating the enduring power of hidden Famine memories. Novelist Thomas Flanagan suggested that Irish-American film director John Ford consciously invoked Famine imagery in his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
. In the 1930s novel and film
Gone With the Wind
, Katie Scarlett O’Hara, daughter of Irish-Catholic immigrants who lived, somewhat improbably, on a plantation in Civil War–era Georgia, vowed that she would never be hungry again—even if she had to steal, cheat, or kill. Novelist William Kennedy observed that for the Irish who controlled politics in his home city of Albany, New York, “starvation . . . was immorality”—not graft, or vice, or ballot-stuffing, or intemperance, or any of the other issues that preoccupied reformers.
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Anxieties about the very basics of life—food on the table, a roof over the house—were evident in the Famine generation’s embrace of secure public employment rather than riskier ventures in the boom-and-bust private economy. To be sure, most Irish-Americans in New York were privately employed, typically as unskilled laborers on construction sites and domestics who tended to the needs of upper-middle-class families. But in popular culture and memory, the stereotype of an Irish police officer or firefighter resonates even today, and for good reason—the Irish dominated these jobs in New York City and other urban centers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“The first thing I learned was that to be a cop or a fireman meant that you would never get laid off, and that to be a construction worker, even in the high-paying skilled trades, was not quite as good because there were always layoffs when the construction boom ebbed, and, most important, because they did not have the twenty-year pension,” wrote Irish-American novelist Dennis Smith, who spent nearly twenty years as a firefighter in the Bronx in the 1950s and ’60s. Within a quarter-century of New York’s conversion from a volunteer fire department to a paid service in 1865, nearly three hundred of the city’s approximately one thousand professional firefighters were Irish-born, and if native-born members with Irish last names were included, the department’s roster for 1888 was more than 75 percent Irish.
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The Irish also developed a quick and strong presence in other government jobs. In 1860, three hundred nine Irish immigrants served in the New York Police Department, compared with eighty-four German immigrants. Twenty percent of the city’s public school teachers were Irish women in 1870. The
New York Times
reported in 1869 that Tammany Hall arranged for government jobs for seven hundred fifty-four Irish immigrants, but only forty-six such jobs went to German immigrants. There’s no doubt that the Irish were more active in city politics and so were in a better position to take advantage of Tammany patronage. But it would also seem true that the Irish were more eager for the security of those jobs, while Germans, who generally were more skilled and more entrepreneurial than the Irish, were less inclined to seek government employment. For the Irish peasant transplanted in New York, fear of joblessness replaced fear of eviction. The solution was the very institution that had facilitated eviction in Ireland but that offered protection in New York: the government.
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In the winter of 1850, at the height of the Famine, Irish-American leaders, including Bishop John Hughes and Congressman Mike Walsh, a onetime leader of the radical workingmen’s movement, joined Whig Governor William Seward and abolitionist editor Horace Greeley in calling for broad land reform in the United States, another implicit sign of the Irish community’s reaction to hunger and eviction in Ireland. During a Tammany Hall rally attended by all four men, resolutions were passed demanding a ban on the purchase of public land by nonresidents, an end to the “land monopoly,” and the creation of a more democratic nation “in which every citizen is a free holder.”
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While the anti-rent and land-reform movements in New York dissipated, the very articulation of these radical demands—uniting an Irish-born Catholic bishop with an Irish-born Protestant union organizer—spoke to the growth of Irish political consciousness in New York. The Famine inspired a broader understanding in New York’s Irish community of other forces at work in a commercializing society, forces that seemed to place economic dogma over the well-being—indeed, the very lives—of the poor.

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Anxieties about the character of the poor, especially the Irish-Catholic poor, spanned the Atlantic, as New York’s Famine immigrants quickly discovered. The newcomers landed just in time for an economic downturn in New York, which prompted the city’s self-styled reformers to demand a reduction in government spending. “Retrenchment is the twin of reform,” argued one of the city’s leading civic leaders, Peter Cooper. He and many future Tammany foes associated political reform not just with traditional good-government causes like ballot access but also with demands for smaller government and lower taxes. That message certainly appealed to the city’s elites, but it lacked a certain resonance with those who benefited from government spending—a group that included, of course, many Irish Catholics. In an article describing the plight of New York’s poor during the winter of 1855, the
New York Times
quoted a German-American woman who complained that the “Irish drew all the public assistance, and got all they wanted, and she could obtain nothing.”
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Coincidentally, the Famine Irish arrived in New York just as the city’s trade-union movement began to find its voice again after years of relative quiet. An umbrella organization known as the New York Industrial Congress emerged as an important force in local politics, threatening Tammany’s hold on labor’s loyalties at a time when the organization was in disarray and willing to cut deals with the city’s financial elites, leading to the nomination and election of a Wall Street Democrat, William Havemeyer, as mayor in 1853. (It was Havemeyer’s second election to the mayoralty—he unseated the nativist James Harper in 1845.) A reform-minded Common Council cut municipal taxes by 20 percent, but, not surprisingly, the measure did nothing to alleviate the distress of the city’s unemployed and its ever-growing population of unskilled Famine Irish.

The Irish quickly became an important presence in the labor movement’s demonstrations during the mid-1850s, when protest rallies attracted tens of thousands of workers and jobless to the city’s public spaces. At one such rally in Tompkins Square Park in the fall of 1857, an Irish speaker was on hand to translate speeches into the language of the Irish poor. The
New York
Evening Post
took note of the Irish presence at the demonstration, mocking a speaker named Maguire by mimicking his accent in print form: “We niver will sase while there’s a man in the land that nades employment,” the paper quoted Maguire, poking fun not simply at his accent but also at his earnest declaration of assistance for the jobless.
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