Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (12 page)

His career path took an unexpected and potentially damaging turn in the summer of 1850, when he and his men in Engine 6 were accused of attacking another engine company with “boxes, barrels and missiles of various kinds,” according to an official report. It was hard to know at times whether New York’s volunteer fire companies lived to fight fires or to fight each other. Individual companies were often affiliated with rival street gangs, but even if they weren’t, each company saw others as rivals for the honor of dousing a fire. Tweed’s Engine 6 was especially aggressive in the defense of its honor.

The head of the department, Chief Engineer Alfred Carson, saw these rivalries as an embarrassment, not to mention a hazard to life and property. He decided that Tweed should be “forever expelled” from the city’s fire service because of the disgrace he brought to the department. This was a potential disaster for Tweed, for banishment from the firehouse would have put an end to his informal politicking and his neighborhood celebrity. Undaunted, Tweed contacted his friends on the Common Council’s Committee for the Fire Department. The aldermen, a sympathetic lot, were known to put their sympathies in service to the highest bidder, earning the nickname “the forty thieves.” By one means or another, Tweed persuaded them to reduce his banishment from forever—no small sentence—to three months. Chief Engineer Carson could hardly contain his anger, accusing one alderman of accepting “sundry golden trinkets” from Tweed and condemning the entire proceeding as a “black and infamous transaction.”
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Carson’s public display of disapproval did little to inspire the aldermen to reconsider. Tweed quickly returned to the fire service, and his standing in the community was revived. He and the lads from Engine 6 were invited to the White House to meet President Millard Fillmore a year after the foreman’s short hiatus from the department, and, in 1852, twenty-nine-year-old Bill Tweed was elected to the Common Council’s Board of Aldermen. The political organization he joined, Tammany Hall, soon adopted Engine 6’s mascot for its own—a tiger. The Tammany tiger would go on to become one of the organization’s indelible images.

Tweed, a big man with a dark brown beard and blue eyes, seemed destined for civic leadership. He was better educated than his old friends from Cherry Street, for his artisan father had found the money to send him to boarding school in New Jersey for a year. Tweed’s sheer size set him apart—he was a growing young man who eventually topped out at more than three hundred pounds—but he was surprisingly nimble on the dance floor, to the delight of his child bride, who was seventeen when she wed twenty-one-year-old Bill in 1844. And he had a deep appreciation for his moment in the history of New York City. Although he was a native-born Scots Presbyterian, Tweed gained power and influence in accordance with his physical size thanks to his courting of the city’s immigrants, especially the Catholic Irish, at a time when immigrants needed all the help they could get. A new and virulent nativism, more potent than the wave that elected James Harper as mayor in 1844, was beginning to take shape in New York life in the early 1850s as Famine immigrants settled into their new lives. Tweed himself dabbled in nativism briefly, but he came to embrace the cause of the city’s immigrant population and its treasure trove of votes.

A new, diverse, chaotic, and—for many—alien community was taking shape in the streets of downtown Manhattan and in other cities with large immigrant populations. And in no city was this demographic revolution greeted with celebrations of difference and pleas for tolerance. Tweed’s friend and ally, Abraham Oakey Hall, a Harvard Law graduate whose pince-nez, quick wit, and theatrical pretensions (he dabbled in writing for the stage) made him an irresistible character in New York politics, could not help but notice that many of his fellow citizens resented the city’s transformation. New York’s “rich old men,” he said, pined for a simpler time when New York lacked “boulevards . . . museums, lyceums, free libraries, and zoological gardens.” They simply didn’t realize, Hall said, “that New York is no longer a series of straggling villages.”
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Some of those rich old men—and some who were neither rich nor old—gathered themselves into a new and secretive organization called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. They and others like them became better known as Know Nothings, and they became an electoral sensation in many Northern states as the country drifted toward civil war in the mid-1850s.

Outright nativism never truly disappeared from New York life even after James Harper was defeated for reelection and the American Republican Party faded as an independent faction in city politics in the late 1840s. Nativists targeted the Democratic city comptroller for defeat in 1849, and while he won anyway, his vote tally trailed that of other Democrats. Bishop John Hughes’s old ally, William Seward, kept a careful watch over the movement, especially since many of his fellow Whigs were collaborating with the nativists. One of Seward’s correspondents noted in 1852 that the Order of the Star Spangled Banner was a force “by no means to be overlooked.”
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That assessment was, if anything, an understatement. The membership rolls of nativist organizations nationwide grew by the tens of thousands between 1852 and 1854, one of the most astonishing mass mobilizations in U.S. political history. The timing was hardly a coincidence, for the Know Nothing movement capitalized on the arrival of hundreds of thousands of poor, unskilled Famine Irish whose faith, customs, and culture changed the face of Northern cities and challenged the assumptions of those who saw the United States as an Anglo-Protestant nation. Catholic spokesmen, including Dagger John Hughes, hardly went out of their way to reassure the anxieties of the nation’s majority population. One of the bishop’s more prominent lectures, given at the height of Famine immigration, was entitled “The Decline of Protestantism and Its Causes.”

Nativism explicitly sought to keep immigrants far from the levers of power. But nativist reaction had a softer side as well, expressed in the proliferation of Anglo-Protestant charitable groups such as the Children’s Aid Society, the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society, and the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, all of which were created in reaction to the huge influx of immigrants who were poor, unskilled, intemperate, and otherwise not in conformance with Anglo-Protestant norms.

These organizations certainly were earnest enough, but their efforts at amelioration were steeped in Anglo-Protestant cultural attitudes that would have seemed familiar to any Irish-Catholic immigrant. The Ladies’ Home Missionary Society, for example, was affiliated with the Methodist Church, and its first priority was evangelization, because the journey out of poverty required that the poor put aside religious tenets that were holding them back. When the society announced plans to use public funds to build a new mission in the notorious Five Points neighborhood, Catholic spokesmen objected because of the group’s overt evangelizing mission. The
New York Times
wondered why Catholics would not allow the missionaries “the chance of making a possible convert to their faith” in exchange for “the unquestioned good they have done.”
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Immigrants who held onto their old-world ways explicitly challenged the assertion of nativists who insisted that the United States was not simply a white republic but a Protestant republic, an Anglo-Saxon republic, and a thrifty, sober republic. Drink, then, became another one of the evils that nativists associated with Catholic immigrants and, therefore, with their advocates in Tammany. The Irish fondness for whiskey, or
uisge baugh
(“the water of life,” in Irish), and the German affection for beer seemed to be further evidence that the new arrivals were morally unfit for citizenship in a republic of virtue. The
New York Tribune
complained that “ninety percent of the rum holes” in some neighborhoods “are kept by foreigners.”
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Not surprisingly, James Harper was a prominent member of a temperance movement in New York City called the Washingtonians—nativism and temperance had much in common. In a dry run of the nation’s most successful antialcohol movement, Prohibition, a dozen states passed temperance legislation seeking to regulate or prohibit the sale and use of alcohol in the early 1850s.

The temperance movement made great strides in New York, leading in 1854 to the passage of state legislation dubbed “An Act for the Suppression of Intemperance,” designed to prohibit the consumption of alcohol. The bill was based on a law passed in Maine in 1849, and its supporters had some reason to expect that Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour would sign it. After all, during his 1852 gubernatorial campaign, he told members of the New York State Temperance Alliance that he believed in “the importance and necessity of suppressing the evils of intemperance,” although he managed to evade the alliance’s direct question—would he sign a bill that would “prohibit the sale of intoxicating liquors”? Candidate Seymour gravely noted that, if elected, his “high and responsible duties” as governor would require him to be “free to act upon every question . . . according to my convictions of duty at the time.”
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The time came in the early spring of 1854, when the temperance bill—actually, an outright prohibition bill—landed on Seymour’s desk after winning overwhelming approval in the State Assembly (where it passed by a 76–27 vote) and somewhat less enthusiastic approval in the State Senate (18–10 in favor). At stake was more than just the right to drink, or the right to regulate potentially destructive personal behavior. The saloon was, along with the volunteer fire company, a center of immigrant political life. Tammany’s ward-level politicians and their constituents met face-to-face in saloons. More to the point, saloons served as polling places on Election Day in many immigrant neighborhoods. Temperance advocates and elite reformers saw in the saloon the very antithesis of the moralistic, disinterested civic order that, in their view, the founders intended. The crusade for temperance, then, was more than a case of moral uplift, more than an assertion of cultural superiority. It was a direct assault on immigrant political power.
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Governor Seymour, under pressure from his allies in Tammany, vetoed the bill, arguing that “experience shows that temperance, like other virtues, is not produced by law-makers.” Laws seeking to regulate morality, he wrote, would inevitably “provoke resistance where they are designed to enforce obedience.”
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Seymour’s veto outraged the city’s moral reformers, who firmly believed in the power of government to legislate morality—at least, that is, the morality of newcomers. “This great cause is the cause of virtue, of morality, of religion, of social progress, of humanity itself,” the bill’s supporters wrote. “A single man has stood between the will of the people, clearly expressed, and the accomplishments of their purpose on this subject.”
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Tammany Hall’s governing body, the General Committee, convened a special meeting in late June of 1854 to prepare for an energetic campaign against the Know Nothings in the coming statewide and municipal elections. The committee passed a resolution defining the campaign as part of a larger struggle between immigrants and those who sought to deprive the foreign-born of their rights and their culture. The committee’s resolution reads like boilerplate pandering today, but in the heyday of Know Nothing power in the Northern United States, it was an expression of high-minded principle.

The “greatness and glory of this republic have been materially advanced by the industry, energy, and patriotism of a large portion of its citizens of foreign birth,” the resolution read, adding that it was “the glory and pride of old Tammany Hall” that it discriminated against nobody “on account of birth or religion.” The committee’s resolutions received prominent notice in the
Freeman’s Journal
, the widely read weekly newspaper geared toward the city’s Irish Catholics. The paper’s headline referred to the committee’s action as a “repudiation of the Know Nothings.”
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The Know Nothings founded a new electoral vehicle, the American Party, to promote their anti-immigrant agenda of longer naturalization periods (which would delay citizenship and, thus, the right to vote for up to twenty-one years), temperance, moral reform, and restrictions on immigration. There were fifty thousand card-carrying Know Nothings in the United States in the spring of 1854. By October, as voters prepared to go to the polls in New York, Massachusetts, and other states with significant immigrant populations, more than a million people joined the Know Nothing rolls.
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Faced with a national uprising against immigrants, New York’s Irish community took understandable comfort in Tammany’s pledge to defend the rights of the foreign-born and uphold religious freedom—the temperance-nativist linkage of morality, virtue, and religion surely carried more than an echo of the Protestant supremacist rhetoric with which Irish Catholics were so familiar. But Tammany could not provide a vigorous defense against the Know Nothing onslaught. The Democratic Party in New York was bitterly split over the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed residents of the two territories to vote on whether to become slave or free states, and the larger question of slavery’s expansion in the West. Emblematic of these passionate divisions in society, culture, and politics, two Democrats ran for governor in 1854. They were Horatio Seymour, the incumbent, who ran as Tammany’s candidate, and Greene C. Brosnan, who represented the so-called hard-shell Democrats, a faction that sought to punish other Democrats who strayed from the party line to support the Free Soil Party’s efforts to keep slavery out of new territories.

The dying Whig Party nominated the author of the temperance bill, Myron Clark, and the Know Nothings rallied behind their own candidate, Daniel Ullman, a lawyer and frequent office-seeker. He argued that America’s assortment of “castes, races, and nationalities” threatened the nation’s future unless they became part of “one great homogenous American race.”
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