Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (8 page)

John Hughes did not achieve his immediate object, but, in a sense, the campaign for public funding was a means to a larger political and cultural end. Hughes contended that the nation’s founding ideals created a place for minority groups who had the right to reject the values of a dominant culture if they found them offensive. He used the language of liberty to argue with his antagonists; he used the power of memory to unify the Irish portion of his flock. This mobilization, like that of O’Connell’s in the 1820s, demonstrated the power of mass politics even in the face of more powerful cultural and political forces.

John Hughes was, in fact, much more than a local spiritual leader—he was the voice of politically engaged American Catholicism. He was not a member of Tammany Hall. But he was, to be sure, the boss.

. . .

Before John Hughes arrived in New York, the Irish lacked a commanding, unifying political voice around which to rally in the face of a hostile civic culture. The Roman Catholic Diocese of New York was fragmented and loosely administered before the 1840s. Hughes changed all that, replacing anarchy with a tightly organized hierarchy that foreshadowed the style and discipline of Tammany Hall. After Hughes became bishop in his own right when Jean Dubois retired due to ill health, power was centralized in Hughes’s office, lay trustees at the parish level were made irrelevant, dependable clerics were recruited from Ireland to serve as foot soldiers in Hughes’s expansion plans, and a new newspaper, the
Freeman’s Journal
, was founded to serve as a print pulpit for the bishop.

With his skepticism of reformers, including abolitionists, whose ideals and theories seemed to promise heaven on earth, Hughes also set a pattern for Tammany Hall. Hughes’s religious training taught him that perfection was impossible on earth. The Catholic Church, he said in 1852, had “little confidence in theoretical systems which assume that great or enduring benefit is to result from the sudden or unexpected excitements, even of a religious kind . . . by which the pace of society is to be preternaturally quickened in the path of universal progress.” Social experiments, he added, too often were prescribed by “new doctors who turned out to have been only quacks.” Tammany’s aversion to radical politics, especially socialism, could be traced to Hughes’s suspicion of those who promised to achieve moral purity and civic perfection in the form of a well-administered city government.
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John Hughes rose to prominence not only because he demanded equal justice for Catholics but also because he defied the popular linkage of Americanism with Protestantism. When one of his longtime antagonists, lawyer Hiram Ketchum, insisted that the United States was a Protestant country, Hughes issued a stinging reply that must have shocked non-Catholic New Yorkers. “That a great majority of the inhabitants of this country are not Catholic, I admit,” he said. “But that it is a Protestant country, or a Catholic country, or a Jewish country, or a Christian country in a sense that would give any sect or combination of sects the right to oppress any other sect, I utterly deny.”
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Hughes saw all minority religions, not just Catholics, as vulnerable to an oppressive dominant culture, and he advised his flock to align with other minority groups rather than assimilate the dominant culture’s values. “If the Jew is oppressed,” he told his fellow Catholics, “then stand by the Jew.” New York’s Irish Catholics certainly did not always heed that advice, but Hughes’s exhortation spoke to his vision of a society that included those who were not Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. “There is no such thing as a predominant religion,” he said, “and the small minority is entitled to the same protection as the greatest majority.”
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. . .

There were approximately eighty thousand Catholics in New York City in 1844, an increase of some forty-five thousand since 1830. About two-thirds were Irish. Protestants in New York and elsewhere believed that American society was doomed as the foundation stone of Plymouth Rock eroded with the crash of each immigrant wave. Evangelical groups with titles that would have sounded familiar to Irish-Catholic immigrants, like the American Tract Society, sprang up in hopes of converting the immigrant Catholics to Protestantism, just as tract societies sought to convert Irish Catholics in Ireland to the state religion of Protestant Britain. A U.S. senator from New Jersey, Theodore Frelinghuysen, descendant of one of his state’s oldest families, saw no future for people like him in the new America of the 1840s. “The tide is constantly swelling and breaking over us,” he said, speaking of his fellow Protestants. “We cannot repel it now.”
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Not everybody was willing to concede the cultural and political field to immigrants. In New York, noted publisher James Harper campaigned for mayor in 1844 as the candidate of the American Republican Party, an avowedly anti-immigrant political faction that emerged in the 1840s, not long after Dagger John Hughes successfully challenged the Public School Society. Harper was a reformer, a member of the city’s mercantile elite, and a committed anti-Catholic nativist. In 1836, his family’s publishing house, Harper Brothers, had secretly printed the memoirs of a French-Canadian woman who told of all manner of sexual depravities in a Catholic convent. The inflammatory tract,
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
, prompted a fresh round of nativist outrage against the city’s growing Catholic population. The tale was quickly proven to be a hoax, but that did not prevent sales of
Maria Monk
from reaching three hundred thousand, a spectacular publishing success.

Harper and his supporters were far more determined than Senator Frelinghuysen to fight back against the un-American hordes. The American Republican Party demanded laws barring immigrants from holding public office and extending the naturalization process to twenty-one years, meaning that immigrants would have to wait that long to become citizens and, thus, voters. The party’s executive committee published a long tirade against “foreign influence” in the United States, stating that “these aliens and adopted citizens” cared “little or nothing for the purity and permanency of our institutions.” The “masses that flood our country,” the committee stated, were determined to commit “rash, blind and anti-American acts.” For that reason, the party pledged that it would “not appoint to any office . . . any person who is not an American by birth.”
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Harper cloaked his nativist rhetoric with the language of a business-minded reformer who vowed to bring efficiency and competence to City Hall. Not for the last time did the language of political reform and the rhetoric of nativism blend seamlessly into a single platform.

Dagger John Hughes—not Tammany Hall, and certainly not the Whig Party—emerged as the immigrants’ champion in the face of aggressive nativism. Hughes bombarded antagonists like Harper and William Stone, editor of the anti-Catholic
Commercial Advertiser
newspaper, with long letters arguing that the promise of the United States was not reserved for one religious denomination. The bishop asserted that, rather than intriguing against the traditions of the United States, he and his fellow Catholics embraced the nation’s ideals. “My feelings and habits and thoughts have been so much identified with all that is American that I had almost forgotten I was a foreigner, until recent circumstances have brought it too painfully to my recollection,” he told Harper. In one of a series of letters to the influential Stone, Hughes continued to argue that in a nation like the United States, place of birth was immaterial—he described himself as “an American who knows and prizes the rights secured by the American Constitution.”
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Harper captured the mayoralty in 1844, to the astonishment of the Democratic and Whig Parties. In mid-May of that year, just weeks before Harper was scheduled to take office, Bishop Hughes was summoned to City Hall to meet with the city’s outgoing mayor, Robert Morris, a veteran leader of Tammany Hall. Morris was deeply concerned about the possibility of violence in the streets. Nativists already had set fire to Catholic churches in Philadelphia, and there were rumors that mobs from the City of Brotherly Love might march north to attack Catholics in New York.

Hughes had responded to those rumors with a threat of his own. If “a single Catholic Church is burned in New York,” he announced, New York would “become a second Moscow.” Hughes’s reference to Russia’s capital, nearly destroyed by fire in 1812 during the Napoleonic Wars, was not lost on the city’s nervous political and mercantile leaders.
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Mayor Morris thought it prudent to take the measure of the man who was so outspoken on behalf of the city’s largest immigrant group. Even if Hughes had blunted the threat from Philadelphia, Morris knew that Harper’s supporters were planning a potentially explosive rally near City Hall to mark the incoming mayor’s inauguration. Morris desperately wished to know how Hughes’s fellow Irish Catholics might react to such a demonstration. It was a sign of Tammany Hall’s isolation from the city’s immigrant population in 1844 that Morris was obliged to consult with Hughes about the temper of Catholic opinion, rather than call on Tammany’s own intelligence-gathering operation.

The mayor, an affluent Protestant like most of the city’s political leaders, opened his meeting with Hughes with a question. Acknowledging the church burnings in Philadelphia, Morris asked the bishop whether he was concerned about similar incidents in New York. “Are you afraid that some of your churches will be burned?” he asked.

No, responded Hughes. “I am afraid that some of
yours
will be burned.”
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Morris’s reaction is unrecorded, but Hughes’s calmly worded threat no doubt made its way from City Hall to the streets. The planned nativist rally near City Hall was canceled soon after the mayor’s meeting with Hughes. No churches of any denomination were set alight in New York.

Dagger John Hughes’s confrontational style and demands for a more inclusive urban political culture made him the first effective political boss of the New York Irish. He also provided Tammany Hall’s future leaders with one of their core beliefs: New York contained multitudes, and those multitudes deserved a share of political power rather than lectures in Americanism. Hughes’s embrace of pluralism was summed up in a letter he wrote to Mayor Harper shortly after the avowed nativist took office. “I even now can remember my reflections on first beholding the American flag,” Hughes wrote. “It never crossed my mind that a time might come when that flag, the emblem of . . . freedom . . . should be divided by apportioning its stars to the citizens of native birth and its stripes only as the portion of the naturalized foreigner.”
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James Harper served only one term of a single year. He left office in the middle of 1845, pronouncing himself satisfied with his reforms, which included the beginnings of a professional police force.

Weeks after Harper left office in 1845, a mysterious blight appeared in the potato fields of Ireland. The staple crop of the Irish people turned black and inedible. Starving Irish soon began to stumble ashore on the East Side of Manhattan, impoverished and embittered, the victims, John Hughes said, not of an act of God but the cruelty of man. The city, and Tammany Hall, would never be the same.

THREE

THE GREAT HUNGER

T
he fall of 1845 brought frightening news to New York’s Irish community: Ireland’s potato crop had failed, literally overnight. The
New York Tribune
reported the failure in an anxious tone. “We regret to have to state that we have had communications from more than one well-informed correspondent, announcing . . . the appearance of what is called ‘cholera’ in the potatoes in Ireland,” the paper’s editors noted. The
Tribune
account quoted a farmer who reported that his potato crop had turned black and slimy in a matter of hours. Other reports noted that a sickening odor lingered over the blasted fields.
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The potato was one of many crops harvested on Irish soil, but it was the one crop on which nearly half the island’s eight million people depended for their daily existence. Adult male farmers and landless farm laborers consumed as much as fourteen pounds of potatoes a day; the other crops they tended were used to pay the rent. Irish-Americans in New York knew better than their fellow citizens that a prolonged crop failure would be catastrophic. And so it was.
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The potato failed again in 1846, and again, and again, year after year, until 1852. Newspapers in New York carried terrifying reports of the horror unfolding in Ireland, but Irish New Yorkers heard about the hunger firsthand from their starving fellow countrymen arriving by the thousands. By the time the potato was restored in 1852, a million people were dead and another two million were across the sea or on their way to England, to Canada, to Australia, and, of course, to the United States. Huge swaths of the island were virtually depopulated. Farmlands that once provided sustenance for millions were converted to grazing pastures for livestock. Cabins that once were home to peasant families were pulled down, their tenants either dead, evicted, or simply vanished. A census of Ireland in 1840 counted more than eight million people. By 1850, the number was 6.5 million, and by 1910, it was under five million. The Irish nation scattered across the Atlantic world and beyond, carrying among its possessions the searing, bitter memories of hunger and deprivation in the midst of plenty, memories that would permanently and unalterably color its narrative of grievance and exile, memories that were destined to inform Irish identity and their view of the world.
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