SACHEMS & SINNERS AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF TAMMANY HALL

From his unofficial throne atop the bootblack stand in the New York County Courthouse, Tammany Sachem George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924) used to extol the virtues of Tammany Hall. He gloried in the durability of the city machine that went on “flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks. Say, that’s the first poetry I ever worked off. Ain’t it great?”

At that, Tammany’s roots go deep, and digging among their intricacies has yielded pungent truffles to M. R. Werner (Tammany Hall) and other researchers. The story begins in May 1789, just a few weeks after the U.S. Constitution took effect, when New York City’s Society of Tammany adopted its own constitution as a superpatriotic club for 100%-pure Americans. For its patron, the society chose a man whose American credentials could not be questioned: Tammany, sachem (pronounced say-chem) of the Lenni-Lenape (Delaware Indians), from whom legends glowed like beams from an August moon. Tammany (it was said) invented the canoe, discovered corn, beans, crabapples and tobacco (for use in destroying fleas). His most heroic feat was in wrestling the Evil Spirit for 50 days. Finally Tammany upended the Evil Spirit with a hip lock and tried to roll him into the Ohio River. But an immense rock stood in the way, and Tammany failed to conquer evil.

The Society of Tammany was first used as a power instrument by a politician whose contact with the Evil Spirit was more caress than competition: Aaron Burr. In Tammany, which drew its membership from working men and enlisted veterans of the army of the Revolution, Burr saw the perfect political counterfoil to Alexander Hamilton’s Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans’ organization made up of officers. When Burr and Hamilton dueled at Weehawken, two Tammany sachems were with Burr, one as his second. That night, as Hamilton lay dying, there was a gala celebration at Tammany headquarters in the Long Room of Abraham Martling’s Nassau Street tavern.

“Look at the bosses of Tammany Hall,” cried George Washington Plunkitt. “What magnificent men! To them New York City owes pretty much all it is today . . . What names in American history compare with them, except Washington’s and Lincoln’s?” Some notes on some of Tammany’s “magnificent men”:

FERNANDO WOOD, handsome, 6 ft. tall and every inch a charlatan. His mother, during her lying-in period in the year 1812, was reading a popular novel, The Three Spaniards, that had as its hero a derring-do lad named Fernando. She named the baby Fernando—and he spent the rest of his life trying to live up to her flamboyant hopes, e.g., he was once credited with saving three lovely maidens from a runaway stagecoach and its drunken driver. Born in Philadelphia, Wood went to New York to become an actor, but turned instead to politics and rose to become the first real Boss of Tammany Hall. In 1854 he became Mayor of New York City. During the Civil War years, Fernando Wood was a leader of the Copperheads, Southern sympathizers resident in the North.

WILLIAM MARCY (“Boss”) TWEED, 300 lbs. of political corruption. Son of an Irish chairmaker, Tweed got into politics as the nose-busting foreman of the Americus, or Big Six, volunteer fire company. On the dashboard of the Big Six engine a tiger’s head was painted, and it was later used by Cartoonist Thomas Nast as the symbol (see cover) for Tammany and its voracious Boss Tweed. Elected to public office, Tweed was a member of the Board of Aldermen, known widely (and correctly) as “The Forty Thieves.” In 1863 Tweed won control of Tammany from Fernando Wood.

Around Tweed in Tammany Hall revolved the infamous Tweed Ring. Among the other ringleaders: City Chamberlain Peter (“Brains”) Sweeny, whose mistress was a masseuse in a Turkish bath; City Comptroller Richard (“Slippery Dick”) Connolly, and Mayor Abraham Oakey (“Elegant Oakey”) Hall, who wrote a play called Let Me Kiss Him For His Mother, and who, while District Attorney, gave a dramatic reading titled Dido versus Aeneas, an ancient breach of promise trial.

With a vast diamond glittering from his shirt front, Boss Tweed lived in the grand manner. The value of gifts, e.g., 40 sets of sterling silver, at his daughter’s wedding was estimated at $700,000. Tweed gave lavishly to charity: once, when approached by a ward leader for a donation to the poor, Tweed wrote a check for $5,000. “Oh Boss,” said the ward heeler, half jokingly, “put another naught to it.” “Well, well, here goes,” said Tweed, and upped the ante to $50,000.

After eight years in power, Tweed finally fell—and fell hard. His reign was exposed, and he was eventually sentenced to a year in jail for forgery, grand larceny and conspiracy. Later, a $6,000,000 civil judgment was returned against him. When asked his occupation for the jail records, Tweed replied: “Statesman.” With official connivance, Tweed escaped from the Ludlow Street Jail and fled to Spain, where authorities recognized him from a Thomas Nast cartoon and arrested him as the kidnaper of two American children. Reason: the cartoon had shown Tweed clutching two symbolic ragamuffins. Tweed was returned to the U.S. and died in jail.

JOHN (“HONEST JOHN”) KELLY. While the Tweed Ring was crumbling, John Kelly, onetime soapstone cutter grown to influence in Tammany, wisely absented himself from the scene; he went off to inspect the Holy Land. Upon the Ring’s breakup, Kelly hastened back to the U.S. with four oil paintings, including The Return of the Prodigal Son, which he presented to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He took over as Boss of Tammany, ruled for 14 years with relative rectitude, and died of a broken heart after his political enemy, Grover Cleveland, became President.

RICHARD CROKER, born in County Cork, Ireland, the son of Eyre Coote Croker. As a youth in New York, Dick Croker was leader of the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang, was the most feared brawler in town. At 22, Croker voted 17 times one day for a Democratic candidate for constable. Such an enterprising fellow was bound to become Tammany’s leader.

Squat, scrubby-bearded, stiletto-eyed Dick Croker was a crook. A highlight of his rule came when the Rev. Charles Parkhurst of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church disguised himself as a Bowery tough and undertook a personal investigation of New York’s vice conditions. Dr. Parkhurst’s fellow crusader on this foray reported later that Parkhurst had sat “with an unmoved face” in a brothel, watching a troupe of naked prostitutes play leapfrog while Madam Hattie Adams playfully tweaked his whiskers.

In his later years Croker got “an achin’ for style.” He went to England, saying: “I am out of politics, and now I am going to win the Derby.” He bought a stud farm, Glencairn, near Dublin, where he played the role of country squire on and off for the rest of his life; in 1907 his horse, Orby, at 100 to 9, won the Epsom Derby.

At 73, Croker married Bula Benton Edmondson, 23, of Oklahoma, who was said to be a direct descendant of Sequoyah, the Cherokee Indian chief (newspapers carried the bride’s Indian name as Kotaw Kaluntuchy). At the wedding her hair was done in Indian style. Said she: “I have been inspired by the example of Pocahontas.” When Croker died, at 80, he was buried at Glencairn near the bones of Thoroughbred Orby. He left some $5,000,000 to Kotaw Kaluntuchy Croker.

CHARLES F. MURPHY, Croker’s successor, came out of New York’s Gas House district, took a job as driver on the “Blue Line” horse cars, saved $500 and opened a saloon. He sold a schooner of beer and a bowl of soup for 5¢ and refused to serve women customers. Named Tammany leader of the Gas House district, Murphy took station by a Second Avenue lamppost at 9 o’clock each evening, ready to transact business, personal and political, with all comers. In the year 1910, as Tammany’s Boss, Murphy won control of both city and state; he was the first Tammany leader really to do so. When Murphy died in 1924 (while making plans to boom Al Smith for President), Mayor Jimmy Walker mourned: “The brains of Tammany Hall lie buried in Calvary Cemetery.” And so they did, at least until Carmine De Sapio came along.

“We’ve got some orators in Tammany Hall,” said Plunkitt, “but they’re chiefly ornamental . . . The men who rule have practiced keepin’ their tongues still, not exercisin’ them.”

But Tammany had its full share of silver-tongued orators, and the greatest of them was William Bourke Cockran (“the Mulligan Guard Demosthenes”), who in 1895 befriended young Sandhurstman Winston Churchill. Through later years Churchill mentioned “the great American orator Bourke Cockran” so often that Lady Churchill threatened to walk off the platform if she heard the name again. A typical flight of Cockran’s soaring speech: “The dweller in the tenement house, stooping over his bench, who never sees a field of waving corn, who never inhales the perfume of grasses and of flowers, is yet made the participator in all the bounties of Providence, in the fructifying influence of the atmosphere, in the ripening rays of the sun,” etc., etc. Cockran’s language was unequaled, said Churchill, “in point, in rotundity, in antithesis or in comprehension.”

For fluency, at the opposite extreme were Croker and Murphy. At a Fourth of July celebration, a reporter noted that Murphy did not join in the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner. The newsman turned to a Tammany official and asked why. “Perhaps,” came the reply, “he didn’t want to commit himself.” Croker, when asked to comment on free silver, the hottest political question of the day, merely growled: “I’m in favor of all kinds of money—the more the better.”

“The politician who steals,” said G. W. Plunkitt, “is worse than a thief. He is a fool. With the grand opportunities all around for a man with political pull, there’s no excuse for stealin’ a cent.”

George Washington Plunkitt died a millionaire. But he sadly sensed the changing times that were to plague Tammany in the post-Murphy era. “Sad indeed,” said he, “is the change that has come over the young men . . . They don’t care no more for firecrackers on the Fourth of July.” He blamed all Tammany’s troubles on civil service reform, but he foresaw a day when the Tiger would rise again. Said he: “I see a vision. I see the civil service monster lyin’ flat on the ground. I see the Democratic Party standin’ over it with foot on its neck and wearin’ the crown of victory. I see Thomas Jefferson lookin’ out from a cloud and sayin’, ‘Give him another sockdologer: finish him.’ And I see millions of men wavin’ their hats and singin’, ‘Glory Hallelujah.’ “