Machine Politics
MARTINETTI, RONALD A.
Machine Politics TIGERS OF TAMMANY By Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb Holt, Rinehart and Winston 384 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by RONALD A. MARTINETTI In the 1932 edition of Tammany Hall....
...Now Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb have written a lively, up-to-date book, modeled after Werner's authoritative work but lacking its zest for reform...
...It's philanthropy," said State Senator George Washington Plun-kitt, "but it's politics too—mighty good politics...
...Jones speaks and moves like a wise old chief," they write, "slowly, precisely, powerfully...
...Nor do they bother—except with a coy hint here and there—to say whether Tammany Hall is currently in a state of temporary political impotence, pending the next mayoralty, or whether the Bosses have finally been beaten to death...
...In fact, while Werner's criticisms of Tammany Hall and its Bosses were considered unduly harsh even by anti-Tammany newspapers of the time...
...and "suspicious as Geronimo," whose relationship to Tammany was only slightly more tenuous than Martin Van Buren's (to whom the authors devote an entire chapter...
...By the turn of the 19th century, under the leadership of William Mooney, its founder and a shrewd furniture dealer, the society had grown into a permanent fixture in New York City politics...
...That is an obituary, one suspects, the authors would not care to write...
...They do not, for example, have many kind words for the reformers, who "in tune with the colorless era of automation have now succeeded in substituting 'great debates' for torchlight parades . . . scientific polls for backroom hunches . . . civil servants for hangers-on . . . and cautious brainpickers (and matinee idols) for candidates...
...A "you-are-there" interview with Sydney Baron, Madison Avenue public relations man and Carmine DeSapio's speech writer, mars an otherwise well-done chapter on DeSapio...
...So it was, and ironically, much credit for passage of the New Deal social legislation that supererogated Tammany's neighborhood feudalism—and thereby did more to wreck the machine than all the reformers this side of Cook County—is owed to Senator Robert Wagner, perhaps the organization's most distinguished alumnus...
...Tammany," explain the authors, "dispensed jobs, bail money, rent, coal, clothes, and Christmas turkeys in exchange for casting the right ballot...
...Indeed, by then it was already involved in political chicanery: Several Tammany politicians, including Mooney who had become Superintendent of the Almshouse, were ousted for defrauding the city...
...In a burst of poesy he is pictured as being "somber as [Charles F.] Murphy," the Tammany oligarch of the 1920s sometimes called The Colossus of Graft...
...As a political machine, Tammany built its reputation upon its ability to win elections...
...Connable and Silberfarb are perhaps guilty of treating modern-day Tammany too sympathetically...
...Morris Werner pointed to Harold Laski's dictum that what is "interesting in representative Government is not its anatomy, but its pathology," and ventured that Tammany Hall has been the most pathological case in the history of American government...
...This new history characterizes Tammany as "colorful" rather than "pathological...
...Connable and Silberfarb are entertaining writers, and their history of Tammany Hall is both readable and good—when they stick to established facts about Tammany Hall...
...Yet, for all their wailing about the "ennui" of urban politics today, Connable and Silberfarb fail to measure Tammany's record against that of the reformers...
...Another section of the book degenerates into an advertisement for Long Island politician Eugene Nickerson ("an articulate intellectual with a speaking style reminiscent of the late President Kennedy"), unsuccessful aspirant in 1966 for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and—as it happens—Connable's employer...
...But Connable and Silberfarb do not say nice things about everybody...
...Tammany Hall has usually functioned under the indisputable domination of one man—known as the Grand Sachem in the society's patois, the Democratic County (Manhattan) Leader in press releases, and the Boss in reality...
...They portray Carmine De-Sapio as "a kind of urban American folk hero," an "ambitious," "sensitive" boy who, as one newspaper put it, "grew up believing that any man could be Postmaster General of the United States...
...impassive as [Aaron] Burr," vice-President and an early Son of St...
...In addition to obtaining votes by such imaginative means as importing voters from Philadelphia and Jersey City, the organization developed an elaborate welfare system that guaranteed it support on election day...
...And they endow Raymond Jones, a City Councilman and the first Negro to head Tammany Hall, with "an aura of power and knowledge" that is perplexing in the light of his own statements when he recently announced he was quitting the post...
...Mooney explained to investigators that he had taken money to purchase "trifles for Mrs...
...Even worse, some of what the authors say is not only irrelevant, it is pap...
...Thus, the Democratic Convention of 1832 is described as "a public show of unanimity in the style of the 1964 LB J pep rally," and Burr's unification of the New York Democratic party in 1800 is termed "an accomplishment which Senator Robert Kennedy hoped to duplicate in the 1960s...
...If the quality of government has improved, the spice of political drama has almost disappeared and with it many of the immigrant virtues which propelled the ideas of democracy beyond the wildest dreams of the founding Puritans...
...Mooney...
...Tammany Hall, which certainly would have exceeded the "wildest dreams" of the Puritans, was organized several weeks after the ratification of the Constitution as a drinking and political society...
...Unfortunately, in an effort to assure readers that history is weighted with contemporary significance, the authors frequently draw parallels that do not quite come off...
Vol. 50 • March 1967 • No. 7
