New York City

 

New York City: The obvious centerpiece of ethnic-based machines is New York City’s Tammany Hall—and the obvious example of typical ethnic machine behavior is Boss Tweed. The Scots-Irish Tweed was a long-standing state politician, previously elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and appointed to the New York County Board of Supervisors in 1858. The latter institution was as important to the Tweed patronage machine as was Tammany. Tweed became Tammany’s Grand Sachem and assumed the “Boss” title in 1863. State constitutional charter reform provided more local control and Tweed became NYC’s Commissioner of Public Works. Other Tweed Ring leaders assumed the Commissioner of Parks and Finance Department. Infrastructure, public buildings (courthouse) and parks were how the Ring made its profits. He took over through elections (Mayor A. Oakley Hall) New York City’s government in 1869.

 

The scandal erupted in 1871[1] and by 1873 Tweed was in jail and the Ring broken. Tweed was arrested in 1872. Despite its contemporary image, and the extent of its graft and corruption, the Tweed Ring’s reign was surprisingly short and its fall rapid. The tale of Tweed exposes the more complex nature of machines and their policy-process—Tweed, for instance, made money for his Ring and provided little to the ethnic voter. In Tweed’s place,  New York’s old (1789) Tammany Hall got its first Irish boss (Kelley) in 1872–after Boss Tweed had been convicted and sent to jail, permitting the Irish to capture the organization.

 

The famous Tammany ethnic machine came together after Irish John Kelley (and later Richard Croker) became Grand Sachem in the wake of Tweed’s breakup. These two bosses stacked the machine and city government with Irish and Irish proxies; that version of the Tammany machine would persist in some form through the 1950’s and early 1960’s. In the nineteenth century, Tammany was for all practical purposes an “Irish” machine. It was resistant to other non-Irish immigrants and its core leadership and focus was Irish. This worked well enough in late nineteenth century New York City where Irish were a large percentage of the voting population[2], but not so well in places like Boston and Buffalo where the Irish voter was not able to dominate city-wide elections. Tammany persisted, however, after 1900,  because its boss, Charles Francis Murphy opened Tammany up to other nationalities, making Tammany for the first time a multi-ethnic machine.

Civic Reform Clubs

The alter-ego of chambers in the early Gilded Age, the “dark side of their force” was undoubtedly the civic reform or good government clubs which flourished from the 1870’s and increased in strength through the era. Perhaps, the earliest of these semi-formal elite-based “political clubs” was the Boston Commercial Club founded in 1868. Civic Reform Clubs were founded in city after city from the 1870’s onward, including Philadelphia’s Citizens Reform Association (1871); the Citizens Association of Chicago (1874; the Commercial Club of Chicago (1877); the Baltimore Reform League (1885); the New Orleans Committee of 100 (1885), the Citizens Association of Boston (1887).

 

These early clubs were populated by “generally wealthy , well-educated business or professional types, men of the Mugwump persuasion were galvanized by the independent Republican movement of the 1872 presidential election and the reform candidacy of Democrat Grover Cleveland [later] in 1884. … Most of the men involved were elitist and patrician in social outlook, Protestant in religion,, and old-stock Anglo-Saxon or Yankee in family background”.[1] While most were certainly members and leaders in their city’s newly forming chambers of commerce, these Mugwump city reformers formed the reform clubs for largely, but not exclusively, political reasons.

 

Intensely opposed to the new immigrant and ethnic “machines”, and frankly extremely uncomfortable with the social and cultural threat of immigrant newcomers to their sense of what has since been labeled “the American way”. Hofstadter wrote in The Age of Reform[2] “… they found themselves checked, hampered and overridden by the agents of new corporations, the corrupters of legislatures, the buyers of franchises, the allies of political bosses”. The first post-Civil War urban reformers (I’m tempted to use terms like neo-conservatives or “old money”) wasted little time in challenging the immigrants, their machines (and big business) that upset the old order.

 

The first substantial urban machine of the era was, of course, New York City’s Tweed Ring run out of Tammany Hall. The Tweed Ring offended a number of New Yorkers on many different levels and Thomas Nast cartoons, a constant barrage of New York Times articles, and the Union League Club’s expose report, prompted the calling of a public meeting at Cooper Hall in early September 1871. With the upcoming November elections in mind, a “Committee of Seventy” composed of city business and lots of Mugwumps and led by Samuel Tilden, was formed to put those crooks in jail. The chairman of the Cooper Hall meeting, William F. Havemeyer (a former 1840’s mayor and a Mugwump) stood for mayor and was elected.

 

His administration, in the midst of a very severe panic or recession, cut drastically public funds for relief programs for the city’s poor. He also stopped infrastructure and public improvement programs which created jobs. He imposed an honest, efficient, free market-oriented, low tax administration (not too dissimilar from that of Herbert Hoover sixty years later). Havemeyer pushed a new city charter through the state legislature which created several independent boards and commissions (which will be discussed shortly), and dispersed key policy-making authority into the Board of Estimate (which controlled budgeting, financing, taxing and bond-issuance).

 

In so doing, he weakened substantially his own power and that of the New York City mayor’s office. Simultaneously, it weakened the city legislatures dominated by the machine. The policy-making coherence of New York’s City government was badly impaired in the aftermath. Havemeyer’s administration provides a sense of early, Mugwump era, business reform and its confused impact on the city’s policy-making process. Fortunately, for the other Big Cities, they could sit back, watch and learn from New York’s City’s Mugwump experiment. After two years in office, Havemeyer, the Mugwump reformers, the Committee of Seventy were swept out of office. Tilden, who went on to greater glories, was another matter. Tammany, in very short order, minus Tweed who was convicted, jailed and shortly after died, formed a new style-ethnic controlled machine under Irishman ‘Honest John Kelly’ and journeyed forward into its Golden Years.

 

The Civic Reform Clubs that followed were less “Mugwump” and more sophisticated in their approach to reconstructing the urban policy system. Their membership tended to be more representative of the various wings of their city’s business and professional community. Recognizing the need to strengthen mayoral power as potentially the most effective means to counter the decentralized control of the city legislatures by the machine and its control ward elections. This, of necessity, meant new city charters which could only be granted by the state legislature. The burden imposed by Dillon’s Law, of having to convince the state legislature for every structural and many policy/budget/tax/administration changes, added a new dimension to urban reform: home rule or the delegation by the state legislature of broad and sometimes sweeping authority to the city to change its own government. The quest to obtain municipal home rule legislation from the state legislature reshaped the drive to change municipal governance.

 

Mohl claims that by 1890 eighty good government associations had been established. These were supplemented by thirty city civil service reform associations, followed in 1881 by the National Civil Service Reform League. Magazine editors such as E. L. Godkin (the Nation) and George William Curtis (Harper’s Weekly) were chairs of such groups[3] entered the fray. By the  mid-1880’s, certainly the 1890’s, Gilded Age Mugwumps were only one of many groupings concerned with city governance. The Municipal League eventually took over the reform effort and by the late 1890’s reform had changed character and had evolved into what we will, in Chapter 5, label the “structural reformers”. Structural reformers will prove to be one of the most significant forces in our history of state and sub-state economic development policy. They deserve to be attended to, and described, separately from our present concern with the Gilded Age formation of a municipal policy system.

[1] Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit, p. 109. To confuse the reader, Mugwumps were Republicans who voted for Democrats (especially Grover Cleveland). Mugwumps were also usually anti-machine , chiefly from New England and New York, and several, such as Louis Brandeis and the famous cartoonist Thomas Nast became identified with Progressives.

[2] Richard Hofstadter, the Age of Reform  (New York City, Knopf, 1955); Mohl, the New City, op. cit. pp. 109-113.

[3] Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit, pp. 111-112.

[1] There were several trials, audits, but Thomas Nast, a cartoonist from Harper’s Weekly kept the investigation ongoing and Samuel Tilden, a Bourbon Democrat and key leader of the state Democratic Party provided the political insulation and considerable legal and financial expertise to the anti-Tweed forces. He was rewarded by being elected Governor in 1874, and was the Democratic candidate for President in 1876.

[2] In 1890, the U.S. Census records that foreign born Irish totaled nearly 1.9 million in New York City.

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New York City: Apparently You Can’t Do it There!

Nothing like a good case study to demonstrate the distinctions among Progressive policy systems while emphasizing the importance of structural reformers. New York City and Progressive policy systems, however, are a lot similar to New England weather—it you don’t like what you see, wait until the next mayor—he’ll be different than the one you got. The 1901NYC mayoralty election is a good place to start. After all, it is the second election since the five boroughs were consolidated to produce the current incomparable city, New York, New York. The first mayor after the 1898 consolidation was Democratic Robert Van Wyck, a former NYC Chief Justice, was selected by Tammany as their candidate for mayor. Not without his strengths as an administrator (he did integrate reasonably well the separate borough governments into a consolidated one, and he oversaw the development of New York City’s first subway), van Wyck was politically wrecked by the ice trust scandal. In an earlier chapter’s discussion on Dillon’s Law, we discussed “ice” and economic development—here is yet another example of how the public/private relationship regarding ice toppled yet another administration.

 

NYC’s corporate elite (J. Pierpont Morgan and Elihu Root) founded the Citizens Union to combat the resurgent Tammany in 1897 (it still exists today); in 1901, the Union approached Seth Low, former Mayor of Brooklyn and President of Columbia University to run for mayor in that election. Low proved to be an excellent hybrid of an old-style Mugwump with the new Progressive structural reformer. He ran on a platform stressing NML home rule reforms, emphasized honesty, efficiency, non-partisanship (a euphemism for merit and professional management as well as an election initiative)—and he was closely associated with the consolidation of the city three years earlier. He carefully avoided, however, the various social reform agendas, such as housing and social welfare. His was the Last Hurrah of a coalition based on Gilded Age business elites, new Progressive businessmen and  middle class constituencies. The excess of Tammany provided both cohesion and inspiration to throw the old rascals out.

 

So Low was the last of a “government of good men” who also advocated a mixture of NML structural reforms and efficient, cheap and honest program implementation. Budgetary and fiscal reforms were top on his list, allowing him to reduce taxes and eliminate wasteful patronage and contracts. Low did not rely extensively on experts or professionals in his administration, using instead Social Registry type individuals to fill his bureaucracy. Melvin Holli, however, correctly observed Low’s version of structural reform offered little to the working class, in fact it often hurt the lower classes by reducing services and ignoring social reform they needed desperately: to Holli Low was a structural reformer who “never seemed to realize that his municipal reform had nothing to off the [working class] voters but sterile mechanical changes”.[1] Worse, Low became associated with morality politics as his police commissioner worked hard to suppress Sunday drinking, saloons, and prostitution. It should be no surprise that in the next election, 1903, George McClellan Jr., the new Tammany Boss Murphy’s first “clean and  balanced” slate crushed Low.

 

McClellan Jr., was far from being a Tammany hack and by the end of his first administration (1905) McClellan wanted out-but was convinced to run once again by Tammany because his principal opponent was the “radical” newspaper publisher Williams Randolph Heart. Hearst was running as the candidate of the Municipal Ownership League in a three way race against Democrat McClellan and Republican Ivins. Hearst enjoyed the support of every able-bodied Progressive and left of center voter in the City, and he campaigned on the platform of a potential social reform mayor, including municipal ownership of gas and light utilities and street car line. Hearst defended unions and thought strikes to be a legitimate tool for unions to negotiate better wages. Anti corruption/Tammany were also cornerstones; he labeled his approach as “urban Jeffersonian”.[2] Unlike Tom Johnson who ran on a fairly similar platform in Cleveland, New York City voters gave McClellan a 2,800 vote lead (over 600,000 votes were cast). Fraud and ballot stuffing were alleged, and somewhat supported by subsequent court decisions—and Hearst lost to McClellan Jr. New York City’s Tammany stymied a social reform mayor.

 

Hearst ran again in 1909 against another Tammany candidate, Judge William Gaynor in yet another three way race—finishing third. Tammany’s Gaynor garnered most of the City’s foreign stock and working class vote. So the NYC social reform mayor had to wait for another day. In any event, the reader may have realized the first decade of the twentieth century has passed, and still no evidence of a Progressive structural reformer? Well … not exactly. The following tale exposes the weakness in Boss Murphy’s new concept of a “respectable” clean machine and how structural reformers could make strange bedfellows. The answer to my earlier question is neither McClellan (second term) nor Gaynor, Tammany nominees as they were, took policy direction from Tammany. They both governed as structural reformers. In his effort to preserve Tammany’s hold on the lower and working classes against Heart’s social reform movement, Boss Murphy had traded “an elegant veneer [a respectable independent candidate] at the cost of loss of control”.[3] Accordingly, Finegold[4] correctly asserts that McClellan’s second administration can “be considered the ‘take-off period’ for New York City’s structural reformers.

 

If the reader remembers, the NYC Municipal Research Bureau came into existence in 1906 as the Citizen’s Union Bureau of City Betterment—in May 1907 it split off as the Bureau (with funding from Carnegie and Rockefeller). McClellan in 1906 had turned to City Betterment for an analysis of the City’s Health Department. From that study, the City introduced “the concept of a budget” into its municipal finance system. The Bureau and McClellan later joined together to expand the budget to all departments in 1907. Then the Bureau conducted a investigation of the Manhattan and Bronx Borough Presidents, the findings of which were used by a special counsel[5] appointed by McClellan. These two Tammany officials were subsequently removed by Governor Hughes.

 

Gaynor was even more hostile to Tammany—even after being endorsed and supported by Boss Murphy during the election. Gaynor’s cabinet included a series of “experts” and professionals—more than any previous mayoral administration. Gaynor defended the Research Bureau from Tammany attacks (Tammany called it the Bureau of Besmirch) and his administration, despite Gaynor’s personal dislike of many of its funders, worked closely with the Bureau’s staff/leadership to inject “efficiency of personnel” and more enhanced budgeting, accounting and purchasing reforms, it reorganized the Manhattan’s Department of Public Works. To train municipal officials on public administration, new administrative practices and skills, the Bureau set up a training school (funded by Mary Harriman). One of its first graduates was Robert Moses who later devised the City’s personnel system. The Bureau, after appropriate research, rejected the commission form of government as unsuitable for the City. The Bureau successfully recommended a new Division of Child Hygiene, mapped tuberculosis cases, and studied tenement reform.

 

By 1913, two Tammany mayors had successfully modernized and professionalized New York City municipal government, in alliance with the Bureau of Municipal Research and the one percenters that funded it. Tammany put up with these disruptions because the greater evil in its eyes was a potential victory of William Randolph Hearst and the installation of a social reformer in the mayor’s office. By threatening Tammany’s hold on the working class and foreign stock, Hearst had forced Tammany into an unwilling alliance with upper class business structural reformers[6]. By 1913, however, Tammany was in for yet another scare. Another potential social reformer, our John Purroy Mitchel, Irish Catholic President of the Board of Alderman, running as a Republican Fusion candidate, relying heavily on the Bureau of Municipal Research for his policy initiatives and political agenda had declared his candidacy for mayor.

 

A Social Reformer Tries Structural Reform—Not so Good

Mitchel’s constituency was former Hearst voters—plus the structural reformer business class and the one percenters. Mitchel’s signature proposal was municipal ownership of the newly constructed subways. His previous anti-Tammany corruption investigation established his credentials as a honest man, and his close association with the Bureau cemented his determination to continue structural reform in New York City and to introduce evermore professional management and administration into its policies and capacity of its government. Mitchel garnered more votes than all the opposition combined.

 

So in 1913 New York City finally had its social reform mayor. Alas for Mayor Mitchel, however, it mostly came to naught. The ultimate cause of his future failure was his inability to hold the “barbell” fusion coalition together in implementing his social reform agenda that demanded new programs while he followed scientific management principles that called for efficiency and economy. The first crisis, a severe recession in 1914-1915 that left 18% of New York City unemployed, was countered by a Mayor’s Commission, led by the head of U.S. Steel and staffed by the Bureau, called for public works and a loan fund (from business contributions). But the City Comptroller refused to release the funds for the public works and business did not contribute to the loan fund. In the end, the Commission represented a victory of “cost-conscious business reformers over socially conscious reformers. The mayor was never able, some say he didn’t try hard enough, to bridge the differences.[7]

 

The same pattern was repeated constantly in the following years. The “Gary School Plan”, the “charities investigation” (in which Mitchel secretly wiretapped an opposition Catholic priest) left all involved dissatisfied; the appointment of New York City’s first woman commissioner and then failing to fund her novel initiatives for a drug treatment center and women’s reform prison; a new expert and prestigious Health Commissioner who was forced by budget cuts to close clinics in schools. The frosting on the cake was Mitchel’s deal with the New York Central Railroad to remove dangerous tracks along the Hudson which was perceived by many as an expensive land swap (grab?) and a perpetual franchise which had to be limited by the New York State Legislature to fifty years. Even the 1916 adoption of the nation’s first comprehensive zoning law left many of its proponents unsatisfied. “Throughout the Mitchel’s administration, then, potentially broad-ranging progressive reforms were implemented in narrowly cost-conscious ways. … [Why? Because] Mitchel depended on big business to finance his two mayoral campaigns, and the city government itself”.[8] In the latter instance, J.P. Morgan during the Recession had assembled a syndicate of banks to purchase bonds  sufficient to fund the City’s operations. Morgan required such bonds be paid by revenues generated—revenues not likely to follow from most social reform initiatives.

 

On top of all this the Bureau and Mitchel quarreled If the Bureau could work with Tammany, it found it difficult to work with social reformers. Social reform initiatives and professional experts called for more government and more taxes in the short term. The Bureau’s approach to produce long-term plans for broad social initiatives could not rest comfortably with the short term need to find funds for their implementation. Accepting a Rockefeller grant, the Bureau reduced its watchdog role in the Mitchel administration (causing several prominent Board resignations), and separated itself from the Training Institute. It might be no surprise that in the next election (1917) Mitchel lost handily to the Tammany candidate. Tammany controlled the Mayor’s office until La Guardia’s election in 1933. Tammany literally removed the Bureau from city affairs and forbade its personnel from entering City Hall. “We have had all the reform that we want in this city for some time to come” wrote the new mayor, Hylan. The city Training Institute in 1921 was spun off and merged into the new National Institute for Public Administration.[9]

 

So in the spirit of “no good deed deserves to go unpunished”, New York City had gotten its structural reform, but not its social reform—and in return both had been kicked out of the office. Nevertheless, the New York City case study illustrates how our Big Cities were able to incorporate scientific management, public administrative principles into Big City municipal bureaucracies. Municipal Research Bureaus financed by the upper echelons of a jurisdiction’s business elite played a huge role in this gradual, decade-long development of bureaucratic capacity and leadership by professional experts into the Big City policy system. The “administration” of policy now included professional neutrality within a hierarchical bureaucracy, organized by function and process, and held accountable to a strong mayor elected to advance his platform’s program. Municipal government now had the bureaucratic capacity to operate a sophisticated policy system through its complete policy cycle—including policy administration and evaluation. It now could possess the leadership of vital professions necessary to develop and implement public policies.

 

The principle of authority would hold everyone in the system accountable. Policy-makers delegated authority to the bureaucracy, and higher-level bureaucrats could use authority to control what their subordinates did. The application of these two principles—hierarchy and authority—would promote efficiency by allowing the creation of sophisticated bureaucracies full of highly skilled workers. It would promote accountability by specifying the relationship of each worker to policymakers. It would remove administration from the political chaos … And it would do all these things by carefully structuring the work within clear boundaries.[10]

 

The next step, changing the form of government, would prove vastly for difficult for Big Cities.

 

[1] Melvin Holli, “Social and Structural Reform: Mayors and Municipal Government” in Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz (Eds) Cities in American History (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1972),  pp. 396-397.  Robert Finegold, Experts and Politicians, op. cit., p. 41, observes this is not entirely fair as Low did build ten neighborhood bath houses, which in its day was a serious initiative.

[2] A persistent small tremor underneath Jefferson’s tombstone is reported to have lasted through the campaign.

[3] Robert Finegold, Expert and Politicians, op. cit., p. 49.

[4] Robert Finegold, Expert and Politicians, op. cit., p. 50.

[5] The special counsel, later McClellan’s Commissioner of Accounts,  was John Purroy Mitchel. Mitchel in 1909 became President of the Board of Alderman and  in 1913 was elected  Mayor.

[6] Robert Finegold, Expert and Politicians, op. cit., p. 53.

[7] Robert Finegold, Expert and Politicians, op. cit., p. 58.

[8] Robert Finegold, Expert and Politicians, op. cit., p. 61.

[9] Robert Finegold, Expert and Politicians, op. cit., p. 65.

[10] Donald F. Kettl, The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for Twenty-First Century America (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 8.

[11] Raymond A. Mohl, the New City, op. cit. p. 118.

[12] Bradley R. Rice, Progressive Cities : the Commission Movement in America, 1900-1920  (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2014).

[13] Raymond A. Mohl, the New City,  op. cit. p. 119.

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