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.
[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.
Ron W. Coan 