New York City, Buffalo and Boston Irish-Dominated Machines
First and second generation immigrant voters can differ in their occupations, orientation to politics, their residential location and the intensity of their adherence to their ethnic culture. Working class machines based on an ethnic constituency are likely to experience tensions from generational change. While they may share common ethnic-based political traditions and even a shared political culture, other factors education, occupation and residential mobility becomes more complex in the post-1900 immigrant community/neighborhood. This is especially serious when subsequent immigration flooded the cities with new nationalities (Italians, Poles, Czechs, Jews, Asians, Norwegians, Swedes. Few post-1900 Big Cities are inhabited solely or overwhelmingly by any one ethnic group (as was Boston). Can a machine built or at least controlled by one nationality share itself with other nationalities? The crisis of machines, and urban politics in general, in these years is to adapt to, and accommodate, multi-ethnic cultures and political demands. Different ethnic groups do not necessarily see things the same way, or are willing to be led by another ethnic group’s politicians. To be a successful machine/boss/charismatic mayor in these years, meant assembling and maintaining a multi-ethnic coalition—which is no easy task.
One of the more fascinating Progressive Era contrasts is that of machine/boss/mayoral politics/systems in New York City, Boston, and Buffalo. Each shared a constant: Irish were the largest single ethnic group included in the machine—and the machine’s leadership was Irish. The case study hopefully demonstrates that even the famous Irish machine/boss politics did not fit the conventional one-size-fits-all Progressive Era stereotype.
Tammany after Tweed (1872) was quickly captured by the Irish. Two Irish Tammany bosses (Kelly and Croker) followed Tweed. Tammany Hall decision-making was dominated by Irish ward bosses and Irish politicians. The strength of this Irish machine ultimately rested upon the numerical strength of Irish voters (initially the single largest ethnic group in the City). After the 1880’s, however, Irish voting superiority was challenged by new ethnic groups that immigrated into the city. Kelly and Croker preserved, to the extent possible, Tammany’s Irish hegemony. But in 1902, surrounded by the usual scandals, a resurgent structural reform business community, and a reduced Irish voting bloc, Croker’s Tammany collapsed electorally. Seth Low and his Progressive reformers moved into city hall. At this critical juncture, Tammany faced, if nothing else, an identity crisis. Could it accommodate other immigrant nationalities into its organization—and its leadership?
At this critical juncture, Tammany got, of all things, got another Irish boss—Charles Francis Murphy if you please. But Murphy was an Irishman of a different stripe than Croker. He remade Tammany from the inside out. Murphy, like Cox, never became mayor; to the extent he was successful, it was because he elected respectable mayors with ties to him and his Tammany. But to his everlasting credit, Murphy “integrated” Tammany and shared its leadership with the non-Irish. Murphy, a former Commissioner of the Docks (NYC’s EDO, remember), recruited an entirely different type of Tammany operative and politician. Murphy dealt with the new ethnic groups by including them into Tammany and selecting from among them non-Irish ethnic political candidates—the balanced ticket. Included in this list is our famous George Washington Plunkitt (of honest graft fame), James Farley (FDR’s future campaign manager, New York State Democratic Chair, and U.S. Secretary of Post Office), James Walker (future mayor) and—Al Smith, future Governor and Presidential candidate.
Tammany’s political candidates were no longer simple hacks; they had personalities, policy positions and some independence. Murphy shifted Tammany policy toward social reform agendas (worker safety, child labor laws, honest graft rather than bribes); in other words Murphy embraced elements of the Progressive social reform agenda of the period. Murphy lasted until 1924, but Tammany, although crippled by the social reformer Mayor La Guardia (1933-1945), came back in the 1950’s, and put up a muted fight until Koch in the middle 1980’s.
On the other hand, Buffalo’s Democratic Irish machine, the beneficiary of Irish numerical dominance in Buffalo politics, shared power with a Republican machine during much of the Gilded Age. The Irish machine always found it difficult to share its power with other ethnic groups who moved into Buffalo. As a consequence, only one Irish mayor was elected during the entire Gilded Age. Occasionally reform candidates such as Grover Cleveland, a bourbon Democrat, snuck into power. The Republican Party, chiefly mayor-businessmen, and the Chamber of Commerce usually were dominant players in the city’s “policy system”. During the Progressive Era under Irish boss William H. Fitzpatrick (chair of the Erie County Democratic Party), the Buffalo regime continued its feuding with the other ethnic groups. Italians and Poles (as well as Germans) were more or less driven out of the Irish dominated party. Some went straight into the Republican Party; others fought a civil war within the Democratic Party. Business structural reformers were able to take advantage of this so that in the thirty years after 1900, Republicans controlled the mayor’s office four times to the Democrats two (neither of whom were machine Irish).
Very simply, the Irish machine, despite the Irish being largest single ethnic group, were outnumbered by the other ethnic groups and were consistently unable to forge coalitions sufficient to dominate Buffalo politics during the Progressive Era. The machine did well enough in the New Deal years (although the city defaulted on its debt), but only after the machine was opened up to other ethnic groups in the mid-1950’s did it enjoy sustained success. The machine more or less returned to Irish control in the 1960’s (Peter Crotty and Joseph Crangle), but lost control of the mayoralty when James Griffin (a maverick Irish Democrat) won four terms in office (1978-1995). A renegade non-machine Pole (Dennis T. Gorski) captured Erie County government in 1987—brought about the demise of Buffalo’s machine[1].
Boston is another story altogether. Two factors stand out which impacted the evolution of Boston’s machine. First, the Irish retained ethnic mastery over Boston politics, despite new arrivals, especially Italians and Blacks. But their inability to forge a city-wide political machine led by an Irish city-wide boss such as that enjoyed in Buffalo and New York City after 1900 meant that the hated Boston Brahmin Protestant business sector was able to impact city policy-making persistently. Through the state legislature, the business elites, using Dillon’s Law, were able to strip away crucial municipal powers (after all why was Governor Coolidge playing the decision-making role in the Boston Police strike of 1920), such as public finances and civil service.
The voting power of the Irish, however, meant that charismatic political candidates such as “Honey Fitz” (John F. Fitzgerald) and James Michael Curley dominated the mayor’s office through the 1990’s. Boston’s neighborhoods were politically controlled by ward bosses through most of this period. In effect, there was an Irish ward-level machine, decentralized and very fragmented—without a city-wide boss–but with a charismatic mayor instead. Boston’s Irish politics was brutal, and would remain so for most of the twentieth century. Conflicting or temporary alliances and deep personal rivalries among Irish and other ethnic ward bosses/political officials played a major role in Boston’s governance—as will be vividly demonstrated in our future case study of Boston’s urban renewal programs in the sixties and seventies.
Tammany’s accommodation to multi-ethnic groups permitted that machine system to continue with varying degrees of effectiveness into the 1980’s—when all three of these systems more of less passed on to the political happy hunting grounds. The other two machines did not adapt as well, or at all, and their ability to shape their jurisdiction’s policy system suffered accordingly. Each in some form persisted for nearly a century. Three brief examples of machine politics are an initial support to our position that machines/bosses are not time-bound, but extend in varying strength and forms throughout most of the twentieth century. Machines with their working class constituency should be considered a legitimate urban policy system. To accomplish this task the conventional image-model of machine politics, however, needs to be refined to allow for the incredible machine/boss variation within and across each political era.
[1] See Mark Goldman, High Hopes: the rise and decline of Buffalo, New York (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1983) and Stephen J. L. Taylor, Desegregation in Boston and Buffalo: the influence of local leaders (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1998). By way of disclosure, the author at one time in his career held the chairmanship of the William H. Fitzpatrick Chair of Political Science at Canisius College in Buffalo. He was also an element of the “renegade Pole’s” successful drive to County Executive and served as both Assistant to the County Executive-Economic Development Coordinator and First Deputy Commissioner of Environment and Planning in that administration. During the remainder of the Gorski administration and two years of the subsequent administration, the author served as Executive Director/President of the ECIDA Agency Group.
Ron W. Coan 