Tammany Hall and the Machine Style in Black Politics

Abstract

“I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” explained George Washington Plunkitt speaking to the journalist William L. Riordan at the dawn of the twentieth century. For many college students, William Riordan's collection of musings and reminiscences from New York State Senator Plunkitt, delivered at a shoeshine stand on Manhattan's West Side, offers a definitive introduction to the history of urban machine politics. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, first published in 1905, has become a ubiquitous text, frequently assigned in political science courses and excerpted in U.S. history source books. Plunkitt's reflections, while entertaining, present a transactional and opportunistic form of political practice. He famously differentiates between honest graft and dishonest graft; insists that showing up at fires to help victims is key to holding your district; declares the Irish to be natural born leaders; and derides reformers as “mornin’ glories.” He rages against the key urban reform project of the era, civil service examinations, as “the curse of the nation,” amounting to “a lot of fool questions about the number of cubic inches of water in the Atlantic and the quality of sand in the Sahara desert.” Civil service exams blocked machine politicians from distributing jobs to loyal followers, which in the case of the New York Democratic machine typically meant recently arrived Irish immigrants. As Plunkitt explains, “The Irishman is grateful. His one thought is to serve the city which gave him a home. He has this thought even before he lands in New York, for his friends here often have a good place in one of the city's departments picked out for him while he is still in the old country.” Plunkitt's characterization of the linkage between migrant arrival and municipal work points to the central role that access to city payrolls played in the economic and political history of the New York Irish. Arguably, the only other urban group that relied as heavily on city jobs for economic mobility has been African Americans.