Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway (review)

The Society of St. Tammany or Columbian Order originated in Manhattan as a fraternal club. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tammany Hall, as the “organization” was better known, survived periodic battles with reformers to dominate New York County’s Democratic Party. Tammany’s influence began to erode in 1933, when the election of Republican-Fusion Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia deprived the political machine of access to patronage, just as some of its denizens were rising to national prominence in the Roosevelt administration.

In Machine Made, Golway, Director of the Kean University Center for History, Politics, and Policy and a former journalist, draws on archival research and synthesizes existing literature to highlight the relationship between Tammany Hall and Irish-Americans. His story begins in 1817, when two hundred Irish New Yorkers descended upon Tammany’s headquarters in a rowdy attempt to win its endorsement of Thomas Addis Emmet, originally of County Cork, for the State Assembly. Emphasizing the similarity between the disdain encountered by the Irish in Ireland and that experienced by Irish immigrants in New York, Golway demonstrates how, over time, Tammany’s Irish leaders successfully challenged “the transatlantic Anglo-American idea of how government ought to run” (xxiv).

The strategies for mass mobilization that Tammany Hall perfected can be traced back to the campaign for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, according to Golway. Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association was open to all who could pay a penny a month and his strategist, Thomas Wyse, saw that material assistance was provided to those who risked their welfare by voting. In the United States, Tammany’s Irish-American politicians employed a similar approach; the machine’s “network of block captains and district leaders encouraged the poor to look to accessible political figures” when faced with economic hardship and prejudice (xx).

Golway persistently probes the influence of Catholicism upon Tammany’s Irish members; perhaps unsurprisingly, the picture that emerges is a complicated one. New York’s Archbishop John Hughes imposed a hierarchical administrative structure upon his diocese and maintained a skeptical stance toward the perfectionist aspirations of antebellum reform movements. Even so, Golway’s implication that Hughes influenced Tammany Hall in these matters may be a stretch; after all, Hughes befriended New York’s Whig Governor William Seward and his attempt to win public funding for Catholic schools divided the Democrats.

In his discussion of the early twentieth century, Golway explores the possible link between Catholic social teaching and the social welfare legislation that Tammany championed, challenging the notion that machine politicians were motivated primarily by pragmatic self-interest. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 is often cited as the impetus for Tammany’s embrace of workplace safety regulations and other progressive measures, but Golway points out that the Hall had earlier supported mothers’ pensions and state regulation of utilities. The devout Charles Francis Murphy was at the machine’s helm as it “redefined reform as a pragmatic, lunch-bucket form of liberalism stripped of the Progressive Era’s moral pieties and evangelical roots” (196). Murphy possessed an extensive library that included texts on religion, he was a contemporary of clerics such as Cardinal James Gibbons and Bishop John Ireland, and one his close advisors, Jeremiah Mahoney, cited Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum as an important influence on the Catholic politicians of his day. On this basis, Golway speculates that an awareness of Catholic social thought may have helped incline Murphy and his machine prodigies to advocate laws to remedy society’s ills. This contention is worthy of further investigation; further research on Jeremiah Mahoney might prove illuminating.

The narrative concludes in 1932, when Tammany’s Al Smith lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s New Deal reflected the influence of Tammany’s progressive legislation, but ultimately reduced the need for its services. Following World War II, many of Tammany’s Irish supporters departed for the...