George Washington Plunkitt: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics. As told to William L. Riordan. Cleveland: Compass Circle, 2019.
This review written in remembrance of my late colleague, Dr. Mickey Craig, who loved this book.
Founded in 1786, the Society of St. Tammany began as a social club with Jeffersonian-republican leanings. ‘Tammany’ was a saint in no church, but he seems to have been a man of good will. As chief of the Lenni-Lenape Indians, he enabled William Penn’s Quakers to establish their peaceful colony along the Delaware River, eventually earning the title “Patron Saint of America.” The Manhattan Tammanyites played along with the story, giving Indian titles to their officers, calling their chief the “Grand Sachem.” As the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties coalesced, Tammany became increasingly organized, recruiting immigrants, especially the Irish, into its ranks, lured by city jobs and happy with the social services Tammany provided. In 1828, President Jackson promised to give Tammany Hall control of federal patronage in Manhattan. Tammany’s candidate for mayor, Fernando Wood, was elected in 1854, and this began Tammany’s 100-year dominance of city politics. A few years later, William M. Tweed took control of the organization.
Tweed quickly won notoriety as one of the biggest crooks ever to enter New York politics. Manhattan was an independent city throughout his reign, as the five boroughs didn’t consolidate until 1898. Stacking the county with his fellow thieves, he embezzled millions and built a real estate empire. It wasn’t until the 1870s that New Yorkers decided that enough was enough; he died in prison. Tweed and his ‘ring,’ as it was called by its critics, consisted of (nominal) Protestants; the fall of Grand Sachem “Boss” Tweed enabled Catholics to take over the organization, which remained corrupt but on a less gargantuan scale. By 1902, Tammany’s boss was Charles Francis Murphy, who worked to clean up the organization’s image without necessarily eliminating some of its sharp business practices, such as ballot-stuffing and patronage. Patronage was the key to Tammany’s success, with the promise of jobs keeping the boys well organized and disciplined. Civil service reformers, Tammany’s worst enemies, claimed that staffing government offices with tenured, professional administrators would eliminate or at least minimize corruption, saving the taxpayers millions wasted on graft. Even less plausibly, reformers also claimed that such a professional bureaucracy would be more democratic because any qualified person could win a job by scoring well on a civil service test, rather than depending upon the favor of the rough-edged Tammany oligarchs. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but that is another story.
Born in 1842, George Washington Plunkitt flourished as Tammany’s leader of the 15th Assembly District before and especially during Murphy’s tenure. In his long career, he served New York, Tammany, and himself as a state senator, a state assemblyman, a New York County Supervisor and Alderman, and as a Police Magistrate. He chaired Tammany’s Elections Committee, always trusted to produce votes for the candidates. By the time he was interviewed by New York Evening Post reporter William L. Riordan, he held no formal office, having eased into the role of Murphy’s trusted advisor; Murphy supplied the book with a brief “tribute” to his ally, whom he lauded as “a straight organization man,” always “faithful and reliable,” a speaker of plain, home truths. In their own way, both men were reformers, if not (Heaven forfend) civil service reformers. They were men who recognized that the old-style political organization needed to sober up a bit in order to survive.
To prove that he has done so, Plunkitt makes a careful distinction. There is “dishonest” graft: blackmail, outright thievery of public funds as practiced by Tweed and his gang. But there is also “honest graft,” adroitly summarized in Plunkitt’s mot, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em”—a thought he wanted to be engraved on his tombstone. The opportunities he saw were, for the most part, real estate investments based on what we now call ‘inside information,’ as when he knew that the city intended to establish a park or to build a road and would need a certain parcel of land to make the project viable. He would purchase said property from the unwitting owner, then sell it to the city at a fine profit. “Shouldn’t I enjoy the profit of my foresight?” he asks, rhetorically. All the auditors “can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft”—a practice “that’s never goin’ to hurt Tammany with the people” because “every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn’t isn’t likely to be popular.” Surely, Tammany leaders never need to sully themselves with dishonest graft “when there is so much honest graft lyin’ around when they are in power.” No, indeed: “I don’t own a dishonest dollar.” If the reformers want to deprecate this as “the spoils system,” well, “all right, Tammany is for the spoils system.” Manhattan under the Tammany spoils system really is, as the song would later put it, an Isle of Joy, “a sort of Garden of Eden, from a political point of view,” an “orchard full of beautiful apple trees,” their fruits read to be plucked by an honest and attentive soul. Just don’t touch that “Penal Code Tree.” It is “Poison.”
Having established that fundamental principle, Plunkitt explains how a young man may become a true statesman, not a meddlesome reformer. “Some young men think they can learn how to be successful in politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of college rot.” Such “book-worms” may “do some good in a certain way, but they don’t count in politics.” On the contrary, a college education handicaps them. Nor will the study of oratory do them much good. “We’ve got some orators in Tammany Hall, but they’re chiefly ornamental.” We trot them out for ceremonial occasions, but otherwise “they don’t count when business is doin’ at Tammany Hall,” since “the men who rule have practiced keepin’ their tongues still, not exercisin’ them.”
The problem is, “You can’t study human nature in books.” You’ll need to unlearn whatever you learned, or thought you learned, in those things, “and unlearnin’ takes a lot of time.” “To learn real human nature you have to go among the people, see them and be seen,” find out “what they like and what they don’t like, what they are strong at and what they are weak in.” Then and only then will you be able “by approachin’ at the right side.” If I hear of “a young feller that’s proud of his voice,” I ask him to join the Tammany Glee Club.” When “he comes and sings…he’s a follower of Plunkitt for life.” Same thing with some kid who can play baseball; we have a spot on our baseball club roster just waiting for him. “You’ll find him workin’ for my ticket at the polls next election day.” They see their opportunities and they take them, courtesy of Mr. Plunkitt and Tammany Hall. What’s not to like? As for “the high-toned fellers, the fellers that go through college,” such a young man is “the daintiest morsel of the lot, and he don’t often escape me.” I just let him take that fool Civil Service exam and, once he flunks it, he finds his way back to Tammany Hall and joins up.
No, real politics is a business, and to go into business you need “marketable commodities.” In the politics business, votes are the commodities you need. “Do as I did”: “Get a followin’.” If you have even one man who will vote the way you do, “through thick and thin,” then you can go to your district leader and say let him know that. Be assured, he will welcome you warmly into the organization. But if you tell him “I took first prize at college in Aristotle; I can recite all Shakespeare forwards and backwards”; I know science; “I’m the real thing in the way of silver-tongued orators,” well, “he’ll probably say: ‘I guess you are not to blame for your misfortunes, but we have no use for you here.'” You’ve got nothing marketable to sell. As for me, I started in politics at the age of twelve, making “myself useful around the district headquarters” and working “at all the polls on election day.” “Show me a boy that hustles for the organization on election day, and I’ll show you a comin’ statesman.”
Once in the organization, once a proven vote-getter for the organization, your best marketable commodities are charity for the poor and jobs for everyone else. If there’s a fire, I’m there, along with my election district captains, “as soon as the fire engines.” “If a family is burned out, I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation.” I just go ahead and find them a place to stay, buy clothes for them, and generally “fix them up till they get things runnin’ again.” When you know human nature, you know that “the poor are the most grateful people in the world, and, let me tell you, they have more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in theirs.” One might say that Tammany embodied a branch of the Democratic Party that had adapted itself to a democratic regime, the one wherein the majority rules.
Speaking of gratitude, “There’s no crime so mean”—none so much contra naturum, if you will—than “ingratitude in politics.” Sorry to say, “but every great statesman from the beginning of the world” has been up against it: “Caesar had his Brutus; that king of Shakespeare’s—Leary, I think you call him” (probably Irish, then)—suffered grievously when he saw “his own daughters go back on him.” I myself, Plunkitt, have endured such betrayals. “It’s a real proof that a man is great when he meets with political ingratitude”; “great men have a tender, trustin’ nature,” and “so have I”—well, “outside the contractin’ and real estate business.” Nonetheless, the natural order prevails in the end. “The ingrate in politics never lasts long.” He takes without giving, and that breeds distrust. As one Tammany boss, Richard Croker, was fond of saying, “Tellin’ the truth and stickin’ to his friends [is] the political leader’s stock in trade,” and he lived according to that precept. As a result, “every man in the organization trusted him.” The same is true of today’s boss, Charles F. Murphy, who “has always stood by his friends even when it looked like he would be downed for doin’ so.” Now, fortunately, Irish Catholics now run Tammany, not those Protestant Tweedites. “The Irish, above all people in the world, hates a traitor,” having had the experience of those Irish Protestant Orangemen back on the Auld Sod, conniving with the English to rule their Catholic brethren. “The Irish was born to rule, and they’re the honestest people in the world.” No Irishman would steal the roof off an almshouse. Not at all, although “he might get the city authorities to put on a new one and get the contract for it himself, and buy the old roof at a bargain—but that’s honest graft,” that’s “goin’ about the thing like a gentleman,” and there’s “more money in it than in tearin’ down an old roof and cartin’ it to the junkman’s—more money and no penal code.” This is why the Irishman “is grateful to the country and the city that gave him protection and prosperity when he was driven by oppression from the Emerald Isle.” And as for their benefactor, George Washington Plunkitt, “I made my pile in politics, but, at the same time, I served the organization and got more big improvements for New York City than any other livin’ man,” all while avoiding arrest by doing nothing illegal.
But the prime marketable commodity a Tammany leader has on offer is jobs with the city. As long as “the leader hustles around and gets all the jobs possible for his constituents,” no ingratitude is likely, and none deserved. He has “a sort of contract” with his constituents, a social contract, to use that high-toned language you need to unlearn from college. His constituents put him into office; now he is morally obligated to make sure “that this district gets all the jobs that comm’ to it.” If he does that, “he shows himself in all ways a true statesman,” and “his followers are bound in honor to uphold him, just as they’re bound to uphold the Constitution of the United States.” On the other hand, if he only works for himself or “shows no talent for scenting out jobs or ain’t got the nerve to demand and get his share of the good things that are going,” then his followers “may be absolved from their allegiance and they may up and swat him without bein’ put down as political ingrates,” as surely as the American colonists whacked their English oppressors back in the day, just the way the poor Irish wished they could have done and fled to America, where we do things right.
Sometimes you hear of inter-party strife, Democrats versus Republicans. Not in little old New York City, at least when it counts. Sure, “we differ on tariffs and currencies and all them things, but we agree on the main proposition that when a man works in politics, he should get something out of it.” And so, if Tammany loses an election, not to worry. It simply turns to the Republicans, who know they can get jobs from Tammany when the electoral results turn against them. “When we win I won’t let any deservin’ Republican in my neighborhood suffer from hunger or thirst, although, of course, I look out for my own people first.” You might say that’s right out of Aristotle: politics is ruling and being ruled, in turn. To which Mr. Plunkitt adds, ‘and get something in return.’
There’s no question, a true statesman needs, as Aristotle recommends in the Nicomachean Ethics, to adapt himself to circumstances. “Tammany Hall is a great big machine, with every part adjusted delicate to do its own particular work,” with leaders chosen to fit each voting district. In his own district, Mr. Plunkitt “don’t try to show off my grammar, or talk about the Constitution, or how many volts there is in electricity or make it appear in any way that I am better educated than they are,” although, by his own testimony, he has at least heard of Aristotle and Shakespeare and King Leary or whatever his name was. “Shakespeare was all right in his way, but he didn’t know anything about Fifteenth District politics.” On the other hand, when Mr. Plunkitt “get[s] into the silk-stockin’ part of the district, I can talk grammar and all that with the best of them,” having gone to school “three winters when I was a boy,” learning “a lot of fancy stuff that I keep for occasions.” Yes, “I’ve got to be several sorts of a man in a single day,” but always “one sort of man” in “one respect: I stick to my friends high and low, do them a good turn whenever I get a chance, and hunt up all the jobs going for my constituents,” there being no “man in New York who’s got such a scent for political jobs as I have.” To those who heed his hard-won prudential wisdom, he advises, “Puttin’ on style don’t pay in politics. The people won’t stand for it.” So, “be simple.” “Live like your neighbors even if you have the means to live better. Make the poorest man in your district feel that he is you equal, or even a bit superior to you.”
Having established the virtues of Tammany Hall politics and politicians, Mr. Plunkitt shares his animadversions against those who would interfere with them: those undemocratic, ignorant underminers of true patriotism, the civil service reformers. Now, as he has shown, Tammany has already reformed itself since the unfortunate days of the dishonest grafter, William M. Tweed. But there is such a thing as going too far.
“Civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age,” the “curse of the nation.” To wrest from elected officials the power of appointing men to administrative offices in the city government violates the principle of “representative government.” “Is it all a fake that this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people?” And “if it isn’t a fake, then why isn’t the people’s voice obeyed and Tammany men put in all the offices?” To place men in office based on their scores on standardized civil service tests causes “the people’s voice” to be “smothered”; “it is the root of all evil in our government.” The menace is clear: “The civil service humbug is underminin’ our institutions and if a halt ain’t called our great republic will tumble down like a Park Avenue house when they were buildin’ the subway, and on its ruins will arise another Russian government.” And if not czarism, then the return of English-like or maybe Frenchified kings, much to the horror of every decent Irishman. Civil service may “gobble up everything, politicians would be on the bum, the republic would fall and soon there would be the cry of ‘Veyey le roi!'” And as for the allegedly democratic reform of primary elections, designed to take the political parties’ nomination power from the Tammany bosses, “it would mean chaos.” Civil service reform would put nominations in the hands of “cart-tail orators and college graduates,” which would be like “takin’ a lot of dry-goods clerks and settin’ them to run express trains on the New York Central Railroad.” “It makes my heart bleed to think of it” especially considering the “magnificent men” (John Kelly, Richard Croker, Charles F. Murphy) who have controlled Democratic Party nominations in New York in recent years. “What names in American history compares with them, except Washington and Lincoln?” Mr. Plunkitt would like to know. “They built up the grand Tammany organization, and the organization built up New York,” with none of the grandstanding seen in primary elections. “The men who put through the primary law are the same crowd that stand for the civil service blight and they have the same objects in view—the destruction of governments by party, the downfall of the constitution and hell generally.”
Where is their patriotism? The true American patriot wants some quid for his quo. Patriots are made, not born. “How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them when they work for their party?” There’s no use “of workin’ for your country” if “there’s nothin’ in the game.” “But, when a man has a good fat salary, he finds himself hummin’ ‘Hail Columbia,’ all unconscious, and fancies, when he’s ridin’ in a trolley car, that the wheels are always sayin’: ‘Yankee Doodle Came to Town.'” Take me, for example, “When I got my first good job from the city, I bought up all the firecrackers in my district to salute this glorious country” because “I felt proud of bein’ an American.” But when the Fourth of July comes around, what do the reformers do? They “run off to Newport or the Adirondacks to get out of the way of the noise an everything that reminds them of the glorious day.” Not so, Tammany; its constitution requires that members “assemble at the wigwam on the Fourth.” “You ought to attend one of these meetin’s. They’re a liberal education in patriotism.” For “four solid hours,” Tammany Democrats listen to a reading of the Declaration of Independence, speeches by “long-winded orators,” and patriotic songs from the glee club, all the while knowing that champagne and beer awaits them when it’s over. That isn’t just patriotism. It’s heroic asceticism, “the highest kind of patriotism, the patriotism of long sufferin’ and endurance.” Doesn’t that civil service reformer who fought in Spain, Theodore Roosevelt, concern himself when a young man who was blocked from a city job because he couldn’t pass the civil service exam turned around and fought for Spain in Cuba? And then there was the other “young man” who “worked for the ticket and was just overflowin’ with patriotism, but when he was knocked out by the civil service humbug he got to hate his country and became an Anarchist.”
A syllogism is in order, here. “First, this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be hell to pay.” “The republic will go to pieces,” and “then a czar or a sultan will turn up.”
Therefore, the reformers “are underminin’ the manhood of the nation and makin’ the Declaration of Independence a farce. We need a new Declaration of Independence, independence of the whole fool civil service business.” And maybe independence of New York City from New York State, the latter being run by hayseeds—farmers who want nothing more than to enact civil service laws and to plunder the riches of industrious City residents. They object to New Yorkers, especially corporations headquartered in the city, who contribute to political campaigns for Tammany candidates. “They might as well howl about givin’ contributions to churches. A political organization has to have money for its business as well as a church, and who has more right to put up than the men who get the good things that are goin’?” Tammany “does missionary work like a church,” giving charity to the poor, and those “big expenses” need “to be supported by the faithful.” (And by the way, Tammany leaders are as much teetotalers as any reform-minded Prohibitionist. “I honestly believe that drink is the greatest curse of the day, except of course, civil service.” Those “great leaders of Tammany Hall” above mentioned had not a regular drinker among them. “A drinkin’ man wouldn’t last two weeks as leader of Tammany Hall. Nor can a man manage an assembly district long if he drinks. He’s got to have a clear head all the time.” Mind you, that didn’t prevent Big Tim Sullivan and Little Tim Sullivan from running saloons down in the Bowery. They made money out of liquor by “sellin’ it to other people,” which is “the only way to get good out of liquor”—if not wine out of water, then profits out of beer.
Tammany Hall has reformed itself but to save Americans from the civil service tyranny the whole Democratic Party needs to get back on the straight and narrow. “The trouble is that the party’s been chasin’ after theories and stayin’ up nights readin’ books instead of studyin’ human nature and actin’ accordin’.” These issues about money—the gold standard versus the silver standard—have no practical value because, as Boss Croker aphorized back in 1900, “What’s the use in discussin’ what’s the best kind of money? I’m in favor of all kinds of money—the more the better.” Same thing with imperialism. “You can’t get people excited about the Philippines.” You need something “that will wake the people up, somethin’ that will make it worth while to work for the party.” And that is nothing less than abolitionism—the “abolition of the iniquitous and villainous civil service laws which are destroyin’ all patriotism, ruinin’ the country and takin’ away good jobs from them that earn them.” Solons of democratic republicanism, repeal those laws and “put every civil service reformer in jail”—that’s the right platform plank to stand on. If such reforms were carried through, “we would have government of the people by the people who were elected to govern them,” “the kind of government Lincoln meant.”
“I see a vision. I see the civil service monster lyin’ flat on the ground. I see the Democratic party standin’ over it with foot on its neck and wearin’ the crown of victory. I see Thomas Jefferson,” American Founder and founder of the Democratic Republicans, “looking out from a cloud and sayin’: ‘Give him another sockdologer: finish him.’ And I see millions of men wavin’ their hats and singin’ ‘Glory Hallelujah!'”
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