You hear a lot of talk about the Tammany district leaders bein'
illiterate men. If illiterate means havin' common sense, we plead
guilty. But if they mean that the Tammany leaders ain't got no education
and ain't gents they don't know what they're talkin' about. Of course,
we ain't all bookworms and college professors. If we were, Tammany might
win an election once in four thousand years. Most of the leaders are
plain American citizens, of the people and near to the people, and they
have all the education they need to whip the dudes who part their name
in the middle and to run the City Government. We've got bookworms, too,
in the organization. But we don't make them district leaders. We keep
them for ornaments on parade days.
Tammany Hall is a great big machine, with every part adjusted delicate
to do its own particular work. It runs so smooth that you wouldn't think
it was a complicated affair, but it is. Every district leader is fitted
to the district he runs and he wouldn't exactly fit any other district.
That's the reason Tammany never makes the mistake the Fusion outfit
always makes of sendin' men into the districts who don't know the
people, and have no sympathy with their peculiarities--We don't put a
silk stockin' on the Bowery, nor do we make a man who is handy with his
fists leader of the Twenty-ninth. The Fusionists make about the same
sort of a mistake that a repeater made at an election in Albany several
years ago. He was hired to go to the polls early in a half-dozen
election districts and vote on other men's names before these men
reached the polls. At one place, when he was asked his name by the poll
clerk, he had the nerve to answer "William Croswell Doane."
"Come off. You ain't Bishop Doane," said the poll clerk.
"The hell I ain't, you--I" yelled the repeater.
Now, that is the sort of bad judgment the Fusionists are guilty of. They
don't pick men to suit the work they have to do.
Take me, for instance. My district, the Fifteenth, is made up of all
sorts of people, and a cosmopolitan is needed to run it successful. I'm
a cosmopolitan. When I get into the silk-stockin' part of the district,
I can talk grammar and all that with the best of them. I went to school
three winters when I was a boy, and I learned a lot of fancy stuff that
I keep for occasions. There ain't a silk stockin' in the district who
ain't proud to be seen talkin' with George Washington Plunkitt, and
maybe they learn a thing or two from their talks with me. There's one
man in the district, a big banker, who said to me one day: "George,
you can sling the most vigorous English I ever heard. You remind me of
Senator Hoar of Massachusetts." Of course, that was puttin' it on too
thick; but say, honest, I like Senator Hoar's speeches. He once quoted
in the United States Senate some of my remarks on the curse of civil
service, and, though he didn't agree with me altogether, I noticed
that our ideas are alike in some things, and we both have the knack of
puttin' things strong, only he put on more frills to suit his audience.
As for the common people of the district, I am at home with them at all
times. When I go among them, I 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. They
wouldn't stand for that sort of thing. No; I drop all monkeyshines.
So you see, I've got to be several sorts of a man in a single day, a
lightnin' change artist, so to speak. But I am one sort of man always
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 ain't a man in New York who's got such a scent for
political jobs as I have. When I get up in the mornin' I can almost
tell every time whether a job has become vacant over night, and what
department it's in and I'm the first man on the ground to get it. Only
last week I turned up at the office of Water Register Savage at 9
A.M. and told him I wanted a vacant place in his office for one of my
constituents. "How did you know that O'Brien had got out?" he asked me.
"I smelled it in the air when I got up this mornin'," I answered. Now,
that was the fact. I didn't know there was a man in the department named
O'Brien, much less that he had got out, but my scent led me to the Water
Register's office, and it don't often lead me wrong.
A cosmopolitan ain't needed in all the other districts, but our men are
just the kind to rule. There's Dan Finn, in the Battery district, bluff,
jolly Dan, who is now on the bench. Maybe you'd think that a court
justice is not the man to hold a district like that, but you're
mistaken. Most of the voters of the district are the janitors of the big
office buildings on lower Broadway and their helpers. These janitors are
the most dignified and haughtiest of men. Even I would have trouble in
holding them. Nothin' less than a judge on the bench is good enough for
them. Dan does the dignity act with the janitors, and when he is with
the boys he hangs up the ermine in the closet and becomes a jolly good
fellow.
Big Tom Foley, leader of the Second District, fits in exactly, too. Tom
sells whisky, and good whisky, and he is able to take care of himself
against a half dozen thugs if he runs up against them on Cherry Hill or
in Chatharn Square. Pat Ryder and Johnnie Ahearn of the Third and Fourth
Districts are just the men for the places. Ahearn's constituents are
about half Irishmen and half Jews. He is as popular with one race
as with the other. He eats corned beef and kosher meat with equal
nonchalance, and it's all the same to him whether he takes off his hat
in the church or pulls it down over his ears in the synagogue.
The other downtown leaders, Barney Martin of the Fifth, Tim Sullivan of
the Sixth, Pat Keahon of the Seventh, Florrie Sullivan of the Eighth,
Frank Goodwin of the Ninth, Julius Harburger of the Tenth, Pete Dooling
of the Eleventh, Joe Scully of the Twelfth, Johnnie Oakley of the
Fourteenth, and Pat Keenan of the Sixteenth are just built to suit the
people they have to deal with. They don't go in for literary business
much downtown, but these men are all real gents, and that's what the
people want--even the poorest tenement dwellers. As you go farther
uptown you find a rather different kind of district leader. There's
Victor Dowling who was until lately the leader of the Twenty-fourth.
He's a lulu. He knows the Latin grammar backward. What's strange, he's
a sensible young fellow, too. About once in a century we come across
a fellow like that in Tammany politics. James J. Martin, leader of the
Twenty-seventh, is also something of a hightoner and publishes a law
paper, while Thomas E. Rush, of the Twenty-ninth, is a lawyer, and Isaac
Hopper, of the Thirty-first, is a big contractor. The downtown leaders
wouldn't do uptown, and vice versa. So, you see, these fool critics
don't know what they're talkin' about when they criticize Tammany Hall,
the most perfect political machine on earth.