Tammany Graft Still Works Well

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 762, 7 September 1929, Page 27

Tammany Graft Still Works Well

VICE AND VIRTUE IN NEW YORK

GREAT REVIVAL PROPHESIED New York City has just been through | one of the most serious political upheavals in many years, says the New I Y’ork correspondent of the Manches-1 ter “Guardian Weekly.” The dispute I was as to who should rule Tammany Hall, the unofficial but all-powerful organisation within the ranks of the Democratic Party which has controlled the city’ the greater part of the time for more than a century’. On one side was former Governor Alfred E. Smith, recently’ Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, and a small group of the devoted followers who have aided him, in the past decade, in building up rvhat is popularly called “The Neiv Tammany.” Opposing him was a larger body of lessknown men, the ward bosses, who are in politics for what they can get out of it, and have al3va3's resented the insistence of Governor Smith on high standards of honest and efficient administration. The result of the struggle was a j complete victory for the point of view I of these bosses. Governor Smith’s I prestige, which had already been ! gravely damaged when he was dej feated by Mr. Hoover, has suffered anj other and almost fatal blow, and as a result he Is virtually out of political ! life. It is one of the anomalies of the j American political system that it has j no place for anything resembling a i leader of the Opposition. Though | Governor Smith received about | 15,000,000 votes last November, his | voice is not heard in any way in the councils of the country. Nearly' every’one has heard of the corruption in which Tammany engaged j in the old days. Fifty years ago there j was an open and shameless alliance { with vice. Gamblers, saloon-keepers, and keepers of houses of ill-fame paid heavy toll for the privilege of doing business. In addition, fat profits were made out of the sale of utility franchises and of contracts to build public works of all sorts. From time to time the citizenry would rebel, the Tammany administration would be turned out at a municipal election, and a noble band of valiant reformers would take its place. Invariably, however, the reformers grew tired within a few years, their enthusiasm was

dissipated, and Tammany, patiently’ biding its time, came hack into office. I Even before the. advent of Governor l new era of at least the out- I ward semblance of respectability had I begun, due chiefly to more exacting 1 standards of public taste. Vice and de- j pravity’ no longer flaunted themselves j so openly’. The police graft j had become a matter of an individual j patrolman preying upon a few unfoY I tunate women as individuals.

Tammany had found new, larger and more respectable fields of operation through an alliance with Big Business. It had learned to deal, on the basis of advance information, in the shares of great public utility corporations whose stock issues ran into millions of pounds, and to invest on a huge scale in land along the routes of secretly projected rapid-transit systems. The Neyv York waterfront is lined with yharves municipally owned and leased b>’ steamship companies; the foodstuffs which are daily’ brought into the city have an enormous value: new building amounts to hundreds of millions of pounds annually’; and in the administration of all these matters Tammany' found way’s and means for lining the pockets of its faithful members.

When it began to seem, seven or eight y’ears ago, that Governor Smith might become the Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party’ the pressure for good behaviour on the part of Tammany became stronger than ever. The word was passed that there must be no open scandals of a sort which would embarrass a possible candidature. This era of involuntary reformation continued through 1924 (when Governor Smith sought the Democratic nomination unsuccessfully), through the historic campaign of 1928, and until a few weeks ago. For some year the nominal leader of Tammany had been Judge George W. Olvany, though Smith’s was the hand which pulled the strings. In the face of a rising protest that the members of Tammany wanted to return to the old way’s Judge Olvany resigned. The struggle which nearly tore the

“Wigwam” asunder came over the election of his successor. Mr. John F. Curry was finally’ chosen, a man who has come up through the ranks in Tammany, a professional politician, who would he the first to repudiate any pretensions to “statesmanship.” Mr. Curry has already’, in polite hut unequivocal language, indicated that “The New Tammany” is to be scrapped. In future, he says, the Wigwam will ignore national politics. In so far as it can. it will even ignore the politics of New York State. It will concentrate on the city, and particularly on Manhattan Island, the region where it has alway’S been strongest.

It would he wrong to suggest that the interlude of sanctity which now comes to an end had been one of unalloyed sweetness and light. Despite the effort to keep things under cover there has not been a year in the past decade when New

York City has not been rocked by’ the ; revelation of some notorious scandal j in connection with its municipal administration. These have not recently been traced directly to Tammany Hall j itself: but invariably the culprits I have been men closely allied to Tam- t many, men whose good behaviour the AYigwam would have guaranteed. It has been discovered, for example, that millions of dollars were being paid annually in bribes to inspectors of food who obligingly overlooked the fact that the products submitted for their inspection, and subsequently j eaten by New Yorkers, were decayed or otherwise in bad condition. Numbers of men have drawn salari- ; ies in the street-cleaning department ! when they did no work, some of them for the good reason that they had , died several y’ears earlier. A huge sewer was built in one dis- ] trict of the city' at ruinous expense j | to the owners of homes, and a quarter j | of a third of the cost went as bribes j i to politically powerful individuals. I Scandals recently unearthed in conJ nection with the appointment of re- • reivers in bankruptcy cases have been | so grave that an investigation by the I Federal Government has been demanded. All these instances of misbehaviour have taken place at the . time when Governor Smith’s influence ; was supposedly at its height. Foreign visitors always ask, what i is the hold which Tammany has over the rank and file of the voters, so that they continue to return its candidates to office? The most important of these is probably the sense of social solidarity’. The chieftains of Tammany ostentatiously ally themselves with the poor; they take great care to use bad grammar even when it is not native to them. The reformers are invariably tagged as being “silk stockings” and “highbrows”; a candidate for the mayoralty was once defeated on the solitary argument that he was a friend of the Vanderbilts!

In addition, Tammany’ lias an elaborate machinery for giving, aid to the poor, provided they are known to vote “right.” Jobs are furnished, gaol doors are opened when the crime is not too serious, ice in summer and coal in winter are furnished free of charge in small quantities, and the captain of each district, in the old day’s, used to take nis entire constituency once a year on an all-day steamship excursion to Long Island Sound.

The universal prosperity of recent y’ears has been something of an embarrassment to Tammany’. Steamship excursions are now regarded with contempt as being too naive. Few are the families which cannot afford their own ice and coal, and many loyal supporters have moved out of New York into nearby towns and have become season ticket holders. Tammany, however, has always been adept at changing its programme to meet changed conditions, and there is every reason to suppose that it will successfully surmount these problems.