Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  This chapter is about the formation of the Democrats’ urban plantation, otherwise known as the urban political machine. Of course there were some Republican machines too, in cities like Philadelphia, in the second half of the nineteenth century. But the urban machine was a creation of the Northern Democrats in the Jacksonian era, and it reflected Democratic power in the cities of the North. So far to my knowledge no one has examined the relationship between the rural and the urban plantations, even though this was the basis for the unification of the Democratic Party and for its political domination from the 1820s through the Civil War.

  The urban plantation was characterized by the fact that it produced nothing. In this respect, it was very different from the rural slave plantations, which produced cotton, sugar cane, rice, tobacco and so on. Rural slave plantations were designed to be productive. Urban plantations were not. They were both designed as mechanisms for stealing. In this respect, one might say that the urban plantation had the same basic purpose as its rural counterpart. Both were systems of larceny on a grand scale.

  Yet the thefts in the two cases were different kinds. On the rural slave plantation, the theft was fairly straightforward. One man—let’s call him A—steals from another man, B, by making him a slave. A is white and B is black, and the product stolen is B’s labor. A benefits by appropriating the fruits of B’s work and making them his own. In this case the larceny is effectuated by force. A purchases B and reduces him to a possession, holds him in captivity and makes him work through whips and intimidation, providing him with just enough to keep him healthy and useful to A’s bottom line.

  In the urban plantation, the theft is more sophisticated, although, in the end, no less profitable. It’s worth noting that on the rural plantation A can become wealthy through stolen labor, but for this to happen he must have lots of Bs. A single B won’t suffice, because B is a poor man and he has nothing that can be taken from him except his labor.

  The thieves on the urban plantation, however, have a much bigger prey. Here they steal from a much larger group, one made up of the entire body of productive citizens. The target of the urban plantation is taxpayers of all income levels and also corporations—anyone who contributes to the public treasury. Here the thief, A, makes a deal with B, or actually many Bs. B is a poor, recently arrived immigrant, typically Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian or Jewish. These Bs are recruited into a theft scheme, but they have no idea how it operates. They are merely poor fellows trying to survive in a new country.

  A promises B—these nameless immigrants whom we’ll collectively call B—some meager favors (a job reference, a place to stay for a few days, a turkey dinner or flask of whiskey) in exchange for something that doesn’t cost B anything, his vote. There is no compulsion here, except that of necessity. B is in dire straits and he agrees to the deal; he might have agreed to do it for even less.

  A then uses B’s votes to accumulate sufficient political power to get his hands on the public treasury. This for A is Fort Knox, and the immigrant vote has now supplied him with the key. Since no one is minding Fort Knox—the taxpayers who have paid into the system have no idea what is being done with their money—A is in a position to loot the treasury. So A uses B’s vote to steal from another man—let’s call him C. Then he uses the proceeds to pay for the pittances he provides to B, ensuring not merely his election but now his reelection.

  Does all of this sound familiar? It should. It is, at least in rough outline, the modus operandi of the contemporary Democratic Party. Yet all of this started in the mid-nineteenth century through the model of the urban plantation, the urban political machine, which was also an ethnic machine. Yet the full scoop on the formation of the urban ethnic machine is an untold story in American politics.

  We do have, of course, the progressive version of the tale, and we should note that this version has itself undergone a change in recent years. For most of the twentieth century, progressive historians portrayed urban ethnic machines like New York’s Tammany Hall as hotbeds of corruption, bravely challenged by progressives and eventually dispatched by progressive icon Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

  Of late, however, Tammany and the machines are getting much better press. Here’s a recent headline in the New York Times: “The Forgotten Virtues of Tammany Hall.” The author, Terry Golway, concedes that Tammany became “the very face of political corruption.” The bosses “stole elections,” “intimidated political antagonists” and “shook down contractors and vendors.”

  But even so, he insists—elaborating his argument in his book Machine Made—Tammany illustrated how the Democrats “extended the hand of friendship” to new immigrants. In an interview with NPR, Golway credited the Democratic bosses with creating in essence “an informal welfare system when of course none existed.” In this respect, Tammany foreshadowed and ultimately enabled the “reform” politics of the New Deal and the modern Democratic Party.7

  The urban ethnic machine, historian Ted Widmer writes, “allowed democracy to grow beyond the founding documents into something tangible for millions of disenfranchised Americans.” The ethnic machines were an “elaborate mechanism” to “put the theoretical ideas of the founders into everyday, working practice.” In Widmer’s progressive portrait, the ethnic machines gave a “voice” to new immigrants who didn’t have anyone to speak for them until the Democratic Party came to their rescue.8

  There is more, much more, in this vein. In 2016 Kevin Baker published a remarkable essay in the New Republic arguing that ethnic “political machines were corrupt to the core—but they were also incredibly effective. If Democrats want to survive in the modern age, they need to take a page from their past.”9 In other words, bring back the old ethnic machine!

  That won’t happen. The old ethnic machines were too obviously corrupt, and progressives gained a lot of political traction in railing against this corruption and portraying their man FDR as the great reformer. But what the progressives don’t say is that Democrats legalized this corruption and made it part of their customary way of doing politics. Today the Democrats are once again active in the politics of ethnic mobilization, and the reason progressives are soft on the ethnic rackets of the past is that they know they are still running those rackets today. In this respect, Tammany is still with us in modified form.

  But where did Tammany come from? What was the origin of the machines themselves? Here’s a clue that reveals the nexus. The ethnic machine produced what historians now term “pork-barrel” politics. The pork barrel is the treasury, and pork-barrel politics refers to the familiar practice of politicians conspiring with each other and ripping off the treasury to fund largely useless projects that buy votes.

  This term, however, can be directly traced to the old plantation. In Chester Collins Maxey’s 1919 article in National Municipal Review, “A Little History of Pork,” we find this revealing tidbit: “On the southern plantations in slavery days, there was a custom of periodically distributing rations of salt pork among the slaves. As the pork was usually packed in salt barrels, the method of distribution was to knock the head out of the barrel and require each slave to come to the barrel and receive his portion. Oftentimes the eagerness of the slaves would result in a rush upon the pork barrel to grab as much as possible for himself.”10

  So the rural and urban plantations were connected closely enough that the customs of the former could be drawn upon to describe the practices of the latter. Both operated on a principle that has defined the Democratic Party since its founding: the principle of dependency. While the slave plantation was based on the dependency of helpless black slaves, the urban plantation was based on the dependency of helpless white immigrants. Both became fodder for the exploitative machinations of the Democratic Party. The man who figured this out was Martin Van Buren.

  THE LITTLE MAGICIAN

  Van Buren has proven to be an enigma, both in his own time and in ours. Today the e
nigma may be partly due to the man’s contemporary obscurity. If we remember what he looks like, his distinguishing feature is his absurdly large sideburns. Some will recall his unsuccessful presidency from 1836 to 1840, when he was defeated for reelection by William Henry Harrison. Van Buren played a bit role as a villain in Steven Spielberg’s film Amistad, in which he was accurately shown as spurning the Africans’ plea for freedom. His obscurity was the butt of a running joke on Seinfeld about a secret group that called itself the “Van Buren Boys.”

  In his own time, however, Van Buren was a colossus. This seems like an odd term to use for a short guy like Van Buren, barely five feet six inches tall, whom his contemporaries nicknamed Little Van. Yet there was no diminishing the importance of the dapper New Yorker who had risen from the obscure origins of a tavern-keeper’s son to become the most powerful politician in the state. In the country, his influence was second only to Andrew Jackson’s. And by all accounts Van Buren “made” Jackson, securing his election in 1828 and assuring his reelection in 1832.

  In the process—here contemporary and modern accounts agree—Van Buren virtually singlehandedly created the urban political machine, and he also created the winning alliance that not only propelled Jackson and then Van Buren himself to the presidency but also sustained the Democratic Party as the majority party for forty years. Incredibly Van Buren did all this before he became president. His was a life in which his unsuccessful presidency was merely an appendage and footnote to an amazingly successful career.

  Yet his contemporaries—friend and foe alike—also considered Van Buren to be a mystery. Biographer Ted Widmer writes of Van Buren’s peers confessing that “no one knows exactly what he is up to” and then adds that he himself cannot trace a “thousand cat steps” that “brought him invisibly to his destination.” Biographer Robert Remini lists several of the names his peers used to describe him: Little Magician, Red Fox of Kinderhook, the Enchanter and Master Spirit.

  Remini cites the example of Davy Crockett, the fiery whimsical frontiersman who was no fan of Van Buren. Crockett dismissed Van Buren as an “artful, cunning, selfish speculating lawyer” who can “lay no claim to pre-eminent services as a statesman; nor has he ever given any evidences of superior talent.” Asked to account for his success, however, Crockett could do no better than to term Van Buren a “riddle [that] must puzzle the devil.”11

  Modern scholars like Remini and Widmer, two progressive biographers of Van Buren, portray the man in glowing colors—a very different portrait from Crockett’s—yet they too profess to be mystified by him. Widmer confesses that “Van Buren eludes us” today and “has been escaping pursuers since they began chasing him.” While admitting that Van Buren’s “creation of the Democratic Party was the achievement of a lifetime” Widmer nevertheless adds, “Even with all the hindsight that history can confer, it is unclear how exactly Van Buren wrought this great change.”

  Widmer attributes the mysteriousness of Van Buren in part to the fact that “he apparently destroyed those parts of his correspondence that would have revealed his innermost secrets.” Moreover, in his own life Van Buren was famously evasive; he was known never to commit himself fully to a position. Acting on a bet that he could force Van Buren to take a stance, a senator once asked him if it was true that the sun rose in the East. Van Buren dryly replied, “I sleep until after sunrise.”12

  The puzzle is not over what Van Buren did; it is over how he did it. The normal way to tell the story is chronologically: first an account of how Van Buren built up his New York machine, and then a subsequent account of how he used it to create the party organization that propelled Jackson to power as the first president from the Democratic Party.

  I believe, however, that we can understand Van Buren better by considering his life in reverse: first, how he created a new party under Jackson—a legacy that lasted forty years—and then how he laid the foundation for ethnic machine politics, a legacy that is with us to this day. Our story, then, breaks with narrative history and gives us Van Buren’s two feats in ascending order of importance.

  We begin around 1821 with Van Buren as the newly elected senator from New York and the undisputed leader of the New York Democratic machine—known as the Albany Regency. Let’s pick up the progressive narrative from biographers like Remini and Widmer. I have no dispute with the basic details of this narrative, which goes like this. Van Buren recognized that any majority coalition in America would have to politically unite the North and the South. A New York–Virginia alliance, assembled during the founding era, had elected in turn Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.

  In that era, however, Virginia was top dog and New York had second place. Van Buren’s New York, however, had grown prodigiously in population and wealth by the second decade of the nineteenth century. So Van Buren’s idea was to create a new political party based on reuniting North and South, New York and Virginia. Only this time New York would play the leading role and Virginia would be invited to go along.13

  At first, Van Buren sought to work this plan through Secretary of State William Crawford of Georgia. Crawford was Van Buren’s candidate for the presidency in 1824. But when Crawford suffered a stroke and fared poorly in the balloting, Van Buren switched his allegiance to another man of the South, Andrew Jackson. Van Buren knew Jackson—the two got to know each other when they were both in the Senate together. Jackson didn’t make it to the Oval Office that year, but four years later he rode the North-South alliance that Van Buren painstakingly assembled all the way to the White House.

  This is the official story. The one little thing—which turns out to be the most important thing—that the progressive narrative leaves out is: on what basis did Van Buren convince Virginia to go along with New York? How did he woo the South to join his Northern alliance? Here the progressives resort to mumbo-jumbo, invoking Van Buren’s political perspicuity, his patient courting of Calhoun and other Southerners, his assiduous vote-counting abilities and his indisputable personal charm and savoir faire.

  HIS MAGIC TRICK, EXPLAINED

  Without discounting Van Buren’s abilities, however, we have to read between the lines of these progressive narratives to figure out how Van Buren really sold the South on his grand unification plan. He did so by making several trips to the South in the period from 1822 to 1828. In 1822, Van Buren announced he was making a visit to Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia. He went to Virginia, but he didn’t go to Monticello. Van Buren was actually on other business.

  He seems instead to have secretly visited Thomas Ritchie, the editor of the Richmond Enquirer. I say “secretly” because there is no formal record of the visit, yet we know it took place because Ritchie alluded to it in his subsequent articles. Ritchie was the head of the Richmond junto, which controlled politics in Virginia, and undoubtedly one of the most powerful political figures in the state. His newspaper was a ferocious defender of the interests of the slaveholding class. Van Buren cultivated Ritchie, proposing to him a union between his Albany Regency machine in New York and the Richmond junto.

  In this way Van Buren sought to create the beginnings of a powerful North-South coalition that could vanquish any political rival. Ritchie was interested but noncommittal. He was sold on Van Buren—whom he praised as a friend and a statesman—but not sold on the bargain. In particular, Ritchie was unconvinced about what benefits such a bargain would bring to the planter interests that the Richmond Enquirer so aggressively promoted.

  Van Buren failed the first time, but he didn’t give up. In 1826, as Andrew Jackson prepared to run a second time—he was thwarted in 1824 by what he termed a “corrupt bargain” between Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams that put Adams in the White House—Van Buren announced that he was making an extensive tour through the South, visiting Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

  He didn’t get to all those places because, as it turns out, he didn’t need to. Van Buren spent the Christm
as holidays of 1826 making a deal with Calhoun at the home of their mutual friend William Fitzhugh of Virginia. The details of the bargain are not known, but it is known that Calhoun was satisfied and agreed to back Van Buren’s candidate, Andrew Jackson, for the presidency in 1828. Van Buren then drafted a letter to Thomas Ritchie, proposing a formal alliance between his New York Regency and the Richmond junto.14

  Van Buren’s progressive admirers focus on their man’s blueprint for a new party united behind “General Jackson’s personal popularity” as a war hero who had been supposedly cheated of the presidency the last time around. Van Buren also called for a new political organization that would “substitute party principle for personal preference.” We can see in this 1827 letter to Ritchie the first traces of the new Democratic Party that existed in Van Buren’s head before it existed in reality.

  Yet Van Buren did not hesitate this time to spell out for Ritchie what this new party would deliver for the planter class: it would recruit the political power of the North to the protection of slave interests in the South. This is the bombshell only partially concealed in Van Buren’s letter by his antiquated and somewhat overbearing rhetoric.

  Van Buren argued that party attachment, “by producing counteracting feelings,” was an antidote to Northern sectional prejudice against the South. Absent party attachments, “the clamor against the Southern Influence and African Slavery” was bound to gain momentum in the North. Van Buren proposed that his new intersectional alliance take on the role of defeating that momentum through its shared ideological commitment to the planter interests of the South.

  Imagine, Van Buren said, an attack by antislavery men on Southerners who were also members of this new party. Naturally, he promised, Northerners belonging to that same party would rush to the Southerners’ defense, regarding the attack as “assaults upon their political brethren and resented accordingly.” The planters sought to uphold their peculiar institution, and the creation of a new party alliance along the lines proposed by Van Buren would be “eminently serviceable in effecting that object.”15