This is incriminating stuff—very inconvenient to report in a laudatory biography—so Remini rushes to assure us that “it would be a mistake to interpret Van Buren’s words as a defense of the slave system of the South.”16 Strictly speaking, this is true. Van Buren was not himself pro-slavery. His family had owned a handful of slaves, and Van Buren himself owned a slave named Tom before he ran away.
We may say of Van Buren what we might say of the younger Democrat Stephen Douglas who would rise to prominence in the 1850s: neither of them cared whether slavery was voted up or down. What Lincoln later said of Douglas—that he had “no very vivid impression that the Negro is a human”—would also apply to Van Buren. He was an unscrupulous man in the process of creating an unscrupulous party.
Van Buren’s interest in the planter class of the South was merely political. He needed a national coalition and they were the ones who supplied the Southern power that Van Buren needed to fuse with the power of his New York Regency. Yes, it could be called the coalition to protect slavery, but had the Southern powers been cannibals instead, Van Buren would willingly have created the coalition to protect cannibalism.
Ritchie was sold on this deal. So, it seems, was Calhoun. No doubt Van Buren pitched his scheme to others and they shook hands on it. The planter class was “in.” Van Buren was elated. He had pulled it off. By making them an offer they could not refuse, Van Buren had united the planter class of the South with his own, as we will see, equally grasping and opportunistic political establishment in the North. The political realignment that Van Buren sought was now underway.
Progressives seek to portray Van Buren’s achievement differently. “His remodeling of Jefferson’s party,” writes Robert Remini, “constituted a major step in transferring the government from the control of the few to the many.”17 This is the usual left-wing balderdash, aimed at camouflaging a sordid deal between elites, specifically the sordid pact that Van Buren actually made with the forces of slavery and exploitation.
So this was Van Buren’s achievement—yes, I speak sarcastically—in creating the Democratic Party or “The Democracy,” as Van Buren and others called it. This party then carried Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 and 1832. Jackson’s opposition organized itself into a rival party in 1833 that began to call itself the Whigs in 1834. Now we turn to Van Buren’s even greater achievement—I speak even more sarcastically—that defines the modus operandi of the Democratic Party right down to the present.
THE UPROOTED
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing through the early twentieth, America experienced one of the largest immigrations in human history. Some thirty-five million people left their homelands in Europe and moved to the United States. Six million came from the lands that became the German empire in 1870, four and a half million from Ireland, four million from Great Britain, almost five million from Italy, two million from the Scandinavian countries, three million from Greece, Macedonia and Armenia, and eight million or so more from the east: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Ukraine.18
In an epic account of this migration, historian Oscar Handlin terms this group “the uprooted.” While we think of these people as immigrants, Handlin shows that most of them in fact were refugees. They were fleeing something. In the case of the Irish—the most destitute of them all—they were fleeing a series of potato famines in the 1840s and early 1850s that had spread the stench of starvation, disease and death throughout Ireland.
So these were the people who washed up on the shores of the United States.
They had permanently cut their ties with the past. They had arrived in a new country with little or nothing. Many of these exiles didn’t even speak English. They crowded into American cities, which were completely unfamiliar; many of them were rural peasants in their homelands. They had no transferable job skills. Now denizens of American ghettos, they were scared, confused and lost.
“They reached their new homes,” Handlin writes, “worn out physically by lack of rest, by poor food, by the constant strain of close, cramped quarters, worn out emotionally by the succession of new situations that had crowded in upon them.” Yet there was no time to recuperate. The immigrants faced “the immediate, pressing necessity of finding a livelihood and of adjusting to conditions that were still more novel, unimaginably so.”19 In their misery, Van Buren saw a political opportunity.
Van Buren knew these people well. The son of Dutch immigrants, Van Buren was a first-generation American, the first U.S. president to be so. He was also the first ethnic president, not descended from Anglo-Saxon roots. Thus Van Buren saw America, as I do, both from the outside and from the inside. And seeing the starving hordes—lost souls if there ever were such—wandering aimlessly in cities like New York, Van Buren noticed that they resembled a group that he had become quite familiar with in his travels through the South: American slaves.
Van Buren had an idea, one that could only have come from a complex, conniving brain such as his. We have to tread carefully here, because nowhere did Van Buren write his idea down. If he did, it must have been in the manuscripts that he—ever the circumspect strategist—subsequently destroyed. Yet the idea can be seen in its implementation. We know, for example, that Lincoln had the idea for the Emancipation Proclamation because of the Emancipation Proclamation he issued. So, too, with Van Buren, we can see his idea in the thing he built. The blueprint can be inferred from the building itself.
So here is Van Buren’s idea, which, for all its subtle ingenuity, in its essence was quite simple: Why not re-create the Democratic model of the rural plantation in the Northern cities? Why not make the new immigrants just as dependent on the Democratic Party in the North as the slaves were dependent on the Democratic planters of the South? Then the two plantation systems would together form the political backbone of the Democratic Party. Such an idea, Van Buren knew, was not a matter of rote application. It would require some creative improvisation, which, fortunately for the Little Magician, happened to be his forte.
Obviously the immigrants and refugees were not slaves; they could not be held by force. Also the new immigrants were white. But the deeper point is that both groups—the immigrants and the slaves—were wretched, impoverished, helpless. Both had experienced the shock of displacement. Family separation was a common experience for these refugees, just as it was for the slaves. The challenges the new immigrants faced were the same. Their great need was to learn how to survive—the first challenge—and then to restore a modicum of security to their lives.
As for the immigrants, their whiteness didn’t matter; they saw themselves in ethnic terms as Irish, Italians, Jews. Their distinguishing feature, Van Buren saw, was a clannish solidarity that was based on their origins. The people in each group huddled together and looked for solace and assistance from fellow countrymen. For many, their countrymen were the only people they could talk to, since they were the only ones that spoke their native language. By necessity, the immigrants sought to meet their challenges not individually but rather through the communal existence of their ethnic groups.
Van Buren saw that the slaves, in a parallel if not similar situation, had created precisely this sort of communal solidarity to survive on the plantation. From the immigrant yearning for survival and security that he well understood, and from their collective ethnic identity that he carefully observed, Van Buren realized the possibility for creating the same type of enduring dependency he had witnessed on the slave plantation but this time in Northern cities.
How to do this? Here Van Buren was in a unique position, because in New York he had already created the first political machine in American history. Leading a group called the Bucktails—so named because they wore deer tails on their hats—Van Buren in 1821 displaced New York’s most powerful politician, DeWitt Clinton, and created a powerful machine called the Albany Regency. He did it, biographer Ted Widmer admits in a telling comparison, “like
a nineteenth-century Vito Corleone.”20
While politicians like DeWitt Clinton based their success on their popularity or on personal political accomplishments—Clinton was a noted abolitionist and the acclaimed champion of the Erie Canal—Van Buren’s machine functioned in a different way. Basically, the machine demanded the complete allegiance of organizers and constituents from the state right down to the local level. The machine’s agenda became their agenda. The machine told them how to vote and required them to campaign for its entire slate during election periods.
Its currency wasn’t patriotism; it was party loyalty. Such loyalty required a certain toleration for corruption and even criminal behavior; machine operatives had to learn to look the other way. No deviation, no backsliding, no independence of mind was permitted; as one Regency man, Silas Wright Jr., vowed, “The first man we see step to the rear, we cut down.”21 In exchange for this devotion, the machine rewarded its members with political and financial patronage.
For Van Buren, the treasury was not a fund of tax money accumulated to promote the common good; rather, it was a prize to be distributed to those who enabled politicians like Van Buren to dip their hands into the treasury. Asked to defend Van Buren’s patronage policies, William Marcy, a prominent member of the Regency, famously responded, “To the victor belong the spoils.”22 For Van Buren and the Albany Regency, politics wasn’t a vocation; it was a business.
Thus, long before the immigrants themselves arrived, Van Buren had already created the basic formula for organizing Democratic power in the Northern cities, which were filling up with immigrants and—over subsequent decades—the children of immigrants. The immigrants could be organized into clans based on their already-existing ethnic identification. These clans, Van Buren figured, could then be ruled by Democratic Party bosses who would demand ethnic loyalty in exchange for political patronage.
This, then, was the Frankenstein that Van Buren created. He was the inventor of the politics of ethnic mobilization. Other elements would be added later, such as the politics of ethnic resentment: hate masquerading as a campaign of resistance to hate. Yet the basic elements are already there. So Van Buren’s Democratic urban machine proves to be his most enduring legacy. Although devised by Van Buren as a political complement to the slave plantation, for the purpose of consolidating Democratic power in the North as well as the South, one can see here, in embryo, the Democratic Party as it functions even today.
MAGNANIMITY, TAMMANY STYLE
One can draw a straight line from Van Buren’s Albany Regency to the full-fledged Democratic machine as epitomized by Tammany Hall. The Regency and Tammany were both in New York, the former based in the city, the latter at the upstate capital in Albany. And eventually there were Tammany-style machines in virtually all the cities: Buffalo, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco. While most of the machines were Irish at first, eventually other ethnic groups were also incorporated or started their own machines.
There were even a few Republican machines, such as George Cox’s turn-of-the-century machine in Cincinnati and the statewide machine run out of Philadelphia that W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about in The Philadelphia Negro. But the vast majority were Democratic machines that, then as now, delivered the Democratic vote even in predominantly Republican states. Lincoln, for example, won New York State in the 1860 election but he lost New York City, which was just as much a Democratic stronghold as it is today. In American politics, we should note the continuities no less than the discontinuities.
The machines, as we know, were founts of political corruption. Tammany bosses like William “Boss” Tweed, Richard Croker and Charles F. Murray ran Democratic fiefdoms, dispensing favors and accumulating wealth culled not only from the public sector but also by coercing private-sector corporations to pay under-the-table fees to secure public contracts and project approvals. In Brooklyn, “Uncle John” McCooey ruled the roost; in Jersey City, Frank “I am the Law” Hague; in Kansas City, Tom Pendergast; in Boston, the duo of James Michael Curley and John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. All of them were Democrats.
In his book Machine Made, progressive Terry Golway gives us a window into Boss Tweed’s operation in the late 1860s. “The great raid on the public treasury was underway. Tweed and his friends raked in millions as they took their cuts from inflated bills for public works projects, including construction of a grand new courthouse . . . and the continued construction of Central Park.”
Journalists knew about some of this but didn’t report on it because many of them had been bought off by Tweed. Only in mid-1871 did the New York Times run an exposé, showing how Tweed had billed “nearly $3 million for furniture and half a million for carpets to outfit the new courthouse . . . hundreds of thousands of dollars for ‘repairs’ and ‘alterations’ paid to a firm with ties to Tweed. A carpenter named George Miller received more than $350,000 for a month’s work.”23
Tweed was eventually removed as grand boss, or “sachem,” of Tammany and found guilty on corruption charges in 1873. Yet he escaped from Ludlow Street Jail, where he awaited trial, and fled to Cuba and then to Spain, where he was finally apprehended and extradited to the United States. He died in prison in 1878. Golway’s account of Tweed’s malpractices is vivid, yet it reveals a streak of genuine sympathy for him; Golway knows and approves of the fact that Tweed-like practices, which he calls “transactional politics,” continue today under the auspices of the modern Democratic Party.24
The bosses frequently did not hold office themselves, but they controlled those who did. And yes, if you were unswervingly loyal to the Democratic machine, the bosses would help you in whatever way they could: fix your immigration problem or intervene with a local judge, say, to get your delinquent son a suspended sentence. Tammany sachems were known for such magnanimities as sustaining widows’ lifestyles by keeping their dead husbands on the payroll.
Tammany’s magnanimity toward widows illustrates how the Democratic urban machines were also employment bureaus. They got their people jobs, whether or not the workers actually did anything useful. The point was to keep them and their families on the payroll so that their loyalty to the Democratic Party would be continuing and secure. How well people like FDR, LBJ and Obama would have fit in as city bosses had they lived in the Tammany era. And it is no wonder that progressive chroniclers of Tammany are sympathetic to bosses who engaged in practices that progressives themselves advocate on behalf of the federal government today.
I am no more impressed by progressive accounts of good bosses than I am by earlier Democratic invocations of the good slave master. We should remember that the Democratic bosses always got the largest share of the heist—Boss Tweed of Tammany accumulated a vast fortune for himself before finally being convicted and sent to prison, and even Tammany underboss George Washington Plunkitt parlayed his influence to hold down four public offices at the same time and become a multimillionaire—and every machine generosity was at someone else’s expense; the bosses never paid out of their own pocket. Moreover, if you crossed the bosses in any way, they would make sure you suffered for it.
ELECTION RIGGING
Just as tightly as the Democratic bosses controlled political appointments and the dispensing of patronage, they also controlled the voting process. In several cities, including New York, the bosses didn’t rely on immigrants to vote correctly. Rather, they supplied the immigrants with filled-in ballots. The immigrants then showed up at the voting booth, where they were handed empty ballots. When the supervisor was not looking, they would simply substitute the filled-in ballot for the empty ballot. Thus outcomes were assured for Democratic bosses.
As the machines grew established they also grew bolder, now going beyond filled-in votes to also deliver dead people’s votes in favor of Democratic machine candidates. Here immigrants would be directed to show up multiple times to vote, sometimes in the names of characters culled from novels or their dead relativ
es or dead people listed on tombstones in local cemeteries. Tammany carried on in this way for nearly a century, from the 1840s through the 1930s.
The bosses could be entertaining. Asked by an investigating committee whether he was “working for his own pocket,” Tammany boss Richard Croker fired back, “All the time—same as you.”25 Despite this refreshing candor, I find it strange to read the progressive paeans to these Tammany thugs. Progressives seem to think that what they did was quite amusing and, although pushing the envelope in terms of legality, nevertheless healthy for democracy. I notice a high tolerance for pork-barrel schemes that are, even now, viewed as a normal way of conducting politics in a democracy. Progressives do not seem overly concerned that politicians are looting the treasury, and no one seems to be minding the store on behalf of the hapless taxpayer.
While progressives admit that the Democratic urban machines were a for-profit enterprise, thoroughly imbued with corruption and election-rigging, they insist, as Widmer says, that the bosses gave immigrants a “voice.” Yet this “voice” was nothing more than the ventriloquist preferences of the bosses themselves. The ethnic exploitation of vulnerable people and the callous use of their votes to rip off the general population are somehow presented as triumphs of democratic inclusion.
I suspect that progressive sympathies for such exploitation are based on the realization that not very much has changed, and that modern-day progressives are into the same sorts of rackets. Even today, as we saw in the 2016 Hillary-Bernie contest, the Democrats are not above rigging elections—even while accusing Trump of electoral collusion. And Democratic resistance to voter identification laws seems to be less based on the honest conviction that poor people cannot produce valid IDs than on the Democrats’ shared belief that, now as in the Tammany era, a vote is a vote regardless of whether it comes from an illegal, a dead guy or a fictional character.
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