American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  New York City fire companies were intensely clannish, convivial, and political. With the loyal backing of his seventy-five fire-fighters, Tweed moved easily into Manhattan’s political world, won election as alderman, and joined the common council that came to be known as “The Forty Thieves.” It was also a school of practical politics and political moneymaking. Tireless and single-minded, Tweed broadened his influence in Tammany, occupied a variety of offices and controlled others, and made money out of every opportunity—kickbacks, city contracts, huge commissions from the Erie Railroad and other corporations, building a $12 million courthouse of which $8 million was graft. This was big business: the ultimate take of Tweed and his ring probably was measured in the upper eight figures.

  It was the story of a young man’s ambition, enterprise, rise to riches—and thorough corruption. As reformism rose during the Grant years, Harper’s Weekly and the New York Times launched a long and tenacious campaign against the ring. Thomas Nast’s merciless caricatures in Harper’s converted the amiable, portly young man into a coarse, vicious-looking criminal, sinister of face and fat of belly. The cartoonists pictured him as William the Conqueror crushing the Constitution, as a crocodile, as a Roman emperor watching the Tammany tiger feasting on women’s bodies in the Colosseum—and most typically, as a bloated dictator with the face of an Irish Fagin.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Tweed liked to taunt his foes. A mass meeting of outraged citizens in Cooper Union, a committee of seventy reformers, revelations from dissident members of the ring itself, and prosecution brought Tweed and his cronies down in the short space of five months. He died in jail at the age of fifty-five. It was a glorious victory for reform, but it did not last long. Reformers found that the “tentacles of the octopus” remained intact even after the head was cut off, as the Plunkitts survived in the wards and precincts. Later Tammany leaders—the Crokers and Murphys and the rest—benefited from Tweed’s downfall. They learned that they must discipline the organization, limit their greed, and share their take with their people in the old egalitarian spirit of Tammany.

  Thus was set the pattern, in scores of cities, of boss control interrupted by bursts of reformism. Some of the machines were more honest and benign, some less so; the bosses were far more diverse in religion, ethnic background, civic virtue, education, appearance, and speech than the caricature of the Irish immigrant grafter would allow. But typically the organization persisted, and the reformers moved off to other interests. The perceptive Plunkitt observed this phenomenon:

  “College professors and philosophers who go up in a balloon to think,” he said from his pulpit, a bootblack stand, “are always discussin’ the question: ‘Why Reform Administrations Never Succeed Themselves.’ ... I can’t tell just how many of these movements I’ve seen started in New York during my forty years in politics, but I can tell you how many have lasted more than a few years—none. There have been reform committees of fifty, of sixty, of seventy, of one hundred and all sorts of numbers that started out to do up the regular political organizations. They were mornin’ glories—looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks.”

  The reason for the fading mornin’ glories? Politics, Plunkitt explained, was a business—as much a “regular business as the grocery or dry-goods or the drug business.” He had been learning it for forty-five years, ever since he had made himself useful around the Hall at age twelve. How could businessmen turn to politics all at once and make a success of it? “It is just as if I went up to Columbia University and started to teach Greek.”

  But the stakes were much deeper than merely between regular and reformer. In the industrial city, not only was politics a business; reform and bossism were so part and parcel of the corporate business world around them as to influence deeply the role of each. The more the bosses responded to business needs for franchises and other favors, the more they entered the business world—becoming in many respects brokers and businessmen themselves—and the more they tended to forfeit their old egalitarian role of giving to the poor. The commissions and bribes from business might trickle down to the needy poor, of course, thus fortifying the bosses’ claims to be modern Robin Hoods, but much of the booty stuck to their own fingers.

  The businessman, Steffens concluded, was the chief source of corruption. “I found him buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York.”

  Nor could reformers escape the pervasive influence of corporate business. Many of them were businessmen themselves, and however much they might denounce the traction magnates and the like who dealt with the bosses, these reformers would not challenge the system of private property and corporate power that lay at the foundation of the industrial city. For some reformers, according to Wiebe, self-conscious businessmen alone among the progressive groups “had the inherent resources—the critical positions in the local economy, the money, and the prestige—to command some kind of response from the government. Weaker reformers, therefore, tried to attach their causes to these men’s ambitions, relying upon their need for expert advice and their general sympathy for systematization and order.” Ultimately, most reformers proved more interested in saving the lower class from liquor, gambling, and prostitutes—basic and necessary releases for those with few other means of diversion—than in reforming the socioeconomic system in which so many of the poor were trapped.

  There was, indeed, a dangerously antidemocratic edge to the outlook of both regulars and reformers. That of the bosses was quite obvious: they perverted the ballot box, the cornerstone of democracy, by stuffing it, by hiring repeaters by the hundreds, voting names off gravestones, foiling the Australian ballot with the “Tasmanian dodge” (pre-marking ballots), intimidating voters, dumping ballots and whole ballot boxes into the river. Quite rightly did Joseph Choate cry out at Cooper Union: “This wholesale filching and slaughter of the suffrage is a deadly thrust at the very source and fountain of our liberties.”

  But some of the reformers, in reacting against what the Times called “the dangerous classes” who cared “nothing for our liberty and civilization,” went much further in their quivering outrage and began to question the tenets of democracy itself. The curse of the city, wrote E. L. Godkin of the Nation, is the “people”—or the half of them that comprised the poor, “that huge body of ignorant and corrupt voters.”

  Noting how white Southerners had deprived Southern blacks of the vote through the “grandfather clause” and other devices, an “expert” predicted that once people became convinced that “universal suffrage inevitably must result in inefficient and corrupt government, it will be abandoned.” From this vantage point it was but a step toward proposals to restrict the suffrage to the propertied class, to bar the poor immigrant, the unschooled, and the illiterate from the polls. And once that process got under way, where would it stop, as each class yearned to strengthen the morals and weaken the power of the class below?

  The Reformation of the Cities

  The answer of some to the plight of the poor and the blight of the city was to focus directly and intensely on what they saw as the heart of the problem—the lack of morality and character in the poor, especially the immigrant poor. This was peculiarly a strategy for preachers, lay and clerical, and many a church and forum resounded with thunderous appeals to the lower classes to shun vice and improve their ways. Some of the upright organized a Union for Concerted Moral Effort, and a leader of the National Union for Practical Progress proposed that a “new moral issue” be “presented to the people each month”—a kind of morality-of-the-month club.

  The uplifters encountered a little problem, though—those to be uplifted were not in church. Most of the upright were middle-class in ideas, speech, dress, and geography; they were not speaking the same la
nguage as the immigrant poor. Recognizing this, many of the preachers made an enormous effort to bridge the gap by taking missions to the slums, turning churches into centers of social activity, sponsoring sports and theatricals. Under the creative leadership of a young native of Dublin, William S. Rainford, St. George’s Episcopal Church, on East 16th Street, set up a boys’ club, industrial training program, recreational activities, congregational singing. The Salvation Army, adapting adroitly to local conditions, helped meet needs for food and shelter and music and camaraderie so successfully that by century’s end it directed seven hundred corps, staffed by 3,000 officers, across the nation.

  The moral uplifters had to face a stark fact, however: even if they reached out to the fallen, poor immigrants would accept the tangible help, politely listen to the moral exhortation that might come with it, and then stick to their old ways. This was all the more reason, other reformers contended, to try a quite different strategy—improving the environment in which the poor grew up and lived. It was a problem of nurture and culture, not innate morality or heredity. Many of the upright recognized this in setting up recreational halls and trade schools, but the most direct and dramatic effort to reshape the environment was through settlement houses. The idea was to bring middle-class reformers into the very heartland of the industrial city, establish warm contacts with the poor, and attract some of the neighborhood people into these houses, which would serve as homes, schools, and social clubs.

  The most famous of the settlement houses was Chicago’s Hull-House, founded and run by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr after they had visited Toynbee Hall, London’s pioneering experiment in transforming the lives of the poor. As the settlement house movement spread to scores of other cities, Addams became its most eloquent promoter and defender. A powerful champion of environmentalism, she wanted transformed cities. “We are only beginning to understand,” she asserted, “what might be done through the festival, the street procession, the band of marching musicians, orchestral music in public squares or parks.” She mixed practicality with idealism: the “delicious sensation to be found in a swimming pool” would surely outweigh the temptation “to play craps in a foul and stuffy alley, even with the unnatural excitement which gambling offers.”

  The settlement movement had its critics. Some contended that the youthful volunteers tended to take on the outlook of those among whom they lived, rather than raising them up. They were “bowled over by the first labor leader, or anarchist, or socialist they met,” said Mary Richmond of the Charity Organization Society. The settlement workers, however, were more likely to share the middle-class values of charity dispensers. The head of Boston’s South End House, himself a prohibitionist, proposed to isolate tramps, alcoholics, and paupers; and Jane Addams, it was said, never doubted that the lower-class environment of saloons, dance halls, and street life needed to be made more like a middle or upper-class neighborhood. Still, Addams emphasized—notably in her influential 1902 work Democracy and. Social Ethics—that the moral defects of the poor were the consequence, not the cause, of poverty.

  Some environmentalists raised their sights far above charity and settlement houses. They would transform the entire city through creative and comprehensive planning, thus shaping a finer social and moral habitat. In part, this idea took the form of the City Beautiful movement, which in scores of industrial cities strove to replace filthy alleys, ugly billboards, overhead electrical wires, and littered vacant lots with trees, shrubbery, fountains, flower beds, even statuary and murals. This movement gained considerable impetus from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with its transformed lakefront, majestic fountains, broad walkways, wide lawns, and clean white buildings of monumental proportions.

  But beautification was not enough, other environmentalists argued: the poor could not get to a world’s fair or even to the parks in their own cities. What was needed was planning or replanning of the whole city. The city planners pointed to the transformation of Paris under Napoleon III, the exciting work in Prussian cities, the breathtaking concentric “rings” planned for fin de siècle Vienna. Could not Americans do better—at least in the nation’s capital? Washington had been planned, after all, and Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 design for the city should now be completed. To do this Congress appointed a commission, which proposed a grand railroad station in the classical tradition, a triangle of neoclassical buildings, a memorial bridge to Arlington. A St. Louis committee rejected the monumental, centralized city in favor of clusters of neighborhood centers with comprehensive activities and programs catering specifically to the needs of the poor. The boldest plan of all, the 1909 Plan of Chicago, would expand the harbors and beaches, the parks and transportation, not only of the city but 3,000 square miles around it, from Michigan City, Indiana, to Kenosha, Wisconsin. Like its Exposition, Chicago would become a city of order, harmony, ennobling vistas, environmental delights, and hence of moral betterment.

  Magnificent dreams—and almost wholly in vain. The city planners could not overcome the machinelike platting of city land into rectangular property lines and street grids; the fierce drive for profits of the real estate enterprisers and their allies in city politics; and the giant industries that ruled where people would reside, under what conditions they would work, and in effect how they would live. Most of the inspiring proposals were cut to pieces in the urban political meat grinders, or simply gathered dust on library shelves.

  “Government must employ every resource in its power,” one city planner’s report asserted, and this was true in all the cities. But with its corrupted politicians, scattered authority, lack of sustained reform vigor, and state and local judges who defended private property to their last breath, government could not employ resources, for it had none. In an age that still respected private power and decried public, government was part of the problem, not its solution.

  Was there, then, no hope for the industrializing cities—no hope that, with all their talent, vitality, and riches, they could be converted into communities that met the material and moral wants, the aesthetic and psychic needs of the citizens—and to do all this efficiently and within the law? The fate of most of the big cities indicated no, no such hope. Yet the experience of a number of cities hinted that, at least at intervals, they bore promise of becoming the kinds of community that the dreamers and utopians had envisaged. The realization of that promise in three cities turned on the quality of their leaders.

  The most innovative and creative of these leaders, Hazen S. Pingree, ended up the least known. When this industrialist was elected mayor of Detroit in his fiftieth year, in 1889, his life had encapsulated a half-century of American history: raised on a poor Maine farm … mill hand in a Saco, Maine, cotton factory ... apprentice leather-cutter in a Massachusetts shoe, factory … raw recruit in the second Battle of Bull Run … prisoner of war in vile Andersonville … escapee and again a soldier … migrant to Detroit … shoe factory hand … shoe factory partner … shoe factory magnate … member of Detroit’s economic and social elite. Angered by a corrupt city government, Republican leaders met to pick a candidate, but no one would run. Finally they turned to Pingree.

  “Mayor?” he exclaimed. “Why that’s political. What in hell do I know about politics? I’m too busy making shoes.” He’d never even been in City Hall except to pay taxes, he said. But he finally gave in.

  Politically, Detroit was enough to daunt any novice. As the old fur-trading town had grown from a commercial center to a big industrial city of steel foundries, machine products, and food processing, immigrants had crowded into the city and taken over the Democratic party. Republicans had run state politics for decades but could win in Detroit only when the Irish and the Germans fought each other for control of the city. The Germans, who by 1889 could boast of eight newspapers in their own language, including three dailies, were simmering over the reluctance of the Irish Democrats to slate them for office. A large Polish population felt even more ignored. Playing skillfully on these
antagonisms, drinking redeye whiskey at the bar to show that he was no prohibitionist, organizing his old shoe customers and shoemakers, Pingree won the election with a margin of 2,300 votes.

  For a time Pingree was just the kind of mayor the GOP business leaders wanted—a cost-cutter and a corruption-fighter. But as he fought, in turn, the city bosses, a utility overcharging for street lighting, a monopolistic street railway company, and even more as he mixed informally with people in their neighborhoods and gained a better sense of their wants and needs, he broke with the business elite and moved toward progressive and even socialistic positions. By the end of his fourth term, when he left Detroit for Lansing and the governorship, Pingree had won lower utility rates, rebuilt the sewer system, built parks and public baths, exposed corruption in the school board and expanded the school system, modernized city transit, carried out equal-tax policies, made street railways and the telephone system more competitive, set up a city-owned light plant, and started a work-relief program that had as its goal, Melvin Holli noted, “both aid to the unfortunate and a change in the climate of public opinion toward ‘paupers.’ ” A vocal foe of child labor, monopoly, and inequitable taxation, tolerant of Sunday drinking, opposed to required Bible readings in the schools, Pingree demonstrated over and again his commitment to both liberty and equality. He was deeply moral without being a self-righteous moralizer.

  Judging by his nickname, preaching morality to other people might have been the avocation of “Golden Rule” Jones of Toledo, but he was a moralist of the Pingree stamp. As a manufacturer of oil well machinery, he posted the Golden Rule in his plant and instituted the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, vacations with full pay, Christmas bonuses; he forbade child labor, timekeepers, and piecework. As mayor of Toledo, he supported municipal ownership of utilities, free kindergartens, public playgrounds, free concerts; he made the police swap their police clubs for light canes and he disapproved arresting on suspicion and holding without charge. Jones too broke with the regular Republican organization and kept winning elections.