Plunkitt of Tammany Hall by William Riordon REVIEW
George Washington Plunkitt, for those of
you who may not recall from your U.S. History classes, was the quintessential “party
boss” in New York City a hundred years ago. He made a business out of
government and a good business at that. In an era long before blogs and
facebook, he was a master at the art of assembling “a following.” He began his
career as a young man by assembling a voting block of two (himself and a friend
who he knew would vote any way that G.W. Plunkitt told him to). He expanded
this original “George Washington Plunkitt Association” to an entire apartment
house and block and kept right on building until he could walk into a political
machine and promise to deliver thousands of votes.
With that promise, he built himself an empire where valuable political favors were arbitraged for voting blocks. He never cared much about national issues or moral issues or platform issues. He made the astute assertion that the masses of New York City could care less about the acquisition of the Philippines or the worth of silver relative to gold or the implications of a war in Cuba. What they cared about was the knowledge that there was someone powerful who could take care of them when they needed cared for. Plunkitt provided that “care” in exchange for their loyalty on election days and cemented that social contract with a thousand favors. If there was a fire, Plunkitt or his lieutenants were there to help. If someone lost a job, Plunkitt was there to give them another. If someone died, Plunkitt was at the funeral. No act of charity was below him in his quest to own the vote of New York City. Votes were his “marketable commodity” as he put it.
“After forty years’ experience at the game I am – well, I’m George Washington Plunkitt. Everybody knows what figure I cut in the greatest organization on earth, and if you hear people say that I’ve laid away a million or so since I was a butcher’s boy in Washington Market, don’t come to me for an indignant denial. I’m pretty comfortable, thank you.”
If you needed steel, you went to Andrew Carnegie. If you needed oil, you went to John D. Rockefeller. If you needed money, you went to J.P. Morgan. If you needed votes, you came to George Washington Plunkitt. By his own admission, he was a “force” to be reckoned with in any political contest. In an era where governments had almost nothing to offer the needy, the needy understood that they could parlay their loyal votes for something by channeling them through people like Plunkitt who understood that loyalty could only be paid with loyalty. “Poll-going for Patronage” was the motto of his business. “Every good man looks after his friends,” he insisted, “and any man who doesn't isn't likely to be popular.” There’s only one way to hold a district,” he added,
“You must study human nature and act accordin’. You can’t study human nature in books. Books is a hindrance more than anything else. If you have been to college, so much the worse for you. You’ll have to unlearn all you learned before you can get right down to human nature, and unlearnin’ takes a lot of time. Some men can never forget what they learned at college. Such men may get to be district leaders by a fluke, but they never last. To learn real human nature you have to go among the people, see them and be seen.”
What tells in holdin’ your grip on your district is to go right down among the poor families and help them in the different ways they need help. I’ve got a regular system for this. If there’s a fire in Ninth, Tenth, or Eleventh Avenue, for example, any hour of the day or night, I’m usually there with some of my election district captains as soon as the fire engines. If a family is burned out I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up till they get things runnin’ again. It’s philanthropy, but it’s politics, too – mighty good politics. Who can tell how many votes one of these fires bring me? The poor are the most grateful people in the world, and, let me tell you, they have more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in theirs.
If there’s a family in my district in want I know it before the charitable societies do, and me and my men are first on the ground. I have a special corps to look up such cases. The consequence is that the poor look up to George W. Plunkitt as a father, come to him in trouble – and don’t forget him on election day.
Another thing, I can always get a job for a deservin’ man. I make it a point to keep on the track of jobs, and it seldom happens that I don’t have a few up my sleeve ready for use. I know every big employer in the district and in the whole city, for that matter, and they ain’t in the habit of sayin’ no to me when I ask them for a job.
And the children – the little roses of the district! Do I forget them? Oh, no! They know me, every one of them, and they know that a sight of Uncle George and candy means the same thing. Some of them are the best kind of vote-getters. I’ll tell you a case. Last year a little Eleventh Avenue rosebud, whose father is a Republican, caught hold of his whiskers on election day and said she wouldn’t let go till he’d promise to vote for me. And she didn’t.”
When George Plunkitt was asked to give young men interested in political careers advice, he insisted that going to college would be the last thing to do. “In fact, a young man who has gone through the college course is handicapped at the outset,” he said, “He may succeed in politics, but the chances are 100 to 1 against him.” “We got bookworms,” he said of his organization, “But we don’t make them district leaders. We keep them for ornaments on parade days.” “If we were bookworms and college professors,” he continued, “Tammany might win an election once in four thousand years.” Thus, studying to be an orator (like William Jennings Bryan) was not likely to get you anywhere either, he noted. And trying to sound more intelligent than the constituents was a sign of political retardation.
“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.”
“Make ‘the poorest man in your district feel that he is your equal, or even a bit superior to you,” Plunkitt advises.
“Another thing that people won’t stand for is showin’ off your learnin’. That’s just puttin’ on style in another way. If you’re makin’ speeches in a campaign, talk the language the people talk. Don’t try to show how the situation is by quotin’ Shakespeare. Shakespeare was all right in his way, but he didn’t know anything about Fifteenth District politics. If you know Latin and Greek and have a hankerin’ to work them off on somebody, hire a stranger to come to your house and listen to you for a couple of hours; then go out and talk the language of the Fifteenth to the people. I know it’s an awful temptation, the hankerin’ to show off your learnin’. I’ve felt it myself, but I always resist it. I know the awful consequences.”
Success in politics he preached, came down to the cultivation of loyal relationships and the assembly of a devoted “following.” Plunkitt’s “machine” could win elections. It did not matter so much to him who got elected (so long as they did not favor civil service reform). To G.W. Plunkitt, Civil Service reform (the regulation of politics so that party bosses such as himself would not be able to offer jobs and political favors for votes) would spell the end of the electoral process itself. For indeed, who would work to get anyone elected if it were not for some bone that victory would grant THEM? “How are you going to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to grant them?” he asked incredulously.
“When the people elected Tammany, they knew just what they were doin’. We didn’t put up any false pretenses. We didn’t go in for humbug civil service and all that rot. We stood as we have always stood, for reward – in’ the men that won the victory. They call that the spoils system. All right; Tammany is for the spoils system, and when we go in we fire every anti-Tammany man from office that can be fired under the law. It’s an elastic sort of law and you can bet it will be stretched to the limit.”
“No Tammany man went hungry” in his district, he promised in this America before Social Security and unemployment benefits. The Civil Service laws, he insisted, were “sappin the foundations of patriotism all over the country.” It is not difficult to see that Plunkitt’s spirit lives on today:
“You read constantly that banks are lobbying regulators and elected officials as if this is inappropriate. We don't look at it that way.” Jamie Dimon, Chief executive Officer at J.P. Morgan
Read selections of George Washington Plunkitt’s thoughts about “honest graft” and his philosophy of politics yourself HERE.
Questions for Comment: Plunkitt asserts that people are essentially self-serving creatures and that it is a “silly morality” that would expect them to be otherwise. He “sees his opportunities and he takes em” and he expects that he is no different from anyone else in that regard. He is just better at it than most. What do you think? Do you think that people can be depended upon to be “patriotic” if there isn’t “something in it for them”?
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