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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
In the late nineteenth century, public outdoor relief came under severe and sustained attack from reformers. Municipal reformers attacked it as a source of machine patronage and corruption, and charity reformers saw it as the cause of pauperism and moral turpitude among the poor. But in New York City, the critical decision to cut the municipal program came not from the reformers, but from the city's Democratic machine, Tammany Hall itself. In December 1876, the machine administration of Tammany Mayor William Wickham and Boss John Kelly terminated municipal outdoor relief funding for 1877, except for the distribution of coal. The previous “reform” administration had, by contrast, kept the program intact.
1. Outdoor relief was the temporary provision of cash and/or coal to recipients who lived at home. It was contrasted to “indoor relief” provided in almshouses and other custodial institutions.
2. In the late nineteenth century, the Democratic party of New York City was divided into a number of competing factions. After 1871, Tammany Hall was a faction dominated by the Irish. By the turn of the century, it had become the most powerful faction, and until the 1930s, Tammany Hall was almost synonymous with the city's Democratic party. It got its name originally from the building “Tammany Hall” where it held its meetings; the building was owned by the Tammany Society or Columbian Order, a local patriotic society founded in May 1789. Tammany Hall was also popularly known as the Wigwam or the Tiger. See McDonald, Terrence J., “Introduction”, in Riordon, William L., Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (Boston: Bedford Books, 1993), 11Google Scholar.
3. Appropriations for outdoor relief were in fact increased between 1874 and 1876 from $71,000 in 1874 to $80,000 in 1876; see New York city Board of Estimate and Apportionment, Minutes, 1874, 1876.
4. See Allswang, John M., Bosses, Machines, and Urban Voters, An American Symbiosis (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press Corp., 1977)Google Scholar; Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1951)Google Scholar; Hays, Samuel P., “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era”, Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (1964): 157–69Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform, from Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage, 1955)Google Scholar; Merton, Robert, Social Theory and Social Structure. Toward the Codification of Theory and Research (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1949)Google Scholar.
5. McDonald, Terrence J., The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860–1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; see also Ethington, Philip J., The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Einhorn, Robin L., Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
6. Shefter, Martin, “The Emergence of the Political Machine: An Alternative View”, in Hawley, Willis D. and Lipsky, Michael, eds., Theoretical Perspectives on Urban Politics (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1976)Google Scholar.
7. Ibid., 34; and see Mandelbaum, Seymour J., Boss Tweed's New York (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965, reprinted by Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981), 93Google Scholar, 107, 111. But see also Shefter, Martin, “Political Interpretation and the Extension of the Left,” Studies in American Political Development (New Haven: Yale, 1986), 50–90Google Scholar.
8. In City Politics, Banfield, Edward C. and Wilson, James Q. argued that machine politicians faced a persistent dilemma: how to maintain the allegiance of the poor and the vitality of the organization in the face of limited resources (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and MIT Press, 1963), 115–27Google Scholar. Beyond observing that there was never enough patronage to go around, political scientists have not seriously looked into the internal organizational dynamics of machines.
9. Tammany Hall's political structure can best be described as a pyramid. At the top was the party boss. The next level down was the Committee on Organization, or the Executive Committee. This was composed of the city's thirty or so assembly district or ward leaders and was chaired by the boss himself. Under the ward leaders, each ward had a ward committee that represented the ward's election districts. The combined ward committees formed the General Committee of Tammany Hall for the city at large, numbering six to seven thousand members strong. At bottom were the election district committees headed by the election district or precinct captains. Precinct captains and their assistants were appointed by the ward leaders, and they worked at the block or neighborhood level to get out the votes. See Breen, Mathew P., Thirty Years of New York Politics (New York: John Polhemus Printing Co., 1899), 38–9Google Scholar; and McDonald, “Introduction,” 12–3.
10. The board was composed of the mayor, the comptroller, the president of the Board of Aldermen and the president of the Department of Taxes and Assessment (New York State Law, Chapter 335, 1873).
11. Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 107.
12. Durand, Edward Dana, The Finances of New York City (New York: Macmillan Company, 1898), 258–61Google Scholar.
13. Teaford, Jon C., The Unheralded Triumph. City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 50Google Scholar.
14. Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 107.
15. During the winter of 1870, James Watson, one of the chiefs of the city's Finance Department, was killed in a sleighing accident. Tweed's arch enemy, James O'Brien, managed to get a political friend to fill Watson's position and got hold of the city's financial accounts. O'Brien brought the evidence to the New York Times in July 1871. See Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 77, 79; Myers, Gustavus, History of Tammany Hall (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), 237–38Google Scholar; Callow, Alexander B. Jr, The Tweed Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 259–60Google Scholar.
16. Officially known as the Executive Committee of Citizens and Taxpayers for Financial Reform of the City.
17. The city's major bankers indicated that they would not extend any loans to the municipal government until a man of their own choosing, Andrew Haswell Green, was granted full authority over the city's finances. See Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 79–86; Shefter, Martin, Political Crisis, Fiscal Crisis: the Collapse and Revival of New York City (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 17–8Google Scholar.
18. Zink, Harold, City Bosses in the United States. A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1930), 111Google Scholar.
19. Lynch, Denis Tilden, The Wild Seventies (New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1941), 343Google Scholar.
20. William Frederick Havemeyer was an anti-Tammany Democrat. In 1871, he was chairman of the Committee of Seventy, which was instrumental in ousting the Tweed Ring. He was a two term mayor of New York City in the 1840s. Havemeyer was elected mayor for a third term in November 1872 on a reform fusion ticket between upstate Republicans/reformers and anti-Tammany Democrats. He assumed office in January 1873. See Futer, Howard B., William Frederick Havemeyer: A Political Biography (New York: American Press Publications, Inc., 1965)Google Scholar.
21. Andrew Haswell Green was a Democrat, but one fiercely opposed by Tammany Hall. In November 1871, Green became the comptroller, head of the Department of Finance of New York City. On Green's career, see Foord, John, The Life and Public Services of Andrew Haswell Green (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1913)Google Scholar; and Mazaraki, George Alexander, “The Public Career of Andrew Haswell Green” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1966)Google Scholar.
22. His policy of insisting on a legal examination of all doubtful claims on the city quickly earned him enemies from all quarters; see Foord, Life and Public Services, 132–38; Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 108—9.
23. New York City Board of Estimate and Apportionment, Minutes, December 19, 1873, and June 29, 1874.
24. The received historical account had it that public outdoor relief in New York City was abolished since 1875, except for limited distribution of coal to the needy and cash to the adult blind; see Almy, Frederic, “The Relation between Private and Public Outdoor Relief, II,” in Charities Review 9 (1899), 70Google Scholar; and Mohl, Raymond A., “The Abolition of Public Outdoor Relief, 1870–1900. A Critique of the Piven and Cloward Thesis,” in Trattner, Walter I., ed., Social Welfare or Social Control? Some Historical Reflections on “Regulating the Poor” (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 41Google Scholar.
This account is not exactly accurate. Subsequent to the budget reduction in 1874, the department suspended outdoor relief from July 1874 to January of 1875. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment did continue to slash the overall budget of the Department of Public Charities and Correction for 1875 and subsequent years. However, not only was the appropriation for outdoor relief not eliminated, it was increased from $71,000 in 1874 to $90,000 in 1875, and in 1876, it was $80,000. It was only from 1877 that cash relief was eliminated. See New York City Board of Estimate and Apportionment, Minutes, June 29, 1874; December 24, 1874; October 30, 1875; November 8, 1875; November 30, 1875; January 4, 1876; and December 29, 1876. The provision of coal was not terminated until February 1898. Noting accurately the timing of the budget cut is important to understanding its causes.
25. Several factors combined to bring about Tammany's resurgence. There was division and disintegration in the ranks of the municipal reformers. The Committee of Seventy, for example, disbanded in 1873. Both Tammany Hall and the Republican organization quarreled with the Havemeyer administration over municipal appointments and division of patronage. The national and state elections of 1874 brought about the old party alignments; reform Democrats and Republicans returned to the regular party organizations. The 1873 Panic and subsequent hard times alienated many voters from the dominant Republican Party nationwide and the “reform” administration in the City. See Foord, Life and Public Services, 152; Furer, William Frederick Havemeyer, 160 and Chapter 10; Hammack, David C., Power and Society, Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982), 132Google Scholar; Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 107–9; Myers, The History of Tammany Hall, 255–56.
26. Foord, Life and Public Services, p. 153; Myers, The History of Tammany Hall, 256–57.
27. Kelly was city comptroller from December 1876 to December 1880.
28. In 1875, the new Commissioners of Charities were Isaac H. Bailey, a Republican, and Edward L. Donnelly and Townsend Cox, both men appointed by Mayor Wickham. From 1876, Edward Donnelly was replaced by Thomas S. Brennan, another Tammany Democrat.
29. Kaplan, Barry J., “Reformers and Charity. The Abolition of Public Outdoor Relief in New York City, 1870–1898,” Social Service Review 52 (1978), 204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30. New York City Board of Estimate and Apportionment, Minutes, December 20, 1876; Schneider, David M. and Deutsch, Albert, The History of Public Welfare in New York State, 1867–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 47Google Scholar.
31. See McDonald, Parameters.
32. O'Connor's “fiscal crisis” theory implies that rollback in social expenditures is dictated by the imperatives of the state to fuel capital accumulation and the power of capital over labor. See O'Connor, James, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), 6, 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his “The Fiscal Crisis of the State Revisited: A Look at Economic Crisis and Reagan's Budget Policy,” Kapitalistate 9 (1981), 42–3. Paul Peterson's “city limits” theory argues that because of the “open systems” of cities and mobility of capital, fiscal pressures would force local governments to refrain from engaging in redistributive welfare functions as well. See Peterson, Paul E., City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33. New York City Board of Estimate and Apportionment, Minutes, November 8, 1877.
34. See Katz, Michael B., In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 46–52Google Scholar.
35. Although Katz has looked into the case of Brooklyn, he himself points out that more detailed historical studies need to be done on the subject (see his chapter two, note 13). It is hoped that this study of New York City will shed some light on any future study of Brooklyn or other cities.
36. The itemization for outdoor relief was reduced from $80,000 to $50,000 in 1877. But this amount included money for purposes other than the outdoor poor. See New York City Board of Estimate and Apportionment, Minutes, December 29, 1876.
37. Budget figures for the different departments are gathered from the Minutes of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment for the respective years.
38. When the Tammany administration slashed the program in 1876, the city's leading private charitable organization, the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (NYAICP), loudly protested. The cut, however, was implemented over the objection of the city's leading charity practitioners. The reformers failed, in fact, to prevent the reduction of the relief program. The charity reformers' position changed beginning in the 1880s, after the formation of the Charity Organization Society (NYCOS) in 1882. They campaigned hard for the termination of the remaining coal relief, but for fifteen years they were unsuccessful. For a full discussion of the role of the charity reformers in New York City's outdoor relief conflicts, see my paper, “Political and Institutional Constraints of Reform: the Charity Reformers' Failed Campaigns against Public Outdoor Relief, New York City, 1874–1898,” forthcoming in Journal of Policy History, 1995.
39. New York City Board of Aldermen, Proceedings, 11 23, 1875Google Scholar; November 23, 1876; December 18, 1876.
40. New York Times, January 24, 1875, and December 29, 1876.
41. New York City Board of Aldermen, Proceedings, 12 28, 1876Google Scholar.
42. Schneider and Deutsch, History of Public Welfare, 47.
43. New York City Board of Aldermen, Proceedings, 12 28, 1876Google Scholar. New York Times, December 29, 1876.
44. New York Times, December 29, 1876.
45. New York City Board of Aldermen, Proceedings, 01 1, 1877Google Scholar.
46. Durand, Edward Dana, The Finances of New York City (New York: Macmillan Company, 1898), 258–61Google Scholar.
47. New York City Board of Estimate and Apportionment, Minutes, 12 31, 1878Google Scholar.
48. New York City Board of Aldermen, Proceedings, 01 27, 1876, 209Google Scholar.
49. New York City Board of Aldermen, Proceedings, 02 3, 1876, p. 287Google Scholar; New York Times, January 1, 1876, and February 9, 1876.
50. New York City Board of Aldermen, Proceedings, 02, 10, 1876, 362–64Google Scholar.
51. The swallowtails were prominent in the city's business community: they were corporate lawyers, merchants, and entrepreneurs, many of whom, such as Samuel Tilden and Abram Hewitt, were also major figures of the national Democratic Party. They were called such for the formal frockcoats they wore. See Shefter, “Emergence of the Political Machine,” 27, 29.
52. Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 93; Shefter, Martin, “The Electoral Foundations of the Political Machine, New York City, 1884–1897,” in Silbey, Joel H., Bogue, Allan G., and Flannigan, William, eds., the History of American Electoral Behavior (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), 285Google Scholar.
53. Erie, Steven P., Rainbow's End: Irish Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985 (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1988), 47–8Google Scholar; Genen, Arthur, “John Kelly, New York's First Irish Boss” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1971), 126Google Scholar; Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 126.
54. Attached to a letter from Saylor, Joe to the mayor, 06 19, 1875, in Mayor Wickham Papers, New York City Municipal ArchivesGoogle Scholar, Box 81–WWH–21.
55. Ibid., and William Martin and Joseph J. O'Donohue to Wickham, Mayor, 12 1, 1876, in Mayor Wickham papers, New York City Municipal ArchivesGoogle Scholar, Box 347; in Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 127.
56. New York City Board of Aldermen, Proceedings, 12 28, 1876, 652–53Google Scholar.
57. Hammack, Power and Society, 159.
58. Shefter, Martin, “Regional Receptivity to Reform: the Legacy of the Progressive Era,” Political Science Quarterly 98, no. 3 (Fall 1983), 466CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59. For a discussion of Kelly's party reforms, see Hammack, Power and Society, 161; Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York, 92, 111, 131; Shefter, “Emergence of the Political machine,” 25–6.
60. Shefter, “Emergence of the Political Machine,” 25–6.
61. Hammack, Power and Society, 161.
62. Citizens' Association of New York, “Report of the Citizens' Association of New York Upon the Condition, etc., of the Institutions Under the Charge of the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction: With Suggestions in Relation to Organizing a Bureau of Labor Statistics and Employment, and Depots in the West for the Distribution of Labor.” (New York: Citizens' Association, 1868), 16.
63. Shefter, “Emergence of the Political Machine,” 34.
64. For a detailed discussion of the charity reformers' campaigns against coal relief and the reasons for their failure, see my paper, “Political and Institutional Constraints of Reform.”
65. New York Times, January 24, 1875.
66. The names of contractors and the years they were awarded contracts were obtained from the New York City Board of City Record, Official Journal, 1875–1897. The party affinities of the contractors were mainly found in contemporary newspaper reports and commentaries, and testimonies from the New York state legislature committee investigations. Other sources will be noted accordingly.
67. (Hon.) Gover, William C., Tammany Hall Democracy of the City of New York, and the General Committee for 1875 (New York: Martin B. Brown, Printer and Stationer, 1875), 115Google Scholar.
68. New York Times, August 23, 1877.
69. New York Daily Tribune, March 30, 1897.
70. New York State Legislature, “Report of the Special Committee of the Assembly Appointed to Investigate the Public Offices and Departments of the City of New York and of the Counties Therein Included.” Transmitted to the Legislature January 15, 1900. Known as the Mazet Committee. Hereafter cited in the footnotes as Mazet Committee.
71. Mazet Committee, 2125–126.
72. The Mazet Committee disclosed that almost every member of the Tammany Executive Committee held office or was a favored contractor. Over $700,000 of the city's orders went to favored contractors without bidding. Boss Croker himself boldly testified before the committee: “to the party belongs the spoils. … We win and we expect everyone to stand by us.” See Mazet Committee, 353, 2126; Myers, History of Tammany Hall, p. 285; Zink, City Boss, 143.
73. New York Senate Committee on Cities, Testimony, pursuant to resolution adopted January 20, 1890. Transmitted to the Legislature April 15, 1891. Known as the Fassett Committee after New York Republican Senator J. Sloat Fassett, who headed the investigation; hereafter cited in the footnotes as Fassett Committee; see also Myers, History of Tammany Hall, 272.
74. This information was drawn from the testimony of Fire Commissioner Henry Purroy. The Republican Senate Committee was intent on exposing Tammany's abuse in the city departments. The committee audited the Fire Department's accounts for the years 1884 to 1890. See Fassett Committee, 2843–48, 2989–92.
75. Croker succeeded Boss John Kelly to Tammany leadership from 1886 to 1901; Myers, History of Tammany Hall, 267.
76. Purroy, however, had been in and out of Tammany Hall. He was, as already noted, one of the disgruntled Tammany aldermen in the 1870s. After the disagreement with Boss Kelly in 1881, he brought his own following into the County Democracy; he became the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the County Democracy. He returned to Tammany only in 1888. Purroy, however, had always worked closely with Boss Croker. In fact, Mathew Breen said, “Purroy was high in the Councils of Boss Croker.” See Breen, Thirty Years of New York Politics, 743–44; Fassett Committee, 2765–66; Hirsch, Mark D., William D. Whitney, Modern Warwick (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 161Google Scholar, 360; Rhadamanthus, , A History of Tammany Hall (Privately printed, 1955), 59Google Scholar; and Shefter, “Emergence of the Political Machine,” 26.
77. New York City Board of City Record, Official Journal, 1882–1896.
78. Figures for the coal contracts were calculated from awards announced in the Official Journal of the New York City Board of City Record for the respective years, and the department budget from the Minutes of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment.
79. Erie, Rainbow's End, 211.
80. New York Times, June 13, 1879.
81. Shefter, “Emergence of the Political Machine,” 16, 33–40.
82. Shefter, Martin, “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide, eds., Working Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 267Google Scholar.
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84. Shefter, “Trade Unions and Political Machines,” 268.
85. See note 5.
86. Boss Kelly's Tammany was backed by, among others, August Belmont, the representative of the House of Rothschild in the United States and Chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Samuel Tilden, one of New York's leading corporate lawyers and the Democratic party's presidential candidate in 1876; and Abram Hewitt, an iron manufacturer and the national Democratic party's leading spokesman for free trade. See Shefter, “Trade Unions and Political machines,” 268–69.
87. Davis, Michael, “Forced to Tramp: The Perspective of the Labor Press, 1870–1900,” in Monkkonen, Eric H., ed., Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790–1935 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 143–44Google Scholar.
88. On labor's central concerns, see Rayback, History, 157–58.
89. Piven, Frances F. and Cloward, Richard A., “Historical Sources of the Contemporary Relief Debate,” in Block, Fred, Cloward, Richard A., Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Piven, Frances F., eds., The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 14–5Google Scholar.
90. Shefter, Martin, “Political Incorporation and Containment: Regime Transformation in New York City,” in Mollenkopf, John H., ed., Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), 146–47Google Scholar.
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