Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway Page B

presided over the catastrophe that so embittered Famine survivors. From his earliest days as mayor, he advocated an activist municipal government at a time when the city’s commercial and intellectual elites viewed assistance to the poor as “bounties for highwaymen,” as an 1857 headline in the New York Evening Post put it. He championed government assistance for the poor and hungry during a deep recession in 1857, and he considered it government’s responsibility to provide work for the unemployed and, even more ambitiously, higher education for the children of the poor. Wood proposed the creation of a free public university so that “the poor man, as well as the rich” could send his children to college. 39
    Whether Wood acted out of genuine sympathy for the poor is hard to know—he was a slippery fellow. But that hardly mattered to his Irish constituents. What mattered was the sound of a sympathetic voice—and the almost hysterical cry of critics who sounded very much like their brethren across the Atlantic. The Irish News , another periodical on the Irish-American community’s expanding newsstand, stated its case for government action in terms that recent immigrants were sure to understand. “When famine stares fifty thousand workmen in the face, when their wives and little ones cry to them for bread, it is not time to be laying down state maxims of economy, quoting Adam Smith or any other politico-economical old fogy.” The invocation of famine and the reference to Adam Smith, the British economist whose work was treated with religious reverence in Victorian Britain, shows that the Irish in New York saw a connection between their plight in Ireland and the conditions—and antagonists—they faced in New York. 40
    “Mr. Wood is greatly indebted as a politician to what are called by social philosophers the ‘dangerous classes,’” wrote the Evening Post in 1857 after the mayor proposed that the city borrow money to purchase fifty thousand pounds each of flour, cornmeal, and potatoes to give to the city’s army of unemployed workers in exchange for their labor on public-works projects. The mayor justified the request by noting that it was October, and winter was approaching. If the city did nothing, “want, destitution, and starvation will pervade the homes of the working men,” he said, adding that the poor did not have the means to “avoid or endure reverses.” Then, turning to language that would sound familiar to members of the workingmen’s movement, Wood added: “Truly it may be said that in New York those who produce everything get nothing, and those who produce nothing get everything.” 41
    Criticism of Wood became increasingly shrill after this admittedly demagogic speech. John Van Buren, son of former president Martin Van Buren and an important power in New York politics, charged that Wood was attempting to “array the poor against the rich.” The Evening Post said that government was not under “any obligation to find people employment or food.” The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, a private charity, asserted that “foreigners” were scheming to obtain government handouts. The association was the outgrowth of a Protestant evangelical organization called the New York City Tract Society, a group very much like the Bible societies in Ireland that sought to improve the condition of the Irish poor by leading them away from Catholicism. The association was intent on distinguishing between the “worthless” poor and the “modest and deserving” poor, in the words of Robert H. Hartley, the group’s executive secretary. Those who wished the association’s help were required to allow staff, or “visitors,” from the organization to inspect their homes and investigate their private lives and habits. 42
    These moralistic views of the poor, framed by an unshakable belief in the intellectual and even physical inferiority of Catholics, were variations on the arguments of