Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway Read Free Book Online

words, “precision, constancy, unanimity, and uniformity.” This highly disciplined, centralized control of local politics, with its emphasis on unity and order, would become a hallmark of Tammany Hall under Irish-American leadership. 22
    Wyse’s genius for organization and his emphasis on pragmatic results rather than utopian ideals established the framework for the sort of organization that the Irish would embrace once they arrived in New York. The Catholic Association’s victories were a credit to O’Connell’s charisma and eloquence, but they also required discipline, order, and organization. As Thomas Wyse understood, the hard work of political organization often is far removed from the color and sound of rallies and meetings. Tammany Hall, like the Catholic Association, understood the importance of spectacle. But its greatest strength was organization.
    . . .
    In early 1840, Daniel O’Connell welcomed an Irish-born visitor from New York City to his office in London, where he was tending to public business as a member of the House of Commons. John Hughes, a forty-three-year-old man with a strong chin, sharply drawn nose, and expansive forehead, was a native of County Tyrone, a highly contested borderland between Protestant settlers and Catholic natives like the Hughes family. O’Connell may have had a gift for articulating Catholic political and cultural alienation, but Hughes had experienced it firsthand, and he made little attempt to hide the scars. Writing of his early childhood, Hughes noted with characteristic irony that for five days—the first five days of his life—he was “on social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire.” But then he was baptized a Catholic and so was relegated to second-class citizenship. He emigrated to the United States in 1817, when he was twenty years old, hoping to find a respite from what he called the “hereditary degradation” of Catholics in his native land. 23
    He found work first as a laborer in a stone quarry in Pennsylvania and then as a gardener on the grounds of Mount Saint Mary’s Catholic Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He caught the attention of a French-born priest named Jean Dubois, who noticed that the young Irishman often skipped meals to catch up on his private reading. Dubois arranged for Hughes to be admitted to the seminary, and Hughes was ordained a priest in 1826.
    By the time of his meeting with O’Connell, Hughes was a bishop in New York, serving alongside his aging and frail mentor, Jean Dubois. It was hardly a secret that the younger and feistier Hughes was the true leader of New York’s mostly Irish Catholics, even though Dubois technically was the senior man in the diocese. Hughes was outspoken, aggressive, and political to his very marrow, although he spared little in excoriating those who accused him of acting more like a boss than a bishop.
    Hughes’s many critics called him “Dagger John,” a reference to the little cross that he and other Catholic clergy scrawled next to their signatures on official correspondence. David Hales, editor of the Journal of Commerce newspaper, charged that Hughes’s cross actually was a dagger aimed at the identity and culture of Protestant New York. So he became “Dagger John.” The menacing nickname only added to the bishop’s larger-than-life image, but it also symbolized fears that Hughes might command his impoverished immigrant flock to violent political action—fears that Hughes was happy to stoke.
    The bishop’s high profile, his insistence that Catholicism was compatible with American ideals, and his eagerness to confront hostile politicians and journalists made him a favorite target of those who saw him as little more than an agent of foreign popery. Walt Whitman called him a “mitred hypocrite,” while former New York City mayor Philip Hone called him a “generalissimo.” He was admired for his intellect, although some critics believed his focus was too