On Tammany's decision to cozy up to Irish immigrants So you had wave upon wave and ship after ship of these poor, Irish-speaking immigrants landing in cities like New York and, over the course of 10 years or so, completely transforming the character of cities like New York and Boston and others so that the foreign-born population of some of the cities in the Northeast by the late 19th century was well more than half.

But that wasn't true until the famine period. And that's sort of the 'huddled masses' stereotype that we have of, say, the Ellis Island generation of immigration. They came with only the clothes on their back.

The people who left Ireland during the famine, many of them didn't speak English - they spoke Irish. These immigrants were unlike any immigrants who had come before, even other Irish immigrants, in the sense that they came really with no skills. Of course, not all of them came to the United States, but a fair portion of them did. Approximately 2 million Irish people left Ireland - that's out of a population of about 8 million. The famine immigration period is roughly from around 1845 to the mid-1850s, and it's one of the great mass movements of the 19th century. On the Irish immigrants of the late 19th century

He writes that some of Tammany's harshest critics, including cartoonist Thomas Nast, openly exhibited a raw anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice. According to Golway, Tammany was responsible for progressive state legislation that foreshadowed the New Deal. He says the Tammany machine, while often corrupt, gave impoverished immigrants critically needed social services and a road to assimilation. Historian Terry Golway has written a colorful history of Tammany Hall, which takes a more sympathetic view of the organization than many historians. Among its more notorious figures were William 'Boss' Tweed, who went to jail for corruption, and George Washington Plunkitt, who's remembered for insisting there's a difference between honest and dishonest graft. Van Wyck was one of a long list of scoundrels associated with the political machine known as Tammany Hall, which influenced - and at times dominated - New York's Democratic Party for more than 100 years. Seen here in 1935, the building that housed Manhattan's Democratic Party, known as Tammany Hall, still stands today.īack in 1900, when Americans in cities counted on ice to keep food, milk and medicines fresh, New York Mayor Robert Van Wyck's career ended when it emerged that a company given a monopoly on the ice business was doubling prices while giving the mayor and his cronies big payoffs.

Washington's General by Terry Golway