Greenwich village and Tammany Hall are among the few social institutions still standing on our flat, gray, affluent landscape which lend themselves at all to romanticism. The Village and Tammany alike have been largely obscured by legend, and their not-so-romantic reality is rarely revealed. It recently was, for both of them at once—as an odd and unintended by-product of the Democratic primary elections in New York City this September, when a wave of mostly amateur politicians shook the sagging walls of Tammany and came close to toppling Carmine De Sapio, master of the Hall, from his key perch as district leader in Greenwich Village’s First Assembly District South. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the close-up view the campaign presented of the Village and Tammany was how much they both have changed. The wild old Village has reached respectable middle age; tough old Tammany is fast approaching respectable senility.
Before plunging into the battle, it will help to define some terms. One of the confusing aspects of any political campaign—especially one which involves a reform movement—is that both of the rivals claim, with impressive documentation and pious fervor, to be fighting for “the people.” As Carmine De Sapio sagely remarked in a typical line from one of his Village campaign talks (which, incidentally, sounded as if they might have been ghost-written by Dwight D. Eisenhower), “politics is people.” The title of his 25-page campaign brochure was “The People Themselves,” a phrase lifted with due acknowledgment from a statement by Thomas Jefferson (identified for any new citizen just off the boat as “one of the Founding Fathers of our nation”) asserting that “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of society but the people themselves. . . .” Without going into the merits of Jefferson’s notion, let us quickly affirm that the high, stated purpose of the insurgent Village Independent Democrats was to eliminate the “bossism” of Tammany Hall and restore politics to “the people.” Since both Mr. De Sapio and his rival, thirty-eight-year-old corporation lawyer Charles McGuinness, claimed to be waging their campaign for “the people,” an innocent observer might justifiably turn to the dictionary and look up the definition of “people.” My own trusted source, Harper’s American College Dictionary, defines the word as: “The whole body of persons constituting a community, a tribe, race, or nation.” Of course—there was the dilemma! The community in question, Greenwich Village, is principally composed of two different tribes. De Sapio represented one of them, McGuinness the other.
De Sapio’s tribe is mainly composed of Americans of Italian extraction. They have changed not so much in their habits and outlook as in their numbers: in the 20’s, they were estimated to make up about half the population of Greenwich Village; today, according to the estimates of their political rivals, they have dwindled to about a third of the Village population. The other tribe—composed of people like myself, who have come to New York and the Village not from Italy, but America’s own remote provinces (distant, dark places such as Indiana and Oklahoma), have changed not only in their numbers, which are growing, but in their average age, habits, occupations, and outlooks. Because of the continual rise of apartment buildings whose rents are as high as their penthouse towers, and the rise of rents in the shabbier (or “atmospheric”) old apartments as well, few artists or bohemians who even have flirted with starvation can afford to live here. A large number have moved across town to the tenements of the Lower East Side,1 and come into the Village restaurants and bars at night or on the weekend, much as Kansas farmers come to town. But a growing number of the real residents hold down regular jobs (most often in what is now called “Communications,” a category covering such various occupations as Doubleday secretary, BBD&O account exec, and usher at Rockefeller Center), have husbands, wives, babies, and grocery carts. The main distinction in material possessions between them and the older Italian residents is that they have hi-fi instead of television sets. In the afternoon, they buy the Post instead of the Journal-American, and are likely to wear toreador pants or slacks instead of skirts and dresses when they wheel their babies into Washington Square Park. Many of them spent the protest years of their youth here, and when they closed that chapter with marriage, decided to stay on. Others have moved in from less pleasant pants of town (almost every other part of town is less pleasant), discovering that the Village is one of the few places in New York where you can walk around without feeling rushed, and found themselves a bright new, or atmospheric old, apartment.
The existence of these two distinct tribes in the Village is nothing new—they were discussed by Caroline Ware in her book Greenwich Village, 1920-1930 and identified as the “Local People” (Italians) and the “Villagers” (the people from the provinces). The new factor is the change on the part of the provincial tribe from a nomadic, rootless residence to a more stable, middle-class and middle-aged, family- and community-conscious life. Unlike the old bohemians, they are the kind of people who want to be active in the PTA, and, if possible, local politics. They are the people who largely make up the Village Independent Democrats.
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It is still the fearful illusion of the local people, however, as evidenced throughout the recent campaign, that these “newcomers” (that was De Sapio’s label for the VID people) are wild bohemians and threaten hearth and home with customs born of Freudianism and Marxism. In the electioneve street meeting for De Sapio which someone unhappily described on advance posters as a “Monster Rally,” these sentiments were in constant evidence. The rally was held in Father Demo Square, which is, as almost every speaker dramatically and significantly noted, “in the shadow of this great church, Our Lady of Pompeii.” A middle-aged Dixieland group struck up “When the Saints Come Marching In” as the De Sapio motorcade approached the square. The teen-age Italian girls danced with each other in the street (they are, in their attire, indistinguishable from the coffeehouse “beats” except for the added elements of lipstick and bubble gum), while the old ladies screeched and clapped as a parade of citizens testified to De Sapio’s fine qualities and referred to the opposition, at various times, as “sinister,” “no-gooders,” and “an invasion of strange forces interested only in rule or ruin.” A stranger innocently wandering by might have thought he had stumbled onto an anti-Communist rally in Laos.
Most of the local people seemed to share the view of the New York Mirror’s daily novelist, Lee Mortimer, who wrote that De Sapio’s opposition was composed of “Village Commies, lefties, eggheads, and beatniks.” One of the basic illusions about the Village, shared by Lee Mortimer and most tourists, is that the beat-attired people on display at coffee shops like Rienzi’s and bars like the Riviera actually live in the Village. The truth is that most of them are commuters. Any night about three o’clock, at the West Fourth Street stop of the Independent subway, you will see great numbers of girls with long, dirty hair and guys with beards get out their tokens, put on their sandals, buy the Times, and go back to Brooklyn, the Bronx, or West End Avenue. This summer a contest was held at one of the local coffee shops to elect “Miss Beatnik,” and the espresso crowd was outraged when it turned out they had voted the crown to a showgirl from midtown. They quickly held another election and this time put in one of their own. She was a seventeen-year old high school girl from Brooklyn, her last name withheld, no doubt to insure against any severance of her allowance due to parental wrath (the allowance now buys espresso and eye makeup, rather than lipstick and ice cream sodas).
The currency of the “beatnik” illusion was so great, however, chat the community’s oldest newspaper, the Villager, ran an editorial on the campaign entitled “Boss vs. Beatnik?” It soberly decided that such labels missed the mark of the two opponents who were, in reality, better typed by the labels “moderate” and “liberal.” One local newspaperman who had followed the campaign and was personally in favor of the VID, remarked that “Maybe calling McGuinness a beatnik isn’t so bad after all—at least that makes him something. It’s hard to tell if he’s anything.” McGuinness, indeed, is by appearance, a singularly bloodless and indistinguishable man. At one of the VID campaign cocktail parties a guest asked a club member, “Who’s McGuinness?” “The one,” the member pointed, “in the television-blue shirt.” That seemed as apt as anything else. We have to take it on the promise of his platform that he is against patronage, evil, and bossism and in favor of clean government and democratic rule. Whatever else he may be, he is no more of a beatnik than is Ezra Taft Benson.
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And what of the label of “Boss” for De Sapio? We are all familiar with the rash of stories several years ago which praised him on the covers of Harper’s and Time magazine as “a new kind of Tammany leader”—more enlightened, more liberal, more honest, more sensitive to the public pulse. Harper’s said in 1956 that “De Sapio has instituted a real measure of reform for which the citizens of New York can be truly grateful.” Time sang out that “Where the old Tammany used to pass around food baskets, De Sapio’s Tammany makes public-minded donations to blood banks. Where the old bosses packed city hall with hoodlums and hacks, De Sapio helps to find good men. . . .” The city papers were equally ecstatic, praising him for twenty-six civic reforms, including election laws and the policy of submitting the names of judicial candidates for approval by the Bar Association. This January the Times editorialized that De Sapio was “a shining example of political enlightenment, as Tammany leader, compared with some other Tammany bosses in the past.” How could liberals argue with endorsements like that?
Their disillusionment sprang not so much from his “government” record as it did from strictly political differences. The first difference to arise was over the feeble exertions De Sapio made on behalf of Stevenson in the 1956 Presidential campaign, after his boy Harriman failed to get the Democratic nomination. It was this, in fact, which resulted in the formation of the Village Stevenson Club—which became the Village Independent Democrats. They got considerable support this year from other party liberals, headed by the “Old Turk” trio of Mrs. Roosevelt, Thomas Finletter, and Herbert Lehman, who openly broke with De Sapio last year after he pushed through Frank Hogan over Finletter as the Democratic candidate for the Senate.
Although born of the liberal disillusionment over Tammany in the Stevenson campaign, once established, the Village Independent Democrats began to pay increasing attention to local irritations, based on the Italian-oldtimer rule of Village politics. A typical example of VID conversion is that of its 1957 candidate against De Sapio, Herman Greitzer. Greitzer had first joined the Tamawa Club (Tammany’s Village local), but when he found that his wife was relegated to a sort of bean-Supper-serving status in the club along with all the other women, who (probably more from social than political reasons) are relegated to a kind of ladies auxiliary, he and his wife joined the VID. The De Sapio forces just don’t understand the type of modern-woman-in-politics view that is part of the newcomers’ code. One young lady who worked as a poll watcher in the 1957 contest was asked with honest curiosity by one of the Tamawa watchers (male, of course) at the polling place, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
During the current campaign I asked this particular girl a basic question myself: Why are you working for the VID against De Sapio? She named with accuracy and full knowledge the reports of Tammany patronage (a VID ad in the local papers before the election named names and salaries of Tamawa club patronage amounting to $273,325 a year), the inferior role of women in the Tamawa club, the De Sapio lack of enthusiasm for people like Stevenson and Finletter, and then said the club wasn’t really serving the local people with such things as legal and rent clinics. I pointed out that they did, indeed, have such services, and after a moment the girl said, “Yes, but I really wouldn’t feel I could take my own problems to them.”
No—any more than an aged Italian widow would feel easy about taking her problems to the bright young hinterlanders of the VID. It is the same reason that the Puerto Ricans in East Harlem don’t often take their problems to the local city councilman, John Merli. He and his club are Italians. We belong to different tribes, and trust our own.
The Italians understand this, but their confusion about the VID, especially at the outset, was that they didn’t recognize the tribe. When the VID ran Herman Greitzer, a Jew, as their candidate for district leader in 1957, some of the Tamawa oldtimers felt they saw the light—the VID was a Jewish club. But now along came 1959 and they ran a man named McGuinness! The VID is a tribe, indeed, but one not familiar to Italians who have lived most of their life in New York. It is the boys from the provinces—or, as De Sapio has expressed it, “newcomers”—and McGuinness is one of the few exceptions who was born in New York. His candidate for co-leader, Gwendolyn Worth, is from Mississippi; the VID president, the Reverend Howard Moody, is from Texas; campaign manager Ted Meyers is from New Jersey. They are also, for the most part, members of an oppressed minority group in all our great cities which one social worker at a New York Intergroup Relations Conference once referred to as “the disenfranchised white middle class.”
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The wave of reform opposition that accounted for three of the six knockdowns (the other three were the doing of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem) of Tammany district leaders in September’s primary can, in large part, be looked at as an upsurge of this same new minority group throughout the city. Part of Tammany’s difficulty with them lies in their lack of understanding of them. The minority groups which, like the Italians, came here from Europe were a different matter. De Sapio himself came to power in the Village in 1943 by finally ousting the Irish leader, Dan Finn, whom he beat three times at the polls before he was finally seated by the Irish-dominated Tammany organization. When after one of his prizeless victories De Sapio, then the “reform” candidate, and some of his cohorts picketed Finn’s office, the Irish leader said the performance was “in line with all the other tactics they’ve been using. I might even say it smells strongly of Communism.”
Some things don’t change. The insurgents are always the reformers, and the opposition always suspects that they are tinged with Communism. The complaint of the young Midwestern worker in the VID that he couldn’t get anywhere in the Tamawa club “if he tried” recalled a statement of De Sapio that when men like Finn were in command “the Irish leaders used to give the Italians important-sounding jobs—without power. . . .”
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The great difference is that this new minority group doesn’t want the same prizes as the others did—except, of course, the basic one of “getting in.” They don’t want patronage and bread-baskets and turkeys at Christmas. They want the more elusive and difficult rewards of leadership, participation, and liberal reform. De Sapio, of course, has altered his own role as Tammany boss and the role of Tammany Hall to meet this new trend—as was mentioned before, he has introduced such forward-looking practices as “public-minded donations to blood banks” and more political reforms than any past Tammany leader would have dreamed of. In the Village itself he is weighted down with civic accomplishments, from a De Sapio scholarship donated to the Village Outdoor Art Show to the chairmanship of the annual dinner of the local Catholic War Veterans, and was named “Man of the Year” by the Village Chamber of Commerce. As Mencken said of Teddy Roosevelt, “one does what one can.” De Sapio is so modern a political leader that he even wears facial makeup, of a tint almost exactly like the kind Billy Graham wears. But there are two things he can’t do. He can’t take off his dark glasses, that symbol of the evil boss, because he suffers from an eye disease known as iritis. And he can’t eliminate patronage—the rock upon which the church of Tammany is founded.
Ironically enough, the newly apparent weakness of Tammany beyond the Village, in the city at large, may not be due to the failure of De Sapio to make his organization more modern and liberal, but his failure to keep it carrying out its oldtime functions. As Time aptly described the rise of Tammany through its help for the new European minority groups in the city: “Tammany fed them, led them, got them housing, found them jobs—and used their votes to sustain itself in power.” Tammany couldn’t have played this role for the newcomers from the American provinces, the college graduate liberals who compose the heart of the VID. But it could have done it with the great minority group migrations that have poured into New York City in our own time, especially since the end of World War II—the migrations of Negroes and Puerto Ricans. There are 350,000 Negroes in Harlem alone, and there are 650,000 Puerto Ricans in the five boroughs of the city. With these key, and still growing groups, Tammany has goofed, and it is too late to do anything about it.
Half of the six toppled Tammany leaders in the recent primaries were knocked off in Harlem by Adam Clayton Powell’s troops, and it was not merely Powell’s own feud with De Sapio that led to the overthrow. Harlem City Councilman Earl Brown, who ran against Powell in the Democratic primary last year, said once that his defeat was not so much due to pro-Powell sentiment as anti-Tammany sentiment. One bitter Negro Tammany official said privately: “You know why Tammany is dead in Harlem? Because it doesn’t do anything for anyone at any time or at any place.”
The same can be said in respect to Tammany and the Puerto Ricans, and with this group more than any other, Tammany might have performed a great service to the city as well as to itself by carrying out its traditional role of aid and recruitment of the newcomers. As Caroline Ware wrote of the immigrant groups in the Village of the 20’s, “in a real sense the political clubs served the community better and more to the community’s satisfaction than did the regular welfare agencies because the political club was trusted and respected where the welfare agency was not.”
The same can be said of the experience of the Puerto Ricans with the one political club in East Harlem that served them in the old “Tammany-style” way—the Vito Marcantonio club. In that neighborhood Marcantonio is still a legend, and he, too, was “trusted and respected where the welfare agency was not.”
The Puerto Rican Tammany leader in East Harlem, installed by De Sapio in 1954 (after more than thirty years of Puerto Rican settlement in the neighborhood), is neither respected, beloved, or feared by the people of his district. Tammany sent Puerto Ricans to the state assembly in 1953 and 1958, and has named a Puerto Rican city magistrate. But it has never gone out and aided and recruited the people as it did with the European immigrants.
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The only New York politician who seems to realize the real potential of the Negroes and Puerto Ricans is Adam Clayton Powell, who early this year organized a “leadership council” which was the first group to bring together Negro and Puerto Rican leaders from all over the city into one body. If he does anything with this group politically, the cry of “demagogue” will rise first and loudest from the lips of those people who were sitting on their hands while Powell was organizing these people. If he wins them it will be first of all because nobody else bothered to invite them in.
Powell is Shunned by the new liberal reform movement that the VID is affiliated with, which carried on the sixteen fights against Tammany district leaders outside of Harlem. (Powell fought four and won three in Harlem.) I happened to be at the VID headquarters one afternoon when Powell dropped in, and as soon as he left, one of their workers rushed up to assure me that their group was in no way affiliated with Powell’s battle against Tammany.
Whether or not the new reformers ever join ranks with Powell (which seems, at the least, unlikely), they are not, any more than Tammany Hall, going to make any lasting mark on city-wide politics if they don’t win the support of the city’s largest potential voting bloc: the Negroes and Puerto Ricans. The Village is probably the only place in the city where the minority group of white middle-class liberals hold anything like a plurality. I am sure that Negroes and Puerto Ricans would be welcomed by any of these new reform groups—but they are going to have to do more than just put a welcome mat outside the door to bring them inside.
De Sapio barely won this round in the Village, squeaking by the VID in a count of 4,857 to 4,271, in the largest primary turnout in the community’s history. His own people were solidly behind him, and the heavily Italian election districts in the south Village piled up big majorities, but McGuinness won a larger number of election districts and cut the Tammany margin in almost every district. On election night the Tamawa captains coming in with the returns, shaking their heads, so often complained that it was “that new apartment house on the block” that hunt the total. The scene is changing and the pressure is on—not only in the new Greenwich Village, but the new New York City, and Tammany Hall has never looked so old.
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1 See “New York's Lower East Side Today” in the June 1959 COMMENTARY.