Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [874]
Soon, indeed, Wall Street businessmen organized a Roosevelt Club, and the Stock Exchange, Produce Exchange, Real Estate Exchange, and Iron and Metal Exchange promised their support. The Union League Club endorsed him. Dry-goods men held rallies. With the setting up of Roosevelt campaign headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Fifth Avenue’s white knight, now known familiarly as the “Cowboy Candidate,” was well launched.
BOSSES, BISHOPS, AND THE MAN OF IRON
The roster of mayoral candidates was not yet complete, however. The organized working class and the organized bourgeoisie had sent in contenders. But the Irish-American middle class, whose nascent power was manifested through the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church, two warily interlaced institutions, had at least as much riding on the outcome.
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, John Kelly had centralized and disciplined Tammany beyond Tweed’s fondest imaginings. He also continued the business community’s program of cutbacks, thus enhancing the Democracy’s standing and making it a more respectable outlet for middle-class Irish ambitions. Kelly did not, however, command sufficient financial resources to do without the well-heeled Swallowtail Democrats. From their Manhattan Club headquarters, now housed in A. T. Stewart’s old marble mansion on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, men such as iron and steel manufacturers Abram Hewitt and Edward Cooper, corporate attorney Samuel Tilden, and bankerrailroad investor August Belmont still wielded great power. These Protestant businessmen and professionals had access to campaign funds, a social standing that reassured the city’s creditors, an avenue to newspapers, a capacity to dispense patronage in their own enterprises, and powerful connections to the national Democratic Party.
Indeed it was national politics that motivated the Swallowtails to contest Tammany for power in the city. As importers and exporters, manufacturers who relied on imported raw materials, bankers, and railroad investors, they were vitally interested in lower tariffs, hard money, and federal aid to commerce through improved harbors, harbor defenses, coastal surveys, and foreign consulates. Given the equilibrium between Democrats and Republicans at the federal level, New York State was often the most important swing state in a presidential election, and with New York City casting a larger proportion of its state’s vote than any other American city, it had provided the margin of national victory in 1880 and 1884, had come close to doing so in 1876, and would again in 1888 and 1892. It was no surprise that the major parties repeatedly nominated candidates for president and vice-president who might attract metropolitan voters.
Tammany had strengthened itself vis-à-vis the Swallowtails by expanding its political base in the burgeoning Irish middle class—appealing to its fraternal organizations and actively cultivating an ethno-religious identity. Under Kelly, who married Cardinal McCloskey’s niece, the Democratic Party arranged for public funding of parish activities, particularly parochial schools. In 1880 Kelly’s forces elected Swallowtail William R. Grace, perhaps America’s most successful Irish immigrant. Grace had left his family’s prosperous County Cork estate, went to sea, roved the world, and ended up in Peru, working for a ship chandler’s firm, of which he and his brother eventually took control. He moved to New York City in 1865 and founded his own firm, W. R. Grace and Company, to cooperate with his brother’s operation and made a vast fortune supplying the Peruvian military and in the