A book of one hundred and nineteen years told by Eric Adams

Mayor Eric Adams says he plans to write a memoir about the corruption scandal currently engulfing his administration. “All this comes out in my book,” he told reporters at City Hall a few days ago. “This will be one of the chapters you will all reflect on.” We hope so. Adams faces charges of fraud, bribery and solicitation of foreign campaign donations, and that appears to be just the beginning. Prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn have ongoing investigations into Adams and his close circle of friends and advisers. More accusations and revelations of misconduct seem inevitable. Now he should start writing.

If the mayor is looking for literary inspiration, someone still legally authorized to contact him could pass him a copy of “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall,” a slim and curious book published in 1905 that still tells a lot about politics and the city from New York. human behavior in general. The book is a collection of twenty-one “very plain talks about very practical politics” purportedly delivered by George Washington Plunkitt, a Hell’s Kitchen “room boss” in the early 20th century. Plunkitt was a staunch defender of Tammany, the corrupt political machine that dominated the city for a century. The son of penniless Irish immigrants, he argued that making money in politics was not only okay, but downright patriotic. “I saw my opportunities and took them,” he said, speaking of the fortune he made during his long career. He is perhaps the most eloquent philosopher of corruption America has ever produced.

In recent weeks, listening to Adams and his allies begin to defend their conduct, I thought of Plunkitt. “This is the case of airline enhancement corruption,” Alex Spiro, the mayor’s celebrity defense attorney, said the other day. Yes, the mayor had accepted seat upgrades from an airline affiliated with the Turkish government. But what? “That’s what airlines do,” Spiro said. “They do it every day. They do it for VIPs. They do it for the congressmen”. Plunkitt didn’t know which airlines they were, but he would have nodded anyway. “No one thinks to make the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft,” he said. “There’s all the difference in the world between the two.” He claimed that while he and his colleagues in Tammany made money from insider information, arranging city contracts and collecting several public salaries at once, they never opted for “dishonest graft,” such as blackmailing officials the room, “work” with the players, or steal the city’s treasure. “Books are always good,” Plunkitt said. “Everything is fine.”

Adams is also saying that everything is fine. Between the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, the Manhattan District Attorney and the city’s Department of Investigation, there appear to be at least a half-dozen active investigations into the mayor, the mayor’s chief advisor, his former first deputy mayor, his outgoing mayor of public safety, his former police commissioner, his former schools chancellor and countless other city officials. A Coney Island bar owner has come forward, alleging that an official from the mayor’s office and the former police commissioner’s brother tried to set him up with a protection racket. (The brother’s attorneys have said he denies any wrongdoing.) Two former Fire Department officials have been charged in a fee-for-service scheme involving fast-track safety inspections. (One has pleaded guilty, the other has pleaded not guilty.) City investigators reportedly found more than a hundred thousand dollars in cash unaccounted for at the sheriff’s office in Long Island City. A former City Council liaison to Muslim communities has been accused of witness tampering, allegedly in connection with donations made to Adams by a construction company executive. Adams has yet to say he sees a problem with all of this. “Just look at the numbers,” he said at a news conference last week, referring to a recent drop in metro crime and other statistics. “You’re watching this city move forward.”

The author of “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall” was not Plunkitt himself, but a reporter named William L. Riordon, who covered Tammany Hall for the New Yorker. Evening postan article edited by EL Godkin, a prominent reformer and sworn enemy of Tammany Hall. Despite his editor’s public animosity toward the machine, Riordon had won the trust and even the affection of the Tammany bosses by being genuinely interested in what they had to say. In a preface, Riordon claimed to have written down the twenty-one sermons that make up the book over several years, as Plunkitt delivered them while sitting in his usual “stand”—the black stand in the courthouse of the Manhattan County, where Plunkitt often had business. , and where Riordon often watched him. As the shoes were shined, Plunkitt would expound on his favorite subjects: the necessity and utility of corruption, the glory of Tammany and its bosses, the weakness of reformers and reform efforts, and the dangers of alcohol. He was an enthusiastic racist, though he saved his worst vitriol for the people of Brooklyn. “Even a Japanese or a Chinese can become a New Yorker, but a Brooklyn never,” he said.

Plunkitt was part of a generation of Tammany leaders that emerged in the wake of the Boss Tweed scandal. Tweed and his ring had embezzled millions of dollars from the city budget, lived large, and fallen hard after enemies leaked evidence of their misconduct in the time. As a result, Tammany leaders downplayed their ambitions and put on modest faces in public. “Look at the great leaders of Tammany Hall!” said Plunkitt, proudly. “There are no regular drinkers among them.” Although he himself was something of a dandy, wearing a top hat and gloves and sporting a thick walrus moustache, he warned younger politicians against the temptations of fancy clothes. “Putting on style doesn’t pay in politics,” he said. “People won’t stand for it.” Adams, a candidate for office, made gestures at his own ascetic habits, posing as a vegan. (Once in office, he was reported to be ordering fish from restaurants.) He completely ignored Plunkitt’s warning about fine suits, declaring that what the city really needed was a mayor with “swagger.”

When the people of New York City voted to put Tammany in office, Plunkitt argued, they knew exactly what they were doing. “We didn’t make any false claims. We didn’t go into the deceitful civil service and all that rot,” he said. “We set out as we always have been, to reward the men who won the victory. That’s what they call the spoils system.” Plunkitt had made a study of Tammany’s opponents, particularly the good-government reformers he called the Mugwumps, and thought he knew why they so often failed: the reformers refused to recognize that politics was a trade like any other, and that it had to be learned from the ground up and could not be jumped from the world of big business, philanthropy or, worst of all, academia. .” If you’ve been to college, so much the worse for you. You will have to unlearn all that you have learned before you can come directly to human nature,” he said. “Shakspere was well on his way, but he knew nothing of the politics of the Fifteenth District.”

Adams, like Plunkitt, abhors mushy reformers with fancy credentials who try to make it in elected politics: He blithely ran and won against some in 2021, dismissing their concerns about corruption and saying that what the city really needed it was a steady hand and a bit of law and order. Like the former heads of Tammany Hall, Adams claimed to understand and represent the working people of the city—in his case, he meant black and brown voters in the outer boroughs. Plunkitt insisted that having Tammany control a large number of city jobs, to reward loyalty and generate revenue, was a good thing, because that’s how you got workers interested in politics to begin with. “You can’t hold an organization together without sponsorship,” he said.

Early in his tenure, Adams tried to give his brother, Bernard Adams, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job as director of “mayor security.” The mayor’s partner, Tracey Collins, received a big promotion at the Department for Education. Lisa White, described in the publication as a “longtime friend” of Adams, he went from earning a thirty thousand dollar annual pension as a retired 911 dispatcher to earning two hundred and forty one thousand dollars as an NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Employee Relations Un another old cop friend, Timothy. Pearson, was appointed to a loosely defined role that allowed him to look over the city’s vast public procurement apparatus. Very little effort was made to conceal these arrangements. Collins’ public schedule at the Department of Education was left seventy-five percent empty. A lawsuit filed against Pearson by a former subordinate claims that among his colleagues, Pearson earned the nickname Crumbs, because when discussing contracts awarded in response to the city’s immigration crisis, he asked, “Where are my wrinkles?” In September, Pearson had his phone and papers seized by investigators, and he resigned a few weeks later. Through a lawyer, he has denied “all allegations of misconduct.”

Plunkitt believed that Tammany’s reign over New York would last forever. In a four-decade political career that began in the years after the Civil War, when he was in his twenties, Plunkitt had served as a state senator, member of the Assembly, police magistrate, county supervisor, alderman, deputy commissioner of road cleaning, and more, sometimes occupying up to four of these positions at once. (“Taking so many salaries is rather tiring,” he said.) But “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall” was not told that, by the time the book appeared, his own power was already waning. Despite the wisdom and fortune he had amassed, West Side voters had grown tired of Plunkitt. In 1905, he lost a race to return to the State Senate and never held public office again. Scholars now believe that Riordon embellished or even invented many of the sermons he attributed to Plunkitt, in an attempt to sell juice. Still, the book helped define the 20th-century public image of the big-city political boss: what he stood for, what he did and how he spoke.

When Plunkitt died in 1924, The Nation he called for copies of “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall” to be distributed to “every student of politics, to every organizer of new parties and movements, to every first voter.” At that time, the book was already out of print. Another strange quality of Plunkittian human nature is how quickly political wisdom can be dismissed, unlearned, and forgotten. Few in New York today remember Plunkitt, though in many ways he still haunts the city’s halls of power. Adams also likes to wear many hats at once. In the spring, he hopes to govern, run for re-election and be tried at the same time. ♦