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But last week, when the leaders of Tammany assembled to choose a candidate to regain the city hall for them, they were a very worried group of men. Something had happened to turn topsy-turvy the best of all political worlds in which they had so long dwelt. For three years they had had no patronage either from the city or from the New Deal. Their leader, James J. Dooling, who succeeded the deposed Boss Curry, was ill as he had been for months. Worse, he had never succeeded in becoming a real boss by bringing all factions of Tammany under his thumb. Worst of all, something had happened to Tammany's city.
New York City does not lie in one county but in five: New York (Manhattan), Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, Bronx and Richmond (Staten Island). Tammany, the Democratic organization of New York County, used to be in the position of the Mother Country of an empire, controlling as the oldest and largest member the city government to which all were tributary. In 1920 Tammany's territory, Manhattan, was still the biggest member of the empire, had about 40% of the city's registered voters. Today it has only about 25% of the voters. If the five boroughs of the city (coterminous with its five counties) are considered as separate municipalities, the eight most populous cities of the U. S. are in approximate order: 1) Chicago. 2) Brooklyn, 3) Philadelphia, 4) Manhattan, 5) Detroit, 6) The Bronx, 7) Los Angeles, 8) Queens. The difficulties of Tammany's Manhattan political machine can therefore be compared to that of a Philadelphia political machine if it tried to dominate the politics of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and also of Richmond, Va. (which has about as large a population as New York City's small borough of Richmond on Staten Island).
But Tammany has one greater difficulty: if it does not dominate the politics of the other boroughs, it will be dominated by them. The Democratic boss of The Bronx is Edward J. Flynn, an oldtime henchman of Jim Farley and onetime Secretary of State in Governor Franklin Roosevelt's State cabinet. He and Boss Kelly of Brooklyn, Boss Sheridan of Queens and Boss Fetherston of Richmond agreed on a ticket. When Tammany met it was split into at least three factions and Leader Dooling, ill abed and acting by proxy, was in danger of being unable to name his own candidate for mayor even in his own borough. By compromising with one faction he was able to beat the third which was in favor of bending the knee to the New Deal and the leaders of the other boroughs and accepting their ticket. Then, three days later Leader Dooling died. So, in the Democratic primary in September, bereaved Tammany, with its own ranks split, will try to nominate a candidate for mayor opposed by the political machines of four boroughs in which there are three votes to every vote in Manhattan.