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When De Sapio seized the leadership of Tammany Hall in 1949, he found himself in command of a rotten, rat-infested political hulk. From its days of corrupted power, Tammany stank. It exacted a heavy price in public money and civic decency for a service. To New York, as to many another U.S. city in the period 1820-1920, came immigrants by the thousands and by the tens and hundreds of thousands—Irish driven by famine, Italians by population pressures, Jews by persecutions. These were not all or mostly the brave or the gallant; many were the fearful, the rootless, the lost. Tammany cared for them when the U.S. Government and most of its higher-minded citizens were unwilling or unable to do so. Tammany fed them, led them, got them houses, found them jobs—and used their votes to sustain itself in power.
Tammany Boss Richard Croker was a harsh, cold man. But even Croker well understood the function of Tammany Hall, and he could speak of it with eloquence and emotion. "Think," he said, "what New York is and what the people of New York are. One half, more than one half, are of foreign birth . . . They do not speak our language, they do not know our laws, they are the raw material with which we have to build up the state . . . There is no denying the service which Tammany has rendered to the Republic. There is no such organization for taking hold of the untrained, friendless man and converting him into a citizen. Who else would do it if we did not? Think of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners dumped into our city. They are too old to go to school. There is not a mugwump in the city who would shake hands with him. They are alone, ignorant strangers, a prey to all manner of anarchical and wild notions."
Tammany, said Croker, "looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them, in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there by which so long a row could have been hoed so quickly or so well?"
Here Comes the Commander. But the torrent of immigration after 1920 was slowed, by national law, to a trickle. The children of the foreigners went to U.S. schools and learned U.S. ways. The welfare state, with its vast governmental social services, sublimated and institutionalized the old relationship between the political machine and the helpless. After Charles F. Murphy, the bosses of Tammany Hall lived with their memories and on petty political thievery, fought among themselves, and scratched their heads in wonderment at their low estate. Then Carmine De Sapio came along to tell them what had happened, and how a different Tammany might live in a different world.