Machines, Mugwumps, and Immigrants:
E.L. Godkin and Tammany Hall
A Paper Presented to the Annual Meeting of the
Organization of American Historians
April, 2001
By:
James J. Connolly
Ball State University
(Please do not cite or quote without permission)
Machines, Mugwumps, and Immigrants:
E.L. Godkin and Tammany Hall
In recent years the portrait of Mugwumps has shifted. Once seen as impractical
and ineffective elitists who carped about political and social changes they had little power
to stop, late nineteenth-century genteel reformers have begun to receive serious historical
consideration again. Recent scholarship has portrayed them as pioneers of an
independent political style, thoughtful critics of American democracy, culture, and
foreign policy, proponents of a more rigorous public morality in an age of corruption, and
a well-positioned interest group able to shape important elements of public policy.1 This
work has returned the Mugwumps, if not to center stage, then to a place of importance in
the political history of Gilded Age America.
While the restoration of Mugwumps to the annals of late nineteenth-century
American public life represents a welcome step forward, it is incomplete. Much of the
revisionist work has a static quality, portraying liberal reformers as unbending ideologues
whose thought and methods changed little over the decades between Reconstruction and
the Progressive era. Any long-term consequences of their efforts seemed to be
inadvertent—the innovations of others who put their ideas to more creative uses. The
belief that Mugwump thought can tell us relatively little of importance about the era
stems partly from the traditional caricature of Gilded Age politics as a battle between
entrenched bosses and noisy but ineffective reformers out of which few important
changes in policy or political culture arose.
1
In the case of E.L. Godkin at least, this portrait of inertia proves inadequate. One
of the preeminent Mugwumps, Godkin was the founding editor of the Nation and later
served as editor of the New York Evening Post. A superb writer and an acute observer of
American public life, he was an advocate of civil service reform, an opponent of
American imperialism, and a sharp critic of Gilded Age party politics. On the surface his
ideas and opinions seemed to change little from the 1860s to the 1890s. But as Kevin
Thornton has shown in his perceptive account of the Nation during the era of
Reconstruction, Godkin’s vision of American politics and society can serve as a subtle
barometer of broader transformations. During that period, Thornton contends, Godkin
jettisoned traditional republican conceptions of public life for a newfound faith in laissezfaire liberalism and social Darwinism. After 1877, a period Thornton’s study does not
address, there was a further shift in Godkin’s understanding of American public life, one
that reflected a broader shift toward a pluralist-style mass politics.2
This paper examines that later transformation through the lens of Godkin’s
commentary on New York City’s Tammany Hall. The quintessential urban machine,
Tammany provided him with an opportunity to comment on the workings of American
democracy in the complex arena of the nation’s largest and most diverse city. While his
essential lament about boss rule changed little between the Tweed scandal of the 1870s
and the anti-Tammany crusades of the 1890s, both the tone and the medium of his
critique did. Angry attacks focused on the problem of immigrant voting during the 1870s
gave way to complaints about the toleration of corruption by the city’s “better element”
twenty years later. This change in emphasis flowed from a change in tactics. Any hope
of curtailing immigrant suffrage had faded by the 1890s. The problem of reform was
2
now to mobilize a middle-class counter force to working-class ethnic power. Godkin’s
efforts to rally a specific social group represented a rudimentary attempt to employ a
strategy that would come to dominate 20th-century American political life. It was one of
many attempts at group mobilization that would lead to a reconception of American
politics as a clash of interests rather than as the pursuit of the public good. That a
Mugwump helped pave the way for this change is an irony most accounts of this era
overlook.3
For Godkin and the Nation, the Tweed scandal underscored the inadequacies of
republican government in a modern context. The traditional faith in a virtuous people
united by a shared moral outlook, a core tenet of republican ideology, no longer seemed
plausible in the face of urban heterogeneity. “The overwhelming fact of the city…made
republicanism impossible,” Kevin Thornton has noted. Godkin’s response to this
challenge, Thornton demonstrates, was to convert to an orthodox laissez faire liberalism
and to adopt a Darwinian emphasis on the inherent virtue of Anglo Saxons. The
exposure of the Tweed Ring in 1871 and the subsequent investigations of New York City
politics provided one of the justifications of this shift and offered Godkin the opportunity
to comment extensively on municipal politics. But in engaging with the problems of
urban democracy over the course of the 1870s, the Nation’s editor made a last gasp
attempt to preserve a conception of public life rooted in the republican ideal of a united,
virtuous citizenry before abandoning that model altogether.4
The Tweed scandal placed city politics at the center of public discussions of the
state of American democracy for several years. Using inside information from a
3
disaffected members of the machine, the New York Times published detailed accounts of
the manner in which Tammany leader William M. Tweed and his confederates had stolen
millions of dollars from the city treasury. The Times’ revelations, presented in July
1871, triggered an outpouring of public discussion, including a collection of memorable
cartoons by Harper’s Weekly artist Thomas Nast and stream of commentary from
Godkin’s Nation. Six years of investigations and trials followed, keeping the issue alive
for most of the decade.5
For Godkin, Tweed’s power was better explained through political and social
analysis than simply as an example of individual moral turpitude. The combination of
universal suffrage and an influx of ill-bred, uneducated immigrants provided a mass of
voters for profit-hungry “adventurers” to manipulate. The excessively complex
machinery of government provided offices and opportunities for these disreputable types
to exploit while the lack of “civic spirit” on the part of respectable New Yorkers allowed
them to do so. Tweed’s rise to power was “distinctly the result of a process of
evolution,” Godkin explained in 1871. Looking back in 1875 he noted that Tweed was
“the product of a state of things which his overthrow would not fundamentally
change…he was a Boss because the condition of the voting population and the nature of
governmental machinery made Bosses inevitable.” He was “an amazing villain,” Godkin
finally concluded, “but nevertheless a legitimate outcome of his time.”6
Of the various causes of the problem, immigrants were most significant. Even
before the scandal, Godkin’s critiques of urban party politics expressed concern about the
power universal suffrage had given to a mass of thoughtless immigrant voters. “We all
know what the source of the evil is,” he declared in an 1866 discussion of municipal
4
government: “a swarm of foreigners have alighted, ignorant, credulous, newly
emancipated, brutalized by oppression, and bred in the habit of regarding the law as their
enemy.” This influx led directly to a decline in the quality of political leadership: “one of
the results, and, perhaps, the worst, of this enormous addition of ignorant strangers to our
voting population is that they have created a class of politicians formerly unknown.”7
The Tweed revelations reinforced this point and Godkin’s commentary made its
Darwinian basis clear. Noting the “fundamental evils…underlying our city government,”
he declared it “an incontrovertible fact that not only a large portion, but even a large
majority of our population consists of foreigners, ignorant, unused to the exercise of the
elective franchise, unendowed with the self-restraint and instinctive discrimination of
men bred to the responsibilities of citizenship and self government.” These newcomers
had been “trained…to follow the leadership of the men whom we are trying to depose
and keep deposed.” The Irish were the chief case in point. Although Godkin himself was
an Irish immigrant, he was from the island’s Protestant elite rather than its Catholic
majority. In terms of “political development,” he argued, the peasantry who made the
bulk of mid-nineteenth-century Irish immigration were still in “the clan stage” and had
not “passed through the same process of political and social development as the other
races of Europe.” In 1866, Godkin had expressed hope for the political assimilation of
the Irish in “one or two generations.” The Tweed revelations destroyed that optimism,
replacing it with an evolutionary perspective that permanently relegated immigrants to
subordinate status.8
The presence of a large number of people lacking the intellectual and moral
capacities for self-government bode ill for the prospects of democracy in urban America.
5
In the Nation’s commentary on the Tweed scandal, Godkin repeatedly stressed the
importance of moral consensus in city politics. “All successful municipal selfgovernment,” he wrote in 1871, “has been carried on by small, homogeneous
communities, animated by a strong sense of fellowship and identity of interest.” In these
settings, voters were “united by the closest of ties, those created by race, religion, and
history” and “their numbers were sufficiently small to make municipal acquaintance
possible and give tremendous force to public opinion.” In New York City, by contrast,
“the heterogeneous composition of the population” made “public opinion and public
spirit weaker” and made Tweed possible.9
Absent the prospect of consensus in a racially plural context, Godkin proposed an
alternative basis for urban governance. The modern city, he concluded, was “not a
political community” but a joint stock association and thus should be run by its
stockholders, namely its taxpayers. Notions of “natural rights and human brotherhood,”
the basis for mass democratic rule, had proven faulty in cities. The solution was to limit
municipal suffrage to taxpayers. “The only fact that creates, in the midst of this confused
mass, a real municipality is the fact of common liability to direct taxation.” This liability
created “a strong feeling of community of interest” and was thus the best “basis for a
municipal government.” Although susceptibility to taxation was not in itself a racial
category, the logic that led Godkin to conceive of it as the only source civic unity had
clear Darwinian origins.10
Godkin played a central role in one attempt to implement this vision. New York
Governor Samuel J. Tilden appointed him to the Commission of Municipal Government
in 1876. The Tilden Commission’s charge was to draft an amendment to the state
6
constitution that created a governmental framework for cities throughout the state. One
feature, which fit with Godkin’s thinking and received ardent support in the columns of
the Nation, was a proposal for a Board of Audit elected by taxpayers only. This branch
of city government would have veto power over all municipal spending measures and
would presumably ensure economy in local affairs. “It would put the city treasury in the
keeping of a board of citizens of character and repute [and] place it out of the reach of the
General Committee of Tammany Hall,” Godkin frankly admitted in one of his several
editorial endorsements of the amendment. The property qualification met with howls of
protest from Tammany, labor activists, and other sources and proved so controversial that
the amendment was killed in the state legislature before it could be submitted for a
popular vote. Its failure signaled the end of serious effort to limit voting rights. 11
Rolling back universal suffrage represented Godkin’s first response to the
problem of urban democracy. Although retreating from the classical republican faith in a
virtuous people and moving toward laissez-faire liberalism and social Darwinism, he
clung to the idea of moral consensus. The purpose of restricting municipal suffrage was
to create a limited, enlightened electorate united by a common interest in efficient,
economical administration. A single public would still govern the city, but it would be a
circumscribed public, drawn from just a fraction of the larger community. Only with the
decisive defeat of this idea in the political arena would Godkin turn to new ways of
pursuing municipal reform and begin to formulate a new vision of the relationship
between politics and society.
7
Godkin developed a new approach to reform, one that reflected a new
understanding of how politics worked in a plural society, during the early 1890s. Moving
from the Nation to the editorship of the Evening Post, where he became entangled in a
struggle for control of the paper, and refraining from sharp attacks on Tammany during
the first Cleveland administration, he had little to say about municipal government in the
decade after the defeat of the Tilden Commission amendment. But he opened a fierce
campaign against Tammany rule in 1890, prompted at least in part by the machine’s
claims of newfound respectability. His portrayal of urban party politics had shifted little
in its particulars, but significantly in its tone and emphasis. These changes signaled a
tactical move away from the earlier attempt to define a narrow but cohesive public to an
approach that accepted the universal male suffrage and envisioned politics as the clash of
contending social groups.
Godkin’s reengagement with Tammany was part of a large assault against the
machine during the first half of the 1890s. Spurred by a flattering presentation of the
“new Tammany,” Godkin put together a series of “Tammany Biographies” for the
Evening Post in early 1890. Updated and republished as a pamphlet for the next two
rounds of city elections, “Tammany Biographies” became part of a larger anti-machine
insurgency that included sensational investigations of the relations between the machine,
the police, and the vice industry conducted by Rev. Charles Parkhurst and the subsequent
revelations of the Lexow Committee. Godkin also produced a new round of
commentary on the state of municipal politics in New York and elsewhere also appeared
in the North American Review, the Nation, and the Atlantic Monthly during the 1890s.
8
Several new reform groups organized and worked to defeat Tammany in the 1894
municipal elections, a result for which Godkin claimed some share of the credit.12
The substance of Godkin’s treatment of Tammany had changed very little from
the Tweed era. The same ingredients went into the recipe of urban political corruption:
ignorant immigrants, particularly the Irish, in possession of the right of suffrage
consistently elected unseemly men, including an inordinate number of liquor dealers and
others without “lawful occupation” or “genuine connection to the respectable business or
social world.” This “vicious element” exploited public office for its own benefit at the
expense of taxpayers.13
Despite these continuities, Godkin moved away from his earlier emphasis on the
corrupting force of immigrants. He praised Germans for their good citizenship and
mitigated his laments about Irish behavior with an acknowledgement that they faced
sharp anti-Catholic prejudice. He also argued that the absence of home rule in Ireland
prevented the Irish from gaining experience in self-government and fostered in them an
understandable distrust of Anglo elites. While unchecked immigration in combination
with universal suffrage made good government more difficult, Godkin acknowledged, it
alone did not cause machine rule. He pointed out that while the Irish dominated New
York politics, corruption was also rampant in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, and
Cincinnati despite the fact that local government in those cities remained in “native
hands.” Godkin also evinced more sympathy for the plight to the poor, suggesting that
the neglect of the poor by those better off helped drive them into the arms of Tammany.14
The Godkin of the 1890s was more concerned with the behavior of the
“intelligent class” than he was with the activities of immigrants. “That the presence of a
9
large body of ignorant foreign voters makes good government in New York more
difficult, there is no denying, but it does not necessarily or readily hand over the control
of the city to such a set of people as compose the Executive Committee of the Tammany
Society.” For that Godkin blamed “the better class of voters” who tolerated a massively
corrupt public life. He was particularly frustrated with the party habits that split upper
and middle class voters and allowed Tammany to carry the city. The insistence of the
Republican leadership on nominating candidates for mayor during the 1880s, even when
a reform candidate was on the ballot, divided the votes of the respectable classes and
allowed the machine to win.15
Following the logic of this analysis, Godkin turned his attention to mobilizing the
“decent and industrious” people of New York against Tammany. While he had sought
such an end during the 1870s, he set about gaining it in different fashion during the 90s.
Universal suffrage, he realized, had “come to stay.” The “most serious question facing
the modern world to-day is the question of the government of great cities under universal
suffrage,” Godkin announced in 1890. Attempts to limit the voting public to one class
were no longer feasible and his Darwinian views provided little sustenance for the idea of
forging a consensus across lines of race and class in a city such as New York. Even
structural changes in municipal government were unlikely to improve matters as long as
voting strength remained lodged in the hands of untutored immigrants. To solve the
problem, he concluded, required mobilizing one segment of the population, the middle
class, against another, the immigrant working class that supported Tammany. The means
to this end was publicity and Godkin sought to expand his audience well beyond the
narrow circle of readers that the Nation and other Mugwump journals reached.
10
“Tammany Biographies” constituted the fullest implementation of this strategy.
Written partly in response to an 1889 Harper’s Weekly article on “the new Tammany”
that portrayed the machines leaders as upright, trustworthy politicians, this series of short
sketches of the machines leaders aimed to counter that impression in the public mind. In
style, substance, and distribution they represented a departure for Godkin. Focusing on
the connections of Tammany’s Executive Committee members to gambling, prostitution,
liquor dealing, and violent crime, the biographies followed some of the conventions that
would come to define muckraking a decade later. Journalism historian Frank Luther
Mott described them as “racy in style, ruthless in exposure.” They sparked numerous
lawsuits by offended Tammanyites and a whirlwind of publicity surrounded them and
Godkin when they were first published.16
Shaping public opinion had long been a part of the Mugwump agenda and
Godkin, as editor of the Nation, had been at the center of that project.17 But in this new
assault on Tammany Godkin sought a far wider audience. A pamphlet version of
“Tammany Biographies” came out on the eve of the 1890 municipal election, shortly
after their initial publication of the Evening Post. At 5 cents a copy, a price only slightly
higher than some newspapers, they were clearly designed to reach a broad audience and
shape mass opinion. Republication followed in the weeks leading up to the 1892 and
1894 elections, with editorial changes designed to make the new editions up to date.
While his commentary for the Nation and other Mugwump journals still aimed to shape
the views of his elite audience, Godkin was now engaging in a publicity-driven form of
mass electioneering.18
11
Although critical of the yellow journalism that was spreading at the time, Godkin
was not averse to a degree of sensationalism himself. “Tammany Biographies” contained
blow-by blow accounts of murders and fistfights and revelations of the intimate ties
between public officials and known criminals. Boss Richard Croker’s profile included
accounts of his various scrapes with the law, including a clash that led to charges of
murder against him and another fight that cost his opponent an ear. Eleventh District
leader John J. Scannell “began his political life by committing a murder in a gambling
house at Twenty-Eighth Street and Broadway, where pools were being sold on elections,”
Godkin reported. There was a detailed account of how County clerk Henry Purroy broke
the jaw of a political opponent during a local Democratic convention and the breathless
revelation that Eight District leader Bernard Martin ran the “Burnt Rag” saloon with
“Red” Leary, the “most notorious burglar in the country” and his wife Kate, the “most
famous pickpocket in the world.”19
The sketches also stressed the class origins of the men who ran Tammany Hall.
A breakdown of the profiles in the 1894 edition revealed four professional gamblers, five
former gambling house operators, nine current or former liquor dealers, two sons of
liquor dealers, and two “nominal” lawyers. “Few of them can write an English note with
any approach to correctness,” the collection’s introduction noted haughtily. Mayor Hugh
Grant’s biography noted gratuitously that he had been raised by a pawn broker. Croker’s
sketch reported that he was “a tough in his younger years,” while Tim Sullivan was “a
typical fourth ward tough” who engaged in street brawls. Most of the sketches referred to
the subject’s nicknames in the manner of a police report: Patrick Diver was “commonly
12
called ‘Paddy;’” Philip Wissig was “known as Foul-Mouthed Phil;’” even Mayor Grant
was “familiarly known among his political associates as Hughey.”20
This emphasis on class reflected the precise political purpose of “Tammany
Biographies.” It contained few specific charges of corruption and none of them were
new. The collection’s purpose was to foment class resentment and to mobilize voters on
that basis. Readers could share in the sense of superiority encouraged by the use of
nicknames, its discussion of family backgrounds, and its mocking employment of
working-class vernacular (“de organization”). As Godkin explained in a Nation editorial
that accompanied its publication, the biographies were designed to reach “that portion of
the community which follows honest callings,” which he believed would not “accept with
eyes open a municipal administration composed of men taken largely from the class of
criminal or shiftless adventurers.”21
In this respect, “Tammany Biographies” represented a change in political
philosophy as well as a new rhetorical strategy for Godkin. The prospect of limiting the
public to a sufficiently educated, propertied citizenry capable of serious consideration of
the common good no longer existed. Any hope that immigrants would assimilate to
Anglo-American political values had long since faded The alternative was to mobilize
the middle class against the collective voting power of working-class immigrants and the
men they chose to lead them. By the 1890s, Godkin was promoting a vision of the
public as a collection of groups pitted against each other rather than as a single people
sharing a common set of values and beliefs.
13
The significance of Godkin’s engagement with urban political reform stems less
from its influence than its representative character. “Tammany Biographies” alone failed
to spark a middle-class insurgency. Only with the Parkhurst investigation and the
revelations of the Lexow Committee did the groundswell of support for reform grow
powerful enough to defeat Tammany. And even that the victory was short-lived; the
machine regained control of city hall two years later. But the newfound effort to
mobilize the middle-class suggests that Kevin Thornton’s contention that Godkin’s
thinking reflected the broader shift in American political culture from republicanism to
Darwinian-tinged liberalism can be taken a step further. By the 1890s, Godkin’s attempts
to spur municipal reform insurgency signaled that even Mugwumps—a groups ostensibly
wedded to the ideal of a unitary common good—could accept and encourage the
reconception of American public life as a clash of social groups. This transformation in
thought and strategy helped usher in a recognizably modern political life characterized by
mass appeals designed to mobilize—and to construct—specific segments of the public on
the basis of class, race, ethnicity, and other categories.
Reconsidering Godkin’s views of Tammany helps us rethink the Mugwumps and
the political world in which they operated. It has been too easy to dismiss Godkin and his
peers as intellectually stagnant reactionaries at odds with an organizationally driven
political culture, or more recently to celebrate them as steadfast adherents to universal
moral principles. Either approach fails to recognize their sensitivity to social, cultural,
and political change. Although hardly the most dynamic of figures, Godkin did more
than simply rail against modern life as his republican idealism fractured in the face of an
increasingly heterogeneous urban society. He developed new strategies that ironically
14
accelerated the social changes he regretted. He did so partly because of alterations in his
own ideas and partly because others—particularly machine politicians—had already
succeeded in mobilizing working-class ethnics and defining them as social groups with
distinctive political interests. Fighting fire with fire, Godkin abandoned any hope of
consensus in an age of mass democracy and encouraged the middle class to array itself
against the blue-collar immigrants in a battle for political control of the city. Even
Mugwumps could change with the times—however reluctantly—in the vibrant, contested
public culture of Gilded Age America.
1
Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics in the American North, 1865-1928 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986); David M. Tucker, Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998); Leslie Butler, “The Mugwump Dilemma: Democracy and
Cultural Authority in Victorian America” (Ph.D. diss, Yale University, 1997) Scott C. James, Presidents,
Parties, and the State: A Party System Perspective on Democratic Regulatory Choice, 1884-1936 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 36-122. See also Gerald W. McFarland, Mugwumps,
Morals, and Politics, 1884-1920 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975).
2
Kevin Pierce Thornton, “The End of Virtue: Public Morality and Individual Autonomy in America, 18651880” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1996), 106-154.
3
Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 18501900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 9 For another recent account of the origins of
interest group politics, see Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People's Lobby : Organizational Innovation and the
Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago : University of Chicago Press,
1997).
4
Thornton, “The End of Virtue,” 137. See also “The Moral of Tweed’s Career,” Nation 26 Apr. 18, 1876
p. 257 for a full statement of this perspective. Articles in the Nation were unsigned, though the
understanding among the editorial staff was that all contributions should be consistent with Godkin’s
views. It appears that Godkin wrote the commentary on urban politics. A comparison of his signed pieces
in other magazines with material on Tammany in the Nation shows obvious similarities. On this issue see
William M. Armstrong: E.L Godkin: A Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978),
99.
5
On the Tweed scandal see Alexander B. Callow, The Tweed Ring (New York: Oxford University Press,
1966); Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Politics and
Society in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Leo Hershkowitz,
Tweed’s New York: Another Look (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press, 1977).
6
“’The People and Municipal Government,’” Nation 19 Dec. 19, 1872, p. 400; “The Rising Against the
Ring,” Nation 13, Nov. 9, 1871, p. 300; “Boss Government,” Nation 21, November 4, 1875, p. 288;
“Tweed,” Nation 25 October 18, 1877, p. 237.
7
“The Government of Our Great Cities,” Nation, Oct. 18, 1866, p. 312.
8
“The People and Municipal Government,” p. 400 and “The Boss’s Dominions,” Nation, Oct. 12, 1871;
“Universal Suffrage,” Nation, November 8, 1866. 371-372.
9
“Municipal Government,” Nation 13, Sept. 21, 1871, p. 189; “The Overthrow of Tweed,” Nov. 27, 1873,
p. 350.
15
“Municipal Government,” 188-189. The Tweed scandal reinforced this view. See Armstrong, E.L.
Godkin, p. 47 for evidence of the racial basis for the taxpayer idea.
11
John Bigelow, The Life and Times of Samuel Tilden (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895), p. 266;
Alexander Clarence Flick, Samuel Jones Tilden, A Study in Political Sagacity (New York: Dodd and Mead
and Co., 1939) p. 262, McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics,” 50; “The Constitutional Amendment on City
Government,” Nation 26, Feb., 14, 1878.
12
McFarland, Mugwumps Morals and Politics, pp. 86-94; Rollo Ogden , The Life and Letters of Edwin
Lawrence Godkin (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1907), pp. 171-172.
13
E.L. Godkin, “Criminal Politics,” North American Review 150 (June, 1890), 715.
14
“Godkin, “Criminal Politics,” 710, “Foreign Immigration,” Nation 62, Mar. 26, 1896, p. 249; E.L.
Godkin, “The Key to Municipal Reform,” North American Review 151 (Oct, 1890), 430; “The Tammany
Society,” Nation 50 (Apr. 10, 1890), p. 291.
15
“Who is Responsible for Tammany,” Nation 50, Apr. 10, 1890, 291.
16
Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, 1690-1960, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 379. On
lawsuits and Godkin’s exploitation of them see Diane Klebanow, “E.L. Godkin, the City, and Civic
Responsibility,” New York Historical Society Quarterly (1971): 70, Ogden, Life and Letters, pp. 169182etc. See Edward Caudill, “E.L Godkin and his (Special and Influential) View of 19 th Century
Journalism,” Journalism Quarterly 69 (1992): 1039-1049 for a discussion of Godkin’s complex views of
mass journalism. See also Godkin, “The Growth and Expression of Public Opinion,” Atlantic Monthly
(1898), v. 81 pp. 6-8. On lawsuits and publicity, see G. to James Bryce Nov. 8, 1889, William M.
Armstrong ed., The Gilded Age Letters of E.L. Godkin, (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1974), 407.
17
Butler, “Mugwump Dilemma,” p. 106-111.
18
Klebanow, “E.L. Godkin, the City and Civic Responsibility, pp.66-67.
19
Tammany Biographies, 3rd ed., rev. and enlarged (New York: New York Evening Post, 1894), 5-6, 9-10,
7, 8.
20
Tammany Biographies, 5-10.
21
Unsigned editorial, Nation 50 Apr. 24, 1890.
10
16