Real Lace Page 4

  As a result of all these factors compelling the Irish logically toward politics, Edward F. Roberts, in Irish in America, has said, “It is probably true that the political machine was not invented by the Irish or conspicuously by anyone, but it is certain that it was developed to its greatest extent and has reached its highest degree of efficiency through the peculiar genius of the Irish for political organization.”

  New York’s Tammany Hall, despite its long association with Irish Democratic politics—and, more recently, with Italian-American politicians—was originally the creation of Old Guard WASP aristocrats, and was as bigoted against the Irish as, if not more so than, the Know-Nothings. Before the American Revolution, a number of groups who were opposed to the revolutionary cause and who proclaimed their loyalty to George III organized under such names as the societies of St. George, St. Andrew, and St. David. As a countermove, a group of revolutionary loyalists formed the Sons of Liberty, or the Sons of St. Tammany—the latter named after a Delaware Indian chief called Tammanend, a man celebrated for his wisdom, benevolence, and love of freedom. The “Saint” was thrown in just to mock the other saintly groups.

  Though the Sons of St. Tammany proclaimed themselves “democratic,” their democracy did not at all extend to the lower economic groups, or to immigrants, and membership in what became the executive committee of the Democratic Party of New York County—or Tammany Hall—was carefully restricted to the landed gentry and “native-born patriots.” As early as 1806, revelations of widespread political corruption among Tammany Hall’s sachems—as, Indian-fashion, its leaders were called—resulted in the dismissal of a number of city officials, including the comptroller, the superintendent of the almshouse, the inspector of bread, and the society’s founder himself. But in spite of these proven charges, these men remained powerful Tammany figures. On April 24, 1817, in protest against Tammany bigotry and its anti-immigrant stance, a noisy horde of hundreds of Irish immigrants stormed Tammany Hall, breaking into a general committee meeting, swinging sticks and hurling brickbats. It was really fear for their lives in the face of the fighting Irish that finally forced Tammany to take in the Irish, to help them become naturalized, and to join in the fight for manhood suffrage. Through sheer numbers, the Irish began taking over Tammany Hall, and by the time of the great wave of immigration in the 1840’s the Irish were running the organization, so that the arriving Irishman found his staunchest political allies in Tammany’s ranks.

  Dan Bradley, on the other hand, was a vociferous opponent of bossism and machine politics—McLaughlin in Brooklyn and Tammany in New York. To him, Tammany was anathema, and he worked assiduously to avoid its “taint.” In this respect, he was the polar opposite of such political bosses as his contemporary, Mayor “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald of Boston, and, later, Jim Curley. He considered machine politics morally dangerous (on his deathbed he warned his children to stay out of politics: it was too corrupting). Taking a political stance of righteous indignation, and charging out against graft and corruption with blackthorn stick in hand, in his rough-hewn, blunt, and moralistic way, he rose rapidly in Brooklyn’s political world.

  In 1874, Bradley was elected to the New York State Assembly on a combined Democratic and Independent ticket. It had been a fierce fight and, in the process, a split had developed in the Kings County Democratic Party on the old slavery issue, between the “Hards” and the “Softs.” The Hards, or Hard-shells, were the more conservative faction, the Softs the more liberal, and Dan Bradley was a Soft. In Albany, Dan Bradley was placed on one of two rival Democratic committees, the other being presided over by Hard Judge John J. Vanderbilt, known as “Kings County’s Favorite Son.” At the time, the Brooklyn Eagle commented that “The contrast between the two men could hardly have been more manifest. Bradley was a mechanic [meaning he had worked with his hands], a plain unlettered man and an uncompromising Democrat. Judge Vanderbilt was … one of the finest looking men in the State of New York, a man of high culture, of commanding presence, well known throughout the State, having once run for Lieutenant Governor.” The Eagle refrained from pointing out that Dan Bradley was an immigrant Irish Catholic, and that Vanderbilt was a member of an old-established Dutch Protestant family, though the implication of anti-Catholic snobbishness is clear.

  In the Assembly, to which he was twice re-elected, Dan Bradley became known as a fighter against graft and corruption in the state government. Once, walking into an office building in Albany, and seeing large checks from building contractors lying blatantly about on the desks of other Assemblymen, he strode from desk to desk, seized the checks, and tore them up. He became quickly known for his personal incorruptibility, earning the nickname of “Honest Dan,” and, as his grandchildren proudly point out, “In those days honest meant honest.” As his reputation grew, he was also called affectionately “Uncle Dan.”

  In 1893 he ran for the New York State Senate as a “Reform” Democrat, and this was another bitter fight. His opponent in this contest, William Van Slooten, was also a member of New York’s Dutch Protestant Establishment. Though Van Slooten was a part of the powerful Hugh McLaughlin machine, he was otherwise relatively unknown, and Dan Bradley took the phrase “Who is Van Slooten?” as his campaign slogan. Shortly after Uncle Dan’s resounding victory, which, though he was then almost sixty, made him the youngest man in the Senate (“Still on the sunny side of seventy,” as he declared in his acceptance speech), the question of who was Van Slooten was answered in spectacular fashion. Whether or not as a result of his defeat, William Van Slooten took a revolver and “blew his head off” in his house at 52 Sidney Place. The suicide filled the newspapers, and the weapon appeared to have mystified the authorities, who had never seen a revolver quite like it. The detectives couldn’t operate the gun or even take the cartridges out and, when they tried to dismantle it in the coroner’s office, the gun suddenly went off and a bullet pierced a desk and several thick books, and narrowly missed a man standing nearby. In the newspaper stories that followed, it turned out that Van Slooten had worked as a mining engineer for Hamilton McKeon Twombly, who was married to a granddaughter of the old Commodore Vanderbilt—“My mortal enemies!” as Dan Bradley used to declare. If the dead do turn in their graves, something of this sort must have happened, many years later, when one of Uncle Dan Bradley’s Murray great-granddaughters eloped with a Vanderbilt.

  A tall, arresting figure who stood “straight as an arrow,” with abundant white hair, according to contemporary reports, Dan Bradley wore tall silk hats, affected semiclerical garb with reversed collar, and was frequently mistaken for a priest. Like his Irish ancestors before him, he was a devout and dedicated Catholic. He was a member of the Church of the Assumption at York and Jay streets in Brooklyn, was active in the Catholic Benevolent Legion, helped establish new branches of the Legion, and was a member of the board of managers of the Catholic Orphan Society. Devotion to Catholic charities, particularly to orphans, would become a persistent theme in the lives of the F.LF.’s. In this latter capacity, Dan Bradley made frequent visits to the orphanage, and lectured his children on the importance of maintaining this visiting schedule. At one meeting of the Society, Dan Bradley and his friend Bernard McCaffrey were both presented with gold-headed canes for their services. The souvenir menu on this occasion stated that Don Bradley’s age was seventy-seven. In his acceptance speech, Dan Bradley announced that he intended to christen his cane by breaking it over the head of the person who had inserted that figure. He was, he insisted, only seventy-four. (The menu, meanwhile, may have been correct; there is a possibility that he was born in 1830, and not 1833, and, since he enjoyed being known as the youngest man in the Senate, “Honest Dan” may have indulged in the not-uncommon politician’s practice of lying about his age.)

  One of Bradley’s first bills in the Senate, in 1894, had been a proposal to establish fixed salaries for Senators. Theretofore, state Senators had been paid in a casual manner that consisted mostly of whatever graft they could collect from cont
ractors and other constituents with special interests in mind. Bradley decided to stop all that. “My bill proposes,” he announced, “to pay the men elected under it one thousand dollars, but I’m willing to make it fifteen hundred, which is a nice salary. The man who takes more pay than he agreed to accept office for is something more than a salary grabber—he is a thief! I represent all shades of politics. I am a whole party in myself. Those who had the best interests of the city at heart voted for your humble servant. I know a little about politics. I know what it is to bring out the vote!”

  Pronouncements of this sort did not, perhaps, endear the humble servant to his fellow legislators. One newspaper report of the period said, in commenting on his legendary honesty, that “He was so honest that those perhaps a little less scrupulously so than he thought that his honesty was ‘overdone.’” On the other hand, no one really questioned his integrity—nor his devoutness—and he had become indeed the darling of the voters of Kings County, particularly those of Irish descent. Though he could proclaim himself “a whole party,” he could also be humble, and the day after he défeated Van Slooten, Dan Bradley appeared at the office of the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle and announced, “Mr. Editor, if tonight after I said my prayers, the Lord should come into my room and ask me, ‘Dan Bradley, what else do you want?’ I would say to him, ‘Nothing, Lord, but more of Thy Grace.’”

  In 1894, Daniel Bradley took an active part in the investigations of the “notorious” Lexow Committee of the State Senate, which uncovered scandal after scandal in the New York City Police Department—voting frauds, policy and prostitution protection, sale of liquor licenses by the Excise Board, and cases of police brutality which make recent charges against New York’s “finest” seem tame by comparison. It made no difference to Bradley that much of the New York police force was Irish, though, in his questioning of witnesses, he tended to make a distinction between a “good” Irishman—one who didn’t drink—and a less-good Irishman, who had succumbed to the Irish weakness. As the investigation wore on, powerful forces were set in motion to call the hearings off. Tammany Hall was beginning to show up in a much less than favorable light. Bradley would have none of it, and told a reporter from the Eagle, “No power on earth can call the Committee off” (implying his recognition of a distinction between “power on earth” and “power in heaven”). He went on to declare in his flamboyant style that “We will not only finish investigating the police but we will fully investigate the police justices, the Excise Board, and other departments. Not one of the big officers will be allowed to escape the probe. Before the end of next week we will have Byrnes and Williams and the other bigwigs of the police force on the rack.” True to his word, the hearings continued until some 57,666 pages of “shocking and revealing” testimony had been heard, and over 3,000 subpoenas had been served.

  Dan Bradley and his wife, the former Julia Duane, had had four children—three girls and a boy. Because of Bradley’s preoccupation with the evils of the Demon Rum, his daughter Catherine mixed whiskey with her children’s castor oil when they were sick, so they would always associate it with a vile taste. It worked. They always did. When, therefore, the enterprising young Tom Murray, already busily amassing a tidy fortune with his inventions, became engaged to Uncle Dan Bradley’s youngest daughter, it was considered an imposing match. It was an alliance of both political and money power. The announcement of their marriage, in 1885, did not fail to note Thomas Murray’s “poor, hard-working origins.” But it also called him a “master inventor” and a “millionaire.” The wedding write-up also commented on the bride’s “handsome and useful presents … from her friends and associates in the local Sodality of the Church of the Assumption.” Theirs was said to have been the first Nuptial Mass ever performed in Brooklyn. They went to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon.

  Thomas and Catherine Murray had, over a spate of years, eight children. And, as the number of Thomas E. Murray’s patents increased, so did the inventor’s fortune. He was also proving himself to be a bold and assertive businessman. Once, when he and his partner, Mr. Edison, needed some power lines strung up in a hurry, Mr. Murray went to the telephone company and asked whether he could use their poles. The telephone company said no. Thomas Murray and his crew went out in the dead of night and put the lines along the telephone poles anyway. When someone suggested that the telephone company might object, and rip the power lines down in the morning, Murray shook his head and said, “No, the telephone company is so scared of power that they’ll never touch us.” He was right, and to this day in certain outlying areas Consolidated Edison and the telephone company still share their poles, in a state of uneasy coexistence.

  The great Murray house was built at 783 St. Marks Avenue—he felt comfortable living on a street named after a saint. Although it did not contain its own private chapel, where Mass could be celebrated for the family, Murray was given the privilege, unusual even for rich Catholics, of keeping the Holy Sacrament in his own house and could thus live in the continuous presence of the Host. The children were dutifully enrolled, one by one, in Catholic schools. Thomas E. Murray was made a Knight of St. Gregory and a Knight of Malta, two of the most prestigious Papal orders. During World War I, meanwhile, his invention for welding shells was found to be the only one that could be used in the production of the 240-millimeter mortar shell, which earned him, in addition to another fortune in government contracts, a special commendation from the War Department. For the dozens of safety appliances he had invented, he received in 1913 the gold medal of the American Museum of Safety in New York. He became president of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, the Murray Manufacturing Company and, eventually, headed five different corporations. At night, he kept sheets of copperplate by his bedside. Whenever an idea for a new invention struck him, he would get up and carefully sketch it out on a copper sheet with a metal stylus. He also installed an alarm in his bedroom, and whenever anything went wrong in one of his power plants, the alarm would go off and Grandpa Murray would leap from his bed and head for the trouble.

  His father-in-law, Dan Bradley, remained a powerful figure in Brooklyn politics. Once, when two of his Murray grandsons were arrested for throwing a baseball through a neighbor’s window, Dan Bradley marched down to the station house, pounded on the sergeant’s desk, and said, “Do you realize that if these two boys are booked on this they’ll never be able to hold political office?” The boys were released, and the arresting officer—who happened to be an Irish Protestant—was chastised.

  Thomas E. Murray was a stern, strict, and pious parent. Whenever one of his children had a date with a non-Catholic, that young person was required to wait for his escort in a special anteroom, kept just for Protestants, at 783 St. Marks. “Grandpa Murray was sort of the conscience of the family,” one of his grandchildren says. Another says, “The Murray brand of Catholicism was all hellfire and damnation—but we paid attention to him.” He could also be kind and generous. As the family grew, he established the practice of giving each child, on its birthday, a little sack containing five twenty-dollar gold pieces. This money, it turned out, represented honorariums which Grandpa Murray had received for attending directors’ meetings of various companies. After the ceremony, to be sure, the money had to be returned to the patriarch to be banked in the child’s name. He continued the practice with his grandchildren, and when one grandchild said shyly to him that he had entertained forty little boys at his birthday party, Grandpa Murray said, “Any boy who has had forty little boys at his birthday party should have another twenty dollars,” and handed the child another gold piece. He could also be stubborn. He never served a drink in his house until the advent of Prohibition. Then, however, he began serving cocktails every night because, as he put it, “Nobody is going to tell me what to do.”

  He continued to love music and singing, and each Christmas he would pay a special visit to the prisoners at Rikers Island, and sing Christmas carols for them, bringing along his children’s piano teache
r as his accompanist. Such deeds were, he carefully explained to his children, Corporal Works of Mercy—caring for the hungry and the needy and the orphaned and imprisoned. Whenever a board meeting at one of his companies was ended, he liked to close the proceedings with a song. In return, his board members sang for him, and children at the local parochial schools always appeared on the doorstep of the Murray mansion on Christmas Eve to serenade Tom Murray.

  He enjoyed taking his children for outings at the theater or to the opera in New York, and the minute the group was settled in the back seat of the big chauffeur-driven car, and it was ready to pull away from the house, Mr. Murray would remove his beads from his vest pocket and, in a solemn and stentorian voice, would begin to recite the rosary, intoning, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible … and in Jesus Christ, His only son …” announcing all the Mysteries as he came to them, delivering a full ten Hail Marys at the appropriate intervals, pausing to cross himself whenever the car passed a church or a cemetery. The recital continued all the way into Manhattan. The children’s Protestant friends were always somewhat baffled by these performances. And yet he considered this a vital ritual, and before any of the family started on a trip, or went into the water, there were prayers and blessings, and everyone was expected to cross himself. He had made, he liked to explain, only two trips to Europe in his life, and both times they had been pilgrimages to Catholic shrines. He also gave his children practical advice—particularly in the field he knew best, electricity. He lectured on how crucial electricity was to the life of New York City, how the city depended on it, and he was one of the first in the field to warn of the dangers—on city streets, where electricity controlled traffic and provided illumination, in apartment houses with electrically run elevators, in hospitals where electrical equipment kept patients alive—of massive blackouts that could occur if systems became overloaded. Long after his death, New Yorkers began to have firsthand experience of what Tom Murray had been talking about.