Free Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway Page A

with his reforms, which included the beginnings of a professional police force.
    Weeks after Harper left office in 1845, a mysterious blight appeared in the potato fields of Ireland. The staple crop of the Irish people turned black and inedible. Starving Irish soon began to stumble ashore on the East Side of Manhattan, impoverished and embittered, the victims, John Hughes said, not of an act of God but the cruelty of man. The city, and Tammany Hall, would never be the same.

THREE

    THE GREAT HUNGER
    T he fall of 1845 brought frightening news to New York’s Irish community: Ireland’s potato crop had failed, literally overnight. The New York Tribune reported the failure in an anxious tone. “We regret to have to state that we have had communications from more than one well-informed correspondent, announcing . . . the appearance of what is called ‘cholera’ in the potatoes in Ireland,” the paper’s editors noted. The Tribune account quoted a farmer who reported that his potato crop had turned black and slimy in a matter of hours. Other reports noted that a sickening odor lingered over the blasted fields. 1
    The potato was one of many crops harvested on Irish soil, but it was the one crop on which nearly half the island’s eight million people depended for their daily existence. Adult male farmers and landless farm laborers consumed as much as fourteen pounds of potatoes a day; the other crops they tended were used to pay the rent. Irish-Americans in New York knew better than their fellow citizens that a prolonged crop failure would be catastrophic. And so it was. 2
    The potato failed again in 1846, and again, and again, year after year, until 1852. Newspapers in New York carried terrifying reports of the horror unfolding in Ireland, but Irish New Yorkers heard about the hunger firsthand from their starving fellow countrymen arriving by the thousands. By the time the potato was restored in 1852, a million people were dead and another two million were across the sea or on their way to England, to Canada, to Australia, and, of course, to the United States. Huge swaths of the island were virtually depopulated. Farmlands that once provided sustenance for millions were converted to grazing pastures for livestock. Cabins that once were home to peasant families were pulled down, their tenants either dead, evicted, or simply vanished. A census of Ireland in 1840 counted more than eight million people. By 1850, the number was 6.5 million, and by 1910, it was under five million. The Irish nation scattered across the Atlantic world and beyond, carrying among its possessions the searing, bitter memories of hunger and deprivation in the midst of plenty, memories that would permanently and unalterably color its narrative of grievance and exile, memories that were destined to inform Irish identity and their view of the world. 3
    Or not. The question of whether the Great Famine produced what the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs called a “collective memory” among the Irish—emigrants as well as those who remained in their native land—remains contested. But there is no question that a bumper crop of bitterness and rage was harvested from the island’s blackened potato fields. Famine survivors absorbed a new and fundamental lesson about power: Those who possess it will never be helpless, and those who are denied it are doomed to starvation and exile when resources become scarce. 4
    In his last speech in the House of Commons, a dying Daniel O’Connell, his once-powerful voice reduced to a whisper, told his colleagues in early 1847 that “Ireland is in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself.” The Irish people themselves understood how powerless they were, and how much their survival depended on the powerful. “The Potatoe crop is much worse than the last,” wrote James Prendergast, a farmer in County Kerry, in 1846. “We expect good measures from the British parliament this year but we [must] wait to know