For much of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, New York City politics ran through a Democratic Party organization called Tammany Hall. The Irish were central to that organization for well over a century. Understanding the relationship between Tammany and the Irish community in New York is part of understanding how a marginalized immigrant group eventually gained a foothold in one of the most competitive cities in the world.

Tammany Hall began not as an Irish organization but as a fraternal society founded in 1786 called the Society of St. Tammany, also known as the Columbian Order. The name came from Tamanend, a leader of the Lenape people, and the organization’s founders used pseudo-Native American insignia and titles. It was incorporated formally in 1789 and by 1800 had become a significant political force in New York City. It established its headquarters in a building that became known as Tammany Hall, and over time the building’s name became the name of the political organization itself.

In its early years, Tammany actually excluded Irish immigrants. The Irish, who were not considered “native-born patriots” by the organization’s leadership, resented this. In April 1817, hundreds of Irish immigrants disrupted a general committee meeting of the Democratic Party in a public protest against Tammany’s nativist attitude. The confrontation forced Tammany’s leadership to reconsider. Within a few years, the organization began naturalizing immigrants and bringing them into its network in order to build a larger and more reliable voting base.

The shift accelerated after 1846, when mass immigration from Ireland began in earnest as a result of the famine. By the 1850s, Irish Catholics dominated Tammany’s district and precinct leadership structure. From 1872 onward, Tammany always had an Irish “boss.” After the mayoral victory of Fernando Wood in 1854, Tammany controlled Democratic Party nominations and political patronage in Manhattan for over a century.

The way Tammany worked for the Irish community was practical and personal. Tammany district leaders knew their constituents. They helped newly arrived immigrants find work, intervened with the courts when someone got into trouble, provided food and coal to families in need, and organized social events that gave people a sense of belonging. In exchange, they expected loyalty at the ballot box. For Irish immigrants who faced discrimination in the labor market and had few other sources of institutional support, the Tammany network offered something real.

The most famous and most corrupt of Tammany’s bosses was William M. Tweed, known as Boss Tweed, who controlled the organization in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Tweed was not Irish himself, but he built his political machine largely on Irish Catholic support and used his control over city contracting to enrich himself and his associates on an enormous scale. He was eventually convicted of fraud and died in jail in 1878.

After Tweed, Irish bosses ran Tammany more directly. Richard Croker, who was born in County Cork and came to the United States as a child, ruled Tammany from 1886 to 1902. Charles F. Murphy, who ran the organization from 1902 until his death in 1924, was another Irish American from the East Side of Manhattan. A large decorated flagpole base within Union Square Park is dedicated to Murphy’s memory today.

Tammany’s power translated into real political advancement for Irish Americans in New York. The organization helped elect Irish mayors, Irish district attorneys, and Irish judges. It helped Irish workers get jobs on the police force, the fire department, the transit system, and in city government more broadly. The connection between Irish New Yorkers and the uniformed services of New York City, which is still visible today in the demographics of those departments and in the way they march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, has its roots in the patronage networks that Tammany built during this period.

In 1928, Tammany’s greatest political success at the national level came when Al Smith, a product of the Irish Catholic Lower East Side community and a four-term governor of New York, won the Democratic presidential nomination. Smith lost the general election to Herbert Hoover, but his nomination represented how far the Irish community had come in American politics since the famine generation arrived with almost nothing.

Tammany’s influence began to decline in the early 20th century as reformers organized against it. Fiorello LaGuardia, who was elected mayor of New York in 1933 and served until 1945, ran explicitly against the machine and systematically dismantled much of its power over city hiring and contracting. Eleanor Roosevelt, working with Herbert Lehman and others, organized a group called the New York Committee for Democratic Voters in the early 1960s to fight the remaining Tammany leadership. By the mid-1960s, the organization had effectively ceased to exist. The last building that served as Tammany Hall’s headquarters, on Union Square, is now occupied by the New York Film Academy.

The legacy of Tammany’s relationship with the Irish community is complicated. The machine provided real services and real opportunities to people who had few other options. It also ran on corruption, vote fraud, and cronyism. What is clear is that the Irish community’s alliance with Tammany Hall shaped New York City’s political culture for more than a century and helped transform Irish immigrants from a despised underclass into one of the dominant forces in the city’s civic life.