George Washington Plunkitt

¶ … Life of Honest Graft -- the Life and Times of George Washington Plunkett The political machine created at Tammany Hall by Boss Tweed of New York City during the Gilded Age of American politics and the Industrial Revolution has become synonymous with political corruption. At the beginning of the book on another Tammany Hall politician, introduced and assembled by the historian William L. Riordon, George Washington Plunkett offers an apparently self-serving Tammany style distinction between honest graft, or illegal political corruption for personal profit, and dishonest graft.

He states "Everybody is talkin' these days about Tammany men growin' rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin' the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There's all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I've made a big fortune out of the game, and I'm gettin' richer every day, but I've not gone in for dishonest graft - blackmailin' gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc.

- and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.. There's an honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works.

I might sum up the whole thing by sayin': "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em." Despite the revulsion such a distinction might create in the heart of a modern reader and despite the assumption that political machines, as operated by men such as Plunkett were universally bad for American democracy, Plunkett's spirit also seems to comprise a certain 'self-made man' ethos that is commensurate with American capitalism and ingenuity, two other values that made the nation great.

Like capitalism, the political machines, although conducive to graft, also enabled men such as Plunkett to come to the forefront of American democracy. Men such as Plunkett would not have come to power in other political systems, not because they were corrupt, but because they were uneducated commoners. In contrast, in the United States, the political machines gave political opportunities to the disenfranchised common men. Through political machines as well, immigrants from despised groups were also empowered, as well as the working and nonworking poor.

The political machines such as the democratic politicians of Tammany Hall mobilized groups such as the Irish to vote and to feel a stake in the system they did not when still living in the context of the royalist regimes of Europe. Plunkett may have profited wrongly through graft but he also enabled others to politically and economically profit through his opportunism.

Hence, his distinction between honest and dishonest graft -- dishonest graft in Plunkett's terms meant corruption that injured others through the dispensing of alcohol and the stirring up of violence. But honest graft merely meant profiting his personal as well as political self economically in an illegal fashion -- but still politically profiting others through the use of positive, pro-immigrant legislation. A chicken in every pot for a vote still enabled families in Brooklyn to eat for a day.

This practical attitude towards his constituents as well as his own physical, human needs is one reason that William Riordon calls Plunkett, "the most thoroughly practical politician of the day," as well as perhaps the most honest in terms of his openness about his political profiteering. Plunkett's moralizing about graft even extended to alcohol. "I have explained how to succeed in politics.

I want to add that no matter how well you learn to play the political game, you won't make a lastin' success of it if you're a drinkin' man. I never take a drop of any kind of intoxicatin' liquor. Money and power was what was important to Plunkett, not intoxicating substances -- not necessarily a bad example for a population all too inclined to use alcohol to assuage the psychological and physical difficulties of the injustices of rapid industrialization.

Instead, Plunkett's main drug of choice was politics for himself, and for others. He was also an astute, self-trained student of human nature and the needs of his constituents, potential and present. "To learn real human nature you have to go among the people, see them and be seen.

I know every man, woman, and child in the Fifteenth District, except them that's been born this summer - and I know some of them, too." (In other words, Plunkett was an unabashed baby-kisser) "I know what they like and what they don't like, what they are strong at and what they are weak in, and I reach them by approachin' at the right side." This shows Plunkett had a real and penetrating interest in those who would elect him, and he served his constituency.

He did not simply make money, but used his position to generate power of his constituency as well as for himself. The prejudice against recent immigrants in society, and the disenfranchisement of the interests of the working poor was thus circumvented by the.