I Seen MyOpportunities

Factories and docks needed workers, and immigrants came by the hundreds of thousands. Most arrived with little money, spoke little English, and knew nobody. They crowded into tenements, narrow buildings where whole families shared one or two rooms.

The city's Democratic Party organization was called Tammany Hall, after the building where its leaders met. Tammany split the city into districts. Each district had a leader, and each leader had captains who knew every family on their blocks by name.

George Washington Plunkitt was a Tammany district leader on Manhattan's West Side. He was born in Manhattan in 1842 to an Irish family and got rich in politics. In 1905 a newspaper reporter named William Riordon published a book of Plunkitt's talks. Plunkitt gave them from his favorite spot, a shoeshine stand inside the county courthouse.

Here is what Plunkitt said he did when a fire broke out in his district.

If a family is burned out I don't ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don't refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation.

George Washington Plunkitt, 1905

It's philanthropy, but it's politics, too, mighty good politics.

George Washington Plunkitt, 1905

Riordon printed a record of one ordinary day of Plunkitt's work. Open each hour.

Before Plunkitt, Tammany belonged to William M. Tweed, called Boss Tweed. In the late 1860s Tweed and a few partners, known as the Tweed Ring, controlled the city's money. Their favorite project was a new county courthouse behind City Hall. In 1858 the city set aside $250,000 to build it.

Contractors who worked on the building sent the city huge bills. The Ring paid the bills with city money, and the contractors handed most of the extra back to the Ring. In July 1871 a county bookkeeper secretly copied the accounts, and the New York Times printed them. Open the invoices.

Thomas Nast, a cartoonist for Harper's Weekly, drew Tweed again and again. Many of Tweed's voters could not read English, but anyone could read a picture. Tweed is supposed to have said this about the drawings.

Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures!

Attributed to William M. Tweed, 1871

Tweed was arrested in 1871 and convicted in 1873. He escaped from jail in December 1875, fled to Cuba and then Spain, and was caught when officials there recognized him from a Nast cartoon. He died in a New York jail on April 12, 1878. A city investigation later estimated the Ring stole between $25 million and $45 million. Tammany Hall kept running city politics for decades after him.

Graft means using a government job to make money for yourself. Riordon's book says Plunkitt once held four public offices in the same year and was paid for three of them at the same time. He became rich, and he did not think he had done anything wrong. He explained the difference in his own words.

My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood.

George Washington Plunkitt, 1905

When the city needed the land for its park, Plunkitt sold it to the city for much more than he paid. He called that honest graft. Stealing from the treasury or taking money from gamblers and saloonkeepers to leave them alone, he called dishonest graft.

I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.

George Washington Plunkitt, 1905

Plunkitt told Riordon that even if his worst enemy wrote the words on his tombstone, this was the most the enemy could say about him. He died on November 19, 1924, at 82.

George W. Plunkitt. He Seen His Opportunities, and He Took 'Em.

George Washington Plunkitt, 1905