Report Outline
Tammany Principles and Practices in the Past
William Gibbs McAdoo, in his speech on “Prohibition, Nullification and. Lawlessness,”1 which was generally accepted as reopening for 1928 the contest that wrecked the Democratic National Convention in 1924, warned the country that “corrupt municipal politics,” cloaked behind the movement against the Volstead act and the prohibition amendment, was making “a concerted and nationwide drive to encompass with its fatal embrace the national politics of this country.”
“The long, hard road which lies before us and the long, hard battle for which we must gird ourselves,” he said, “is to break down the power of the corrupt political machines and rings which form the connecting link between crime and politics; and which, not content with holding so many of our large cities in their grip, are now insolently reaching out to control the politics of some of our great states and even of the national government itself.”
In the November elections, he said, two great municipal bosses had sought places in the United States Senate as champions of the liquor traffic and behind the anti-prohibition smoke screen a concerted advance upon the national government was being made “by the forces which, since the days of Tweed and Croker, have been mainly responsible for selling protection against the law to crime and criminals.” McAdoo quoted Jefferson's expression of doubt of the success of popular government in large centres of congested population, and added: |
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