What seemed like so much overheated political speculation in Albany just a week ago has now become entirely feasible — the prospect that New York’s Democratic-controlled state Legislature will impeach and remove three-term Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.
That possibility had once been regarded as absurd: Republicans mentioned impeachment almost every day, but in Albany they have all the clout of a footman in Buckingham Palace. And while some Democrats said they were in favor, their numbers were in the high single digits, allowing the governor’s rough-hewn allies to signal their reply with just the one digit.
That calculus, however, seemed on the verge of changing as the week drew to a close in Albany. Sixty-five of the Legislature’s 150 Democrats have called on the governor to either resign or be impeached. Most prefer resignation to outright impeachment, but with developments changing almost daily, that may change.
So the stage may be set for the first impeachment of a New York governor since 1913, during the height of the Progressive Era in Albany.
The governor in question was William Sulzer, who, among his other talents, could direct a missile of tobacco juice into a spittoon from a distance of several feet. He displayed this remarkable skill during meetings with lobbyists and legislators, to the chagrin of good-government advocate Frances Perkins, who would one day become the nation’s first female Cabinet secretary.
Sulzer, it is important to note, was a Tammany Hall man, so you probably know where this is going. (Spoiler alert: You’re wrong.) He won election to the state Assembly in 1889 with Tammany’s support, and served as speaker for a year (1893) during which the chamber was especially active. He was savvy enough to deflect any credit, saying that all good things were “dictated by that great statesman, Richard Croker.” Croker was the boss of Tammany Hall — but he soon decided it might be better to live outside the jurisdiction of the United States, so he returned to his native Ireland, where he raised thoroughbreds, married a Native American woman 40 years his junior, and lived in a castle until his death in 1922.
Sulzer, who was elected to Congress in 1894, continued to prosper under Tammany’s next boss, Charles Francis Murphy, who operated a saloon on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 20th Street in Manhattan’s old Gashouse District. But there was nothing gassy about Charlie Murphy — so quiet and careful was he that newspaper reporters once criticized him for not joining in the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” at some patriotic event. Murphy’s spokesperson explained that the boss was simply hedging his bets.
Sulzer was elected governor in 1912 with the support of Murphy’s Tammany machine. “Mister Murphy,” as he was known affectionately to all — including, it is thought, his wife — had every reason to believe that Sulzer would be receptive to Tammany’s occasional requests for a favor here and there. Murphy had a special interest in highway contracts — his “brothers” owned a trucking company — but more than anything else, he was determined to make sure that a bill allowing for open party primaries met the same fate that would one day make Tammany Judge Joseph Force Crater a household name.
He was not counting on Sulzer suddenly discovering his virtuous side. Like a precinct captain for Caligula proclaiming the benefits of chastity, Sulzer announced a state investigation into the awarding of highway contracts and his support for a direct primary system explicitly designed to neuter the influence of people like Murphy over nominations.
The boss tried to dissuade Sulzer from proceeding, even offering a compromise that would have made it easier for independent candidates to get on the ballot. He would have none of it. He denounced Murphy in a speech indicating that he had spent the night before flipping through a Sparks Notes version of Shakespeare: “Shall it go forth from one end of the country to the other that Mr. Murphy doth feed upon something, forsooth, that he has grown so great that he has more power, that he has more influence, than all the other ten millions of people in the state of New York?“
As scholars seemed to agree that use of the word “forsooth” was not considered an impeachable offense, Murphy had no choice to bide his time. Sulzer then introduced a direct primary bill, referred to the Republican leader of the state Senate as “an old fossil of the Paleozoic age” and predicted his bill would pass with flying colors. If it didn’t, he said, “I don’t know anything about politics.”
Well, he was right about the last part.
The Paleozoic Republican joined with Murphy in crushing Sulzer’s bill, and Murphy then summoned the services of a certain state senator named James Frawley, perhaps best known for dispatching two allies of a political opponent — both of them described in the press as “husky motormen“ — to a local hospital after their facial features collided with the senator’s fists. Murphy instructed Frawley to form a committee to look into various state departments to make sure that everything was on the up and up. Because you never know what you might find.
The Frawley committee went about its business in the summer of 1913 and discovered that Sulzer had received more money in campaign contributions than he reported. He funneled the unreported money into a private account, which he used to place a few bets on Wall Street.
Tammany’s leader and his allies who controlled the Legislature were shocked to discover that a politician who had been a loyal member of the organization for decades was playing fast and loose with campaign contributions. The Assembly gathered in Albany in August, every legislator’s favorite time of year to be cooped up in the state Capitol, to consider eight articles of impeachment in a session that extended well past midnight. Finally, at around 5 a.m., the clerk began to call the roll, though the highly dramatic ritual did not unfold as planned. Speaker Al Smith slammed down his gavel in disgust.
“A number of members, I take it, are asleep in their chairs,” he rasped in his Lower East Side accent. “Members will please answer when their names are called.”
They snapped to attention, and voted in favor of impeachment 79 to 45.
With Sulzer impeached, the Legislature determined that Lt. Gov. Martin Glynn should serve as acting governor while the Senate considered his fate. Sulzer, however, declared the proceedings illegal and announced that he was indeed the governor and Glynn a mere pretender, sort of like the Catholic Church’s Great Schism except with less-fabulous wardrobes. The New York press was filled with sensational stories about the state’s dueling governors.
After a few weeks, in late September, a High Court of Impeachment found Sulzer guilty on three of the Assembly’s counts, and in a separate vote, removed him from office. He finally surrendered to the inevitable but remained defiant on his way out of Albany.
He assailed the “looters and grafters” who did him in, saying they were “stealing the taxpayers’ money,” which, he noted slyly, he never did.
Sulzer would wind up returning to Albany, winning an Assembly seat later in 1913, but it was a short comeback. He soon faded into obscurity.
The men in charge of the impeachment proceedings, however, managed to make something of themselves. Smith, the Assembly speaker, went on to become one of New York’s greatest governors and was the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1928.
And the president of the state Senate was Robert Wagner, who would later earn promotion to the U.S. Senate and would craft the New Deal’s most-significant social legislation in the 1930s. His portrait hangs in the Senate’s Reception Room, the chamber’s hall of fame.
As for Charlie Murphy, who empowered both Smith and Wagner, he died in 1924 and was buried out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. Sixty thousand people showed up to watch his casket disappear into a waiting hearse on Fifth Avenue.
Terry Golway is a senior editor at POLITICO responsible for New York state political coverage out of Albany. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including “Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics.”
Source: https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2021/03/12/new-yorks-only-impeachment-when-accusations-of-corruption-shocked-tammany-hall-1367627
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Terry Golway
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