Buying Judges and Acquiring a Patron Saint - 17 March 2000

I once knew a Russian. I take that back - maybe it can be done today but in my day you didn't know any Russians unless you were a spy.

In the delegates' lounge of the United Nations they kept to themselves but from time to time they would permit a "howdy do" and respond according to a short polite catechism dictated, no doubt, by the Kremlin.

One man however, a jolly looking man, loosened up a little by his vodka, told me two discoveries he'd made about America and I'd better say now that I never saw him again, maybe he was recalled and liquidated for daring to share a couple of secrets with a member of the imperialist fascist press.

He told me, this was probably a fatal slip, that the Russian delegation actually preferred the vodka made in Connecticut to their own famous brand.

"It is cheaper," he said, "and it does not carry a perfume."

The other secret was more engaging. He said the day he first arrived in New York City was on a mild March day in the morning.

He unpacked and he went out and he walked into a corner steak house for lunch.

Even though he was not a member of the KGB - I guess - he learned and noticed at once two revealing things about America and Americans. Like all first visitors of all nations, even the most educated, what he first noticed about a particular place or time or experience was immediately transformed in his brain into a generalisation about the whole nation.

We live and breathe by the one case induction method. I've just been re-reading the diaries of the late diplomat/journalist/linguist Harold Nicholson, a cultivated man if ever there was one.

He sails into New York, is picked up by a chauffeur and whisked off to a rich man's estate in New Jersey. Within two days he is lamenting the American inclination to turn wild country into a suburban look.

After a talk with one politician he writes: "The odd thing about Americans is they never listen."

And from then on he sets down, confidently, a little regretfully: "The trouble with Americans, poor dears, is ..." anything he'd noticed about one person, one place.

Well, the Russian - and the second of his discoveries.

He sat down and looked over the menu and looked over the clientele and from observing the plates at the nearby tables: "Americans eat nothing for lunch but corn beef and cabbage. Odder still they mostly wear bright green ties."

Every waiter he could see wore one and half the diners. He did not attach these oddities to the date which would have told him everything: 17 March - St Patrick's Day of course.

But another thing he'd not been briefed on when he left Moscow was that St Patrick, not Lenin, had saved civilisation. He would, however, soon learn all this.

Once outside he heard to the west a strange hubbub - a sort of surge in the sky like the frequent breaking of a wave.

It was the most conspicuous and joyous of all New York's annual parades: a tramp of the Irish up Fifth Avenue including lots of men, especially public figures - the mayor, senators, congressmen, councilmen and women, judges - everybody who needs or craves Irish votes.

Even more representative of men and women in public office or people who want to be is the parade up in Boston which, you may remember, was the American terminus of the Cunard line out of Cobh.

Consequently Boston became the city that landed more Irish in one place in the 1850s in the wake of the famine than any other city in the land.

I hear one young legal friend across the water crying: "Judges! Buying judges?"

Well yes, one way or another, buying judges is one of the liveliest exercises of political bosses. And remember, city and county and state judges, below the courts of appeal - and, of course, the supreme courts of the states - are elected. For this practice you have to thank Benjamin Franklin.

Among the myriad problems of government that came up during the making of the Constitution was the question of the integrity of judges. There was a lively debate.

Franklin, the 17th child of a poor Boston soap boiler, and an astonishingly learned man, remarked on the English belief that the best qualified judges would be men appointed by the top lawyers. But he saw in this simply an old boys' network where promotion came from favours and intrigue and taking care of your own.

Franklin thought that throwing judgeships open to the voters would at least healthily publicise their motives and help people keep a closer watch on the courts.

The first trial I ever covered was of a charming old Irishman who was the head of a Tammany - the Democrats' political machine in New York City.

In a seething, bewildering city of packed slums and crumbling tenements, his type would help people settle in - meet the boats, help their teenagers out of trouble before "friendly judges", get the family before an immigration inspector and after a little under the counter exchange the inspector would declare the family ready for citizenship and in no time the family would be whisked off to Democratic headquarters and registered as voting Democrats.

This particular Tammany chiefdom was accused of buying congressmen, city officials, not least - most of all - judges.

But he had not bought the judge who tried him in 1938 on charges of knowing and protecting one or two of the most notorious gangsters who were shaking down the city with rackets that protected your laundry, your vegetables, your butcher...

Protected from what? From some unnamed villain who might set fire to the laundry, poison the vegetables, steal the meat - awful.

If you want to see in one flashing hour how it worked don't fail to catch the old Preston Sturges movie 'The Great McGinty'.

Well James J Hines went to jail and he was only one example of the determination of the cocky and courageous little mayor, the immortal Fiorello La Guardia, to smash the rackets and in the process smash the power of Tammany.

La Guardia ran both as a Republican and an independent "fusion" candidate, and he was elected twice as mayor and did a prodigious house-cleaning job for a very amiably corrupt city in my first days here.

Now you ought not, from this brief account of the Democrats' hold on the city, infer that the Irish were the core or fire brigade of Tammany, of the bad side of Tammany.

Most members of Tammany were native born. An amalgam of men of Irish or Italian or Central European Jewish background.

But the Irish always bulked large in Tammany and often in their humdrum daily way they did much good - they helped new immigrants get jobs, they eased their sicknesses, they dispensed shoes and other necessities to the poor. Indeed the Irish were the leaders in this sort of practical politics for which the resident Anglos and other theoreticians of political science were privately very grateful.

Tammany - I should have said how the society came about.

Very shortly after the Revolution - the War of Independence - the people who'd been openly, then secretly, on the English side - the people who deeply resented turning into American citizens - started a society - it's maintained to this day - called the Order or Society of Saint George.

And only a year or two later some spirited Irish - they'd been coming in since the early 1800s and proud to be American citizens - they thought they had better acquire a patron saint.

They'd heard of the chief of an Indian tribe in Delaware to the South. A benevolent, greatly admired chief. A man named Tammanen or Tammany. He'd do fine.

So they set up the first Democrats' political machine and called it, originally, the Sacred Order of St Tammany. It ruled New York City politics for 150 years. La Guardia, they say, broke it.

But then we keep hearing that the Mafia has been broken or even as a former governor of New York - a bold, good man of Italian roots - said: "The Mafia doesn't exist."

These are some of the thoughts that drifted through one mind watching the colourful and boisterous and wildly good-natured St Patrick's Day parade.

This year there was a problem, an embarrassment, for the faithful.

We're in Lent and the injunction is for Catholics to forego meat on Fridays. St Patrick's Day fell on a Friday and all the restaurant and no doubt legions of Catholics homes were already stacked with mountains of the sainted dish of choice on that day - corned beef and cabbage.

What to do?

Well, the solution depended on whose archdiocese you lived under and where. The Cardinal of New York issued a dispensation for Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island - let beef be eaten and fast another day.

But the Bishop who's the shepherd of the flock in Queens and Brooklyn and on Long Island did not grant the same permission.

Two hundred miles away up in Boston the archdiocese has a tradition dating back, it says, to the 18th century - a tradition of bending the rules.

Speaking with the Irish community in the North East, the owner of a pub, with the glorious name of Seamus O'Toole, said for his part he would offer lots of corn beef but also what he calls "salmon". He recognises a higher court.

"The man above us," he says, "will look down at us, and at St Patrick himself, and say: 'Go ahead fellas, it's a great day to get it.' "

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