ABSTRACT
Tammany within bounds is the cornerstone of McGoldrick’s New Tammany. But the declawed Tiger was a fragile beast whose true nature surfaced only a few months after McGoldrick’s optimistic pronouncement. As the Stock Market crashed and the Great Depression loomed, prosperity supposedly Tammany’s greatest ally deserted the Tiger. In an increasingly bitter mood, reform groups turned their attention once more to the structure of city politics to the social system of organized crime. The Yiddish press stated that the Jews had once again been attacked for the sake of gaining base political profit. With a show of unanimity the Yiddish newspapers called for the defeat of those reform forces which had linked Tammany’s fortunes to the denigration of the immigrant community. The high point of this process of tolerance for the machinations of Tammany politics came in 1928. The backbone or as McGoldrick states “the anode and the cathode of Tammany’s political battery” is the district leader.
