As Irish immigration to America intensified after the 1846-47 potato famine, Troy, New York—a city of mills and factories at the eastern end of the Erie Canal—offered work to the Irish among friends and relatives from the Old Country.

In Karl Marx’s industrial wasteland, owners and overlords exploited men and women and even children, forcing them to work long hours for little pay and then locking them out when business slowed. Labor unions sought to improve conditions by organizing resistance, but often only succeeded in sparking confrontation and violence. The numerical superiority of the Irish, though, opened one avenue for advancement: politics.

Edward J. Murphy, a prosperous Troy brewer, bank president and former mayor who built Troy’s splendid city hall in 1875, aligned himself with New York’s Democrat machine, Tammany Hall, and in 1893 got himself appointed United States senator. Even though he often journeyed to Washington to pass tariff bills and protect the markets for the Protestant, he still ran Troy with an iron fist, using the police department as his personal army. To stay in power, Murphy used voting fraud. Each election day his legions of Irish Catholic ward heelers hit the streets with gangs of repeat voters and the cops guarding the polls let them inside with a “tip o’ the wink.”

Next Page