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Richard Croker

1841–1922

 

On 1st July 1907, the city council of Dublin elected and admitted Richard Wellsted Croker as the twenty-first honorary burgess of the city.  To a list that included Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and CHARLES PARNELL [5], Richard Croker, the former head of Tammany Hall and a byword for civic corruption, made a curious addition.  If the life of the Irish American was city centred, men like Richard 'Boss' Croker were at the heart of it, as the architects of Irish-American urban politics.

      Croker was born just before the famine in Clonakilty in west Cork in the south of Ireland on 23rd November 1841.  Though in later years he allowed his followers the impression that he came from an impoverished peasant background, this was not true.  Impoverished his father, Eyre Coote Croker, may have been, but he came from landed gentry of largely English extraction.  The family, in which there were nine children, immigrated to New York City when Richard was three.  He was educated there in public schools, beginning his working life at the age of thirteen.

      His first job was as a machinist, but he was big and strong, and in his late teens was a fighter with a reputation on the Upper East Side as leader of the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang.  All his life he retained the outlook and morality of the street gang.

      He soon entered local politics, disguising his past.  He even became a Catholic to forward his political ambitions.  He joined Tammany Hall, then led by its notorious 'Boss' William M. Tweed, and soon had the ambition to lead it himself.  Croker became an alderman in 1868, putting his foot on the first rung of city promotion.  He was later appointed coroner of New York City at a salary of $25,000 a year.

      He succeeded 'Honest John' Kelly, a leading Democrat, as Tammany leader in 1866 and held power for seventeen years.  He added to his positions the equally lucrative ones of fire commissioner and city chamberlain.  Croker had opposed Tweed, and claimed that his only ambition was to save a great city from that crook's clutches.  However the investigations into the corruption of local politics made life more difficult for him in New York.  He was already tainted by a rumour that he had murdered a man.  Certainly, on election day in 1874 an opponent of Croker's was shot and killed.  Though Croker later claimed that one of his henchmen had done the deed, some thought that 'Boss' Croker himself was responsible.

      Through a system of local patronage, he creamed off the spoils from a great city, allowing, however, his henchmen their share.  The investigations of the Lexow Committee marked the beginning of a move against Tammany.  In 1894, to put some distance between himself and the law, he retired to England, though he later moved to Clencairn, a large mansion outside Dublin.

      There he was the greatest of the 'returned Yanks', as people in Ireland called their countrymen who returned laden with money from the New World.  His income had always been something of a mystery.  The British tax authorities, a more rigid organization than he was used to dealing with in New York, estimated his income in 1900 at $100,000, and fixed his tax at $5,000.  He adopted the style and manners of the country squires from whom he sprang, breeding a famous Derby winner, Orby, in 1907 - the first Irish horse to win that classic race.  From the chief herald of Ireland he gained a grant of a coat of arms; given his true family background this posed little problem.  The New York crook had become the complete Irish gentleman.

      When his first wife, from whom he had long been estranged, died in 1914, he married Beula Benton Edmondson, a princess of the Cherokee Nation from Oklahoma, who was many years younger.  This alliance led to disagreements with his children, which continued after his death in 1922, resulting in a spectacular law case heard in Dublin at which it was alleged that the beautiful Beula, far from being an Indian princess, was actually the wife of an Italian plumber.  The citizens of Dublin queued around the block for weeks to hear the evidence.

      For Irish people, 'Boss' Croker was an extraordinary personality, though silent and reserved.  His funeral at the end of April 1922, when his remains were buried in the grounds of Glencairn, was attended by leading members of the new Irish government with an honour guard of Irish Free State soldiers.

      Undoubtedly 'Boss' Croker was corrupt to the core, but from the point of view of his Irish constituents, he was the man who made the system, so long controlled by American Protestants, serve the needs of the new Catholic Irish.  The whole basis of the Democratic Party in the great cities of the northeast rested on this arrangement.  In that he served the interests of his own community well, Richard Wellsted Croker's influence was immense.  What was unforgivable in the eyes of many others was the corruption of the civic institutions of a great city which accompanied it.