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“Attitude of the Easy Boss”

From Different Points of View

Cartoonist
W. A. Rogers is unconvinced by Senator Thomas Platt's insistence that he
really represents the policies and best interests of the New York
Republican Party, for which he has been the longtime political
boss. Here, the elaborately dressed Republican Elephant upon which
Platt sits is actually a flat, phony prop, behind which Platt lights the
cigar of Richard Croker, the Democratic boss of Tammany
Hall.
Thomas Collier Platt was born in 1833 in Owego, Tioga County, along the banks of the Susquehanna River in upstate New York. As a young man, he studied theology at
Yale (1850-1852) to please his father, who wanted his son to become a
Presbyterian minister. After dropping out of Yale, Thomas Platt
returned to Owego, where he began a twenty-year career as a druggist,
and eventually served as president of Tioga National Bank and invested
in lumber interests in Michigan. In the mid-1850s, he became
active in Republican politics, campaigning for John C. Frémont in 1856
and winning election as county clerk in 1859.
As chairman of the Tioga County
Republican Party in the late 1860s, Platt met Senator Roscoe Conkling,
boss of upstate New York Republicans. Under Conkling's tutelage,
Platt was elected two years later to the first of two consecutive terms
in Congress (1873-1877), and became a trusted lieutenant in Conkling's
political machine. In January 1881, Conkling orchestrated Platt's
election to the U.S. Senate by the New York State Legislature.
Once in Washington, the two men quickly became embroiled with James
Garfield, the new Republican president, over control of patronage at the
New York City Port. On May 16, 1881, to nearly everyone's
surprise, New York's two senators resigned, hoping to be
vindicated with reelection by the state legislature. In early
June,
members of another Republican faction blackmailed Platt into withdrawing
after they discovered him in bed with a woman who was not his
wife. A few weeks later, the state legislature elected two new
senators.
Conkling
retired from politics, but Platt
returned to Owego, where he worked over the next few years building his
own political machine, modeled after Tammany Hall, the Democratic
machine in New York City. Unlike many political bosses, however,
he did not manipulate his power to gain personal wealth, nor rule with a
heavy hand; in fact, his soft touch earned him the nickname, "the
Easy Boss." During the 1880s, he served as president of the
United States Express Company, and built important friendships with
major businessmen, who looked to him to help ease government
regulations. He also served as president of the New York State Quarantine Board and as a member of the National Republican
Committee.
Platt
moved to Manhattan where he enhanced his control over New York's
Republican Party. In the 1894 elections, Republicans captured the
governorship (under Levi Morton) and both houses of the legislature,
which two years later elected Platt to the first of two terms in the
U.S. Senate (1897-1909). He was largely uninterested in national
policy or politics, though, and initiated no important legislation,
seldom spoke on the Senate floor, and failed to earn the respect of his colleagues.
However, he continued to be deeply involved in state politics, returning
every weekend to Manhattan, where he met with state or local politicians
on Sundays at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The meetings became known as
"Platt's Sunday School" or the "Amen Corner" because
his subordinates were said to always agree with him.
In
1898, the Republican Party in New York faced an uphill battle in the
upcoming elections, so Platt reluctantly backed reformer Theodore
Roosevelt for governor. The senator's concerns proved accurate
when Governor Roosevelt refused to appoint Platt's men to patronage
positions and endorsed regulatory legislation that angered the Easy
Boss's business cronies. In order to get Roosevelt out of New
York, Platt successfully worked to win the governor the Republican vice
presidential nomination in 1900. Ironically, Roosevelt became
president after the death of President William McKinley in September
1901. Furthermore, although the new governor of New York, Benjamin
Odell, was a Platt protégé, he maneuvered control of the state
Republican Party away from his former mentor. After retiring in
1909, Platt lived quietly at his Fifth Avenue Hotel suite in Manhattan,
where he died the next year.
Robert C. Kennedy
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