John Kelly rose from a poor Irish boyhood in New York to Congress and then to the leadership of Tammany Hall after the fall of Boss Tweed. McLaughlin’s admiring biography sets his career against Know-Nothing nativism, the Civil War years and the reform of the city’s Democratic Party, with plenty of anecdote about the streets and wards.
A partisan but detailed portrait of nineteenth-century New York machine politics. Download the free EPUB.