Decades of anti-Tammany rhetoric vanished when Moses needed the machine

Evidence

For Moses, who had so long and so violently despised Tammany Hall and all that it stood for, who had called Tammany “a rotten political machine,” who had spent the first years of his career fighting it, who had understood so well that the essence of the machine, the motivation of its leaders, men he said were interested only in “dough,” in “obscurely making a living out of politics,” never changed, who had asked so eloquently in 1933, “Do you think that the Currys, McCooeys, Farleys and Flynns are in any essential respect different from the Murphys, McCooeys, McCabes and McCalls of the cartoons of a generation ago?,” who had warned voters in three separate mayoral campaigns that they must never let Tammany return to power, who had said during the 1941 campaign that “a return to the city of Tammany would be a counsel of despair,” who had said of Tammany’s 1941 candidate, the same William O’Dwyer who was its candidate now, “No Tammany man can rise above the local machine”—this same Robert Moses, during the entire campaign, never once criticized Tammany or its candidate. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2974

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Moses equated the new anti-Tammany coalition with old Tammany corruption — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 1586