ALBANY — One can argue whether the Albany Democratic machine was good or evil or how much of it remains today, but this much is indisputable: It has etched itself into American political history as one for the ages.
It has been 100 years since the O’Connell-Corning Democratic machine seized control of City Hall in 1921 by defeating the entrenched Barnes Republican machine. The Democrats have not relinquished power since.
Albany ranks first as the longest run of uninterrupted Democratic rule, longer than Boston (since 1930), Chicago (1931), St. Louis (1949), Philadelphia (1951), Buffalo (1962) or any other deep-blue city in the nation.
Aside from a place in American political history, the streak reminds us that Albany has one major-league sport: politics. In ways large and small, the machine left an indelible mark on the city’s soul.
The machine united a caste divide: Political boss Dan O’Connell was a streetwise fifth-grade dropout reared in his father’s South End saloon who pulled the levers of power behind the scenes; his front man was an Ivy League-educated patrician and Albany’s 11-term mayor, Erastus Corning 2nd, who took orders from the boss and served as Uncle Dan’s urbane alter ego. They bonded over the illicit bloodsport of cockfighting and the hurlyburly of politics.
Dan O'Connell. April 1967.
Times Union ArchiveThe love-hate relationship between the machine and a populace under whose yoke it toiled spans generations. Its impact is debated to this day. Was it a benevolent oligarchy that doled out patronage jobs for the working-class, as well as a turkey at Thanksgiving and buckets of coal in winter? Or was it a malevolent force that solidified its power through intimidation and retribution by jacking up property assessments, co-opting Black citizens with $5 bills for their votes and leaving disenfranchised minorities to languish in ghettos?
It depends on who you ask.
“The Albany Democratic Party was a wonderful organization that always cared about the people and helped the poor,” said Leonard Weiss, a World War II veteran and 1948 graduate of Albany Law School. He served as Albany City Court judge, state Supreme Court judge and chaired the Albany County Democratic Committee.
Mayor Erastus Corning with Judge Leonard Weiss, candidate for Albany City Court Judge. Oct. 17, 1977.
Times Union Historic ImagesWeiss recalled the day in 1977 when Corning telephoned and asked if he wanted to be a City Court judge. Weiss said yes. “He swore me in the next day at City Hall,” Weiss said. “That’s the way things were done back then.”
Weiss likes the way that Polly Noonan – Corning’s longtime confidante and grandmother of U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand – characterized the O’Connell-Corning apparatus. “Polly used to say it was an organization, because a machine doesn’t have a heart and the Albany Democrats always had a heart,” Weiss said.
Polly Noonan of the VFW Ladies Auxiliary and former politico in Albany County. July 9, 1988.
Skip Dickstein/Times Union Historic ImagesAlice Green, a leading Black activist in Albany for more than 50 years and founder of The Center for Law and Justice, views the machine in starkly different terms.
“I think the machine still exists, but works to exert control differently today,” Green said. “People in the Black community are hard-pressed to see what has changed because the police are still used to exert control over Black lives and the police department reports to the mayor.”
Green recalled working as a poll watcher in 1970 and confronting a uniformed cop on duty. “He was literally leaning on the voting machine and I said that was against election rules and he would have to leave,” Green said. The cop grew angry, but eventually left when Green produced an election rules booklet.
Want to see more photos from the Times Union Archive? Capital Region Memories: A Pictorial History of the Early Years through the 1930s
Despite two Black police chiefs – John Dale in 1989 and Eric Hawkins since 2018 – Green sees disenfranchisement in Black neighborhoods. “Look at the low voter turnout in the Black community,” she said. “They feel their vote doesn’t count.”
“The machine is getting creaky, but it’s still alive and kicking,” said Leon Van Dyke, a leader of The Brothers, a Black militant group in Albany in the 1960s. “Dan O’Connell and the machine were racist and held back Albany the same way racism held back the whole country.”
Leon Van Dyke outside The Brothers shop. Jan. 19, 1968.
Jack Madigan/Times Union Historic ImagesThe Brothers clashed frequently with the machine over unsanitary conditions and slum landlords in poor Black neighborhoods. They picketed and led protests demanding the hiring of Black laborers at the South Mall construction site.
When Van Dyke moved to Albany from Philadelphia in 1960, he was shocked to see machine operatives handing out $5 bills from large stacks on street corners in Black neighborhoods on Election Day. “Like they were hawking newspapers,” he recalled. The Brothers carried signs at demonstrations that proclaimed, “Don’t sell your soul for $5.”
When Van Dyke returned to Albany a year ago after 11 years in the Philippines, he noticed significant changes. “I went down to City Hall and saw a Black Lives Matter banner hanging over the entrance and thought, 'Dan O’Connell must be spinning in his grave,'” he said, pleased also to find that two Black men now lead the city’s Common Council, President Corey Ellis and President Pro Tem Kelly Kimbrough.
A "Black Lives Matter Banner" hangs above the doors of Albany City Hall on Thursday, June 11, 2020, in Albany, N.Y.
Will Waldron/Albany Times Union“I’m a proud Democrat, but the way we govern and what it means to be a Democrat has changed dramatically from how the machine operated 100 years ago,” said Mayor Kathy Sheehan, who acknowledged decades of neglect of minority neighborhoods in a city currently about 28 percent Black and 9 percent Hispanic. She conceded abandoned buildings and blight in the South End and West Hill is a machine legacy of disinvestment and redlining.
“More diverse voices are being heard today and that is something to celebrate,” said Sheehan, the first female mayor in the city’s 327-year history when she was sworn in seven years ago.
“We were raised with the basic understanding that we’d all rather be Democrats than Republicans in this city,” said Albany’s former five-term mayor, Jerry Jennings (1994-2014). He grew up in the Irish-Catholic enclave of North Albany, worked in his father’s saloon from a young age, knew Corning and O’Connell and hung around the machine pols.
Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings acknowledges the crowd at his inauguration. Jan. 01, 1994.
Steve Jacobs/Times Union Historic Images“The machine lasted so long because it was well-organized, tightly controlled and they knew how to get out the vote,” Jennings said. “It doesn’t really exist anymore because there is so much apathy and divisiveness.”
“The machine held the city back in many ways because its primary focus was holding onto power,” said Frank Robinson, author of “Albany’s O’Connell Machine: An American Political Relic,” published in 1973. “It does not exist anymore because it doesn’t have the same presence or leverage.”
Robinson, a former staff counsel for the New York Public Service Commission, was a Republican ward leader who ran unsuccessfully for City Court Judge in 1975. “Republicans were the reformers taking on the machine in the 1970s,” Robinson said. The high-water mark for the GOP in Albany came in 1973 when Republican Carl Touhey, owner of Orange Motors, came within 3,500 votes of a shocking upset of Corning, so-called “mayor for life.” The election was marred by allegations of polling place irregularities, which were never proven.
The Democrats swept into power in the wake of a coal scandal during the winter of 1921. As poor residents struggled to heat their homes, an investigation revealed that $18,000 worth of coal billed to the city never materialized while Republican city officials received loads of coal delivered without charge to their homes. “South End ablaze from coal steal” read a Times Union headline. The coal scandal buried Republican boss William “Billy” Barnes, Harvard-educated and publisher of the Albany Evening Journal, founded by his grandfather, GOP power broker Thurlow Weed.
Dan O'Connell at home in 1963.
Former state Assemblyman and historian Jack McEneny, author of “Capital City on the Hudson,” said that scandals often topple political organizations. The Democratic machine teetered after a 1929 baseball betting pool scandal sent O’Connell to prison. Gov. Thomas Dewey grilled Corning in a 1943 state investigation on machine kickbacks, no-show jobs and no-bid contracts, but won no substantial indictments.
“For the past 100 years, the Democrats have managed to convince the people of Albany that it is still the people’s party,” McEneny said. “Democrats were at their best in Albany during the Rockefeller era because Republicans pushed them to be better. Competition is healthy. Democrats will remain in power only if they change as the city changes.”
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