From Tammany To The Twin Cities: The Timeless Script Of Boss Politics

In her beloved roman à clef, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” Betty Smith describes 1912 New York City through the eyes of 11-year-old Francie Nolan — based on Smith herself.

The daughter of a singing waiter and a scrubwoman, Francie lives in a tenement house among mostly Irish first-generation immigrants. She and her brother, Neeley, are called “sheeny” and “mick” by the shopkeepers who manhandle them. Their young life is rough.

Celebrations provide glimmers of joy, namely Christmas and the Fourth of July. But nothing compares to Election Day, which Francie calls the “greatest holiday” of the year. It “belongs” to the whole neighborhood, she says, echoing her father, Johnny, because they’re all good Democrats.

Families gather in the streets and dance in snake-like lines, singing about victory for Tammany Hall. Francie overhears Johnny — a loyal union man — telling her skeptical mother that the party helps their people.

A man has relatives in the old country but he can’t get them over here on account of a lot of red tape. Well, Tammany can fix that up.

Sure, they get them foreigners over here and see to it that they start in on their citizenship papers and then tell them they must vote Democratic ticket or go back where they came from.

No matter what you say, Tammany’s good to poor people. Say a man’s been sick and can’t pay his rent. Do you think the organization would let the landlord dispossess him? No sir. Not if he’s a Democrat.

They discuss the fact that Democrats get bumped up on the list for jobs after taking the civil service exam, whereas Republicans can wait years for a post. And how Tammany will ignore factory violations if large employers hire only unemployed Democrats.

A big community-wide summer excursion for Irish families includes a boat trip, carnival games, food, and keg-beer, “Free to all Democrats.”

On Election Day morning, before the festivities, Irish men are given cigars and assigned voting times. Francie asks why.

“I’ll tell you why,” broke in Mama. “They want to keep tabs on who’s voting and how.”

Replace the Irish families with Somali and Tammany Hall with the Minnesota DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), and this scene describes pretty accurately what’s going on in the state today.

Nothing here is new, and corruption isn’t specific to one ethnic group. The only constant — the theme — is that big boss politics by the Democrats incentivize mass immigration and criminal behavior, while exploiting the very group they’re pretending to serve.

Somalis are not the first, and far from the largest mass migration to the US.  They’re not even the largest wave to come to Minnesota; in the 1980s and 1990s, over 300,000 Hmong refugees came to America, having fought with the U.S. against the communists. More than 60,000 settled in Minnesota, a community that has grown to over 100,000, mostly in the Twin Cities.

And yet the Hmong — a mountain tribe whose lifestyle in Laos and Vietnam had scarcely advanced from the 7th Century until the CIA introduced them to guns and guerrilla warfare — have largely adapted to life in the U.S. There’s little crime or drama in their community. (The current St. Paul mayor is an outlier, but her case is an all-American kind of drama — a model of assimilation.) Most Hmong Minnesotans walk the delicate line between adopting our culture and contributing their own rich one to the state.

But the Somali?  For a litany of reasons, they’re another story. The Somali community has been associated, for reasons both unfair and deadly accurate, with the pandemic of fraud that’s kept Minnesota in the news for the past few years, as well as a wavelet of splashy street crimes that galvanize Minnesota’s already rigidly tribal political divide.

In his sharp, fair, and deeply researched County Highway story, “The Shame of Our Cities,” Armin Rosen wrote: “Picking on the Somalis tends to obscure as much as it reveals. American urban history is a grand pageant of ethnic mafias: For the newly arrived immigrant underclass, community-wide criminal activity has always been an engine of wealth, social cohesion, and protection amid the exclusions of an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile society. The Somalis are following a trail that Irish Catholics, Italians, and Jews all blazed. And what’s more American than fraud?”

Indeed. The perpetrators of the crimes were Somali. But the enablers, the people at the top, were true-blue, native-born Americans with names like those on our kindergarten rosters in the 1970s Midwest.

There’s a reason Minnesota politicians chose Somali people to be their workforce and mass voting blocs, rather than the Hmong. Every culture comes with skills. The Hmong are hardworking farmers and vendors. But the Somali — who came from an arid, hardscrabble, war-torn place — had learned how to subvert systems of commerce. They were literally the most audacious and successful pirates on the planet when Minnesota invited them to patriate en masse. They needed little training to pull off bold, flawless fraud.

And as in the Tammany Hall era, City Hall has their back. A mayor and Attorney General dancing at their festivals. A lieutenant governor dressing in their native hijab. County attorneys failing to prosecute them, even denying their gang activity exists. There’s a whole network of supporters behind Somali crime.

When ICE’s Operation Metro Surge hit the Twin Cities in January, state officials instructed residents to block and threaten federal law enforcement. The generous explanation, the one Johnny Nolan might have made, is that Democrats care about people. But the likely truth is that the DFL was simply protecting its voter base—and if it had to sacrifice a few social justice warriors to do it, it considered it a small price to pay.

Modern conservatism is founded on the ideal that both blame and credit go to individuals, not groups. The introduction to the Sharon Statement, released in 1960 by Young Americans for Freedom, reads “We, as young conservatives, believe: That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force.”

Blaming Somalis as a group for the scourge of Minnesota fraud and crime is tempting. They’re an easy target. But like the Irish in 1912, they’re willing participants in a much larger political machine.

We reserve our ardent disdain, and the lion’s share of blame, for those Boss Tweed wannabes running Minnesota. They’re the people, the individuals, at the root of this. And many of them are about to be re-elected to govern the state again.

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Ann Bauer and Mitch Berg are co-founders of the publishing platform Storyalīz.