Charles Francis Murphy was one of the most-influential Irish American politicians of the early 20th century, and it’s a fair bet you’ve never heard of him. Not to worry – most Americans, even in his home city of New York, wouldn’t know his name either.
That was how he preferred it. The press called him “Silent Charlie” because when it came to public pronouncements, Murphy was nothing if not parsimonious. His discipline and capacity for self-control can be summed up thusly: The man owned several popular saloons, but rarely was he seen with anything stronger than a glass of Vichy water.
Murphy was the boss of Tammany Hall, the Irish-dominated political machine in New York, for the first quarter of the 20th century. During those years, the politicians he controlled implemented vast social reforms designed to protect ordinary people from the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. Elite progressives in New York had been trying for years to achieve pass measures like workers’ compensation, the beginnings of minimum wage regulations, public pensions for widows and orphans, greater regulation of business, and shorter hours for workers. They were astonished when Murphy and his ward-heeler allies turned those ideas – and more – into law.
Historians and political scientists in the decades since Murphy’s death in 1924 have sought to explain why and how this uneducated barkeeper from Manhattan’s Gas House District came to embrace significant challenges – the New York Times called the reforms “radical” — to free-market dogma. Some say he simply wanted to win elections (as if that were a corrupt aspiration for a political boss). Others have suggested he was responding to a growing socialist vote among Jewish immigrants in his home city.
Few if any academics or journalists have ever taken note of a single critical data point in Murphy’s biography: His father was a Famine immigrant who fled Ireland in 1848. Does that explain everything? Absolutely not. Does it explain something? Undoubtedly, in my view.
Famine immigrants in America were living witnesses to the inequities, hypocrisies, and cruelties of Anglo-American free market capitalism. They were driven from their homes by hunger, eviction and genocidal public policy, only to find that the principles of ruthless laissez-faire economics had preceded them across the Atlantic. But it was in America where they developed the strength and power to challenge the callousness and inhumanity that turned their home island into a mass graveyard. And Murphy came to power at a time when those challenges were reaching their peak.
Murphy never claimed that his father’s memories of hunger in Ireland led him to support vast social reforms in New York, including laws requiring employers to give workers one day off per week, minimum wages for some state workers, public welfare for households where the breadwinner was dead, limits on the work week, and other interventions in the private economy that violated every precept of the free market. But Murphy’s rectitude is not entirely surprising. First of all, recall that he was nicknamed “Silent Charlie.” He didn’t talk very much. But even if he did, it’s unlikely that he would have invoked his personal experiences to explain his public positions. The personal was not so intertwined with the political in 1910 as it is today.
What we do know, however, is that Murphy’s actions as the most-powerful unelected politician in New York were a direct attack on the very dogma that drove his father out of Ireland – the notion, as Charles Trevelyan had it, that government aid to the poor was dangerous and could lead to dependence since the poor tended to be lazy anyway.
Murphy was hardly the first Irishman on either side of the Atlantic to confront free market dogma and its judgments on the poor, as readers of Jonathan Swift well know. (Suffice it to say that it is highly unlikely that Murphy was familiar with Swift’s modest proposal. Swift, after all, was not a constituent of his on Manhattan’s East Side.)
About a century and a quarter later, as hunger was killing hundreds of thousands in Ireland and sending more into exile, an Irish immigrant in New York named John Hughes made the remarkable claim that starvation in Ireland was not the result of an act of God but the inevitable and perhaps even intended consequence of Britain’s economic orthodoxy.
Hughes, a native of County Tyrone and the Roman Catholic bishop of New York, delivered a remarkable speech in New York in 1847 in which he denounced the “political economy” that allowed food to be exported from Ireland even as people starved. To blame the potato blight on God, he said, was to “blaspheme.” The blame lay with men who placed profit and dogma over the lives of the poor. “The rights of life are dearer and higher than those of property,” Hughes said, “and in a general famine like the present, there is no law of Heaven nor of nature that forbids a starving man to seize on bread wherever he can find it.” The speech was reprinted in Young Ireland’s journal, The Nation, just as John Mitchel was formulating his own bitter critique of the Famine as the result of deliberate public policy.
Frank Armstrong review a new history of the Great Famine by Padraic X. Scanlan that explodes some myths about the Irish relationship with the potato.https://t.co/dnYmnvSvUy
— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 8, 2026
The men and women who survived hunger, disease and the perilous trip across the Atlantic would soon make clear they were finished hearing lectures about the wisdom of the free market from the likes of Trevelyan and his counterparts in their new home. Mary Harris, a Famine-era immigrant from County Cork, would reinvent herself as Mother Jones after losing her husband and children to yellow fever in Tennessee. She became one of the most famous women in America through her work on behalf of organized labor, particularly mine workers. Publisher Patrick Ford, a Galway native, would devote his newspaper, The Irish World, to the cause of land reform in Ireland and economic justice in the United States. John Devoy, the great Fenian born in Kildare, also supported radical land reform in Ireland in defiance of Irish republican orthodoxy. Leonora Barry, a Famine immigrant from Cork, became a prolific organizer for America’s first national labor union, the Knights of Labor.
And James Gibbons, whose father died during the Famine after the immigrant family made the unusual decision to move back to Ireland, returned to America, became a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, and was a passionate voice for the rights of labor in the late 19th Century, aligning himself with Pope Leo XIII. Gibbons had profound influence on Leo’s famous encyclical, Rerum Novarum, the centerpiece of the Church’s teaching on social justice and a document that inspired the current Pope Leo.
It surely is no coincidence that these campaigners for economic and social justice happened to be Famine immigrants. They and their American-born children, including the likes of Charles Francis Murphy and other politicians, helped to move America away from rugged individualism and social Darwinism to a more cooperative and equitable society.
Two of Murphy’s Tammany Hall proteges, Al Smith, a four-time governor of New York and the grandson of Irish immigrants, and Robert Wagner, a German immigrant, became champions of the new social order of the early 20th Century. Smith, who dropped out of school at age 13 when his father died, implemented social reforms and government regulations that served as a model for Franklin Roosevelt’s famous New Deal. Wagner went on to write America’s Social Security law, providing pensions for the elderly and disabled, and legislation supporting the right to form trade unions.
Wagner once said that the great American myth of self-reliance and free-market economics was “bunk.” For every person who managed to lift themselves out of poverty on their own, Wagner said, “a thousand are destroyed.” Left to the ruthless devices of the free market, Wagner suggested, workers could expect no mercy.
The Famine generation understood this and acted accordingly. The American social contact of the 20th Century was written, in part, by those who survived and then defied the rules written by their overlords.
The pity is that so many Irish Americans today have forgotten this history, if they ever knew it in the first place.
Feature Image: During the reign of Boss Tweed, editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast denounced Tammany as a ferocious tiger mauling the country, personified as Columbia. The tiger became a lasting symbol of Tammany Hall.
