Every so often I feel the need to go back and reread some of my favorite books, as if I might forget their importance if I didn’t. It’s probably why I don’t get to as much new stuff as most people otherwise do in a year. Nonetheless, I have a great appreciation for the books on my shelf, so much so I’m sometimes afraid to lend them out to anyone. Frodo has his ring, I have my bookshelf (which, ironically, does not contain a single work by Tolkien).

One of the books I’ve been indulging in over the past few days has been Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, which is more of a series of spoken essays than anything else. I thought that I might make a series of posts going through each major chapter in this short book, explaining what Plunkitt has to say, and then trying to make it relevant to present day society, since in the end, isn’t that what makes a book valuable?

Before I begin with his first diatribe, let me explain a little bit about George Washington Plunkitt. Born almost twenty years before the Civil War to an Irish family, Plunkitt had no real education to speak of, instead he began working in various jobs at a young age in New York City, ultimately ending up as a butcher, before, perhaps appropriately, going into politics. About this time, Plunkitt’s generation was on the verge of experiencing the hayday of machine politics, and Plunkitt, as his talks clearly illustrate, was all about machine politics. Besides becoming a millionaire off of insider political knowledge (which I’ll cover in a moment since it’s the first chapter), Plunkitt became one of the highest ranking members of his party, Tammany Hall, as well as a State Senator, Assemblyman, Police Magistrate, Alderman, and County Supervisor. He would pass away in 1924.

Honest and Dishonest Graft

In Plunkitt’s first talk, he discusses the difference between honest and dishonest graft. For Plunkitt, dishonest graft included activities like blackmailing, or stealing money from the treasury. Honest graft on the other hand, well, Plunkitt says it best: “I seen my opportunities, and I took ‘em.” As examples of honest graft, Plunkitt talks about how a friend of his tipped him off to the location of a new park that was about to be proposed, so he bought up all the land in that area dirt cheap, and when the city went to build the park, they had to buy Plunkitt out at the price he set. He also postulates that building a bridge requires waterfront land he’d be wise to purchase while it’s cheap and sell later at a much higher price to the city. Additionally, he relates a particularly amusing story where the state was selling granite blocks at auction to make back revenue, so he goes to the auction and convinces other potential buyers to let him purchase all the blocks, and he would give them the specific amounts they needed for free and keep the rest to sell at fair market price. When it came time to bid only Plunkitt chose to do so, and he walked away with the entire stock for only $2.50.

Plunkitt Today

I think there’s few people who would think that Plunkitt’s distinction between honest and dishonest graft is valid or even moral. In a world that is so fearful of insider trading, clearly this kind of insider information trading would especially scare people. Nonetheless, this kind of machine politics certainly does still exist, and it does have at least one merit. Individuals who understand that they can get rich, let’s say, off the building of a park, will build that park and make the money off of it. To the inhabitants of that neighborhood, who really cares if a politician or his friend made off like bandits? After all, they did build a new local park that everyone can benefit from. The other side of the coin, of course, is that your tax dollars were just spent to buy land at a much higher price than they should have been, but if you’re not very well off, and don’t pay much in taxes, then it’s not your concern. So, naturally, there is a duality. Politicians like Plunkitt are both angels and devils, delivering services to the poor, often neglected folks, on the dimes of the middle and upper classes. This is, in my opinion, the only true example of trickle-down.

But Plunkitt tells us something else very important about our society, and that’s the value of information. It’s little wonder that businesses cannot usually quantify, but at least acknowledge that there is a value assigned to the information they control. We go to school to gain information, some of us get jobs that deal in information, and our entire infrastructure is designed to facilitate the flow of information. And information for the sake of information isn’t even practical anymore. Fact checking is an entire department, displays of information have to be intelligible, concise, and avoid the pitfalls of misinterpretation of the information, or data, available to us. Verified information is the difference between going to war in Iraq or not. Information is also transferable and alterable, and, perhaps most importantly, susceptible to perception.

After all, the numbers tell us we’re safer, so why don’t we feel safer?