Honest Graft?
 

13
 

vented younger men from taking leadership there. No one could
have been more surprised than Plunkitt when Saxe won the elec¬
tion by more than six hundred votes.

Plunkitt's loss to Saxe emboldened an opponent from within
Tammany Hall itself Assemblyman Thomas J. "The" McManus.
 

George W. Plunkitt seated on his rostrum, the bootblack stand at the
New York County Courthouse
 

Since he first won election to the state assembly as an "indepen¬
dent" (i.e. non-Tammany) candidate in 1891, McManus had been a
thorn in Plunkitt's political side. Born in 1864, and thus twenty-
two years younger than Plunkitt, McManus was an attorney with a
reputation as an orator who carried on a series of campaigns for the
assembly through the 1890s, sometimes with Plunkitt's blessing
and sometimes against Plunkitt's hand-picked candidates. Sup¬
ported within the district by his mother and six brothers—who
were a formidable political force themselves—and his own political
club, the Thomas J. McManus Association, McManus steadily