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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | King of the Bowery: Big Tim Sullivan, Tammany Hall, and New York City from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era
ISBN# 9780838641767
Reviewed by: Peter Quinn
Commonweal, May 2009 |
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King of the Bowery is a lively, scholarly account of the life and times of Timothy J. Sullivan, aka Big Tim--a moniker that described Sullivan's physical and political presence and distinguished him from his cousin and consigliore, Little Tim. It is also a necessary book for anyone unsatisfied by the usual histories of Irish-American urban political machines, which reduce some of the most successful and long-lived political operations in U.S. history to a tale of Caesarean simplicity: They came, they saw, they stole. (The coda hardly needs stating: good riddance.)
The Irish-American boss has rarely been awarded careful appraisal of the kind that Welch, a historian at C.W. Post College of Long Island and the author of several well-regarded books, gives Sullivan.
Large as Big Tim once loomed in the life of New York City, memory of him quickly shrank to a few traces: an ordinance against carrying concealed weapons that still bears his name, and the eastern end of Delancey Street, renamed Kenmare to honor the Irish village in which his beloved mother was born (and where, during the Famine, the dead lay unburied in the streets). With King of the Bowery, Richard Welch has rescued Big Tim from undeserved obscurity and given him his due as "the last great--greatest--practitioner of nineteenth-century urban politics."
But caveat lector: you don't have to be an Irish American or a New Yorker or a Democrat to enjoy this book. All you have to be is interested in a well-told story that is also a first-rate work of history.
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