(Excerpt from Proceedings of the Legislature of the State ...)
Excerpt from Proceedings of the Legislature of the State of New York: Commemorative of the Life and Public Services of Patrick Henry McCarren, Held at the Capitol, Monday Evening, May 16, 1910, Albany, N. Y Honorable Patrick Henry Mccarren, Senator representing the Seventh Senatorial District of the State of New York, died on Saturday, October twenty - third, nineteen hundred and nine. He had been a member of the Senate since eighteen hundred and ninety, with the exception of the years eighteen hundred and ninety-four and five, and was a Member of the Assembly in the years eighteen hundred and eighty-two and three and eighteen hundred and eighty-nine. He was a Democrat, one of the most powerful and influential members of his party, and for sev eral years previous to his death had been the leader of the regular Democratic organization of Kings county. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Patrick Henry McCarren was born on June 18, 1847 in East Cambridge, Massachussets. He was the son of Owen and Mary (McCosker) McCarren. Both parents were born in County Tyrone, Ireland. They removed from East Cambridge to Williamsburgh, now a part of Brooklyn, N. Y.
Young McCarren attended school in New York until he was seventeen. He then learned the cooper's trade.
McCarren's started his professional life in sugar refineries along the waterfront. He made friends easily, became a natural leader in the district, and at the age of twenty-one was made a member of the Democratic general committee of Kings County. Hugh McLaughlin, Brooklyn Democratic boss since 1857, recognizing his value, had him nominated and elected to the state Assembly in 1881. He was twice reelected, and in 1889 was advanced to the state Senate, of which, except for the years 1894-95, he remained a member until his death. In that body his influence was felt in the committee room, and he is reported to have expressed the opinion that it was "only once a century that a vote was changed by argument on the floor". In 1897, he served on the Lexow committee to investigate the trusts and his minority report dissenting from that of the majority with respect to the American Sugar Refining Company gave him a reputation as the friend of trusts in a period when they were distinctly unpopular. He was chairman of the committee which managed the campaign of Van Wyck against Roosevelt for governor in 1898, and, though the shouting was all on the colorful Colonel's side, McCarren's remarkable marshaling of the opposition forces made the race exceedingly close. Having first served as one of McLaughlin's ablest lieutenants, McCarren overthrew the veteran Brooklyn leader of forty-six years' standing when, in 1903, he defied orders by supporting McClellan for mayor and carried Brooklyn for his candidate. He thus allied himself temporarily with boss Charles F. Murphy of Tammany, but almost immediately declared that the Brooklyn Democracy would maintain its independence.
During the remainder of his life, he fought desperately and successfully to keep Murphy from securing control of Brooklyn. Frequently, McCarren held the balance of power between Tammany and the upstate democracy, and he used it in 1904 to support Parker rather than Hearst for the presidential nomination, and again in 1906 when he threw the Brooklyn vote to Hughes as against Hearst for governor, thereby furnishing the margin by which the former was elected. Almost immediately, however, he plunged into a spectacular legislative campaign against Hughes's reform program and came close to wrecking it. He died on October 23, 1909, in St. Catherine's Hospital, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
McCarren introduced a bill in the New York State Senate for the construction of the East River Bridge, knowing it would boost the area's growth and prosperity ewpecially for the many factories that existed there. The bill passed and the bridge was built and renamed the Williamsburgh Bridge. Upon his death, Greenpoint Park was renamed McCarren Park. It remains today and hosts one of the popular public swimming pools in the entire city.
(Excerpt from Proceedings of the Legislature of the State ...)
a member of the State Senate (7th D. ), a member of the State Assembly
There were few men were more bitterly attacked in the New York press by innuendo and caricature than McCarren; yet men who believed him an evil influence in public life liked him personally. His genius for tactical management was unquestioned and many stories are told of how he escaped from tight corners when he seemed defeated. A little over six feet in height, spare, and slightly stooped, with an unusually long head, and a habitual grim expression on his face, he was a figure of which cartoonists made the most. The loss of his wife, Kate Hogan, and their five children seemed to have imparted a fatalistic turn to his philosophy. He solaced himself by wide reading; by the study of law he was admitted to the bar after he was forty-three years old; by indulgence in various forms of gambling, notably the race-track, of which he was passionately fond; and by politics, which also he seemed to have enjoyed chiefly for the game's sake.
McCarren married Kate Hogan (died 1883), a school teacher, and they had five children who all died in infancy.
