Thomas P. McCoy, one of seven children of Irish immigrants Patrick and Elizabeth McCoy, was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on Dec. 3, 1883, two years before the city’s incorporation. His childhood ended in the eighth grade, when, he later wrote, “a turn in the fortune of my family compelled me to go to work.”  McCoy began working at age 14, delivering milk on a wagon, and then he worked for five years at Union Wadding Company. He held a series of jobs through his teen years before becoming a railway conductor, which required him to rise every morning at four o’clock. This shift not only allowed him to take evening high school classes and courses at Brown University, but it also freed him to pitch for the Street Carmen Union’s baseball team, where his proficiency at throwing a spitball might have been a harbinger of things to come. McCoy was a conductor of the RI Streetcar Company until 1924. He was a member of the Carman’s Union and successfully fought for increased compensation for workers. McCoy was elected in 1920 to the RI State Legislature, a position he held for ten years. He is viewed as a reformer for both citizen and worker rights. McCoy helped pass a 48-hour work week without pay reduction and introduced the first old-age pension bill. In 1928, McCoy helped pass the first state Inheritance tax. Most importantly, he was instrumental in forming the Irish, French, and Italian coalition to fight the stronghold of the Republican domination in the state. 

He became a popular union leader whose easy charm and oratorical ability intrigued the city’s Democratic political machine, now in the control of ascendant Irish Catholic leaders of mill-worker lineage who had displaced the old-guard Protestants of mill-owner connections. After paying his dues in politics and populist causes—for a time, he was president of the St. Mary’s Total Abstinence and Benevolence Society—McCoy was elected to the state legislature in 1920, where he became known as a progressive Democrat and champion of immigrants, with cut-throat backroom skills. By 1930, he had risen to become the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, running with Theodore Francis Green. They narrowly lost to the Republicans by less than 4,000 votes. In 1932, the Democrats were swept into power statewide. He became the City of Pawtucket’s Auditor under newly elected Mayor John F. Quinn. They worked well together to repair the financial crisis in the city but disagreed over the control of the police and fire departments. McCoy continued to influence state affairs by controlling a block of votes in the legislature. In 1935, he was State Budget Director, devising innovative plans to balance the state budget. McCoy is credited as one of the architects of the 1935 Bloodless Revolution, which reorganized the state government. Frustrated by narrowly failing to capture the state Senate by what appeared to be fraudulent returns in three districts, Green, Quinn, McCoy, and a small group of other Democrats worked out a secret plan to challenge the results and reorganize the entire state government. Democratic hopes were boosted when a supervised recount certified that a Democrat had been elected in one disputed race. With lightning-like speed on the first day of the new year, lieutenant Governor Quinn opened the Senate session by appointing a committee to recount ballots in the other two districts. The Democratic-supervised count produced two more senators and control of state government. By day’s end, this well-engineered coup had provided for the initial reorganization of state administration, swept away the Supreme Court, and eliminated offices of the high sheriff of Providence County, Providence Safety Board, and finance commissioner – all Republican power bases. In one historic day, Democrats had seized the long-sought prize and, with high-sounding hopes, launched a new phase of Rhode Island history.  

To maintain his position as a state powerbroker, McCoy redoubled his efforts in Pawtucket, becoming city auditor, city comptroller, and the kingpin of a political operation so tight-knit that the councilman overseeing his discharge of fiscal duties was his brother Ambrose. His landslide election as mayor in 1936 gave him the title to the position he already effectively possessed. Not only was McCoy now the mayor, the auditor, and the comptroller, but he was also the chairman of the Sinking Fund, chairman of the Purchasing Board, and clerk of the city council. McCoy controlled Pawtucket so completely that the line blurred between man and city. Some of his fiscal decisions, including restructuring the tax base, enabled Pawtucket to tough out the Depression’s devastating effects on the textile industry. He also increased the budget of the relief rolls, improved health services, modernized the city’s public safety programs, and took full advantage of the Roosevelt administration’s many funding programs, including the New Deal, to build a new city hall and other much-needed public facilities. On the other hand, he and his cronies often dipped into city coffers for unauthorized expenditures, routinely tossed reporters out of city hall, and used city funds to create a newspaper that wholeheartedly supported the administration and played a role in the travesty of the 1938 election, in which one in eight ballots cast in Pawtucket were fraudulent.

 Rhode Island’s Narragansett Park was the scene of one of the most curious episodes in American racing history when a political feud between the track’s owner and the governor of the state escalated into what became known as ‘The Rhode Island Racetrack War.”  While the battle was between Rhode Island Governor Robert E. Quinn and Walter E. O’Hara, who had built the $1.2 million racetrack, McCoy was more than an interested bystander. O’Hara had backed McCoy over Quinn for the Democratic nomination for governor, and McCoy supported O’Hara during the racetrack turmoil. In the summer of 1937, O’Hara got into an altercation with the state racing steward. The state Horse Racing Division ordered that O’Hara be removed as a track official for intimidating and interfering with the steward. The Horse Racing Division also ordered an audit of the Narragansett Racing Association’s books, which resulted in six new charges against the track to revoke its license during the fall racing season. O’Hara responded to the charges in the Star-Tribune in an article in which he implied that Governor Quinn was or would end up in Butler Hospital, a psychiatric hospital specializing in the treatment of substance abuse. Quinn eventually pursued criminal libel charges, and state police arrested O’Hara at his penthouse in Narragansett Park. With McCoy’s help, he was quickly released on bail. On September 15, 1937, the Rhode Island Supreme Court unanimously quashed the division’s order to remove O’Hara. However, Quinn filed two charges with the division seeking O’Hara’s removal as a track official and revoking the Narragansett Racing Association’s license for O’Hara’s attacks in the newspaper. The division sided with the Governor, ordered O’Hara’s removal, and indefinitely suspended the track’s license at the end of the summer races. The summer racing season ended on September 30, 1937; however, the track did not remove O’Hara.  However, Quinn refused to permit racing at the track. On October 17, Quinn declared that Narragansett Park was “in a state of insurrection” and ordered the National Guard to enforce martial law. O’Hara, who was in Maryland on business, flew back to the track and was escorted by guardsmen to his penthouse on the track’s roof, where he entertained journalists and politicians.  At 1 a.m. on October 27, Quinn arrested O’Hara in another libel suit.  O’Hara was freed on $7,500 bail in the morning. Quinn eventually decided to discontinue the suit on April 26, 1938. On February 9, 1938, sheriff’s deputies battered down the Narragansett Racing Association’s doors and seized records on the order of the Superior Court. O’Hara then resigned as the association’s president and managing director. James Dooley succeeded him

At the height of his power, Mayor McCoy decided to build a baseball park somewhere in Pawtucket. He cherished his younger days as an athlete and often regaled his entourage of gofers and hacks with tales of his physical exploits. To his credit, McCoy understood baseball’s integral role in Pawtucket and the Blackstone Valley. By the twentieth century, the Rhode Island System had evolved into what the historian Doug Reynolds called a “moral economy.” Workers agreed to lower pay in exchange for various considerations, including cheaper rents in company-owned mill housing, available care at company-controlled hospitals, and access to various company-sponsored diversions. Diversions like baseball, often with company teams chock-full of ringers and competing in industrial leagues. The game was thought to boost morale, help “Americanize” immigrant workers, and underscore central ideals in life and in business. Teamwork. Allegiance. Pride. Considering McCoy’s past as a union leader, his baseball park plan was intended less for mill owners than mill workers, who are now unemployed. Beyond the entertainment and community pride to be created, building a ballpark meant jobs. After receiving assurances of federal funding from Washington, the mayor announced that a ballpark and a recreational field would be built in Pawtucket—on the sinkhole site now occupied by Hammond Pond. Work began in the summer of 1938, with shifts of men toiling knee-deep in muck, by the sunlight of day and the floodlights of night, round the clock, six days a week. Their first task was to drain the swampy pond, but the project wound up swallowing time, manpower, money, and more, thanks to the underground springs. The pond seemed to have an insatiable appetite for the hundreds of concrete and wood pilings being driven into its maw to create a semblance of solid ground. Stories of vehicles and construction equipment disappearing into the ground overnight became part of Pawtucket lore.  As the years passed, and those pilings continued to vanish into the earth, the project came to be called “McCoy’s Folly.” The federal government’s Works Progress Administration suspended its financial support until the city could provide assurances that “a safely constructed stadium could be built at a reasonable cost.” The workers nicknamed the site “Alcatraz.” The original cost estimate of $600,000 ballooned to well over $ 1 million, even as the ground finally took hold. Mayor McCoy came out on a Sunday afternoon in November 1940, two days before the municipal elections, to lay the cornerstone of the ballpark in a small crowd of city workers and their families. He buried a sealed box that contained, among other items, a letter that dedicated the stadium “to the health, happiness, and enjoyment of the people of Pawtucket for all eternity.” of St. Mary’s,” and the governor of Rhode Island, among other dignitaries, prattled on. But the long morning ended with the stadium being named after McCoy, as it should be.

By the late 1930s, the influential Providence Journal had begun to view McCoy’s tactics with a jaundiced eye and relentlessly carried on a vituperative campaign to destroy him politically. The Journal was joined in this endeavor by the Pawtucket Times. With his public reputation tainted by frequent charges of election frauds, by the onset of the 1940s, McCoy no longer vied for predominance with the state Democratic leaders. Instead, he contended himself with local power, insisting only that he be given his fair share of state patronage and that legislation that he demanded be accepted by the state organization. Despite his unsavory tactics, McCoy did much good for his native Pawtucket. His debt-refunding program leveled off the city’s annual debt-service payments and enabled the city to lower the tax rate, a boon to homeowners and businesses. Quickly perceiving the benefits of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, McCoy sought and received hundreds of thousands of federal dollars for many city projects that put men to work and added to the municipality’s capital stock. These federally subsidized projects and the resulting patronage also helped McCoy strengthen his already powerful political machine.

After he assumed the post as governor in 1939, William H. Vanderbilt was determined to eradicate voter fraud and dual office holding. His target: Pawtucket mayor and city boss Thomas P. McCoy, who held multiple positions simultaneously and had won the mayoral race through questionable means. Sensing McCoy’s vulnerability, Vanderbilt set out to corner the Pawtucket boss by authorizing hiring a New York detective agency to investigate municipal corruption in Pawtucket. Listening devices were placed on McCoy’s home and office telephone services. Upon discovering that his phone lines had been tampered with, McCoy called upon his former rival, District Attorney J. Howard McGrath. Throughout the 1930s, McGrath had conspired to eliminate McCoy’s control of Pawtucket. McCoy resented this encroachment into his “city” and was noticeably upset when McGrath opposed his legislation to implement city-owned public utilities. Now, McGrath and McCoy united to defeat the Republicans. Suppose McGrath, in his role as district attorney, could clear McCoy of allegations of voter fraud. In that case, McCoy might line up behind McGrath’s “program” to capture the Democratic nomination for governor in 1940.

Governor Vanderbilt appeared before the press, justifying his actions by claiming that wiretapping “has been a usual method of getting information and obtaining leads in investigations.” On May 28, 1940, Vanderbilt told the Senate Wire Tapping Committee that he secretly engaged a private detective to investigate in his state because of ‘dissatisfaction’ with the prosecution of election fraud cases. Despite his public rhetoric, however, Vanderbilt knew that he had been beaten before he embarked on his bid for reelection in 1940. McGrath was just what the Democratic Party needed: handsome, well-dressed, and politically and financially successful. More importantly, he, as the federal district attorney from Rhode Island, had succeeded in discrediting a liberal Republican whose investigation against fraudulent local elections would otherwise have threatened the Democrats.

As a result, McGrath won the 1940 election handily, garnering 177,161 votes to Vanderbilt’s 139,820.

McCoy died on August 15, 1945, as the rest of the country rejoiced over the war-ending surrender of Japan. The following spring, the city he once ruled held a lavish dedication ceremony at the stadium, home now to a new professional team called the Pawtucket Slaters—after Samuel Slater, the textile industrialist who started it all. Young school children performed every ethnic dance imaginable, Irish and Russian, Chinese and Dutch, and older students conducted a Pageant of Nations, and the Boys and Girls Glee Club sang “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” The stadium was renamed in memory of McCoy. He was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 1999.

References:   

Matthew J. Smith, “The Real McCoy in the Bloodless Revolution of 1935,”  Rhode Island  History, 1973.

William Jennings, Prince of Pawtucket: A Study of the Politics of Thomas P. McCoy,  East Providence, RIPS, 2024.