Baltimore’s Muldoons

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jeff Price. I’m calling you from Mattapoisette, Massachusetts.

Mattapoisette, Massachusetts. I think you’re our first Mattapoisette, Massachusetts caller. What’s up?

I have been wondering about a word that was certainly part of my language when I was working for the Baltimore Sun.

It was always in a political context. The word was Muldoons.

So Muldoons, M-U-L-D-O-O-N-S, Muldoons.

And so it’s particular to Baltimore politics, right?

Well, it’s certainly, yes.

I think, you know, I may have heard it elsewhere.

I don’t think that it is exclusive to Baltimore.

So the news is that it is exclusive to Baltimore.

Like even close cities like D.C. didn’t use them, didn’t use the word Mildoon.

And the guy who popularized the term and may even have coined it was Frank Kent, who had a column called The Game of Politics or The Great Game of Politics and then a book based on those columns that came out in 1925.

But as far back as 1920, he used the term in the Baltimore Sun.

He used it all the time, like column after column.

And the way he described it was very close to what you said.

A Muldoon was the person in a precinct or ward with the largest extended family, either biological or borrowed.

And so they had the ability to deliver a block of votes.

And so a political boss would be the supreme Milton through that concept of extended family.

And so that family then would be rewarded with appointments or easy to win election spots.

Yeah.

I think that survived long after Frank Kent, who, even though I worked for the Baltimore Sun for 35 years, he was gone by the time I got there.

Yeah, yeah. You will find it well into the 80s and 90s, but often just as a historical term.

But I think your notion about it being the Irish machine, meaning the Irish-controlled political arm of the local government,

is probably spot on because Muldoon can be an Irish name and is often an Irish name.

And there are any number of Muldoons in the Baltimore area over the last 150 years.

You mean people actually named Muldoon?

People actually named Muldoon, and some of them quite famous.

There was a guy who ran a famous boxing club, William Muldoon.

He was a famous Greco-Roman wrestler, and he had this training center for athletes where he trained boxers like John L. Sullivan.

Oh, my God.

He was a bigwig.

And Billy Muldoon, as he was known, would take you under his wing and tell you what to do to succeed as a boxer.

And it’s possible that Billy Muldoon could even be the origin of it because he had his fingers in everything.

Yeah, yeah.

Boy, when I was doing some research on this, I came across a column that was written about 30 years ago by actually a guy who worked for me when I was state editor, Bill Zorzi.

And he said he described it as a system that counted on the BAHOYS, B apostrophe, H-O-Y-S, as the Bostas’ trusted followers.

They deployed the Muldoons, which Sorsi describes as the foot soldiers who worked the polls, their pockets stuffed with walk-around money, corralling the masses, handing out ballots and voting, sometimes early and often.

Yeah, so I’m not surprised.

The big majority of every legislature in the 1920s supposedly were Muldoons.

These are people who owed their position to the machine.

Well, Jeff, I got to say, I love the messiness of local politics.

But I also love the language that comes out of it.

And we want to thank you.

35 years at the Sun must have shown you some stuff,

and I’m glad that you shared some of it with us.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, I could go on about it forever.

All right, you take care now, and thanks for calling, all right?

Yes, thank you.

Thank you for taking my call.

Our pleasure.

Sure thing.

Be well.

Bye-bye now.

Bye-bye.

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