Satan's Invisible World Displayed; or, Despairing Democracy
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Title: Satan's Invisible World Displayed; or, Despairing Democracy
Author: W. T. Stead
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SATAN'S INVISIBLE WORLD DISPLAYED; OR, DESPAIRING DEMOCRACY ***
SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD DISPLAYED
[Illustration: THE CITY HALL, NEW YORK.]
SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD DISPLAYED
OR, Despairing Democracy.
_A STUDY OF GREATER NEW YORK._
BY W. T. STEAD,
AUTHOR OF “IF CHRIST CAME TO CHICAGO!”
“Inasmuch as no government can endure in which corrupt
greed not only makes the laws but decides who shall
construe them, many of our best citizens are beginning
to despair of the Republic.”--EX-GOVERNOR ALTGELD,
_Labour Day_, 1897.
The “Review of Reviews” Annual, 1898.
EDITORIAL OFFICES:
MOWBRAY HOUSE, NORFOLK STREET, LONDON, W.C.
PUBLISHING OFFICE:
125, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
PREFACE.
For the past four years I have devoted the ANNUAL of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS
to a romance based upon the leading social or political event of the year.
This year I intermit the publication of the Series of Contemporary History
in Fiction in order to publish a study of the most interesting and
significant of all the political and municipal problems of our time. To
those who may object to the substitution of a companion volume to my
Chicago book for their usual annual quantum of political romance, I reply,
first, that “changes are lightsome” and a novelty is attractive, and,
secondly, that nothing that the wildest imagination of the romance-writer
could conceive exceeds in startling and sensational horror the grim
outline of the facts which are set forth in this survey of that section of
“Satan’s Invisible World” which was brought to light by the Lexow
Committee.
The trite old saying that “Truth is stranger than Fiction” has seldom been
better exemplified than in the story of the way in which the Second City
in the World has been governed, unless it be in the consequences of the
resulting despair. For if the revelations made before the Lexow Committee
are almost incredible, the deliberate decision of the ablest and most
public-spirited Americans that there is no way of escape save by the
hamstrung Cæsarism of the Charter of Greater New York is still more
marvellous as a confession of the shipwreck of faith. Sin, when it has
conceived, bringeth forth Death, and the corruption that rotted the
administration previous to 1894 has only brought forth its natural fruit
in the adoption of a bastard Bonapartism of the Second Empire as the best
government for the First City in the American Republic.
The election of the first Mayor for Greater New York, which is progressing
while these pages are being written, gives a special actuality and
interest to this study. But its permanent value does not depend upon the
issue of the _plébiscite_ which has decided who will sway the destinies of
the Second City of the World at the eve and on the dawn of the Twentieth
Century.
It will, I hope, render available to the whole English-speaking world the
gist and essence of the evidence taken before the Committee appointed by
the Senate of the State of New York to inquire into the Police Department
of the City. This Committee, presided over by Senator Lexow, held seventy
sittings in the year 1894, and ultimately published the Report of their
inquiry in five stout octavo volumes of 1100 pages each. All their
proceedings were public, and the New York papers published ample reports
from day to day. Outside New York nothing but brief telegrams or
occasional letters informed the world of what was taking place, and the
final Report was never published in the British or Colonial press. Yet the
lesson of the state of things revealed by the Lexow Committee was one
which every great city would do well to take to heart. What New York was,
London, Glasgow, or Melbourne may--nay, will certainly--become, if the
citizens lose interest in the good government of their city.
When I was in New York in September, I tried in vain to purchase a copy of
the Lexow Report. As for exhuming the files of the daily papers, one might
as well try to resurrect Cheops. Fortunately, just as I was stepping on
board the _Teutonic_, the five bulky volumes were handed over to me as a
loan. Dr. Shaw had at the last moment succeeded in borrowing the office
copy of the Report from the Society for the Prevention of Crime. It was
apparently the only available set in the whole city. I deemed it well
therefore to master the voluminous evidence in order to construct a
readable and authentic narrative which would make this great object-lesson
accessible to the world.
W. T. STEAD.
MOWBRAY HOUSE,
NORFOLK STREET, LONDON, W.C.
_November, 1897._
CONTENTS.
PAGE.
FRONTISPIECE: THE CITY HALL, NEW YORK 2
PREFACE 5
PART I.--THE GATEWAY OF THE NEW WORLD.
CHAPTER.
I. LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD 9
II. THE SECOND CITY IN THE WORLD 17
III. ST. TAMMANY AND THE DEVIL 27
IV. THE LEXOW SEARCHLIGHT 43
PART II.--“SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD.”
I. THE POLICE BANDITS OF NEW YORK 57
II. THE POWERS AND THE IMPOTENCE OF THE POLICE 61
III. PROMOTION BY PULL AND PROMOTION BY PURCHASE 67
IV. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A POLICE CAPTAIN 79
V. “THE STRANGER WITHIN THE GATES” 87
VI. THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSES OF THE POLICE 95
VII. KING MCNALLY AND HIS POLICE 107
VIII. THE PANTATA OF THE POLICY SHOP AND POOL ROOM 119
IX. FARMERS-GENERAL OF THE WAGES OF SIN 125
X. “ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN” 135
XI. BELIAL ON THE JUDGMENT SEAT 145
XII. THE WORST TREASON OF ALL 151
PART III.--HAMSTRUNG CÆSARISM AS A REMEDY
I. DESPAIRING DEMOCRACY 159
II. THE TSAR-MAYOR 165
III. THE CHARTER OF GREATER NEW YORK 171
IV. GOVERNMENT BY NEWSPAPER 179
V. WHY NOT TRY THE INQUISITION? 189
VI. THE PLEBISCITE FOR A CÆSAR 197
VII. THE FIRST MAYOR OF GREATER NEW YORK 211
APPENDIX 214
INDEX 217
[Illustration: THE JANITRESS OF THE LAND OF LIBERTY.]
“SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD DISPLAYED”; OR, DESPAIRING DEMOCRACY.
PART I.
THE GATEWAY OF THE NEW WORLD.
CHAPTER I.
LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD.
The entrance to the harbour of New York is not unworthy its position as
the gateway--the ever open gateway--of the New World.
And the colossal monument raised by the genius of Bartholdi at the
threshold of the gateway is no inapt emblem of the sentiments with which
millions have hailed the sight of the American continent.
The harbour, though guarded by great guns against hostile intruder, and
infested by the myrmidons of the Customs, is nevertheless an appropriate
antechamber of the Republic, from whose never-dying torch stream the rays
of Liberty enlightening the world.
Over the great lagoon-like waters flit the white-winged yachts--the
butterflies of the sea--dancing in the rays of the rising sun. On shore
the luxuriant foliage of the trees betrays but here and there the hectic
flush that portends the glories of the Indian summer. The islands, as
emeralds in the setting of the sea, are a doubly welcome sight to eyes
which for days past have seen nothing but the heaving billows of the broad
Atlantic. Here and there, flecking with colour the sunlit scene, flutter
the Stars and Stripes. Far away in the West, faintly audible in the
distance, come the multitudinous sounds of the awakening seaport. The
great Liner, which shuddered and throbbed for three thousand miles as it
forged five hundred miles a day across the sea, is gliding smoothly and
softly as a gondola towards the Venice of the Western World. Except when
approaching the Golden Horn, no more beautiful scene greets the traveller
on approaching a great capital than that presented by the entrance to the
harbour of New York. And right in the centre of the fair vision stands the
Bartholdi monument, with its gigantic figure hailing the pilgrims from the
Older World with the glad welcome of the New. What more appropriate
janitress of the Land of Liberty?
The cynic may sneer that the analogy between the City of the Great
Assassin and the City of the Boss extends further than the sea-gate to the
city. But to the millions whose eyes have rested hungrily upon the nearing
land such reflections are unknown. To them the New World, of which New
York holds the keys, has ever been arrayed in the rainbow garment of Hope.
New York, merely as the portal of the continent, had long been to them as
a kind of New Jerusalem, let down from Heaven in mercy to hard-driven,
hopeless men. From their earliest childhood they had heard of the great
Commonwealth beyond the sea, where the blood-tax of the conscription was
unknown, where all men were free and all men were equal, and where, in
solid, unmistakable reality, the dreams of the poets were found embodied
in a Constitution that was at once the envy and despair of the world:--
There’s freedom at thy gates and rest
For earth’s downtrodden and oppressed;
A shelter for the hunted head,
For the starved labourer toil and bread;
Power at thy bounds
Stops, and calls back his baffled hounds.
What wonder that the storm-tossed emigrant, as he first saw the city of
New York glimmering through the haze, felt the magic charm with which the
tribes of Israel first gazed upon the confines of the Promised Land.
To the great mass of the English, Scottish, and Irish people--as
distinguished from the travelled and more or less cultured minority--the
United States has for a hundred years been the land of their ideal, often
dearer to them than their own. A very large section, possibly a majority,
of our race has ever been more in sympathy with the people that was
believed to have sprung from the loins of the men of the _Mayflower_ than
with the nation which recalled Charles the Second and still tolerates the
ascendency of the Establishment and the dominance of the landed
aristocracy. It is quite recently that this enthusiastic devotion to the
American Commonwealth has been somewhat dashed in Great Britain. It still
exists in full force across the Irish Channel. To the Irishman the United
States is much more of a fatherland than the British Empire. We are,
indeed, but a step-motherland to the Irishman, whereas in the United
States he is not merely at home, but in most of the cities he is at the
head of the household. But forty, thirty, and even twenty years ago it was
practically the accepted creed of the English Radical that America led
the van, and whenever he was downcast and dispirited by the temporary
triumph of the Tories, he found consolation in the reflection that in the
great Republic beyond the Atlantic a new and vigorous race was carrying
out his ideals, free from the hateful clog of the hidebound Conservatism
of the Old Country. No one can read the speeches of Bright and Cobden
without feeling that it was on the Hudson and the Mississippi they found
their spiritual fatherland, and the generation that sat at their feet
learned from them to regard America much as Walt Whitman painted it in his
swinging dithyrambs in praise of “Liberty’s Nation.” We all more or less
were brought up to exult in the belief that--
America is the continent of the Glories, and of the triumph of Freedom,
And of the Democracies, and of the fruits of Society, and of all that
is begun.
Hence nothing more extravagant can be said in praise of New York Harbour
than that even to those nurtured on such pabulum it is no unworthy
approach to the sea-gate of a new and better world.
Nor is it only the outside of the harbour that is most impressive. The
Hudson--that stately river compared with which the Rhine is but a muddy
creek, and the Thames a sluggish rivulet--is not less worthy of its _rôle_
as the throne of the great city. It is impossible to exaggerate the
impression which the Hudson at night must produce on the peasant from the
Carpathians or the labourer from Connemara. Even to those who have more
travelled eyes, and are not unfamiliar with seagirt citadels, the
spectacle is superb. Never shall I forget my first impression of the
mighty river.
It seemed as if I had strayed to the entrance of faerie-land, or that,
unawares, I had been transported to the sea-gate of some enchanted city.
Midnight was near. In the sky overhead the stars gleamed, but they were
faint and speck-like, for the moon was shining unveiled by cloud. But it
was neither the lapping of the rippling water nor the silver sheen of the
moonlight on the wave that gave the scene its fascination of wonder. These
things are the universal poetry of Nature--the music of the waves and the
magic of the moon. And there is no speech or language where their voice is
not heard. But here there was something more. For on either side of the
expanse of water rose high banks of irregular outline, from whose rugged
shadows gleamed the lights as of a myriad eyes:--
Behold the enchanted towers of Carbonek,
A castle like a rock upon a rock,
With chasm-like portals open to the sea,
And steps that met the breaker.
Up and down either side, as far as you could see, until the dark outlines
merged in the distant horizon, these innumerable eyes looked out over
the water. Sometimes they winked, and now and then one or another would
close. It was as if each bank were guarded by some vast monster with a
thousand times the eyes of him who watched the treasure of the Golden
Fleece.
[Illustration: THE OCEAN GATE OF THE NEW WORLD. A Misty Morning in New
York.]
And behind the basilisk of the shore there rose, tier upon tier, the
buildings of the city, in which dwelt millions and millions of the
children of men. Palaces and temples, brightly outlined in light or
towering dark against the luminous haze behind, pierced the sky-line.
Amidst the vast confusion two lofty eminences stood out conspicuous,
dominating the whole. One was a crown-like dome, poised in mid-air,
shining resplendent with jewels of electric light; the other a lofty tower
girdled with a blazing zone of fire. Stars of flame shone on its summit,
while ever and anon a beam of white light, quick and piercing as a
two-edged sword, flashed like the brand of an archangel over the shadowy
city. And it was as it was written of old time, when our first parents,
after being cast out of Eden, looked back and saw “a flaming sword turning
every way to keep the way of the tree of life.” The sword was not of fire,
but of pure white light. Above and below it made darkness visibly black,
but revealed with startling distinctness everything on which it fell.
That was but the background, the framework of the picture. For the great
scene was on the water. Never until at Spithead this midsummer, when six
square miles of the Solent crowded with the warships of the world burst at
a signal into a glittering wilderness of lights, had I ever seen anything
to compare to the Hudson at midnight. In Paris on the night of the fête of
the Republic in Exhibition year, when the Seine was crowded with steamers,
all illuminated and decorated from stem to stern, there was something like
this. But the Seine was but a skein of silk stretched across the city; the
water was hidden by the craft. Here the whole expanse of waterway exceeded
even that of the Neva at St. Petersburg; and, although full of life and
colour and sound, was nowhere crowded.
Imagine a great arm of the sea across which, between the two shores, were
swiftly, ceaselessly gliding like silent faerie shuttles in some
enchanter’s loom huge floating palaces, radiant from end to end with
innumerable lights. They moved with such strenuous rapidity that the
waters foamed beneath their keel, and the anchored vessels seemed to fly
past as we left them behind. No great galleon of Spain illuminated in
honour of her patron saint ever shone more resplendent, and none ever
moved with half the fierce, resistless rush of these monsters of the
river. No sails had they or visible means of propulsion, they sped as if
thought-impelled. Seldom had I seen anything more weirdly beautiful, or
more calculated to impress the imagination.
Now and then a smaller palace would float down the stream, reviving, I
know not how, strange reminiscences of the great State barges in which the
Rinaldos of mediæval romance would be rowed to some high festival in
Armida’s garden. Two starry lights overhead, as at the masthead--though
masts there were none--dimly revealed the contour below, where the light
streaming from serried windows produced a curious effect, as if banks of
illuminated oars were speeding the galley on her way. And then again,
silent and slow, with but one light burning at her prow, a sombre
melancholy scow would drift across the moonlit waters--like
the barge
Whereon the lily maid of Astolat
Lay smiling like a star on darkest night.
On sea and on shore it was one perpetual feast of lanterns. Mingled with
the golden and silver rays of the electric lights there shone everywhere
lamps of ruby and of amethyst and of emerald, glowing like jewels of
intense colour, set in a tiara of diamonds and pearls.
And to add to the weirdness and mystery of the scene, ever and again there
would rise from the waters a strange melodious murmur, increasing in
intensity to a wail, which would continue a minute and then die away as it
arose. It was like the plaintive lowing of sea-monsters for their lost or
wandering calves. Otherwise all was still, save the lapping of the waves
on the shore.
“And behold I saw,” said the seer of the Apocalypse, “as if it were a sea
of glass mingled with fire. And lo----”
It was New York seen from a New Jersey ferry-boat on the Hudson, plying
between 23rd Street and the Pennsylvania railway. Could there be a more
sudden descent from the poetry of faerie-land to the vulgar prose of a
work-a-day world? The light-crowned dome was the office of the _World_
newspaper, the flashing beam from the tower the advertisement of a dry
goods store from Chicago. Yet, nevertheless, the effect of the reality, as
it may be seen every fine night, far exceeds my poor description. To those
who have eyes to see it is one of the most wonderful and beautiful and
suggestive of scenes.
Such then is the outward and visible aspect of the Empire City, a city
which from its situation is beautiful exceedingly, and which until quite
recently was regarded as the joy of the whole earth, and which still does
honour to the statue of such a martyr of Liberty as Nathan Hale. How it
has come to pass that the mighty has fallen, and the city which was once a
name at the sound of which men renewed their hope and faith in the
progress of the world, has become a byword, a hissing and reproach, it
will be the object of this volume to explain. It is a subject in which we
of the Old World have weighty reason to be interested. For we have
suffered a severe blow and a grievous discouragement in the betrayal of
the cause of Liberty in the very vestibule and entrance chamber of the
Republic. For all round the world the shame of New York darkens the sombre
shade which encompasses the oppressed and gladdens with evil joy the heart
of the oppressor.
[Illustration: STATUE OF NATHAN HALE. City Hall Park, New York.]
[Illustration: THE GRIDIRON STREETS OF THE NOISY CITY. New York Post
Office, Broadway.]
CHAPTER II.
THE SECOND CITY IN THE WORLD.
A pandemonium of type-writing machines--of gigantic type-writing machines
driven by demons who never tire--in some vast hall of Eblis. The clank of
the type, the swish of the machine, the quick nervous ring of the bell,
all indefinitely multiplied and magnified, fill the vast space with a
reverberating clangour. This clangour continuously increases until its
very vibrations seem to become clotted and fill the air with a sound that
can be felt in every pore. It is like the pressure of an atmosphere so
dense you can almost cut it with a knife, an atmosphere that is never
still, but perpetually frets, and moans, and snarls with feverish unrest.
How many machines there must be to crowd the air with this million times
multiplied misery of click and clang--ring-ring--ring-ring--and clang and
click, that never stops, but rises and falls, rhythmless and rude, like
the waves of a choppy sea on a rocky beach! Now and again through the
infernal hubbub there pierces a dreadful wail,
As it were, one voice in agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes
Or hath come since the making of the world.
How hot the air is! a temperature of the antechamber of Tophet. As the
perspiration bursts in great beads of moisture from your brow, you hear
the faint hum of circling wings, faint at first, but ever growing shriller
and more acute--hiss, zip--as the invisible fiend circles round his
prostrate victim. Hiss, zip, nearer, louder than before, audible clearly
even above the metallic storm of the type-writing machines. And as the
mosquito settles on your ear, you awake with a start and suddenly realise
where you are.
You are not in even the outermost circles of Dante’s “Inferno.” You are
trying to sleep in the heart of Central New York, in the midst of all the
thunder and the rush and the roar of her million-crowded streets, along
which surges as a restless tide the turbid and foaming flood of city life.
The bells of the tramcars continually sounding, the weariless trampling of
the ironshod hoofs over granite roadway, the whirling rumble of the
wheels, the roar of the trains which on the elevated railways radiate
uproar from a kind of infernal firmament on high, all suffused and
submerged in the murmurous hum that rises unceasing from the hurrying
footsteps in the crowded street, that inarticulate voice of New York--
Sad as the wail that from the populous earth
All day and night to high Olympus soars.
And that dreadful shriek is the farewell of an Ocean liner sounding a
sonorous note with stentorian lungs as it quits the wharf.
There is nothing like it in London. Chicago, with all its bustle, has
nothing to compare to this harsh metallic clangour of struggle and
strife--although there the mournful death-tolling bell on the locomotives
which thread the streets supplies a note of pathos and of awe that is
missing in the racket and roar of New York.
One grows used to it in time, just as after a few days you become used to
the thrust and swirl of the screw which drives the liner across the sea.
The great ship vibrates in every nerve of steel, and the state-room throbs
with the thud of the engines. So the great city pulses with strenuous
power, and in the multitudinous uproar of its streets we hear the sound of
the friction of the two-million manpower engine which has made even Lesser
New York one of the greatest driving forces of the American Republic.
It is a dynamo of the first order. And like the dynamo it is instinct with
magnetic power. All great cities are great magnets, and New York is the
greatest--but one--in the world.
The figures of the portentous growth of cities in our epoch recall the
familiar story in the “Arabian Nights Entertainments” of the vessel which,
sailing too near the Loadstone Mountain, was whelmed into sudden
destruction. For the attraction of the loadstone was such that all the
iron nails in the vessel were drawn out of their fastenings, and the
timbers that were once a ship became mere flotsam and jetsam on the water.
It is a wild and romantic fable in the mouth of the Princess Scheherazade;
but it is grim reality in the world to-day. For the great city is to the
rural population exactly what the Arabian loadstone mountain was to the
heedless sailor who came within the range of its fascination. All the iron
in the rural ship of State is attracted to the mighty Babylon. The men
with iron in their blood, the girls whose pulses leap and tingle with the
eager flush of adventure and ambition, desert the village and the farm to
crowd the roaring mart and glaring street. The country is denuded of its
most vigorous children. The city engulfs into its insatiate maw all those
the brightest, the bravest, and the best.
The process goes on at an ever accelerating ratio. As Mr. Godkin has well
observed:--
Parks and gardens, cheap concerts, free museums and art galleries,
cheap means of conveyance, model lodging-houses, rich charities, such
as every city is now offering in abundance to all comers, are so many
inducements to country poor to try their luck in the streets. They are
the exact equivalents, as an invitation to the lazy and the
pleasure-loving, of the Roman circus and free flour which we all use
in explanation of the decline and fall of the Empire. They are
luxuries which seem to be within every man’s reach gratis, and they
act with tremendous force on the rural imagination.--_North American
Review_, June, 1890.
The percentage of urban to the total population of the United States,
defining as urban all dwellers in cities of more than 8,000 population,
was 3·35 in 1790. Forty years later it had doubled. But in 1860 it was
16·13, and in 1890, 29·12. But the growth of the cities which alone
deserve the name of great has been still more phenomenal. In 1840--not
sixty years ago--the ten greatest cities of America contained a total
population of 711,652. To-day Brooklyn alone, which has been merged as a
kind of suburb in Greater New York, has a population of a million, while
the ten great cities, to be hereafter known as the Great Ten--New York,
Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, San
Francisco, Cincinnati, and Cleveland--had in 1890 a population of
6,660,402, and will have in 1900 a population of eight millions. In fifty
years the population of the United States did not quadruple itself, for it
only expanded in round numbers from 17 millions to 62½ millions. But the
great cities increased themselves nearly ten-fold in the same period, and
to-day they contain 11 per cent. of the whole population of the Union. The
latest estimate of the present population of the country gives the cities
25 millions out of the 72 million citizens of the United States.
If one-third of the inhabitants of the American Commonwealth dwell in
cities, these urban centres possess even more than one-third of the wealth
of the nation, and far more than one-third of its actual power. A writer
in one of the recent American magazines points out that the wealth of the
Great Ten in 1890 exceeded the wealth of the whole country, cities
included, in 1850. The revenue of the same Great Ten amounted in 1890 to
£25,000,000 per annum, a greater sum than was raised for State purposes in
all the federated States and Territories. The annual Budget of New York
and Brooklyn in 1890 dealt with ten millions sterling, a sum almost
exactly equalling the Budget of the United States forty years ago.
It is now half a century since De Tocqueville wrote:--“I look upon the
size of certain American cities, and especially upon the nature of their
population, as a real danger which threatens the security of the
Republic.” Since then this “real danger” has gone on increasing at an ever
accelerating ratio. When De Tocqueville wrote, there were only three or
four cities with a population over 100,000. To-day there are thirty. And
most remarkable fact of all, the population of Greater New York is now
equal in number to the total population of the United States at the time
of the Declaration of Independence. Her 3,200,000 inhabitants exceed
nearly four-fold the total number of the inhabitants in all the cities in
the States at the time De Tocqueville visited America. In the State of
New York, sixty per cent, of the inhabitants live in cities; in
Massachusetts, seventy per cent.
This tendency townwards, which is one of the most striking characteristics
of the English-speaking race all round the world, is nowhere more
conspicuous than in the United States; and New York, of all American
cities, is that where this centripetal law is just now seen to be
operating most powerfully. In the amalgamation by which the Greater New
York has come into being we have the latest manifestation of the craving
on the part of all modern men to come together in ever-increasing
agglomerations of humanity. The fissiparous tendency so perceptible in
politics is not visible in cities. There are numerous instances of two
cities fusing into one; but no city having once achieved its unity splits
it up. Amalgamation, not separation, is the order of the day. Where a
river does not divide--as for instance, in the case of Gateshead, that
“long, narrow, dirty lane leading into Newcastle-on-Tyne,” or in the case
of Salford--the larger town invariably swallows up its minor neighbours,
as a large raindrop on the window-pane attracts the smaller drops in its
immediate vicinity. In the case of Greater New York, not even the dividing
river has been able to prevent the law of gravitation doing its will.
The City of New York is indeed seated upon rivers, and if State boundaries
had not stood in the way, there is little doubt that Jersey City would
have shared the fate of Brooklyn and Long Island. But even without Jersey
City, the new urban conglomerate will be the second city of the world in
populousness and greater even than London in area.
The City of New York has an area of 39 square miles, while the area of
Greater New York is over 300 square miles. Brooklyn contains 29 square
miles, Staten Island comprises nearly 60 square miles, Westchester County
annex has an area of about 20 square miles, and the Long Island townships
included in the scheme have an aggregate extent of perhaps 170 miles.
At the first election for the Greater New York, held this year, no fewer
than 567,000 citizens were registered as electors in this colossal
constituency. The Greater New York charter divides the city into five
boroughs. (1) Manhattan, consisting of the island of Manhattan, and the
outlying islands naturally related to it. (2) The Bronx, including all
that part of the present City of New York lying north of the Harlem, a
territory which comprises two-thirds of the area of the present City of
New York. (3) Brooklyn. (4) Queen’s, consisting of that portion of Queen’s
County which is incorporated into the Greater New York. (5) Richmond; that
is, Staten Island. The population of the City of New York which before the
amalgamation was close on 2,000,000, is now swollen to 3,200,000, of whom
nearly 2,000,000 live in tenement houses.
The size of New York is by no means its most notable distinction. Chicago
some day may, by right of its more central position, win the prize of
being recognised as the real if not the political capital of the United
States. But the position to which Chicago aspires has, for nearly a
century, been held by New York. For New York is one of the few cities in
the States which are not of yesterday. Of course, compared with London,
which dates back to the Cæsars, New York is but a mushroom upstart. But as
in the realm of the blind the one-eyed man is king, so in the New World a
city which can count its history by centuries may be regarded as
possessing quite a respectable antiquity.
[Illustration: Map of GREATER NEW YORK.]
To us in the Old World it is the window through which we look into
America. Peter the Great built his capital on the Neva in order to have a
window from which he could look into Europe. New York serves much the same
purpose. It is through the window-pane of New York that the Old World sees
what little it does see that is going on in the American Republic. All the
newspaper correspondents of the European press without a single exception,
so far as I know, cable from New York. Not a single British newspaper has
a correspondent at Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, or Washington. As for
the suggestion of publishing telegrams from New Orleans or San Francisco,
it would be more reasonable to expect to see despatches from Mars. This
leads, no doubt, to much misconception. The New York window is by no means
of transparent crystal. Those who consent to see the United States solely
through their New York window-pane will often be egregiously misled.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that New York is the only window through
which the Old World peeps into the New.
Nor is that the only special reason why New York is better known to us of
the older branch of the race than any other part of the American
Continent. New York is not more the only window than it is the only door
of the New World. The Atlantic is furrowed by a thousand keels, but all
the liners steer for New York. Steamers no doubt ply to Boston and to
Philadelphia, but the great trade route--the only passenger route--lies
past Sandy Hook. New York is the front gate of the Western hemisphere.
Even Canada finds it more convenient to use the New York entrance than the
ice-blocked mouth of the St. Lawrence. Hence, whatever else the Old World
man may see or fail to see in the New World, the one place he is certain
to see, the one place which he cannot avoid seeing, is the Queen of the
Hudson.
And as New York is the first American city which every traveller sees, and
the last which he leaves, so New York has attracted a greater number of
European residents than any other city, with the doubtful exception of
Chicago. In 1888, thirty-six per cent. of the citizens were either Irish
or of Irish descent. The German element was in 1891 estimated at
twenty-five per cent. In the City of New York the indigenous American only
numbers twenty per cent.
But it is not its imported population which makes it so peculiarly
European. Chicago is at least as cosmopolitan, but the city on Lake
Michigan counts herself much more American than her sister on the Hudson.
During the last Presidential Campaign New York was constantly singled out
for attack by the Bryanite orators of the West and South as if it were a
foreign and hostile colony encamped on American soil. Wall Street, the
centre of the financial system of the United States, was as sound on the
currency question as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and the
advocates of Free Silver confounded New York and London alike beneath
their savage anathema. Community of interest begets community of ideas,
and the Western men angrily declare that New York is no more a typical
American city than London or Liverpool. This is an exaggeration, no doubt.
But neighbourhood counts for something, and New York is a thousand miles
nearer to London than to Chicago.
New York is only six days’ steaming from Europe. It is the centre from
whence the mighty shuttles ply back and forth across the Atlantic,
weaving the ocean-sundered sections of our race into one. Of the threads,
some end at Southampton and others at Liverpool. But they all start from
New York.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE WINDOW-PANES OF THE WINDOW OF THE NEW WORLD.
Printing-House Square, New York.]
There is another distinctive element about New York. It is the great
literary producing-centre of the American people. Boston has long since
been dethroned. No other city has even ventured to contest the primacy of
New York. There is not a single magazine printed in America that has any
circulation outside the United States which is not edited, printed, and
published in New York. The advantages of a more central position enjoyed
by Chicago are as nought compared with those which New York enjoys in
other ways. When I proposed to publish the American _Review of Reviews_ in
Chicago, I was promptly silenced by the statement that with the exception
of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ there was not a single periodical published
outside New York which could claim to have achieved a success. New York,
from the publishing point of view, is the hub of the American universe.
Her magazines, admirably edited and marvellously illustrated, circulate in
every nook and corner of the English-speaking world. The magazines of the
other cities are virtually unknown outside the Republic, and often, it may
be said, outside the city that gives them birth. New York, then, as the
window and front door of the United States, with an unchallenged
financial, commercial, shipping and literary ascendency, has the pull over
all her rivals. To nine-tenths of mankind New York is America. All the
rest of the country is but the pedestal upon which New York stands.
This pre-eminent position carries with it a grave responsibility. If the
world at large judges the American Commonwealth by New York, then New York
owes a double duty both to the American Commonwealth and to the world at
large. Hence the extreme interest which the latest evolution in the civic
development of New York naturally arouses. This Greater New York--what
does it mean? How did it come into being? What were the issues at stake at
the late Election? All these questions every one is asking. I propose to
attempt to supply some answer.
It is a task of some difficulty and no little importance; for not merely
is New York--rightly or wrongly--regarded as the most typical and best
known American city, but the United States tends more and more to become
not a federation of States and territories, but an association of huge
cities. The Great Ten not merely include within their boundaries nearly
eight million persons, or more than ten per cent. of the whole population;
they do the thinking and the guiding and the managing of a very large
proportion of the remaining nine-tenths. Draw a circle with a
three-hundred-mile radius round the Great Ten, and you inclose an area
which is practically dominated by the Ten and educated by their
newspapers. The Newspaper Area is a phrase not yet naturalised in
geographies, but it is the most real and living area of all those into
which the social organism is divided. For the newspaper collects its news
every day, and sells its news every morning and evening, thereby creating
a living, ever-renewed bond between the dwellers within the radius of its
circulation infinitely superior to the nexus supplied by the tax-collector
and the policeman. It is not difficult to define the length of the range
within which a newspaper can create a constituency. It is rigidly limited
by the distance from the printing-office in which a newspaper can be
delivered before breakfast. After breakfast the influence of the newspaper
dwindles every minute. Any one living so far off as not to be able to
obtain his newspaper before dinner is practically outside the
pale--unless, of course, he lives remote from any local centre of news
distribution. In that case the range of influence is almost indefinite, as
is shown to this day in the hold which the weekly _New York Tribune_
exercises over farmers scattered everywhere between the Atlantic and the
Rocky Mountains. But speaking generally, the range of the Newspaper Area
is limited by breakfast-time.
[Illustration: THE FRONT DOOR OF THE NEW WORLD.]
Greater New York has come into being in order to increase, not to
diminish, the influence of New York in the Republic and in the world at
large. This influence may be for evil. “Under the new charter,” says Mr.
W. C. De Witt, Chairman of the Committee which drafted that document, “the
City of New York at one bound becomes the mistress of the Western
hemisphere and the second city of the world. It should be to its people
what Athens was to the Greek, Rome to the Romans, Florence to the
Florentine--an object of constant solicitude and of civic pride.”
The question whether they intend to obey the voice of their friendly
mentor is one on which the future fortune of the American Commonwealth
will largely depend. For, as Mr. J. C. Adams pointed out in a thoughtful
article on “The Municipal Threat in National Politics,” which he
contributed to the _New England Magazine_ in July, 1891:--
The misgovernment of the cities is the prophecy of misgovernment of
the nation; just as the paralysis of the great nerve-centres means the
palsy of the whole body. There is graver danger to the republic in the
failure of good government in our cities than arises from the moral
corruption which accompanies that failure. The misgovernment of our
cities means the break-down of one of the two fundamental principles
upon which our political fabric rests. It is the failure of local
self-government in a most vital part. It is as great a peril to the
republic as the revolt against the Union. For the republic is
organised upon two great political ideas, both essential to its
existence. The first is the principle of federation, which is embodied
in the Union; the second is the principle of local self-government,
which places the business of the states and the towns in the hands of
the people who live in them. Both of these are vital principles. The
republic has survived the attempt to subvert one of them. It has just
entered on its real struggle with a serious attack upon the other.
The fate, therefore, of the American Republic may be bound up with the
fortunes of Greater New York.
CHAPTER III.
ST. TAMMANY AND THE DEVIL.
Hitherto, the city government of New York has not been a credit to the
Republic; otherwise I should not be publishing a survey of the way in
which New York has been governed as “Satan’s Invisible World Displayed.”
The title, of course, is an adaptation, not an invention. The original
holder of the copyright was one Hopkins, of the seventeenth century, who,
having had much experience in the discovery of witches, deemed himself an
expert qualified to describe the inner history and secret mystery of the
infernal regions under that picturesque title. I have adopted it as being
on the whole the most appropriate description of the state of abysmal
abomination into which the government of New York had sunk before the
great revolt of 1894 broke the power of Tammany--for a season--and placed
in office a Reform Government charged to cleanse the Augean stable. The
old witchfinder had no story to tell so horrible or so incredible as that
which I have drawn up from the sworn evidence of witnesses exposed to
public cross-examination before a State Commission in the City of New
York. In the reports of the infernal Sabbats, for attending which
thousands of old women were burnt or hanged in the seventeenth century,
there always figures in the background, as the central figure in the
horrid drama, a form but half-revealed, concerning whose identity even the
witchfinders speak with awe. The weird women, with their incantations and
their broomsticks, their magic spells and their diabolical trysts, are but
the slaves of the Demon, who, whether as their lover or their torturer, is
ever their master, whose name they whisper with fear, and whose commands
they obey with instant alacrity. For the Master of Ceremonies in the
Infernal revels, the Lord of the Witches’ Sabbat, is none other than Satan
himself, the incarnate principle of Evil, the Boss of Hell!
In the modern world, sceptical and superstitious, these tales of witches
and warlocks seem childish nonsense, unworthy of the attention of grown-up
men. But although the _dramatis personæ_ have changed, and the
_mise-en-scène_, the same phenomena reappear eternally. Here in the
history of New York we have the whole infernal phantasmagoria once again,
with heelers for witches, policemen as wizards, and secret sessions in
Tammany Hall as the Witches’ Sabbat of the new era. And behind them all,
always present but dimly seen--the omnipresent central force, whose name
is muttered with awe, and whose mandate is obeyed with speed--is the same
sombre figure whom his devotees regard with passionate worship, and whom
his enemies dread even as they curse his name. And this modern
Sathanas--this man who to every good Republican is the most authentic
incarnation of the principle of Evil, the veritable archfiend of the
political world--is the Boss of Tammany Hall.
Among the many legends which have clustered round the beginning of the
great association which has played so conspicuous a part in the history of
New York, there is one which appeals specially to the sense of humour.
Tammany, according to tradition, was the name of a Delaware Indian who in
ancient days belonged to a Redskin confederacy that inhabited the regions
now known as New Jersey and Pennsylvania. His name has been variously
spelled as Temane, Tamanend, Taminent, Tameny, and Tammany.
Curiously enough, by a kind of metamorphosis by no means without precedent
among more historical saints, his name has been attached to a locality
which he probably never visited, and with the inhabitants of which he and
his people lived in hereditary feud. This was not, however, due to any of
his conflicts with the Mohicans, who in those days pitched their wigwams
on the island of Manhattan. He owes it to a battle which he fought with no
less a personage than the great enemy of mankind. In the days when St.
Tammany, passed his legendary existence, there were no white men on the
American Continent; but although the Pale-Face was absent, the Black man
was in full force, and one fine day St. Tammany was exposed to the fell
onslaught of the foul fiend. At first, as is his wont, the bad spirit,
with honeyed words, sought to be admitted to a share in the government of
Tammany’s realm.
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” rendered in the choicest Delaware dialect,
was the Saint’s response to the offers of the tempter. But as a more
illustrious case attests, the Devil is not a person who will accept a
first refusal. Changing his tactics, he brought upon St. Tammany and his
Delawares many grievous afflictions of body and of estate, and while the
good Chief’s limbs were sore and his heart was heavy, the cunning deceiver
attempted to slink into the country unawares.
St. Tammany, however, although sick and sore, slept with one eye open, and
the Devil was promptly ordered to “get out of that,” with an emphasis
which left him no option but to obey. Again and again the Devil, renewing
his attacks, tried his best to circumvent St. Tammany, but finding that
all was in vain, he at last flung patience and strategy to the winds, and
boldly attacked the great Sagamore in order to overwhelm him by his
infernal might.
[Illustration: UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK, WITH THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT.]
Then, says the legend, ensued the most tremendous battle that has ever
been waged between man and his great enemy. For many months the great
fight went on, and as Tammany and the Devil wrestled to and fro in mortal
combat, whole forests were broken down, and the ground was so effectually
trampled under foot that it has remained prairie land to this day. At
last, after the forests had been destroyed, and the country trodden flat,
St. Tammany, catching his adversary unawares, tripped him up, and hurled
him to the ground. It was in the nick of time, for Tammany was so
exhausted with the prolonged struggle that when he drew his scalping-knife
to make a final end of the Evil One, the fiend, to the eternal regret of
all the children of men, succeeded in slipping from Tammany’s clutches. He
escaped across the river to New York, where--so runs the legend, as it is
recorded by a writer in _Harper_--“he was hospitably received by the
natives, and has ever since continued to make his home.”
Such, in the quaint but suggestive narrative of the ancient myth, is the
way in which the Devil first came to New York, where, as if in revenge for
his defeat, he seems to have christened the political organisation which
has been his headquarters after the name of Tammany.
The Tammany organisation did not in the beginning take its rise in New
York. It first sprang into being in the ranks of the revolutionary army of
Pennsylvania. Tammany, or Tamanend, as he was then called, was adopted by
the Pennsylvanian troops under General Washington as their patron saint.
There were two reasons for this. In the first place, it was Hobson’s
choice, for St. Tammany was the only native American who had ever been
canonised; and, in the second place, nothing seemed more appropriate to
the revolutionary heroes than to adopt as their patron saint a brave who
had “whipped the Devil.” St. Tammany, therefore, came to be adopted by the
American army as a kind of counterpart to our own St. George. St. Tammany
and the Devil seemed to be a good counterpoise to the legendary tale of
St. George and the Dragon. The 12th of May was Tammany’s Saint’s Day, and
was celebrated with wigwams, liberty poles, tomahawks, and all the regular
paraphernalia of the Redskin. A soldier attired in Indian costume
represented the great Sachem, “and, after delivering a talk full of
eloquence for law and liberty and courage in battle to the members of the
order, they danced with feathers in their caps and buck tails dangling on
behind.” The practice spread from the Pennsylvania troops to the rest of
the army, and so popular did Tammany become that May 12th bid fair to be
much more a popular national festival than July 4th.
It was not until this century had begun that the Tammany Society was
domiciled in New York. It was introduced there by an upholsterer of Irish
descent, named William Mooney. He did not take much stock in St. Tammany,
but preferred to call his Society the Columbian Order, in honour of
Columbus. The transactions of the Society dated from the discovery of
America. Besides the European head, who was to be known as the Great
Father, there were to be twelve Sachems, or counsellors--“Old Men” being
the Indian signification of the word; a Sagamore, or master of ceremonies;
a Wiskinkie, or doorkeeper of the sacred wigwam; and a Secretary.
The Society from its outset appears to have been political, but in its
early days it combined charity with politics. In the second year of its
existence it undertook the establishment of a Museum of Natural History,
and got together the exhibits which formed the nucleus of Barnum’s famous
museum. It was a social and convivial club, which met first in a hotel of
Broadway, then in a public-house in Broad Street, and finally in the
Pig-pen, a long room attached to a saloon kept by one Martling. In 1811 it
erected a hall of its own. Its present address is “Tammany Hall,
Fourteenth Street.”
There is no necessity to do more than glance at the curious beginnings of
a society which is perhaps the most distinctively American of all the
associations that have ever been founded in the New World. A writer of
“The Story of Tammany,” which appeared in _Harper’s Magazine_ many years
ago, from which most of these facts are taken, says:--
The Tammany Society, or Columbian Order, is doubtless the oldest
purely self-constituted political association in the world, and has
certainly been by far the most influential. Beginning with the
government, for it was organised within a fortnight of the
inauguration of the first President, and at a spot within the sound of
his voice as he spoke his first official words to his countrymen, it
has not only continued down to the present time--through nearly three
generations of men--but has controlled the choice of at least one
President, fixed the character of several national as well as State
administrations, given pseudonyms to half a dozen well-known
organisations, and, in fact, has shaped the destiny of the country in
several turning-points of its history.
Few suspect, much less comprehend, the extent of the influence this
purely local association has exerted. To its agency more than any
other is due the fact that for the last three-quarters of a century
New York city has been the most potent political centre in the world,
not even Paris excepted. Greater than a party, inasmuch as it has been
the master of parties, it has seen political organisation after
organisation, in whose conflicts it has fearlessly participated,
arise, flourish, and go down, and yet has stood ready, with powers
unimpaired, to engage in the struggles of the next crop of
contestants. In this experience it has been solitary and peculiar.
Imitators it has had in abundance, but not one of them has succeeded
in catching that secret of political management which has endowed
Tammany with its wonderful permanency.
What is that secret? It is unquestionably to be traced, in part, to
the sagacity which Tammany’s leaders have at all times shown in
forecasting the changes of political issues, or availing themselves of
the opportunities afforded by current events as they have arisen.
Tammany has not only furnished the most capable politicians the
country has possessed, but has managed to ally itself with the
shrewdest ones to be found outside of its own organisation. It has
always shown a willingness to trade in the gifts at its command, and
rarely indeed has it got the worst of a bargain.
[Illustration: FIRST TAMMANY HALL, ERECTED 1811.]
The writer in _Harper_, however, while attempting to explain the secret of
Tammany, only raises a still more difficult question. How is it that
Tammany should have been able to discern the signs of the times better
than its rivals? How is it that Tammany has been able to furnish the most
capable politicians the country has ever possessed, and how is it that it
has displayed so much wisdom? There is one explanation, which, no doubt,
commends itself to many of those who have spent their life in fighting
Tammany Hall. Tammany has little regard for the innocence of the dove, but
it has always displayed the wisdom of the serpent. Considering the place
where the Author of all Evil found refuge after his discomfiture by St.
Tammany, a Republican may be pardoned for suggesting that the wisdom of
Tammany is due to the wisdom of the Old Serpent. Certainly, many innocent
persons have been accused of dalliance with the foul fiend on much worse
_primâ facie_ evidence than that which is furnished by the universal
admission that Tammany, out of the most uncompromising materials, has
succeeded in achieving exploits which antecedently would have been
absolutely impossible. For Tammany, although preserving and maintaining
from first to last a discipline which is the despair of all the other
political machines in the country, has never been without fierce
internecine fights. It has cast out leader after leader, and the ferocity
of the feuds within Tammany has exceeded that of any of the combats which
have been waged against the common enemy. Nevertheless, notwithstanding
all schisms, all reverses, all exposures, Tammany remains to this day the
strongest, the best disciplined, and the most feared political
organisation in the world.
[Illustration: TAMMANY HALL, OPENED 1860.]
Mr. Croker, in the series of interviews which I reported in the October
number of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS, argued with much force and plausibility
that it was contrary to the law of human nature that an organisation could
live and last so long if it were composed of Thugs and desperados, and
that witness no doubt is true. Even so stout and stalwart an opponent of
Tammany as Dr. Albert Shaw has frequently felt himself constrained to
admit that the insane fashion in which New York has been governed rendered
even the rule of Tammany preferable to the constitutional and legal chaos
which was the only substitute. Dr. Shaw, speaking of the system under
which New York has hitherto been governed, said:--
To know its ins and outs is not so much like knowing the parts and the
workings of a finely adjusted machine as it is like knowing the
obscure topography of the great Dismal Swamp considered as a place of
refuge for criminals.
Again he wrote:--
In New York, the absurdly disjointed and hopelessly complex array of
separate boards, functions, and administrative powers, first makes it
impossible for the community to focalise responsibility anywhere in
the formal mechanism of municipal government, and then makes it
possible for an irresponsible self-centred political and mercenary
society like Tammany to gain for itself the real control, and thus to
assume a domination that ought to be centred in some body or
functionary directly accountable to the people. Government by a secret
society like Tammany is better than the chaos of a disjointed
government for which there can be no possible location of central
responsibility.
It is not for me to dogmatise where experts, native to New York,
hopelessly disagree. But viewed from the outside the secret of Tammany’s
success seems to lie chiefly in the fact that Tammany has from the first
been really a democratic organisation. No one was too poor, too wicked, or
too ignorant to be treated by Tammany as a man and a brother if he would
stand in with the machine and join the brotherhood.
This secret of Tammany--the open secret--was explained to me in Chicago by
a saloon-keeper of more than dubious morals who had been a Tammany captain
in New York. I saw him the night after Dr. Parkhurst had scored his first
great success over the politicians of New York. The ex-Tammany Captain
shook his head when I asked him what he thought of Dr. Parkhurst’s
campaign. He had no use for Dr. Parkhurst. For a time, he thought, he
might advertise himself, which was no doubt his object, but after that
everything would go on as before. The one permanent institution in New
York was Tammany.
I asked him to explain his secret. “Suppose,” said I, “that I am a newly
arrived citizen in your precinct, and come to you and wish to join
Tammany, what would be required of me?”
“Sir,” said he, “before anything would be required of you we would find
out all about you. I would size you up myself, and then after I had formed
my own judgment I would send two or three trusty men to find out all about
you. Find out, for instance, whether you really meant to work and serve
Tammany, or whether you were only getting in to find out all about it. If
the inquiries were satisfactory then you would be admitted to the ranks of
Tammany, and you would stand in with the rest.”
“What should I have to do?”
“Your first duty,” said he, “would be to vote the Tammany ticket whenever
an election was on, and then to hustle around and make every other person
whom you could get hold of vote the same ticket.”
“And what would I get for my trouble?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said he, “unless you needed it. I was twenty years captain and
I never got anything for myself, but if you needed anything you would get
whatever was going. It might be a job that would give you employment under
the city, it might be a pull that you might have with the alderman in case
you got into trouble, whatever it was you would be entitled to your share.
If you get into trouble, Tammany will help you out. If you are out of a
job Tammany will see that you have the first chance of whatever is going.
It is a great power, is Tammany. Whether it is with the police, or in the
court, or in the City Hall, you will find Tammany men everywhere, and they
all stick together. There is nothing sticks so tight as Tammany.”
Therein, no doubt, this worthy ex-captain revealed the great secret, of
Tammany’s success. Tammany is a brotherhood. Tammany men stick together,
and help each other.
The record of Tammany, however, hardly bears out the claim made for it by
Mr. Croker as to the honesty and purity of its administration. From its
very early days Tammany has had a bad record for dishonesty and utter lack
of scruple. As early as 1837, two Tammany leaders, who had held the
federal offices of Collector of the Port of New York, and of United States
District Attorney for the Southern district of New York, skipped to Europe
after embezzling, the one £250,000, the other £15,000. About twenty years
later, another Tammany leader, who was appointed Postmaster for New York,
advanced £50,000 of post-office money in order to carry Pennsylvania for
Buchanan. These, however, were but bagatelles compared with the carnival
of plunder which was established when Tweed was Tammany Boss.
It was not until about the middle of the century that Tammany laid the
hand upon the agency which for nearly fifty years has been the sceptre of
its power. A certain Southerner, rejoicing in the name of Rynders, who was
a leading man in Tammany in the Forties, organised as a kind of affiliated
institution the Empire Club, whose members were too disreputable even for
Tammany. These men, largely composed of roughs and rowdies, who rejoiced
in the expressive title of the Bowery Plug Uglies, were the first to lay
their hand upon the immigrant and utilise him for the purpose of carrying
elections. Mr. Edwards, writing in _McClure’s Magazine_, says:--
It was the Empire Club, indeed, which taught the political value of
the newly-arrived foreigner. Its members approached the immigrants at
the piers on the arrival of every steamship or packet; conducted them
into congenial districts; found them employment in the city works, or
perhaps helped them to set up in business as keepers of grog-shops.
“Politics in Louisiana,” General Grant is reported to have said on one
occasion, “are Hell.” They seem to have been very much like hell in the
days when the Plug Uglies with Rynders at their head ruled the roast at
Tammany. Mr. Edwards tells a story which sheds a lurid ray of light on the
man and manners of that time. Mr. Godwin, who preceded Mr. Godkin in the
incessant warfare which the _Evening Post_ has waged against Tammany, had
given more than usual offence to Rynders. That worthy, therefore, decided
to assassinate the editor as he was taking his lunch at the hotel. Mike
Walsh, however, a plucky Irishman, interfered, and enabled Godwin to make
his escape. When the intended victim had gone out--
Rynders stepped up to Walsh and said: “What do you mean by interfering
in this matter? It is none of your affair.”
“Well, Godwin did me a good turn once, and I don’t propose to see him
stabbed in the back. You were going to do a sneaking thing; you were
going to assassinate him, and any man who will do that is a coward.”
“No man ever called me a coward, Mike Walsh, and you can’t.”
“But I do, and I will prove that you are a coward. If you are not one,
come upstairs with me now. We will lock ourselves into a room; I will
take a knife and you take one; and the man who is alive after we have
got through, will unlock the door and go out.”
Rynders accepted the challenge. They went to an upper room. Walsh
locked the door, gave Rynders a large bowie-knife, took one himself,
and said: “You stand in that corner, and I’ll stand in this. Then we
will walk towards the centre of the room, and we won’t stop until one
or the other of us is finished.”
Each took his corner. Then Walsh turned and approached the centre of
the room. But Rynders did not stir. “Why don’t you come out?” said
Walsh. Rynders, turning in his corner, faced his antagonist, and said:
“Mike, you and I have always been friends; what is the use of our
fighting now? If we get at it, we shall both be killed, and there is
no good in that.” Walsh for a moment said not a word; but his lip
curled, and he looked upon Rynders with an expression of utter
contempt. Then he said: “I told you you were a coward, and now I prove
it. Never speak to me again.”
Mike Walsh, the hero of this episode of the bowie-knife, is notable as
having been the first man to publicly accuse Tammany of tampering with the
ballot-box. He was not the last by any means; but Tammany seems to have
begun well, for, says Mr. Edwards:--
Roscoe Conkling once said, chatting with a group of friends, that
Governor Seward had told him that the Tammany frauds committed by the
Empire Club in New York City in 1844 unquestionably gave Polk the
meagre majority of five thousand which he obtained in New York State,
and by which he was brought to the Presidency.
[Illustration: FERNANDO WOOD.]
It is not surprising that with this beginning things went on from bad to
worse until Mike Walsh, a few years before the War, publicly declared in a
great Democratic meeting in the city:--
“I tell you now, and I say it boldly, that in this body politic of New
York there is not political or personal honesty enough left to drive a
nail into to hang a hat upon.”
There is a fine picturesqueness about this phrase which enables it to
stick like a burr to the memory. It was not, however, until the Irish
emigration began in good earnest that Tammany found its vocation. Fernando
Wood was first elected to the Mayoralty in 1854. Fernando Wood was a ward
politician who first became known to the public by a prosecution in which
it was proved that he had cheated his partner by altering the figures in
accounts. He did not deny the charge, but pleaded statutory limitation.
Having thus succeeded in avoiding gaol, he promptly ran for the Mayoralty,
and was duly elected. With him came what Mr. Godkin calls “the
organisation of New York politics on a criminal basis.” The exploits of
Fernando Wood, however, were thrown entirely into the shade by the lurid
splendour of his successor.
This was William M. Tweed, the famous “Boss” Tweed, who began his life as
a journeyman, and ended it in Ludley Street Gaol, after having ruled New
York for years, as if he were a Turkish Pasha. After serving
apprenticeship as a Member of the New York Senate, Deputy Street
Commissioner, and President of the Board of Supervisors, he gradually made
his way upwards until he was recognised as Boss of Tammany. It was not,
however, until the year 1868 that he succeeded in giving the public a true
taste of his quality. Even hardened Tammany politicians were aghast at the
colossal frauds which he practised at the polls--frauds not only unique in
their dimensions, but in the exceeding variety and multiplicity of their
methods. On January 1st, 1869, Tweed and his allies began to plunder the
city in a fashion which might have made the mouth of a Roman proconsul
water. His ally, Connolly, was made Comptroller, while Tweed himself found
ample scope for his fraudulent genius in the posts of Deputy Street
Commissioner and Supervisor. In the first year he issued fraudulent
warrants for £750,000. The money was spent fast and furiously. Tweed was a
fellow of infinite variety, and he seemed almost to revel in the diversity
of methods by which he could plunder the public. One very ingenious and
simple fraud was his securing an Act of the Legislature, making a little
paper which he owned the official organ of the City Government. In that
capacity he drew £200,000 a year from the rates and taxes, as compensation
for printing the report of the proceedings of the Common Council. Mr.
Edwards says:--
He established a printing company, whose main business was the
printing of blank forms and vouchers, for which in one year two
million eight hundred thousand dollars was charged. Another item was a
stationer’s company, which furnished all the stationery used in the
public institutions and departments, and this company alone received
some three millions a year. On an order for six reams of cap paper,
the same amount of letter paper, two reams of notepaper, two dozen
pen-holders, four small ink-bottles, and a few other articles, all
worth not more than fifty dollars, a bill of ten thousand dollars was
rendered and paid.
The frauds upon which the conviction of Tweed was obtained consisted
in the payment of enormously increased bills to mechanics, architects,
furniture-makers, and, in some instances, to unknown persons, for
supplies and services. It was the expectation that an honest bill
would be raised all the way from sixty to ninety per cent. In the
first months of the ring’s stealing the increase was about sixty per
cent. Some of the bills were increased by as much as ninety per cent.,
but the average increase was such as to make it possible to give
sixty-seven per cent. to the ring, the confederates being allowed to
keep thirty-three per cent.; and of that thirty-three per cent.
probably at least one-half was a fraudulent increase.
After a time the outrageous nature of his stealings provoked a revolt in
Tammany itself. It is to this which Mr. Croker looks back with such proud
complacency as marking the advent of reformed Tammany. Tweed was beaten at
the elections, and his opponents secured a majority on the Board of
Aldermen. Thereupon the resourceful rascal promptly went down to Albany,
bought up a sufficient number of Congressmen and senators to give him
control of the Legislature, and so secured a new Charter for New York,
which legislated his opponents out of office. By this Charter a board of
audit was created which consisted of Tweed, Connolly and Mayor Hall. What
followed is thus described by the _Nation_:--
The “Board” met once for but ten minutes, and turned the whole
“auditing” business over to Tweed. This sounds like a joke, but is
true. Tweed then went to work, and “audited” as hard as he could,
Garvey and other scamps bringing in the raw material in the shape of
“claims,” and he never stopped till he had “audited” about 6,000,000
dols. worth. Connolly’s part in the little game then came in, and that
worthy citizen drew his warrants for the money, which that
simple-minded “scholar and gentleman” the Mayor endorsed, without
having the least idea what was going on. Tweed’s share of the plunder
amounted to about 1,000,000 dols. in all. The Joint Committee,
reporting on the condition of the city’s finances, declared that the
discoverable stealings of three years are 19,000,000 dols., which is
probably only half the real total.
Never was a more unblushing rascal, as Mr. Tilden said in his account of
Tweed’s sovereignty. The Tammany Ring
controlled the State Legislature, the police, and every department or
functionary of the law; several of the judges on the bench were its
servile instruments, and issued decrees at its command; it secured the
management of the election “machine,” and “ran” it at its own free
will and pleasure; a large part of the press was absolutely at its
disposal. In the course of three years it had paid to eleven
newspapers the sum of 2,329,482 dols. (about £466,000) nominally for
advertisements, most of which were never even published, or never
seen. Not only the City government, but the lion’s share of the State
government also had fallen into the hands of “Boss” Tweed and his
confederates. Millions of dollars were stolen by the conspirators by
means of “street openings,” “improvements,” new pavements, and other
frauds. The Ring took from the public treasury a sum amounting to over
£1,500,000 for furnishing and “repairing” a new Court-house. The
charges for plastering alone came to about £366,000. For carpets,
warrants were drawn for £120,000, although there were scarcely any
carpets in the building. The floors were either bare, or covered with
oil-cloth. Nearly £100,000 was alleged to have been paid for iron
safes, and over £8,200 for “articles” not defined and never found. The
total sum stolen was over £4,000,000.
[Illustration: WILLIAM M. TWEED.]
Tweed’s brief but dazzling career--for he was indeed a hero clad in
Hell-fire--is said by President Andrews to have cost the City of New York
160,000,000 dols. The fine levied by Germany on the City of Paris after
the War of 1870-1 was only one-fourth that amount. Fraud may be more
costly than War. The total direct property loss occasioned by the great
fire at Chicago in 1871, when three square miles of buildings were burned
down, and 98,500 persons rendered homeless, was only 30,000,000 dols.
above the plunder of Tweed and his gang. Thus Fraud can be almost as
ruinous as Fire.
[Illustration: MR. TILDEN.]
Tweed was a fellow, if not of infinite jest like poor Yorick, at least of
infinite insolent humour. In 1871 he boasted that he had amassed a fortune
of 20,000,000 dols. Nor did he in the least scruple to avow the means by
which he acquired it. President Andrews, of Brown University, in telling
the history of the last quarter century, says, “He used gleefully to show
his friends the safe where he kept money for bribing legislators, finding
those of the Tammany-Republican stripe easiest game. Of the contractor who
was decorating his country place at Greenwich he inquired, pointing to a
statue, ‘Who the hell is that?’ ‘That is Mercury, the god of merchants and
thieves,’ was the reply. ‘That’s bully,’ said Tweed; ‘put him over the
front door.’”
Tweed was to the last popular with the masses of the people. Even when the
whole town was ringing with proofs of his guilt, he stood as candidate for
the Senate of New York State, and was elected. He had distributed in the
poorer districts some £10,000 worth of coal and flour, and one of his
champions brought down the house by declaring that “Tweed’s heart has
always been in the right place, and, even if he is a thief, there is more
blood in his little finger and more marrow in his big toe than the men who
are abusing him have in their whole bodies.”
This man, with this excessive development of marrow in his big toe, was
ultimately run down by Mr. Tilden and the Committee of Seventy. Connolly,
the Comptroller, weakened and made terms with his opponents by appointing
Mr. Green as Deputy-Comptroller. Mr. Green had little difficulty in laying
hands upon all that was necessary in order to secure the prosecution and
conviction of Tweed. Tweed’s two infamous judges were driven from the
bench, and he himself was clapped into gaol. He made his escape, and
sought refuge in Spain. He was, however, delivered up to the American
authorities, and reconducted to prison, where he died. To the last Tweed
retained possession of much of his ill-gotten wealth. An offer which was
made to surrender the residue of his millions in return for his liberty
was rejected.
Tweed thought himself on the whole, an ill-used man. The judge who tried
Tweed declared that he had perverted the “power with which he was clothed
in a manner more infamous, more outrageous, than any instance of a like
character which the history of the civilised world afforded.” But Tweed
himself declared that he believed he had done right, and was willing to
“submit himself to the just criticism of any and all honest men.” From
this it would seem that Mr. Croker is not alone in his imperturbable
consciousness of public rectitude. Tweed on one occasion admitted that he
had perhaps erred, but he explained he was not to blame. The fault lay
with human nature in the first place, and with the system under which New
York was governed in the second. Therein, no doubt, he was right. “Human
nature,” he said, “could not resist such temptations as were offered to
men who were in power in New York, so long as the disposition of the
offices of the city was at their command.”
The most outrageous thing that Tweed ever did was to pass a bill through
the State Legislature at Albany, giving the judges unlimited power to
punish summarily whatever they chose to consider to be contempt. By this
law, which was fortunately vetoed by the Governor, every newspaper in New
York would have been gagged as effectually as the press of Constantinople.
After Tweed fell, Tammany was reorganised under Honest John Kelly and
Richard Croker. Mr. Godkin declares that Honest John Kelly was only honest
in name. He says:--
John Kelly practised the great Greek maxim “not too much of anything,”
simply made every candidate pay handsomely for his nomination,
pocketed the money himself, and, whether he rendered any account of it
or not, died in possession of a handsome fortune. His policy was the
very safe one of making the city money go as far as possible among the
workers by compelling every office-holder to divide his salary and
perquisites with a number of other persons.
The same system had prevailed down to the year 1894, when Tammany, for the
first time in many years, was driven from power. Just before the upset,
the New York _Evening Post_ published the records of the twenty-eight men
who now or recently composed the Executive Committee of Tammany. It showed
that they were all professional politicians, and that among them were one
convicted murderer, three men who had been indicted for murder, felonious
assault, and bribery, respectively, four professional gamblers, five
ex-keepers of gambling houses, nine who either now or formerly sold
liquor, three whose fathers did, three former pugilists, four former
rowdies, and six members of the famous Tweed gang. Seventeen of these
held office, seven formerly did, and two were favoured contractors.
By these men New York was governed down to the year 1894. All the efforts
of the reformers seemed in vain. Mr. Godkin reluctantly confessed:--
The power of the semi-criminal organisation known as Tammany Hall not
only remains unshaken, but grows stronger from year to year. Every
year its management descends, with perfect impunity, into the hands of
a more and more degraded class.
But it is ever the darkest hour before the dawn. Although on the very eve
of the November election of 1894 it was declared that “Mr. Croker held
almost as despotic a sway over New York as an Oriental potentate over his
kingdom,” one month after that statement had been made he was hurled from
power by a great outburst of popular indignation. How that was brought
about I will now proceed to tell.
[Illustration: MR. E. L. GODKIN, EDITOR OF THE “EVENING POST,” NEW YORK.
The sworn foe of Tammany.]
CHAPTER IV.
THE LEXOW SEARCHLIGHT.
Mr. Lowell good-humouredly chaffed John Bull when he declared that
He detests the same faults in himself he neglected,
When he sees them again in his child’s glass reflected,
and we only need to glance at current English criticisms upon American
affairs to justify the poet’s remark. Especially is this the case with a
vice which of all others is regarded as distinctively English. John Bull
has plenty of faults, but of those which render him odious to his
neighbours there is none which is quite so loathsome as his “unctuous
rectitude.” That phrase, coined by Mr. Rhodes to express the contempt
which he and every one who knew the facts felt on contemplating the
hypocrisy and Pharisaism displayed in connection with the Jameson Raid, is
likely to live long after Mr. Rhodes has vanished from this mortal scene.
This tendency to Pharisaism and self-righteous complacency, which thanks
God that it is not as other men are, is one of those vices which John
Bull’s children seem to have inherited in full measure. We are pretty good
at Pharisaism in the Old Country, but we are “not a circumstance,” to use
the familiar slang, when we compare ourselves to some of the Pharisees
reared across the Atlantic. This has nowhere been brought into such strong
relief as when on the very eve of the exposure and discomfiture of Tammany
their spokesmen took the stump and talked like very Pecksniffs concerning
the immaculate purity of Tammany Hall.
The same characteristic is observable in all of them. Whether it is Boss
Tweed, appealing confidently to the verdict of honest men upon a career of
colossal theft and almost inconceivable fraud; or Mr. Croker, who, after
surveying his whole life, declares that he has not discovered a single
action which he has reason to regret, for he has not done anything but
good all his life; or Bourke Cochran, who was at one time the Apollo and
the Demosthenes of Tammany, the same unctuous rectitude oozes out of every
pore. When Tammany was at its heyday of prosperity and power in 1889, it
assembled in its thousands to cheer enthusiastically the impassioned
oratory of Mr. Cochran, who declared, as among the self-evident truths
which found an echo in every breast, that “if corruption prevails among
the people, liberty will become a blighting curse, subversive of order.
Corruption once begun, decay is inevitable and irresistible; the
destruction of the Republic is immediate, immeasurable, irredeemable;
since history does not record a case of a popular government which has
been arrested in its downward course.” Tammany listened to this with
ecstatic admiration, cheered to the echo their eloquent oracle, and then
went on using the proceeds of a system of blackmail for the perfecting of
an engine of corruption to which it is difficult to discover a parallel in
the annals of mankind.
In Mr. Croker’s case, his calm consciousness of incorruptible virtue seems
to be based upon a curious inversion of a belief in a Divine Providence.
Tammany is not strong in theology, but Mr. Croker, in talking to me, based
his argument in favour of the excellence of Tammany on the postulate that
the government of the universe was founded on the law of righteousness.
This being the case, it was only possible to reconcile the continued
existence of Tammany on one of two hypotheses. Either the domination of
evil was permitted for a season for some sufficient cause hidden in the
inscrutable mysteries of the Divine councils, or we must boldly assert
that, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, Tammany rule was in
accordance with the eternal law, _Credo quia impossibile_, rather than
admit that so great an anomaly as a terrestrial Inferno could be permitted
to exist by the good government of God. Mr. Croker, of course, adopted the
latter hypothesis. There is much in it, no doubt, especially to those in
Mr. Croker’s position. It is, however, open to the fatal objection that
the same process of logic would _à fortiori_ secure a certificate of good
conduct for the Great Assassin of Stamboul himself. The Ottoman Empire has
lasted even longer than Tammany Hall, but even Mr. Croker would shrink
from maintaining that Abdul Hamid was on that account the exemplary
vicegerent of the Almighty.
This Pharisaic panoply in which Tammany was clad, as in a coat of mail,
was no small element of its strength. The consciousness of wrong-doing is
always an element of weakness. Not until a man can do evil and persuade
himself that he is doing good can he silence that conscience which makes
cowards of us all. Probably this unctuous rectitude on the part of Tammany
and its Boss should be estimated as one of the chief obstacles in the way
of the scattered and despairing band of reformers who, five or six years
ago, confronted the stronghold of iniquity entrenched in their midst.
Its position, indeed, appeared almost impregnable. Tammany Hall commanded
an annual revenue large enough to equip and maintain a small army. It had
under its orders the whole of the executive force in its police--a body of
men practically above the law, armed with powers hardly inferior to those
of the police of St. Petersburg. Besides the police, all the persons on
the pay-rolls of the City and County were under the thumb of the Boss.
There was hardly a city official, from the highest to the lowest, who did
not hold office by the sovereign will and pleasure of Tammany. As there
are 27,000 names on those pay-rolls, all of whom were voters and were
taxable to an almost unlimited extent whenever the Tammany exchequer
needed to be replenished, it is obvious how enormous were the odds against
the assailants of Tammany.
[Illustration: _Photo by Tom Reveley, Wantage._ RICHARD CROKER IN HIS
GARDEN AT WANTAGE, BERKSHIRE.]
But the unctuous rectitude of its leaders, the prompt obedience of the
police Janissaries, and the discipline of the standing army of the
twenty-seven thousand Pretorians on the city pay-rolls, were by no means
the only difficulties which had to be overcome. Tammany Hall itself might
be compared to a central citadel or keep of a Norman fortress. The
outworks consisted of all the saloons, gaming hells, and houses of
ill-fame in the City of New York. Some of these, no doubt, were by no
means enthusiastic in support of the powers that be, but they resembled
tribes which, having been subdued by force of arms, are compelled to pay
tribute and use their weapons in support of their conquerors. In New York,
just before the revolt against Tammany, the number of licences for the
sale of intoxicants in New York City was over 6,000. The number of
unlicensed drinking places was estimated at from 2,000 to 3,000. Each of
these saloons might be regarded as a detached outwork, holding a position
in advance of the main citadel, and covering it from the attack of its
foes.
In those days it used to be said that licences were granted by the Excise
Board to anybody who had not served a term in a penitentiary. One
indignant divine declared that it was perfectly safe to say that, if the
Devil himself should apply to the Excise Board for a licence to set up a
branch establishment on the children’s playground in the Central Park, it
would be granted. As to the other establishments of even worse fame than
the saloon, there was an unwritten contract by which, in return for
tribute paid directly or indirectly, they were shielded by the strong arm
of Tammany from the enforcement of the law. It was calculated that if all
the saloons in New York were placed side by side, averaging them at only
twenty feet frontage each, they would form a line of circumvallation
twenty miles long. To put it in another way, there was on an average one
saloon for every thirty voters.
In addition to its control of the saloon, Tammany had two extremely
important financial resources which have not yet been mentioned. The first
was the control of the city contracts. A great city like New York, with an
expenditure that exceeded that of the whole Federal Government of the
United States fifty years ago, had an enormous means of influence at its
disposal in the mere granting of contracts. But even this was a
comparatively trivial element in the financial strength of Tammany. There
existed in New York, as in almost every city, great corporations
representing enormous capital, and dividing gigantic dividends, which, in
the Tammany scheme of the universe, might have been created for the
express purpose of furnishing an unfailing supply of revenue to the party
chest. The corporations which enjoyed franchises from the city, giving
them control of the streets, whether for the purpose of traction, of
lighting, or of electrical communication, were Tammany’s milch cows. They
all possess monopolies, granted to them in the first instance either by
corruption or by negligence, which enable them to plunder the public.
These monopolies can only be terminated or modified by the Legislature,
and the Legislature can only act in obedience to the party machine. All
that needs to be done when the campaign fund runs low is for the Boss to
intimate to the various corporations that milking time has come, and that
if they do not contribute liberally of their substance to the party
treasury, Tammany will no longer be able to give them protection when the
usual attack is made next session upon their monopoly or their franchise.
Money is the sinews of war, and as the Tammany war chest was always full,
Tammany snapped its fingers at all its enemies, and contemptuously
declared that the reformers did not amount to a row of pins.
[Illustration: THE CHILDREN’S PLAYGROUND, CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK.]
The outlook undoubtedly was very gloomy. From the point of view of
practical politics it was simply hopeless; nevertheless, in a couple of
years the fortress was stormed, and the government of New York placed in
the hands of the Reformers. The story of the way in which this was brought
about should never be forgotten by all those who are called upon to lead
forlorn hopes against immense odds. As long as the world lasts, such
narratives are among the most precious cordials which in times of danger
and distress restore the courage and revive the faith of man. Dr.
Parkhurst’s attack on Tammany is one of the latest of a long series of
victories achieved by the leader of an outnumbered handful. When Gideon
went forth against the hosts of Midian with only three hundred followers,
he left a leading case on record for the encouragement of all who should
come after. How many reformers and revolutionists who have helped the
world forward in the path of progress have been cheered by the dream in
which the Midianitish soldier saw a cake of barley bread smite and
overturn the multitudinous camp of the conqueror, history does not record!
But if ever a man needed the inspiration of that barley cake it was Dr.
Parkhurst, when in 1892 he set himself to the desperate task of wresting
New York City from the grasp of Tammany.
Dr. Parkhurst was a Massachusetts minister of Puritan ancestry, who, in
1880, at the age of thirty-eight, had been called to Madison Square
Church, in New York. For ten years he went in and out among the people,
quietly building up his church, ministering to his congregation, and
learning at first-hand the real difficulties which offered almost
insuperable obstacles to right living in New York. In 1890, on the eve of
the November election, he preached a sermon on municipal politics, which,
although it failed in influencing the polls, nevertheless marked Dr.
Parkhurst out as the man to succeed Dr. Howard Crosby as President of the
Society for the Prevention of Crime. He took office in 1891. In less than
twelve months he began the campaign from which he never withdrew his hand
until the government of the city was wrested from the control of Tammany.
Nothing is more characteristic, both of the state of things in New York
and the uncompromising directness of Dr. Parkhurst, than the fact that he
had no sooner assumed the control of the Society for the Prevention of
Crime than he adopted as his motto the significant watchword, “Down with
the Police!” That fact alone speaks volumes as to how utterly New York
City had fallen under the control of the Evil One. For a society for the
prevention of crime to adopt “Down with the Police!” as its watchword,
seems to us of the Old World absolutely inconceivable. The police exist
for the prevention of crime, yet here was a society of leading citizens,
presided over by a doctor of divinity, putting in the forefront of its
programme the formula “Down with the Police!”
Strange though it may seem to us, the best people of New York understood
and appreciated what Dr. Parkhurst was after. But it was not till the 14th
of February, 1892, that he put the trumpet to his lips and blew a blast
the echoes of which are still sounding through the world. His sermon was
an impeachment of the Government of New York, the like of which had seldom
been heard before in a Christian pulpit. If any one questions the justice
of the title of this volume, let him read what Dr. Parkhurst said in the
sermon, of which the following sentence is a fair sample:--
There is not a form under which the Devil disguises himself that so
perplexes us in our efforts, or so bewilders us in the devising of our
schemes, as the polluted harpies that, under the pretext of governing
this city, are feeding day and night on its quivering vitals. They are
a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot.
That was plain speaking in honest, ringing Saxon, for Dr. Parkhurst knew
that there was no better way of spoiling the trump card of the Devil’s
game than to refuse to let him keep things mixed. He maintained that the
district attorney, or, as we should say, the public prosecutor, was guilty
of complicity with vice and crime: that “every effort to make men
respectable, honest, temperate, and sexually clean was a direct blow
between the eyes of the mayor and his whole gang of drunken and lecherous
subordinates, who shielded and patronised iniquity.” Criminals and
officials, he declared, were hand-and-glove, and he summed up the whole
matter in the following concise exposition of the _status quo_ in “Satan’s
Invisible World” in New York, 1892:--“It is simply one solid gang of
rascals, half of the gang in office and the other half out, and the two
halves steadily catering to each other across the official line.”
[Illustration: From _Frank Leslie’s Weekly_. REV. C. H. PARKHURST, D.D.,
DENOUNCING TAMMANY’S GOVERNMENT OF NEW YORK.]
Of course there was a great outcry. Some good people were scandalised,
while as for the bad ones, they were simply outraged at such “violent and
intemperate utterances in the pulpit.” One of the police captains declared
“it was a shame for a minister of the Gospel to disgrace the pulpit by
such utterances.” Dr. Parkhurst was summoned before the Grand Jury, and
solemnly reproved for making statements which he could not for the moment
substantiate with chapter and verse. When the Grand Jury condemned him and
the judge rebuked him, Tammany was in high glee; but Dr. Parkhurst bided
his time. He was not a man to be “downed” by censure. Finding that his
general statements were scouted because he could not produce first hand
evidence as to the literal accuracy of each particular instance on which
he built up his general finding, he took the bold and courageous step of
going himself through the houses of ill-fame, gaming hells, and other
resorts which were running open under the protection of the police. He was
accompanied in his pilgrimage by a detective and a lawyer, and for three
weeks every night Dr. Parkhurst, to use his own phrase, “traversed the
avenues of our municipal hell.” They entered into no houses not easy of
access, went into no places which were not recognised as notorious, and
were perfectly well known by the constable on the beat. In one case they
succeeded in proving police collusion by getting the policeman on beat to
stand guard while they visited the house, ostensibly for an immoral
purpose, in order to warn them against any signs of a possible raid.
Having thus mastered his facts and obtained incontrovertible evidence at
first hand as to the fact of police complicity in the wholesale violation
of the law, Dr. Parkhurst stood up in his pulpit on the morning of March
13th, 1892, and once more arraigned the city authorities. This time,
however, he was armed with a mass of facts ascertained at first hand, and
supported by unimpeachable, independent testimony. He brought forward no
fewer than two hundred and eighty-four cases in which the law was
flagrantly violated under the noses of the police, who, he maintained,
were guilty of corrupt complicity in the violation of the law they were
appointed to enforce.
It was a great sermon, and one that shook the city to its centre. Some
idea of its drift and spirit may be gained from this extract:--
There is little advantage in preaching the Gospel to a young fellow on
Sunday, if he is going to be sitting on the edge of a
Tammany-maintained hell the rest of the week. Don’t tell me that I
don’t know what I am talking about. Many a long, dismal,
heart-sickening night, in company with two trusted friends, have I
spent since I spoke on this matter before, going down into the
disgusting depths of this Tammany-debauched town; and it is rotten
with a rottenness that is unspeakable and indescribable, and a
rottenness that would be absolutely impossible except by the
connivance, not to say the purchased sympathy, of the men whose one
obligation before God, men, their own consciences, is to shield virtue
and make vice difficult. Now, that I stand by, because before
Almighty God I know it, and I will stand by it though buried beneath
presentments as thick as autumn leaves in Vallombrosa, or snowflakes
in a March blizzard.
And stand by it Dr. Parkhurst did. He was promptly summoned again before
the Grand Jury, and this time he had his facts at command. Instead of
being rebuked, the Grand Jury reported emphatically that it was impossible
to reconcile the facts presented by Dr. Parkhurst with any other theory
than that of wholesale police corruption.
The following month various keepers of disreputable houses were prosecuted
upon Dr. Parkhurst’s evidence, when every effort was made to damage Dr.
Parkhurst by representing him as the vicious criminal who was responsible
for the very evils which he had brought to light.
It is the old, old story. As long as you sit still and say nothing you are
all right, but the moment you call attention to a hideous wrong or a
shameful crime, all those whose iniquities you have disclosed combine with
your enemies in order to make a busy public believe that it is you who
have exposed the crime who is the real criminal, while they, poor
innocents, are the injured parties, for whom a respectable public should
have nothing but sympathy, and commiseration.
The ferocity of the attacks upon Dr. Parkhurst provoked a reaction in his
favour. The City Vigilance Society was formed by the association of forty
religious and secular societies of the city. The work of sapping and
mining went steadily on. In order to bring odium upon Dr. Parkhurst, the
police suddenly decided to close up several houses of ill-fame, so as to
turn their unfortunate occupants into the streets on one of the coldest
nights of the winter of 1892. Dr. Parkhurst met this by promptly providing
homes for all the dispossessed women. Foiled in this cruel manœuvre, the
police prosecuted Dr. Parkhurst’s detective for an alleged attempt to levy
blackmail. This was Satan reproving sin with a vengeance, and for the
moment it had a temporary success. The detective was convicted, in the
first instance, but on appeal the verdict was set aside. Undaunted,
however, by this reverse, Dr. Parkhurst began to carry the war into the
enemy’s camp. He got up cases against forty-five of the sixty-four
gambling and disorderly houses which were allowed to run by the police
captain of a single precinct. The trials followed with varying results. It
was evident that the difficulties in the way of obtaining a full
disclosure of police corruption could only be overcome by special
measures. Public opinion was now deeply stirred, and the Chamber of
Commerce memorialised the Senate of New York City to hold an inquiry into
the Police Department of New York.
The Senate appointed a Committee of Investigation, and passed a bill
providing for the payment of its expenses. This bill was vetoed by
Governor Flower, himself a Democrat, whose veto elicited another
illustration, if it were wanted, of the marvellous Pharisaism of Tammany
and its friends.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR FLOWER.]
Where party feeling runs high, anything that one party proposes the other
one opposes, and Governor Flower, finding the Republican majority of the
Senate in favour of the investigation into the misdeeds of the New York
police, could only see in it a Republican plot for the manufacture of
political capital in the division of political patronage. So he took
special objection to any investigation of the Police Department of New
York. The following passage from the veto message deserves to stand on
record as one of the most extraordinary eulogies ever pronounced upon a
rotten system on the very eve of its exposure. Speaking of New York,
Governor Flower said:--
Except for political objects, there is no good reason why that city
should be singled out for legislative scrutiny. The same men who do
the investigating in public will admit in private what every
well-informed person knows is true--that no city in the State is so
well governed as New York. No city in the State has a lower tax rate;
no city has a better police regulation; no city has a lower ratio of
crime; no city has better streets; no city has a better fire
department; no city has better parks; no city has better schools; no
city has a better health department; no city has a better credit; no
city is so comfortable a place to live in. That bad men sometimes get
in office there is true. That frauds upon the city treasury sometimes
occur is true; that mal-administration sometimes happens is true; that
ideal municipal government has not yet been attained there is true;
but these things are as equally true of every city in the world, they
are truer of other cities of our State than they are of New
York.--Lexow Commission, vol. i., p. 10.
In order to get round the Governor’s veto, prominent members of the
Chamber of Commerce guaranteed to the Committee counsel’s fees to an
amount necessary to enable them to prosecute the investigation. Thereupon
the Committee was appointed and set to work. All its members were Senators
of the State of New York. It was presided over by Mr. Clarence Lexow. The
names of the other members were Edmund O’Connor, George W. Robertson,
Cuthbert W. Pound, Charles T. Saxton, Jacob A. Cantor, Daniel Bradley,
with William A. Sutherland and John W. Goff as counsel. The only member of
the Committee representing New York City was Mr. Cantor, who presented the
minority Report, which maintained that the Republicans were as bad as the
Democrats, and that most of the officials in the Police Department
implicated in blackmail, fraud and corruption were Republicans.
[Illustration: JOHN W. GOFF.]
The Committee held its first meeting on the 9th of March, 1894. At the
earlier sittings the Police Department was represented by counsel, but
after a while he was withdrawn, and the Committee was left to conduct its
inquiries as best it could. It was fortunate in securing the services of a
famous lawyer, Mr. John W. Goff, who is now Recorder of New York,
“succeeding a man who fined him for contempt because he insisted upon his
rights as counsel in protecting one of Dr. Parkhurst’s agents.” As even
the one dissentient member of the Committee reported, “No more tireless,
industrious or effective counsel was ever employed by a Committee charged
with the responsibility of its character.” As I read over the voluminous
reports of the evidence taken by the Lexow Committee, I could not repress
a sigh: would that we had enjoyed the privilege of having such an examiner
as John W. Goff on the South Africa Committee! But, of course, there was
one great difference: the Lexow Committee was appointed for the purpose of
finding out the facts and exposing scandal, whereas the South Africa
Committee seems to have accepted the theory that it was appointed for
exactly the opposite purpose of hushing them up, and of screening Mr.
Chamberlain at any cost.
The members of the Lexow Committee when they undertook their duties had no
idea as to how far it would lead them. They thought that two days a week
for three weeks would complete the investigation. No sooner, however, had
they begun to apply the probe than they came upon evidence of such
rottenness that even the laziest of them felt they had no option but to go
on. Go on they did day after day, taking evidence from morning till night,
but it was not until the end of the year that they were able to finish
their Provisional Report. This was dated January 16th, 1895. In the Report
they thus summarise the evidence which they took:--
The record shows a total of 10,576 pages of proceedings. This does not
include a mass of documentary exhibits which were read and considered
in evidence, for the purpose of information. Of this testimony, 1,077
pages embrace the subject-matter of police interference at the polls,
and the balance, or almost 9,500 pages, refer to the subject-matter of
blackmail, extortion and corruption. In all, 678 witnesses were
examined, of whom 81 were examined on the first and 597 on the second
branch of the inquiry. In all, about 3,000 subpœnas were served, of
which upwards of 2,750 were with reference to the second branch of the
inquiry.--_Ib._, vol. i., p. 4.
It is upon this immense body of evidence taken on oath, under
cross-examination in public audiences, that I have based this volume.
“Satan’s Invisible World” is thus displayed, not by a stranger or a casual
observer, or an amateur investigator. The revelation has been made by
American subjects testifying on oath before an American tribunal as to the
state of things that actually existed in the City of New York. As the
result of the investigation the old system of Tammany rule was overthrown,
and the police thoroughly reorganised. They have now as Chief Commissioner
Mr. Moss, who, after Mr. Goff, was the chief instrument in exposing the
corruption of the old system. If any one doubts the accuracy of the
picture of what actually existed down to 1894, which is set forth in this
and the following pages, I can only refer him to the volumes of evidence
to which reference is made throughout in the passages quoted.
It is not surprising that men who have lived in the midst of such a city
should sometimes burst out like Dr. Parkhurst with the despairing cry:--
You can love your country and work for it, pray and plead for it, but
there is a stage of rottenness which once reached, the country is
damned beyond the power of the Holy Ghost to do anything for it.
That such a state of rottenness has been reached in any part of the
English-speaking world we must all be loath to admit. The great popular
uprising which swept Tammany from power in 1894 was a healthy sign that
the rottenness had not eaten to the vitals of the community. But the
Charter of Greater New York proves only too well how deeply distrust has
sapped the faith of the citizens in the possibility of governing their
city by the ordinary democratic machinery of an elective assembly.
[Illustration: SENATOR LEXOW.]
PART II.
SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD.
CHAPTER I.
THE POLICE BANDITS OF NEW YORK.
The Lexow Committee experienced great difficulty in procuring evidence
owing to the Reign of Terror which was established in New York by the
police. The story reads more like a description of an Indian province
terrorized by a band of Thugs than a statement of how New York was
governed. When unwilling witnesses--and the vast majority of witnesses
were most unwilling--were placed on the stand, they were thus addressed by
the Chairman:--
Any testimony you give now, under oath, before this Committee with
reference to bribery or corruption, cannot be used against you in any
form, shape, or way. The fact of your confession here before this
Committee will be a complete bar against any prosecution against you
for that offence. In other words, if you sit here and tell the truth,
and confess that you have committed any crime of that description, you
will be absolutely relieved from any punishment for the commission of
that crime. On the other hand, if you swear to anything that is false,
then, not only could you be punished for the crime that you committed,
if you did commit the crime of bribery, but for the crime of false
swearing, or perjury, besides; you understand that?--Vol. iv., p.
3,615.
Notwithstanding this, the amount of perjury committed, especially by
policemen, was appalling. One of them, of the name of Interman, admitted
frankly that it was the common understanding among the members of the
force that it was their duty to swear falsely to conceal the facts about
bribery and corruption. If they spoke the truth they would be bounced or
persecuted, whereas if they came forward and perjured themselves they
would stand high with their superiors. The wrath of a captain who can make
it hot for you next day evidently weighed much more with the police than
the wrath of an offended God, whose mills grind so slowly that retribution
may not begin till the day of judgment.
The answers to questions put to brothel-keepers and others as to their
belief in the binding character of an oath and the reality of a future
state were hardly edifying. One woman, Julia Mahoney, broke the record
for the unhesitating candour with which she answered counsel’s questions.
“Do you not know,” said Mr. Goff, “that you would meet your punishment in
the world hereafter?”
“I hope not,” Julia replied simply.
“And you know that you would be liable to go to the State’s prison?”
persisted Mr. Goff. But Mrs. Mahoney was proof against that threat.
“If I was in prison I would be out in twenty-four hours,” she remarked.
“She has got a pull,” sagely observed Senator Bradley.
It must be admitted that it was a task of uncommon difficulty to extract
the truth from witnesses such as these, who fear not God neither regard
man. Why should they? They have got a pull, and the pull ends all things.
Two competent American observers have recently told us what a policeman is
in an American city. Both confirm to the letter what was stated by a
leading citizen of Chicago five years ago. “Never mind what is said about
this or that system of city government. In Chicago and all the West the
police govern the city, and that is all there is to it.” In New York it
would appear to have been much the same. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, who was
head of the New York police in the first two years of the Reform
Administration, writing in the _Century Magazine_ for October, says:--
The police occupy positions of great importance. They not merely
preserve order, the first essential of both liberty and civilisation,
but to a large portion of our population they stand as the embodiment
as well as the representative of the law of the land. To the average
dweller in a tenement-house district, especially if born abroad, the
policeman is in his own person all that there is of government: he is
judge, executive and legislature, constitution and town meeting.
The other witness is Mr. Godkin, the editor of the _Evening Post_, who,
writing in the _North American Review_ seven years back, says of the newly
landed immigrant:--
No sooner has he established himself in a tenement-house or a
boarding-house than he finds himself face to face with three
functionaries who represent to him the government of his new
country--the police justice of the district, the police captain of his
precinct, and the political “district leader.” These are, to him, the
Federal, State and municipal governments rolled into one.... These
three men are to him America. Everything else in the national
institutions in which Americans pride themselves he only sees through
a glass darkly, if he sees it at all.
These dwellers in tenement-houses in New York, to whom the police--of whom
there were then 4,000--are judge, executive, and legislature, constitution
and town meeting, comprise two-thirds of the population of the city. To
the foreign denizen of these districts--say one-half of the whole--the
policeman and his masters of the political machine are all of America that
he can see or understand.
Now let us see what kind of an America the New York police presented to
the eyes of the majority of the population of the city. The Lexow
Committee in its final Report, after commenting on the difficulty of
obtaining evidence owing to the terrorism practised by the police, said of
a typical case:--
This situation was characteristic. A consuming desire to put an end to
an outrageous servitude on the one hand, and a dread lest failure
might result in a still more galling thraldom on the other! It seemed,
in fact, as though every interest, every occupation, almost every
citizen, was dominated by an all-controlling and overshadowing dread
of the police department.
Those in the humbler walks of life were subjected to appalling
outrages which to some extent continued, even to the end of the
investigation. They were abused, clubbed and imprisoned, and even
convicted of crimes on false testimony by policemen and their
accomplices. Men of business were harassed and annoyed in their
affairs, so that they too were compelled to bend their necks to the
police yoke, in order that they might share that so-called protection
which seemed indispensable to the profitable conduct of their affairs.
People of all degrees seemed to feel that to antagonize the police was
to call down upon themselves the swift judgment and persecution of an
invulnerable force, strong in itself, banded together by self-interest
and the community of unlawful gain, and so thoroughly entrenched in
the municipal government as to defy ordinary assault. Strong men
hesitated when required to give evidence of their oppression, and
whispered stories; tricks, subterfuges and schemes of all kinds were
resorted to to withhold from this committee and its counsel the fact
that they had knowledge of acts of corruption or oppression by the
police. The uniform belief was that if they spoke against the police,
or if the police discovered that they had been instrumental in aiding
your Committee, or had given information, their business would be
ruined, they would be hounded from the city, and their lives even
jeopardised.--Vol. i., pp. 25, 26.
For wrongs inflicted by the police there was no redress. Mr. Goff in the
concluding stages of the investigation referred to this phase of the
question in the following significant terms:--
A great many innocent people who have been clubbed by the police in
our city have thought that the city was responsible for the actions of
its employés; but the courts have held time and time again that the
city is not responsible; and then from the further fact that nearly
every policeman in the city has his property in his wife’s name, it
has become a notorious thing that it is useless to bring an action for
assault against a policeman.... Mr. Jerome reminds me now of the
celebrated case of Mr. Fleming; I think it was a Decoration Day
parade. Captain Williams clubbed him in Madison Square, and he got a
judgment of $2,500; but the judgment was never collected. We have
never been able to get it on the record that a judgment against a
police official has been paid.--Vol. v., p. 4,661.
It is not surprising after this to read the answer of a witness, a
journalist of standing, who had been nearly murdered by a police captain
in the cells of the police-station. He was asked if he had taken
proceedings against his assailant. He replied:--
“I never did, sir. It is no use going to law with the Devil, and
Court, and Hell!”
To quote the more formal but not less emphatic finding of the Lexow
Committee:--
It appears, therefore, that the police formed a separate and highly
privileged class, armed with the authority and the machinery for
oppression and punishment, but practically free themselves from the
operation of the criminal law.--Vol. i., p. 30.
[Illustration: A VIEW IN ST. PETERSBURG. A City where the Police have as
much power as in New York.]
CHAPTER II.
THE POWERS AND THE IMPOTENCE OF THE POLICE.
One of the most pathetic of human fallacies is the assumption that you
have only to pass a law in order to extirpate an evil. The touching faith
of English-speaking men in the efficacy of statute-made law is nowhere
more strikingly illustrated than in the great cities of the United States.
The fact that a statute is only so much good paper inked by a
printing-press does not seem to occur to the citizens, even after the
repeated demonstrations of its impotence. Nowhere can severer laws be
found for the suppression of all manner of vice and crime than in those
cities where vice and crime hold high carnival under the patronage of the
police. It has been frequently observed that this habit of finding relief
for moral indignation by placing a stringent law upon the statute-book is
exactly the instinct which leads the private citizen to say “Damn!” There
is a great deal of this swearing at large in the passing of rigorous
statutes, which are no sooner passed than they appear to be forgotten.
Take, for instance, the laws which were passed from time to time to secure
the extirpation of vice and crime in the City of New York. They certainly
did not err in the direction of leniency. The usual complaint of the
police elsewhere is that they are not vested with sufficient power in
order to deal with the vicious and criminal classes. This cannot be said
with truth of the New York police, as will be seen from the following
extract from the proceedings before the Lexow Committee:--
Mr. Moss: We have got a situation here as autocratic as anything than
can be found in St. Petersburg; a law was passed in 1873 for the
purpose of giving the police abundant opportunity to enter such places
for any purpose that they might see fit to enter.
Mr. Goff: Judicial functions have been vested in the Superintendent of
Police, in a policeman of this city, who, on his own motion, can under
Section 285 of the Consolidation Act issue a warrant, and on the
execution of that warrant the doors of any house in the City of New
York may be broken in. If we had time to introduce evidence of cases,
we could do so where from spleen and malice on the part of some common
policeman, the respectable houses have been invaded without colour or
authority of right, except this arbitrary power given to the police by
law.
Senator O’Connor: That is simply a horrible condition of affairs;
better submit to a thousand disorderly houses than that one decent
house should be treated in such a manner.
Mr. Goff: Under the law as it exists to-day in the City of New York, a
policeman who is the Superintendent of Police--that is all he is, a
policeman--has the power to issue his warrant fully equal to that
exercised by the Prefect of Police in St. Petersburg....
Counsel then read as follows:--
“If any member of the police force, or if any two or more
householders, shall report in writing under his or their signature, to
the Superintendent of Police that there are good grounds, and state
them, for believing any house, room or premises within the said city
to be kept or used as a common gaming-house or common gaming premises
or room for playing for wagers, or for money at any game of chance, or
to be kept or used for lewd and obscene purposes or amusements, or the
deposit or sale of lottery tickets or lottery policies, it shall be
lawful for the Superintendent of Police to authorise in writing any
member or members of the police force to enter the same, who may
forthwith arrest all persons there found offending against the law,
but none other, and seize all implements of game or lottery tickets or
lottery policies and convey any person so arrested before a magistrate
and bring the article so seized to the office of the clerk; it shall
be the duty of the said Superintendent of Police to cause such
arrested person to be rigorously prosecuted and such articles seized
to be destroyed as the orders, rules and regulations of the Board of
Police shall direct.”
There has been no law in our country under our system of a more
complete, sweeping and comprehensive measure placed within the powers
of a simple executive office, as the Superintendent of Police is, as
this law. It exceeds that of the Common Law, where the power is vested
in a judicial officer to issue a warrant; but here a policeman may
authorise in writing any members of his police force to enter any
place complained of by either a member of the police force or by two
householders, and arrest all such persons found therein.--Vol. iv.,
4,493-7.
Notwithstanding this right of domiciliary visitation, which equals or
exceeds that possessed by the Prefect of St. Petersburg, we have it
admitted on all hands that it utterly failed in attaining its end. The
police machine, Mr. Goff declared, was by no means inefficient. Regarded
as a machine it was indeed, in his opinion, the most perfect machine ever
invented in New York. Notwithstanding all its mechanical perfection the
result was nothing but organised impotence.
Witness after witness appeared on the stand to attest the extraordinary
inability of the police authorities to cope with the flagrant evils in the
city or in the force under their command. On one occasion it was proved
that the agents of the Society for the Prevention of Crime had been hunted
by a mob of bullies and crooks for half a mile through Bowery. It was a
regular riot, in which the agents for the Society were struck and stoned
through the whole of Captain Devery’s precinct; the police officers
looking on as amused spectators. They were appealed to for assistance, and
took no notice. At last, the hunted men jumped on a car, and escaped with
their lives. But although this riot had taken place in the heart of the
city, and created a scandal through the whole of New York, Superintendent
Byrnes reported that he could not find any evidence that there had been a
riot (p. 4,834.) The extraordinary inability of the police to see what was
going on under their noses, although apparently phenomenal, was so
habitual that it ceased to excite any surprise. Saloons ran open all
Sunday under the eyes of the patrolmen. The Superintendent of the Society
for the Prevention of Crime gave evidence on this subject as follows:--
I pointed out an open saloon to a patrolman, whose name I do not know,
and inquired why he did not close it; he said that if I insisted upon
it, he supposed he must do so; but it would do no good, and only get
him in trouble with the department and cause his removal to some
undesirable precinct.--Vol. v., p. 4,835.
[Illustration: JOHN C. SHEEHAN. Ex-Police Commissioner. Boss of Tammany.]
But it is only when the Police Commissioners, who stand at the head of the
whole force, are under examination that we discover the extent of their
utter inability to find out anything. There was, for instance, Mr.
Sheehan, who at that time was Police Commissioner, and who now is the
titular Boss of Tammany Hall. The question of pool-rooms was under
consideration when he admitted that they existed, and that he knew they
were corrupting the police. Then the Chairman put the following
question:--
And, notwithstanding the fact that you knew or had heard that those
pool-rooms were corrupting the police, you thought it was not
necessary to take any action upon it?
Mr. Sheehan replied:--
I did start an inquiry to find out if those pool-rooms were paying,
what they were paying, and who they were paying it to. I did that
within a few months after I became a Police Commissioner, but I
couldn’t get any authoritative information of any kind on the subject;
but I got it from all sides that they were paying, and it was
believed that they were, but no person would substantiate or stand for
it.--Vol. iv., p. 3,765.
So he abandoned the subject as one which it was no use discussing any
further.
It was just the same with Mr. Commissioner Martin. He was asked concerning
the existence of corruption in the police force. I quote the following
from the Record:--
Examined by Mr. Sutherland: What did you do to restore the tone and
efficiency of the police?
A. The Board of Police was waiting for any evidence of that character
to be brought to it.--Vol. i., p. 483.
Q. What investigation has the Police Commissioners ever instituted to
discover the falsity of those charges?
A. No special investigation.--Vol. i., p. 484.
It was the same thing with disorderly houses.
Examined by Mr. Nicoll: And, during all the years you have been Police
Commissioner, you never have examined the record to see how many there
are or where they are located?
A. No, sir; I have not.
Q. And hasn’t that led you to go to these records to see what houses
were put down as disorderly in this category?
A. No, sir; I have not.
Q. Has the subject of suppression or diminution of these disorderly
houses been a matter of discussion before the Board of Police?
A. No, sir.--Vol. i., p. 528.
Even when crime was discovered, when the criminal was, as it were, taken
red-handed, there seemed to be a strange paralysis that prevented his
appearance in court. This affected other Boards besides that of the
Police. When the action of the Excise Board was under consideration, it
was admitted by Mr. Andrews, a Commissioner of the Board, that in one
notorious case the licence had been obtained by false swearing. Mr. Goff
asked:--
Q. Did you ever, when you discovered these false papers, as you say,
and of perjuries having been committed before the Board--did you ever
take any steps to have the perpetrators called to answer for the
crime?
A. No steps were ever taken for indictment; no.--Vol. iv., p. 4,386.
It was not for want of painstaking on the part of the Legislature that the
police force was not more efficient. Every constable before being
appointed had to comply with the provisions of the Civil Service law,
which were thus explained by Commissioner Martin:--
The candidate is required to have the names of a certain number of
citizens, usually five, to vouch for him as to his character--their
acquaintance with him; and all those papers having been finally
completed, the papers are sent to the Civil Service Board, where
examinations are held from time to time of batches of such applicants.
Application is made to the captain for examination of his character
and as to the persons who signed the paper, and a report is made in
writing by the captain. There are three Civil Service Commissioners
appointed by the Mayor; I do not recollect the names just at this
time. Once a year the Civil Service Board made an examination of all
applicants for patrolmen, and they usually examine in batches of from
400 to 600.--Vol. i., p. 567.
The Commissioners themselves, when asked about the subject, were at a loss
to explain how it was vice and crime flourished under their very eyes. Mr.
John McClave, the Republican Police Commissioner, told the Committee that
he had always voted with his Tammany Commissioners on the Board, because
“he had never known them to do anything wrong.” There was a very touching
little scene described by Mr. McClave’s son-in-law, as to the grief which
the appointment of the Lexow Committee occasioned Mr. McClave. Mr. and
Mrs. McClave were going to a reception one night, and, said Mr. Gideon
Granger, the son-in-law--
Mr. McClave was quite nervous, and Mrs. McClave turned to him and
said, “Why, Johnnie, what is the matter with you?” And he says, “Oh,
nothing, nothing.” And she says, “Oh yes, there is; it is that police
investigation business. I would not worry over that.” And he said, “I
don’t see why it is those hayseed politicians up in Albany want to
come down here and bother us honest men.”--Vol. i., p. 1,162.
Notwithstanding Mr. McClave’s pathetic lament, the Lexow Committee went on
with its work, and the conduct of these “honest men” was brought forth to
the light of day. With results.
[Illustration: SUPERINTENDENT BYRNES.]
[Illustration: NEW YORK AND BROOKLYN BRIDGE.]
CHAPTER III.
PROMOTION BY PULL AND PROMOTION BY PURCHASE.
The New York Police Department as it existed in 1894 was like the Scribes
and Pharisees in the Gospel. It was like unto whited sepulchres, which
indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones
and of all uncleanness. Hardly a single thing that was proved to exist
could have existed if the laws, rules and regulations had been faithfully
enforced. Therefore until the searchlight of the Lexow inquiry was turned
on, it was the correct thing to deny that the abuses, the corruption, the
blackmail had any existence. On paper the New York police was the finest
in the world. It was the most perfectly equipped, and it was armed with
authority as great as that of any autocrat. What then could possibly be
wrong?
The answer of the Lexow Committee, after hearing the evidence, was short
and succinct. Their answer to the question, What is wrong in the Police
Department? might be summed up in one word--Everything. From the crown of
the head down to the sole of the feet, the department was proved to be one
mass of putrefying sores. There was no health in it, and it was worst of
all at the top.
The Lexow Report says:--
The conclusion which has impressed itself upon your Committee is that
the disorganising elements at work in the Police Department are such
that operate from the higher officials down, rather than from the
patrolmen up.--Vol. i., p. 29.
But the origin of the mischief was found to exist not in the department at
all, but outside the department. The first thing that was wrong was that
the police were practically run by Tammany Hall politicians in the
interest of their party, and that the real governing power in the force
lay outside of it. Two of the Police Commissioners in whose hands the
control of the force was nominally lodged were leaders in their own
districts for Tammany Hall, and their sense of their obligations to their
party far outweighed their obligations to the law or to the city. As one
of the witnesses put it bluntly:--
So long as our municipal departments are run by Boss Croker, they will
be regarded as adjuncts of a political organisation, and will be used
to perpetuate its power. A police commission controlled by such
influence is incapable of rendering justice.--Vol. i., p. 114.
From an English point of view what New York needed most was a City
Council, with some effective control over the affairs of the city. The
shadowy unreality known as the Board of Aldermen cuts no figure in the
inquiry into the forces which actually governed New York. Tammany Hall,
the executive committee of Tammany Hall, came much nearer to the ideal of
a Municipal Assembly than the Board of Aldermen. It was to Tammany Hall,
and not to the Board of Aldermen, that the Police Commissioners appealed
when they wanted to enforce their authority over the men under their own
orders. This came out very plainly in Commissioner Martin’s evidence. He
found that his subordinates were taking so active a hand in politics,
joining political clubs and the like, that he wished to check it. He went,
not to the Board of Aldermen, but to Tammany Hall. He was asked:--
Q. Why did you go there?
A. I took occasion to speak in Tammany Hall about it, because there I
could reach people from different assembly districts; I have spoken to
representatives of the different districts about it in my office.
Q. And you went to Tammany Hall to engage their co-operation in
securing greater efficiency of the police force in New York city?
A. To aid in making it efficient; yes, sir.
Q. Was that because there was no other place to go to?
A. There was no other place to go to that would be as effective as
that.--Vol. i., p. 443.
No wonder the Committee reports:--
No stronger illustration is necessary to show how under the then
existing conditions a political faction had impressed itself so
strongly upon the police force that its authority was more potent than
that of the nominal chiefs of the department.--Vol. i., p. 19.
It was to Tammany Hall also that the liquor dealers appealed for
protection from the intolerable exactions of the police. “There was no
other place to go to.” The legal authorities were paralysed by the extreme
distrust felt by Americans in all elective assemblies. Tammany Hall
naturally and inevitably became the one living centre of popular authority
in the city. Its moral authority in New York was something like that of
the Land League over Ireland under Mr. Parnell. The Lexow Committee report
with a certain jealous awe concerning the “supreme head of authority,” Mr.
Richard Croker, who, although a private citizen, unconnected with the
Police Department, but leader of Tammany Hall, “was able to do what all
the other legally constituted authorities failed to accomplish.” They
say:--
The same private citizen whose authority was so potent to accomplish
all this, was able, by a word of command, at once to shut up all the
pool-rooms then in full operation, and which, according to the
testimony up to that time, neither the whole force of police, of
detectives, of superintendent, or of the Commissioners themselves
could effectively close.--Vol. i., pp. 18-19.
“Taken as a whole,” says the Lexow Report, “the records disclose the fact
that the Police Department, from the highest down to the lowest, was
thoroughly impregnated with the political influence of Tammany Hall”; and
they add, what naturally follows, “that the suppression and repression of
crime depended not so much upon the ability of the police to enforce the
law, but rather upon the will of that organisation or faction to have the
law enforced” (vol. i., p. 19).
The leaders of Tammany, no doubt, were not “agin the law” in the abstract.
But they owed their first allegiance to their party, and their first
thought was not of the duty they owed to the city, but of the duty they
owed to Tammany. The claims of that great brotherhood had precedence over
such trifles as the laws of the State, which after all were passed by
“Hayseed” legislators, or, in plain English, by the rustic vote of the
rural districts of the State of New York. One redoubtable worthy, Judge
and ex-Senator Roesch, who figures conspicuously in this American Tartarus
as one of the minor Plutonian deities, gave very interesting evidence on
this point. He was a Judge, an ex-Senator, and a leader of Tammany Hall.
His aid in the latter capacity seems to have been generally invoked by the
various law-breakers of the neighbourhood. He was asked by Senator
O’Connor whether it was not one of the duties of the district leader, “if
the members of his party were labouring under any kind of difficulty at
all, for the purpose of conducting his organisation and making that solid
with the parties, to do what he could to give them aid?”
The Senator answered unhesitatingly, “In every case.” When he was proved
to have received money from keepers of disorderly houses, whose girls were
run in by the police, he said that he received it entirely as a lawyer for
giving legal advice. But he admitted that when he went to the
station-house to bail out the girls, he acted as a political leader. So
the Chairman observed, “You advised as a lawyer and acted as a political
leader in carrying out your advice.” Mr. Senator Roesch is in many ways a
more typical representative of Tammany than Mr. Croker himself. Both,
however, agree on one principle. They always stick by their friends, and
when anything is going they see that, their supporters are not left out in
the cold. This, which would be denounced as scandalous nepotism on the
part of a less democratic Government, was unblushingly proclaimed as the
sole saving principle of appointing officials under Tammany. Senator
Roesch had used his influence or political pull in order to induce the
Police Commissioner Martin to transfer one Sergeant Schryer to another
precinct. Questioned by Mr. Goff before the Committee as to the grounds
for this intervention on his part in the promotion of the police, he made
the following answer:--
A. I will tell you; when a man comes to me and wants to get an
appointment or transfer, or anything like that, I never stop to
consider who is in the place he wants to go to, but my object is to
get him there; necessarily, somebody has got to get out of the way,
and here it happened to be Sergeant Schryer....
If I can get a friend of mine on the force, or get him a promotion or
position on the force, I always try to do it.
Q. And without inquiring, whether or not the man who is going to
suffer by the removal, who was to suffer?
A. That was none of my business; it was sufficient for me to know the
man they appointed to that place was competent and worthy of it, was a
friend or party organisation.
By Senator O’Connor: A political leader or a man holding a high
position here in the city, regardless entirely of the merits of the
man whom he seeks to remove, when requested by one of his
friends--political friends--to secure his position, that leader does
everything in his power to bring about that result?
A. For his friend.
By Mr. Goff: Now, we have it that both parties do it?
A. Certainly.
Q. Only that the Republican leaders do not have a pull?
A. Well, Republican leaders are not in the majority; New York city is
more a Democratic city.--Vol. ii., pp. 1,283-4.
Mr. Roesch confessed with frank brutality the principle upon which all the
politicians acted in relation to the patronage to which they believed they
were entitled. To make room for their friend, to secure a place on the
city pay-rolls for a political comrade, was ample justification for
insisting upon the removal of any officer who might happen to be in the
way. Let no one imagine that this was an exceptional case. Commissioner
Martin admitted frankly that from eighty-five to ninety per cent. of all
the appointments which he had made when he was chairman of the Police
Board were endorsed, in the first instance, by the district leader of
Tammany Hall for the district in which the applicant resided.
Under such a system promotion by merit was practically non-existent. On
this point Commissioner Martin was equally frank. He was questioned very
closely as to whether he had ever promoted an officer simply for merit.
After thinking a bit, he said he thought he could name one or two cases.
Then said Mr. Goff:--
So far as your recollection goes, with the exception of two instances,
so long as you have been police commissioner, you have not recommended
for appointment, promotion or transfer a single man, except one, who
was backed by political influence?
A. I do not recollect of any others. I think there are others of
them.--Vol. vi., p. 448.
But if a district leader of the type of Roesch was able to nominate
officers to the police, what becomes of the law by which all officers were
to be appointed by open competition in an examination conducted according
to Civil Service rules? The answer to this question is twofold. In the
first case, a certain margin was allowed to the Commissioners. They were
not bound always to appoint the candidates who came out on top. If they
were tolerably near the top, it was held to be sufficient. The second
answer is much more extraordinary. It was proved before the Committee that
by connivance with a police clerk it was quite possible for candidates to
be returned as having passed their examinations who had never been in
the examination-hall, and who never had written a single answer to any of
the questions! This was done by personation. A competent person entered
himself in the name of the candidate, filled in his examination papers,
and passed in his name. By this means there was no difficulty in driving a
coach and four through the Civil Service rules. The persons who obtained a
position on the force by this means were known as the pupils of those who
passed their examinations in their study, and were blackmailed
accordingly.
[Illustration: CITY HALL PARK, BROADWAY.]
John Schlie, examined by Mr. Moss, described how one of the personators
went gathering in his fees:--
I went down one day with Dave Brant to the police headquarters. We met
an officer; the next thing I know I saw two 10-dollar bills slipped in
his hand: he said, “That is good;” I said, “How did you get that?” He
said, “That is one of my students;” I said, “What do you mean?” he
said, “I passed for them people;” he said, “That is good;” so we went
and had a drink and walked a couple of blocks; he commenced scratching
his head, and he said, “I guess I have another student;” he goes down
there and gets 15 dollars more.--Vol. ii., p. 1,474.
Of course, it was impossible thus to cheat the Civil Service examinations
without the connivance of some of the officials, and this connivance had
to be paid for at a price. Thus the natural process, promotion by pull,
led up to promotion by purchase. The evidence on this point was
overwhelming. It appeared that in a very great number of cases--so many
indeed as practically to establish the rule--candidates who wished to be
appointed to the force had to pay 300 dollars to a go-between, who
negotiated the matter with the police authorities. How much money stuck to
the fingers of the go-between, and how much was passed on to those in
authority, does not clearly appear, but there is no doubt that the sum of
300 dollars was demanded, and paid, as a preliminary before the candidate
could assume the uniform of policeman.
This practice once begun, it rapidly extended. As the initial cost was 300
dollars, each step in promotion cost a larger sum. To be made a sergeant
cost 1,600 dols., while the price of a captaincy was 15,000 dollars! The
police who had purchased their promotion in this fashion naturally felt
that they had a vested interest in their posts. In the British army a
similar system of purchase grew up, but it was one which was regulated by
law and sanctioned by custom, whereas in the case of the New York police
the whole system was under the ban of the law. The Lexow Committee
remarked in their report upon this subject:--
The policeman who pays for his appointment commences his career with
the commission of a crime, and it is not strange that the
demoralisation thus engendered should follow him in his further
career. The captain who pays a fortune for his appointment finds
himself compelled to recoup in order to return the moneys loaned to
him by his friends by resorting to the practices which have been
disclosed in the record before us. It seems incredible that men who
are otherwise law-abiding and efficient should stoop to the
perpetration of the monstrous and debasing practices revealed by this
record, unless influenced by a system existing as the result of the
conditions hereinbefore alluded to. Nor is it strange that, in the
contemplation of these practices by superior officers, inferior
members of the force should have become demoralised, until the
contamination has spread throughout the entire department.--Vol. i.,
pp. 49, 50.
It may be asked how was it that, while the evil was still in its infancy,
and the force as a whole was not yet tainted through and through, its
honest members did not expose the corruption which was being established
in their midst? The answer is that the evil began at the top and spread
downwards. Hence, it was impossible for the private constable to make a
stand without exposing himself to a severe punishment for daring to be
more virtuous than his superiors. The following extract from Gideon
Granger’s evidence will show how this pressure from above operated upon
those below:--
A. I did not come to court because of the threats that were made by
Mr. McClave and Mr. Nicoll, and I knew the power that a police
commissioner has got, to use every bit of the department against
anybody, to accomplish their own ends, and, in fact, he has boasted of
that.
Q. Mr. McClave?
A. Yes, sir; endless power he has boasted of.
Q. What has he said in his boasting?
A. He said police commissioners had more power than the President of
the United States had; repeatedly said that.--Vol. i., p. 1,142.
In considering the action of the police, we ought in justice to remember
that they were living in a city the whole administration of which was
infected by this money canker.
Mr. William M. Ivins, private secretary to Mayor Grace, by whom he was
appointed City Chamberlain, estimated that in his time “assessments”--that
is, money paid by candidates to “guarantee the result” of their
elections--averaged £40,000 per annum. He wrote:--
“The existing system amounts to an almost complete exclusion from
official public life of all men who are not enabled to pay, if not a
sum equal to the entire salary of the office they seek, at least a
very large percentage of it. The poor man, or the moderately
well-to-do man, is thus at once cut off from all political ambition,
because the only key to success is wealth or machine power. The ablest
lawyer at our Bar could not secure a nomination for a judgeship unless
he were able to pay an assessment of from 10,000 dollars to 20,000
dollars (£2,000 to £4,000); while a mere political lawyer, if he have
the means of paying his assessment and stands well with the party
leaders, can without great difficulty secure a nomination, and even an
election, to an office for which he has no peculiar qualifications.”
It would therefore be unjust to judge the police without making due
allowance for the condition of their environment.
One of the most interesting witnesses who came before the Committee was
Captain Creedon. It was in his case that the facts concerning the purchase
of promotion were brought out most clearly.
Creedon was an Irishman, with a distinguished record and a high character.
He joined the police force in 1864, and was made sergeant after fifteen
years in the ranks. He remained sergeant for thirteen years, when he was
promoted to a captaincy. Before he entered the police he had served with
great gallantry in the Union army. He served with his regiment in no fewer
than twenty-three engagements. He entered as a private, rose to be a
sergeant, and his name was down for a first lieutenancy when he left the
army. His record on the police for thirty years’ service was extremely
good, hardly anything being entered to his discredit. Such entries as were
to be found related only to breaches of the technical rules of the force,
and in no way implied any moral guilt.
Captain Creedon was put in the witness-box, and asked how much he had paid
to be made a captain. He denied he had paid anything. As the facts were
perfectly well known, the Committee was much startled by Captain Creedon’s
perjury. But after adjournment had given time for reflection, the worthy
Captain came to the stand and explained that he had denied everything
because he was an Irish revolutionist, and that he had such a dread and
terror of being regarded as an informer, that he preferred to perjure
himself rather than incur that disgrace. He was willing to sacrifice
himself and risk going to gaol for perjury rather than in any way
implicate any of his friends in the improper and illegal transactions in
which he had been engaged.
It was carefully explained to him that he was not in Ireland, and that
nothing he could possibly say on the stand could expose him to the
imputation of being an informer. Having received this assurance, Captain
Creedon opened his mouth and spoke.
The story he had to tell was very simple. Three times he had gone up for
examination for a captaincy before the Civil Service Board. He had passed
creditably every time, but notwithstanding this, he seemed no nearer to
securing an appointment. His friends kept on telling him that he was
simply wasting his time going up for examination after examination. He had
much better stay at home unless he made up his mind to do one thing. He
steadily turned a deaf ear to their representations, until at last four
years after his first application, seeing that no one was promoted without
bribing their superiors, he consented to fall in with the general
practice. As soon as he did this, the way was made plain before him. Mr.
Reppenhagen, the representative of the New York Democracy in his district,
was indicated as the man to approach Police Commissioner Voorhis. Mr.
Reppenhagen saw the Commissioner, and reported to the Captain that the
place could be had for 12,000 dollars. Creedon had not at that time 12,000
dollars to invest in the purchase of a captaincy, but on talking it over
with his friends, they agreed to make up a purse, so as to enable him to
acquire the position which he coveted. While they were raising the money,
Reppenhagen reappeared, and announced that a certain sergeant named
Weigand had offered 12,000 dollars for the captaincy, and that if Creedon
wished to secure it, it would cost him 15,000 dollars. Creedon’s friends
were men of mettle, and they agreed to raise the full sum. Creedon gave
the subscribers notes acknowledging their subscriptions as a loan, which
he afterwards repaid. The money was raised, and deposited in a bank. A Mr.
Martin then appears on the scene as the confidential man of the Police
Commissioner, smelling round after the 15,000 dollars as a rat noses round
a cheese. For some reason or other there was a hitch in the appointment,
and Creedon’s friends and Reppenhagen passed some days in horrible
suspense as to whether or not, in spite of the money being “put up,” the
appointment might go to Sergeant Weigand, while Martin was equally alarmed
lest the 15,000 dollars should slip through his fingers.
The Record contains the following entries:--
John W. Reppenhagen examined by Mr. Goff: Do you remember saying to
Martin further, that as long as Creedon’s friends had put up more
money than Weigand was reported to have put up, that it would play the
devil in the organisation in that district if Creedon was not
appointed?
A. I might have said that.--Vol. v., p. 5,010.
Q. Don’t you remember when you said that to Martin, that Martin said
in word and in substance as follows: “I will go right down and I will
see Voorhis, who is too damned hoggish about this thing.” Do you
remember those words?
A. I don’t remember the words.
Q. When he was in that condition of excitement, and when he struck the
bar several times with his clenched fist, didn’t he say those words,
“That Voorhis wanted everything, almost the earth; he was hoggish, and
he would go right down to New York and talk right up to him, and tell
him he must do the right thing?”
A. In substance he said that--yes.--Vol. v., p. 5,014-5.
Reppenhagen was evidently in a state of great uneasiness about securing
the patronage for which the money had been raised by Creedon’s friends. By
way of enforcing his representations, he reminded Mr. Martin pointedly
that the only chance he had of fingering any of the money was to see that
Creedon’s appointment went through, otherwise he would not make a cent.
Thus pressed, Martin went off to see Voorhis. When he next saw Reppenhagen
he assured him that it was all right, and that Voorhis had pledged his
word to appoint Creedon the next Board Day. Even after this there was a
hitch. It was reported that Weigand was going to be appointed after all.
Reppenhagen then found it necessary to take hold of the affair with a
strong hand.
“John,” said he to Martin, “you had better go down yourself, and stay by
the Commissioner until the appointment is made.” Thus adjured, John went
down, vowing that he would not leave the Commissioner until he had
appointed Creedon. Then at last Creedon was duly appointed.
After this another hitch arose as to the difficulty of paying over the
money. Then it was Mr. Martin’s turn to be uneasy. He said he thought he
had been bilked, and that the money would never be turned over. Creedon’s
friends, however, were men of affairs, and knew the kind of gentry they
were dealing with. They had refused to hand over the money until the
Captain was duly appointed. But now that Creedon was a captain at last
they released the money. When Reppenhagen handed over the fifteen thousand
dollars to Martin, that functionary handed him back five thousand dollars
for himself. How much of the ten thousand dollars went to Commissioner
Voorhis or how much of it stuck to Martin’s fingers the record does not
show. Here, however, was clear and unmistakable evidence as to the
systematic manner in which promotions were arranged for and carried
through between the Commissioners on the one hand and the candidates on
the other.
There is a sequel to this story, which is so exquisitely absurd that it
seems more like _opera bouffe_ than a chapter from recent history. While
the Committee was still engaged in ferreting out how the money was paid
which secured Captain Creedon his captaincy, a startling rumour reached
the Committee that the Police Board had suspended Captain Creedon from
duty on account of his having obtained his captaincy by corrupt means. A
bombshell falling in the court could hardly have created greater
consternation.
To begin with, the Committee was a privileged body. All its proceedings
were privileged. For any outside authority to act upon the testimony which
it had taken without the direct authorisation of the Committee would be a
contempt of the Senate. Further, the evidence given by Captain Creedon was
tendered on the assurance of the Committee that no action could be taken
upon it by any outside authority. They had promised him protection and
immunity from persecution and prosecution, and for the Police Board to use
his own admissions against him, which were privileged communications, the
making of which secured him protection from any action based upon such
admissions, was an indictable offence at the common law. But what made
things worse was that, when the Captain left the stand, he had been
addressed in eulogistic terms by counsel. This was not without cause. His
candour in owning up and admitting everything had enabled the Committee to
penetrate into the depths of the mystery of promotion by purchase. Mr.
Goff had concluded his little speech by declaring that, “In view of
everything; in view of your splendid service to your country, and your
good service on the Police Department, it is the unanimous expression of
the Committee that the public interests would not be served were you to be
disturbed in your present position as police captain” (p. 4,982).
Within an hour of this emphatic and public certificate of commendation,
the Police Board met and suspended Captain Creedon from duty. Not a single
captain or police officer of all the black regiment of clubbers and
blackmailers, whose infamy had been proved before the Committee, and who
had been indicted before the Grand Jury, had been removed from duty. Only
when this honest officer had admitted the truth did they pounce down upon
him and make an example. It is only fair to say that the Board was not
aware when it suspended Creedon of the remarks that had been made by the
counsel of the Committee as he left the witness stand. When they were
rebuked they restored him to his post. But even with this allowance, the
fact that the Commissioners should have only made one suspension, and that
of a man who had confessed and repented of his wrong-doing, while they
left all the other scoundrels unwhipped, was one of the most significant
incidents in the whole course of the inquiry.
But after such an illustration of the methods of the Police Board, is it
very surprising that until the Lexow Committee sat the authorities were
utterly unable to discover any specific evidence as to the corruption into
which the whole force had sunk?
[Illustration: CAPTAIN CREEDON.]
[Illustration: CAPTAIN MAX F. SCHMITTBERGER.]
CHAPTER IV.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A POLICE CAPTAIN.
The following narrative of the career of a police captain of the City of
New York is taken for the most part textually from the evidence tendered
on oath by Captain Max F. Schmittberger, then in command of the Nineteenth
Precinct. The police of New York were four thousand strong, divided for
purposes of administration--and of plunder--into thirty-eight Precincts.
Schmittberger was Captain of the Nineteenth. He gave his evidence almost
at the close of the inquiry, when the essential facts were all proved up
to the hilt by the evidence of a multitude of witnesses. Strange, almost
incredible though it may appear that such an official should make so
remarkable a confession, it is to be remembered that the facts were
already known, and the only chance he had of saving himself was by turning
Queen’s evidence. When he took the stand under subpœna, the Chairman
addressed him as follows:--
We are here on the great State service to ascertain not only
individual or specific cases of fraud or corruption, but the general
system, and any witness who places himself on the stand here, no
matter if he has himself been guilty of the violation of the law, if
he places himself under the protection of this Committee, to serve it,
to aid it in the ascertainment of those questions that the State
Senate has imposed upon us, we shall consider it not only our
obligation and our duty under the circumstances as Senators,
individually and collectively, to do all that we can to see that that
immunity which the law throws about you is safely guarded, but that he
shall hereafter be protected from any of those results that that
testimony might otherwise bring upon him.--Vol. v., pp. 5,311-2.
Thus adjured, Captain Schmittberger did on the 21st of December, 1894,
unfold as remarkable a tale of infamy as ever was deposed on oath by an
officer supposed to be responsible for the enforcement of the law. When he
had closed his testimony, he said, “I have made a clean breast of
everything I know.” Mr. Goff, who was examining him, asked:--
Is it not a fact that, owing to the developments before this Committee
showing the corrupt and rotten condition of affairs in the Police
Department, you feel justified in coming forward and stating all you
know for the benefit of the people of this city and of this State? The
Captain replied: “I feel that the pillars of the church are falling,
and have fallen, and I feel in justice to my wife and my children that
I should do this.”--Vol. v., p. 5,382.
In compiling his autobiography I quote, wherever possible, textually from
his own words, giving the reference in all important points to the page
from which the quotation is taken.
FROM THE EVIDENCE OF CAPTAIN SCHMITTBERGER.
I joined the police force when I was twenty-three years old, on January
28th, 1874. I had previously been a confectioner. I was married when I was
admitted to the force. The Civil Service rules were not in operation then,
neither had I to pay anything, for the practice of paying money for a
position in the force had not commenced so early as 1874.
I was first assigned to the 19th Precinct, then the 29th, better known as
the “Tenderloin.” For three years I served as patrolman. In those years I
discovered the importance of the political pull. The local politician, by
his influence with the Police Commissioners and the chief police
authorities, could generally make the sergeant his mouthpiece, and induce
him to give preference and show favours to patrolmen who were friends and
supporters of the politician. It was decidedly detrimental to discipline,
but it was the principle throughout. A sergeant who was seeking promotion
relied much more on his political pull than upon his record as a police
officer.
Senator O’Connor interrupted to ask:--
Is there any recognition of merit at all in the department as now
conducted, apart from money considerations or political influence?
Captain Schmittberger replied:--
To a very small extent. It is either politics or money.--Vol. v., p.
5,382.
The result has been that in the last ten years the police have
deteriorated. “They are more politicians than anything else” (p. 5,316).
The mischief of the political pull was increased when candidates had to
pay for their appointment. They felt they had purchased their positions,
and were sort of independent.
The system of purchase, which did not exist in 1874, gradually became so
general that if men wanted to get into the department it was necessary to
see one of the “go-betweens,” a set of men of whom one Charley Grant,
Commissioner McClave’s secretary, was very well known. These
purchase-officers made poor policemen, and they felt they had a right to
more protection than the others. When they were rebuked for offences by
their officers they would often defy them, basing their defiance upon the
ground of political influence and power to protect them from the
consequences of their act. This was especially the case with those men who
belonged to political organisations, political clubs.
There was the Pequod Club, for instance, a Tammany club, presided over by
Police Commissioner Sheehan, which I was pressed to join, owing to the
pull it would give me if I belonged to the Commissioner’s club. Several
police captains belonged to it, and the tickets for the club outings, at
five dollars apiece, were forced upon storekeepers and liquor dealers by
the police. They also compelled all the liquor dealers in the precinct to
buy Munzinger’s mineral waters, for Munzinger was secretary of the Pequod.
In the Tenderloin there were a great number of disorderly houses, which
were resorts for the criminals of the whole country, who came there to
meet prostitutes. That precinct of New York was the centre for the
criminal classes. No one interfered with them, it being perfectly well
understood by the police that they were under protection, and they were
under protection because they paid money for protection directly to the
police captain of the precinct. This was necessary, because without his
protection the officers would have closed the house. If they had
interfered with a protected house, they would have been removed to another
beat. Even if outrages occurred they knew they were not to interfere, as
the houses had paid the captain for protection, and no interference was
permitted. I heard once of an officer, of the name of Coleman, who was
killed in a disorderly house, and there never has been an inquest or an
arrest of any persons suspected of the crime, or any judicial inquiry
whatever touching the cause of that officer’s death (p. 5,328).
I was raised to the rank of a roundsman in April, 1880, because I found
Commissioner Whelan’s favourite dog, and I remained in the precinct till
March 6th, 1883. During all that time the state of things was very bad.
French women used to stand out in front of the railing in front of their
houses and pull every man in as he went through the street. When citizens
complained, they got no satisfaction. On one occasion a citizen who
complained was ordered out quick. There was a friction--a very large
one--between him and the Captain. It was even reported in the newspapers
at the time that the Captain had threatened to club the complaining
citizen out of the precinct.
During these early years I had a good record. I had arrested an important
burglar, who had shot at me. I received honourable mention twice; I got
the medal of honour from the department, and also the gold and diamond
medal from the citizens of the precinct for raiding out the thieves there;
I sent over 1,200 people to State prison whom I arrested myself in seven
years as a detective (pp. 5,383-4).
So it came to pass that in March, 1883, I was made sergeant. I remained as
sergeant for seven years, when I was made captain. I had passed at the
head of the Civil Service list, and had some influential political men
recommending me. I paid nothing for my appointment.
When I became captain I objected at first to the levying of blackmail. I
was appointed to the steamboat squad, and I had not been there any time
when detective Vail told me that he collected money from the ship
companies and dock occupants or lessees, and that my predecessors always
received half. I told him I did not care about a thing of that kind. Vail
replied, “You’re a damned fool if you don’t do it; you might as well get
it as well as the others” (p. 5,337). So I told him to go on and do the
collecting. He brought me 190 dollars a month, and I gave him 20 per cent.
commission.
At this time, in the police department when I became captain, it was an
understood thing, and a matter of common understanding among the captains
of the various precincts, that they were to take advantage of any
opportunity that presented itself to make money out of their respective
precincts (p. 5,337).
I did it--we all did it. It was the universal custom. I had a list of the
men and the amounts they received. The wardman brought me half of it to
the station-house. I then returned him 20 per cent. It was a poor
district, and so I was not expected to send any of my share up to the
inspector. He told me himself that he hardly expected anything, as there
wasn’t anything in the precinct. That was true, and therefore I tried to
get another as soon as possible. At the end of thirteen months I was
transferred to the Twenty-fifth Precinct. I brought with me my
confidential collector, Gannon the detective.
When we settled down in the new station we discussed what collections
could be made. We found there was nothing, only the policy shops, of which
there were about ten, and the Liquor Dealers’ Association. There was no
difficulty about either.
The policy shops, all those in the precinct and in the upper part of the
city, are under a man by the name of Parker, and if I remember right,
Parker came to the station-house and saw me, and told me how many shops he
had in the precinct; that was all. He was introduced to Gannon, and Gannon
did the rest (p. 5,341). He fixed the old price that had been understood
for years long before my time--twenty dollars a month per shop. The
Bohemian Liquor Dealers’ Association were equally easy to manage. They
paid eighty dollars per month.
My predecessor before he left had a talk with me about what should be
given to the Inspector. He said he gave him usually from fifty to
seventy-five dollars a month. He used to put the money in an envelope, and
give it to an officer, who would give it to the sergeant in Inspector
Williams’s office. I did not take this course. I went directly to Williams
and handed him fifty dollars in an envelope. He took it in his office at
headquarters without a word (p. 5,343).
I was three months in that precinct. I gave the Inspector a hundred
dollars one month. It was necessary to square him because it was in
Williams’s power to send men up there to raid those policy shops over my
head; I had to prevent him from doing that. Of course, upon consideration
of receiving that sum of money every month he wouldn’t do it (p. 5,344).
I had also to pay 20 per cent. to my collector. In return for this money I
gave protection to the policy shops, and allowed all the liquor dealers to
run open on Sunday. I was in the precinct three months, during which time
I duly reported to headquarters concerning disorderly houses, gambling
houses, &c., in my precinct, but I was very careful to say nothing of the
ten policy shops which paid for protection. It was an understood thing the
law was not to be enforced in the case of those who paid for protection.
After three months I was changed to the Twenty-seventh Precinct. In that
precinct there were ten policy shops and three pool-rooms. I brought
Gannon along with me. The policy shops paid as before, but the pool-rooms
paid two hundred dollars a month. This was the old tariff paid to my
predecessor, and continued, as a matter of course. Besides the usual 20
per cent. to the collector, I had to pay two hundred dollars per month to
Inspector Williams. During the nine months I was in the precinct I handed
him directly eighteen hundred dollars. He made no remark, and I would
merely say, “Here is something for you.” I gave him the same money I
received from the pool-rooms. But in this precinct I drew no money from
the saloons. There had been some trouble with my predecessor, and it had
been arranged that instead of paying the police the liquor dealers were,
in future, to pay direct to Tammany Hall (p. 5,349).
I was removed from this precinct because of the liquor dealers.
Superintendent Byrnes ordered me to make direct _bonâ fide_ excise arrests
where liquor was sold on Sunday. I made over twenty _bonâ fide_ arrests.
The President of the Liquor Dealers threatened the officers to have them
transferred if they made real arrests, and he was as good as his word. I
also was transferred for the same cause. The liquor dealers pulled the leg
of Commissioner Martin, who was a Tammany chief, and we were all
transferred. The Superintendent whose orders I obeyed could not protect
us. He simply told me to keep quiet, that the thing would right itself.
I was transferred to the Fifth Precinct, and there remained only nine
weeks. There were only two pool-rooms, which yielded four hundred dollars
a month, of which I gave fifty dollars to Inspector McAvoy. I put the
money in a blank envelope and left it on his desk at headquarters.
From the Fifth I was removed to the Ninth, where I only remained a month.
I made no collections there. But when I was removed to the Twenty-second I
had better fortune: I remained there from May to December. Here I first
struck disorderly houses. They paid--some ten, others twenty-five, and
others again as much as fifty dollars a month. The policy shops paid the
usual twenty-dollar tariff. There I collected from five hundred to six
hundred dollars per month. The gambling houses were all strictly closed
up.
It was while I was in this precinct that I came across Commissioner
Martin, who was protecting personally a house of ill-fame kept by Mrs.
Sadie West, 234, West Fifty-first Street. A body of citizens had made a
formal complaint. I sent an officer down to make inquiries. Mrs. West
said, “Commissioner Martin is a friend of mine, and don’t you do anything
until you hear from him.” Next day Commissioner Martin, who was at the
head of the Police Board, ordered me to send the officer back to apologise
and say he had made a mistake. “Hold on, Commissioner,” I said; “this
originates from a complaint of citizens.” “Well,” he replied, “I don’t
care; I want you to do what you are told.” So I had to send that officer
back, and he had to apologise (p. 5,363).
That was not the only difficulty I had with the Commissioners.
Commissioner Sheehan did his utmost to induce me to allow a gambling house
to be opened in the precinct by one Maynard, a friend of his friend Mr.
Proctor. The capital which Proctor was to bring to the gambling house was
his pull with Sheehan--the Superintendent’s orders were strict. So I told
Sheehan, whom I met at the Pequod Club. Sheehan told me that there was a
Spanish Club in that house, and I had no right to interfere with it; “if
they played cards among themselves without playing gambling games that I
had no right to interfere.” But the Superintendent said he would break me
if I allowed cards to be played there. When I told Sheehan this he
exclaimed, “Well, if they cannot play, Daly can’t play!” As a matter of
fact Daly was not playing (p. 5,368).
During my stay in this precinct I used to take one hundred and fifty
dollars a month in a closed envelope and give it to Inspector McAvoy at
headquarters. One curious circumstance I remember about him. The Inspector
is a very religious man, and he had conscientious scruples. He asked me
one time if some of the money I gave him came from disorderly houses; if
it did he didn’t want it, because he didn’t want any money of that kind; I
told him no, it hadn’t; he drew the line there (p. 5,370).
Of course as he had been captain in the precinct himself he knew that it
did come from disorderly houses, but he wished to be told it did not. I
reported to headquarters that there were no disorderly houses in the
precinct.
In December, 1893, I was made Captain of the Tenderloin, and have been
there ever since. But the glory had departed owing to the raids made after
Dr. Parkhurst’s action. I did not get more than 200 dols. a month there.
Georgiana Hastings’s house of ill-fame I was warned not to touch, as if I
did I should burn my fingers. I was informed that certain public officials
were in the habit of visiting Georgiana Hastings’s house--some officials
that graced the Bench, and some officials that held commissions in the
City of New York. One night, when a Bench warrant was sent there for
execution, there were two officials, one a judge of a Court in this
city--not of a Civil Court--in the house, and so that warrant was not
executed (p. 5,374). She paid no protection money. She was protected
inviolate by the law on account of the influential character of her
customers.
Last year I made a political contribution of 100 dols. both to Mr. Martin
and to Mr. Sheehan, who were both Police Commissioners and Tammany leaders
in their respective districts. I had nothing much to do with handling
money in payment for promotion. I acted as go-between in the case of
Martens. I took 1,600 dols. of his to Captain Williams, and he got him
made sergeant. Martens afterwards told me it would cost him 14,000 dols.
to be made captain. On the whole, I have been four years a police captain.
In that time I have been in command in six precincts, in every one of
which I found the custom of collections regularly established from of old.
* * * * *
It would seem that the tariff was fixed: the commission to the collectors,
and the proportion for the Inspector. The figures were as follows:--
Sources of Collectors’ Total
Time of Revenue Com. Inspectors’ Net
Precinct Stay per Month 20 per cent. Share Receipts
37 13 months Blackmail on ships, $190 495 -- 1,975
25 3 " {10 policy shops at $20 }
{Liquor dealers, $80 } 168 200 472
27 9 " {10 policy shops at $20 }
{3 pool-rooms at $200 } 1,450 1,800 3,950
5 2 " 2 pool-rooms at $200 160 150 590
{Policy shops, $20 }
9 7 " {Houses of ill-fame, } 700 1,050 1,750
{ $10, $25, and $50 = }
{ $500 }
19 12 " Houses of ill-fame, $200 480 -- 1,920
-- ----- ----- ------
46 3,453 3,200 10,657
The ransom extorted from the vicious and criminal classes of a single
precinct by the police would seem to be an irreducible minimum of a
thousand pounds per annum.
The Lexow Committee reported:--
The confessions summarised show the existence throughout the city of a
system so well regulated and understood that upon the assignment of a
new captain no conversation was necessary to instruct the precinct
detectives or wardmen as to their line of conduct. Without a word they
collected the illicit revenue, simplifying their duties as much as
they could, either by granting monopolies of a special kind of crime
to individuals, or imposing upon certain individuals who had knowledge
of a particular class of crime the obligation of collecting for them,
thus collecting monthly from all licensed vice and crime, and paying
over their collections to the captain, deducting for their services
twenty per cent. from the total. Or, rather, at first, paying the
whole to the captain, and receiving twenty per cent. back from him,
and thereafter making the deductions themselves. The captain, on his
side, visited the inspector and paid over to him a substantial
proportion of the amount collected.--Vol. i., pp. 45, 46.
[Illustration: THE CITIES WHERE DWELL THE STRANGERS WITHIN THE GATES. View
of Brooklyn Bridge from a roof in Broadway.]
CHAPTER V.
“THE STRANGER WITHIN THE GATES.”
“I was a stranger and ye took me in.” The familiar passage needs to be
interpreted in a different sense if it is to describe the treatment of the
stranger by the police of New York. In the evidence of the men who
practise the confidence trick, the curious fact came out that the police
expressly abandoned strangers to the tender mercies of the Bunco Steerer
and Green Goods dealer. These thieves were forbidden to practise their
arts upon the resident population of New York. But the “guy” was fair
game. The stranger from the country was abandoned to the plunderer, who
indeed could count upon the active co-operation of the police--in return
for a share of the loot. The stranger was taken in indeed. But not in the
sense of the Bible text.
The treatment of Americans who were strangers in the sense of not
possessing a fixed abode within the city limits, was bad. The treatment of
the stranger from over sea, the foreign immigrant, was infinitely worse.
It has been the glory of Columbia, as one of the poets declared, that her
latchkey was never drawn in to the poorest and weakest of Adam’s kin. The
boast is no longer true. Restrictions upon the pauper immigrants from the
Old World have been multiplied of late with ominous rapidity. But the
foreigner had already established himself by the million within the
Republic before the restrictive policy was begun.
In the Civil War, when the negroes were enrolled as soldiers in the
Federal ranks, their presence was excused by the cynical remark that
niggers were good enough food for powder. The foreign denizen of the New
York slums is regarded in much the same light by the police of the city.
Not as food for powder, but as material for plunder--squeezable folk who
have no rights, save that of being allowed to swell the registration list
of their oppressors. The police brigands levied blackmail boldly enough
even when dealing with the cute Yankee and the smart New Yorker. But when
they were let loose on the foreigner their rapacity knew no bounds. They
had the power of a Turkish pasha in an Armenian province, and they used it
almost as ruthlessly. They did not massacre, it is true. There was no
occasion for such extreme measures. Even the Turk would not slaughter his
taxable cattle if they were not guilty of indulging in aspirations after
freedom. No dream of revolt ever crosses the mind of the poor wretches in
the city slums to whom the policeman is the incarnate embodiment of the
whole American Constitution. Back of him stands the whole
Government--City, State, and Federal. What he says goes. So the
foreigner--poor, ignorant, friendless--can only obey.
A witness before the Lexow Committee testified to the existence of a gang
of criminals known as the Essex Market Gang, which had established a
regular reign of terror in the neighbourhood. This witness, whose name was
John Collins, said:--
Last night business people spoke to me; I live nineteen years in that
neighbourhood and begged of me to protect them; it is impossible to
live there with the gang; they can convict any man they want to, and
they can make free any man they want to, because they have got their
witnesses; the leading man is Martin Engel, he owns property over
200,000 dollars, got from ruining people.
Mr. Moss: You can see what power these men have when they have lots of
men swearing to anything, and police officers to make arrests, and
judges holding them and discharging them at will.
Chairman Lexow: If the situation is such as indicated, how is it there
has not been a revolt down there?
Mr. Moss: The class of people are largely those who have come from
foreign countries--countries where they have been used to that sort of
thing, and supposed this Government just about the same, and, perhaps,
a little worse than the place they came from; they are largely Polish
Jews and Russian Jews and foreigners of that class, who have small
understanding of the English language and no knowledge of our custom.
Those are the class of people that are terrorised by this gang.--Vol.
v., p. 4,896.
In small things as in great, the helplessness of the poor foreigner is
conspicuous. Here is an instance of the way in which an Italian shoeblack
was treated for daring to ask an officer, whose boots he had blacked on
credit for a month until the little bill had run up to 75 cents, to settle
up. The bootblack, whose name was Martini, stopped the officer, whose name
was Gwinnen, as he was passing their stand, and said:--
“Gwinnen, why don’t you pay what you owe me?” so he said, “The next
time you stop me on my way going across the street, I will smash you
on the jaw, you dirty Italian son-of-a-bitch;” at the same time my
partner got up and said, “Well, why don’t you pay us?” At the same
time he rushed up against my partner like a cyclone and struck him
right and left with his hand; and he had him all bleeding. I tried to
step in between the two of them to separate them, and this officer
Looney came along from behind me and he grabbed me by the back of the
neck and punched me between the eyes, and he said, “Let us pull the
guinea in.”
Q. Whom did he mean by the guinea?
A. Well, he meant us two; so we went to the station-house, and they
made a charge of disorderly conduct: they claimed that we were
fighting each other, me and my partner.
Q. And both of you were cut and bleeding at this time?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Were the officers in uniform?
A. All in uniform. When they went into the station-house they told
their story, and when I went to tell my story, they wouldn’t listen.
They heard the policeman’s story, but would not let us tell ours at
all. Another officer took me to the court, and Gwinnen took my partner
along; when we got to the other side of the station-house,
Sixty-seventh and Lexington Avenue, this Gwinnen took off his belt,
doubled it in two, and struck my partner in the face two or three
times.
Q. You were then under arrest?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And on your way to the police-court?
A. Yes, sir; I appealed to the officer that had me, and I said,
“Officer, tell him that he should not hit him any more;” so after he
turned around my partner was a sight.--Vol. iv., pp. 3576-7.
The sequel of this episode is interesting. The judge, apparently thinking
the poor wretches who were brought before him all bloody had had enough of
it, dismissed the case. Strange to say, the victims in this case
endeavoured to obtain redress. They appealed to the Superintendent, who
promised that the officers should be punished. Nothing was done. They then
made another effort, raised £5 to pay a lawyer, and began an action for
assault. One officer was held for the Grand Jury. But it was postponed
again and again. The lawyer insisted on more money, which was not
forthcoming, and so the Italians lost their £5, had their beating, and do
not even appear to have recovered their 75 cents.
The lesson thus taught, not to throw good money after bad, and the
impossibility of getting justice of a policeman, has been learned so well
that one marvels at the temerity of the brave bootblacks, whose courage
deserved a better fate.
The Lexow Committee in their Report put it on record as their deliberate
conclusion that--
The poor ignorant foreigner residing on the great east side of the
city has been especially subjected to a brutal and infamous rule by
the police, in conjunction with the administration of the local
inferior criminal courts, so that it is beyond a doubt that innocent
people who have refused to yield to criminal extortion, have been
clubbed and harassed and confined in gaol, and the extremes of
oppression have been applied to them in the separation of parent and
child, the blasting of reputation and consignment of innocent persons
to a convict’s cell.--Vol. i.
The case which appears to have produced the deepest impression for wanton
wickedness and ingenious devilry on the minds of the Commissioners was the
attempt to plunder an unfortunate widow woman of the name of Urchittel.
Mrs. Urchittel was a Russian Jewess, who emigrated to the United States in
1891. Her husband had died at Hamburg, from which city she sailed for New
York, where she arrived, accompanied by her four children, the eldest of
whom was fourteen, the youngest three. But it is best to print in her own
simple language the statement of her wrongs:--
In 1891 I came to New York, a widow with four children; my husband
died in Hamburg. Being without means, I applied to the Hebrew
charities on Eighth Street for help, and they were kind enough to
support me for starting a boarding-house in 166 Division Street, and
gave me for furniture and other necessaries, and, besides 60 dollars,
sent immigrants to my boarding-house. My business was increasing
daily, having thirty to thirty-five persons every week, and in eight
months I saved 600 dollars. I worked hard indeed, but I did it gladly,
knowing that this will enable me to support my children, the orphans.
The immigration having been stopped, I had to give up boarding
business, and applying again to the Charities, they supported me
again, giving me 150 dollars, and sent me to Brownsville, where I
bought a restaurant and made a nice living, but having the misfortune
to lose one of my beloved children, I left Brownsville, after staying
there but a little time, and came back to New York.
I bought a cigar store in 33, Pitt Street, corner of Broome, for 175
dollars, and gave the landlord 40 dollars security, and supplied more
goods for 50 dollars. On the second day of my taking possession of the
store a man came in and bought a package of chew tobacco for five
cents. A couple of days later the same man came in, asking me for a
package of chew tobacco, to trust him, which I refused, excusing
myself being recently the owner of that store; I don’t know anybody of
that surrounding. I cannot do it. He took then out a dollar of his
pocket and gave it to me for changing, and having no small change,
only pennies, which he wouldn’t take, I sent my one-year aged daughter
to get other coin for the dollar, and handing same to the man I felt a
tickling in my hand caused by the quarter of the dollar in the hand of
the man, and I said good-bye to him.
On the evening of that day another man came in the store, and told me
that the man who was before asking for chew tobacco without money is a
detective, and that he has a warrant to arrest me, and I can avoid the
trouble by giving the detective 50 dollars, and refusing to do it, I
will be locked up, and my children taken away from me till the
twenty-first year. Not knowing to have done anything wrong, I laughed
at the man, and told him that I wouldn’t give a cent to anybody, and
if that man should come in again, I will chase him out with a broom.
The other night, at 11 o’clock, the children being asleep already, the
same man who asked me to trust him the chew tobacco, and after which I
learned he was a detective, named Hussey, came in with another man who
took away my cousin that came to see me in that night, and the
detective remained with me alone in the store; he told me then that he
knows that I keep a disorderly house and saved 600 dollars of that
dishonest business. If I wanted to escape being arrested, he wanted 50
dollars. I opposed to his assertion, and protested against his wanting
money of me, saying that I ever made a living by honest business, but
he wouldn’t listen to me, and in spite of my protesting and the crying
of my children, I was forced to leave my store and follow him.
As we were two blocks away we met Mr. Hochstein, and crying, I told
him all my trouble, and how I don’t know anything about the false
accusations. It was of no avail; Mr. Hochstein told me that the
detective wants 75 dollars, but he will try to settle it with 50
dollars, but without any money nothing can be done for me, and gave me
also his advice, to pay 10 dollars monthly to the detective I wouldn’t
be troubled at all, and that I should resume my business unhindered. I
repeated again that I don’t know anything about dishonest business,
but it was no use talking more.
I was dragged from corner to corner till three o’clock in the morning,
insisting that I had money with me, 600 dollars I kept it in my
stockings. Weary and tired out, I sat down at the corner of Essex and
Rivington Streets at a dry goods store and took off my stockings,
showing that I had no money in them. “If you don’t want to give the
money,” said the detective to me, “I can’t help it, you must follow me
to the station-house.” Being convinced that it is impossible that I
should escape without giving money, I took out 25 dollars of my
pocket, the only money I had, and handed them over to the detective
standing by a window, which money was parted between Mr. Hochstein and
himself, he taking 13 dollars and Hochstein 12 dollars.
They went with me to Essex Street, and, sending me in through a gate
in the house, where I was kept about two minutes, they sent me home
after with the warning to be prepared with fifty dollars. At seven
o’clock in the morning the detective, Hussey, came to my store asking
for the money. I cried again and begged him to let me go, that I am
not able to give him any more money; but he didn’t want to hear me any
more, and I had to follow him. By the signal of a whistle a man came
near me, and the defective gave me over to him with the remark not to
let me go till I have the fifty dollars. The name of that man is Mr.
Meyer. I went with him to Mr. Lefkovitz, manufacturer of syrups, 154,
Delaney Street, and to Mr. Frank ---- for selling the store even for
the fifty dollars, but they didn’t want to buy it, seeing the man
after me and fearing trouble. After trying in vain to sell the store
the detective said to Mr. Meyer, “That bad woman don’t want to give
the money. Take her to the court,” and I had to stay at the trial.
Two bad, disreputed boys were engaged by the detective, Hussey, for
witness. The one said that he gave me fifty cents for gratifying him,
and the other said that he would give me forty cents, and I did not
agree asking fifty, and thus I was detained in default of five
hundred dollars bail. Having been sitting in the court the detective,
Hussey, came in to me on the same day at four o’clock P.M., and told
me that my children are already taken away from my house, and if I can
give him the fifty dollars he can help me even now.
Hearing the distress of my poor children, I cried loudly, and a lady
took me to a dark room, where I was locked up. Unable to procure bail,
I was imprisoned for three days, and sent after to the Tombs, where I
had to stand trial.
There were about fifty persons to witness that I had always made an
honest living, but they were not asked at all, and being wholly unable
to understand the English language, I couldn’t defend myself. The
lawyer, who was sent from the Hebrew Charities, came too late, and had
to give only the certificate of the society, testifying that I was
supported by them, and led a decent living. It came too late, and I
could not talk any more.
I was fined fifty dollars. My brother sold my store for sixty-five
dollars, and paid the fine.
I ran then crazy for my children, for I didn’t know where they were.
Meeting the detective he told me that they are in the hands of a
society in Twenty-third Street. I ran there, but no one knew of my
children. Finally, after five weeks, I received a postcard of my
child, that the children are at One Hundred and Fifty-first Street and
Eleventh Avenue, and when I got there, and begged to give me back my
children, none would hear me.
Grieved at the depths of my heart, seeing me bereaved of my dear
children, I fell sick, and was laying six months in the Sixty-sixth
Street hospital, and had to undergo a great operation by Professor
Mundy. After I left the hospital, I had the good chance to find a
place in 558, Broadway, where I fixed up a stand by which I am enabled
to make a nice living, to support and educate my children. I went
again to Twenty-third Street, begging to release my children, and that
was denied again. My heart craves to have my children with me.
I have nothing else in the world only them. I want to live, and to die
for them. I lay my supplication before you, honourable sir, father of
family, whose heart beats for your children, and feels what children
are to a faithful mother. Help me to get my children. Let me be mother
to them. Grant me my holy wish, and I will always pray for your
happiness, and will never forget your kind and benevolent act towards
me. Your very humble and faithful servant, (Signed) CAELA
URCHITTEL.--Vol. iii., pp. 2, 961-4.
[Illustration: MRS. URCHITTEL.]
The piteous plea of this bereaved mother produced a great effect upon the
mind of the Committee. The children had been taken away by the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, under an Act which had been passed
with the best intentions in the world, but which, as the case of Mrs.
Urchittel showed, was only too facile an instrument in the hands of the
corrupt police. It will be noticed that in her evidence she said that “two
bad, disreputed boys” were engaged to swear away her character. The
allusion was a reminder of the fact that one of the worst developments of
the system under which the police became bandits was the organisation of a
band of professional perjurers, who would swear anything the police cared
to tell them. Mrs. Urchittel’s character was irreproachable, yet on the
evidence of these scoundrels she was convicted of keeping a house of
prostitution. The man Hochstein, who divided the plunder with the
detective, was a saloon-keeper, and a prominent politician in the
district, who figures very conspicuously in the evidence of other
witnesses before the Committee. No sooner had Mrs. Urchittel given her
evidence than two men came to her and warned her that if she were to
commence with Mr. Hochstein she would get into trouble, and be sent to
prison for two years.
The efforts of the Commissioners to secure the return of the children to
their distracted mother were for a time thwarted by the provisions of the
law which is so hidebound and imperative in its terms that no judge would
venture to interfere with the commitment of the police magistrate. Mr.
Goff called attention to the fact that “the condition of the law in New
York City is that, upon the _ipse dixit_ of one man, children can be taken
from their protectors, fathers and mothers, and secreted away in some
institution, and there is no power invested in any court or in any
official to compel him to reveal where the children are or to restore
them.” The sensation occasioned by this case was so great that the
Commission were able towards the close of their sittings to announce the
gratifying intelligence that they had at last succeeded in securing the
release of the children, who were then, after more than eighteen months,
handed over to their mother. The opinion of the Commissioners on the case
was embodied in the following terms, which I quote from their Report:--
Oppression of the lowly and unfortunate, the coinage of money out of
the miseries of life, is one of the noteworthy abuses into which the
department has fallen....
The evidence of many witnesses shows the existence of a wonderful
conspiracy in the neighbourhood of Essex Market police-court, headed
by politicians, including criminals, professional bondsmen,
professional thieves, police, and those who lay plots against the
unwary, and lead them into habits of law-breaking, or surround them
with a network of false evidence, and then demand money as the price
of salvation, and if they do not receive it, drag their victims into
court and prison, and often to a convict’s cell....
In another case, Mrs. Urchittel, a humble Russian Jewess, ignorant of
our tongue, an honest and impoverished widow with three small
children, whom she was striving to support, was falsely accused by a
precinct detective of keeping a disorderly house in the back room of
her little store where she and her little children slept, and he
demanded a sum of money which she could not pay, whereupon he took her
from her home, dragged her through the streets until three o’clock in
the morning, pulled down and searched her stockings for money, until
she in despair produced all that she had saved for her month’s rent.
This being insufficient, he gave her a short time to obtain the
balance, and she tried to sell her store, but failed, and then he
arrested her again, lodged a false and infamous charge against her,
fastened it upon her by the testimony of miserable tools whom he had
employed for the purpose, and secured her conviction. Her children
passed into the hands of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children. Her fine was paid by selling her store, and she was
released, only to fall into a severe and lingering illness. When she
recovered her home was gone, her children were gone, and she was
p
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