THE TAMMANY TIGER
You shake your head and say: “I had no idea of such things; yes,
Southern California must be very bad indeed!” But I beg you not to fool
yourself in that way. Southern California is exactly the same as the
rest of industrial America. In the course of this book we shall visit
the Bay Cities of California, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley; also
Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, in the far Northwest. We
shall visit a number of cities scattered across the continent—Spokane,
Butte, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit; on
the Atlantic coast we shall visit New York, Boston, Worcester,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. We shall have glimpses of many
towns, and of the rural schools in many states; also we shall not
overlook the private schools and the big “prep” schools, where our
youthful aristocracy is made ready for the gladiatorial combats and the
social intrigues of college.
In all these regions we shall find the plutocracy in control of business
and politics; and we shall find the very same interests, and as a rule
the very same individuals, in control of the schools. Whether or not
they use the methods of the Black Hand depends purely and simply upon
one question—to what extent the subject classes are attempting to
protest. If the subject classes make no protest, there is no violence by
the master class. If the subject classes attempt to protest, then there
is whatever amount of violence is necessary to hold them down.
I begin with New York City, because that is the headquarters of our
financial, and therefore of our intellectual life. It is from New York
that we are controlled, both in body and in mind, whether we have any
idea of it or not. As it happens, I know New York and its schools at
first hand, having spent my boyhood and youth in the city.
The Black Hand of the metropolis is known as Tammany Hall; and under its
shadow I went to school, and also to college—a free, public college,
full of Tammany professors. In my home the father of the family was
drinking himself to death; it was Tammany saloon-keepers who sold him
the liquor, it was Tammany politicians and a Tammany police force which
guarded these saloons while they defied a dozen different laws. In that
city hundreds of thousands of children were wondering, just as I
wondered, why all powers of the state were used for their destruction,
instead of for their aid. With the dope-rings and the bootleggers
flourishing as they are today, there must be ten times as many children
asking this question; and with exceptions so few as to be hardly worth
mentioning, all the power of the schools and the colleges, as well as of
the pulpit and the press, is devoted to keeping these children from
finding out. They kept me from finding out until I had entirely come out
from under both the physical and the intellectual control of the Black
Hand of New York.
Tammany Hall is an old-style pirate crew, wearing modern clothing and
operating systematically at looting the richest of all modern cities.
Its symbol is the Tiger. In the days of my boyhood people still
remembered Tammany as it was run by Tweed, who carried off a great part
of its cash and sold a great part of its belongings. In my day the chief
was a grown-up gangster and bruiser by the name of Richard Croker, who
stated to a committee of the state legislature, “I am working for my
pocket all the time.” His method was to make systematic collections from
the brothels and gambling-dives and saloons; also, of course, from the
contractors who wanted to charge half a dozen prices for the paving of
streets and the removing of the garbage, and other jobs for which a city
has to pay.
Even in my day the Tammany chieftains, like other successful bandits,
were beginning to grope their way toward respectability. Every bandit in
America wishes to become respectable—the test of respectability being
that you get a hundred times as much loot. The financiers of Wall
Street—the banks and insurance companies and the New York Central
Railroad, which were organized as the Republican party and controlled
“upstate”—used to fight the Tammany machine year after year, and be
beaten, for the simple reason that Tammany controlled the polling places
in the East Side slums, and distributed free coal to the poor in winter
and free ice in summer, and therefore could count upon loyal “repeaters”
and ballot-box staffers at election time. During my youth, the
financiers, finding that they could not oust the Tiger, came to terms
with it; such men as Whitney and Ryan, the backers of Tammany, were
making so many tens of millions out of traction steals that they left
the police graft as small change to their political subordinates.
I had an opportunity to observe this transformation at first-hand, for
the reason that part of the profits were at my disposal. A friend of my
boyhood was founder and president of a big financial concern, which
wanted to come into New York. He went to the chiefs of Tammany, and took
one of them for his New York manager, and distributed generous blocks of
stock to Croker and his henchmen. At once his concern became the
official house for that class of business, and the word went out that
every politician and every city employe must patronize it. I remember as
a lad sitting at luncheon with this friend, hearing him denounce the
evil-minded men who criticized our business leaders, the master minds of
our country; then presently the conversation changed, and this friend
told me how he had just obtained the nomination of one of his managers
as state treasurer, and how much he was paying to the campaign fund of
the Democratic party, expecting to get it back many times over in the
form of business with the state.
Today the chiefs of Tammany Hall are great financiers, and the efforts
of the Republican party to win elections in New York City are largely
formal. How completely the two parties are one, you realize the instant
there is prospect of a Socialist candidate being elected. Immediately
the leaders of the two old parties get together and agree upon a ticket,
and their watchers at the polls unite to slug the “Reds” and stuff the
ballot boxes. Afterwards, when the Socialists collect evidence of these
crimes, the Democratic officials of the city and the Republican
officials of the state unite in doing nothing about it. And so the Black
Hand rules New York.