THE BOSS, AND HOW HE CAME TO RULE NEW YORK
By Alfred Henry Lewis
Author Of “Peggy O'Neal,” “President,” “Wolfvilledays,” Etc.
A. L. Burt Company, Publishers, New York
1903
[Illustration: 0005]
THE WORD OF PREFACE
It should be said in the beginning that these memoirs will not be
written by my own hand. I have no skill of pen and ink, and any relation
of length would be beyond my genius. The phrasing would fall to be
disreputable, and the story itself turn involved and to step on its own
toes, and mayhap with the last of it to fall flat on its face, unable
to proceed at all. Wherefore, as much for folk who are to read as for
my own credit, I shall have one who makes print his trade to write these
pages for me.
Nor shall I advance apology in this. If I plan for the construction of
a house, I call to my aid architects and artisans in wood and stone and
iron. I am not disgraced for that out of my own hands and head I do not
throw up the walls and lay on the roof of the edifice. Why, then, when
now I am about the paper-telling of my life, should I blush because I am
driven to seek the aid of him who makes an inkpot his profession? I am
like a lumber-yard or a stone-quarry, and full of the raw material for
this work; but I require one drilled of saw and chisel to carry off the
business of my housebuilding.
It would be the thing natural, should you who open these leaves put the
question of motive and ask why, when now I am retired, and should be
cautious with my threescore years, I come forth with confidences which,
aside from the mere sorrow of them, are like to prove less for my honor
than I might wish. Why is it that I who have removed my loneliness
and my millions to scenes of peace at least, may not leave well enough
alone? Why should I return with disclosures touching Tammany and the
inner history of that organization, when the dullest must apprehend only
trouble and pain as the foolish fruits of such garrulity?
To the cheer of ones still on the firing lines of Tammany effort, let me
promise to say no more of them than belongs of necessity to the story
of my own career. I aim towards the painting of no man's picture save
my own. Also from first to last I will hold before the face of each old
friend the shield of an alias and never for a moment in name or feature
uncover him to the general eye.
As to why it pleases me to give the public my Tammany evolution, and
whether I hope for good or ill therefrom, I am not able to set forth.
There is that within my bosom to urge me to this work, that much I know;
the thing uncertain being--is it vanity, or is it remorse or a hunger
for sympathy to so ride me and force my frankness to top-speed? There
comes one thought: however black that robe of reputation which the truth
weaves for me, it will seem milk-white when laid side by side with what
Mendacity has invented and Malice sworn to as the story of my career.
Before I lift the latch of narration, I would have you pardon me a first
defensive word. Conceiving that, in the theory of politics, whatever the
practice may discover, there is such a commodity as morals and such a
ware as truth, and, remembering how much as the Chief of Tammany Hall I
have been condemned by purists and folk voluble for reform as a fashion
of City Satan, striving for all that was ebon in local conditions and
control, I would remind the reader--hoping his mind to be unbiased and
that he will hold fairly the scales for me--that both morals and truth
as questions will ever depend for their answer on environment and point
of view. The morality of one man is the sin of another, and the truth in
this mouth is the serpent lie in that. Having said this much, let me now
go forward without more of flourish or time to be eaten up with words.
THE BOSS
CHAPTER I--HOW THE BOSS CAME TO NEW YORK
MY father was a blacksmith, and he and my mother came out of Clonmel,
where I myself was born. There were four to our family, for besides my
father and mother, I owned a sister named Anne, she being my better in
age by a couple of years. Anne is dead now, with all those others I have
loved, and under the grass roots; but while she lived--and she did not
pass until after I had reached the size and manners of a man--she abode
a sort of second mother to me, and the littlest of my interests was her
chief concern.
That Anne was thus tenderly about my destinies, worked doubtless a deal
of fortunate good to me. By nature, while nothing vicious, I was as
lawless as a savage; and being resentful of boundaries and as set for
liberty as water down hill, I needed her influence to hold me in some
quiet order. That I have the least of letters is due wholly to Anne, for
school stood to me, child and boy, as hateful as a rainy day, and it was
only by her going with me to sit by my side and show me my blurred way
across the page that I would mind my book at all.
It was upon a day rearward more than fifty years when my father,
gathering together our slight belongings, took us aboard ship for
America. We were six weeks between Queenstown and New York; the ship my
father chose used sails, and there arose unfriendly seas and winds to
baffle us and set us back. For myself, I hold no clear memory of that
voyage, since I was but seven at the time. Nor could I have been called
good company; I wept every foot of the way, being sick from shore to
shore, having no more stomach to put to sea with then than I have now.
It was eight of the clock on a certain July night that my father, having
about him my mother and Anne and myself, came ashore at Castle Garden.
It being dark, and none to meet us nor place for us to seek, we slept
that night, with our coats to be a bed to us, on the Castle Garden
flags. If there were hardship to lurk in thus making a couch of the
stone floors, I missed the notice of it; I was as sound asleep as a tree
at midnight when we came out of the ship and for eight hours thereafter,
never once opening my eyes to that new world till the sun was up.
Indeed, one may call it in all candor a new world! The more since, by
the grace of accident, that first day fell upon the fourth of the month,
and it was the near, persistent roar of cannon all about us, beginning
with the break of day, to frighten away our sleep. My father and mother
were as simple as was I, myself, on questions of Western story, and
the fact of the Fourth of July told no news to them. Guns boomed; flags
flaunted; bands of music brayed; gay troops went marching hither and
yon; crackers sputtered and snapped; orators with iron throats swept
down on spellbound crowds in gales of red-faced eloquence; flaming
rockets when the sun went down streaked the night with fire! To these
manifestations my father and the balance of us gave admiring ear and
eye; although we were a trifle awed by the vehemence of an existence
in which we planned to have our part, for we took what we heard and
witnessed to be the everyday life of the place.
My father was by trade a blacksmith, and one fair of his craft. Neither
he nor my mother had much learning; but they were peaceful, sober folk
with a bent for work; and being sure, rain or shine, to go to church,
and strict in all their duties, they were ones to have a standing with
the clergy and the neighbors, It tells well for my father that within
the forty-eight hours to follow our landing at Castle Garden, he had a
roof above our heads, and an anvil to hammer upon; this latter at a
wage double the best that Clonmel might offer even in a dream. And so
we began to settle to our surroundings, and to match with them, and fit
them to ourselves; with each day Clonmel to gather a dimness, and we to
seem less strange and more at home, and in the last to feel as naturally
of America as though we had been born upon the soil.
It has found prior intimation that my earlier years ran as wild as a
colt, with no strong power save Anne's to tempt me in a right direction.
My father, so far as his mood might promise, would have led me in paths
I should go; but he was never sharp to a condition, and with nothing to
him alert or quick he was one easily fooled, and I dealt with him as I
would. Moreover, he had his hands filled with the task of the family's
support; for while he took more in wage for his day's work than had ever
come to him before, the cost to live had equal promotion, and it is
to be doubted if any New York Monday discovered him with riches in his
pocket beyond what would have dwelt there had he stayed in Clonmel. But
whether he lacked temper or time, and whatever the argument, he cracked
no thong of authority over me; I worked out my days by patterns to
please myself, with never a word from him to check or guide me.
And my mother was the same. She had her house to care for; and in a
wash-tub day, and one when sewing machines were yet to find their birth,
a woman with a family to be a cook to, and she of a taste besides to see
them clothed and clean, would find her every waking hour engaged.
She was a housekeeper of celebration, was my mother, and a star for
neighboring wives to steer by; with floor and walls and everything about
her as spick and span as scouring soap and lye might make them. Pale,
work-worn, I still carry her on the skyline of my memory; and I recall
how her eye would light and her gray cheek show a flush when the priest
did us the credit of supper at our board, my father pulling down his
sleeves over his great hairy arms in deference to the exalted station of
the guest. It comes to this, however, that both my father and my mother,
in their narrow simplicities and time taken up with the merest arts of
living, had neither care nor commands for me. I came and I went by
my own clock, and if I gave the business thought, it was a thought of
gratitude to find myself so free.
To be sure I went now and then to my lessons. Anne had been brisk to
seek forth a school; for she refused to grow up in ignorance, and even
cherished a plan to one day teach classes from a book herself. Being
established, she drew me after her, using both persuasion and force to
that end, and to keep me in a way of enlightenment, invented a system
of rewards and punishments, mainly the former, by which according to my
merit I was to suffer or gain.
This temple of learning to which Anne lured me was nothing vast, being
no bigger than one room. In lieu of a blackboard there was a box of
clean white sand wherewith to teach dullards of my age and sort their
alphabet. That feat of education the pedagogue in charge--a somber
personage, he, and full of bitter muscularities--accomplished by tracing
the letter in the sand. This he did with the point of a hickory ruler,
which weapon was never out of his hand, and served in moments of
thickness as a wand of inspiration, being laid across the dull one's
back by way of brightening his wits. More than once I was made wiser in
this fashion; and I found such stimulus to go much against the grain and
to grievously rub wrong-wise the fur of my fancy.
These hickory drubbings to make me quicker, falling as thickly as
October's leaves, went short of their purpose. On the heels of one of
them I would run from my lessons for a week on end. To be brief with
these matters of schools and books and alphabets and hickory beatings,
I went to my classes for a day, only to hide from them for a week; as
might be guessed, the system collected but a scanty erudition.
It is a pity, too: that question of education cannot too much invite an
emphasis. It is only when one is young that one may be book-taught, just
as the time of spring is the time for seed. There goes a byword of an
old dog and a new trick, and I should say it meant a man when he is
thirty or forty with a book; for, though driven by all the power of
shame, I in vain strove with.
What was utmost in me to repair in middle years the loss of those
schooldays wasted away. I could come by no advance; the currents of
habitual ignorance were too strong and I made no head against them. You
think I pause a deal over my want of letters? I tell you it is the thing
I have most mourned in all my life.
When a fugitive from lessons, I would stay away from my home. This was
because I must manage an escape from Anne; should she find me I was
lost, and nothing for it save to be dragged again to school. The look of
grief in her brown eyes meant ever defeat for me. My only safety was to
turn myself out of doors and play the exile.
This vagabondage was pleasant enough, since it served to feed my native
vagrancy of temper. And I fared well, too; for I grew into a kind of
cateran, and was out of my sleeping lair with the sun to follow the
milkman and baker on their rounds. Coming betimes to the doors of
customers who still snored between their sheets, these merchants left
their wares in areas. That was all my worst need asked; by what time
they doubled the nearest corner I had made my swoop and was fed for the
whole of a day.
Moreover, I knew a way to pick up coppers. On a nearby corner in the
Bowery a great auction of horses was going. Being light and little, and
having besides a lively inclination for horses, I was thrown upon the
backs of ones put up for sale to show their paces. For each of these
mounts I came the better off by five cents, and on lucky days have made
as much as the half of a dollar at that trade. As for a bed, if it were
summer time, what should be finer than the docks? Or if winter, then the
fire-rooms of the tugs, with the engineers and stokers whereof I made
it my care to be friendly? I was always ready to throw off a line, or
polish a lantern, or, when a tug was at the wharf, run to the nearest
tap-room and fetch a pail of beer; for which good deeds the East River
went thickly dotted of my allies before ever I touched the age of ten.
These meager etchings give some picture of what was my earlier life, the
major share of which I ran wild about the streets. Neither my father nor
my mother lived in any command of me, and the parish priest failed as
dismally as did they when he sought to confine my conduct to a rule.
That hickory-wielding dominie, with his sandbox and alphabet, was a
priest; and he gave me such a distaste of the clergy that I rolled away
from their touch like quicksilver. Anne's tears and the soft voice of
her were what I feared, and so I kept as much as possible beyond their
spell.
Coming now to a day when I began first to consider existence as a
problem serious, I must tell you how my lone sole claim to eminence
abode in the fact that, lung and limb, I was as strong and tireless as
any bison or any bear. It was my capital, my one virtue, the mark that
set me above my fellows. This story of vast strength sounds the more
strange, since I was under rather than above the common height, and
never, until when in later life I took on a thickness of fat, scaled
heavier than one hundred and forty pounds. Thus it stood, however, that
my muscle strength, even as a youth, went so far beyond what might be
called legitimate that it became as a proverb in the mouths of people.
The gift was a kind of genius; I tell of it particularly because it
turned to be the ladder whereby I climbed into the first of my fortunes.
Without it, sure, I never would have lifted myself above the gutter
levels of my mates, nor fingered a splinter of those millions that now
lie banked and waiting to my name and hand.