BEFORE I abandon the late election in its history to the keeping of time
past, there is an episode, or, if you will, an accident, which should
find relation. Of itself it would have come and gone, and been of brief
importance, save for an incident to make one of its elements, which in
a later pinch to come of politics brought me within the shadow of a
gibbet.
Busy with my vote-getting, I had gone to the docks to confer with the
head of a certain gang of stevedores. These latter were hustling up and
down the gangplanks, taking the cargo out of a West India coffee boat.
The one I had come seeking was aboard the vessel.
I pushed towards the after gangplank, and as I reached it I stepped
aside to avoid one coming ashore with a huge sack of coffee on his
shoulders. Not having my eyes about me, I caught my toe in a ringbolt
and stumbled with a mighty bump against a sailor who was standing on
the string-piece of the wharf. With nothing to save him, and a six-foot
space opening between the wharf and the ship, the man fell into the
river with a cry and a splash. He went to the bottom like so much
pig-iron, for he could not swim.
It was the work of a moment to throw off my coat and go after him. I was
as much at ease in the water as a spaniel, and there would be nothing
more dangerous than a ducking in the experiment. I dived and came up
with the drowning man in my grip. For all his peril, he took it coolly
enough, and beyond spluttering, and puffing, and cracking off a jargon
of oaths, added no difficulties to the task of saving his life. We
gained help from the dock, and it wasn't five minutes before we found
the safe planks beneath our feet again.
The man who had gone overboard so unexpectedly was a keen small dark
creature of a Sicilian, and to be noticed for his black eyes, a red
handkerchief over his head, and ears looped with golden earrings.
“No harm done, I think?” said I, when we were both ashore again.
“I lose-a my knife,” said he with a grin, the water dripping from his
hair. He was pointing to the empty scabbard at his belt where he had
carried a sheath-knife.
“It was my blunder,” said I, “and if you'll hunt me up at Big Kennedy's
this evening I'll have another for you.”
That afternoon, at a pawnshop in the Bowery, I bought a strange-looking
weapon, that was more like a single-edged dagger than anything else. It
had a buck-horn haft, and was heavy and long, with a blade of full nine
inches.
My Sicilian came, as I had told him, and I gave him the knife. He was
extravagant in his gratitude.
“You owe me nothing!” he cried. “It is I who owe for my life that you
save. But I shall take-a the knife to remember how you pull me out. You
good-a man; some day I pull you out--mebby so! who knows?”
With that he was off for the docks again, leaving me neither to hear nor
to think of him thereafter for a stirring handful of years.
It occurred to me as strange, even in a day when I gave less time to
thought than I do now, that my first impulse as an alderman should be
one of revenge. There was that police captain, who, in the long ago,
offered insult to Anne, when she came to beg for my liberty. “Better
get back to your window,” said he, “or all the men will have left the
street!” The memory of that evil gibe had never ceased to burn me with
the hot anger of a coal of fire, and now I resolved for his destruction.
When I told Big Kennedy, he turned the idea on his wheel of thought for
full two minutes.
“It's your right,” said he at last. “You've got the ax; you're entitled
to his head. But say! pick him up on proper charges; get him dead to
rights! That aint hard, d'ye see, for he's as crooked as a dog's hind
leg. To throw him for some trick he's really turned will bunco these
reform guys into thinkin' that we're on th' level.”
The enterprise offered no complexities. A man paid that captain money to
save from suppression a resort of flagrant immorality. The bribery
was laid bare; he was overtaken in this plain corruption; and next, my
combinations being perfect, I broke him as I might break a stick across
my knee. He came to me in private the following day.
“What have I done?” said he. “Can I square it?”
“Never!” I retorted; “there's some things one can't square.” Then I told
him of Anne, and his insult.
“That's enough,” he replied, tossing his hand resignedly. “I can take my
medicine when it's come my turn.”
For all that captain's stoicism, despair rang in his tones, and as he
left me, the look in his eye was one to warm the cockles of my heart and
feed my soul with comfort.
“Speakin' for myself,” said Big Kennedy, in the course of comment, “I
don't go much on revenge. Still when it costs nothin', I s'ppose
you might as well take it in. Besides, it shows folks that there's a
dead-line in th' game. The wise ones will figger that this captain held
out on us, or handed us th' worst of it on th' quiet. The example of him
gettin' done up will make others run true.”
Several years slipped by wherein as alderman I took my part in the
town's affairs. I was never a talking member, and gained no glory for my
eloquence. But what I lacked of rhetoric, I made up in stubborn loyalty
to Tammany, and I never failed to dispose of my vote according to its
mandates.
It was not alone my right, but my duty to do this. I had gone to the
polls the avowed candidate of the machine. There was none to vote for
me who did not know that my public courses would be shaped and guided by
the organization. I was free to assume, therefore, being thus elected as
a Tammany member by folk informed to a last expression of all that the
phrase implied, that I was bound to carry out the Tammany programmes and
execute the Tammany orders. Where a machine and its laws are known, the
people when they lift to office one proposed of that machine, thereby
direct such officer to submit himself to its direction and conform to
its demands.
There will be ones to deny this. And these gentry of denials will be
plausible, and furnish the thought of an invincible purity for their
assumptions. They should not, however, be too sure for their theories.
They themselves may be the ones in error. They should reflect
that wherever there dwells a Yes there lives also a No. These
contradictionists should emulate my own forbearance.
I no more claim to be wholly right for my attitude of implicit obedience
to the machine, than I condemn as wholly wrong their own position of
boundless denunciation. There is no man so bad he may not be defended;
there lives none so good he does not need defense; and what I say of a
man might with equal justice be said of any dogma of politics. As I set
forth in my preface, the true and the false, the black and the white in
politics will rest ever with the point of view.
During my years as an alderman I might have made myself a wealthy man.
And that I did not do so, was not because I had no profit of the place.
As the partner, unnamed, in sundry city contracts, riches came often
within my clutch. But I could not keep them; I was born with both hands
open and had the hold of money that a riddle has of water.
This want of a money wit is a defect of my nature. A great merchant late
in my life once said to me:
“Commerce--money-getting--is like a sea, and every man, in large or
little sort, is a mariner. Some are buccaneers, while others are sober
merchantmen. One lives by taking prizes, the other by the proper gains
of trade. You belong to the buccaneers by your birth. You are not a
business man, but a business wolf. Being a wolf, you will waste and
never save. Your instinct is to pull down each day's beef each day.
You should never buy nor sell nor seek to make money with money. Your
knowledge of money is too narrow. Up to fifty dollars you are wise.
Beyond that point you are the greatest dunce I ever met.”
Thus lectured the man of markets, measuring sticks, and scales; and
while I do not think him altogether exact, there has been much in my
story to bear out what he said. It was not that I wasted my money in
riot, or in vicious courses. My morals were good, and I had no vices.
This was not much to my credit; my morals were instinctive, like
the morals of an animal. My one passion was for politics, and my one
ambition the ambition to lead men. Nor was I eager to hold office; my
hope went rather to a day when I should rule Tammany as its Chief. My
genius was not for the show ring; I cared nothing for a gilded place.
That dream of my heart's wish was to be the power behind the screen,
and to put men up and take men down, place them and move them about, and
play at government as one might play at chess. Still, while I dreamed
of an unbridled day to come, I was for that the more sedulous to execute
the orders of Big Kennedy. I had not then to learn that the art of
command is best studied in the art of obedience.
To be entirely frank, I ought to name the one weakness that beset me,
and which more than any spendthrift tendency lost me my fortune as fast
as it flowed in. I came never to be a gambler in the card or gaming
table sense, but I was inveterate to wager money on a horse. While money
lasted, I would bet on the issue of every race that was run, and I was
made frequently bankrupt thereby. However, I have said enough of my want
of capacity to hoard. I was young and careless; moreover, with my place
as alderman, and that sovereignty I still held among the Red Jackets,
when my hand was empty I had but to stretch it forth to have it filled
again.
In my boyhood I went garbed of rags and patches. Now when money came,
I sought the first tailor of the town. I went to him drawn of his high
prices; for I argued, and I think sagaciously, that where one pays the
most one gets the best.
Nor, when I found that tailor, did I seek to direct him in his labors.
I put myself in his hands, and was guided to quiet blacks and grays, and
at his hint gave up thoughts of those plaids and glaring checks to which
my tastes went hungering. That tailor dressed me like a gentleman and
did me a deal of good. I am not one to say that raiment makes the man,
and yet I hold that it has much to do with the man's behavior. I can say
in my own case that when I was thus garbed like a gentleman, my conduct
was at once controlled in favor of the moderate. I was instantly ironed
of those rougher wrinkles of my nature, which last, while neither noisy
nor gratuitously violent, was never one of peace.
The important thing was that these clothes of gentility gave me
multiplied vogue with ones who were peculiarly my personal followers.
They earned me emphasis with my Red Jackets, who still bore me aloft as
their leader, and whose favor I must not let drift. The Tin Whistles,
too, drew an awe from this rich yet civil uniform which strengthened my
authority in that muscular quarter. I had grown, as an alderman and that
one next in ward power to Big Kennedy, to a place which exempted me
from those harsher labors of fist and bludgeon in which, whenever the
exigencies of a campaign demanded, the Tin Whistles were still employed.
But I claimed my old mastery over them. I would not permit so hardy
a force to go to another's hands, and while I no longer led their war
parties, I was always in the background, giving them direction and
stopping them when they went too far.
It was demanded of my safety that I retain my hold upon both the Tin
Whistles and the Red Jackets. However eminent I might be, I was by no
means out of the ruck, and my situation was to be sustained only by the
strong hand. The Tin Whistles and the Red Jackets were the sources of my
importance, and if my voice were heeded or my word owned weight it was
because they stood ever ready to my call. Wherefore, I cultivated their
favor, secured my place among them, while at the same time I forced them
to obey to the end that they as well as I be preserved.
Those clothes of a gentleman not only augmented, but declared my
strength. In that time a fine coat was an offense to ones more coarsely
clothed. A well-dressed stranger could not have walked three blocks on
the East Side without being driven to do battle for his life. Fine
linen was esteemed a challenge, and that I should be so arrayed and
go unscathed, proved not alone my popularity, but my dangerous repute.
Secretly, it pleased my shoulder-hitters to see their captain so garbed;
and since I could defend my feathers, they made of themselves another
reason of leadership. I was growing adept of men, and I counted on this
effect when I spent my money with that tailor.
While I thus lay aside for the moment the running history of events
that were as the stepping stones by which I crossed from obscurity
and poverty to power and wealth, to have a glance at myself in my more
personal attitudes, I should also relate my marriage and how I took a
wife. It was Anne who had charge of the business, and brought me this
soft victory. Had it not been for Anne, I more than half believe I
would have had no wife at all; for I was eaten of an uneasy awkwardness
whenever my fate delivered me into the presence of a girl. However
earnestly Anne might counsel, I had no more of parlor wisdom than a
savage, Anne, while sighing over my crudities and the hopeless thickness
of my wits, established herself as a bearward to supervise my conduct.
She picked out my wife for me, and in days when I should have been
a lover, but was a graven image and as stolid, carried forward the
courting in my stead.
It was none other than Apple Cheek upon whom Anne pitched--Apple Cheek,
grown rounder and more fair, with locks like cornsilk, and eyes of
even a deeper blue than on that day of the docks. Anne had struck out a
friendship for Apple Cheek from the beginning, and the two were much in
one another's company. And so one day, by ways and means I was too much
confused to understand, Anne had us before the priest. We were made
husband and wife; Apple Cheek brave and sweet, I looking like a fool in
need of keepers.
Anne, the architect of this bliss, was in tears; and yet she must have
kept her head, for I remember how she recalled me to the proprieties of
my new station.
“Why don't you kiss your bride!” cried Anne, at the heel of the
ceremony.
Anne snapped out the words, and they rang in my delinquent ears like a
storm bell. Apple Cheek, eyes wet to be a match for Anne's, put up her
lips with all the courage in the world. I kissed her, much as one
might salute a hot flatiron. Still I kissed her; and I think to the
satisfaction of a church-full looking on; but I knew what men condemned
have felt on that journey to block and ax.
Apple Cheek and her choice of me made up the sweetest fortune of my
life, and now when I think of her it is as if I stood in a flood of
sunshine. So far as I was able, I housed her and robed her as though she
were the daughter of a king, and while I have met treason in others and
desertion where I looked for loyalty, I held her heart-fast, love-fast,
faith-fast, ever my own. She was my treasure, and when she died it was
as though my own end had come.
Big Kennedy and the then Chief of Tammany, during my earlier years as
alderman, were as Jonathan and David. They were ever together, and their
plans and their interests ran side by side. At last they began to fall
apart. Big Kennedy saw a peril in this too-close a partnership, and was
for putting distance between them. It was Old Mike who thus counseled
him. The aged one became alarmed by the raw and insolent extravagance of
the Chief's methods.
“Th' public,” said Old Mike, “is a sheep, while ye do no more than
just rob it. But if ye insult it, it's a wolf. Now this man insults
th' people. Better cut loose from him, Jawn; he'll get ye all tor-rn to
pieces.”
The split came when, by suggestion of Old Mike and
Big Kennedy, I refused to give my vote as alderman to a railway company
asking a terminal. There were millions of dollars in the balance, and
without my vote the machine and the railway company were powerless. The
stress was such that the mighty Chief himself came down to Big Kennedy's
saloon--a sight to make men stare!
The two, for a full hour, were locked in Big Kennedy's sanctum; when
they appeared I could read in the black anger that rode on the brow of
the Chief how Big Kennedy had declined his orders, and now stood ready
to abide the worst. Big Kennedy, for his side, wore an air of confident
serenity, and as I looked at the pair and compared them, one black, the
other beaming, I was surprised into the conviction that Big Kennedy of
the two was the superior natural force. As the Chief reached the curb he
said:
“You know the meaning of this. I shall tear you in two in the middle an'
leave you on both sides of the street!”
“If you do, I'll never squeal,” returned Big Kennedy carelessly. “But
you can't; I've got you counted. I can hold the ward ag'inst all you'll
send. An' you look out for yourself! I'll throw a switch on you yet
that'll send you to th' scrapheap.”
“I s'ppose you think you know what you're doin'?” said the other
angrily.
“You can put a bet on it that I do,” retorted Big Kennedy. “I wasn't
born last week.”
That evening as we sat silent and thoughtful, Big Kennedy broke forth
with a word.
“I've got it! You're on speakin' terms with that old duffer, Morton,
who's forever talkin' about bein' a taxpayer. He likes you, since you
laid out Jimmy the Blacksmith that time. See him, an' fill him up with
th' notion that he ought to go to Congress. It won't be hard; he's sure
he ought to go somewhere, an' Congress will fit him to a finish. In two
days he'll think he's on his way to be a second Marcy. Tell him that if
his people will put him up, we'll join dogs with 'em an' pull down th'
place. You can say that we can't stand th' dishonesty an' corruption
at th' head of Tammany Hall, an' are goin' to make a bolt for better
government. We'll send the old sport to Congress. He'll give us a bundle
big enough to fight the machine, an' plank dollar for dollar with it.
An' it'll put us in line for a hook-up with th' reform bunch in th'
fight for th' town next year. It's the play to make; we're goin' to see
stormy weather, you an' me, an' it's our turn to make for cover. We'll
put up this old party, Morton, an' give th' machine a jolt. Th' Chief'll
leave me on both sides of th' street, will he? I'll make him think,
before he's through, that he's run ag'inst th' pole of a dray.”