"Remanded till tomorrow morning."
As we walked out of the court room, the attorney condescendingly advised
me not to waste much time on this case. "Its useless," he said. But I
did not want to give up without a fight.
When I tried to see the members of the firm, I found that my opponent
had stolen a march on me by telephoning to warn them of my mission.
Their office secretaries told me that they were very busy, that they
already knew my business and did not care to go into the matter with me.
I was acquainted with the city editor of one of the large morning papers
and I had found that the judges were very susceptible to newspaper
criticism. More than once a properly placed story would make them see a
case in a new light. I found a vacant desk in the reporters' room and
wrote up Nora in the most livid style I could manage--"soulless
corporation," "underpaid slaves" and such phrases.
"It's a good story," the city editor said, "Too bad there isn't a
Socialist paper to run it. But we can't touch it. They're the biggest
advertisers we've got. I'm sorry. It certainly is a sad case. I wish
you'd give this to the mother."
He handed me a bank-note. But I told him to go to the father of yellow
journalism. It was not money I wanted. I stamped out of his office,
angry and discouraged. But my promise to Mrs. Lund, to get Nora out,
made it impossible for me to give up. I walked up the street racking my
brains for some scheme. Suddenly an inspiration came. They would not
listen to me. Perhaps I could make money talk.
My small deposits were in an up-town bank. It did not have a large
commercial business, but specialized on private and household accounts.
The cashier was a fraternity mate of mine. With a little urging I got
from him a list of depositors who had large accounts at the store where
Nora had worked. I picked out the names of the women I knew to be
interested in various charities and borrowed a telephone.
It is hard to be eloquent over a telephone. The little black rubber
mouth-piece is a discouraging thing to plead with, but I stuck to it all
the afternoon. As soon as I got connection with some patron of the
store, I told her about Nora's plight--most of them remembered her face.
I tried to make them realize how desperately little six dollars a week
is. I told the story of her hard struggle to keep the home going, how
the firm had refused to give her a raise and were now trying to send her
to state prison. I spoke as strongly as might be about personal
responsibility. The firm paid low wages so that their patrons might buy
silk stockings at a few cents less per pair. And low wages had driven
Nora to crime. I laid it on as heavily as I dared and asked them to
call up the manager and members of the firm--to get them personally--and
protest against their severity towards Nora. I urged them to spread the
story among their friends and get as many of them as possible to
threaten to withdraw their trade.
I started this campaign about three in the afternoon and kept it up till
after business hours. It bore fruit. Some of the women, I found out
afterwards, went further than I had suggested and called on the wives of
the firm. I imagine that the men, who had refused to see me, did not
spend a peaceful or pleasant afternoon and evening.
In the morning, when Nora's case was called, the attorney made a
touching speech about the quality of mercy and how to err is human, to
forgive divine. He said that the firm he represented could not find
heart to prosecute this damsel in distress and that if the court would
be merciful and give her another chance they would take her back in
their employment. Judge Ryan was surprised, but very glad to discharge
her. However, I was able to find her a much better place to work.
Her story is a sad commentary on our system of justice. The court did
not care to offend a group of wealthy men. The press did not dare to.
The only way to get justice for this girl was by appealing to the
highest court--the power of money.
It is always hard for me to write about our method of dealing with crime
in restrained and temperate language--the whole system is too utterly
vicious. I had not been many weeks in the Tombs before I was guilty of
contempt of court.
Four of the five judges in general sessions were machine men. It was
rare that their judgments were influenced by their political
affiliations; in the great majority of the cases they were free to
dispense what happened to strike them as justice. It is simpler for the
organization to "fix" things in the police courts where there are no
juries. But once in a while a man would come up to us who "had a
friend." The "Old Man" on Fourteenth Street would send down his orders
and one of these four judges would arrange the matter. The impressive
thing about it was the cynical frankness. Everybody knew what was
happening.
The fifth judge, O'Neil, was a Scotchman. He was said to be--and I
believe was--incorruptible. He had been swept into office on a former
wave of reform, and had no dealings with the machine. But he was
utterly unfit to be on the bench. A few weeks after I was sworn in, I
saw a phase of his character which was worse than "graft."
A man was brought before him for "assault"--a simple exchange of
fisticuffs. In general such cases are treated as a joke. Two men have
a fight--then they race to the police station. The one who gets there
first is the complainant, the slower footed one is the defendant. Each
brings a cloud of witnesses to court to swear that the other was the
aggressor. It is hopeless to try to place the blame. The penal code
fixes a maximum sentence of one year and five hundred dollars fine, but
unless some especial malice has been shown, the judges generally
discharge the prisoner with a perfunctory lecture or, at most, give them
ten days.
This man had an especially good record. He had worked satisfactorily
for several years in the same place, his wife and her three small
children were entirely dependent upon his earnings. O'Neil skimmed over
his recommendations listlessly, until his eye caught a sentence which
told the nature of the man's employment. He stiffened up with a jerk.
"Are you a janitor?" he thundered.
"Yes, your honor."
"Well, I tell you, sir, janitors must be taught their place! There is
no more impudent, offensive class of men in this city. This morning,
sir, there was no heat in my apartment, and when my wife complained the
janitor was insolent to her! Insulted her! My wife! When I went
downstairs he insulted me, sir! The janitor insulted me, I say! He
even threatened to strike me as you have wantonly assaulted this
reputable citizen here, the complainant. It is time the public was
protected from janitors. I regret that the law limits the punishment I
can give you. The court sentences you, sir, to the maximum. One year
and five hundred dollars!"
The outburst was so sudden, so evidently a matter of petty spite, that
there was a hush all over the court.
"What's the matter?" his honor snapped. "Call up the next case."
Of course this sentence would have been overthrown in any higher court,
but the man had no money. Such things did not happen very often, but
frequently enough to keep us ever reminded of their imminent
possibility.
I have sixty fat note-books which record my work in the Tombs. Almost
every item might be quoted here to show how little by little contempt of
court grew in my mind. It crystallized not so much because of the
relatively rare cases where innocent men were sent to prison, as because
of the continual commonplace farce of it.
Very early I learned--as the lawyers all knew--that considerations of
abstract justice were foreign to the Tombs. Each judge had his foible.
It was more important to know these than the law. Judges McIvor and
Bell were Grand Army men. Bell was always easy on veterans. He had a
stock speech--"I am sorry to see a man who has fought for his country in
your distressing condition. I will be as lenient as the law allows."
McIvor, if he saw a G.A.R. button on a man before him would shout, "I am
pained and grieved to see a man so dishonor the old uniform," and would
give him the maximum.
Ryan, the most venal, the most servile machine man of the five, had a
beautiful and intense love for his mother. A child of the slum, he had
supported his mother since he was fourteen, had climbed up from the
gutter to the bench. And filial love, like his own, outweighed any
amount of moral turpitude with him. When I found a man in the Tombs who
seemed to me innocent, I did not prepare a brief on this aspect of the
case. I looked up his mother, and persuaded the clerk to put the case
on Ryan's calendar. If I could get the old woman rigged up in a black
silk dress and a poke bonnet, if I could arrange for two old-fashioned
love-locks to hang down before her ears, the trick was turned. All she
had to do was to cry a little and say, "He's been a good son to his old
mother, yer honor."
The cases were supposed to be distributed among the judges in strict
rotation. It was, in fact, a misdemeanor for the clerk to juggle with
the calendar. But the largest part of a lawyer's value depended on his
ability to persuade the clerk to put his client before a judge who would
be lenient towards his offense.
O'Neil believed that a lady should be above suspicion. So when a woman
was accused of crime, she was certainly not a lady, and probably guilty.
It was for the good of the community to lock her up. Of course whenever
a lawyer had a woman client his first act was to "fix" the clerk so that
the case would not be put down before O'Neil.
Yet I would be eminently unfair to the people of the Tombs, if I spoke
only of their evil side. Of course this was the side I first saw. But
by the end of a year I had established myself. Once they had lost their
fear that I was trying to interfere with their means of livelihood--a
fear shared by the judges as well as the screws--hostility gave place to
tolerance, and in some cases to respect and a certain measure of
friendship. I began to think of them, as they did of themselves, as
dual personalities. There was sinister symbolism in the putting on of
the black robes by the judges. The screws out of uniform, in off hours,
were very different beings from the screws on duty.
It is a commonplace that machine politicians are big-hearted. They
listened to any story I could tell of touching injustice, often went
down in their pockets to help the victim. I have never met more
sentimental men. All it needed to start them was a little "heart
interest." Frequently Big Jim, the gate man, would raise ten or fifteen
dollars from the other screws to help out one of my men.
Judge Ryan met me one day on the street and invited me into a saloon.
There began a very real friendship. Off the bench he was a most
expansive man; he had wonderful power of personal anecdote. In the
story of his up-struggle from the gutter, his mother on his shoulders,
he was naive in telling of incidents which to a man of my training
seemed criminal. He owed his first opportunity, the start towards his
later advancement, to Tweed. And he was as loyal to him as to his
mother. The soul of the slum was in his story. It was an interpretation
of the ethics which grow up where the struggle for existence is bitter.
An ethics which is foul with the stink of fetid tenements, wizened with
hunger, distorted with fear.
The attitude of the people of the Tombs to this dual life of theirs, the
insistence with which they kept separate their professional and personal
life, was shown clearly when a young assistant district attorney broke
the convention. He brought his wife to court! He was a youngster, it
was his first big case, he wanted her to hear his eloquence. The
indignation was general. I happened to be talking to Big Jim, the gate
man, when one of the screws brought the news.
"What?" Jim exploded. "Brought his wife down here? The son of a ----!
Say. If my old woman came within ten blocks of the place--or any of the
kids--I'd knock their blocks off. Go on. Yer kidding me."
When they insisted that it was true, he scratched his head disgustedly
and kept reiterating his belief in the chap's canine ancestry. Two
hours later, when I was going out of the Tombs, he stopped me. It was
still on his mind.
"Say," he said, "what d'ye think of that son of a ----?"
*III*
It did not take me very long to see that the trouble with our criminal
courts goes deeper than the graft or ill-temper of the judges. Day
after day the realization grew upon me that the system itself is wrong
at bottom.
A man can do a vicious thing now and then without complete moral
disintegration. It is constant repetition of the act which turns him
into a vicious man. Brown may once in a while lose his temper and strike
his wife, and still be, on the whole, an estimable fellow. But if he
makes a regular habit of blacking her eye every Saturday night, we would
hold him suspect in all relations. We would not only question his
fitness to bring up children, we would doubt his veracity, distrust him
in money matters.
The more I have been in court the stronger grows the conviction that
there is something inherently vicious in passing criminal judgment on
our fellow men. A Carpenter who lived in Palestine two thousand years
ago thought on this matter as I do. His doctrine about throwing stones
is explicit. If he was right in saying "Judge not," we cannot expect
any high morality from our judges. The constant repetition of evil
inevitably degrades.
Unless we can expect our judges to be omniscient--and no one of them is
so fatuous as to believe himself infallible--we are asking them to
gamble with justice, to play dice with men's souls. We give them the
whole power of the state to enforce their guesses. The counters with
which they play are human beings--not only individual offenders, but
whole families, innocent women and children. Such an occupation--as a
steady job--will necessarily degrade them. It would change the Christ
Himself.... But he said very definitely that He would not do it.
However, my work in the Tombs has not made me a pessimist. Science has
conquered the old custom of flogging lunatics. The increase of
knowledge must inevitably do away with our barbaric penal codes, with
cellular confinement and electrocution. An enlightened community will
realize that the whole mediaeval idea of punishing each other is not
only a sin--according to Christ--but a blunder, a rank economic
extravagance, as useless as it is costly. We will learn to protect
ourselves from the losses and moral contagions of crime as we do from
infectious diseases. Our prisons we will discard for hospitals, our
judges will become physicians, our "screws" we will turn into trained
nurses.
The present system is epileptic. It works out with unspeakable cruelty
to those who are suspected of crime--and their families--it results in
the moral ruin of those we employ to protect us, and it is a failure.
The amount of money which society expends in its war against crime is
stupendous--and crime increases. All statistics from every civilized
country....
But this personal narrative is not the place for me to discuss in detail
my convictions in regard to criminology.
*IV*
The influence of the Tombs on my way of thinking was slow and
cumulative, here a little and there a little. I got a more sudden
insight into some of the ways of the world, some of its stupidities and
pretenses, from the peculiar circumstances under which Benson and I were
thrown out of the settlement. I had been there almost two years when
the crash came. In this affair, I was little more than the tail of his
kite. That is the fact I wish to emphasize. Benson was I think beyond
any doubt, the most valuable "resident" in the Children's House. It was
not only that he gave much money into the general treasury and that he
gave far more to such subsidiary enterprises as his Arbeiter Studenten
Verein, all of which gave added prestige to the settlement, but also his
personality was a great asset. Through his professional and social
connections he was continually recruiting new supporters. And certainly
to the people of the neighborhood, he was the most popular of us all.
And yet to preserve certain stupid ideas of respectability, Benson was
sacrificed.
The Jewish population--penniless refugees from Russian massacres--had
been growing rapidly in our district. They had almost entirely driven
out the Germans and Irish. And as a result of their intense poverty,
prostitution was becoming frightful. There were red lights all about
us. To the thoughtful Jews this had become the only political issue.
The machine was cynically frank in its toleration of vice. Two years
before a man named Root had been elected congressman on the reform
ticket. It was pretty generally known that he had used his time in
office to make peace with the machine. And although he still talked of
reform, he was so friendly with the enemy that they had nominated a
figure-head named O'Brien. But this Democratic candidate was only for
appearances, we all knew that Root was to be re-elected and that Tammany
votes were promised him.
Benson shared my hatred of hypocrisy. We often talked over this
political tangle.
"I'd like to get the evidence against him," Norman said one night.
"Nothing I'd like better than to shoot some holes into his double-faced
schemes."
I gathered a good deal of information, which if it was not legal
evidence, was certainly convincing. The Tombs was a great place for
political gossip. I was almost the only person there at this time who
was not a Tammany man. And as in my two years of work I had taken no
interest in politics, I was considered innocuous. From scraps of
conversation I learned that there had been a meeting between Root and
the Old Man and some treaty made between them. I could guess at the
terms. The organization was to throw enough votes to elect Root, and he
was to keep too busy in Washington to interfere in local affairs. But I
did not dare to ask questions, and had no idea when or where the
agreement had been reached. By the barest chance I was able to fill in
these details:
Coming up the Bowery late one night, I ran into a crowd who had made a
circle around two girls who were fighting. Just as I arrived on the
scene one of the girls called out----
"Charley--give me a knife."
Her cadet handed her one with a very ugly looking blade. I seldom used
my right as county detective to make arrests. But as this seemed to
threaten serious bloodshed, I broke up the fight and collared the cadet.
He turned out to be a man of some importance in politics, a runner for
"The Old Man." Two or three times he had been arrested, but his pull
had always got him off.
He was half drunk and in a great funk over the serious charge I said I
would make against him. As I was jerking him along towards the station
house, he threatened me with dire consequences if I ran him in--said he
was a friend of the Old Man. I pretended not to believe him, and in his
effort to convince me that he really was protected, he let the cat out
of the bag. He had been the messenger from the "Old Man" to Root, and
had arranged for the meeting between them. It had taken place on the
evening of September third, in the back room of Billy Bryan's saloon.
He did not know what had happened at the meeting, the only person
present beside the two principals had been a "heeler" of Root's, named
"Piggy" Breen. There was no use in arresting a man with his "pull," so
I turned him loose.
I hurried back to the settlement and telephoned for Benson at his club.
He brought along Maynard to give us legal advice. Maynard was an
erratic millionaire. One-third of the year he played polo, one third he
spent in entering his 75-foot sloop in various club regattas, and the
rest of the time he lived in the city, leading cotillions at night and
maintaining a charity law office in the day-time. He was also a trustee
of the settlement. He was wildly indignant over the story of Root's
treachery.
"We can defeat Root, dead easy," Benson said. "It's a cinch. Publicity
has never been tried in politics" (as far as I know, Benson invented
this term "publicity," now so commonly applied to organized
advertising)--"it's a cinch. In less than twenty-four hours everybody
in the district will know he's a crook."
"What reform man can we get to run in his place?" Maynard asked.
"Hell!" Benson said. "We haven't time to nominate anybody--election is
only a week off. I don't care who's elected so we put Root out of
business."
"Well, but," Maynard protested, "we don't want to throw the influence of
the settlement in favor of Tammany Hall."
"We don't need to. There must be some other candidates--Socialist or
Prohibition--just so he isn't a red-light grafter."
"There isn't any Prohibition ticket," I said. "The Socialist candidate
is named Lipsky."
"All right," said Benson, "we'll elect Lipsky."
Maynard went up in the air. Help elect a Socialist! He did not believe
in political assassinations.
"Oh, devil!" Benson snapped. "Would you rather see one of these cadet
politicians in office than an honest working man? I don't know who this
man Lipsky is, like as not a fool who sees visions. But the Socialists
never nominate crooks. What we want is an honest man."
Maynard, however, did not believe in community of wives, felt it
necessary to protect the sanctity of the home--even at the cost of
prostitution. And so he left us.
I wish I could remember half the things Benson said about Maynard after
he had deserted us. I have seldom seen anything more invigorating than
Benson mad. But he did not let his indignation interfere with business.
It was far along towards morning, but he set to work at once. He wrote
to Lipsky promising to support him, and then began sketching cartoons
and posters.
One was a picture of Root selling a girl in "parlor clothes" to "The Old
Man." Another read:
"VOTE FOR LIPSKY
if you have a daughter!
If you vote Democratic, you
Vote for the RED LIGHTS!
If you vote Republican, you
Vote for the CADETS!
VOTE THE SOCIALIST TICKET, and you
VOTE FOR DECENCY!"
But the best were a series:
"ASK ROOT
where he was on the evening of September Third?"
"ASK ROOT
what business he had with the Old Man?"
"ASK ROOT
how much he got?"
Having mailed the letter to Lipsky and sent off the copy to the printer,
we turned in just at sun-up.
We were awakened a few hours later by the arrival of a socialist
committee. There was Dowd, a Scotch carpenter; Kaufmann, a brewery
driver, and Lipsky, the candidate. He was a Russian Jew, and had been a
professor in the old country. He could speak very little English, but
he had served a long term of exile in the Siberian prison mines.
The socialists had no idea of winning the election. The campaign was for
them only a demonstration, a couple of months when they had larger
audiences at their soap-box meetings. They were suspicious of us.
That consultation is one of the most ludicrous of my memories. Benson,
sitting in an arm-chair, in blue silk pajamas, smoking cigarettes,
outlined the plan in his fervent, profane, pyrotechnic way--much of
which was beyond their comprehension. Kaufmann had to translate it into
German for Lipsky. And when we talked German, Dowd could not
understand.
"But," said Herr Lipsky, when the posters had been translated to him,
"there is nothing there about our principles. There is no word about
surplus value. It is not the red lantern we are fighting--but the
Kapitalismus."
"The people," Benson raged--"the people with votes don't know surplus
value from the binominal theorem. Perhaps they will vote for their
daughters--they can see them. But they won't get excited about their
great-great-grandchildren."
There was a squabble among the committee-men. The Scotchman was too
canny to take sides; he wanted to refer the matter to the local, which
was not to meet until two days before the election.
"Aber," said the brewery man, "Ve need etwas gongrete."