worth $200,000. Among the many other unfit appointments were those of
“Barney” Martin, “Joe” Koch, and “Tom” Graham to the police courts,
and of “Mike” Daly, John J. Scannell, and “Andy” White to important
municipal offices. In 1892–93 the _Evening Post_, _Times_, and _World_
repeatedly challenged the methods of conducting the public business
in the Building Department, Dock Department, and Street Cleaning
Bureau, and in the latter part of 1893 the City Club began collecting
evidence of corruption from top to bottom in the Police Department.
This corruption, indeed, was almost a matter of common knowledge, for
repeated charges were made against police captains, and the bipartisan
Police Commission of four shielded the men in the most audacious way.
The insurrection of virtue, as Theodore Roosevelt called it, reached
a head during 1892–1893 in the charges of Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst,
minister of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, that the police
system was battening upon an extensive blackmail system. The response
was immediate; business men and others came to Dr. Parkhurst with
evidence that was incontestable; the City Club began demanding an
investigation by the Legislature; and _Harper’s Weekly_, which had
defended Tammany a few years earlier, published early in January,
1894, a cartoon which recalled Nast in the Tweed days. Entitled
“Tammany’s Tax on Crime,” it showed a line of saloon-keepers, criminals
and prostitutes passing before a cashier’s desk in which stood the
dummy figure of a policeman, with Boss Croker crouching behind it and
stretching forth his hand for the “contributions.” From the public
uproar grew the Lexow Inquiry.
For Mr. Clarence Lexow, the Senator who offered at Albany the
resolution for an investigating committee and became its chairman, the
_Evening Post_ had no respect. It called him “a young country lawyer
of very moderate abilities residing at Nyack, N. Y., and dabbling
more or less in politics under the guidance of the rather mediocre
understanding of Mr. T. C. Platt,” and it believed his interest in the
inquiry was as lukewarm as Platt’s own. But it earnestly supported
the movement for the inquiry, was disappointed when the committee
failed to secure Choate for counsel, and, when Gov. Flower vetoed the
appropriation of $25,000 for its work on the ground that it was a
partisan body, said that it knew no precedent for such a gross abuse
of the executive power save Gov. Hill’s veto of the appropriation for
the similar Fassett Committee. The State Chamber of Commerce came to
the rescue by advancing $17,500 to cover the committee’s expenses, and
John W. Goff, assisted by Frank Moss and Wm. Travers Jerome, proved an
admirable counsel.
By the middle of June, 1894, the inquiry had driven one of the four
Police Commissioners, John McClave, to resignation and flight. It
had been disclosed that the police force had a well-determined
tariff of charges for its protection of various criminal trades and
practices within the city. Each disorderly house was expected to
pay an “initiation fee” of $500 to every new police captain placed
in charge of the district, and $50 a month thereafter, besides a
contribution to the captain’s “Christmas present.” One keeper of such
a house testified that he had been charged $750 within three months.
Concert saloons, without a city license, had to pay $50 a month to the
captain, while the regular tariff for saloons employing waitresses,
and operating without a license, ran from $15 to $25 a month. It is
not surprising that the fact was elicited that one captain had paid
$15,000 for appointment to his post. For the privilege of selling on
Sunday all saloons regularly paid the ward men--the name then given
a petty officer--$5. Whenever the inspector of the excise department
found a saloon without a city license, he got $5 for overlooking the
fact. Tickets to Tammany “chowder parties,” usually distributed among
disorderly houses and saloons in blocks of five, were $5 each, and it
was gross bad manners to send any back. The push-cart men were expected
to pay $3 a week from their pitiful earnings, and the ward-men had
miscellaneous sources of tribute which made an appointment to the force
worth $300.
Every steamship line landing cargoes at the port had to pay heavy
blackmail charges at every stage of its business, and to every
official--police, dock, and custom-house--connected with Tammany. The
agent of the French Line displayed pitiable embarrassment when called
upon to explain an item of $500 “_payés a qui le droit_.” All merchants
who wished to use the sidewalks to display or handle goods paid $25
to $50 annually, it being customary to put this in an envelope and
leave it somewhere to be called for. Men who rented their premises for
polling booths had to divide the money with the police. But much worse
than such grafting as this was the evidence that the police, instead of
repressing pure criminality, were actually encouraging it as a source
of revenue. Thus green-goods swindlers were allowed to do business
on payment of $50 a month to the police captain, policy-gamblers had
the same privilege, and receivers of stolen goods shared with the
detectives. As a climax, to quote the _Post_, “Mr. Goff showed us a
police justice sitting on the bench, and not merely shielding a regular
practitioner of abortion from punishment, but conniving with him in his
guilt.”
The news pages, following the inquiry closely, showed how the early
bravado of the police force changed within a few weeks to panic:
That which has altered the feelings of the police [wrote a reporter
June 16] is the fact that the committee has entered recesses of
the corruption system which were believed to be unapproachable. So
long as the despised lowest class of criminals was the one drawn
upon for witnesses, there was felt little alarm. It was reasoned
that the records of the persons sworn would crush the force of
their testimony.... But when the “better class” women and the
professional criminal, like George Appo, began to squeal, danger
was foreseen. Women in the “tenderloin” and other more pretentious
districts have been treated fairly from a police standpoint. Where
they have paid for protection they got it, or, according to the
blackmailers, are supposed to have received it. If there was any
abuse of the police power it was not authorized, and must have been
the indiscretion of the wardman or the individual patrolman. It was
meant that the “ladies,” as they are uniformly called, should be
justly and squarely dealt with. Anyway, it is a shock to the guilty
to learn that women like “Eva Bell,” who has been protected for
years in Thirty-sixth Street, should give the game away and peach
as she did on Friday.
Worse than the fickleness of the women is the weakening of the
criminal and the gambler to the men who watch such lines of defense
give way. Appo, it is said, however, has been ill-treated, has a
grievance, and these are taken in account as reasons for his having
“thrown down” his fellows.
Mr. Godkin insisted that the source of the corruption was in the higher
ranks of the Tammany hierarchy, and in the impracticable administration
of the police by a bipartisan board of four instead of a single
Commissioner. The reporters declared that the best elements of the
force also held its heads to blame:
These men complain chiefly that the political phase of the matter
is not more urgently bored into. They say that the conduct of the
commissioners for years has been such as to poison a patrolman from
the time he first applies for admission to the force. The payment
for appointment, the reputation of the politicians in the Board,
the uses made of him by his executive superiors in their private
schemes, and by the Commissioners, directly and indirectly, for
their partisan purposes, together with the general moral tone of
the force and the work, all tend to teach him how he is to do for
himself when he can. There ... is daily disappointment that the
higher evils are not kept in view.
So far as immediate remedial legislation was concerned, the Lexow
inquiry produced less effect than had been hoped. Boss Platt controlled
the Republican Legislature, and had a strong influence upon Gov. Levi
P. Morton, who succeeded Flower; and Platt declared that to put the
police under a single Commissioner would be “revolution.” When the
Committee made its report in January, 1895, the _Evening Post_ joined
with Dr. Parkhurst in ridiculing its recommendations, which included
retention of the bipartisan, four-headed Police Commission. Godkin
drew a scathing picture of Lexow as he “sneaked off to Platt’s express
office, and engaged in a dirty little intrigue for the defeat of the
reform movement, and tossed his little head in the air and sniffed at
all the leading men in the city, and abused reformers in general, and
went to work under Platt’s direction to concoct a few little bills to
secure for Platt a few little offices.” The Legislature refused to put
the police under a single head. It passed enactments making possible
the reformation of the police court bench, and the reorganization of
the public school system, but in other fields in which the reformers
had expected changes it refused to act.
The real triumph of reform came in the municipal election in 1894.
Tammany, trying to brazen out the Lexow revelations, first nominated
Nathan Straus, one of the worst Park Commissioners the city ever had,
the chief abettor in 1892 of a scheme to ruin Central Park by putting
a race-track in it; but he declined, and the nomination was given
“Hughie” Grant, who had begun the process of filling the city offices
with the criminals and semi-criminals who adorned them. The reform
Democrats and reform Republicans held a meeting in Madison Square
Garden and selected a Committee of Seventy to conduct their campaign,
this body nominating William M. Strong for Mayor and John W. Goff for
Recorder. Its choice struck the _Evening Post_ as admirable, not only
because Strong was a man of high character, a successful citizen, and
well known to the public, but because he was a Republican. The next
Governor and Legislature, wrote Godkin, with accurate anticipation of
the fact, would be Republican, and while a Republican administration in
New York city might not be able to get from Gov. Morton and Boss Platt
all that was desired, they would certainly get more than any Democrat.
“A Democratic Mayor would probably not be allowed to make a single
removal or appointment except such as came to him under the present
Charter, and we should continue to wallow in our present quagmire
until the next Presidential election, and then might well bid farewell
to all thought of city reform.” Decent citizens this time were fully
aroused. They went to the polls in such numbers that, although Tammany
mustered 108,000 votes, Strong and Goff had a majority of over 45,000.
It was an impressive demonstration, wrote Mr. Godkin, of the power of
non-partisanship:
The Committee of Seventy have shown, more conspicuously than ever
before, the power which, even in this city of many nationalities
and creeds, lies in the union of good people. We believe the Good
Government clubs are doing invaluable work in turning the lesson
to account. They are spreading the non-partisan (not bi-partisan)
view of city affairs. It is especially important that they should
hammer it into the brains of the young, for the men who have
conducted this campaign against Tammany will be gone from the stage
in twenty years, as the men of 1871 are now, and in about twenty
years Tammany regains its old strength. Tammany will surely come
again, unless young and old get into the way of looking at the city
as they look at their bank, and think no more about the Mayor’s
politics than they think about the politics of the cashier who
keeps their accounts. All the well-governed cities of the world are
governed on this business plan, all the badly governed on the other.
The plan of going down among the rank and file of Tammany with
books and pamphlets, and University Settlements, and popular
lectures, we know has merit. It is a work of humanity and
civilization which is always in order. But they deceive themselves
who think the city can be saved by any such missionary work. What
Tammany offers to the ignorant and poor is always something more
palpable and succulent than enlightenment, or free reading rooms,
or cheap coffee. It can never be met and vanquished except by union
among the honest, industrious, and intelligent. These are now in
a majority and have always been in a majority. A great commercial
city like New York could not exist and prosper if they were not in
a majority. Whenever they cease to be in a majority, capital and
labor will both begin to move away from Manhattan Island.
The splendid achievements of Mayor Strong’s reform administration need
not be rehearsed in detail. Col. George E. Waring was appointed head
of the Street Cleaning Department, and before he had been at work a
fortnight the _Evening Post_ commented on the change he had wrought.
When people saw gangs of able-bodied sweepers and shovelers working
like Trojans under bosses, instead of groups of infirm and decrepit
creatures leaning upon their implements and talking politics, they
rubbed their eyes. Snow actually vanished over night; trucks were no
longer stabled in the streets to shelter vice; and the accidents to
horses from nails and rubbish strikingly diminished. Waring’s most
competent predecessor had cleaned 53 miles of street daily in 1888,
whereas Waring cleaned 433 miles from once to five times daily.
Theodore Roosevelt was made President of the Police Commission, with
results familiar to every one. A new Board of Education, after failing
to procure President Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins, chose William
H. Maxwell to be the energetic Superintendent of the Schools; while in
Mayor Strong’s first year fourteen new school buildings were finished,
and the salaries of teachers were materially raised. The police
courts were reorganized, the Mayor taking pains to choose the best
magistrates available. The City College, cramped into small quarters
on Twenty-third Street, was given an adequate site on the heights
overlooking Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum was enlarged, bridges were
built over the Harlem, and the parks were much more carefully tended.
The administration made blunders, but it was one of the best New York
has ever had.
For this great revolt of 1894 and its fruits, Mr. Godkin gave equal
credit to the foolish audacity of the Tammany yahoos and “the
persistence and pluck with which Dr. Parkhurst stuck to the police. It
was his splendid bulldog obstinacy in holding on to them which really
made the first clear impression on the public mind.” Dr. Parkhurst will
always remain the hero of the uprising. But many who were foremost
in the struggle thought at the time that Godkin himself should be
bracketed with the fighting pastor, and publicly or privately said so.
Dr. Parkhurst just after the election expressed his warm gratitude to
the editor. This was all very well, wrote Col. George E. Waring; “but
Parkhurst don’t know, as do those who have watched your course during
all the years of your work here, to what an extent you alone are to
be credited with the maintaining, among the leaders of the community,
of the spirit which at last made Parkhurst and his work possible. I
have known in my short life no equal example of persistent, vigorous,
aggressive virtue receiving the reward of such crowning success.”
Frederick Keppel wrote in the same terms: “Both Dr. Parkhurst and
Mr. Goff deserve the public honors that have been heaped upon them;
but long before these gentlemen were ever publicly heard of (and
unfalteringly ever since) your journal has fought against corruption
and wrong with a power and vigor which certainly has done more than any
other single influence to bring about the magnificent result of last
election day.” Wayne MacVeagh and President Gilman expressed themselves
with equal enthusiasm. Dr. W. R. Huntington suggested statues to Dr.
Parkhurst and Mr. Godkin overlooking Tammany Hall.
The strength of this sentiment led a month after the election to the
presentation to Mr. Godkin of a loving cup, the speech on the occasion
being delivered by Bishop Henry C. Potter. The subscription was made by
a list of women, and the cup testified to their “grateful recognition
of fearless and unfaltering services to the city of New York.”
The two chief municipal issues in which Godkin was interested after
1894, the creation of Greater New York under a charter drafted in 1896,
and the election of its first Mayor in 1897, both resulted in defeats
for his views. He opposed consolidation as premature. His belief was
that if the separate governments of New York and Brooklyn were both
corrupt, as they had been with few intermissions for a long generation,
their union would simply present a harder problem for reformers, and
fatter jobs and more boodle for the bosses. Moreover, he knew that
the guiding hand in the formation of a Charter Commission and the
legislative approval of its work would be Platt’s. But the Platt and
Croker machines agreed in supporting the consolidation programme, and
many of the reform element stood behind it, so that it was easily made
effective. The result of the ensuing mayoralty campaign of 1897 was not
long in doubt. On the Tammany side there was one candidate, Robert Van
Wyck, and opposing him there appeared three. The Citizens’ Union was
formed that spring, and its efforts led to the nomination of Seth Low,
well known as successively Mayor of Brooklyn and President of Columbia
University--an admirable choice; the Platt Republicans nominated Gen.
B. F. Tracy; and the Bryan Democrats put forward Henry George. Van Wyck
received 233,997 votes, while Low, his nearest rival, obtained only
151,540.
[Illustration: E. L. GODKIN
Associate Editor 1881–1883, Editor-in-Chief 1883–1899.]
This result seemed a stunning reaction from the great victory of 1894.
Van Wyck made a clean sweep of Mayor Strong’s efficient departmental
heads, and when Devery became chief of police the city ran “wide open.”
Yet in the moment of defeat Godkin did not lose heart, pointing out
that Van Wyck’s three antagonists combined had a larger vote than
he. “Four years is a long time to wait, undoubtedly, for another attack
on Tammany,” the _Post_ said, “but in those four years Tammany will be
furnishing us with plenty of ammunition, and Republicans will be seeing
and thinking, and the Citizens’ Union will be learning how to fight.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FREE SILVER, THE SPANISH WAR, AND IMPERIALISM
The three great final battles of Godkin’s editorship were those against
the free silver craze, the Spanish War, and the retention of the
Philippines. The first was decisively won, but the decisive loss of the
other two cast a shadow over Mr. Godkin’s last days. “American ideals
were the intellectual food of my youth, and to see America converted
into a senseless, Old World conqueror, embitters my age,” he wrote a
friend in May, 1899. In all three struggles the _Evening Post_ took the
same aggressive leadership as in the Mugwump campaigns against Blaine
and in Godkin’s fifteen years of war upon Tammany.
The portents of the free silver uprising first became alarming to the
_Evening Post_ in 1890. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of that year
it roundly attacked, and Horace White and the other editors always
regarded it as the chief cause of the panic of 1893. As he pointed
out, it added nearly $200,000,000 to the fiat money of the country,
alarmed men at home and abroad regarding the ability of the United
States to redeem its obligations in gold upon demand, caused the
steady withdrawal of capital from the country, and decreased business
confidence and increased money rates until failures took place on every
hand. The _Post’s_ detestation of the Sherman Act was increased by the
fact that it was passed by a nefarious combination of silver men and
supporters of the McKinley Tariff, a measure which the _Post_ equally
abominated. For some years in the nineties the silver danger seemed the
greater because Republicans flirted with it as coyly as Democrats. In
1894 both Speaker Reed and Senator Lodge proposed to force silver upon
the world by high discriminating tariffs against nations which refused
to adopt bimetallism. Lodge, in fact, left the _Evening Post_ aghast
by introducing a demagogic resolution in the Senate for applying this
policy against England.
Late in 1894 the reception given “Coin’s Financial School” showed how
irresistibly the free silver question was thrusting itself into the
political foreground. This famous pamphlet, by W. H. Harvey, related
how a “smooth little financier” of Chicago named Coin, struck by the
rural distress and business depression, opened a school of finance in
the Art Institute in May, 1894. His lectures and colloquies continued
six days. At first only young men were present, but the audience
increased until it included statesmen, professors, bank presidents,
and others of note, many of them--as Lyman J. Gage and J. Laurence
Laughlin--designated by name. When they interrupted Coin, he quickly
silenced them by his incisive logic and superior knowledge. In the end,
completely converted, the company tendered him a glittering reception
at the Palmer House. The pamphlet was illustrated by coarse woodcuts.
One showed silver a beautiful woman decapitated by her enemies; another
depicted America as a cow which the farmers were laboriously feeding
while a fat capitalist milked her; a third represented the gold
standard by a man hobbling on one leg. Coin had made the utmost of his
ability to ask the questions as well as answer them. As Horace White
said, his discussion with Prof. Laughlin was equaled by nothing save
the debate in Rabelais upon the question whether a chimera ruminating
in a vacuum devoureth second intentions. The booklet was full of
deceptive analogies. For example, when asked if Government coinage of
depreciated silver would really make it worth a dollar in gold, Coin
replied: “Certainly; if the Government bought 100,000 horses, wouldn’t
the price go up?” This retort was set off with a woodcut of a horse.
No man in the country, not even Prof. W. G. Sumner, was so well
equipped to answer Coin as Horace White. The “comic publication,” as
the _Post_ called it, would have been unworthy of attention had its
influence not been tremendous. Silver miners, mortgage-ridden farmers,
small shopkeepers and workmen, were everywhere soon studying it, making
its specious arguments their own, and convincing themselves that an
Eastern plutocracy had committed “the crime of ’73”--the demonetization
of silver--in order to depress the prices of crops and labor. By March,
1895, it was impossible to ignore the booklet. In a series of twelve
articles Mr. White exposed its many misstatements and fallacies. Coin
asserted that silver was “demonetized secretly” in 1873, whereas the
discussion had been full and open. He said that the silver dollar was
the monetary unit of the United States 1792–1873, when it was actually
so only from 1783 to 1792. He stated that the United States was the
first nation to demonetize silver, whereas Germany had closed her mints
to silver except for small coins in 1871. As for the horse-buying
illustration, Mr. White showed that when in 1890 the Government began
buying 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month, the price actually
fell because the supply increased also. He discussed in detail the
greenback question, Coin’s queer delusion that the country had never
been prosperous since 1873, and the supposed “English octopus” that had
fastened gold upon the world. With some revision, his articles appeared
early in 1895 as a pamphlet entitled “Coin’s Financial Fool,” and were
distributed in large numbers by the Reform Club at fifteen cents a
hundred.
At the beginning of 1896 the _Evening Post_ welcomed the signs that
a great national battle over free silver was coming. The result, it
predicted, would be the same that had crowned the greenback contest. “A
sharp division between those who want an honest dollar and those who do
not is on all accounts to be desired,” it said on April 10. “A year’s
discussion of the principles that enter into this question is the best
possible preparation of the public mind for the presidential campaign
of 1896.” It knew that the sharp division would have to be a division
between the two great parties. As the isolation of Cleveland and other
gold men in the Democrat party, and the ascendancy of silverites like
Bland and Tillman, became more emphatic, it frankly pinned its hopes to
the Republicans.