PUTIN' on style don't pay in politics. The people won't stand for it. If
you've got an achin' for style, sit down on it till you have made your
pile and landed a Supreme Court Justiceship with a fourteen-year term at
$17,000 a year, or some job of that kind. Then you've got about all you
can get out of politics, and you can afford to wear a dress suit all day
and sleep in it all night if you have a mind to. But, before you have
caught onto your life meal ticket, be simple. Live like your neighbors
even if you have the means to live better. Make the poorest man in your
district feel that he is your equal, or even a bit superior to you.
Above all things, avoid a dress suit. You have no idea of the harm
that dress suits have done in politics. They are not so fatal to young
politicians as civil service reform and drink, but they have scores of
victims. I will mention one sad case. After the big Tammany victory
in 1897, Richard Croker went down to Lakewood to make up the slate of
offices for Mayor Van Wyck to distribute. All the district leaders and
many more Tammany men went down there, too, to pick up anything good
that was goin.' There was nothin' but dress suits at dinner at Lakewood,
and Croker wouldn't let any Tammany men go to dinner without them. Well,
a bright young West Side politician, who held a three-thousan dollar job
in one of the departments, went to Lakewood to ask Croker for something
better. He wore a dress suit for the first time in his hie. It was his
undoin'. He got stuck on himself. He thought he looked too beautiful for
anything, and when he came home he was a changed man. As soon as he got
to his house every evenin' he put on that dress Suit and set around in
it until bedtime. That didn't satisfy him long. He wanted others to see
how beautiful he was in a dress suit; so he joined dancin' clubs and
began goin' to all the balls that was given in town. Soon he began
to neglect his family. Then he took to drinkin', and didn't pay any
attention to his political work in the district. The end came in less
than a year. He was dismissed from the department and went to the dogs.
The other day I met him rigged out almost like a hobo, but he still
had a dress-suit vest on. When I asked him what he was doin', he said:
"Nothin' at present, but I got a promise of a job enrollin' voters at
Citizens' Union head-quarters." Yes, a dress Suit had brought him that
low!
I'll tell you another case right in my own Assembly District. A few
years ago I had as one of my lieutenants a man named Zeke Thompson. He
did fine work for me and I thought he had a bright future. One day he
came to me, said he intended to buy an option on a house, and asked me
to help him out. I like to see a young man acquirin' property and I had
so much confidence in Zeke that I put up for him on the house.
A month or so afterwards I heard strange rumors. People told me that
Zeke was beginnin' to put on style. They said he had a billiard table in
his house and had hired Jap servants. I couldn't believe it. The idea
of a Democrat, a follower of George Washington Plunkitt in the Fifteenth
Assembly District havin' a billiard table and Jap servants! One mornin'
I called at the house to give Zeke a chance to clear himself. A Jap
opened the door for me. I saw the billiard table--Zeke was guilty! When
I got over the shock, I said to Zeke: "You are caught with the goods on.
No excuses will go. The Democrats of this district ain't used to dukes
and princes and we wouldn't feel comfortable in your company. You'd
overpower us. You had better move up to the Nineteenth or Twenty-seventh
District, and hang a silk stocking on your door." He went up to the
Nineteenth, turned Republican, and was lookin' for an Albany job the
last I heard of him.
Now, nobody ever saw me puttin' on any style. I'm the same Plunkitt I
was when I entered politics forty years ago. That is why the people of
the district have confidence in me. If I went into the stylish business,
even I, Plunkitt, might be thrown down in the district. That was shown
pretty clearly in the senatorial fight last year. A day before the
election, my enemies circulated a report that I had ordered a $10,000
automobile and a $125 dress suit. I sent out contradictions as fast as
I could, but I wasn't able to stamp out the infamous slander before the
votin' was over, and I suffered some at the polls. The people wouldn't
have minded much if I had been accused of robbin' the city treasury, for
they're used to slanders of that kind in campaigns, but the automobile
and the dress suit were too much for them.
Another thing that people won't stand for is showin' off your learnin'.
That's just puttin' on style in another way. If you're makin' speeches
in a campaign, talk the language the people talk. Don't try to show how
the situation is by quotin' Shakespeare. Shakespeare was all right in
his way, but he didn't know anything about Fifteenth District politics.
If you know Latin and Greek and have a hankerin' to work them off on
somebody, hire a stranger to come to your house and listen to you for a
couple of hours; then go out and talk the language of the Fifteenth to
the people. I know it's an awful temptation, the hankerin' to show off
your learnin'. I've felt it myself, but I always resist it. I know the
awful consequences.