his world was his own, once the gates were lifted he went dancing
off the boat and up the dock, a jaunty, devil-may-care air and step
characterizing him, and was soon lost in the world farther on. But
about it all, as it seemed to me, there was something that said to
those of us who were left in the way, that he and his kind were
neither to be pitied nor blamed. They were as they were, unsocial,
unconventional, indifferent to the saving, grasping, scheming plans
of men, and in accord with moods if not plans of their own. They will
not, and I suspect cannot, run with the herd, even if they would. And
no doubt they taste a form of pleasure and satisfaction that is as
grateful to them as are all the moods and emotions which characterize
those who are so unlike them and who see them as beings so utterly to
be pitied or foresworn. At least I imagine so.
[Illustration]
THE MICHAEL J. POWERS ASSOCIATION
In an area of territory including something like forty thousand
residents of the crowded East Side of New York there dwells and rules
an individual whose political significance might well be a lesson to
the world.
Stout, heavy-headed and comfortably constituted, except in the matter
of agility, he walks; and where he is not a personal arbiter he is at
least a familiar figure. Not a saloon-keeper (and there is one to every
half-block) but knows him perfectly and would be glad to take off his
hat to him if it were expected, and would bring him into higher favor.
Not a street cleaner or street division superintendent, policeman
or fireman but recognizes him and goes out of his way to greet him
respectfully. Store-keepers and school children, the basement barber
and the Italian coal-dealer all know who is meant when one incidentally
mentions “the boss.” His progress, if one might so term his daily
meanderings, is one of continual triumph. It is not coupled with
huzzahs, it is true, but there is a far deeper and more vital sentiment
aroused, a feeling of reverence due a master.
I have in mind a common tenement residence in a crowded and sometimes
stifling street in this vicinity, where at evening the hand-organs play
and the children run the thoroughfare by thousands. Poor, compact; rich
only in those quickly withering flowers of flesh and blood, the boys
and girls of the city. It is a section from which most men would flee
when in search of rest and quiet. The carts and wagons are numerous,
the people are hard-working and poor. Stale odors emanate from many
hallways and open windows.
Yet here, winter and summer, when evening falls and the cares of his
contracting business are over for the day, this individual may be seen
perched upon the front stoop of his particular tenement building or
making a slow, conversational progress to the clubhouse, a half-dozen
doors to the west. So peculiar is the political life of the great
metropolis that his path for this short distance is blockaded by dozens
who seek the awesome confessional of his ear.
“Mr. Powers, if you don’t mind, when you’re through I would like a word
with you.”
“Mr. Powers, if you’re not too busy, I want to ask you a question.”
“Mr. Powers--” how often is this simple form of request made into his
ear. Three hours’ walking, less than three hundred feet--this tells
the story of the endless number that seek to buttonhole him. “Rubbing
something offen him,” is the way the politicians interpret these
conversations.
Being a big man with a very “big” influence, he is inclined to be
autocratic, an attitude of mind which endless whispered pleas are
little calculated to modify. Always he carries himself with a reserved
and secret air. There is something uncompromising about the wide mouth,
with its long upper lip, the thin line of the lips set like the edge of
an oyster shell, the square, heavily-weighted jaw beneath, which is
cold and hard. Yet his mouth is continually wrinkling at the corners
with the semblance of a smile, and those nearest as well as those
farthest from him will tell you that he has a good heart. You may take
that with a grain of salt, or not, as you choose.
I had not been in the district very long before I saw in the windows of
nearly every kind of store a cheaply-printed placard announcing that
the annual outing of the Michael J. Powers Association would take place
on Tuesday, August 2d, at Wetzel’s Grove, College Point. The steamer
_Cygnus_, leaving Pier 30, East River, would convey them. Games,
luncheon and dinner were to be the entertainment. Tickets five dollars.
Any one who has ever taken even a casual glance at the East Side would
be struck by the exorbitance of such a charge as five dollars. No one
would believe for an instant that these saving Germans, Jews and other
types of hard-working nationalities would willingly invest anything
over fifty cents in any such outing. Times are always hard here, the
size of a dollar exceedingly large. Yet there was considerable stir
over the prospective pleasure of the day in this district.
“Toosday is a great day,” remarked my German barber banteringly, when I
called on the Saturday previous to get shaved.
“What about Tuesday?”
“Mr. Powers holds his picnic. Der will be some beer drunk, you bet.”
“What do you know about it? Do you belong to the association?”
“Yes. I was now six years a member alretty. It is a fine association.”
“What makes them charge five dollars? There can’t be very many around
here who can afford to pay that much.”
“Der will be t’ree t’ousand, anyway,” he answered, “maybe more.
Efferybody goes. Mr. Powers say ‘Go,’ den dey go.”
“Oh, Mr. Powers makes you go, does he?”
“No,” he replied conservatively. “It is a nice picnic. We haf music, a
cubble of bands. Der is racing, schwimming, all de beer you want for
nodding, breakfast und dinner, a nice boat ride. Oh, we haf a good
time.”
“Do you belong to Tammany?”
“No, sir.”
“Hold any office under Mr. Powers?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, why do you go, then? There must be some reason.”
“I haf de polling place in my back room,” he finally admitted.
“How much do you get for that?”
“Sixty-five dollars a year.”
“And you give five of that back for a ticket?”
He smiled, but made no reply.
It was on Monday that the German grocer signified his intention of
going.
“Do all of you people have to attend?” I inquired.
“No,” he replied, “we don’t have to. There will be somebody there from
most of the stores around here, though.”
“Why?”
“Ask Mr. Powers. There’ll be somebody there from every saloon,
barbershop, restaurant and grocery in the district.”
“But why?”
“Ho,” he returned, “it’s a good picnic. Mr. Powers looks mighty fine
marching at the head. They say he is next after Croker now.”
Among the petty dealers of the neighborhood generally could be found
the same genial acceptance of the situation.
“Dat is a great parade,” said a milk dealer to me. “You will see
somet’ing doing if you are in de distric’ dat night. Senators walk
around just de same as street cleaners; police captains, too.”
I thought of the condescension of these high-and-mighties deigning to
walk with the common street cleaners, coerced into line.
“Are you going?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Want to go?”
“Oh, it’s good enough.”
“What do you think of Powers?”
“He is a great man. Stands next to Croker. Wait till you see de
procession dat goes by here.”
[Illustration: The Michael J. Powers Association]
This was the point, the procession. Any such rich material evidence
of power was a sufficient reason for loyalty in the minds of these
people. They worship power. None know it better than these particular
individuals who lead them. The significance of forcing so many to
march, coming thus rapidly home to me, I dropped around to the district
Tammany club on the afternoon and evening preceding this eventful
day. The palatial chambers of the district leader in the club are
his arena, and on this particular evening these same were the center
of much political activity. Signs of the power of which I had heard
and seen other evidences were here renewed before my eyes. Arranged
in a great meeting-chamber, the political hall of the club, were
tables and counters, behind which were standing men who, as I learned
immediately afterward, were of high standing in the district and
city organization. Deputy commissioners of the water department, the
department of highways, of sewers; ex-State senators, ex-assemblymen,
police sergeants, detective sergeants, aldermen, were all present and
all doing yeoman service.
Upon the tables were immense sheets, yards in diameter, with lists of
names. Back of the tables were immense piles of caps, badges and canes.
As fast as the owners of the names on the list appeared their names
were checked and their invitation cards, which they threw down cheerily
upon the table in company with a five-dollar bill, were marked paid and
passed back for further use. At the other tables these cards were then
good for a cap, a cane, and two badges, all of which the members were
expected to wear.
Energetic as were the half-dozen deputy commissioners, police
sergeants, detective sergeants, ex-assemblymen and the like, who
labored at this clerical task without coats or vests, they were no
match for the throng of energetic Tammanyites who filed in and out,
carrying their hats and canes away with them. Hundreds of clerks,
precinct captains, wardmen, street-cleaners, two-thousand-dollar-a-year
clerks, swarmed the spacious lobby and greeted one another in that
perfunctory way so common to most political organizations. The
“Hellos,” “Well, old mans,” “Well, how are things?” and “There goes”
were as thick and all-pervading as the tobacco smoke which filled the
rooms. Tammanyites in comfortable positions of all degrees moved about
in new clothes and squeaky shoes. Distinct racial types illustrated
how common is the trait of self-interest and how quick are the young
Germans, Irish and Jews to espouse some cause or profession where
self-interest and the simultaneous advancement of the power of some
particular individual or organization are not incompatible. Smilingly
they greeted one another, with that assumption of abandon and good
fellowship which was as evidently assumed for the occasion as could be.
In the case of many it was all too plain that it was an effort to be as
bright and genial as they appeared to be. However, they had mastered
the externals and could keep a straight face. How hard those straight
mouths could become, how defiant those narrow protruding jaws, only
time and a little failure on some one’s part would tell.
While the enthusiasm of this labor was at its highest Mr. Powers put
in an appearance. He was as pictured. On this occasion, his clothes
were plain black, his necktie black, his face a bright red, partially
due to a recent, and very close shave. He moved about with catlike
precision and grace, and everywhere politicians buttonholed or bowed to
him, the while he smiled upon every one in the same colorless, silent
and decidedly secret way.
“Mr. Powers, we’re going to run out of caps before long,” one official
hurried forward to say.
“Dugan has that in charge,” he replied.
“I guess we’ll have a full attendance,” whispered another of those high
in his favor.
“That’s good.”
While he was sitting in his rosewood-finished office at one side of the
great room dozens of those who had come from other districts to pay
their respects and buy a ticket looked in upon him.
“I’ll be with you in the morning, Michael,” said a jolly official from
another district.
“Thank you, George,” he replied smiling. “We’ll have a fine day, I
hope.”
“I hope so,” said the other.
Sitting about in their chairs, some of the older officials who had come
to the club on this very special occasion fell into a reflective mood
and dug up the conditions of the past.
“Do you remember Mike as an alderman, Jerry?”
“I do. There was none better.”
“Remember his quarrel with Murtha?”
“Aye! He was for taking no odds from anybody those days.”
“Brave as a lion, he was.”
“He was.”
“There’s no question of his nerve to-day.”
“None at all.”
“He’s a good leader.”
“He is.”
“How did Powers ever come to get his grip upon the district?” I
inquired of an old office-holder who was silently watching the buzzing
throng in the rooms before him.
“He was always popular with the boys,” he answered. “Long before the
fortieth was ever divided he was popular with the boys of one section
of it. Creamer was leader at that time.”
“Yes, but how did he get up?”
“How does anybody get up?” he returned. “He worked up. When he was
assistant mechanic in the Fire Department, getting a hundred and twenty
a month, he gave half of it away. Anybody could get money off him; that
was the trouble. I’ve known him as a lad to give seventy-seven dollars
away in one month.”
“Who was he, that he should distribute money so freely?”
“Captain of two hundred, of course. He wasn’t called upon to spend his
own money, though.”
“And that started him?”
“He was always a smart fellow,” returned the speaker. “Creamer liked
him. Creamer was a fighter himself. Mike was as brave as a lion. When
they divided the district he got John Kelly to give Powers the other
half. He did it, of course, because he could trust Powers to stand with
him. But he did it, just the same.”
“Kelly was head of Tammany Hall then?”
“He was.”
While we were talking a cart-driver or street-cleaner made his way
through the broad street-door towards the private office where so many
others were, taking off his hat as he did so and waiting respectfully
to one side. Dozens of young politicians were trifling about. The
deputy commissioner of highways, the assistant deputy tax commissioner,
the assistant deputy of the department of sewers, and others were
lounging comfortably in the chief’s room. Three or four black-suited,
priestly-looking assistants from the office of the chief of police were
conferring in that wise, subtle and whispering way which characterizes
all the conversation of those numerous aspirants for higher political
preferment.
Some one stalked over to the waiting newcomer and said: “Well?”
“Is Mr. Powers here this evening?”
At the sound of his name the leader, who was lounging in his
Russia-leather chair within, raised his head, and seeing the figure in
the reception area, exclaimed:
“Put on your hat, old man! No one is expected to put off his hat here.
Come right in!”
He paused, and as the street-sweeper approached he turned lightly to
his satellites. “Get the hell out of here, now, and let this man have
a chance,” he said quickly, the desire to be genial with all being
apparent. The deputies came out of the room smiling and the old man was
ushered in.
“Now, Mr. Cassidy,” I heard him begin, but slowly he moved around to
the door and closed it. The conversation was terminated so far as we
listeners from without were concerned. Only the profuse bowing of
the old man as he came out, the “Thank ye, Mr. Powers, thank ye,”
repeated and repeated, gave any indication as to what the nature of the
transaction might have been.
While such incidents were passing the evening for some, the great crowd
of ticket-purchasers continued. Hundreds upon hundreds filed in and
out, some receiving a nod, some a mere glance of recognition, some only
a scrutiny of a very peculiar sort.
“Are these all members of the club?” I asked of a friend, an
ex-assemblyman and now precinct captain in the block in which I voted.
“They’re nearly all members of the district organization,” he replied.
“How many votes do you claim to control?”
“About five thousand.”
“How many votes are there in the district?”
“Ten thousand.”
“Then you have fully half the votes assured before election-time rolls
around?”
“We’ve got to have,” he replied significantly. “There’s no going into a
fight under Powers, unless he knows where the votes are. He won’t stand
for it.”
While sitting thus watching the proceedings, the hours passed and the
procession thinned down to a mere handful. By midnight it looked as if
all were over, and the leader came forth and quietly took his leave.
“Anything more, Eddie?” he asked of a peaked-face young Irishman
outside his office door.
“Nothing that I can think of.”
“You’ll see to the building?” he asked the deputy commissioner of taxes.
“It’ll look like a May party in the morning, Chief.”
THE FIRE
It is two o’clock of a sultry summer afternoon in one of those
amazingly crowded blocks on the East Side south of Fourteenth Street,
which is drowsing out its commonplace existence through the long and
wearisome summer. The men of the community, for it may as well be
called a community since it involves all that makes a community, and
that in a very small space, are away at work or in their small stores,
which take up all of the ground floors everywhere. The housewives are
doing their shopping in these same stores--groceries, bakeries, meat
and fish markets. From the streets which bound this region people are
pouring through, a busy host, coming from what sections of the city
and the world and going to what sections of the city and the world no
one may divine. Wagons rattle, trucks rumble by with great, creaking
loads, a slot conduit trolley puts a clattering car past every fifteen
or twenty seconds. The riffraff of life fills it as full as though it
were the center of the world. Children, since there is no school now,
are playing here. The streets are fairly alive with a noisy company
of urchins who play at London Bridge and My Love’s Lover, and are
constantly getting in the way of one another and of every one else who
chances to pass this way.
Suddenly, in the midst of an almost wearisome peace, comes the cry
of fire. It comes from the cleanly depths of Number 358, in the
middle of this block, where one Frederick Halsmann, paint-dealer and
purveyor of useful oils to the inhabitants of this neighborhood, has
apparently been busy measuring out a gallon of gasoline. He has been
doing a fairly thriving business here for years, the rejuvenation of a
certain apartment district nearby having brought him quite a demand for
explosive and combustible oils, such as naphtha, gasoline and benzine,
to say nothing of turpentine and some other less dangerous products,
all of which he has stored in his basement. There is a law against
keeping more than twenty gallons of any kind of explosive oil in a
store or the basement of a store, but this law, like so many others of
the great city, enjoys its evasions. What is the law between friends?
All the same, and at last, a fire has broken out--no one ever knows
quite how. A passing stranger notes smoke issuing from a grating in
front of the store. He calls the attention of Mr. Halsmann to it,
but even before that the latter has seen it. He starts to descend an
outside stairway leading to his particular basement but is halted by a
terrific explosion which knocks him and some strangers down, shatters
the windows in his own and other stores four or five numbers away, and
tears a hole in the floor of his store through which his paints, a
counter, a cash register and some other things begin to tumble. He is
too astounded to quite grasp it all but recovering his feet he begins
to shout: “Maria! Maria! Come quick! And the children! Come out! Come
down!”
But his cries come too late. He has scarcely got the words out of his
mouth when a second explosion, far more violent than the first, tears
up the floor and the stairs leading to his home and throws the lurid
fire into the rooms above. It smashes the glass in the front windows
of stores across the street and blows a perfect hurricane of fire in
the same direction. People run, yelling and screaming, a hundred voices
raising the cry of “Fire!”
“My God! My God!” cries an old Jewish butcher over the way. He is
standing in front of his store wringing his hands. “It is Halsmann’s
store! Run quick!” This to a child near him. Then he also runs. An idle
policeman breaks for the nearest fire alarm box, and the crowds of the
neighboring thoroughfares surge in here until the walks and the paving
stones are black with people. A hundred heads pop out of neighboring
windows. A thousand voices take up the cry of “Fire!”
From the houses adjoining, and even in this one, for the upper floors
have not yet been completely shattered, people are hurrying. A woman
with a child on the third floor is screaming and waving her free
hand frantically. A score of families in the adjoining buildings are
gathering their tawdry valuables together and hastening into the
street. Some policemen from neighboring beats, several from the back
rooms of saloons, come running, and the fight to obtain a little order
in anticipation of the fire engines begins.
[Illustration: The Fire]
“Get back there!” commands Officer Casey, whose one idea of natural
law in a very unspiritual world is that all policemen should always
be in front where they can see best. He begins pushing hard at the
vitals of a slender citizen whose curiosity is out of all proportion to
his strength. “Get back, I say! Ye’d think ye owned the earth, the way
ye’re shovin’ in here. Get back!”
“Give ’em a crack over the sconce,” advises Officer Rooney, who can
see no use in wasting time bandying words. “Back with ye! I’ll not be
tellin’ ye twice. Back!” And he places a brawny shoulder so as to do
the utmost damage in the matter of crushing bones. It is rather good
fun for a policeman who only a moment before was wondering what to do
with his time.
In the meanwhile the flames are sweeping upward. In the basement,
where gasoline sat by kerosene, and naphtha by that, the urge of the
flames is irresistible. Already one small barrel and a five-gallon
measure of gasoline have gone, sacrificing to its concentrated force
the lives of Halsmann’s wife and child. Now, a large half-barrel
having been reached, the floors to the third level are ripped out by
a terrifying crash that shatters the panes of glass in the windows in
the next block and Plumber Davidson, on the third floor of the house
next door, running to get his pocketbook out of a kitchen drawer and a
kit of tools he had laid down before putting his head out of the front
window, is seen to be caught and pinioned, and slaughtered where he
stands. Street-sweeper Donnelson’s wife, a stout slattern of a woman,
who had run with many agonized exclamations to a cradle to pick up her
little round-headed Johnnie and then to the mantel to grab a new clock,
is later found in the basement of the same building, caught midway
between the iron railing of a stair and a timber. Mrs. Steinmetz, the
Jewish peddler’s wife, of the fourth floor, is blown to the ceiling
from her kitchen floor, and then, tumbling down, left unconscious on a
stretch of planking, from which later she is rescued.
Outside, on the ground below, the people are gazing in terror and
intense satisfaction. Here is a spectacle for you, if you please, here
the end of a dull routine of many days. The fire-god has broken loose.
The demon flame is trying his skill against the children of men and the
demon water. He has caught them unawares. He has seized upon the place
where the best of their ammunition is stored. From his fortress in
the cellar he is hurling huge forks of flame and great gusts of heat.
Before him now men and women stand helpless. White-faced onlookers gaze
upward with expressions of mingled joy and pain.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
And the wail of a siren.
And yet another.
And yet another.
They announce the men of the Fortieth Hook and Ladder Company, of the
Twenty-seventh Hook and Ladder and Fire Patrol, of the Thirty-third
Engine and Hook and Ladder Company, and the Fifty-first Engine and Hose
Company, down through a long list of stations covering an area of a
half-dozen square miles.