“ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN.”
“After all,” some readers will say, “what does it matter? These people are
all outlaws; they deserve what they get, whatever it is.” But the net of
the New York police was exceeding wide, and the mesh was exceeding fine,
and no class of the community escaped. As the sun riseth upon the evil and
the just, so the blackmailer of the Police Department marked as his prey
the honest and virtuous as well as the vicious and criminal. The Lexow
Committee report:--
The evidence of blackmail and extortion does not rest alone on the
evidence of criminals or persons accused of the commission of crime.
It has been abundantly proven that bootblacks, push-cart, and fruit
vendors, as well as keepers of soda-water stands, corner grocerymen,
sailmakers with flag poles extending a few feet beyond the place which
they occupy, boxmakers, provision dealers, wholesale drygoods
merchants, and builders, who are compelled at times to use the
sidewalk and street, steamboat and steamship companies, who require
police service on their docks, those who give public exhibitions, and
in fact all persons, and all classes of persons whose business is
subject to the observation of the police, or who may be reported as
violating ordinances, or who may require the aid of the police, all
have to contribute in substantial sums to the vast amounts which flow
into the station-houses, and which, after leaving something of the
nature of a deposit, then flow on higher. The commerce of the port
even is taxed when the functions of the police department touch it, so
that the shippers are compelled to submit to exactions in the city of
New York that they do not meet with in any other port.--Vol. i., p.
42.
The chief sufferers, of course, were the poor and those who had no helper.
They were as much at the mercy of their oppressors as the French people
before the Revolution were at the mercy of their nobles. Again and again
the senators expressed their amazement that a population so harassed and
oppressed did not rise in revolt. Their wrongs certainly were immeasurably
greater than those which led to the Tea-party in Boston Harbour and the
Declaration of Independence. The chief abuse, the great grievance, might
be summed up in one sentence. There was no justice for the poor. A witness
of the name of Collins, speaking of the notorious Alderman, Silver Dollar
Smith, and the gang by which he reigned supreme on the east side, said:--
Smith has a regular organisation; you couldn’t convict them people
neither; you couldn’t convict them people in Court neither. It is an
organisation to represent witnesses to condemn people if they have no
money. If they have money to give, they are innocent; they perjure
themselves if they pay money.--Vol. v., p. 4,894.
But it is not necessary to go beyond the finding of the Lexow Committee in
their official Report:--
The co-ordination of all the departments of city government, under the
sway of the dominant Democratic faction in that city, has produced a
harmony of action operating so as to render it impossible for
oppressed citizens, particularly those in the humbler walks of life,
the poor and needy, to obtain redress or relief from the oppression or
the tyranny of the police. Their path to justice was completely
blocked. It is not credible that the abuses shown to exist have been
the creation of but a short time. It is clear from the evidence that
abuses have existed for many years back; that they have been
constantly increasing through the years, but that they did not reach
their full and perfect development until Tammany Hall obtained
absolute control of the city government, and under that control the
practices which have been shown conclusively before your Committee,
were brought into a well regulated and comprehensive system, conducted
apparently upon business principles.--Vol. i., p. 37.
The way in which the criminals in uniform and on the judge’s bench acted
when by any chance they could punish any one for doing what they
themselves were doing all the time has already been remarked in the case
of Captain Creedon, who was the only captain suspended by the Police Board
during the whole investigation. A more cruel case was that of Karl Werner.
This man had tried to bribe a policeman with five dollars, and was
promptly arrested. Every difficulty was placed in the way of letting him
have bail. At last the Court promised to accept bail, and a professional
bondsman offered to give bonds for 100 dollars. His wife raised 95
dollars, and because she could not raise the additional five on the spot,
the bondsman confiscated the 95 dollars, and the poor wretch was sent to
gaol. The professional bondsman is one of the worst of the harpies who
prey upon the unfortunate. Mr. Goff, who reported this incident to the
Commission, deplored the impotence to save the victim of the bondsman and
the police. “It is,” he said, “simply another of the many instances of the
terrible reign of terrorism” (vol. iv., p. 4,225).
Yet at the very time when Werner was being treated so harshly, the police
were collecting blackmail by thousands of dollars every week. At first the
Committee was incredulous. The Chairman asked once:--
Do you conscientiously believe that, notwithstanding these
revelations, notwithstanding the situation that we are brought face to
face with now, and what has occurred, there are police officers to-day
in this city who accept blackmail?
But he was speedily convinced that the revelations and the terrors of
exposure had only reduced the amount of the blackmail levied by reducing
the number of those who could be compelled to pay. The evidence of Captain
Meakin’s collector, Edward Shalvey, was conclusive on this point. He swore
in the witness-box that he had gone on collecting, without making the
slightest change, right down to September:--
Q. You collected from these several places, liquor dealers, policy
shops, and houses of ill-fame as you did under the previous captain?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Did you ever meet with any refusal to pay from people engaged in
this class of business, or did they all pay as matter of course?
A. They all paid as matter of course.
Q. So that, officer, even beneath the terrible frown of the Lexow
Committee, the collections went on just the same?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. The old, old story continued, is that not so?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And while, as a matter of fact, while there were exposures made and
being testified to before this Committee since last April or May,
right along the collections continued unbroken, did they not?
A. Yes, sir; not to such an extent.
Q. And the captains took the money in the same way?
A. Yes, sir.
Chairman Lexow: It seems incredible!--Vol. i., pp. 5,407-8.
“It is a tough old world, sir,” as the old stager remarked to an
enthusiastic young Reformer, “and takes a deal of moving.” It is a very
tough old world, and in the whole hemisphere there are few places tougher
than New York.
The contributions paid by contractors to Mr. Croker can easily be
understood. One Michael Moran, who was engaged in the towboat business,
towing garbage under the Street Cleaning Department, made various
subscriptions of from £10 to £30 to Tammany Hall. He was asked why he did
so. He replied that Mr. Croker was the treasurer of the organisation he
was doing some work for. “Tammany Hall, you mean?” asked the Chairman.
“Well, I guess so,” replied Moran. “Don’t you know there is a distinction
between the City and the organisation known as Tammany Hall?” asked the
Chairman. There was no reply. But Moran evidently did not. Tammany Hall
was the organisation that stood for the City. For him it was the City, and
Moran said to subscribe to Tammany was the natural feeling amongst
everybody that worked for the City; “one done it, and I didn’t want to be
left behind by anybody else; I thought I would hold my own end up”:--
Q. Did any one suggest to you the advisability of giving up this
money?
A. I have had conversations with other men that were in the employ of
the City, and we compared notes occasionally to know what was done,
and how we could keep ourselves solid.
No political contributions were made by Moran before Tammany came into
power. So the Chairman asked:--
Q. How is it then that when the Department changed you felt called
upon to send a cheque to Mr. Croker?
A. Well, because I didn’t think I could go on and do the amount of
business I had for the City without recognising the people that were
in power.
In 1892, when the Presidential Election was on, Moran doubled his
subscription. Why was that? He replied:--
I compared notes with somebody in the same business that I was in
myself, and found out somebody was paying a little more than I did,
and I was afraid somebody in my line of business would put in a little
more and I would get left.--Vol. v., pp. 4,912-6.
When once an evil system has got itself established, innumerable other
influences combine to render its extirpation extremely difficult. The
Committee was much scandalised by discovering that for premises whose
licence had been cancelled for immorality, a new licence was granted
almost immediately. But when the President of the Excise Board was asked
to explain, he said:--
There came into consideration property interests; we found that if
licences were refused for places where business was carried on, that
the banks were affected who had loaned money on mortgages, persons who
had loaned on mortgages, the banks who had notes of parties in
business; the rents went to the support of persons who depended upon
them solely; the tax commissioners of the city protested to the Board
of Excise against the refusal to license premises, because it reduces
the value of property, and for that reason reduces the taxable values,
and affected the city in that way; real estate agents and other
persons interested, and owners of property came to us and protested at
the start that we ought not to refuse to allow a reputable business to
be carried on on any premises, because they had been improperly
conducted before.--Vol. iv., p. 4,379.
And it came to pass that no sooner was a saloon closed for vice or crime
than it was opened again with a fresh licence.
The most mournful and tragic part of all these stories of oppression is
that which relates to the treatment of the forlorn and desolate women who
have no money with which to bribe the police. For them there is no mercy.
The theory of the police, as we have seen, seems to have been that
prostitutes existed for the purpose of raising revenue for the force. The
women of the streets were the irregular tax-gatherers of the Department.
Their vice was not merely connived at, but actively encouraged, so long as
the police received their stipulated proportion of the wages of shame.
The women were the bondslaves of the Administration. By law they had no
right to ply for hire; but, in consideration of the payment of a regular
ransom, they were left free to earn their precarious living.
“This is a phase,” said Mr. Goff, “and a revolting phase, of a custom that
exists in New York. I suppose it is the lowest form of oppression and
corruption that possibly could be conceived by the human mind; and that
is, a tax upon these unfortunate women in the streets at night; for they
will not be allowed to walk the streets at night unless they pay so much
to the officer, and this has been the custom in many districts of this
city for years.”--Vol. iv., p. 3,617.
The tariff varied.[1] On some profitable beats, the licence fee was fifty
cents per night. But as a general rule the rate for “cruising” was a
dollar a week. So long as she paid she was all right--always with the
understanding that the policeman was to be free to arrest her if she was
complained of by any whom she molested. Irregulars--occasional clandestine
unfortunates--were, of course, regarded as interlopers and hunted down
remorselessly. The zeal of the policeman, which was not stirred in the
least by the breach of the law, rose to white heat when a woman who had
not paid her fees attempted to pick up customers.
[1] The following table of some of the rates enforced by the police
may be found convenient for reference:--
Pool-rooms from £10 to £60 per month.
Policy shops from £4 per month.
Liquor dealers, 8s. per month.
Prostitutes, outside, from 4s. a week to 2s. per night.
Prostitutes, inside, 4s. per week.
Houses of ill-fame from £2 to £10 per month.
Ditto. Initiation fee on opening, from £100 to £400.
Price of Police appointment, £60.
" of a Sergeant’s post, £300.
" of Captaincy, £3,000.
In theory, in New York--and, alas, in many other great cities--the right
of a woman to freedom from arbitrary arrest without process of trial, and
to redress for wrongful arrest, is absolute. In practice it does not
exist. Every poor woman who is out after dark is liable to be arrested by
a policeman, and to a woman friendless and forlorn there is written over
the portals of every police-station, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.”
Before the Police Justice, the policeman’s word goes. No corroborative
evidence seems to have been demanded in New York. As one worthy testified
before the Committee, he made arrests on general principles, and swore
that his victim was loitering for purposes of prostitution. It was not
necessary that she should commit any overt act, that she should molest any
one, or that any citizen should complain of her molestation. It was enough
that she should be loitering in the street. The oath of the policeman as
to her intent settled her fate. A hurried gabble of words in a crowded
court, and she was packed off to gaol.
This is the besetting sin of all attempts to keep the streets clear of
immoral women by giving men, more or less immoral themselves, absolute
liberty to arrest any woman whom they please to say is loitering for
purposes of prostitution. It was with a flush of pride that I came all
unawares upon a reference made before the Lexow Committee to the case of
Miss Cass, which made the name of Endacott a byword and a reproach in
London some dozen years ago. Counsel had not got the story quite right.
His version curiously mixed up the Trafalgar Square agitation with the
arrest of the dressmaker in Regent Circus, but he had the main idea quite
right. Scotland Yard and Mr. Matthews hit the poor girl a foul blow before
the incident was ended, but it was a welcome thing to find that their
belated vengeance had failed to silence the reverberations of indignation
evoked by her scandalous arrest.
Americans and foreigners are often shocked at the state of London streets.
Mr. Croker, I remember, expressed himself as being much horrified at the
state of Piccadilly at midnight. But better a thousand times have the
scandal of our streets than place the liberty of all women at the mercy of
the police. The arrests of women fell 50 per cent. in London after the
uproar that was made about Miss Cass, and they are not likely to rise so
long as the authorities insist upon the most just and salutary rule then
introduced, that no woman shall be arrested for molesting by solicitation,
unless the citizen who is molested is willing to give evidence next day in
the police-court to that effect. The right of a human being to walk about
the streets, to loiter about the streets, does not depend, and ought not
to depend, upon the chastity of that individual. But if that principle
were to be adopted as a principle of police action, it ought in justice to
be applied impartially to both sexes.
Some very scandalous instances of the arbitrary arrest of innocent women,
and their consignment to prison on the uncorroborated oath of a policeman,
were brought before the Committee. The case of Ettie Kelter is one
instance of the kind of thing that follows inevitably from making the
policeman practically at once sole accuser and sole judge of the right of
a woman to be at large in the streets.
Ettie Kelter was a young married woman of unimpeachable character. She had
lived in Albany until August, 1894, when she came to live in New York. One
Saturday evening in the following month she went out shopping, and being a
stranger in the city she lost her way. She asked a gentleman to direct her
to her destination. He did so. She took the wrong turning, so he called
after telling her where she should go. She had hardly taken a few steps in
the right direction before a young man--a policeman in plain
clothes--seized her arm and dragged her off to the police-station. There
he gave her in charge, declaring he had known her for years. It was in
vain she protested she had never been in the city till the previous month.
She was removed under arrest to another police-station, where she was
locked up in a cell with a prostitute. She was terrified. She had been
dragged through the street at a great rate, and no sooner was she in the
cell than a blood-vessel burst. The blood gushed from her nose and mouth,
scaring her companion, who thought she was bleeding to death. The blood
streamed over the floor of the cell. But all the efforts of her companion
failed to attract the attention of the policeman or the matron. She
hammered at the door with a tin cup, but no one came. Not until the
morning did the officer come to release them from the bloody cell.
[Illustration: STREET SCENE IN NEW YORK: OYSTER ROW.]
Pale, weak, distracted, almost fainting, Ettie Kelter was bundled into
court in the midst of a crowd of the offscourings of the streets, and
brought up before Judge Hogan. She could not hear the charge, nor could
she make out what the Judge said, excepting that he said something about
soliciting. She did not know what it meant, but she passionately denied
that she was anything but a respectable married woman who had only just
come to New York. She might as well have held her peace. “Two months’
imprisonment. After that, three hundred dollars bail good behaviour.” This
was Sunday morning. She was taken back to the cell, and her companion,
who had been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, showed her a
lawyer’s card. “Send for that man,” she said, “give him twenty dollars and
he will get you out.” Her companion did so and got out. Mrs. Kelter
thought it would be better to send for her husband, who was employed as
fireman on the emigrant ferryboat. The policeman who arrested her
volunteered to go and tell him. But when he saw Kelter the message the
policeman delivered was--
“Now you have a good chance of divorce; I arrested your wife last night,
and she has got two months on the Island.”
She tried to write to her husband. But she had only two cents, and they
would not give her a sheet of paper for less than five, nor would they
send it out for less than fifty cents.
So the poor woman was taken to the Island, and kept there in prison for
twenty-four days. At the end of that time her husband placed fifteen
dollars in an envelope and handed it to Justice Hogan. His wife was
released.
And that kind of infamy was going on all the time. The way in which the
unfortunates were driven from pillar to post and treated as mere cattle,
to be fleeced and plundered, provoked a very remarkable protest from a
Police Captain who had sufficient humanity left in him to see the horror
of the system which he had to administer. He was asked whose fault it was
that the social evil flourished to such an extent. He said it was the
fault of the law:--
Q. The law itself?
A. Yes, sir, if you give the women the same protection by law that you
do a mule and a dog you will do away with two-thirds of the houses of
prostitution and women of the street.--Vol. i., p. 5,198.
In reply to the Chairman he explained how it was that houses of ill-fame
were so much more difficult to deal with than gaming houses. He said:--
Because, Senator, you take the women to court, they are fined a few
dollars and turned out on the street again to go and get more money,
be re-arrested and pay again; the trouble is that prostitutes are
fined.
Q. Wasn’t that done with gamblers as well?
A. Well, you could get their paraphernalia and get them away, but you
couldn’t with the women; a prostitute should never be fined and her
money taken away from her; those women are not bad women until they
are made so; they are dragged off the street and dragged before the
court and their money taken away from them, and then drove out on the
street again; they are not bad until they are drove to it; now, there
were fully 30,000 arrests made from January 1st, 1876, to January 1st,
1878, in that little precinct alone, and I will venture to say there
were not 1,500 women arrested, but arrested over and over again.--Vol.
v., p. 5,213.
He was still further examined by Senator O’Connor:--
Q. I want to ask you a question or two: what do you mean to say, that
if people would give the women the same protection given to mules and
horses prostitutes would be fewer?
A. What I mean by it is this: when they are arrested, instead of
sending them to a magistrate to be fined and money taken from them,
send them to a reformatory and inquire into their history, and you
will find there are a great many of these people that you see lost in
the papers. As I say, the women are not bad naturally; it is only
where they are driven to it. If there was a reformatory and the money
taken from them and taken care of, and put the institution under good
women, good, proper persons to control that reformatory, and not abuse
them, not send them to jail or abuse them, but send them to a
reformatory. You will find some people from Massachusetts, some from
Ohio, some from somewhere else, some from Michigan; send them to their
homes, and if they are foreigners, who have not been here five years,
send them back to Europe, and you will find as a general thing that
the reason why the prostitutes and why the disorderly houses cannot be
overcome is that there is no care taken of them; they haven’t a friend
in the world. There is no friend to a prostitute; everybody bangs her,
everybody beats her; she is dragged into the station-house, taken to
court, fined, and thrown on the street to get more money and bring it
back.--Vol. i., p. 5,214.
These words deserve to be written up in letters of gold in every place
wherever men discuss the question of abating this plague. It is the
verdict of experience upon the habitual resource of the unthinking. “Go
to, let us harry our sisters!” is the first and last word of most of those
who dream it is possible to promote the cause of morality by outraging the
principles of justice.
Of the system in New York there is only one good thing to be said. Bad as
it was, it is infinitely better than the hideous abomination of the
European system of tolerated houses with their _police des mœurs_ and the
compulsory weekly surgical examination of their unhappy inmates. Better a
thousand times even the rude, irregular tyrannies of Hoch and Koch, and
all the diabolical gang of blackmailers, than elaborate all these infamies
into a legalised system stamped with the seal of the approval of the State
and enforced by the dread penalties of the law.
Prostitution, everywhere hateful, is at least less intolerable when it is
free. When to the horrors of prostitution there is added the legalised
slavery of the regulation system, you have indeed the sum of all
villainies, and the abomination that maketh desolate is at last set up in
the very holy of holies.
[Illustration]