just had an illustration of its truth in municipal politics. Waring and
Roosevelt were the Patrick Mullens of the reform administration which
Tammany has now replaced with her insolent platform, "To hell with
reform." It was not an ideal administration, but it can be said of it,
at least, that it was up to the times it served. It made compromises
with spoils politics, and they were wretched failures. It took Waring
and Roosevelt on the other plan, on which they insisted, of divorcing
politics from the public business, and they let in more light than even
my small parks over on the East Side. For they showed us where we stood
and what was the matter with us. We believed in Waring when he
demonstrated the success of his plan for cleaning the streets: not
before. When Roosevelt announced his programme of enforcing the excise
law because it _was_ law, a howl arose that would have frightened a less
resolute man from his purpose. But he went right on doing the duty he
was sworn to do. And when, at the end of three months of clamor and
abuse, we saw the spectacle of the saloon keepers formally resolving to
help the police instead of hindering them; of the prison ward in
Bellevue Hospital standing empty for three days at a time, an
astonishing and unprecedented thing, which the warden could only
attribute to the "prompt closing of the saloons at one A. M.;" and of
the police force recovering its lost self-respect, we had found out more
and greater things than whether the excise law was a good or a bad law.
We understood what Roosevelt meant when he insisted upon the "primary
virtues" of honesty and courage in the conduct of public business. For
the want of them in us, half the laws that touched our daily lives had
become dead letters or vehicles of blackmail and oppression. It was
worth something to have that lesson taught us in that way; to find out
that simple, straightforward, honest dealing as between man and man is
after all effective in politics as in gunmaking. Perhaps we have not
mastered the lesson yet. But we have not discharged the teacher, either.
[Illustration: A TAMMANY-SWEPT EAST SIDE STREET, BEFORE WARING
(_See picture facing page 248_)]
Courage, indeed! There were times during that stormy spell when it
seemed as if we had grown wholly and hopelessly flabby as a people.
All the outcry against the programme of order did not come from the
lawless and the disorderly, by any means. Ordinarily decent,
conservative citizens joined in counseling moderation and virtual
compromise with the law-breakers--it was nothing else--to "avoid
trouble." The old love of fair play had been whittled down by the
jackknife of all-pervading expediency to an anaemic desire to "hold the
scales even;" that is a favorite modern device of the devil for
paralyzing action in men. You cannot hold the scales even in a moral
issue. It inevitably results in the triumph of evil, which asks nothing
better than the even chance to which it is not entitled. When the
trouble in the Police Board had reached a point where it seemed
impossible not to understand that Roosevelt and his side were fighting a
cold and treacherous conspiracy against the cause of good government, we
had the spectacle of a Christian Endeavor Society inviting the man who
had hatched the plot, the bitter and relentless enemy whom the Mayor had
summoned to resign, and afterward did his best to remove as a fatal
obstacle to reform,--inviting this man to come before it and speak of
Christian citizenship! It was a sight to make the bosses hug themselves
with glee. For Christian citizenship is their nightmare, and nothing is
so cheering to them as evidence that those who profess it have no sense.
Apart from the moral bearings of it, what this question of enforcement
of law means in the life of the poor was illustrated by testimony given
before the Police Board very recently. A captain was on trial for
allowing the policy swindle to go unchecked in his precinct. Policy is a
kind of penny lottery, with alleged daily drawings which never take
place. The whole thing is a pestilent fraud, which is allowed to exist
only because it pays heavy blackmail to the police and the politicians.
Expert witnesses testified that eight policy shops in the Twenty-First
Ward, which they had visited, did a business averaging about thirty-two
dollars a day each. The Twenty-First is a poor Irish tenement ward. The
policy sharks were getting two hundred and fifty dollars or more a day
of the hard-earned wages of those poor people, in sums of from one and
two cents to a quarter, without making any return for it. The thing
would seem incredible, were it not too sadly familiar. The saloon keeper
got his share of what was left, and rewarded his customer by posing as
the "friend of the poor man" whenever his business was under scrutiny; I
have yet in my office the record of a single week during the hottest of
the fight between Roosevelt and the saloons, as showing of what kind
that friendship is. It embraces the destruction of eight homes by the
demon of drunkenness: the suicide of four wives, the murder of two
others by drunken husbands, the killing of a policeman in the street,
and the torture of an aged woman by her rascal son, who "used to be a
good boy till he took to liquor, when he became a perfect devil." In
that role he finally beat her to death for giving shelter to some
evicted fellow tenants who else would have had to sleep in the street.
Nice friendly turn, wasn't it?
And yet there was something to be said for the saloon keeper. He gave
the man the refuge from his tenement which he needed. I say needed,
purposely. There has been a good deal of talk lately about the saloon
as a social necessity. About all there is to that is that the saloon is
there, and the necessity too. Man is a social animal, whether he lives
in a tenement or in a palace. But the palace has resources; the tenement
has not. It is a good place to get away from at all times. The saloon is
cheery and bright, and never far away. The man craving human
companionship finds it there. He finds, too, in the saloon keeper one
who understands his wants much better than the reformer who talks civil
service in the meetings. "Civil service" to him and his kind means yet a
contrivance for keeping them out of a job. The saloon keeper knows the
boss, if he is not himself the boss or his lieutenant, and can steer him
to the man who will spend all day at the City Hall, if need be, to get a
job for a friend, and all night pulling wires to keep him in it, if
trouble is brewing. Mr. Beecher used to say, when pleading for bright
hymn tunes, that he didn't want the devil to have the monopoly of all
the good music in the world. The saloon has had the monopoly up to date
of all the cheer in the tenements. If its owner has made it pan out to
his own advantage and the boss's, we at least have no just cause of
complaint. We let him have the field all to himself.
As to this boss, of whom we hear so much, what manner of man is he? That
depends on how you look at him. I have one in mind, a district boss,
whom you would accept instantly as a type, if I were to mention his
name, which I shall not do for a reason which I fear will shock you: he
and I are friends. In his private capacity I have real regard for him.
As a politician and a boss I have none at all. I am aware that this is
taking low ground in a discussion of this kind, but perhaps the reader
will better understand the relations of his "district" to him, if I let
him into mine. There is no political bond between us, of either district
or party; just the reverse. It is purely personal. He was once a police
justice,--at that time he kept a saloon,--and I never knew one with more
common sense, which happens to be the one quality especially needed in
that office. Up to the point where politics came in I could depend upon
him entirely. At that point he let me know bluntly that he was in the
habit of running his district to suit himself. The way he did it
brought him under the just accusation of being guilty of every kind of
rascality known to politics. When next our paths would cross each other,
it would very likely be on some errand of mercy, to which his feet were
always swift. I recall the distress of a dear and gentle lady at whose
dinner table I once took his part. She could not believe that there was
any good in him; what he did must be done for effect. Some time after
that she wrote asking me to look after an East Side family that was in
great trouble. It was during the severe cold spell of last winter, and
there was need of haste. I went over at once; but although I had lost no
time, I found my friend the boss ahead of me. It was a real pleasure to
me to be able to report to my correspondent that he had seen to their
comfort, and to add that it was unpolitical charity altogether. The
family was that of a Jewish widow with a lot of little children. He is a
Roman Catholic. There were no men, consequently no voters, in the house,
which was far outside of his district, too; and as for effect, he was
rather shamefaced at my catching him at it. I do not believe that a
soul has ever heard of the case from him to this day.
[Illustration: THE SAME EAST SIDE STREET WHEN COLONEL WARING WIELDED THE
BROOM
(_See picture facing page 242_)]
My friend is a Tammany boss. During that same cold spell a politician of
the other camp came into my office and gave me a hundred dollars to
spend as I saw fit among the poor. His district was miles uptown, and he
was most unwilling to disclose his identity, stipulating in the end that
no one but I should know where the money came from. He was not seeking
notoriety. The plight of the suffering had appealed to him, and he
wanted to help where he could, that was all.
Now, I have not the least desire to glorify the boss in this. He is not
glorious to me. He is simply human. Often enough he is a coarse and
brutal fellow, in his morals as in his politics. Again, he may have some
very engaging personal traits that bind his friends to him with the
closest of ties. The poor man sees the friend, the charity, the power
that is able and ready to help him in need; is it any wonder that he
overlooks the source of this power, this plenty,--that he forgets the
robbery in the robber who is "good to the poor"? Anyhow, if anybody got
robbed, it was "the rich." With the present ethical standards of the
slum, it is easy to construct even a scheme of social justice out of it
that is very comforting all round, even to the boss himself, though he
is in need of no sympathy or excuse. "Politics," he will tell me in his
philosophic moods, "is a game for profit. The city foots the bills."
Patriotism means to him working for the ticket that shall bring more
profit. "I regard," he says, lighting his cigar, "a repeater as a shade
off a murderer, but you are obliged to admit that in my trade he is a
necessary evil." I am not obliged to do anything of the kind, but I can
understand his way of looking at it. He simply has no political
conscience. He has gratitude, loyalty to a friend,--that is part of his
stock in trade,--fighting blood, plenty of it, all the good qualities of
the savage; nothing more. And a savage he is, politically, with no soul
above the dross. He would not rob a neighbor for the world; but he will
steal from the city--though he does not call it by that name--without a
tremor, and count it a good mark. When I tell him that, he waves his
hand toward Wall Street as representative of the business community,
and toward the office of his neighbor, the padrone, as representative
of the railroads, and says with a laugh, "Don't they all do it?"
The boss believes in himself. It is one of his strong points. And he has
experience to back him. In the fall of 1894 we shook off boss rule in
New York, and set up housekeeping for ourselves. We kept it up three
years, and then went back to the old style. I should judge that we did
it because we were tired of too much virtue. Perhaps we were not built
to hold such a lot at once. Besides, it is much easier to be ruled than
to rule. That fall, after the election, when I was concerned about what
would become of my small parks, of the Health Department in which we
took such just pride, and of a dozen other things, I received one
unvarying reply to my anxious question, or rather two. If it was the
Health Department, I was told: "Go to Platt. He is the only man who can
do it. He is a sensible man, and will see that it is protected." If
small parks, it was: "Go to Croker. He will not allow the work to be
stopped." A playgrounds bill was to be presented in the legislature, and
everybody advised: "Go to Platt. He won't have any objection: it is
popular." And so on. My advisers were not politicians. They were
business men, but recently honestly interested in reform. I was talking
one day with a gentleman of very wide reputation as a philanthropist,
about the unhappy lot of the old fire-engine horses,--which, after lives
of toil that deserve a better fate, are sold for a song to drag out a
weary existence hauling some huckster's cart around,--and wishing that
they might be pensioned off to live out their years on a farm, with
enough to eat and a chance to roll in the grass. He was much interested,
and promptly gave me this advice: "I tell you what you do. You go and
see Croker. He likes horses." No wonder the boss believes in himself. He
would be less than human if he did not. And he is very human.
I had voted on the day of the Greater New York election,--the Tammany
election, as we learned to call it afterward,--in my home out in the
Borough of Queens, and went over to the depot to catch the train for the
city. On the platform were half a dozen of my neighbors, all business
men, all "friends of reform." Some of them were just down from
breakfast. One I remembered as introducing a resolution, in a meeting we
had held, about the discourtesy of local politicians. He looked
surprised when reminded that it was election day. "Why, is it to-day?"
he said. "They didn't send any carriage," said another regretfully. "I
don't see what's the use," said the third; "the roads are just as bad as
when we began talking about it." (We had been trying to mend them.) The
fourth yawned and said: "I don't care. I have my business to attend to."
And they took the train, which meant that they lost their votes. The
Tammany captain was busy hauling his voters by the cartload to the
polling place. Over there stood a reform candidate who had been defeated
in the primary, and puffed out his chest. "The politicians are afraid of
me," he said. They slapped him on the back, as they went by, and told
him that he was a devil of a fellow.
So Tammany came back. The Health Department is wrecked. The police force
is worse than before Roosevelt took hold of it, and we are back in the
mud out of which we pulled ourselves with such an effort. And we are
swearing at it. But I am afraid we are swearing at the wrong fellow. The
real Tammany is not the conscienceless rascal that plunders our treasury
and fattens on our substance. That one is a mere counterfeit. It is the
voter who waits for a carriage to take him to the polls, the man who
"doesn't see what's the use;" the business man who says "business is
business," and has no time to waste on voting; the citizen who "will
wait to see how the cat jumps, because he doesn't want to throw his vote
away;" the cowardly American who "doesn't want to antagonize" anybody;
the fool who "washes his hands of politics." These are the real Tammany,
the men after the boss's own heart. For every one whose vote he buys,
there are two of these who give him theirs for nothing. We shall get rid
of him when these withdraw their support, when they become citizens of
the Patrick Mullen stamp, as faithful at the polling place as he was at
the forge; not before.
The true work of reform is at the top, not at the bottom. The man in the
slum votes according to his light, and the boss holds the candle. But
the boss is in no real sense a leader. He follows instead, always as
far behind the moral sentiment of the community as he thinks is safe. He
has heard it said that a community will not be any better than its
citizens, and that it will be just as good as they are, and he applies
the saying to himself. He is no worse a boss than the town deserves. I
can conceive of his taking credit to himself as some kind of a moral
instrument by which the virtue of the community may be graded, though
that is most unlikely. He does not bother himself with the morals of
anything. But right here is his Achilles heel. The man has no
conscience. He cannot tell the signs of it in others. It always comes
upon him unawares. Reform to him simply means the "outs" fighting to get
in. The real thing he will always underestimate. Such a man is not the
power he seems. He is formidable only in proportion to the amount of
shaking it takes to rouse the community's conscience.
The boss is like the measles, a distemper of a self-governing people's
infancy. When we shall have come of age politically, he will have no
terrors for us. Meanwhile, being charged with the business of governing,
which we left to him because we were too busy making money, he follows
the track laid out for him, and makes the business pan out all that is
in it. He fights when we want to discharge him. Of course he does. No
man likes to give up a good job. He will fight or bargain, as he sees
his way clear. He will give us small parks, play piers, new schools,
anything we ask, to keep his place, while trying to find out "the price"
of this conscience which he does not understand. Even to the half of his
kingdom he will give, to be "in" on the new deal. He has done it before,
and there is no reason that he can see why it should not be done again.
And he will appeal to the people whom he is plundering to trust him
because they know him.
Odd as it sounds, this is where he has his real hold. I have shown why
this is so. To the poor people of his district the boss is a real friend
in need. He is one of them. He does not want to reform them; far from
it. No doubt it is very ungrateful of them, but the poor people have no
desire to be reformed. They do not think they need to be. They consider
their moral standards quite as high as those of the rich, and resent
being told that they are mistaken. The reformer comes to them from
another world to tell them these things, and goes his way. The boss
lives among them. He helped John to a job on the pipes in their hard
winter, and got Mike on the force. They know him as a good neighbor, and
trust him to their harm. He drags their standard ever farther down. The
question for those who are trying to help them is how to make them
transfer their allegiance, and trust their real friends instead.
It ought not to be a difficult question to answer. Any teacher could do
it. He knows, if he knows anything, that the way to get and keep the
children's confidence is to trust them, and let them know that they are
trusted. They will almost always come up to the demand thus made upon
them. Preaching to them does little good; preaching at them still less.
Men, whether rich or poor, are much like children. The good in them is
just as good as it is said to be, and the bad, considering their
enlarged opportunities for mischief, not so much worse than it is
called. A vigorous optimism, a stout belief in one's fellow man, is
better equipment in a campaign for civic virtue than stacks of tracts
and arguments, economic and moral, are. There is good bottom, even in
the slum, for that kind of an anchor to get a grip on. A year ago I went
to see a boxing match there had been much talk about. The hall was
jammed with a rough and noisy crowd, hotly intent upon its favorite. His
opponent, who hailed, I think, from somewhere in Delaware, was greeted
with hostile demonstrations as a "foreigner." But as the battle wore on,
and he was seen to be fair and manly, while the New Yorker struck one
foul blow after another, the attitude of the crowd changed rapidly from
enthusiastic approval of the favorite to scorn and contempt; and in the
last round, when he knocked the Delawarean over with a foul blow, the
audience rose in a body and yelled to have the fight given to the
"foreigner," until my blood tingled with pride. For the decision would
leave it practically without a cent. It had staked all it had on the New
Yorker. "He is a good man," I heard on all sides, while the once
favorite sneaked away without a friend. "Good" meant fair and manly to
that crowd. I thought, as I went to the office the next morning, that
it ought to be easy to appeal to such a people with measures that were
fair and just, if we could only get on common ground. But the only hint
I got from my reform paper was an editorial denunciation of the
brutality of boxing, on the same page that had an enthusiastic review of
the college football season. I do not suppose it did any harm, for the
paper was probably not read by one of the men it had set out to reform.
But suppose it had been, how much would it have appealed to them?
Exactly the qualities of robust manliness which football is supposed to
encourage in college students had been evoked by the trial of strength
and skill which they had witnessed. As to the brutality, they knew that
fifty young men are maimed or killed at football to one who fairs ill in
a boxing match. Would it seem to them common sense, or cant and humbug?
It comes down in the end to a question of common sense and common
honesty. For how many failures of reform effort is insincerity not to
blame! Last spring I attended a meeting at Albany that had been called
by the governor to discuss the better enforcement of the labor laws. We
talked the situation over, and Mr. Roosevelt received from those present
their ready promise to aid him in every way in making effective the laws
that represented so much toil and sacrifice, yet had until then been in
too many instances barren of results. Some time after, a workingman told
me with scorn how, on our coming home, one of our party had stopped in
at the factory inspector's office to urge him to "let up" on a friend, a
cigar manufacturer, who was violating a law for which the labor
organizations had fought long years as absolutely necessary to secure
human conditions in the trade. How much stock might he and his fellows
be supposed to take in a movement that had such champions? "You scratch
my back and I'll scratch yours," is a kind of politics in which the
reformer is no match for the boss. The boss will win on that line every
time. A saving sense of humor might have avoided that and many other
pitfalls. I am seriously of the opinion that a professional humorist
ought to be attached to every reform movement, to keep it from making
itself ridiculous by either too great solemnity or too much conceit. As
it is, the enemy sometimes employs him with effect. Failing the adoption
of that plan, I would recommend a decree of banishment against
photographers, press-clippings men, and the rest of the congratulatory
staff. Why should the fact that a citizen has done a citizen's duty
deserve to be celebrated in print and picture, as if something
extraordinary had happened? The smoke of battle had not cleared away
after the victory of reform, in the fall of 1894, before the citizens'
committee and all the little sub-committees rushed pell-mell to the
photographer's to get themselves on record as the men who did it. The
spectacle might have inspired in the humorist the advice to get two sets
made, while they were about it,--one to serve by and by as an exhibit of
the men who didn't; and, as the event proved, he would have been right.
But it is easy to find fault, and on that tack we get no farther. Those
men did a great work, and they did it well. The mile-posts they set up
on the road to better things will guide another generation to the goal,
however the present may go astray. Good schools, better homes, and a
chance for the boy are arguments that are not lost upon the people.
They wear well. It may be that, like Moses and his followers, we of the
present day shall see the promised land only from afar and with the eye
of faith, because of our sins; that to a younger and sturdier to-morrow
it shall be given to blaze the path of civic righteousness that was our
dream. I like to think that it is so, and that that is the meaning of
the coming of men like Roosevelt and Waring at this time with their
simple appeal to the reason of honest men. Unless I greatly err in
reading the signs of the times, it is indeed so, and the day of the boss
and of the slum is drawing to an end. Our faith has felt the new
impulse; rather, I should say, it has given it. The social movements,
and that which we call politics, are but a reflection of what the people
honestly believe, a chart of their aims and aspirations. Charity in our
day no longer means alms, but justice. The social settlements are
substituting vital touch for the machine charity that reaped a crop of
hate and beggary. They are passenger bridges, it has been truly said,
not mere "shoots" for the delivery of coal and groceries; bridges upon
which men go over, not down, from the mansion to the tenement. We
have learned that we cannot pass off checks for human sympathy in
settlement of our brotherhood arrears. The church, which once stood by
indifferent, or worse, is hastening to enter the life of the people. In
the memory of men yet living, one church, moving uptown away from the
crowd, left its old Mulberry Street home to be converted into tenements
that justly earned the name of "dens of death" in the Health
Department's records, while another became the foulest lodging house in
an unclean city. It was a church corporation which in those bad days
owned the worst underground dive downtown, and turned a deaf ear to all
remonstrances. The church was "angling for souls." But souls in this
world live in bodies endowed with reason. The results of that kind of
fishing were empty pews and cold hearts, and the conscience-stricken cry
that went up, "What shall we do to lay hold of this great multitude that
has slipped from us?"
[Illustration: THEODORE ROOSEVELT]