it under oath on the stand. If they did, Gardner and Norbeck would be
indicted, tried, and probably convicted. In themselves, these men were
of no great importance; but they were the key to the situation, and a
way up to the mayor. It was worth trying. Mr. Clarke went into the jail
with Messrs. Lester Elwood and Willard J. Hield, grand jurors on whom he
relied most for delicate work. They stood by while the foreman talked.
And the foreman’s way of talking was to smile, swear, threaten, and
cajole. “Billy” Edwards told me afterwards that he and Howard were
finally persuaded to turn State’s evidence, because they believed that
Mr. Clarke was the kind of a man to keep his promises and fulfill his
threats. “We,” he said, meaning criminals generally, “are always
stacking up against juries and lawyers who want us to holler. We don’t,
because we see they ain’t wise, and won’t get there. They’re quitters;
they can be pulled off. Clarke has a hard eye. I know men. It’s my
business to size ‘em up, and I took him for a winner, and I played in
with him against that whole big bunch of easy things that was running
things on the bum.” The grand jury was ready at the end of three weeks
of hard work to find bills. A prosecutor was needed. The public
prosecutor was being ignored, but his first assistant and friend, Al J.
Smith, was taken in hand by Mr. Clarke. Smith hesitated; he knew better
even than the foreman the power and resources of the Ames gang. But he
came to believe in Mr. Clarke, just as Edwards had; he was sure the
foreman would win; so he went over to his side, and, having once
decided, he led the open fighting, and, alone in court, won cases
against men who had the best lawyers in the State to defend them. His
court record is extraordinary. Moreover, he took over the negotiations
with criminals for evidence, Messrs. Clarke, Hield, Elwood, and the
other jurors providing means and moral support. These were needed.
Bribes were offered to Smith; he was threatened; he was called a fool.
But so was Clarke, to whom $28,000 was offered to quit, and for whose
slaughter a slugger was hired to come from Chicago. What startled the
jury most, however, was the character of the citizens who were sent to
them to dissuade them from their course. No reform I ever studied has
failed to bring out this phenomenon of virtuous cowardice, the baseness
of the decent citizen.
Nothing stopped this jury, however. They had courage. They indicted
Gardner, Norbeck, Fred Ames, and many lesser persons. But the gang had
courage, too, and raised a defense fund to fight Clarke. Mayor Ames was
defiant. Once, when Mr. Clarke called at the City Hall, the mayor met
and challenged him. The mayor’s heelers were all about him, but Clarke
faced him.
“Yes, Doc Ames, I’m after you,” he said. “I’ve been in this town for
seventeen years, and all that time you’ve been a moral leper. I hear you
were rotten during the ten years before that. Now I’m going to put you
where all contagious things are put—where you cannot contaminate anybody
else.”
The trial of Gardner came on. Efforts had been made to persuade him to
surrender the mayor, but the young man was paid $15,000 “to stand pat,”
and he went to trial and conviction silent. Other trials followed
fast—Norbeck’s, Fred Ames’s, Chief of Detectives King’s. Witnesses who
were out of the State were needed, and true testimony from women. There
was no county money for extradition, so the grand jurors paid these
costs also. They had Meix followed from Michigan down to Mexico and back
to Idaho, where they got him, and he was presented in court one day at
the trial of Norbeck, who had “steered” him out of town. Norbeck thought
Meix was a thousand miles away, and had been bold before. At the sight
of him in court he started to his feet, and that night ran away. The
jury spent more money in his pursuit, and they caught him. He confessed,
but his evidence was not accepted. He was sentenced to three years in
State’s prison. Men caved all around, but the women were firm, and the
first trial of Fred Ames failed. To break the women’s faith in the ring,
Mayor Ames was indicted for offering the bribe to have Gardner made
sheriff—a genuine, but not the best case against him. It brought the
women down to the truth, and Fred Ames, retried, was convicted and
sentenced to six and a half years in State’s prison. King was tried for
accessory to felony (helping in the theft of a diamond, which he
afterward stole from the thieves), and sentenced to three and a half
years in prison. And still the indictments came, with trials following
fast. Al Smith resigned with the consent and thanks of the grand jury;
his chief, who was to run for the same office again, wanted to try the
rest of the cases, and he did very well.
All men were now on the side of law and order. The panic among the
“grafters” was laughable, in spite of its hideous significance. Two
heads of departments against whom nothing had been shown suddenly ran
away, and thus suggested to the grand jury an inquiry which revealed
another source of “graft,” in the sale of supplies to public
institutions and the diversion of great quantities of provisions to the
private residences of the mayor and other officials. Mayor Ames, under
indictment and heavy bonds for extortion, conspiracy, and
bribe-offering, left the State on a night train; a gentleman who knew
him by sight saw him sitting up at eleven o’clock in the smoking-room of
the sleeping-car, an unlighted cigar in his mouth, his face ashen and
drawn, and at six o’clock the next morning he still was sitting there,
his cigar still unlighted. He went to West Baden, a health resort in
Indiana, a sick and broken man, aging years in a month. The city was
without a mayor, the ring was without a leader; cliques ruled, and they
pictured one another hanging about the grand-jury room begging leave to
turn State’s evidence. Tom Brown, the mayor’s secretary, was in the
mayor’s chair; across the hall sat Fred Ames, the chief of police,
balancing Brown’s light weight. Both were busy forming cliques within
the ring. Brown had on his side Coffee John and Police Captain Hill.
Ames had Captain “Norm” King (though he had been convicted and had
resigned), Captain Krumweide, and Ernest Wheelock, the chief’s
secretary. Alderman D. Percy Jones, the president of the council, an
honorable man, should have taken the chair, but he was in the East; so
this unstable equilibrium was all the city had by way of a government.
Then Fred Ames disappeared. The Tom Brown clique had full sway, and took
over the police department. This was a shock to everybody, to none more
than to the King clique, which joined in the search for Ames. An
alderman, Fred M. Powers, who was to run for mayor on the Republican
ticket, took charge of the mayor’s office, but he was not sure of his
authority or clear as to his policy. The grand jury was the real power
behind him, and the foreman was telegraphing for Alderman Jones.
Meanwhile the cliques were making appeals to Mayor Ames, in West Baden,
and each side that saw him received authority to do its will. The Coffee
John clique, denied admission to the grand-jury room, turned to Alderman
Powers, and were beginning to feel secure, when they heard that Fred
Ames was coming back. They rushed around, and obtained an assurance from
the exiled mayor that Fred was returning only to resign. Fred—now under
conviction—returned, but he did not resign; supported by his friends, he
took charge again of the police force. Coffee John besought Alderman
Powers to remove the chief, and when the acting mayor proved himself too
timid, Coffee John, Tom Brown, and Captain Hill laid a deep plot. They
would ask Mayor Ames to remove his brother. This they felt sure they
could persuade the “old man” to do. The difficulty was to keep him from
changing his mind when the other side should reach his ear. They hit
upon a bold expedient. They would urge the “old man” to remove Fred, and
then resign himself, so that he could not undo the deed that they wanted
done. Coffee John and Captain Hill slipped out of town one night; they
reached West Baden on one train and they left for home on the next, with
a demand for Fred’s resignation in one hand and the mayor’s own in the
other. Fred Ames did resign, and though the mayor’s resignation was laid
aside for a while, to avoid the expense of a special election, all
looked well for Coffee John and his clique. They had Fred out, and
Alderman Powers was to make them great. But Mr. Powers wabbled. No doubt
the grand jury spoke to him. At any rate he turned most unexpectedly on
both cliques together. He turned out Tom Brown, but he turned out also
Coffee John, and he did not make their man chief of police, but another
of someone else’s selection. A number of resignations was the result,
and these the acting mayor accepted, making a clearing of astonished
rascals which was very gratifying to the grand jury and to the nervous
citizens of Minneapolis.
But the town was not yet easy. The grand jury, which was the actual head
of the government, was about to be discharged, and, besides, their work
was destructive. A constructive force was now needed, and Alderman Jones
was pelted with telegrams from home bidding him hurry back. He did
hurry, and when he arrived, the situation was instantly in control. The
grand jury prepared to report, for the city had a mind and a will of its
own once more. The criminals found it out last.
Percy Jones, as his friends call him, is of the second generation of his
family in Minneapolis. His father started him well-to-do, and he went on
from where he was started. College graduate and business man, he has a
conscience which, however, he has brains enough to question. He is not
the fighter, but the slow, sure executive. As an alderman he is the
result of a movement begun several years ago by some young men who were
convinced by an exposure of a corrupt municipal council that they should
go into politics. A few did go in; Jones was one of these few.
The acting mayor was confronted at once with all the hardest problems of
municipal government. Vice rose right up to tempt or to fight him. He
studied the situation deliberately, and by and by began to settle it
point by point, slowly but finally, against all sorts of opposition. One
of his first acts was to remove all the proved rascals on the force,
putting in their places men who had been removed by Mayor Ames. Another
important step was the appointment of a church deacon and personal
friend to be chief of police, this on the theory that he wanted at the
head of his police a man who could have no sympathy with crime, a man
whom he could implicitly trust. Disorderly houses, forbidden by law,
were permitted, but only within certain patrol lines, and they were to
pay nothing, in either blackmail or “fines.” The number and the standing
and the point of view of the “good people” who opposed this order was a
lesson to Mr. Jones in practical government. One very prominent citizen
and church member threatened him for driving women out of two flats
owned by him; the rent was the surest means of “support for his wife and
children.” Mr. Jones enforced his order.
Other interests—saloon-keepers, brewers, etc.—gave him trouble enough,
but all these were trifles in comparison with his experience with the
gamblers. They represented organized crime, and they asked for a
hearing. Mr. Jones gave them some six weeks for negotiations. They
proposed a solution. They said that if he would let them (a syndicate)
open four gambling places downtown, they would see that no others ran in
any part of the city. Mr. Jones pondered and shook his head, drawing
them on. They went away, and came back with a better promise. Though
they were not the associates of criminals, they knew that class and
their plans. No honest police force, unaided, could deal with crime.
Thieves would soon be at work again, and what could Mr. Jones do against
them with a police force headed by a church deacon? The gamblers offered
to control the criminals for the city.
Mr. Jones, deeply interested, declared he did not believe there was any
danger of fresh crimes. The gamblers smiled and went away. By an odd
coincidence there happened just after that what the papers called “an
epidemic of crime.” They were petty thefts, but they occupied the mind
of the acting mayor. He wondered at their opportuneness. He wondered how
the news of them got out.
The gamblers soon reappeared. Hadn’t they told Mr. Jones crime would
soon be prevalent in town again? They had, indeed, but the mayor was
unmoved; “porch climbers” could not frighten him. But this was only the
beginning, the gamblers said: the larger crimes would come next. And
they went away again. Sure enough, the large crimes came. One, two,
three burglaries of jewelry in the houses of well-known people occurred;
then there was a fourth, and the fourth was in the house of a relative
of the acting mayor. He was seriously amused. The papers had the news
promptly, and not from the police.
The gamblers called again. If they could have the exclusive control of
gambling in Minneapolis, they would do all that they had promised
before, and, if any large burglaries occurred, they would undertake to
recover the “swag,” and sometimes catch the thief. Mr. Jones was
skeptical of their ability to do all this. The gamblers offered to prove
it. How? They would get back for Mr. Jones the jewelry recently reported
stolen from four houses in town. Mr. Jones expressed a curiosity to see
this done, and the gamblers went away. After a few days the stolen
jewelry, parcel by parcel, began to return; with all due police-criminal
mystery it was delivered to the chief of police.
When the gamblers called again, they found the acting mayor ready to
give his decision on their propositions. It was this: There should be no
gambling, with police connivance, in the city of Minneapolis during his
term of office.
Mr. Jones told me that if he had before him a long term, he certainly
would reconsider this answer. He believed he would decide again as he
had already, but he would at least give studious reflection to the
question—Can a city be governed without any alliance with crime? It was
an open question. He had closed it only for the four months of his
emergency administration. Minneapolis should be clean and sweet for a
little while at least, and the new administration should begin with a
clear deck.
THE SHAMELESSNESS OF ST. LOUIS
(_March, 1903_)
Tweed’s classic question, “What are you going to do about it?” is the
most humiliating challenge ever delivered by the One Man to the Many.
But it was pertinent. It was the question then; it is the question now.
Will the people rule? That is what it means. Is democracy possible? The
accounts of financial corruption in St. Louis and of police corruption
in Minneapolis raised the same question. They were inquiries into
American municipal democracy, and, so far as they went, they were pretty
complete answers. The people wouldn’t rule. They would have flown to
arms to resist a czar or a king, but they let a “mucker” oppress and
disgrace and sell them out. “Neglect,” so they describe their impotence.
But when their shame was laid bare, what did they do then? That is what
Tweed, the tyrant, wanted to know, and that is what the democracy of
this country needs to know.
Minneapolis answered Tweed. With Mayor Ames a fugitive, the city was
reformed, and when he was brought back he was tried and convicted. No
city ever profited so promptly by the lesson of its shame. The people
had nothing to do with the exposure—that was an accident—nor with the
reconstruction. Hovey C. Clarke, who attacked the Ames ring, tore it all
to pieces; and D. Percy Jones, who re-established the city government,
built a well-nigh perfect thing. There was little left for the people to
do but choose at the next regular election between two candidates for
mayor, one obviously better than the other, but that they did do. They
scratched some ten thousand ballots to do their small part decisively
and well. So much by way of revolt. The future will bring Minneapolis up
to the real test. The men who saved the city this time have organized to
keep it safe, and make the memory of “Doc” Ames a civic treasure, and
Minneapolis a city without reproach.
Minneapolis may fail, as New York has failed; but at least these two
cities could be moved by shame. Not so St. Louis. Joseph W. Folk, the
Circuit Attorney, who began alone, is going right on alone, indicting,
trying, convicting boodlers, high and low, following the workings of the
combine through all of its startling ramifications, and spreading before
the people, in the form of testimony given under oath, the confessions
by the boodlers themselves of the whole wretched story. St. Louis is
unmoved and unashamed. St. Louis seems to me to be something new in the
history of the government of the people, by the rascals, for the rich.
“Tweed Days in St. Louis” did not tell half that the St. Louisans know
of the condition of the city. That article described how in 1898, 1899,
and 1900, under the administration of Mayor Ziegenhein, boodling
developed into the only real business of the city government. Since that
article was written, fourteen men have been tried, and half a score have
confessed, so that some measure of the magnitude of the business and of
the importance of the interests concerned has been given. Then it was
related that “combines” of municipal legislators sold rights,
privileges, and public franchises for their own individual profit, and
at regular schedule rates. Now the free narratives of convicted boodlers
have developed the inside history of the combines, with their
unfulfilled plans. Then we understood that these combines did the
boodling. Now we know that they had a leader, a boss, who, a rich man
himself, represented the financial district and prompted the boodling
till the system burst. We knew then how Mr. Folk, a man little known,
was nominated against his will for Circuit Attorney; how he warned the
politicians who named him; how he proceeded against these same men as
against ordinary criminals. Now we have these men convicted.
We saw Charles H. Turner, the president of the Suburban Railway Co., and
Philip H. Stock, the secretary of the St. Louis Brewing Co., the first
to “peach,” telling to the grand jury the story of their bribe fund of
$144,000, put into safe-deposit vaults, to be paid to the legislators
when the Suburban franchise was granted. St. Louis has seen these two
men dashing forth “like fire horses,” the one (Mr. Turner) from the
presidency of the Commonwealth Trust Company, the other from his brewing
company secretaryship, to recite again and again in the criminal courts
their miserable story, and count over and over for the jury the dirty
bills of that bribe fund. And when they had given their testimony, and
the boodlers one after another were convicted, these witnesses have
hurried back to their places of business and the convicts to their seats
in the municipal assembly. This is literally true. In the House of
Delegates sit, under sentence, as follows: Charles F. Kelly, two years;
Charles J. Denny, three years and five years; Henry A. Faulkner, two
years; E. E. Murrell, State’s witness, but not tried.[1] Nay, this
House, with such a membership, had the audacity last fall to refuse to
pass an appropriation to enable Mr. Folk to go on with his investigation
and prosecution of boodling.
Footnote 1:
See _Post Scriptum_, end of chapter.
Right here is the point. In other cities mere exposure has been
sufficient to overthrow a corrupt régime. In St. Louis the conviction of
the boodlers leaves the felons in control, the system intact, and the
people—spectators. It is these people who are interesting—these people,
and the system they have made possible.
The convicted boodlers have described the system to me. There was no
politics in it—only business. The city of St. Louis is normally
Republican. Founded on the home-rule principle, the corporation is a
distinct political entity, with no county to confuse it. The State of
Missouri, however, is normally Democratic, and the legislature has taken
political possession of the city by giving to the Governor the
appointment of the Police and Election Boards. With a defective election
law, the Democratic boss in the city became its absolute ruler.
This boss is Edward R. Butler, better known as “Colonel Ed,” or “Colonel
Butler,” or just “Boss.” He is an Irishman by birth, a master horseshoer
by trade, a good fellow—by nature, at first, then by profession. Along
in the seventies, when he still wore the apron of his trade, and bossed
his tough ward, he secured the agency for a certain patent horseshoe
which the city railways liked and bought. Useful also as a politician,
they gave him a blanket contract to keep all their mules and horses
shod. Butler’s farrieries glowed all about the town, and his political
influence spread with his business; for everywhere big Ed Butler went
there went a smile also, and encouragement for your weakness, no matter
what it was. Like “Doc” Ames, of Minneapolis—like the “good fellow”
everywhere—Butler won men by helping them to wreck themselves. A priest,
the Rev. James Coffey, once denounced Butler from the pulpit as a
corrupter of youth; at another time a mother knelt in the aisle of a
church, and during service audibly called upon Heaven for a visitation
of affliction upon Butler for having ruined her son. These and similar
incidents increased his power by advertising it. He grew bolder. He has
been known to walk out of a voting-place and call across a cordon of
police to a group of men at the curb, “Are there any more repeaters out
here that want to vote again?”
They will tell you in St. Louis that Butler never did have much real
power, that his boldness and the clamor against him made him seem great.
Public protest is part of the power of every boss. So far, however, as I
can gather, Butler was the leader of his organization, but only so long
as he was a partisan politician; as he became a “boodler” pure and
simple, he grew careless about his machine, and did his boodle business
with the aid of the worst element of both parties. At any rate, the
boodlers, and others as well, say that in later years he had about equal
power with both parties, and he certainly was the ruler of St. Louis
during the Republican administration of Ziegenhein, which was the worst
in the history of the city. His method was to dictate enough of the
candidates on both tickets to enable him, by selecting the worst from
each, to elect the sort of men he required in his business. In other
words, while honest Democrats and Republicans were “loyal to party” (a
point of great pride with the idiots) and “voted straight,” the
Democratic boss and his Republican lieutenants decided what part of each
ticket should be elected; then they sent around Butler’s “Indians”
(repeaters) by the vanload to scratch ballots and “repeat” their votes,
till the worst had made sure of the government by the worst, and Butler
was in a position to do business.
His business was boodling, which is a more refined and a more dangerous
form of corruption than the police blackmail of Minneapolis. It
involves, not thieves, gamblers, and common women, but influential
citizens, capitalists, and great corporations. For the stock-in-trade of
the boodler is the rights, privileges, franchises, and real property of
the city, and his source of corruption is the top, not the bottom, of
society. Butler, thrown early in his career into contact with
corporation managers, proved so useful to them that they introduced him
to other financiers, and the scandal of his services attracted to him in
due course all men who wanted things the city had to give. The boodlers
told me that, according to the tradition of their combine, there “always
was boodling in St. Louis.”
Butler organized and systematized and developed it into a regular
financial institution, and made it an integral part of the business
community. He had for clients, regular or occasional, bankers and
promoters; and the statements of boodlers, not yet on record, allege
that every transportation and public convenience company that touches
St. Louis had dealings with Butler’s combine. And my best information is
that these interests were not victims. Blackmail came in time, but in
the beginning they originated the schemes of loot and started Butler on
his career. Some interests paid him a regular salary, others a fee, and
again he was a partner in the enterprise, with a special “rake-off” for
his influence. “Fee” and “present” are his terms, and he has spoken
openly of taking and giving them. I verily believe he regarded his
charges as legitimate (he is the Croker type); but he knew that some
people thought his services wrong. He once said that, when he had
received his fee for a piece of legislation, he “went home and prayed
that the measure might pass,” and, he added facetiously, that “usually
his prayers were answered.”