legislative body is divided into two houses—the upper, called the
Council, consisting of thirteen members, elected at large; the lower,
called the House of Delegates, with twenty-eight members, elected by
wards; and each member of these bodies is paid twenty-five dollars a
month salary by the city. With the mayor, this Assembly has practically
complete control of all public property and valuable rights. Though
Butler sometimes could rent or own the mayor, he preferred to be
independent of him, so he formed in each part of the legislature a
two-thirds majority—in the Council nine, in the House nineteen—which
could pass bills over a veto. These were the “combines.” They were
regularly organized, and did their business under parliamentary rules.
Each “combine” elected its chairman, who was elected chairman also of
the legal bodies where he appointed the committees, naming to each a
majority of combine members.
In the early history of the combines, Butler’s control was complete,
because it was political. He picked the men who were to be legislators;
they did as he bade them do, and the boodling was noiseless, safe, and
moderate in price. Only wrongful acts were charged for, and a right once
sold was good; for Butler kept his word. The definition of an honest man
as one who will stay bought, fitted him. But it takes a very strong man
to control himself and others when the money lust grows big, and it
certainly grew big in St. Louis. Butler used to watch the downtown
districts. He knew everybody, and when a railroad wanted a switch, or a
financial house a franchise, Butler learned of it early. Sometimes he
discovered the need and suggested it. Naming the regular price, say
$10,000, he would tell the “boys” what was coming, and that there would
be $1,000 to divide. He kept the rest, and the city got nothing. The
bill was introduced and held up till Butler gave the word that the money
was in hand; then it passed. As the business grew, however, not only
illegitimate, but legitimate permissions were charged for, and at
gradually increasing rates. Citizens who asked leave to make excavations
in streets for any purpose, neighborhoods that had to have street
lamps—all had to pay, and they did pay. In later years there was no
other way. Business men who complained felt a certain pressure brought
to bear on them from most unexpected quarters downtown.
A business man told me that a railroad which had a branch near his
factory suggested that he go to the Municipal Legislature and get
permission to have a switch run into his yard. He liked the idea, but
when he found it would cost him eight or ten thousand dollars, he gave
it up. Then the railroad became slow about handling his freight. He
understood, and, being a fighter, he ferried the goods across the river
to another road. That brought him the switch; and when he asked about
it, the railroad man said:
“Oh, we got it done. You see, we pay a regular salary to some of those
fellows, and they did it for us for nothing.”
“Then why in the deuce did you send me to them?” asked the manufacturer.
“Well, you see,” was the answer, “we like to keep in with them, and when
we can throw them a little outside business we do.”
In other words, a great railway corporation, not content with paying
bribe salaries to these boodle aldermen, was ready, further to oblige
them, to help coerce a manufacturer and a customer to go also and be
blackmailed by the boodlers. “How can you buck a game like that?” this
man asked me.
Very few tried to. Blackmail was all in the ordinary course of business,
and the habit of submission became fixed—a habit of mind. The city
itself was kept in darkness for weeks, pending the payment of $175,000
in bribes on the lighting contract, and complaining citizens went for
light where Mayor Ziegenhein told them to go—to the moon.
Boodling was safe, and boodling was fat. Butler became rich and greedy,
and neglectful of politics. Outside capital came in, and finding Butler
bought, went over his head to the boodle combines. These creatures
learned thus the value of franchises, and that Butler had been giving
them an unduly small share of the boodle.
Then began a struggle, enormous in its vile melodrama, for control of
corruption—Butler to squeeze the municipal legislators and save his
profits, they to wring from him their “fair share.” Combines were formed
within the old combines to make him pay more; and although he still was
the legislative agent of the inner ring, he had to keep in his secret
pay men who would argue for low rates, while the combine members,
suspicious of one another, appointed their own legislative agent to meet
Butler. Not sure even then, the cliques appointed “trailers” to follow
their agent, watch him enter Butler’s house, and then follow him to the
place where the money was to be distributed. Charles A. Gutke and John
K. Murrell represented Butler in the House of Delegates, Charles Kratz
and Fred G. Uthoff in the Council. The other members suspected that
these men got “something big on the side,” so Butler had to hire a third
to betray the combine to him. In the House, Robertson was the man. When
Gutke had notified the chairman that a deal was on, and a meeting was
called, the chairman would say:
“Gentlemen, the business before us to-night is [say] the Suburban
Railway Bill. How much shall we ask for it?”
Gutke would move that “the price be $40,000.” Some member of the outer
ring would move $100,000 as fair boodle. The debate often waxed hot, and
you hear of the drawing of revolvers. In this case (of the Suburban
Railway) Robertson rose and moved a compromise of $75,000, urging
moderation, lest they get nothing, and his price was carried. Then they
would lobby over the appointment of the agent. They did not want Gutke,
or anyone Butler owned, so they chose some other; and having adjourned,
the outer ring would send a “trailer” to watch the agent, and sometimes
a second “trailer” to watch the first.
They began to work up business on their own account, and, all decency
gone, they sold out sometimes to both sides of a fight. The Central
Traction deal in 1898 was an instance of this. Robert M. Snyder, a
capitalist and promoter, of New York and Kansas City, came into St.
Louis with a traction proposition inimical to the city railway
interests. These felt secure. Through Butler they were paying seven
members of the Council $5,000 a year each, but as a precaution John
Scullin, Butler’s associate, and one of the ablest capitalists of St.
Louis, paid Councilman Uthoff a special retainer of $25,000 to watch the
salaried boodlers. When Snyder found Butler and the combines against
him, he set about buying the members individually, and, opening wine at
his headquarters, began bidding for votes. This was the first break from
Butler in a big deal, and caused great agitation among the boodlers.
They did not go right over to Snyder; they saw Butler, and with Snyder’s
valuation of the franchise before them, made the boss go up to $175,000.
Then the Council combine called a meeting in Gast’s Garden to see if
they could not agree on a price. Butler sent Uthoff there with
instructions to cause a disagreement, or fix a price so high that Snyder
would refuse to pay it. Uthoff obeyed, and, suggesting $250,000,
persuaded some members to hold out for it, till the meeting broke up in
a row. Then it was each man for himself, and all hurried to see Butler,
and to see Snyder too. In the scramble various prices were paid. Four
councilmen got from Snyder $10,000 each, one got $15,000, another
$17,500, and one $50,000; twenty-five members of the House of Delegates
got $3,000 each from him. In all, Snyder paid $250,000 for the
franchise, and since Butler and his backers paid only $175,000 to beat
it, the franchise was passed. Snyder turned around and sold it to his
old opponents for $1,250,000. It was worth twice as much.
The man who received $50,000 from Snyder was the same Uthoff who had
taken $25,000 from John Scullin, and his story as he has told it since
on the stand is the most comical incident of the exposure. He says
Snyder, with his “overcoat full of money,” came out to his house to see
him. They sat together on a sofa, and when Snyder was gone Uthoff found
beside him a parcel containing $50,000. This he returned to the
promoter, with the statement that he could not accept it, since he had
already taken $25,000 from the other side; but he intimated that he
could take $100,000. This Snyder promised, so Uthoff voted for the
franchise.
The next day Butler called at Uthoff’s house. Uthoff spoke first.
“I want to return this,” he said, handing Butler the package of $25,000.
“That’s what I came after,” said Butler.
When Uthoff told this in the trial of Snyder, Snyder’s counsel asked why
he returned this $25,000.
“Because it wasn’t mine,” exclaimed Uthoff, flushing with anger. “I
hadn’t earned it.”
But he believed he had earned the $100,000, and he besought Snyder for
that sum, or, anyway, the $50,000. Snyder made him drink, and gave him
just $5,000, taking by way of receipt a signed statement that the
reports of bribery in connection with the Central Traction deal were
utterly false; that “I [Uthoff] know you [Snyder] to be as far above
offering a bribe as I am of taking one.”
Irregular as all this was, however, the legislators kept up a pretense
of partisanship and decency. In the debates arranged for in the combine
caucus, a member or two were told off to make partisan speeches.
Sometimes they were instructed to attack the combine, and one or two of
the rascals used to take delight in arraigning their friends on the
floor of the House, charging them with the exact facts.
But for the serious work no one knew his party. Butler had with him
Republicans and Democrats, and there were Republicans and Democrats
among those against him. He could trust none not in his special pay. He
was the chief boodle broker and the legislature’s best client; his
political influence began to depend upon his boodling instead of the
reverse.
He is a millionaire two or three times over now, but it is related that
to someone who advised him to quit in time he replied that it wasn’t a
matter of money alone with him; he liked the business, and would rather
make fifty dollars out of a switch than $500 in stocks. He enjoyed
buying franchises cheap and selling them dear. In the lighting deal of
1899 Butler received $150,000, and paid out only $85,000—$47,500 to the
House, $37,500 to the Council—and the haggling with the House combine
caused those weeks of total darkness in the city. He had Gutke tell this
combine that he could divide only $20,000 among them. They voted the
measure, but, suspecting Butler of “holding out on them,” moved to
reconsider.
The citizens were furious, and a crowd went with ropes to the City Hall
the night the motion to reconsider came up; but the combine was
determined. Butler was there in person. He was more frightened than the
delegates, and the sweat rolled down his face as he bargained with them.
With the whole crowd looking on, and reporters so near that a delegate
told me he expected to see the conversation in the papers the next
morning, Butler threatened and pleaded, but finally promised to divide
$47,500. That was an occasion for a burst of eloquence. The orators,
indicating the citizens with ropes, declared that since it was plain the
people wanted light, they would vote them light. And no doubt the people
thought they had won, for it was not known till much later that the
votes were bought by Butler, and that the citizens only hastened a
corrupt bargain.
The next big boodle measure that Butler missed was the Suburban
Traction, the same that led long after to disaster. This is the story
Turner and Stock have been telling over and over in the boodle trials.
Turner and his friends in the St. Louis Suburban Railway Company sought
a franchise, for which they were willing to pay large bribes. Turner
spoke about it to Butler, who said it would cost $145,000. This seemed
too much, and Turner asked Stock to lobby the measure through. Stock
managed it, but it cost him $144,000—$135,000 for the combine, $9,000
extra for Meysenburg—and then, before the money was paid over and the
company in possession of its privilege, an injunction put a stop to all
proceedings. The money was in safe-deposit vaults—$75,000 for the House
combine in one, $60,000 for the Council combine in the other—and when
the legislature adjourned, a long fight for the money ensued. Butler
chuckled over the bungling. He is said to have drawn from it the lesson
that “when you want a franchise, don’t go to a novice for it; pay an
expert, and he’ll deliver the goods.”
But the combine drew their own conclusions from it, and their moral was,
that though boodling was a business by itself, it was a good business,
and so easy that anybody could learn it by study. And study it they did.
Two of them told me repeatedly that they traveled about the country
looking up the business, and that a fellowship had grown up among
boodling alderman of the leading cities in the United States. Committees
from Chicago would come to St. Louis to find out what “new games” the
St. Louis boodlers had, and they gave the St. Louisans hints as to how
they “did the business” in Chicago. So the Chicago and St. Louis
boodlers used to visit Cleveland and Pittsburg and all the other cities,
or, if the distance was too great, they got their ideas by those
mysterious channels which run all through the “World of Graft.” The
meeting place in St. Louis was Decker’s stable, and ideas unfolded there
were developed into plans which, the boodlers say to-day, are only in
abeyance. In Decker’s stable the idea was born to sell the Union Market;
and though the deal did not go through, the boodlers, when they saw it
failing, made the market men pay $10,000 for killing it. This scheme is
laid aside for the future. Another that failed was to sell the
court-house, and this was well under way when it was discovered that the
ground on which this public building stands was given to the city on
condition that it was to be used for a court-house and nothing else.
But the grandest idea of all came from Philadelphia. In that city the
gas-works were sold out to a private concern, and the water-works were
to be sold next. The St. Louis fellows have been trying ever since to
find a purchaser for their water-works. The plant is worth at least
$40,000,000. But the boodlers thought they could let it go at
$15,000,000, and get $1,000,000 or so themselves for the bargain. “The
scheme was to do it and skip,” said one of the boodlers who told me
about it, “and if you could mix it all up with some filtering scheme it
could be done; only some of us thought we could make more than
$1,000,000 out of it—a fortune apiece. It will be done some day.”
Such, then, is the boodling system as we see it in St. Louis. Everything
the city owned was for sale by the officers elected by the people. The
purchasers might be willing or unwilling takers; they might be citizens
or outsiders; it was all one to the city government. So long as the
members of the combines got the proceeds they would sell out the town.
Would? They did and they will. If a city treasurer runs away with
$50,000 there is a great halloo about it. In St. Louis the regularly
organized thieves who rule have sold $50,000,000 worth of franchises and
other valuable municipal assets. This is the estimate made for me by a
banker, who said that the boodlers got not one-tenth of the value of the
things they sold, but were content because they got it all themselves.
And as to the future, my boodling informants said that all the
possessions of the city were listed for future sale, that the list was
in existence, and that the sale of these properties was only postponed
on account of accident—the occurrence of Mr. Folk.
Preposterous? It certainly would seem so; but watch the people of St.
Louis as I have, and as the boodlers have—then judge.
And remember, first, that Mr. Folk really was an accident. St. Louis
knew in a general way, as other cities to-day know, what was going on,
but there was no popular movement. Politicians named and elected him,
and they expected no trouble from him. The moment he took office, on
January 1, 1901, Butler called on him to appoint an organization man
first assistant. When Folk refused, Butler could not understand it.
Going away angry, he was back in three days to have his man appointed
second assistant. The refusal of this also had some effect. The boodlers
say Butler came out and bade them “look out; I can’t do anything with
Folk, and I wouldn’t wonder if he got after you.” They took the warning;
Butler did not. It seems never to have occurred to him that Mr. Folk
would “get after” _him_.
What Butler felt, the public felt. When Mr. Folk took up, as he did
immediately, election fraud cases, Butler called on him again, and told
him which men he might not prosecute in earnest. The town laughed. When
Butler was sent about his business, and Folk proceeded in earnest
against the repeaters of both parties, even those who “had helped elect
him,” there was a sensation. But the stir was due to the novelty and the
incomprehensibility of such non-partisan conduct in public office.
Incredulous of honesty, St. Louis manifested the first signs of that
faith in evil which is so characteristic of it. “Why didn’t Mr. Folk
take up boodling?” was the cynical challenge. “What do a few miserable
repeaters amount to?”
Mr. Folk is a man of remarkable equanimity. When he has laid a course,
he steers by it truly, and nothing can excite or divert him. He had said
he would “do his duty,” not that he would expose corruption or reform
St. Louis; and beyond watching developments, he did nothing for a year
to answer the public challenge. But he was making preparations. A civil
lawyer, he was studying criminal law; and when, on January 23, 1902, he
saw in the St. Louis _Star_ a paragraph about the Suburban bribe fund in
bank, he was ready. He sent out summonses by the wholesale for bankers,
Suburban Railway officials and directors, legislators and politicians,
and before the grand jury he examined them by the hour for days and
days. Nobody knew anything; and though Mr. Folk was known to be “after
the boodlers,” those fellows and their friends were not alarmed and the
public was not satisfied.
“Get indictments,” was the challenge now. It was a “bluff”; but Mr. Folk
took it up, and by a “bluff” he “got an indictment.” And this is the way
of it: the old row between the Suburban people and the boodle combine
was going on in secret, but in a very bitter spirit. The money, lying in
the safe-deposit vaults, in cash, was claimed by both parties. The
boodlers said it was theirs because they had done their part by voting
the franchise; the Suburban people said it was theirs because they had
not obtained the franchise. The boodlers answered that the injunction
against the franchise was not theirs, and they threatened to take the
dispute before the grand jury. It was they who gave to a reporter a
paragraph about the “boodle fund,” and they meant to have it scare
Turner and Stock. Stock really was “scared.” When Mr. Folk’s summons was
served on him, he believed the boodlers had “squealed,” and he fainted.
The deputy who saw the effect of the summons told Mr. Folk, who, seeing
in it only evidence of weakness and guilt, sent for the lawyer who
represented Stock and Turner, and boldly gave him the choice for his
clients of being witnesses or defendants. The lawyer was firm, but Folk
advised him to consult his clients, and their choice was to be
witnesses. Their confession and the seizure of the bribe fund in escrow
gave Folk the whole inside story of the Suburban deal, and evidence in
plenty for indictments. He took seven, and the reputation and standing
of the first culprits showed right away not only the fearlessness of the
prosecution, but the variety and power and wealth of the St. Louis
species of boodler. There was Charles Kratz, agent of the Council
combine; John K. Murrell, agent of the House combine; Emil A.
Meysenburg, councilman and “good citizen”—all for taking bribes; Ellis
Wainwright and Henry Nicolaus, millionaire brewers, and directors of the
Suburban Railway Company for bribery; and Julius Lehmann and Henry A.
Faulkner, of the House combine, for perjury. This news caused
consternation; but the ring rallied, held together, and the cynics said,
“They never will be tried.”
The outlook was stormy. Mr. Folk felt now in full force the powerful
interests that opposed him. The standing of some of the prisoners was
one thing; another was the character of the men who went on their bail
bond—Butler for the bribe takers, other millionaires for the bribers.
But most serious was the flow of persons who went to Mr. Folk privately
and besought or bade him desist; they were not alone politicians, but
solid, innocent business men, eminent lawyers, and good friends. Hardly
a man he knew but came to him at one time or another, in one way or
another, to plead for some rascal or other. Threats of assassination and
political ruin, offers of political promotion and of remunerative and
legitimate partnerships, veiled bribes—everything he might fear was held
up on one side, everything he might want on the other. “When you are
doing a thing like this,” he says now, “you cannot listen to anybody;
you have to think for yourself and rely on yourself alone. I knew I
simply had to succeed; and, success or failure, I felt that a political
future was not to be considered, so I shut out all idea of it.”
So he went on silently but surely; how surely may be inferred from the
fact that in all his dealings with witnesses who turned State’s evidence
he has not made one misstep; there have been no misunderstandings, and
no charges against him of foul play. While the pressure from behind
never ceased, and the defiance before him was bold, “Go higher up” was
the challenge. He was going higher up. With confessions of Turner and
Stock, and the indictments for perjury for examples, he re-examined
witnesses; and though the big men were furnishing the little boodlers
with legal advice and drilling them in their stories, there were breaks
here and there. The story of the Central Traction deal began to develop,
and that went higher up, straight into the group of millionaires led by
Butler.
But there was an impassable barrier in the law on bribery. American
legislators do not legislate harshly against their chief vice. The State
of Missouri limits the liability of a briber to three years, and the
Traction deal was outlawed for most of the principals in it. But the law
excepted non-residents, and Mr. Folk found that in moments of vanity
Robert M. Snyder had described himself as “of New York,” so he had
Snyder indicted for bribery, and George J. Kobusch, president of the St.
Louis Car Company, for perjury, Kobusch having sworn that he knew of no
bribery for the Central Traction franchise, when he himself had paid out
money. Kobusch turned State’s witness against Snyder.
High as these indictments were, the cry for Butler persisted, and the
skeptical tone of it made it plain that to break up the ring Mr. Folk
had to catch the boss. And he did catch him. Saved by missing the
Suburban business, saved by the law in the Central Traction affair,
Butler lost by his temerity; he went on boodling after Mr. Folk was in
office. He offered “presents” of $2,500 each to the two medical members
of the Health Board for their approval of a garbage contract which was
to net him $232,500. So the “Old Man,” the head of the boodlers, and the
legislative agent of the financial district, was indicted.