ring is rooted in special interests. Tammany, too, is allied with
“vested interests”—but Tammany labors under disadvantages not known in
Philadelphia. The Philadelphia ring is of the same party that rules the
State and the nation, and the local ring forms a living chain with the
State and national rings. Tammany is a purely local concern. With a
majority only in old New York, it has not only to buy what it wants from
the Republican majority in the State, but must trade to get the whole
city. Big business everywhere is the chief source of political
corruption, and it is one source in New York; but most of the big
businesses represented in New York have no plants there. Offices there
are, and head offices, of many trusts and railways, for example, but
that is all. There are but two railway terminals in the city, and but
three railways use them. These have to do more with Albany than New
York. So with Wall Street. Philadelphia’s stock exchange deals largely
in Pennsylvania securities, New York’s in those of the whole United
States. There is a small Wall Street group that specializes in local
corporations, and they are active and give Tammany a Wall Street
connection, but the biggest and the majority of our financial leaders,
bribers though they may be in other cities and even in New York State,
are independent of Tammany Hall, and can be honest citizens at home.
From this class, indeed, New York can, and often does, draw some of its
reformers. Not so Philadelphia. That bourgeois opposition which has
persisted for thirty years in the fight against Tammany corruption was
squelched in Philadelphia after its first great uprising. Matt Quay,
through the banks, railways, and other business interests, was able to
reach it. A large part of his power is negative; there is no opposition.
Tammany’s power is positive. Tammany cannot reach all the largest
interests and its hold is upon the people.
Tammany’s democratic corruption rests upon the corruption of the people,
the plain people, and there lies its great significance; its grafting
system is one in which more individuals share than any I have studied.
The people themselves get very little; they come cheap, but they are
interested. Divided into districts, the organization subdivides them
into precincts or neighborhoods, and their sovereign power, in the form
of votes, is bought up by kindness and petty privileges. They are forced
to a surrender, when necessary, by intimidation, but the leader and his
captains have their hold because they take care of their own. They speak
pleasant words, smile friendly smiles, notice the baby, give picnics up
the River or the Sound, or a slap on the back; find jobs, most of them
at the city’s expense, but they have also news-stands, peddling
privileges, railroad and other business places to dispense; they permit
violations of the law, and, if a man has broken the law without
permission, see him through the court. Though a blow in the face is as
readily given as a shake of the hand, Tammany kindness is real kindness,
and will go far, remember long, and take infinite trouble for a friend.
The power that is gathered up thus cheaply, like garbage, in the
districts is concentrated in the district leader, who in turn passes it
on through a general committee to the boss. This is a form of living
government, extra-legal, but very actual, and, though the beginnings of
it are purely democratic, it develops at each stage into an autocracy.
In Philadelphia the boss appoints a district leader and gives him power.
Tammany has done that in two or three notable instances, but never
without causing a bitter fight which lasts often for years. In
Philadelphia the State boss designates the city boss. In New York,
Croker has failed signally to maintain vice-bosses whom he appointed.
The boss of Tammany Hall is a growth, and just as Croker grew, so has
Charles F. Murphy grown up to Croker’s place. Again, whereas in
Philadelphia the boss and his ring handle and keep almost all of the
graft, leaving little to the district leaders, in New York the district
leaders share handsomely in the spoils.
There is more to share in New York. It is impossible to estimate the
amount of it, not only for me, but for anybody. No Tammany man knows it
all. Police friends of mine say that the Tammany leaders never knew how
rich police corruption was till the Lexow committee exposed it, and that
the politicians who had been content with small presents, contributions,
and influence, “did not butt in” for their share till they saw by the
testimony of frightened police grafters that the department was worth
from four to five millions a year. The items are so incredible that I
hesitate to print them. Devery told a friend once that in one year the
police graft was “something over $3,000,000.” Afterward the syndicate
which divided the graft under Devery took in for thirty-six months
$400,000 a month from gambling and poolrooms alone. Saloon bribers,
disorderly house blackmail, policy, etc., etc., bring this total up to
amazing proportions.
Yet this was but one department, and a department that was overlooked by
Tammany for years. The annual budget of the city is about $100,000,000,
and though the power that comes of the expenditure of that amount is
enormous and the opportunities for rake-offs infinite, this sum is not
one-half of the resources of Tammany when it is in power. Her resources
are the resources of the city as a business, as a political, as a social
power. If Tammany could be incorporated, and all its earnings, both
legitimate and illegitimate, gathered up and paid over in dividends, the
stockholders would get more than the New York Central bond and stock
holders, more than the Standard Oil stockholders, and the controlling
clique would wield a power equal to that of the United States Steel
Company. Tammany, when in control of New York, takes out of the city
unbelievable millions of dollars a year.
No wonder the leaders are all rich; no wonder so many more Tammany men
are rich than are the leaders in any other town; no wonder Tammany is
liberal in its division of the graft. Croker took the best and the
safest of it, and he accepted shares in others. He was “in on the Wall
Street end,” and the Tammany clique of financiers have knocked down and
bought up at low prices Manhattan Railway stock by threats of the city’s
power over the road; they have been let in on Metropolitan deals and on
the Third Avenue Railroad grab; the Ice trust is a Tammany trust; they
have banks and trust companies, and through the New York Realty Company
are forcing alliances with such financial groups as that of the Standard
Oil Company. Croker shared in these deals and businesses. He sold
judgeships, taking his pay in the form of contributions to the Tammany
campaign fund, of which he was treasurer, and he had the judges take
from the regular real estate exchange all the enormous real estate
business that passed through the courts, and give it to an exchange
connected with the real estate business of his firm, Peter F. Meyer &
Co. This alone would maintain a ducal estate in England. But his real
estate business was greater than that. It had extraordinary legal
facilities, the free advertising of abuse, the prestige of political
privilege, all of which brought in trade; and it had advance information
and followed, with profitable deals, great public improvements.
Though Croker said he worked for his own pockets all the time, and did
take the best of the graft, he was not “hoggish.” Some of the richest
graft in the city is in the Department of Buildings: $100,000,000 a year
goes into building operations in New York. All of this, from out-houses
to sky-scrapers, is subject to very precise laws and regulations, most
of them wise, some impossible. The Building Department has the
enforcement of these; it passes upon all construction, private and
public, at all stages, from plan-making to actual completion; and can
cause not only “unavoidable delay,” but can wink at most profitable
violations. Architects and builders had to stand in with the department.
They called on the right man and they settled on a scale which was not
fixed, but which generally was on the basis of the department’s estimate
of a fair half of the value of the saving in time or bad material. This
brought in at least a banker’s percentage on one hundred millions a
year. Croker, so far as I can make out, took none of this! it was let
out to other leaders and was their own graft.
District Attorney William Travers Jerome has looked into the Dock
Department, and he knows things which he yet may prove. This is an
important investigation for two reasons. It is very large graft, and the
new Tammany leader, Charlie Murphy, had it. New York wants to know more
about Murphy, and it should want to know about the management of its
docks, since, just as other cities have their corrupt dealings with
railways and their terminals, so New York’s great terminal business is
with steamships and docks. These docks should pay the city handsomely.
Mr. Murphy says they shouldn’t; he is wise, as Croker was before he
became old and garrulous, and, as Tammany men put it, “keeps his mouth
shut,” but he did say that the docks should not be run for revenue to
the city, but for their own improvement. The Dock Board has exclusive
and private and secret control of the expenditure of $10,000,000 a year.
No wonder Murphy chose it.
It is impossible to follow all New York graft from its source to its
final destination. It is impossible to follow here the course of that
which is well known to New Yorkers. There are public works for Tammany
contractors. There are private works for Tammany contractors, and
corporations and individuals find it expedient to let it go to Tammany
contractors. Tammany has a very good system of grafting on public works;
I mean that it is “good” from the criminal point of view—and so it has
for the furnishing of supplies. Low bids and short deliveries, generally
speaking (and that is the only way I can speak here), is the method. But
the Tammany system, as a whole, is weak.
Tammany men as grafters have a confidence in their methods and system,
which, in the light of such perfection as that of Philadelphia, is
amusing, and the average New Yorker takes in “the organization” a queer
sort of pride, which is ignorant and provincial. Tammany is ‘way behind
the times. It is growing; it has improved. In Tweed’s day the
politicians stole from the city treasury, divided the money on the steps
of the City Hall, and, not only the leaders, big and little, but heelers
and outsiders; not only Tweed, but ward carpenters robbed the city; not
only politicians, but newspapers and citizens were “in on the divvy.”
New York, not Tammany alone, was corrupt. When the exposure came, and
Tweed asked his famous question, “What are you going to do about it?”
the ring mayor, A. Oakey Hall, asked another as significant. It was
reported that suit was to be brought against the ring to recover stolen
funds. “Who is going to sue?” said Mayor Hall, who could not think of
anybody of importance sufficiently without sin to throw the first stone.
Stealing was stopped and grafting was made more businesslike, but still
it was too general, and the boodling for the Broadway street railway
franchise prompted a still closer grip on the business. The organization
since then has been gradually concentrating the control of graft. Croker
did not proceed so far along the line as the Philadelphia ring has, as
the police scandals showed. After the Lexow exposures, Tammany took over
that graft, but still let it go practically by districts, and the police
captains still got a third. After the Mazet exposures, Devery became
Chief, and the police graft was so concentrated that the division was
reduced to fourteen parts. Again, later, it was reduced to a syndicate
of four or five men, with a dribble of miscellaneous graft for the
police. In Philadelphia the police have nothing to do with the police
graft; a policeman may collect it, but he acts for a politician, who in
turn passes it up to a small ring. That is the drift in New York. Under
Devery the police officers got comparatively little, and the rank and
file themselves were blackmailed for transfers and promotions, for
remittances of fines, and in a dozen other petty ways.
Philadelphia is the end toward which New York under Tammany is driving
as fast as the lower intelligence and higher conceit of its leaders will
let it. In Philadelphia one very small ring gets everything, dividing
the whole as it pleases, and not all those in the inner ring are
politicians. Trusting few individuals, they are safe from exposure, more
powerful, more deliberate, and they are wise as politicians. When, as in
New York, the number of grafters is large, this delicate business is in
some hands that are rapacious. The police grafters, for example, in
Devery’s day, were not content with the amounts collected from the big
vices. They cultivated minor vices, like policy, to such an extent that
the Policy King was caught and sent to prison, and Devery’s ward-man,
Glennon, was pushed into so tight a hole that there was danger that
District Attorney Jerome would get past Glennon to Devery and the
syndicate. The murder of a witness the night he was in the Tenderloin
police station served to save the day. But, worst of all, Tammany, the
“friend of the people,” permitted the organization of a band of
so-called Cadets, who made a business, under the protection of the
police, of ruining the daughters of the tenements and even of catching
and imprisoning in disorderly houses the wives of poor men. This horrid
traffic never was exposed; it could not and cannot be. Vicious women
were “planted” in tenement houses and (I know this personally) the
children of decent parents counted the customers, witnessed their
transactions with these creatures, and, as a father told with shame and
tears, reported totals at the family table.
Tammany leaders are usually the natural leaders of the people in these
districts, and they are originally good-natured, kindly men. No one has
a more sincere liking than I for some of those common but generous
fellows; their charity is real, at first. But they sell out their own
people. They do give them coal and help them in their private troubles,
but, as they grow rich and powerful, the kindness goes out of the
charity and they not only collect at their saloons or in rents—cash for
their “goodness”; they not only ruin fathers and sons and cause the
troubles they relieve; they sacrifice the children in the schools; let
the Health Department neglect the tenements, and, worst of all, plant
vice in the neighborhood and in the homes of the poor.
This is not only bad; it is bad politics; it has defeated Tammany. Woe
to New York when Tammany learns better. Honest fools talk of the reform
of Tammany Hall. It is an old hope, this, and twice it has been
disappointed, but it is not vain. That is the real danger ahead. The
reform of a corrupt ring means, as I have said before, the reform of its
system of grafting and a wise consideration of certain features of good
government. Croker turned his “best chief of police,” William S. Devery,
out of Tammany Hall, and, slow and old as he was, Croker learned what
clean streets were from Colonel Waring, and gave them. Now there is a
new boss, a young man, Charles F. Murphy, and unknown to New Yorkers. He
looks dense, but he acts with force, decision, and skill. The new mayor
will be his man. He may divide with Croker and leave to the “old man”
all his accustomed graft, but Charlie Murphy will rule Tammany and, if
Tammany is elected, New York also. Lewis Nixon is urging Murphy
publicly, as I write, to declare against the police scandals and all the
worst practices of Tammany. Lewis Nixon is an honest man, but he was one
of the men Croker tried to appoint leader of Tammany Hall. And when he
resigned Mr. Nixon said that he found that a man could not keep that
leadership and his self-respect. Yet Mr. Nixon is a type of the man who
thinks Tammany would be fit to rule New York if the organization would
“reform.”
As a New Yorker, I fear Murphy will prove sagacious enough to do just
that: stop the scandal, put all the graft in the hands of a few tried
and true men, and give the city what it would call good government.
Murphy says he will nominate for mayor a man so “good” that his goodness
will astonish New York. I don’t fear a bad Tammany mayor; I dread the
election of a good one. For I have been to Philadelphia.
Philadelphia had a bad ring mayor, a man who promoted the graft and
caused scandal after scandal. The leaders there, the wisest political
grafters in this country, learned a great lesson from that. As one of
them said to me:
“The American people don’t mind grafting, but they hate scandals. They
don’t kick so much on a jiggered public contract for a boulevard, but
they want the boulevard and no fuss and no dust. We want to give them
that. We want to give them what they really want, a quiet Sabbath, safe
streets, orderly nights, and homes secure. They let us have the police
graft. But this mayor was a hog. You see, he had but one term and he
could get his share only on what was made in his term. He not only took
a hog’s share off what was coming, but he wanted everything to come in
his term. So I’m down on grafting mayors and grafting office holders. I
tell you it’s good politics to have honest men in office. I mean men
that are personally honest.”
So they got John Weaver for mayor, and honest John Weaver is checking
corruption, restoring order, and doing a great many good things, which
it is “good politics” to do. For he is satisfying the people, soothing
their ruffled pride, and reconciling them to machine rule. I have
letters from friends of mine there, honest men, who wish me to bear
witness to the goodness of Mayor Weaver. I do. And I believe that if the
Philadelphia machine leaders are as careful with Mayor Weaver as they
have been and let him continue to give to the end as good government as
he has given so far, the “Philadelphia plan” of graft will last and
Philadelphia will never again be a free American city.
Philadelphia and New York began about the same time, some thirty years
ago, to reform their city governments. Philadelphia got “good
government”—what the Philadelphians call good—from a corrupt ring and
quit, satisfied to be a scandal to the nation and a disgrace to
democracy. New York has gone on fighting, advancing and retreating, for
thirty years, till now it has achieved the beginnings, under Mayor Low,
of a government for the people. Do the New Yorkers know it? Do they
care? They are Americans, mixed and typical; do we Americans really want
good government? Or, as I said at starting, have they worked for thirty
years along the wrong road—crowded with unhappy American cities—the road
to Philadelphia and despair?
* * * * *
_Post Scriptum_: Mayor Low was nominated on the Fusion ticket. Tammany
nominated George B. McClellan. The local corporations contributed
heavily to the Tammany campaign fund and the people of New York elected
the Tammany ticket by a decisive majority of 62,696. The vote was:
McClellan, 314,782; Low, 252,086.
THE END
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Edward W. Townsend
Author of “Chimmie Fadden,” “Days Like These,” etc.
LEES AND LEAVEN
❦
No novel of New York City has ever portrayed so faithfully or so vividly
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then the calmer and comforting domestic scenes of wholesome living,
pass, as actualities, before our very eyes. In this turbulent maelstrom
of ambition, he finds room for love and romance also.
There is a bountiful array of characters, admirably drawn, and
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Bannister and Gertrude Carr. The book is unlike Mr. Townsend’s “Chimmie
Fadden” in everything but its intimate knowledge of New York life.
Cloth, 12mo $1.50
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By A. Conan Doyle
Author of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”
THE ADVENTURES OF GERARD
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Stories of the remarkable adventures of a Brigadier in Napoleon’s army.
In Etienne Gerard, Conan Doyle has added to his already famous gallery
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he takes part in nearly every one of Napoleon’s campaigns. In Venice he
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Everywhere else he is just as marvelous, and at Waterloo he is the
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For all his lumbering vanity he is a genial old soul and a remarkably
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Illustrated by W. B. Wollen.
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By Stanley J. Weyman
Author of “A Gentleman of France”
THE LONG NIGHT
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Geneva in the early days of the 17th century; a ruffling young theologue
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Illustrated by Solomon J. Solomon.
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BARLASCH OF THE GUARD
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Illustrated by the Kinneys.
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By Henry Harland
Author of “The Cardinal’s Snuff Box.”
MY FRIEND PROSPERO
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found at its best in _My Friend Prospero_. Mr. Harland introduces us
again to the lovers’ Italy of blue skies and marvelous landscapes. The
story takes place in a magnificent Austrian castle in northern Italy,
and the hero, whose real name is John, is an Englishman—such a witty,
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beautiful Maria Dolores, an Austrian Princess, who is quite John’s match
in joyous fancy and quaintness of wit. The dialogue is contagious in its
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Radiant in literary style.... The book must be read in order to
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Italy.—_New York Evening Post._
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By David Graham Phillips
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THE MASTER ROGUE
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