The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

“No harm done, I think?” said I, when we were both ashore again.

“I lose-a my knife,” said he with a grin, the water dripping from his hair. He was pointing to the empty scabbard at his belt where he had carried a sheath-knife.

“It was my blunder,” said I, “and if you’ll hunt me up at Big Kennedy’s this evening I’ll have another for you.”

That afternoon, at a pawnshop in the Bowery, I bought a strange-looking weapon, that was more like a single-edged dagger than anything else. It had a buck-horn haft, and was heavy and long, with a blade of full nine inches.

My Sicilian came, as I had told him, and I gave him the knife. He was extravagant in his gratitude.

“You owe me nothing!” he cried. “It is I who owe for my life that you save. But I shall take-a the knife to remember how you pull me out. You good-a man; some day I pull you out – mebby so! who knows?”

With that he was off for the docks again, leaving me neither to hear nor to think of him thereafter for a stirring handful of years.

It occurred to me as strange, even in a day when I gave less time to thought than I do now, that my first impulse as an alderman should be one of revenge. There was that police captain, who, in the long ago, offered insult to Anne, when she came to beg for my liberty. “Better get back to your window,” said he, “or all the men will have left the street!” The memory of that evil gibe had never ceased to burn me with the hot anger of a coal of fire, and now I resolved for his destruction.

When I told Big Kennedy, he turned the idea on his wheel of thought for full two minutes.

“It’s your right,” said he at last. “You’ve got the ax; you’re entitled to his head. But say! pick him up on proper charges; get him dead to rights! That aint hard, d’ye see, for he’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. To throw him for some trick he’s really turned will bunco these reform guys into thinkin’ that we’re on th’ level.”

The enterprise offered no complexities. A man paid that captain money to save from suppression a resort of flagrant immorality. The bribery was laid bare; he was overtaken in this plain corruption; and next, my combinations being perfect, I broke him as I might break a stick across my knee. He came to me in private the following day.

“What have I done?” said he. “Can I square it?”

“Never!” I retorted; “there’s some things one can’t square.” Then I told him of Anne, and his insult.

“That’s enough,” he replied, tossing his hand resignedly. “I can take my medicine when it’s come my turn.”

For all that captain’s stoicism, despair rang in his tones, and as he left me, the look in his eye was one to warm the cockles of my heart and feed my soul with comfort.

“Speakin’ for myself,” said Big Kennedy, in the course of comment, “I don’t go much on revenge. Still when it costs nothin’, I s’ppose you might as well take it in. Besides, it shows folks that there’s a dead-line in th’ game. The wise ones will figger that this captain held out on us, or handed us th’ worst of it on th’ quiet. The example of him gettin’ done up will make others run true.”

Several years slipped by wherein as alderman I took my part in the town’s affairs. I was never a talking member, and gained no glory for my eloquence. But what I lacked of rhetoric, I made up in stubborn loyalty to Tammany, and I never failed to dispose of my vote according to its mandates.

It was not alone my right, but my duty to do this. I had gone to the polls the avowed candidate of the machine. There was none to vote for me who did not know that my public courses would be shaped and guided by the organization. I was free to assume, therefore, being thus elected as a Tammany member by folk informed to a last expression of all that the phrase implied, that I was bound to carry out the Tammany programmes and execute the Tammany orders. Where a machine and its laws are known, the people when they lift to office one proposed of that machine, thereby direct such officer to submit himself to its direction and conform to its demands.

There will be ones to deny this. And these gentry of denials will be plausible, and furnish the thought of an invincible purity for their assumptions. They should not, however, be too sure for their theories. They themselves may be the ones in error. They should reflect that wherever there dwells a Yes there lives also a No. These contradictionists should emulate my own forbearance.

I no more claim to be wholly right for my attitude of implicit obedience to the machine, than I condemn as wholly wrong their own position of boundless denunciation. There is no man so bad he may not be defended; there lives none so good he does not need defense; and what I say of a man might with equal justice be said of any dogma of politics. As I set forth in my preface, the true and the false, the black and the white in politics will rest ever with the point of view.

During my years as an alderman I might have made myself a wealthy man. And that I did not do so, was not because I had no profit of the place. As the partner, unnamed, in sundry city contracts, riches came often within my clutch. But I could not keep them; I was born with both hands open and had the hold of money that a riddle has of water.

This want of a money wit is a defect of my nature. A great merchant late in my life once said to me:

“Commerce – money-getting – is like a sea, and every man, in large or little sort, is a mariner. Some are buccaneers, while others are sober merchantmen. One lives by taking prizes, the other by the proper gains of trade. You belong to the buccaneers by your birth. You are not a business man, but a business wolf. Being a wolf, you will waste and never save. Your instinct is to pull down each day’s beef each day. You should never buy nor sell nor seek to make money with money. Your knowledge of money is too narrow. Up to fifty dollars you are wise. Beyond that point you are the greatest dunce I ever met.”

Thus lectured the man of markets, measuring sticks, and scales; and while I do not think him altogether exact, there has been much in my story to bear out what he said. It was not that I wasted my money in riot, or in vicious courses. My morals were good, and I had no vices. This was not much to my credit; my morals were instinctive, like the morals of an animal. My one passion was for politics, and my one ambition the ambition to lead men. Nor was I eager to hold office; my hope went rather to a day when I should rule Tammany as its Chief. My genius was not for the show ring; I cared nothing for a gilded place. That dream of my heart’s wish was to be the power behind the screen, and to put men up and take men down, place them and move them about, and play at government as one might play at chess. Still, while I dreamed of an unbridled day to come, I was for that the more sedulous to execute the orders of Big Kennedy. I had not then to learn that the art of command is best studied in the art of obedience.

To be entirely frank, I ought to name the one weakness that beset me, and which more than any spendthrift tendency lost me my fortune as fast as it flowed in. I came never to be a gambler in the card or gaming table sense, but I was inveterate to wager money on a horse. While money lasted, I would bet on the issue of every race that was run, and I was made frequently bankrupt thereby. However, I have said enough of my want of capacity to hoard. I was young and careless; moreover, with my place as alderman, and that sovereignty I still held among the Red Jackets, when my hand was empty I had but to stretch it forth to have it filled again.

In my boyhood I went garbed of rags and patches. Now when money came, I sought the first tailor of the town. I went to him drawn of his high prices; for I argued, and I think sagaciously, that where one pays the most one gets the best.

Nor, when I found that tailor, did I seek to direct him in his labors. I put myself in his hands, and was guided to quiet blacks and grays, and at his hint gave up thoughts of those plaids and glaring checks to which my tastes went hungering. That tailor dressed me like a gentleman and did me a deal of good. I am not one to say that raiment makes the man, and yet I hold that it has much to do with the man’s behavior. I can say in my own case that when I was thus garbed like a gentleman, my conduct was at once controlled in favor of the moderate. I was instantly ironed of those rougher wrinkles of my nature, which last, while neither noisy nor gratuitously violent, was never one of peace.

The important thing was that these clothes of gentility gave me multiplied vogue with ones who were peculiarly my personal followers. They earned me emphasis with my Red Jackets, who still bore me aloft as their leader, and whose favor I must not let drift. The Tin Whistles, too, drew an awe from this rich yet civil uniform which strengthened my authority in that muscular quarter. I had grown, as an alderman and that one next in ward power to Big Kennedy, to a place which exempted me from those harsher labors of fist and bludgeon in which, whenever the exigencies of a campaign demanded, the Tin Whistles were still employed. But I claimed my old mastery over them. I would not permit so hardy a force to go to another’s hands, and while I no longer led their war parties, I was always in the background, giving them direction and stopping them when they went too far.

It was demanded of my safety that I retain my hold upon both the Tin Whistles and the Red Jackets. However eminent I might be, I was by no means out of the ruck, and my situation was to be sustained only by the strong hand. The Tin Whistles and the Red Jackets were the sources of my importance, and if my voice were heeded or my word owned weight it was because they stood ever ready to my call. Wherefore, I cultivated their favor, secured my place among them, while at the same time I forced them to obey to the end that they as well as I be preserved.

Those clothes of a gentleman not only augmented, but declared my strength. In that time a fine coat was an offense to ones more coarsely clothed. A well-dressed stranger could not have walked three blocks on the East Side without being driven to do battle for his life. Fine linen was esteemed a challenge, and that I should be so arrayed and go unscathed, proved not alone my popularity, but my dangerous repute. Secretly, it pleased my shoulder-hitters to see their captain so garbed; and since I could defend my feathers, they made of themselves another reason of leadership. I was growing adept of men, and I counted on this effect when I spent my money with that tailor.

While I thus lay aside for the moment the running history of events that were as the stepping stones by which I crossed from obscurity and poverty to power and wealth, to have a glance at myself in my more personal attitudes, I should also relate my marriage and how I took a wife. It was Anne who had charge of the business, and brought me this soft victory. Had it not been for Anne, I more than half believe I would have had no wife at all; for I was eaten of an uneasy awkwardness whenever my fate delivered me into the presence of a girl. However earnestly Anne might counsel, I had no more of parlor wisdom than a savage, Anne, while sighing over my crudities and the hopeless thickness of my wits, established herself as a bearward to supervise my conduct. She picked out my wife for me, and in days when I should have been a lover, but was a graven image and as stolid, carried forward the courting in my stead.

It was none other than Apple Cheek upon whom Anne pitched – Apple Cheek, grown rounder and more fair, with locks like cornsilk, and eyes of even a deeper blue than on that day of the docks. Anne had struck out a friendship for Apple Cheek from the beginning, and the two were much in one another’s company. And so one day, by ways and means I was too much confused to understand, Anne had us before the priest. We were made husband and wife; Apple Cheek brave and sweet, I looking like a fool in need of keepers.

Anne, the architect of this bliss, was in tears; and yet she must have kept her head, for I remember how she recalled me to the proprieties of my new station.

“Why don’t you kiss your bride!” cried Anne, at the heel of the ceremony.

Anne snapped out the words, and they rang in my delinquent ears like a storm bell. Apple Cheek, eyes wet to be a match for Anne’s, put up her lips with all the courage in the world. I kissed her, much as one might salute a hot flatiron. Still I kissed her; and I think to the satisfaction of a church-full looking on; but I knew what men condemned have felt on that journey to block and ax.

Apple Cheek and her choice of me made up the sweetest fortune of my life, and now when I think of her it is as if I stood in a flood of sunshine. So far as I was able, I housed her and robed her as though she were the daughter of a king, and while I have met treason in others and desertion where I looked for loyalty, I held her heart-fast, love-fast, faith-fast, ever my own. She was my treasure, and when she died it was as though my own end had come.

Big Kennedy and the then Chief of Tammany, during my earlier years as alderman, were as Jonathan and David. They were ever together, and their plans and their interests ran side by side. At last they began to fall apart. Big Kennedy saw a peril in this too-close a partnership, and was for putting distance between them. It was Old Mike who thus counseled him. The aged one became alarmed by the raw and insolent extravagance of the Chief’s methods.

“Th’ public,” said Old Mike, “is a sheep, while ye do no more than just rob it. But if ye insult it, it’s a wolf. Now this man insults th’ people. Better cut loose from him, Jawn; he’ll get ye all tor-rn to pieces.”

The split came when, by suggestion of Old Mike and

Big Kennedy, I refused to give my vote as alderman to a railway company asking a terminal. There were millions of dollars in the balance, and without my vote the machine and the railway company were powerless. The stress was such that the mighty Chief himself came down to Big Kennedy’s saloon – a sight to make men stare!

The two, for a full hour, were locked in Big Kennedy’s sanctum; when they appeared I could read in the black anger that rode on the brow of the Chief how Big Kennedy had declined his orders, and now stood ready to abide the worst. Big Kennedy, for his side, wore an air of confident serenity, and as I looked at the pair and compared them, one black, the other beaming, I was surprised into the conviction that Big Kennedy of the two was the superior natural force. As the Chief reached the curb he said:

“You know the meaning of this. I shall tear you in two in the middle an’ leave you on both sides of the street!”

“If you do, I’ll never squeal,” returned Big Kennedy carelessly. “But you can’t; I’ve got you counted. I can hold the ward ag’inst all you’ll send. An’ you look out for yourself! I’ll throw a switch on you yet that’ll send you to th’ scrapheap.”

“I s’ppose you think you know what you’re doin’?” said the other angrily.

“You can put a bet on it that I do,” retorted Big Kennedy. “I wasn’t born last week.”

That evening as we sat silent and thoughtful, Big Kennedy broke forth with a word.

“I’ve got it! You’re on speakin’ terms with that old duffer, Morton, who’s forever talkin’ about bein’ a taxpayer. He likes you, since you laid out Jimmy the Blacksmith that time. See him, an’ fill him up with th’ notion that he ought to go to Congress. It won’t be hard; he’s sure he ought to go somewhere, an’ Congress will fit him to a finish. In two days he’ll think he’s on his way to be a second Marcy. Tell him that if his people will put him up, we’ll join dogs with ‘em an’ pull down th’ place. You can say that we can’t stand th’ dishonesty an’ corruption at th’ head of Tammany Hall, an’ are goin’ to make a bolt for better government. We’ll send the old sport to Congress. He’ll give us a bundle big enough to fight the machine, an’ plank dollar for dollar with it. An’ it’ll put us in line for a hook-up with th’ reform bunch in th’ fight for th’ town next year. It’s the play to make; we’re goin’ to see stormy weather, you an’ me, an’ it’s our turn to make for cover. We’ll put up this old party, Morton, an’ give th’ machine a jolt. Th’ Chief’ll leave me on both sides of th’ street, will he? I’ll make him think, before he’s through, that he’s run ag’inst th’ pole of a dray.”

CHAPTER X – HOW JIMMY THE BLACKSMITH DIED

BIG KENNEDY was right; the reputable old gentleman rose to that lure of Congress like any bass to any fly. It was over in a trice, those preliminaries; he was proud to be thus called upon to serve the people. Incidentally, it restored his hope in the country’s future to hear that such tried war-dogs of politics as Big Kennedy and myself were making a line of battle against dishonesty in place. These and more were said to me by the reputable old gentleman when I bore him that word how Big Kennedy and I were ready to be his allies. The reputable old gentleman puffed and glowed with the sheer glory of my proposal, and seemed already to regard his election as a thing secured.

In due course, his own tribe placed him in nomina-ton. That done, Big Kennedy called a meeting of his people and declared for the reputable old gentleman’s support. Big Kennedy did not wait to be attacked by the Tammany machine; he took the initiative and went to open rebellion, giving as his reason the machine’s corruption.