The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

“I shall try to be the optimist,” said the Reverend Bronson at last, tossing up a brave manner. “Since the dying administration was not so good as I hoped for, I trust the one to be born will not be so bad as I fear. And, as I gather light by experience, I begin to blame officials less and the public more. I suspect how a whole people may play the hypocrite as much as any single man; nor am I sure that, for all its clamors, a New York public really desires those white conditions of purity over which it protests so much.”

“Really!” returned Morton, who had furnished ear of double interest to the Reverend Bronson’s words, “it is an error, don’t y’ know, to give any people a rule they don’t desire. A government should always match a public. What do you suppose would become of them if one were to suddenly organize a negro tribe of darkest Africa into a republic? Why, under such loose rule as ours, the poor savage beggars would gnaw each other like dogs – they would, really! It would be as depressing a solecism as a Scotchman among the stained glasses, the frescoes, and the Madonnas of a Spanish cathedral; or a Don worshiping within the four bare walls and roof of a Highland kirk. Whatever New York may pretend, it will always be found in possession of that sort of government, whether for virtue or for vice, whereof it secretly approves.” And Morton surveyed the good dominie through that historic eyeglass as though pleased with what he’d said.

“But is it not humiliating?” asked the Reverend Bronson. “If what you say be true, does it not make for your discouragement?”

“No more than does the vulgar fact of dogs and horses, don’t y’ know! Really, I take life as it is, and think only to be amused. I remark on men, and upon their conditions of the moral, the mental, and the physical! – on the indomitable courage of restoration as against the ceaseless industry of decay! – on the high and the low, the good and the bad, the weak and the strong, the right and the wrong, the top and the bottom, the past and the future, the white and the black, and all those other things that are not! – and I laugh at all. There is but one thing real, one thing true, one thing important, one thing at which I never laugh! – and that is the present. But really!” concluded Morton, recurring to affectations which for the moment had been forgot, “I’m never discouraged, don’t y’ know! I shall never permit myself an interest deep enough for that; it wouldn’t be good form. Even those beastly low standards which obtain, as you say, in New York do not discourage me. No, I’m never discouraged – really!”

“You do as much as any, by your indifference, to perpetuate those standards,” remarked the Reverend Bronson in a way of mournful severity.

“My dear old chap,” returned Morton, growing sprightly as the other displayed solemnity, “I take, as I tell you, conditions as I find them, don’t y’ know! And wherefore no? It’s all nature: it’s the hog to its wallow, the eagle to its crag; – it is, really! Now an eagle in a mud-wallow, or a hog perching on a crag, would be deuced bad form! You see that yourself, you must – really!” and our philosopher glowered sweetly.

“I shall never know,” said the Reverend Bronson, with a half-laugh, “when to have you seriously. I cannot but wish, however, that the town had better luck about its City Hall.”

“Really, I don’t know, don’t y’ know!” This deep observation Morton flourished off in a profound muse. “As I’ve said, the town will get what’s coming to it, because it will always get what it wants. It always has – really! And speaking of ‘reform’ as we employ the term in politics: The town, in honesty, never desires it; and that’s why somebody must forever attend on ‘reform’ to keep it from falling on its blundering nose and knees by holding it up by the tail. There are people who’ll take anything you give them, even though it be a coat of tar and feathers, and thank you for it, too, – the grateful beggars! New York resembles these. Some chap comes along, and offers New York ‘reform.’ Being without ‘reform’ at the time, and made suddenly and sorrowfully mindful of its condition, it accepts the gift just as a drunkard takes a pledge. Like the drunkard, however, New York is apt to return to its old ways – it is, really!”

“One thing,” said the Reverend Bronson as he arose to go, and laying his hand on my shoulder, “since the Boss of Tammany, in a day of the machine, is the whole government and the source of it, I mean to come here often and work upon our friend in favor of a clean town.”

“And you will be welcome, Doctor, let me say!” I returned.

“Now I think,” said Morton meditatively, when the Reverend Bronson had departed, “precisely as I told our excellent friend. A rule should ever fit a people; and it ever does. A king is as naturally the blossom of the peasantry he grows on as is a sunflower natural to that coarse stem that supports its royal nod-dings, don’t y’ know. A tyranny, a despotism, a monarchy, or a republic is ever that flower of government natural to the public upon which it grows. Really! – Why not? Wherein lurks the injustice or the inconsistency of such a theory? What good is there to lie hidden in a misfit? Should Providence waste a man’s government on a community of dogs? A dog public should have dog government: – a kick and a kennel, a chain to clank and a bone to gnaw!”

With this last fragment of wisdom, the cynical Morton went also his way, leaving me alone to chop up the town – as a hunter chops up the carcass of a deer among his hounds – into steak and collop to feed my hungry followers.

However much politics might engage me, I still possessed those hundred eyes of Argus wherewith to watch my girl. When again about me she had no word for what was past. And on my side, never once did I put to her the name of young Van Flange. He was as much unmentioned by us as though he had not been. I think that this was the wiser course. What might either Blossom or I have said to mend our shattered hopes?

Still, I went not without some favor of events. There came a support to my courage; the more welcome, since the latter was often at its ebb. It was a strangest thing at that! While Blossom moved with leaden step, and would have impressed herself upon one as weak and wanting sparkle, she none the less began to gather the color of health. Her cheeks, before of the pallor of snow, wore a flush like the promise of life. Her face gained rounder fullness, while her eyes opened upon one with a kind of wide brilliancy, that gave a look of gayety. It was like a blessing! Nor could I forbear, as I witnessed it, the dream of a better strength for my girl than it had been her luck to know; and that thought would set me to my task of money-getting with ever a quicker ardor.

Still, as I’ve said, there was the side to baffle. For all those roses and eyes like stars, Blossom’s breath was broken and short, and a little trip upstairs or down exhausted her to the verge of pain. To mend her breathing after one of these small household expeditions, she must find a chair, or even lie on a couch. All this in its turn would have set my fears to a runaway if it had not been for that fine glow in her cheeks to each time restore me to my faith.

When I put the question born of my uneasiness, Blossom declared herself quite well, nor would she give me any sicklier word. In the end my fears would go back to their slumbers, and I again bend myself wholly to that task of gold.

Good or bad, to do this was when all was said the part of complete wisdom. There could be nothing now save my plan of millions and a final pilgrimage in quest of peace. That was our single chance; and at it, in a kind of savage silence, night and day I stormed as though warring with walls and battlements.

CHAPTER XXVII – GOLD CAME, AND DEATH STEPPED IN

NOW, when I went about refurnishing my steel box with new millions, I turned cautious as a fox. I considered concealment, and would hide my trail and walk in all the running water that I might. For one matter, I was sick and sore with the attacks made upon me by the papers, which grew in malignant violence as the days wore on, and as though it were a point of rivalry between them which should have the black honor of hating me the most. I preferred to court those type-cudgelings as little as stood possible, and still bring me to my ends.

The better to cover myself, and because the mere work of it would be too weary a charge for one head and that head ignorant of figures, I called into my service a cunning trio who were, one and all, born children of the machine. These three owned thorough training as husbandmen of politics, and were ones to mow even the fence corners. That profit of the game which escaped them must indeed be sly, and lie deep and close besides. Also, they were of the invaluable brood that has no tongue, and any one of the triangle would have been broken upon the wheel without a syllable of confession disgracing his lips.

These inveterate ones, who would be now as my hand in gathering together that wealth which I anticipated, were known in circles wherein they moved and had their dingy being, as Sing Sing Jacob, Puffy the Merchant, and Paddy the Priest. Paddy the Priest wore a look of sanctity, and it was this impression of holiness to confer upon him his title. It might have been more consistent with those virtues of rapine dominant of his nature, had he been hailed Paddy the Pirate, instead. Of Sing Sing Jacob, I should say, that he had not served in prison. His name was given him because, while he was never granted the privilege of stripes and irons, he often earned the same. In what manner or at what font Puffy the Merchant received baptism, I never learned. That he came fit for my purpose would find sufficient indication in a complaining compliment which Paddy the Priest once paid him, and who said in description of Puffy’s devious genius, that if one were to drive a nail through his head it would come forth a corkscrew.

These men were to be my personal lieutenants, and collect my gold for me. And since they would pillage me with as scanty a scruple as though I were the foe himself, I must hit upon a device for invoking them to honesty in ny affairs. It was then I remembered the parting words of Big Kennedy. I would set one against the others; hating each other, they would watch; and each would be sharp with warning in my ear should either of his fellows seek to fill a purse at my expense.

To sow discord among my three offered no difficulties; I had but to say to one what the others told of him, and his ire was on permanent end. It was thus I separated them; and since I gave each his special domain of effort, while they worked near enough to one another to maintain a watch, they were not so thrown together as to bring down among them open war.

It will be required that I set forth in half-detail those various municipal fields and meadows that I laid out in my time, and from which the machine was to garner its harvest. You will note then, you who are innocent of politics in its practical expressions and rewards, how the town stood to me as does his plowlands to a farmer, and offered as various a list of crops to careful tillage. Take for example the knee-deep clover of the tax department. Each year there was made a whole valuation of personal property of say roundly nine billions of dollars. This estimate, within a dozen weeks of its making, would be reduced to fewer than one billion, on the word of individuals who made the law-required oaths. No, it need not have been so reduced; but the reduction ever occurred since the machine instructed its tax officers to act on the oath so furnished, and that without question.

That personage in tax peril was never put to fret in obtaining one to make the oath. If he himself lacked hardihood and hesitated at perjury, why then, the town abounded in folk of a daring easy veracity. Of all that was said and written, of that time, in any New York day, full ninety-five per cent, was falsehood or mistake. Among the members of a community, so affluent of error and mendacity, one would not long go seeking a witness who was ready, for shining reasons, to take whatever oath might be demanded. And thus it befell that the affidavits were ever made, and a reduction of eight billions and more, in the assessed valuation of personal property, came annually to be awarded. With a tax levy of, say, two per cent. I leave you to fix the total of those millions saved to ones assessed, and also to consider how far their gratitude might be expected to inure to the yellow welfare of the machine – the machine that makes no gift of either its forbearance or its help!

Speaking in particular of the town, and what opportunities of riches swung open to the machine, one should know at the start how the whole annual expense of the community was roughly one hundred and twenty-five millions. Of these millions twenty went for salaries to officials; forty were devoted to the purchase of supplies asked for by the public needs; while the balance, sixty-five millions, represented contracts for paving and building and similar construction whatnot, which the town was bound to execute in its affairs.

Against those twenty millions of salaries, the machine levied an annual private five per cent. Two-thirds of the million to arise therefrom, found their direct way to district leaders; the other one-third was paid into the general coffer. Also there were county officers, such as judges, clerks of court, a sheriff and his deputies: and these, likewise, were compelled from their incomes to a yearly generosity of not fewer than five per cent.

Of those forty millions which were the measure for supplies, one-fifth under the guise of “commissions” went to the machine; while of the sixty-five millions, which represented the yearly contracts in payments made thereon, the machine came better off with, at the leanest of estimates, full forty per cent, of the whole.

Now I have set forth to you those direct returns which arose from the sure and fixed expenses of the town. Beyond that, and pushing for the furthest ounce of tallow, I inaugurated a novelty. I organized a guaranty company which made what bonds the law demanded from officials; and from men with contracts, and those others who furnished the town’s supplies. The annual charge of the company for this act of warranty was two per cent, on the sum guaranteed; and since the aggregate thus carried came to about one hundred millions, the intake from such sources – being for the most part profit in the fingers of the machine – was annually a fair two millions. There were other rills to flow a revenue, and which were related to those money well-springs registered above, but they count too many and too small for mention here, albeit the round returns from them might make a poor man stare.

Of those other bottom-lands of profit which bent a nodding harvest to the sickle of the machine, let me make a rough enumeration. The returns – a bit sordid, these! – from poolrooms, faro banks and disorderly resorts and whereon the monthly charge imposed for each ran all the way from fifty to two thousand dollars, clinked into the yearly till, four millions. The grog shops, whereof at that time there was a staggering host of such in New York City of-the-many-sins! met each a draft of twenty monthly dollars. Then one should count “campaign contributions.” Of great companies who sued for favor there were, at a lowest census, five who sent as tribute from twenty to fifty thousand dollars each. Also there existed of smaller concerns and private persons, full one thousand who yielded over all a no less sum than one million. Next came the police, with appointment charges which began with a patrolman at four hundred dollars, and soared to twenty thousand when the matter was the making of a captain.

Here I shall close my recapitulation of former treasure for the machine; I am driven to warn you, however, that the half has not been told. Still, if you will but let your imagination have its head, remembering how the machine gives nothing away, and fails not to exert its pressures with every chance afforded it, you may supply what other chapters belong with the great history of graft.

When one considers a Tammany profit, one will perforce be driven to the question: What be the expenses of the machine? The common cost of an election should pause in the neighborhood of three hundred thousand dollars. Should peril crowd, and an imported vote be called for by the dangers of the day, the cost might carry vastly higher. No campaign, however, in the very nature of the enterprise and its possibilities of expense, can consume a greater fund than eight hundred thousand. That sum, subtracted from the income of the machine as taken from those sundry sources I’ve related, will show what in my time remained for distribution among my followers.

And now that brings one abreast the subject of riches to the Boss himself. One of the world’s humorists puts into the mouth of a character the query: What does a king get? The answer would be no whit less difficult had he asked: What does a Boss get? One may take it, however, that the latter gets the lion’s share. Long ago I said that the wealth of Ophir hung on the hazard of the town’s election. You have now some slant as to how far my words should be regarded as hyperbole. Nor must I omit how the machine’s delegation in a legislature, or the little flock it sends to nibble on the slopes of Congress, is each in the hand of the Boss to do with as he will, and it may go without a record that the opportunities so provided are neither neglected nor underpriced.

There you have the money story of Tammany in the bowels of the town. Those easy-chair economists who, over their morning coffee and waffles, engage themselves for purity, will at this point give honest rage the rein. Had I no sense of public duty? Was the last spark of any honesty burned out within my bosom? Was nothing left but dead embers to be a conscience to me? The Reverend Bronson – and I had a deep respect for that gentleman – put those questions in his time.

“Bear in mind,” said he when, after that last election, I again had the town in my grasp, “bear in mind the welfare and the wishes of the public, and use your power consistently therewith.”

“Now, why?” said I. “The public of which you tell me lies in two pieces, the minority and the majority. It is to the latter’s welfare – the good of the machine – I shall address myself. Be sure, my acts will gain the plaudits of my own people, while I have only to go the road you speak of to be made the target of their anger. As to the minority – those who have vilified me, and who still would crush me if they but had the strength – why, then, as Morton says, I owe them no more than William owed the Saxons when after Hastings he had them under his feet.”

When the new administration was in easy swing, and I had time to look about me, I bethought me of Blackberry and those three millions taken from the weakness and the wickedness of young Van Flange. I would have those millions back or know the secret of it.

With a nod here and a hand-toss there – for the shrug of my shoulders or the lift of my brows had grown to have a definition among my people – I brewed tempests for Blackberry. The park department discovered it in a trespass; the health board gave it notice of the nonsanitary condition of its cars; the street commissioner badgered it with processes because of violations of laws and ordinances; the coroner, who commonly wore a gag, gave daily news of what folk were killed or maimed through the wantonness of Blackberry; while my corporation counsel bestirred himself as to whether or no, for this neglect or that invasion of public right, the Blackberry charter might not be revoked.

In the face of these, the president of Blackberry – he of the Hebrew cast and clutch – stood sullenly to his guns. He would not yield; he would not pay the price of peace; he would not return those millions, although he knew well the argument which was the ground-work of his griefs.

The storm I unchained beat sorely, but he made no white-flag signs. I admired his fortitude, while I multiplied my war.

It was Morton who pointed to that final feather which broke the camel’s back.

“Really, old chap,” observed Morton, that immortal eyeglass on nose and languid hands outspread, “really, you haven’t played your trumps, don’t y’ know.”

“What then?” cried I, for my heart was growing hot.

“You recall my saying to our friend Bronson that, when I had a chap against me whom I couldn’t buy, I felt about to discover his fad or his fear – I was speaking about changing a beggar’s name, and all that, don’t y’ know?”

“Yes,” said I, “it all comes back.”

“Exactly,” continued Morton. “Now the fear that keeps a street-railway company awake nights is its fear of a strike. There, my dear boy, you have your weapon. Convey the information to those Blackberry employees, that you think they get too little money and work too long a day. Let them understand how, should they strike, your police will not repress them in any crimes they see fit to commit. Really, I think I’ve hit upon a splendid idea! Those hirelings will go upon the warpath, don’t y’ know! And a strike is such a beastly thing! – such a deuced bore! It is, really!”

Within the fortnight every Blackberry wheel was stopped, and every employee rioting in the streets. Cars were sacked; what men offered for work were harried, and made to fly for very skins and bones. Meanwhile, the police stood afar off with virgin-batons, innocent of interference.

Four days of this, and those four millions were paid into my hand; the Blackberry president had yielded, and my triumph was complete. With that, my constabulary remembered law and order, and, descending upon the turbulent, calmed them with their clubs. The strike ended; again were the gongs of an unharassed Blackberry heard in the land.

And now I draw near the sorrowful, desperate end – the end at once of my labors and my latest hope. I had held the town since the last battle for well-nigh three and one-half years. Throughout this space affairs political preserved themselves as rippleless as a looking-glass, and nothing to ruffle with an adverse wind. Those henchmen – my boys of the belt, as it were – Sing Sing Jacob, Puffy the Merchant, and Paddy the Priest, went working like good retrievers at their task of bringing daily money to my feet.

Nor was I compelled to appear as one interested in the profits of the town’s farming, and this of itself was comfort, since it served to keep me aloof from any mire of those methods that were employed.