Part 2

Turning now to New York city, we find the political situation very similar to that of the country town already described. The interests which actually control the businesses of the city are managed by very few individuals. It is only that the sums involved are different. One of these men is president of an insurance company whose assets are $130,000,000; another is president of a system of street railways with a capital stock of $30,000,000; another is president of an elevated road system with a capital of the same amount; a fourth is vice-president of a paving company worth $10,000,000; a fifth owns $50,000,000 worth of real estate; a sixth controls a great railroad system; a seventh is president of a savings-bank in which $5,000,000 are deposited; and so on. The commercial ties which bind the community together are as close in the city as in the country town. The great magnates live in palaces, and the lesser ones in palaces, also. The hardware-dealer of the small town is in New York the owner of iron-works, a man of stainless reputation. The florist is the owner of a large tract of land within the city limits, through which a boulevard is about to be cut. The retired merchant has become a partner of his nephew, and is developing one of the suburbs by means of an extension of an electric road system. But the commercial hierarchy does not stop here; it continues radiating, spreading downward. All businesses are united by the instruments and usages which the genius of trade has devised. All these interests together represent the railroad of the country town. They take no real interest in politics, and they desire only to be let alone.

For the twenty years before the Strong administration the government of the city was almost continuously under the control of a ring, or, accurately speaking, of a Happy Family. Special circumstances made this ring well nigh indestructible. The Boss-out-of-Power of the Happy Family happens to be also the boss of the State legislature. He performs a double function. This is what has given Platt his extraordinary power. It will have been noticed that some of the masses of wealth above mentioned are peculiarly subject to State legislation: they subscribe directly to the State boss’s fund. Some are subject to interference from the city administration: they subscribe to the city boss’s fund.

We see that by the receipt of his fund the State boss is rendered independent of the people of the city. He can use the State legislature to strengthen his hands in his dealings with the city boss. After all, he does not need many votes. He can buy enough votes to hold his minority together and keep Tammany safely in power, and by now and then taking a candidate from the citizens he advertises himself as a friend of reform.

As to the Tammany branch of the concern, the big money interests need specific and often illegal advantages, and pay heavily over the Tammany counter. But as we saw before, public officers, if once corrupted, will work only for money. Every business that has to do with one or another of the city offices must therefore now contribute for “protection.” A foreign business that is started in this city subscribes to Tammany Hall as a visitor writes his name in a book at a watering-place. It gives him the run of the town. In the same way, the State-fearing business man subscribes to Platt for “protection.” No secret is made of these conditions. The business man regards the reformer as a monomaniac who is not reasonable enough to see the necessity for his tribute. In the conduct of any large business, this form of bribery is as regular an item as rent. The machinery for such bribery is perfected. It is only when some blundering attempt is made by a corporation to do the bribing itself, when some unbusinesslike attempt is made to get rid of the middleman, that the matter is discovered. A few boodle aldermen go to jail, and every one is scandalized. The city and county officers of the new city of New York will have to do with the disbursing of $70,000,000 annually,--fully one half of it in the conduct of administration. The power of these officers to affect or even control values, by manipulation of one sort or another, is familiar to us all from experience in the past.

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So much for business. Let us look at the law. The most lucrative practice is that of an attorney who protects great corporate interests among these breakers. He needs but one client; he gets hundreds. The mind of the average lawyer makes the same unconscious allowance for bribery as that of the business man. Moreover, we cannot overlook the cases of simple old-fashioned bribery to which the masses of capital give rise. In a political emergency any amount of money is forthcoming immediately, and it is given from aggregations of capital so large that the items are easily concealed in the accounts. Bribery, in one form or another, is part of the unwritten law. It is atmospheric; it is felt by no one. The most able men in the community believe that society would drop to pieces without bribery. They do not express it in this way, but they act upon the principle in an emergency. A leader of the bar, at the behest of his Wall Street clients, begs the reform police board not to remove Inspector Byrnes, who is the Jonathan Wild of the period. The bench is fairly able. But many of the judges on the bench have paid large campaign assessments in return for their nominations; others have given notes to the bosses. This reveals the exact condition of things. In a corrupt era the judges pay cash. Now they help their friends. The son or the son-in-law of a judge is sure of a good practice, and referees are appointed from lists which are largely dictated by the professional politicians of both parties.

It would require an encyclopædia to state the various simple devices by which the same principle runs through every department in the life of the community. Such an encyclopædia for New York city would be the best picture of municipal misgovernment in the United States during the commercial era. But one main fact must again be noted: this great complex ring is held together by the two campaign funds, the Tammany Hall fund and the Republican fund. They are the two power houses which run all this machinery.

So far as human suffering goes, the positive evils of the system fall largely on the poor. The rich buy immunity, but the poor are persecuted, and have no escape. This has always been the case under a tyranny. What else could we expect in New York? The Lexow investigation showed us the condition of the police force. The lower courts, both criminal and civil, and the police department were used for vote-getting and for money-getting purposes. They were serving as instruments of extortion and of favoritism. But in the old police courts the foreigner and the honest poor were actually attacked. Process was issued against them, their business was destroyed, and they were jailed unless they could buy off. This system still exists to some extent in the lower civil courts.

It is obvious that all these things come to pass through the fault of no one in particular. We have to-day reached the point where the public is beginning to understand that the iniquity is accomplished by means of the political boss. Every one is therefore abusing the boss. But Platt and Croker are not worse than the men who continue to employ them after understanding their function. These men stand for the conservative morality of New York, and for standards but little lower than the present standards.

Let us now see how those standards came to exist. Imagine a community in which, for more than a generation, the government has been completely under boss rule, so that the system has become part of the habits and of the thought of the people, and consider what views we might expect to find in the hearts of the citizens of such a community. The masses will have been controlled by what is really bribery and terrorism, but what appears in the form of a very plausible appeal to the individual on the ground of self-interest. For forty years money and place have been corrupting them. Their whole conception of politics is that it is a matter of money and of place. The well-to-do will have been apt to prosper in proportion as they have made themselves serviceable to the dominant powers, and have become part and parcel of the machinery of the system. It is not to be pretended that every man in such a community is a rascal, but it is true that in so far as his business brings him into contact with the administrative officers every man will be put to the choice between lucrative malpractice and thankless honesty. A conviction will spread throughout the community that nothing can be done without a friend at court; that honesty does not pay, and probably never has paid in the history of the world; that a boss is part of the mechanism by which God governs mankind; that property would not be safe without him; and, finally, that the recognized bosses are not so bad as they are painted. The great masses of corporate property have owners who really believe that the system of government which enabled them to make money is the only safe government. These people cling to abuses as to a life-preserver. They fear that an honest police board will not be able to bribe the thieves not to steal from them, that an honest State insurance department will not be able to prevent the legislature from pillaging them. It is absolutely certain that in the first struggles for reform the weight of the mercantile classes will be thrown very largely on the side of conservatism.

Now, in a great city like New York the mercantile _bourgeoisie_ will include almost every one who has an income of five thousand dollars a year, or more. These men can be touched by the bosses, and therefore, after forty years of tyranny, it is not to be expected that many of those who wear black coats will have much enthusiasm for reform. It is “impracticable;” it is “discredited;” it is “expensive;” it is “advocated by unknown men;” it speaks ill of the “respectable;” it “does harm” by exciting the poor against the rich; it is “unbusinesslike” and “visionary;” it is “self-righteous.” We have accordingly had, in New York city, a low and perverted moral tone, an incapacity to think clearly or to tell the truth when we know it. This is both the cause and the consequence of bondage. A generation of men really believe that honesty is bad policy, and continue to be governed by Tammany Hall.

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The world has wondered that New York could not get rid of its famous incubus. The gross evils as they existed at the time of Tweed are remembered. The great improvements are not generally known. Reform has been slow, because its leaders have not seen that their work was purely educational. They did not understand the political combination, and they kept striking at Tammany Hall. Like a child with a toy, they did not see that the same mechanism which caused Punch to strike caused Judy’s face to disappear from the window.

It is not selfishness and treason that are mainly responsible for the discredit which dogs “reform.” It is the inefficiency of upright and patriotic men. The practical difficulty with reform movements in New York has been that the leaders of such movements have clung to old political methods. These men have thought that if they could hire or imitate the regular party machinery, they could make it work for good. They would fight banditti with bravi. They would expel Tammany Hall, and lo, Tammany is within them.

Is it a failure of intellect or of morality which prevents the reformers from seeing that idealism is the shortest road to their goal? It is the failure of both. It is a legacy of the old tyranny. In one sense it is corruption; in another it is stupidity; in every sense it is incompetence. Political incompetence is only another name for moral degradation, and both exist in New York for the same reason that they exist in Turkey. They are the offspring of blackmail.

Well-meaning and public-spirited men, who have been engrossed in business for the best part of their lives, are perhaps excusable for not understanding the principles on which reform moves. Any one can see that if what was wanted was merely a good school board, the easiest way to get it would be to go to Croker, give him a hundred thousand dollars, and offer to let him alone if he gave the good board. But until very recently nobody could see that putting good school commissioners on Platt’s ticket and giving Platt the hundred thousand dollars was precisely the same thing.

In an enterprise whose sole aim is to raise the moral standard, idealism always pays. A reverse following a fight for principle, like the defeat of Low, is pure gain. It records the exact state of the cause. It educates the masses on a gigantic scale. The results of that education are immediately visible.

On the other hand, all compromise means delay. By compromise, the awakened faith of the people is sold to the politicians for a mess of reform. The failures and mistakes of Mayor Strong’s administration were among the causes for Mr. Low’s defeat. People said, “If this be reform, give us Tammany Hall.” Our reformers have always been in hot haste to get results. They want a balance-sheet at the end of every year. They think this will encourage the people. But the people recall only their mistakes. The long line of reform leaders in New York city are remembered with contempt. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

That weakness of intellect which makes reformers love quick returns is twin brother to a certain defect of character. Personal vanity is very natural in men who figure as tribunes of the people. They say, “Look at Abraham Lincoln, and how he led the people out of the wilderness; let us go no faster than the people in pushing these reforms; let us accept half-measures; let us be Abraham Lincoln.” The example of Lincoln has wrecked many a promising young man; for really Lincoln has no more to do with the case than Julius Cæsar. As soon as the reformers give up trying to be statesmen, and perceive that their own function is purely educational, and that they are mere anti-slavery agitators and persons of no account whatever, they will succeed better.

As to the methods of work in reform,--whether it shall be by clubs or by pamphlets, by caucus or by constitution,--they will be developed. Executive capacity is simply that capacity which is always found in people who really want something done.

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In New York, the problem is not to oust Tammany Hall; another would arise in a year. It is to make the great public understand the boss system, of which Tammany is only a part. As fast as the reformers see that clearly themselves, they will find the right machinery to do the work in hand. It may be that, like the Jews, we shall have to spend forty years more in the wilderness, until the entire generation that lived under Pharaoh has perished. But education nowadays marches quickly. The progress that has been made during the last seven years in the city of New York gives hope that within a decade a majority of the voters will understand clearly that all the bosses are in league.

In 1890, this fact was so little understood by the managers of an anti-Tammany movement which sprang up in that year that, after raising a certain stir and outcry, they put in the field a ticket made up exclusively of political hacks, whose election would have left matters exactly where they stood. The people at large, led by the soundest political instinct, re-elected Tammany Hall, and gave to sham reform the rebuff it deserved. In 1894, after the Lexow investigation had kept the town at fever-heat of indignation all summer, Mayor Strong was nominated by the Committee of Seventy, under an arrangement with Platt. The excitement was so great that the people at large did not examine Mr. Strong’s credentials. He was a Republican merchant, and in no way identified with the boss system. Mayor Strong’s administration has been a distinct advance, in many ways encouraging. Its errors and weaknesses have been so clearly traceable to the system which helped elect him that it has been in the highest degree valuable as an object-lesson. In 1895, only one year after Mayor Strong’s election, the fruits of his administration could not yet be seen. In that year a few judges and minor local officers were to be chosen. By this time the “citizens’ movement” had become a regular part of a municipal election. A group of radicals, the legatees of the Strong campaign, had for a year been enrolled in clubs called Good Government Clubs. These men took the novel course of nominating a complete ticket of their own. This was considered a dangerous move by the moderate reformers, who were headed by the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce and its well-meaning supporters then took a step which, from an educational standpoint, turned out to be most important. In their terror lest Tammany Hall should gain the prestige of a by-election, they made an arrangement with Platt, and were allowed to name some candidates on his ticket. This was the famous “fusion,” which the Good Government men attacked with as much energy as they might have expended on Tammany Hall. A furious campaign of crimination between the two reform factions followed, and of course Tammany was elected.

The difference between the Good Government men (the Goo-Goos, as they were called) and the Fusionists was entirely one of political education. The Goo-Goo mind had advanced to the point of seeing that Platt was a confederate of Tammany and represented one wing of the great machine. To give him money was useless; to lend him respectability was infamous. These ideas were disseminated by the press; and it was immaterial that they were disseminated in the form of denunciations of the Good Government Clubs. The people at large began to comprehend clearly what they had always instinctively believed. There was now a nucleus of men in the town who preferred Tammany Hall to any victory that would discredit reform.

It may be noted that the Good Government Clubs polled less than one per cent of the vote cast in that election; and that in the recent mayoralty campaign the Citizens’ Union ran Mr. Low on the Good Government platform, and polled 150,000 votes. In this same election, the straight Republican ticket, headed by Tracy, polled 100,000 votes, and Tammany polled about as many as both its opponents together. A total of about 40,000 votes were cast for George and other candidates.

Much surprise has been expressed that there should be 100,000 Republicans in New York whose loyalty to the party made them vote a straight ticket with the certainty of electing Tammany Hall; but in truth, when we consider the history of the city, we ought rather to be surprised at the great size of the vote for Mr. Low. He was the man who arranged the fusion of 1895. It was entirely due to a lack of clear thinking and of political courage that such an arrangement was then made. Two years ago the Chamber of Commerce did not clearly understand the evils that it was fighting. Is it a wonder that 100,000 individual voters are still backward in their education? If we discount the appeal of self-interest, which determined many of them, there are probably some 75,000 Republicans whose misguided party loyalty obscured their view and deadened their feelings. They cannot be said to hate bad government very much. They do not think Tammany Hall so very bad, after all. As the London papers said, the dog has returned to his vomit. It is unintelligent to abuse them. They are the children of the age. A few years ago we were all such as they. Of Mr. Low’s 150,000 supporters, on the other hand, there are probably at least 40,000 who would vote through thick and thin for the principles which his campaign stood for.

Any one who is a little removed by time or by distance from New York knows that the city cannot have permanent good government until a clear majority of our 500,000 voters shall develop what the economists call an “effective desire” for it. It is not enough merely to want reform. The majority must know how to get it. For educational purposes, the intelligent discussion throughout the recent campaign is worth all the effort that it cost. The Low campaign was notable in another particular. The banking and the mercantile classes subscribed liberally to the citizens’ campaign fund. They are the men who have had the most accurate knowledge of the boss system, because they support it. At last they have dared to expose it. Indeed, there was a rent in Wall Street. The great capitalists and the promoters backed Tammany and Platt, as a matter of course; but many individuals of power and importance in the street came out strongly for Low. They acted at personal risk, with courage, out of conscience. The great pendulum of wealth has swung toward decency. It is very difficult to use this or any money in the cause of reform without doing more harm than good. But the money is not the main point; the personal influence of the men who give it operates more powerfully than the money. Hereafter reform will be respectable. The professional classes are pouring into it. The young men are re-entering politics. Its victory is absolutely certain, and will not be distant.

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The effect of public-spirited activity on the character is very rapid. Here again we cannot separate the cause from the consequence; but it is certain that the moral tone of the community is changing very rapidly for the better, and that the thousands of men who are at this moment preparing to take part in the next citizens’ campaign, and who count public activity as one of the regular occupations of their lives, are affecting the social and commercial life of New York. The young men who are working to reform politics find in it not only the satisfaction of a religious instinct, but an excitement which business cannot provide.

One effect of the commercial supremacy has been to make social life intolerably dull, by dividing people into cliques and trade unions. The millionaire dines with the millionaire, the artist with the artist, the hat-maker with the hat-maker, gentlefolk with gentlefolk. All of these sets are equally uninspiring, equally frightened at a strange face. The hierarchy of commerce is dull. The intelligent people in America are dull, because they have no contact, no social experience. Their intelligence is a clique and wears a badge. They think they are not affected by the commercialism of the times; but their attitude of mind is precisely that of a lettered class living under a tyranny. They flock by themselves. It is certain that the cure for class feeling is public activity. The young jeweller, the young printer, and the golf-player, each, after a campaign in which they have been fighting for a principle, finds that social enjoyment lies in working with people unlike himself, for a common object. Reform movements bring men into touch, into struggle with the powers that are really shaping our destinies, and show them the sinews and bones of the social organism. The absurd social prejudices which unman the rich and the poor alike vanish in a six weeks’ campaign. Indeed, the exhilaration of real life is too much for many of the reformers. Even bankers neglect their business, and dare not meet their partners, and a dim thought crosses their minds that perhaps the most enlightened way to spend money is, not to make it, but to invest their energies directly in life.

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