CHAPTER VI.

THE PLÉBISCITE FOR A CÆSAR.

The contest for the mayoralty of Greater New York, which was fought out at the polls on the 2nd of November, has been one of the most famous elections ever fought. To begin with, never before have half a million electors voted in the same day for the election of a chief magistrate. Greater New York contains more that 3,000,000 inhabitants, and 567,000 registered electors. The constituency is not more vast than the powers of the mayor are unlimited. As no chief magistrate before received the suffrages of so many electors, so no chief magistrate was ever invested with such absolute authority. Mr. Van Wyck, the new Mayor of Greater New York, for six months at least is almost as much master of New York as Napoleon III. was master of France after the _plébiscite_ which installed him at the Tuileries. The two-chambered elective council of the city has even less control over his municipal appointments than the senate and _Corps Législatif_ of the Second Empire. For so great a stake it was natural that all parties should enter their best men, and that the contest should be fought with as much energy as a Presidential Election.

The first to enter the field was Mr. Seth Low, the President of Columbian University, and the candidate of the Citizens’ Union. Mr. Low--or Seth Low as he is usually called--was the first Reform Mayor of the City of Brooklyn, where he was re-elected and served a second term. Although he belongs to the Republican party, he stood as the candidate of those who object to the subordination of municipal to national issues. The one great curse which has plagued New York in the past has been that its citizens never had a chance of voting upon a straight civic issue, but were always pulled hither and thither by the conflicting interest of the Republican or Democratic parties, compared with whose real or imaginary interests the welfare of the city was regarded as dust in the balance. Mr. Low was one of the leading members of the Commission which framed the Charter of Greater New York. He is a man of education, of leisure, of experience, and of the highest character. The Citizens’ Union was formed last winter in the old City of New York, with the object of electing what is called a non-partisan mayor. The Citizens’ Union, although nominally non-partisan, was really recruited in a great measure by the Republicans. Hence it was regarded by the leaders of the Republican machine as virtually a revolt against the Republican Caucus, and the Chairman of the County Republican Committee publicly declared that the Republican party would much rather see a Tammany man installed as the first Mayor of Greater New York than a mayor who was not the nominee of the Republican organisation. And the Republican Party men have had their wish.

It was this declaration that led Mr. Seth Low to join the Citizens’ Union, which he had not previously done. About the middle of the year, the ticket which had long been current as to the advisability of nominating Seth Low for the Mayoralty began to crystallise into action. The Citizens’ Union had increased its membership from 6,000 to 25,000, and it had secured nearly 100,000 signatures to a memorial requesting Mr. Low to be put in nomination as a candidate for the Mayoralty. Earlier in the year he had contemplated standing only as a unifying force among the friends of good government, but when the memorial was presented, and the Citizens’ Union insisted upon taking independent action without conferring with the other organisations, he accepted the nomination, and in the beginning of September issued his address.

His appeal to the constituency was based, according to his own statements, upon the following principles. First, he stood for the idea of having a free man in the Mayor’s chair, a man who would be responsible to the people who put him there, and not to any party machine. The Reform Mayor of New York, he said, in a passage which stung General Tracy into unwonted fury, must be in the City Hall of New York, and not on a racecourse in England, or in the Senate Chamber of Washington. The suggestion, of course, being that if the Tammany candidate were elected, its master would be Richard Croker, who was supposed to spend his time on English race tracks, while if General Tracy were elected, he would take his orders from Senator Platt, the Republican Boss. Secondly, Mr. Low stood for the idea of Home Rule--Home Rule for New York. A community of three million and a quarter of people ought to be entitled to shape their own destinies in matters that are purely local. Further, he stood as the advocate of good city civic administration, which he defined as a civic government so well administered that no interest in the great metropolis shall be so small as to be beneath its care, and no interest so great that it shall timidly shrink from attempting to deal with it. In Mr. Seth Low’s address, accepting the nomination, he frankly avowed that he was a Republican, and expected to remain one; but he would pledge himself that, in making appointments, he would fill every place with an eye single to the public good. “The patronage of the city shall not be used, so far as it is in the mayor’s power to prevent it, for purposes of either strengthening or weakening one party or another, or any fraction of another party.” On the subject of public franchises, by which the streets of New York have been practically handed over to irresponsible corporations, he made the significant suggestion that the city should be able to deal with every application for a change of the power by which the street railways were worked, as being equivalent to a demand for a new franchise. There is more in this than is discernible at first sight by an English reader. The tramways of New York are largely operated at present by cables and horses. These are being superseded as rapidly as possible by electricity. If no street railway were to be allowed to adopt electricity as a mode of traction, unless it surrendered what we should call its local Act of Parliament, empowering it to use the streets, and had to make terms _de novo_ for that privilege, the relation between the public and the companies would be immediately transformed. At present the companies have got all they want, and pay the city next to nothing. It may not be possible to adopt Mr. Seth Low’s suggestion, but the idea is well worth consideration.

In his reference to the Labour Laws of the City, he maintained that they should be administered in the letter and in the spirit. The vexed question of the saloon was dealt with in a lengthy paragraph, in which he balanced himself as best he could between the two schools of restriction and of freedom. The Raines Liquor Law, which was imposed upon the City of New York by the State Legislature, has created an immense amount of irritation by its attempt to secure Sunday closing, and to enforce stricter discipline on the saloons. Mr. Low condemned the Raines law for not taking into account the public sentiment of so cosmopolitan a city as New York. This being interpreted, means that the German citizens object to be deprived of their Sunday beer, and that, to adopt the local vernacular, you cannot swing a great world-city on principles of the hayseed legislators up at Albany. What Mr. Low would do in relation to the licensing does not precisely appear, beyond desiring to adopt some system of local option:--

In my opinion, an excise law, so far as it affects the daily life and the habits of the people, should reflect the public opinion of the city. On such points, in case of radical differences of opinion, I should take the appeal to the people themselves.

The keynote, therefore, of his address lay in the sentence that he desired to secure for “this Imperial City” the opportunity to start upon its new career under an administration pledged to make the interests of the city its supreme care. Mr. Low had the great advantage of not being a mere theorist, but one who had had four years’ experience in the application of the principles upon which he would propose to act as Mayor of Greater New York. The city government, he maintained, should be organised on business principles. Quite recently he contributed a chapter to Mr. Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” on City Government in the United States, in which he embodied the result of his experience and observation as Mayor of Brooklyn. His dominant idea is that the government of a city should be conducted upon very much the same principles as the management of any corporation, railroad, or joint stock company. The Mayor should be general manager, and the head of every department should hold office at his supreme discretion. Another principle upon which he insists is that wherever executive work is to be done, it must be put in the hands of one man, but that wherever it is not an affair for action, but for discretion, in the multitude of councillors there is wisdom. Where the work is discretionary have a board, where it is executive have one man.

The second candidate to enter the field was one as well known in this country as he is in his native land. Henry George, whose sudden death on the eve of the poll gave so tragic a note to the contest, was nominated by the Bryanite section of the Democratic party. He commanded, and deserved to command, a great deal of public support, and still more of popular sympathy. Henry George stood as candidate for Mayor some years since, and was defeated by Tammany Hall joining hands with the Republicans, in order to elect Mr. Hewitt. Mr. Croker talked over that ancient history with me on the steamer, and then expressed a confident conviction that the Labour Unions would never again support Henry George. They were all in line, he said, with Tammany. Henry George, whose book, “Progress and Poverty,” was practically discovered in Great Britain after it had fallen very flat in the United States, was an honest man, full of all generous enthusiasms, and his candidature deserved and obtained general sympathy, because it was the most emphatic, picturesque, and sensational method of expressing dissatisfaction with things as they are. Mr. George was a strong Free Trader, but he was not an advocate of Free Silver.

His followers, however, tolerated all differences of opinion in return for the value of his support. They even left him to nominate his own ticket. He was selected as candidate for a party calling itself the United Democracy, which adopted the Liberty Bell as its emblem. The speaker who moved the nomination of Mr. George in the Convention, spoke of him as “the great, the immortal Henry George, the man who had shown the working people the way out of their difficulties. When George is mayor, the problems which vexed the municipality will cease. Corruption and bribery will keep away from the City Hall if George is there. They fear him as the inhabitants of the lower regions do the angels of heaven.” When he accepted the nomination, he declared that he stood not as a Silver Democrat or a Gold Democrat, but as one who believed in the cardinal principles of Jeffersonian Democracy. The defeat of Bryan, he declared, was “the defeat of everything for which our fathers had stood, and it looked to him as though the United States were fast verging into a virtual aristocracy and despotism.” He stood, therefore, upon the doctrine of the equality of men, and in the conviction that in the democracy that believed that all men were created equal lay the power that would vivify not merely New York, but the world.

The platform of the United Democracy, after denouncing unscrupulous corporations and corrupt combinations, whose influence is felt alike in local and national courts, proceeds to define the aims and aspirations of its supporters in a manifesto, of which the following is a summary:--

It reaffirms the Chicago platform, demands home rule in municipal affairs, denounces the Excise laws, demands not only municipal ownership of franchises but their operation by the municipal government, three cent (or less) car fares on surface and “L” roads, dollar gas, the abolition of contract work for the city, enforcement of the eight-hour law on city work, the representation of labour in the Administration, increase of school accommodation and the introduction into the schools of industrial training: the designation of public places for free exercise of the right of free speech, the opening of court houses and schools for the free use of the people in the evening: it denounces the abuse of injunctions by the courts, and demands the abolition of property qualifications for grand and petit jurors.

The clause in the plank of the Tammany platform which refers to the Raines Liquor Law ran as follows:--

We condemn the so-called “Raines” Liquor Law as iniquitous and intolerant. It was passed at the instigation of the Republican State machine against the protest of the majority of the people of New York, irrespective of party. It has injured owners of real estate. It has closed avenues of legitimate employment. It has deprived thousands of our citizens of rational enjoyment. It has given rise to a system of spying and official intermeddling abhorrent to a free people. It extorts exorbitant revenues from this city to aggrandise other portions of the State. It sought to deprive the citizen of a trial by jury, and, in the collection of penalties, compels the licensee, at the caprice of the State Commissioner of Excise, to defend himself in remote localities. It protects and masks the dive-keeper, while it harasses and impoverishes the reputable dealer. It promotes intemperance, furnishes a legalised refuge for vice, imperils the innocence of children, and destroys the sanctity of home. We therefore demand its prompt repeal and the enactment of an Excise law, conservative of the public morals and liberal in its provisions, that shall place its administration and revenue, so far as shall apply to this city, within the control of this municipality, thus insuring strict enforcement of law by the consent of the governed.

Tammany is almost as pronounced as Henry George was as to the municipal ownership. The following is the paragraph referring to this subject in their manifesto:--

All proper municipal functions should be exercised by the municipality itself, and not delegated to others. We favour municipal ownership and municipal control of all municipal franchises. We oppose the granting of any public franchise in perpetuity. We oppose the granting or extending of any such franchise, or the bestowal of any new privilege upon a corporation holding such franchise, without adequate compensation.

We, therefore, approve, as a step in the right direction, the provisions of the new Charter, which require adequate compensation to the city for all franchises hereafter to be granted, and which limit the terms of all such franchises, with reversion to the city on their expiration. We denounce the Republican party for its wasteful and reckless grant of valuable public franchises to private individuals by special legislation, with no provision for compensation to the municipality, whereby this city has already lost some of the most valuable franchises on its most important streets.

The most significant plank in the platform is that demanding municipal ownership of monopolies of service as essential to the purification of politics and the protection of the citizen against taxation:--

We declare that the functions of street railway transportation, the lighting of the streets and homes of the people, whether by gas or electricity, the carriage of the people by ferries about the waterways of Greater New York, the facilitation of the interchange of speech by telephones or telegraphs, are all purely municipal functions, things which can better be done by organised society than by individuals; we insist that the present system of delegating these functions to corporations has resulted in a heavy sacrifice of public wealth and convenience, the practice of extortion upon citizens compelled to enlist the services of these corporations, and the creation of powerful moneyed interests which, enjoying rich public grants, systematically employ every art of corruption in politics to control the city government for their own profit.

Mr. George declared he was a poor man as the candidate of poor men. Mr. George simply stood where he did in 1886. Hence, he simply had to fall back upon his old thunder, and to reproduce the fierce denunciations which he hurled against the existing state of things by which the control of the modern American city was given over to the worst classes of the community. Here, for instance, is a passage in which he lashed the corrupt influences that dominate American politics:--

The influences which have degraded the rich and debased the poor, and, under the forms of Democracy, given over the metropolis of our country to the rule of a class more unscrupulous and more arrogant than that of the hereditary aristocracy from which it is our boast that we of the new world have emancipated ourselves?

The type of modern growth is the great city. Here are to be found the greatest wealth and the deepest poverty. And it is here that popular government has most clearly broken down. In all the great American cities there is to-day as clearly defined a ruling class as in the most aristocratic countries of the world. Its members carry wards in their pockets, make up slates for nominating conventions, distribute offices as they bargain together, and--though they toil not, neither do they spin--wear the best of raiment and spend money lavishly. They are men of power, whose favour the ambitious must court, and whose vengeance he must avoid.

Who are these men? The wise, the good, the learned--men who have earned the confidence of their fellow citizens by the purity of their lives, the splendour of their talents, their nobility in public trusts, their deep study of the problems of government? No; they are gamblers, saloon keepers, pugilists, or worse, who have made a trade of controlling votes, and of buying and selling offices and official acts.

It is through these men that rich corporations and powerful pecuniary interests can pack the Senate and the Bench with their creatures. It is these men who make school directors, supervisors, assessors, members of the Legislature, Congressmen.

Mr. George was a magnetic man--a man of intense enthusiasm and tireless energy. He spoke night after night, and as the contest waxed hotter and hotter his discourses rose in temperature, until, before the contest came to a close, he pledged himself to send Richard Croker to the Penitentiary as a thief; and he left his hearers in very little doubt that if he could have had his way, the Republican boss would occupy the adjacent cell. To Mr. Seth Low, Mr. George was a great speculative writer and a dreamer. To General Tracy, he was a man who went in for Free License and Free Everything excepting Free Silver. To Tammany he was a most dangerous foe.

The following extract from a speech delivered by Charles Frederick Adams is a fair illustration of the kind of ferment that is working under the surface of American politics:--

Everywhere that man is oppressed by man the people are straining their ears to hear of Henry George’s election. He is a man of men, one who dues not confine his attention to the great individuals and the more fortunate classes, but one who lends his head and heart to the cause of man. He is the Moses to whom we all look to be led out of the wilderness. He is the lodestar of suffering humanity.

This is no single tax movement. It is a movement to benefit down-trodden man, a movement to throw off the chains of serfdom in order that we may once again breathe God’s pure air with freedom. Henry George has the respect of every intelligent man and woman in this country. His name is the keynote to truth and freedom. And yet there are men who claim to be his friend who went to him and asked him not to accept a nomination for first Mayor of the Greater New York. They appeal to his modesty, telling him that he is only wanted by a handful of mere agitators. They know they lied when they tried to turn him aside, and yet they call themselves his friend, but their friendship is like a celebrated kiss in a celebrated garden.

It is not a question of silver, the tariff, or anything of that kind; it is the more vital question of trying to rescue a great city from a lot of organised robbers. As a guarantee of our sincerity we ask Henry George to be our candidate and raise us from the contemptible tyranny of little men. If we were held in thraldom by a Cæsar or a Napoleon we might stand it, but, my God! a Croker, a Croker, gentlemen; a Croker or a Platt!

The time has come when the common man, that great crucified of eternity, shall say like the crucified divinity: “Choose ye now which ye will serve; he that is not with me is against me,” and with these words I ask you to take off your coats and work for the election of Henry George.

The Tammany candidate, who was elected by a majority of 85,000 votes, was Mr. Justice Van Wyck. Henry George stood 5 ft. 6 ins. in his shoes. Mr. Van Wyck stands 5 ft. 7 ins. Mr. Van Wyck is not yet fifty years of age. In 1880 he distinguished himself by publicly denouncing Boss Kelly in Tammany Hall for betraying John Hancock, the Democratic nominee for the Presidency. He was howled down, but he bided his time, and when Mr. Croker and Mr. Sheehan, the past and present Bosses of Tammany, put their heads together to find a man who is best calculated to carry the election, they decided that there was none so good as Mr. Van Wyck. He is a clear speaker, but he refused at this election to follow his opponents on to the platform.

Tammany’s victories are not won by oratory. Tammany’s platform had many planks, but three were prominent:--(1) The denunciation of Reform administration, for raising the rates, and increasing the expenditure of the city. (2) An attack upon the Streets Department, with Mr. Colles at its head. The ground for this attack was the irritation that was produced in Fifth Avenue and elsewhere by the Works Department permitting the drainage and other works to be carried on so slowly as to practically render the traffic in the thoroughfares impossible for twelve months at a time. (3) An attack on the Raines Law as in every way an intolerant measure, which protected the evil, and persecuted the reputable. In this respect Mr. Van Wyck was at one with Henry George. The two candidates also agreed in demanding Dollar Gas, a phrase which needs a moment’s explanation. The gas companies which supply New York charge 5s. per thousand feet. It was proved before a Committee of the Legislature that gas can be sold at a profit at 4s. per thousand feet, but the influence of the wealthy corporations was too great to permit such a heavy cut in their charges. The price of gas, therefore, has to come down 2½d. a year for five years, a postponement of the interests of the consumer to the greed of the gas companies which is bitterly resented in New York.

Like Mr. Low and Mr. Henry George, Mr. Van Wyck was in favour of building fresh schools for the children, who are at present without school accommodation, and also in favour of more rapid transit and more bridges. On municipal ownership he spoke with an uncertain sound, merely remarking that the corporations now in the control of their streets have gone to such lengths as to require legislation and municipal oversight. By way of appealing to the labour party, he declared that the eight hour law on the Statute Book on the State was a righteous one, and must be maintained, and he denounced government by injunction as a violation of the rights of man, striking at time-honoured principles which are the foundation of the laws. Everything, he declared, was possible for an administration which would have as its guiding thought the future rather than the present, prosperity rather than patronage, progress rather than politics. To be the first Mayor of Greater New York seemed to him to be an opportunity of a generation. If he were elected, he declared that before the end of four years there would be such progress as this hitherto divided city had never before enjoyed. Mr. Van Wyck is the Chief Justice of the City Court. His father was a lawyer of Dutch extraction. It remains to be seen whether his confident prognostication will be fulfilled.

General Tracy, the nominee of the Republican Convention, was too good a man to be sacrificed in such a fight. He has served the nation as Secretary for the Navy, and if common rumour be not a common liar, he did a good deal of the work of Secretary of State in the last years of Mr. Blaine. England owes him a special meed of gratitude, because it was he who, when he was in supreme control of the American Navy, insisted upon breaking through all rules and precedents in order to allow Captain Mahan to continue at a post on land, where he had leisure to finish his great work on “Sea Power in History.” General Tracy is also too old a man to be intrusted with the onerous task of governing this great heterogeneous conglomerate of cities which is known as Greater New York. He is nearly sixty-eight years of age, and, although he is hale and hearty, he will be over three score and ten by the time the first Mayor of the Greater New York has to retire from office. His nomination was due to the fixed determination of his partner’s father, Mr. Senator Platt, the Republican machine man, to assert himself at this election. In his eyes the Citizens’ Union is an arrogant upstart, a mutinous offshoot, which has the audacity to deny to the regular Republican machine its legitimate voice in the control of affairs in New York. Mr. Platt and Mr. Croker agree in believing that it is impossible to govern New York without a regular party machine. The Citizens’ Union, of course, would in time become a party machine, but as it starts on non-partisan lines, the process of evolving a Boss from the Citizens’ Union would be slower than would be the case of other organisations based upon regular party lines. In order to secure a platform for General Tracy, the Republican Party men had to repudiate the programme for which they had repeatedly committed themselves in times past. The separation of municipal from national issues had been repeatedly affirmed in the strongest terms by previous Republican conventions; but on this occasion, in order to justify General Tracy’s candidature, the Republican platform was throughout an attempt to introduce the national issues into the city contest. The one great issue before the people, it declared, was the Chicago platform, an admission of which Mr. Bryan after the victory has naturally made the most.

Bryanism was confounded with Tammany Hall, and it was asserted in the strongest possible terms that “the code of good government, meaning thereby honest and intelligent administration, can never be divorced from the Republican party.” “We are the people, and wisdom will die with us,” and not wisdom only, but honesty, ability, righteousness and all manner of virtue will only perish from the land unless the regular Republican candidate is put into office and kept there. That is always the burden of their song. General Tracy appealed to the citizens as the candidate of sound money, which has absolutely nothing to do with any municipal issue--the candidate of social order and the endorser of the patriotic and successful administration of William McKinley. Forgetful of the fact that they had declared they would prefer to see a Tammany mayor elected than the candidate of the Citizens’ Union, the Republicans denounced Tammany in no measured terms. “The crimes of the Tammany democracy should never be forgotten or forgiven.” The platform then commends the Raines law on the ground that by removing power from the excise or local license board, and conceding the right to sell intoxicating liquors to any citizen who paid the tax and obeyed the law, it had taken the saloon out of politics, and had liberated the saloon-keeper from the politician. It had also been financially advantageous. But having endorsed the Raines Law up to this point, they hedged in the final paragraph, in which, after referring to the cosmopolitan character of the city, they said that “provisions of the law relating to the times and conditions at and under which liquor may be sold, and the provisions of the law enforced, are wisely to be left to the will of the people of the city rather than to the judgment of their duly constituted authorities.”

Finally, the platform pledged the party to a strict enforcement of the labour laws, which were defined as follows:--“The Factory Inspection Law, the Mechanics Lien Law, the Law Regulating the Employment of Minors in Mercantile Establishments, the Anti-Sweating Law, the Law Guaranteeing Union Wages on all Public Works, and the Law Preventing the Subletting of Contracts.” General Tracy in accepting the nomination declared that it was not enough for the Mayor to be negatively honest. “He must be affirmatively and aggressively honest.” But he also harped upon the spectre of Bryanism, which would not down, and invoked for the exorcising of that spectre “the Republican Party, which in the Providence of God, for more than forty years, has been the great bulwark of national honour and prosperity.” Any attempt to disintegrate, weaken or destroy that organisation seemed to him a grievous mistake, fraught with calamity and disaster.

On September 27th the _Journal_ sent out an army of reporters, with instructions to interview all the citizens whom they met in the course of the day in certain well-defined districts, in order to ascertain their preference as between General Tracy and Seth Low. The voters were approached indiscriminately, and represented all sorts and conditions of men, from hod-carriers to bankers. The result was that 9,102 citizens were interviewed, 4,835 of whom preferred Seth Low, and 4,267 voted for Tracy. This poll suggested the holding of a much more comprehensive census of opinion. An attempt was made to interrogate a whole vast constituency. Three hundred reporters were sent out with the following ticket:--

+-----------------------------------------------------------+ | _NEW YORK JOURNAL._ | | | | VAN WYCK. TRACY. | | GEORGE. LOW. | | | |As between B. F. Tracy, the Republican candidate; Seth Low,| |the Citizens’ Union candidate; R. A. Van Wyck, the regular | |Democratic candidate; and Henry George, the Independent | |Democratic candidate, whom do you prefer for Mayor of the | |Greater New York? | | | | NAME OF CANDIDATE.................................... | | YOUR SIGNATURE..................................... | | YOUR ADDRESS..................................... | | BOROUGH OF..................................... | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ _Sign this Ballot and send it to the Journal._

The town was marked out into districts, and the canvassers proceeded systematically from house to house. Never before had there been so extended a canvass introduced of what they call a straw ballot in any constituency. It was, of course, not a ballot in the sense of secret voting at all, for all the citizens signed their papers, which were then taken to the central office and carefully examined. The census began on the 4th of October and was continued for a week. It was closed with the following result:--

Each elector was required to sign his name and address upon a voting card supplied by the canvasser. When the poll was closed the _Journal_ had obtained signed declarations from no fewer than 277,871. The voting was divided as follows:--

Total _Journal_ Poll.

Van Wyck 89,056 George 85,050 Low 59,764 Tracy 44,001 ------- Total 277,871

These figures show that Mr. Van Wyck had 32 per cent. of the constituency, Henry George 30½, Low 21½ and Tracy nearly 16. If on the 2nd of November the whole 550,000 electors had gone to the poll, and those who have not been reached by the canvassers had voted in the same proportion as those who have, the result would have worked out as follows:--

Position in Greater New York. Actual Vote.

Van Wyck 176,269 | 235,181 George 168,345 | 20,727 Low 118,288 | 149,873 Tracy 87,098 | 101,823 ------- | ------- Total 550,000 | 507,604

All calculations, however, were vitiated by the death of Henry George. His son, whose name was substituted for his father’s at the eleventh hour, naturally could not command the same amount of support.