The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

The situation, thus phrased, called for neither intrigue nor labor on my own part. I had but to stay in my chair, and “reform” itself would drive the people into Tammany’s arms.

In those days I had but scanty glimpses of the Reverend Bronson. However, he now and then would visit me, and when he did, I think I read in his troubled brow the fear of machine success next time. Morton was there on one occasion when the Reverend Bronson came in. They were well known to one another, these two; also, they were friends as much as men might be whose lives and aims went wide apart.

“Now the trouble,” observed Morton, as the two discussed that backward popularity of the present rule, “lies in this: Your purist of politics is never practical. He walks the air; and for a principle, he fixes his eyes on a star. Besides,” concluded Morton, tapping the Reverend Bronson’s hand with that invaluable eyeglass, “you make a pet, at the expense of statutes more important, of some beggarly little law like the law against gambling.”

“My dear sir,” exclaimed the Reverend Bronson, “surely you do not defend gambling.”

“I defend nothing,” said Morton; “it’s too beastly tiresome, don’t y’ know. But, really, the public is no fool; and with a stock-ticker and a bucket shop on every corner, you will hardly excite folk to madness over roulette and policy.”

“The policy shops stretch forth their sordid palms for the pennies of the very poor,” said the Reverend Bronson earnestly.

“But, my boy,” retorted Morton, his drooping inanity gaining a color, “government should be concerned no more about the poor man’s penny than the rich man’s pound. However, if it be a reason, why not suppress the barrooms? Gad! what more than your doggery reaches for the pennies of the poor?”

“There is truth in what you say,” consented the Reverend Bronson regretfully. “Still, I count for but one as an axman in this wilderness of evil; I can fell but one tree at a time. I will tell you this, however: At the gates of you rich ones must lie the blame for most of the immoralities of the town. You are guilty of two wrongs: You are not benevolent; and you set a bad moral example.”

“Really!” replied Morton, “I, myself, think the rich a deuced bad lot; in fact, I hold them to be quite as bad as the poor, don’t y’ know. But you speak of benevolence – alms-giving, and that sort of thing. Now I’m against benevolence. There is an immorality in alms just in proportion as there’s a morality to labor. Folk work only because they lack money. Now you give a man ten dollars and the beggar will stop work.”

“Let me hear,” observed the Reverend Bronson, amused if not convinced, “what your remedy for the town’s bad morals would be.”

“Work!” replied Morton, with quite a flash of animation. “I’d make every fellow work – rich and poor alike. I’d invent fardels for the idle. The only difference between the rich and the poor is a difference of cooks and tailors – really! Idleness, don’t y’ know, is everywhere and among all classes the certain seed of vice.”

“You would have difficulty, I fear,” remarked the Reverend Bronson, “in convincing your gilded fellows of the virtuous propriety of labor.”

“I wouldn’t convince them, old chap, I’d club them to it. It is a mistake you dominies make, that you are all for persuading when you should be for driving. Gad! you should never coax where you can drive,” and Morton smiled vacantly.

“You would deal with men as you do with swine?”

“What should be more appropriate? Think of the points of resemblance. Both are obstinate, voracious, complaining, cowardly, ungrateful, selfish, cruel! One should ever deal with a man on a pig basis. Persuasion is useless, compliment a waste. You might make a bouquet for him – orchids and violets – and, gad! he would eat it, thinking it a cabbage. But note the pleasing, screaming, scurrying difference when you smite him with a brick. Your man and your hog were born knowing all about a brick.”

“The rich do a deal of harm,” remarked the Reverend Bronson thoughtfully. “Their squanderings, and the brazen spectacle thereof, should be enough of themselves to unhinge the morals of mankind. Think on their selfish vulgar aggressions! I’ve seen a lake, once the open joy of thousands, bought and fenced to be a play space for one rich man; I’ve looked on while a village where hundreds lived and loved and had their pleasant being, died and disappeared to give one rich man room; in the brag and bluster of his millions, I’ve beheld a rich man rearing a shelter for his crazy brain and body, and borne witness while he bought lumber yards and planing mills and stone quarries and brick concerns and lime kilns with a pretense of hastening his building. It is all a disquieting example to the poor man looking on. Such folk, dollar-loose and dollar-mad, frame disgrace for money, and make the better sentiment of better men fair loathe the name of dollar. And yet it is but a sickness, I suppose; a sort of rickets of riches – a Saint Vitus dance of vast wealth! Such go far, however, to bear out your parallel of the swine; and at the best, they but pile exaggeration on imitation and drink perfumed draff from trough of gold.”

The Reverend Bronson as he gave us this walked up and down the floor as more than once I’d seen him do when moved. Nor did he particularly address himself to either myself or Morton until the close, when he turned to that latter personage. Pausing in his walk, the Reverend Bronson contemplated Morton at some length; and then, as if his thoughts on money had taken another path, and shaking his finger in the manner of one who preferred an indictment, he said:

“Cato, the Censor, declared: ‘It is difficult to save that city from ruin where a fish sells for more than an ox.’ By the bad practices of your vulgar rich, that, to-day, is a description of New York. Still, from the public standpoint, I should not call the luxury it tells of, the worst effect of wealth, nor the riches which indulge in such luxury the most baleful riches. There be those other busy black-flag millions which maraud a people. They cut their way through bars and bolts of government with the saws and files and acids of their evil influence – an influence whose expression is ever, and simply, bribes. I speak of those millions that purchase the passage of one law or the downfall of another, and which buy the people’s officers like cattle to their will. But even as I reproach those criminal millions, I marvel at their blindness. Cannot such wealth see that in its treasons – for treason it does as much as any Arnold – it but undermines itself? Who should need strength and probity in government, and the shelter of them, more than Money? And yet in its rapacity without eyes, it must ever be using the criminal avarice of officials to pick the stones and mortar from the honest foundations of the state!”

The Reverend Bronson resumed his walking up and down. Morton, the imperturbable, lighted a cigarette and puffed bland puffs as though he in no fashion felt himself described. Not at all would he honor the notion that the reverend rhetorician was talking either of him or at him, in his condemnation of those pirate millions.

“I should feel alarmed for my country,” continued the Reverend Bronson, coming back to his chair, “if I did not remember that New York is not the nation, and how a sentiment here is never the sentiment there. The country at large has still its ideals; New York, I fear, has nothing save its appetites.”

“To shift discussion,” said Morton lightly, “a discussion that would seem academic rather than practical, and coming to the City and what you call its appetites, let me suggest this: Much of that trouble of which you speak arises by faults of politics as the latter science is practiced by the parties. Take yourself and our silent friend.” Here Morton indicated me: “Take the two parties you represent. Neither was ever known to propose an onward step. Each of you has for his sole issue the villainies of the other fellow; the whole of your cry is the iniquity of the opposition; it is really! I’ll give both of you this for a warning. The future is to see the man who, leaving a past to bury a. past, will cry ‘Public Ownership!’ or some equally engaging slogan. Gad! old chap, with that, the rabble will follow him as the rats followed the pied piper of Hamelin. The moralist and the grafter will both be left, don’t y’ know!” Morton here returned into that vapidity from which, for the moment, he had shaken himself free. “Gad!” he concluded, “you will never know what a passion to own things gnaws at your peasant in his blouse and wooden shoes until some prophetic beggar shouts ‘Public Ownership!’ you won’t, really!”

“Sticking to what you term the practical,” said the Reverend Bronson, “tell me wherein our reform administration has weakened itself.”

“As I’ve observed,” responded Morton, “you pick out a law and make a pet of it, to the neglect of criminal matters more important. It is your fad – your vanity of party, to do this. Also, it is your heel of Achilles, and through it will come your death-blow.” Then, as if weary of the serious, Morton went off at a lively tangent: “Someone – a very good person, too, I think, although I’ve mislaid his name – observed: ‘Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!’ Now I should make it: ‘Oh, that mine enemy would own a fad!’ Given a fellow’s fad, I’ve got him. Once upon a time, when I had a measure of great railway moment – really! one of those measures of black-flag millions, don’t y’ know! – pending before the legislature at Albany, I ran into a gentleman whose name was De Vallier. Most surprising creature, this De Vallier! Disgustingly honest, too; but above all, as proud as a Spanish Hidalgo of his name. Said his ancestors were nobles of France under the Grand Monarch, and that sort of thing. Gad! it was his fad – this name! And the bitterness wherewith he opposed my measure was positively shameful. Really, if the floor of the Assembly – the chap was in the Assembly, don’t y’ know – were left unguarded for a moment, De Vallier would occupy it, and call everybody but himself a venal rogue of bribes. There was never anything more shocking!

“But I hit upon an expedient. If I could but touch his fad – if I might but reach that name of De Vallier, I would have him on the hip. So with that, don’t y’ know, I had a bill introduced to change the fellow’s name to Dummeldinger. I did, ’pon my honor! The Assembly adopted it gladly. The Senate was about to do the same, when the horrified De Vallier threw himself at my feet. He would die if he were called Dummeldinger!

“The poor fellow’s grief affected me very much; my sympathies are easily excited – they are, really! And Dummeldinger was such a beastly name! I couldn’t withstand De Vallier’s pleadings. I caused the bill changing his name to be withdrawn, and in the fervor of his gratitude, De Vallier voted for that railway measure. It was my kindness that won him; in his relief to escape ‘Dummeldinger,’ De Vallier was ready to die for me.”

It was evening, and in the younger hours I had pulled my chair before the blaze, and was thinking on Apple Cheek, and how I would give the last I owned of money and power to have her by me. This was no uncommon train; I’ve seen few days since she died that did not fill my memory with her image.

Outside raged a threshing storm of snow that was like a threat for bitterness, and it made the sticks in the fireplace snap and sparkle in a kind of stout defiance, as though inviting it to do its worst.

In the next room were Anne and Blossom, and with them young Van Flange. I could hear the murmur of their voices, and at intervals a little laugh from him.

An hour went by; the door between opened, and young Van Flange, halting a bit with hesitation that was not without charm, stepped into my presence. He spoke with grace and courage, however, when once he was launched, and told me his love and asked for Blossom. Then my girl came, and pressed her face to mine. Anne, too, was there, like a blessing and a hope.

They were married: – my girl and young Van Flange. Morton came to my aid; and I must confess that it was he, with young Van Flange, who helped us to bridesmaids and ushers, and what others belong with weddings in their carrying out. I had none upon whom I might call when now I needed wares of such fine sort; while Blossom, for her part, living her frightened life of seclusion, was as devoid of acquaintances or friends among the fashionables as any abbess might have been.

The street was thronged with people when we drove up, and inside the church was such a jam of roses and folk as I had never beheld. Wide was the curious interest in the daughter of Tammany’s Chief; and Blossom must have felt it, for her hand fluttered like a bird on my arm as, with organ crashing a wedding march, I led her up the aisle. At the altar rail were the bishop and three priests. And so, I gave my girl away.

When the ceremony was done, we all went back to my house – Blossom’s house, since I had put it in her name – for I would have it that they must live with me. I was not to be cheated of my girl; she should not be lost out of my arms because she had found a husband’s. It wrought a mighty peace for me, this wedding, showing as it did so sure of happiness to Blossom. Nor will I say it did not feed my pride. Was it a slight thing that the blood of the Clonmel smith should unite itself with a strain, old and proud and blue beyond any in the town? We made one family of it; and when we were settled, my heart filled up with a feeling more akin to content than any that had dwelt there for many a sore day.

CHAPTER XXIV – HOW VAN FLANGE WENT INTO STOCKS

IT was by the suggestion of young Van Flange himself that he became a broker. His argument I think was sound; he had been bred to no profession, and the floor of the Exchange, if he would have a trade, was all that was left him. No one could be of mark or consequence in New York who might not write himself master of millions. Morton himself said that; and with commerce narrowing to a huddle of mammoth corporations, how should anyone look forward to the conquest of millions save through those avenues of chance which Wall Street alone provided? The Stock Exchange was all that remained; and with that, I bought young Van Flange a seat therein, and equipped him for a brokerage career. I harbored no misgivings of his success; no one could look upon his clean, handsome outlines and maintain a doubt.

Those were our happiest days – Blossom’s and mine. In her name, I split my fortune in two, and gave young Van Flange a million and a half wherewith to arm his hands for the fray of stocks. Even now, as I look backward through the darkness, I still think it a million and a half well spent. For throughout those slender months of sunshine, Blossom went to and fro about me, radiating a subdued warmth of joy that was like the silent glow of a lamp. Yes, that money served its end. It made Blossom happy, and it will do me good while I live to think how that was so.

Morton, when I called young Van Flange from his Mulberry desk to send him into Wall Street, was filled with distrust of the scheme.

“You should have him stay with Mulberry,” said he. “If he do no good, at least he will do no harm, and that, don’t y’ know, is a business record far above the average. Besides, he’s safer; he is, really!”

This I did not like from Morton. He himself was a famous man of stocks, and had piled millions upon millions in a pyramid of speculation. Did he claim for himself a monopoly of stock intelligence? Van Flange was as well taught of books as was he, and came of a better family. Was it that he arrogated to his own head a superiority of wit for finding his way about in those channels of stock value? I said something of this sorb to Morton.

“Believe me, old chap,” said he, laying his slim hand on my shoulder, “believe me, I had nothing on my mind beyond your own safety, and the safety of that cub of yours. And I think you will agree that I have exhibited a knowledge of what winds and currents and rocks might interrupt or wreck one in his voyages after stocks.”

“Admitting all you say,” I replied, “it does not follow that another may not know or learn to know as much.”

“But Wall Street is such a quicksand,” he persisted. “Gad! it swallows nine of every ten who set foot in it. And to deduce safety for another, because I am and have been safe, might troll you into error. You should consider my peculiar case. I was born with beak and claw for the game. Like the fish-hawk, I can hover above the stream of stocks, and swoop in and out, taking my quarry where it swims. And then, remember my arrangements. I have an agent at the elbow of every opportunity. I have made the world my spy, since I pay the highest price for information. If a word be said in a cabinet, I hear it; if a decision of court is to be handed down, I know it; if any of our great forces or monarchs of the street so much as move a finger, I see it. And yet, with all I know, and all I see, and all I hear, and all my nets and snares as complicated as the works of a watch, added to a native genius, the best I may do is win four times in seven. In Wall Street, a man meets with not alone the foreseeable, but the unforeseeable; he does, really! He is like a man in a tempest, and may be struck dead by some cloud-leveled bolt while you and he stand talking, don’t y’ know!”

Morton fell a long day’s journey short of convincing me that Wall Street was a theater of peril for young Van Flange. Moreover, the boy said true; it offered the one way open to his feet. Thus reasoning, and led by my love for my girl and my delight to think how she was happy, I did all I might to further the ambitions of young Van Flange, and embark him as a trader of stocks. He took office rooms in Broad Street; and on the one or two occasions when I set foot in them, I was flattered as well as amazed by the array of clerks and stock-tickers, blackboards, and tall baskets, which met my untaught gaze. The scene seemed to buzz and vibrate with prosperity, and the air was vital of those riches which it promised.

It is scarce required that I say I paid not the least attention to young Van Flange and his business affairs. I possessed no stock knowledge, being as darkened touching Wall Street as any Hottentot. More than that, my time was taken up with Tammany Hall. The flow of general feeling continued to favor a return of the machine, for the public was becoming more and sorely irked of a misfit “reform” that was too tight in one place while too loose in another. There stood no doubt of it; I had only to wait and maintain my own lines in order, and the town would be my own again. It would yet lie in my lap like a goose in the lap of a Dutch woman; and I to feather-line my personal nest with its plumage to what soft extent I would. For all that, I must watch lynx-like my own forces, guarding against schism, keeping my people together solidly for the battle that was to be won.

Much and frequently, I discussed the situation with Morton. With his traction operations, he had an interest almost as deep as my own. He was, too, the one man on whose wisdom of politics I had been educated to rely. When it became a question of votes and how to get them, I had yet to meet Morton going wrong.

“You should have an issue,” said Morton. “You should not have two, for the public is like a dog, don’t y’ know, and can chase no more than just one rabbit at a time. But one you should have – something you could point to and promise for the future. As affairs stand – and gad! it has been that way since I have had a memory – you and the opposition will go into the campaign like a pair of beldame scolds, railing at one another. Politics has become a contest of who can throw the most mud. Really, the town is beastly tired of both of you – it is, ‘pon my word!”

“Now what issue would you offer?”

“Do you recall what I told our friend Bronson? Public Ownership should be the great card. Go in for the ownership by the town of street railways, water works, gas plants, and that sort of thing, don’t y’ know, and the rabble will trample on itself to vote your ticket.”

“And do you shout ‘Municipal Ownership!’ – you with a street railway to lose?”

“But I wouldn’t lose it. I’m not talking of anything but an issue. It would be a deuced bore, if Public Ownership actually were to happen. Besides, for me to lose my road would be the worst possible form! No, I’m not so insane as that. But it doesn’t mean, because you make Public Ownership an issue, that you must bring it about. There are always ways to dodge, don’t y’ know. And the people won’t care; the patient beggars have been taught to expect it. An issue is like the bell-ringing before an auction; it is only meant to call a crowd. Once the auction begins, no one remembers the bell-ringing; they don’t, really!”

“To simply shout ‘Public Ownership:’” said I, “would hardly stir the depths. We would have to get down to something practical – something definite.”

“It was the point I was approaching. Really! what should be better now than to plainly propose – since the route is unoccupied, and offers a field of cheapest experiment – a street railway with a loop around Washington Square, and then out Fifth Avenue to One Hundred and Tenth Street, next west on One Hundred and Tenth Street to Seventh Avenue, and lastly north on Seventh Avenue until you strike the Harlem River at the One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street bridge?”

“What a howl would go up from Fifth Avenue!” said I.

“If it were so, what then? You are not to be injured by silk-stocking clamor. For each cry against you from the aristocrats, twenty of the peasantry would come crying to your back; don’t y’, know! Patrician opposition, old chap, means ever plebeian support, and you should do all you may, with wedge and maul of policy, to split the log along those lines. Gad!” concluded Morton, bursting suddenly into self-compliments; “I don’t recall when I was so beastly sagacious before – really!”

“Now I fail to go with you,” I returned. “I have for long believed that the strongest force with which the organization had to contend, was its own lack of fashion. If Tammany had a handful or two of that purple and fine linen with which you think it so wise to quarrel, it might rub some of the mud off itself, and have quieter if not fairer treatment from a press, ever ready to truckle to the town’s nobility. Should we win next time, it is already in my plans to establish a club in the very heart of Fifth Avenue. I shall attract thither all the folk of elegant fashion I can, so that, thereafter, should one snap a kodak on the machine, the foreground of the picture will contain a respectable exhibition of lofty names. I want, rather, to get Tammany out of the gutter, than arrange for its perpetual stay therein.”

“Old chap,” said Morton, glorying through his eyeglass, “I think I shall try a cigarette after that. I need it to resettle my nerves; I do, really. Why, my dear boy! do you suppose that Tammany can be anything other than that unwashed black sheep it is? We shall make bishops of burglars when that day dawns. The thing’s wildly impossible, don’t y’ know! Besides, your machine would die. Feed Tammany Hall on any diet of an aristocracy, and you will unhinge its stomach; you will, ’pon my faith!”

“You shall see a Tammany club in fashion’s center, none the less.”

“Then you don’t like ‘Public Ownership?’” observed Morton, after a pause, the while twirling his eyeglass. “Why don’t you then go in for cutting the City off from the State, and making a separate State of it? You could say that we suffer from hayseed tyranny, and all that. Really! it’s the truth, don’t y’ know; and besides, we City fellows would gulp it down like spring water.”

“The City delegation in Albany,” said I, “is too small to put through such a bill. The Cornfields would be a unit to smother it.”

“Not so sure about the Cornfields!” cried Morton. “Of course it would take money. That provided, think of the wires you could pull. Here are a half-dozen railroads, with their claws and teeth in the country and their tails in town. Each of them, don’t y’ know, as part of its equipment, owns a little herd of rustic members. You could step on the railroad tail with the feet of your fifty city departments, and torture it into giving you its hayseed marionettes for this scheme of a new State. Pon my word! old chap, it could be brought about; it could, really!”

“I fear,” said I banteringly, “that after all you are no better than a harebrained theorist. I confess that your plans are too grand for my commonplace powers of execution. I shall have to plod on with those moss-grown methods which have served us in the past.”