Statesmen – Page 2 – City of Smoke

Subterranean Democracy

“Any dead fish can swim with the stream, but it takes a real live one to go against the current.” So said the Hon. Mike Walsh.

Mike Walsh never had to proclaim he was his own man. In the politics of antebellum New York City, being a Democrat was merely an expression of a sentiment. One’s faction was more definitive—Tammany, with its Softshells (favoring compromise when necessary) and Hardshells (uncompromising conservatives); Loco-Focos (named for the matches that iluminated their meeting after Tammanyites shut off the gas); Hunkers (who hunkered after office), and Barnburners (reformers so extreme they would burn down the barn, i.e., destroy the party, to kill the rats in it).

Then there was Walsh. M.R. Werner, in Tammany Hall, calls Walsh “formidable and picturesque.” He was, and more. Mike Walsh was the city’s most successful radical politician before the Marxists transformed American left-wing politics into a parlor game. He was a rabble-rousing militant and an enemy of corruption. He was also a funny, vitriolic orator and journalist, for whom excoriating the city’s elite as “rat-faced swindlers,” “cowardly, hang-dog, state’s evidence ruffians,” “sneaking, pimping, red-haired little scamps” and “an imbecile lump of mere organized animal matter” was merely a day’s work.

Walsh was born in Youghal, near Cork, Ireland, on May 4, 1810. He immigrated with his parents, who settled in New York City. He became a reporter on the New York Aurora, then edited by Walt Whitman, and drifted into politics. He was first elected to the state Assembly in 1839. A year later, he founded the Spartan Association, which according to Luc Sante “partook equally of the political club, the fraternal order, and the gang, although it had…a deliberately proletarian cast to it.”

According to Gotham, by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, “scores of gangs crystallized” during the depression of the late 1830s. Then as now, gangs provided fellowship and a sense of control over one’s life. They valued the qualities bourgeois society devalued: muscular prowess, masculine honor, swaggering bravado and colorful display. Walsh’s talents with voice and pen were equaled by those of his fists, and the Spartans became very effective. In 1840, he smashed up Whig headquarters at the head of 40 club-wielding Spartans. In 1841, he led some 300 Spartan shoulder-hitters into Tammany’s general convention and seized the stage. Having fought his way to the rostrum, Walsh denounced Tammany’s leadership as “a few unprincipled blackguards, usually office-holders or office-seekers, who meet in the back room of some low groggery, where they place upon a ticket for the support of their fellow-citizens a number of wretches of their own moral caliber, whose characters and consciences have been so long buried that they have become putrid…” At this point, according to Walsh himself, there were “tremendous cheers, and hisses, mingled with cries of ‘go it Mike, go it my hero, give it to ’em,’ with counter-cries of ‘turn him out, throw him out of the window, pull him off the stand.'”

Walsh roared at the Tammanyites, “Come up; come up here, you craven cowardly scoundrels…and pull me off yourselves.” He turned to his followers and shouted, “Is this not a pretty scene, there now are…the very stool pigeons and thieves I have just been describing!” He turned back to his foes, shouting, “You have men to contend with here! Not poor destitute and forlorn wretches… I…tell you that Tammany Hall belongs to us-and…we are determined to keep possession of it until you are able to dispossess us-and that I believe is as good as a lease for life, isn’t it, boys!” The hall was filled with “terrific cheering, hisses, and cries of ‘yes,’ mingled with ‘go it Mike,’ ‘turn him out’, etc., which finally ended in two or three beautiful fights.”

Tammany regrouped and nominated its slate. The Carroll Hall ticket, organized by Roman Catholic Bishop John “Dagger John” Hughes, nominated Walsh for Congress. Walsh polled about 15 percent of the vote in a three-way race.

In 1843, in partnership with George Wilkes, a pimp and blackmailer who later founded the National Police Gazette, Walsh started The Subterranean. Its motto was “Independent in everything-neutral in nothing.” On its masthead appeared the all-seeing eye with the warning, “Knaves and Tyrants Beware, This is Upon You.”

Walsh was a working-class punk, a raffish, swaggering, proletarian dandy who used slang, as Sante put it, “like any tramp who had graduated from the gutter,” and combined ragged clothes with diamond rings and a silver-knobbed cane. He condemned corruption: “I tell you now, and I say it boldly, that in the body politic of New York there is not political or personal honesty left to drive a nail into to hang a hat on.” He named and blasted the “wire-pullers” that elected corrupt hacks to hand out city or state contracts to their friends. He decried excessive campaign spending, which meant no one could get elected who wasn’t already rich or had not “basely [sold] himself to corrupt and wealthy men.”

He believed Tammany used pseudo-populist rhetoric to betray the larger interests of working people: “There are many men in the party who fawn upon us and call us the bone and sinew of the country…who would use us until there was nothing but bone and sinew left of us.” Once, when Walsh was inciting a mob by describing the wrongs the politicians had inflicted upon them, someone shouted, “We’ve stood it too long.” “All I’m afraid of,” Walsh replied, “is that you’ll stand it too much longer.”

The fact was, he insisted, “no man can be a good political democrat without he’s a good social democrat.” He may have foreseen our President’s $100,000-a-plate black-tie fundraisers when he wrote of a Tammany reception, “…if a ragged or illy-dressed member of the unterrified should chance to intrude, he would excite as much seeming curiosity and astonishment amongst the regular visitors, as a wild Winnebago would in the streets of Constantinople.

“But how striking the change is during the excitement of elections. Then…applicants for office seem to vie with each other in their unqualified admiration of men with patched clothes and empty stomachs. How sudden-how palpable is the condescension of pompous, arrogant, nabobs on these periodic occasions!”

After describing a mass Tammany reception at which he found the police chief, “two Aldermen, and an ex-Mayor, dancing to the tune of ‘The devil among the tailors,’ which old Nexan was playing pretty correctly for a man so far gone in liquor, on a second-hand jew’s harp,” he continues, “There is something, even to a rigidly temperate individual like myself, truly exhilarating in these scenes of jovial and glorious equality, which is only marred by reflecting on the shortness of its duration.”

In 1845, The Subterranean, Walsh and Wilkes, his coeditor, were successfully prosecuted for criminal libel, and the paper folded. Wilkes, as an admirer put it, had “printed the poetic truth, if not always the actual truth.” Nonetheless, Mike fought his way back into the Assembly in 1846. Walsh described the convention: “About seven o’clock p.m., I stepped into my residence-I’m never ahead of time, though always on hand-washed my face-put on a clean shirt-blacked my old boots…and started for Tammany Hall in company with myself. Here I…found some six or seven thousand persons at least, all of whom were roaring out all sorts of noises at the top of their voices, and pulling, hauling and fighting as hard as they could. I pushed through the tumultuous crowd as fast as I was able, and was greeted at every step by some warm-hearted and enthusiastic disciple… As soon as I reached the stand I was hailed by the assembled thousands beneath, with a deafening, soul-cheering round of applause, such as Tammany Hall or no other Hall ever rang with before… From the moment I was first seen upon the stand they would hear nobody nor listen to anything but…‘Walsh,’ ‘Walsh,’ ‘Mike,’ ‘Mike,’ ‘Walsh, Walsh,’ ‘Nobody but Mike, the poor man’s well-tried friend,’ ‘Mike, they can’t buy you from us,’ ‘You’re the only man amongst them we’ve got confidence in, and you’re the only one we’ll listen to,’ and a thousand similar declarations were heard from all parts of the room…

The calls for me now became truly terrific and thinking it about time I should put a stop to the insulting mummery, I stepped forward, and after ordering…one or two loafers out of the road, so as to have plenty of elbow room, I commenced a speech which was listened to with the most breathless attention for an hour or two, unbroken by any interruptions save the thundergusts of applause… At the conclusion of the speech, which had to be prolonged much longer than I intended, in consequence of the repeated, deafening, and irresistible cries of “go on,” “go on,” nine tremendous cheers were given for ‘Mike Walsh, the poor man’s friend,’ and “Champion of the Young Democracy.”

Walsh won another term in the Assembly in 1848. Around this time, according to E.J. Edwards in McClure’s Magazine, Captain Isaiah Rynders decided to murder Park Godwin, a New York Post editor, because Godwin had denounced him in the paper. Godwin was snacking at the oyster bar in Florence’s Restaurant when he noticed Mike Walsh beside him. Walsh murmured, “Go on eating your oysters, Mr. Godwin, but do it as quickly as you can and then go away. Rynders and his men have been waiting here for you and intend to kill you, but they won’t attack you as long as I am by your side.”

After Godwin had left, Rynders walked up. He said, “What do you mean by interfering in this matter? It is none of your affair.”

Walsh replied, “Well, Godwin did me a good turn once, and I don’t propose to see him stabbed in the back. You were going to do a sneaking thing; you were going to assassinate him, and any man who will do that is a coward.”

“No man ever called me a coward, Mike Walsh, and you can’t.”

“But I do, and I will prove that you are a coward. If you are not one, come upstairs with me now. We will lock ourselves into a room; I will take a knife and you take one, and the man who is alive after we have got through, will unlock the door and go out.”

They went to an upper room. Walsh locked the door, gave Rynders a large bowie knife, took one himself, and said: “You stand in that corner, and I’ll stand in this. Then we will walk toward the center of the room, and we won’t stop until one or the other of us is finished.” Each took his corner. Rynders did not stir. “Why don’t you come out?” said Walsh. Rynders said, “Mike, you and I have always been friends; what is the use of our fighting now? If we get at it, we shall both be killed, and there is no good in that.” Walsh looked at Rynders with contempt. Then he said: “I told you you were a coward, and now I prove it. Never speak to me again.”

In 1852, Mike Walsh was elected to the 33rd Congress. Walsh felt antislavery agitation allowed rich reformers to strike virtuous poses while avoiding his constituents’ real issues: the imbalance of wealth and power, wage slavery and conditions of work. In Congress, he wasted his time denouncing Free Soilers. In 1854, “Honest John” Kelly, the future Tammany boss, defeated Walsh by 18 votes. After his defeat, Mike became an alcoholic. On March 17, 1859, Walsh was found dead on 8th Ave. after a binge. Someone had rifled his pockets. His remains lie in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, Plot 7517, Section 2.

New York Press, September 26, 2000

The Primitive American

Shortly before 11 a.m. on January 1, 1910, William J. Gaynor, a slender, elegantly dressed man with a Van Dyke beard, left his brownstone at 20 Eighth Avenue, near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. About an hour later, having walked all the way, he strode up the front steps of City Hall, in which he had not before set foot. Within minutes, Gaynor would become the 94th mayor of New York.

Shortly before 11 a.m. on January 1, 1910, William J. Gaynor, a slender, elegantly dressed man with a Van Dyke beard, left his brownstone at 20 Eighth Avenue, near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. About an hour later, having walked all the way, he strode up the front steps of City Hall, in which he had not before set foot. Within miinutes, Gaynor would become the 94th mayor of New York.

At noon precisely, Gaynor took the oath. He delivered one of the shortest inaugural addresses on record: “I enter upon this office with the intention of doing the very best I can for the City of New York. That will have to suffice; I can do no more.”

Gaynor was born in Whitesboro, New York, on February 2, 1848. He spent four years in the Christian Brothers as Brother Adrian Denys. The experience left him with a taste for the Stoics, particularly Epictetus; Don Quixote, which he ranked second only to The Bible; and the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Benvenuto Cellini. He read law for about two years and was admitted to the New York bar in 1871. Then he worked briefly as a reporter for the Brooklyn Argus before hanging out his shingle in Flatbush.

He married in 1874 and was divorced seven years later on the only grounds then available in New York: adultery. In 1886, he married Augusta C. Mayer, a beautiful woman, gracious, domestic and fond of society. The marriage endured despite Gaynor’s temper, although Philip Kohler, one of Gaynor’s secretaries, insisted there was a slug in the woodwork of the Gaynors’ front hall that she had fired at the judge in a moment of anger and missed. He represented such men as Shifty Hughie McCarthy who, as Lately Thomas wrote in The Mayor Who Mastered New York, was “always in trouble, suspected of everything, and usually guilty.” He also represented saloonkeepers accused of violating the Sunday opening laws. He became a superb trial lawyer, cutting quickly to the heart of a lawsuit through thorough preparation, cold logic, and terse, colloquial presentation.

Gaynor first came to public notice after investigating election frauds in Coney Island, when he jailed John Y. McKane, the local Democratic boss who had once elected himself Gravesend town supervisor, land commissioner, chairman of the water, tax and excise boards, and chief of police—all at the same time. Elected to the New York Supreme Court in 1893 and reelected in 1907, Gaynor proved an extreme libertarian; he was, as the New York Globe later wrote, “…a primitive American and really believed in the Bill of Rights…These things did not represent sentimental nonsense to him nor did he regard them as impractical abstractions.”

To Gaynor, government should not interfere with those who lived as they wanted without disturbing their neighbors. People should spend their Sundays as they wished, and he usually released boys and young men arrested for playing ball on the Christian Sabbath. He was tolerant of backsliding from the stricter moral codes. He sensed men would not be transformed into angels, at least in his time, and lacked patience for those who insisted on its immediate possibility.

Among working men and women he was at ease, and he chatted easily with the uneducated about farming or work or politics. Among his intellectual equals, he was a genial and fascinating conversationalist. If a reporter caught him on a good day, as did a reporter from the World who met him at his summer home on Long Island, he would murmur, “Well, if you have to interview me, let’s step inside and go to work on it like mechanics.” Once they were in his office, he took out two tumblers and uncorked the “Old Senator.”

He loved dining with friends over a bottle of champagne, talking about history, politics, literature, the law, and whatever came to mind. His capacity for spirits was bottomless and seemed only to sharpen his tongue. Ira Bamberger, a lawyer and friend, spent such an evening with the judge. Their conversation went on for quite some time and “more than one cork was popped.” Bamberger had a case on Gaynor’s calendar the next morning. Bamberger missed the first call. He staggered late into court, evidencing the kind of hangover in which the growth of one’s hair is an agony. Judge Gaynor called Bamberger up to the bench and delivered a deadpan rebuke the the lawyer’s lateness, concluding, “From your appearance, you would seem to have fallen among bad companions.”

Yet all Gaynor’s philosophy could not bridle his bad temper. Years later, reporters who had covered City Hall during the administrations of Gaynor and La Guardia agreed hands-down that Gaynor’s capacity for sustained, epic, imaginative profanity, rich with allusion, imagery and metaphor, made the Little Flower’s tantrums look a little silly.

In 1909, Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy began figuring how the party might keep City Hall at that year’s elections. He chose Gaynor, somehow believing he could be controlled. This was a mistake. The Republicans nominated Otto Bannard, a wealthy, colorless banker, and a strong ticket with him. Then publisher William Randolph Hearst, who had unsuccessfully run for president in 1904, mayor in 1905 and governor in 1906, announced his independent candidacy.

Gaynor found his 30 years’ public service meant nothing. Only the World and the New York Press endorsed him. The Times deemed his nomination “a scandal.” Gaynor’s opponents called him “a symbol for everything that is indecent and disgusting,” “a poor, I will go further and say a bad judge,” “a hypocrite,” “a learned fraud,” “mentally cross-eyed,” “incapable of telling the truth.” Gaynor replied in kind, saying of one opponent, “Hearst’s face almost makes me want to puke.” The press said that no campaign had ever been fought on such low terms. (Then, as now, political reporters had no memory or sense of history).

On Election Day, Gaynor polled forty-three percent of the vote, Bannard thirty percent, and Hearst twenty-seven.

Gaynor’s marriage with Tammany was short-lived: he made the mistake of appointing qualified officials regardless of party ties. By contrast, for Tammany, party ties were often the highest qualification. Besides, its men kicked back part of their salaries to the organization’s coffers. Without patronage, Tammany was on a starvation diet.

“What do we have for Charlie Murphy?” a colleague once asked.

“A few kind words,” the Mayor replied.

During lulls in his office routine, Gaynor buzzed for a stenographer, took a basket of letters and began dictating. Most correspondents received such letters as:

Dear Sir: I thank you very much for your kind and encouraging letter of March 31.Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor

Others received more individual replies: “Dear Sir: I care nothing for common rumor, and I guess you made up the rumor in this case yourself. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”

“Dear Sir: Your letter is at hand and I have read enough of it to see that you are a mere scamp. Nonetheless, I sometimes derive profit from the sayings and doings of scamps. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”

“Dear Madam: I regret to say that I do not know anyone I can recommend to you as a husband. You can doubtless make a better selection than I can, as you know the kind of man you want. Of course, it may be very hard to find him, but no harder for you than for me. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”

“Dear Sir: I am very glad to receive your letter and your poem. The poem is very fine but your advice is very bad. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”

“Dear Sir: No, I do not want a bear. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”

His most famous photograph was taken in August 1910 by a photographer for the New York World who had shown up late. The Mayor was leaving for a European vacation. He had boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and was chatting on the deck when an unkempt man, James Gallagher, rushed up behind him, shouting, “You have taken away my bread and butter.” Gallagher, who had been fired from the city’s Docks Department some three weeks before, put put a pistol to Gaynor’s neck and fired. The photographer just kept snapping pictures. Andy Logan, in Against the Evidence, notes that Charles Chapin, the Evening World’s renowned and sadistic editor, later rejoiced at the photographs: “Blood all over him, and an exclusive, too!”

The bullet lodged in the vault of Gaynor’s larynx. On doctors’ advice, it was not removed. One result was frequent fits of exhausting coughing. His temper became still shorter, his tongue sharper.

The city’s better element had long since decided vice and its companion, police corruption, were New York’s great problems. To professional reformers like the Rev. Charles Parkhurst, this meant eradicating prostitution and gambling. Somehow, it also meant rigidly enforcing Sunday closing laws, which meant denying most working people any entertainments on their one day off. To Gaynor, Parkhurst and his ilk were self-righteous busybodies. Once, when Gaynor was introduced to William Sheafe Chase, a Sunday law enforcement fanatic who affected the ecclesiastical title of Canon, Gaynor refused his extended hand, saying, “You’re no canon. You’re only a popgun.”

Gaynor’s view of the police was molded by his passion for personal liberty and the rule of law. He stopped warrantless raids. He disciplined officers for casual brutality, such as using clubs on children and innocent passersby to clear the streets. Nonetheless, graft and corruption permeated the Department and led to repeated scandals.

Gaynor’s police commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo, was a gentleman descended from the earliest Dutch settlers, a wealthy 34-year-old West Pointer who had fought bravely in the Philippines. He was honest, energetic and enthusiastic. He had beautiful manners. And, unlike the character based on him in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, he was clueless. His three senior deputies were grafters. His chief of staff, Winfield Sheehan, was one of the three men controlling illegal gambling in the city. The lieutenant commanding the vice squad, Charles Becker, was a brutal, corrupt thug, a slugger and grafter throughout his career, who would die in the electric chair.

But by the time Becker took the hot squat in 1915, Gaynor’s career was long over. Understandably, Tammany Hall did not renominate him in 1913. The Republicans and reformers nominated John Purroy Mitchel, a dashingly handsome social climber barely 30 years old. Rejected by all parties, Gaynor ran as an independent. In a massive demonstration and parade at City Hall, he picked up a shovel and said he would “shovel all these grafters into the ground.”

But it would not happen. Shortly after the rally, an exhausted Gaynor left for a brief vacation in Europe. On September 12, 1913, as RMS Baltic approached Ireland, Gaynor’s son walked up to his father’s deck chair. He bent down, touched the huddled old man, and realized death had preceded him.

Eight days later, Gaynor’s body lay in state on a bier in the City Hall rotunda, where Lincoln’s body had lain nearly 50 years before. At 8 a.m., the doors were opened. Five hundred were waiting to pay their respects. By 9 a.m., 15,000 men and women were standing in a line two miles long to honor the mayor who, whether right or wrong, had always been on their side. Throughout the day, the people filed past him. At midnight, when the doors were closed, 20,000 were still in line. The next morning, more than 100,000 people lined Broadway as a horse-drawn caisson bore the coffin down Broadway to Trinity Church.

His official portrait in City Hall is hidden behind the door to Room 9, the Press Room.

New York Press, December 26, 2000

Mr. Wood Is Mayor

December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union in response to Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency. “Poor South Carolina,” exclaimed James L. Petigru, one of the Palmetto state’s few Unionists. “Too small for a republic, too large for a lunatic asylum.”

December 20, 1860 South Carolina seceded from the Union in response to Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency. “Poor South Carolina,” exclaimed James L. Petigru, one of the Palmetto state’s few Unionists. “Too small for a republic, too large for a lunatic asylum.”

On January 6, 1861, as other Southern states followed suit, Fernando Wood, mayor of the City of New York, issued an official message to the Common Council, a body sometimes called “The Forty Thieves.” Calling secession “a fixed and certain fact,” the Mayor proposed the City secede too, becoming an independent city-state. This, as Abraham Lincoln commented, was like the front doorstep setting up housekeeping on its own.

Wood was born in Philadelphia on June 14, 1812. His mother named her son after the swashbuckling hero of The Three Spaniards, a novel she read during her pregnancy. [In Tweed’s New York, Leo Hershkowitz cites a story that Wood was “reported to have entered New York as the leg of an artificial elephant in a travelling show,” [if this is still Hershk. then either quote it straight or find a way to recast it; this is too termpapery…]and became the manager of a “low groggery” on the waterfront, dealing in liquor and “segars.” In 1839, his business partner, Edward E. Marvine, sued him for fraud, but Wood successfully pled the statute of limitations, which Marvine had missed by a day.

Wood was slender, erect, about six feet tall, and strikingly good-looking, with dark blue eyes and coal black hair. (In later years, he dyed it.) He was dignified, eloquent, and self-possessed: he seems never to have lost his temper. At the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to Congress for one term. Defeated for reelection, Wood went back into business. M.R. Werner, in Tammany Hall, reports that his merchant barque, the John W. Cater, was the first supply ship into San Francisco after the discovery of gold on Sutter’s farm. When its cargo sold at an immense profit, Wood kept it all by cheating a new partner of his fair share. Wood then retired from business and became a statesman.

In 1850, he narrowly lost his first campaign for mayor. Four years later, he ran again. This time, Wood was supported by old toughs from Tammany Hall and young toughs like the Dead Rabbits. These last, a band of thugs who loved fighting for its own sake, had been part of an informal militia, the Roach Guards, named after a prominent liquor dealer. Someone had enlivened a meeting by throwing a dead rabbit into their midst. “Dead rabbit” was then slang for “really tough guy.” [was the term current before? or did the incident create the slant? not clear]The incident was an inspiration.

Today, a politician might reflect for some time before openly accepting support from the Crips or Bloods. [or you could point out that NY pols were following in a noble tradition; Roman elections couldnt’ ahve existed without similar gangs of thugs] Wood had no qualms. After all, the campaign proved violent, and their support was useful. Wood was sanguine: he claimed the people “will elect me Mayor though I should commit a murder in my family between this and the Election.” He was elected by 1,456 votes, receiving 400 more votes in the “Bloody Sixth” ward than there were voters. Some argued this was merely a clerical error.

When Wood was elected[if all his misdeeds had been of a private and eprsonal nature, how did they know he was a baddun? why were they vilifying him?], the Morning Courier and Enquirer wrote:

Well, it now appears that Mr. Wood is Mayor… Supported by none but ignorant foreigners and the most degraded class of Americans, Mr. Wood is Mayor. In spite of the most overwhelming proofs that he is a base defrauder, Mr. Wood is Mayor. Contrary to every precedent in the allotment of honor through a municipal history of nearly two hundred years, Mr. Wood is Mayor. His assertion to us that a murder by his own hands could not prevent his election had reason in it; Mr. Wood is Mayor.

Yet, during his first term of office, Wood proved efficient and hardworking, often personally leading the police in breaking up riots and closing down illegal bars. He maintained a complaint book at City Hall, and often personally investigated entries.

His second term was different. He won by 10,000 votes in 1856, and probably his entire margin of victory was fraudulent. Election Day riots broke out in the First, Sixth, and Seventeenth wards, with the Dead Rabbits battling the Bowery Boys, smashing ballot boxes and terrifying opposition voters. Wood apparently foresaw the advantages of chaos: he had furloughed the police for the day.

Wood now realized his opportunities and he took them. [Isn’t that “Plunkett?”] He sold appointment as corporation counsel, the city’s lawyer, to two different men at the same time, for cash. He sold the police commissionership for $50,000. He sold the street cleaning contract to a high bidder after arranging a $40,000 bribe to the Common Council and a twenty-five percent interest in the profits for his beloved brother Ben. Most memorably, Wood allowed City Hall to be sold at auction to satisfy a judgment against the City. [what does that mean?]

The Legislature in Albany now shortened Wood’s term to one year. They created a state-controlled Metropolitan Police Force and ordered the Municipal Police dissolved. Wood had none of it. Do you mean he “was having none of it?” On June 16, 1857 when the state tried taking over the Street Cleaning Department, Wood ordered the Municipal Police to physically remove the state appointees from their offices, and this was done. The state authorities obtained an order to arrest Wood for inciting a riot. Capt. George Walling, a redoubtable ex-Municipal turned Metropolitan, went into City Hall alone to arrest Wood. The Mayor greeted him cordially, learned of his mission, turned to his Municipals and said, “Men, put that man out.” Walling seized Wood, according to Luc Sante, and began dragging him toward the door. Then the Municipals laid hands upon Walling, freed the Mayor and tossed Walling down the front steps.

Some say they merely escorted him out, for old-time’s sake. [Don’t get it]

The Metropolitans now marched fifty strong from their White Street headquarters to find City Hall held in force by the Municipals. They charged up the front steps as the Municipals issued forth with a cheer to meet them, and the air was filled with the sound of locustwood clubs, which “emitted a sound like a bell”[???source???] on hitting human skulls. The Municipals outnumbered the Metropolitans, and drove them back. The state forces rallied, however, and charged City Hall once more. At this moment, the Dead Rabbits and “a miscellaneous assortment of suckers, soaplocks, Irishmen, and plug-uglies, officiating in a guerrilla capacity,” [???source???] rushed the Metropolitans from the rear.

“The scene was a terrible one,” wrote The New York Times. “Blows upon naked heads fell thick and fast, and men rolled helpless down the steps, to be leaped upon and beaten until life seemed extinct.”

The day was saved by the 7th Regiment, then marching down Broadway to embark for Boston. The Metropolitans requested help. The gallant 7th, drums rolling, flags flying, turned toward City Hall. The Mayor capitulated.

For several weeks the city was patrolled by two police forces working at cross purposes. A Municipal might arrest some thug only to have a Metropolitan set him free. Each side freely raided the other’s precinct houses to liberate prisoners en masse. The gangs found this stimulating: on July 4, 1857 the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys started a two-day battle in the area around Mott, Mulberry, Bayard and Elizabeth Streets, leaving eight dead and 100 wounded in a whirl of stones, brickbats, clubs, and gunfire. In the fall, the courts determined that the City’s ancient royal charters were meaningless and the City was no more than a creature of the State. The Municipals hung up their clubs and badges.

Tammany’s 1857 convention nominated Wood by a vote of 100 to five for his only opponent, William M. Tweed, who would be heard from again. Nonetheless, in the fall elections, Wood proved that not even Wood could survive financial panics, police riots, and the foreclosure sale of City Hall. Within a year, however, the Model Mayor defeated his successor for reelection and returned to power. In common with most Democrats, Wood opposed the abolition of slavery out of both personal racism and belief in the City’s dependence on the cotton trade. [the logic of this paragraph is giving me whiplash]

To be sure, he did not publicly dwell upon the lottery concession that his brother Ben and he held in Louisiana, which someone once described as akin to being given a color offset lithographic machine by the Federal Reserve with the injunction: “Now go ahead and print all the one hundred dollar bills you need.” [again, I don’t get this, or how what comes next follows from it] In a speech at New Rochelle in 1859, Wood argued that the city’s prosperity depended on Southern trade, “the wealth which is now annually accumulated by the people…of New York, out of the labor of slavery—the profit, the luxury, the comforts, the necessity, nay, even the very physical existence depending upon products only to be obtained by the continuance of slave labor and the prosperity of the slave master.”

This was not oratory. By 1860, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the city’s largest industry was garment production, with 398 factories employing 26,857 workers to create clothing worth $22,420,769—largely from Southern cotton. Sugar-refining, the second largest, also depended on Southern cane to refine sugar products worth $19,312,500. These two industries created more than a quarter of the city’s gross industrial product.

Losing Southern raw materials might devastate the city’s economy. As Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace note in Gotham, “the city’s key economic actors—the shipowners who hauled cotton, the bankers who accepted slave property as collateral for loans, the brokers of southern railroad and state bonds, the wholesalers who sent goods south, the editors with large southern subscription bases, the dealers in tobacco, rice and cotton—all had come to profitable terms with its slave economy.” They feared that secession would mean massive Southern defaults: the nonpayment of bills due and owing to New York merchants. Thus, they pressed for conciliation with the South at all costs.

Even in 1860, decades after the United States had abolished the slave trade, ships launched from New York shipyards and financed by New York investors, though flying foreign flags and manned by foreign crews, carried slaves from Africa to Cuba, where the slave trade was still legal, yielding profits as high as $175,000 for a single voyage. Moreover, although New York State abolished slavery on July 4, 1827, the Tammany city government tolerated “blackbirders,” illegal slave importers who operated out of New York. Apparently, District Attorney James Roosevelt refused to prosecute them, believing their activities did not constitute piracy, although federal law defined it as such. Some blackbirders were professional bounty hunters searching for runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act. A few even kidnapped free blacks for sale in the South. It is no wonder that Dan Emmett, a minstrel show composer, premiered “Dixie,” the Southern national anthem, in New York City on April 4, 1859.

The Mayor’s 1861 message argued, based on the effect of the secession crisis on New York City’s trade, the city fathers should anticipate the Union’s collapse with a policy of neutrality among the Northern and Southern states, noting that “With our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States we have friendly relations and a common sympathy.” He said New York City should strike for independence, “peaceably if we can, forcefully if we must.”

Wood was probably the first politician to show New York City provided far more tax revenue to the federal government than it received in public expenditure.

Finally, the Mayor suggested that New York, as a free city, financed through a nominal tariff on imported goods, could abolish all direct taxation on its citizens. Theodore Roosevelt noted in his History of the City of New York that the Common Council “received the message enthusiastically, and had it printed and circulated wholesale.”

While Wood may have contemplated the common good, he surely considered the vast possibilities inherent in running one’s own country. According to Luc Sante, the Common Council approved a plan for merging the three islands of Long, Manhattan and Staten into a new nation, to be called Tri-Insula. Three months later, after the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, the plan was quietly rescinded. The city survived despite more than $300 million in defaulted Southern trade debts and more than 30,000 suddenly unemployed workers. Within months, the Union’s demands for uniforms, rifles, artillery, and warships restored full employment.

Fernando Wood lost the mayoralty in 1861. Realizing the rise of William M. Tweed and his Ring to power was irresistible, he made peace. Wood was nominated to a safe congressional seat and other persons who had paid him approximately $100,000 to $200,000 for various appointments and nominations received them. Wood, aging gracefully, remained in Congress for the rest of his life. Although censured by the 40th Congress for “use of unparliamentary language” and defeated for the speakership in 1875, Wood became chairman of House Ways and Means in 1877. He died in 1881. Wood is buried in Trinity churchyard, at the head of Wall Street. As always, he is near the money.

New York Press, January 9, 2001

John Morrissey: Wharf Rat, Chicken Thief, Congressman

Elections are dull because politicians are. They can’t help it: only safe, conventional men and women with bland, plausible personalities can raise the kind of money required to pay for television commercials and bulk mailings. Authentic old-fashioned elections—those orgies of repeating, ballot-box stuffing, and election day riots with their torch-lit parades and bonfires, their bunting and barbecues—have vanished from the land.

john-morrissey2

From New York Press, September 16, 1998

“Elections nowadays are sissy affairs,” complained “Dock Walloper Dick” Butler even seventy years ago. “Nobody gets killed any more and the ambulances and patrol wagons stay in their garages. There’s cheating, of course, but it’s done in a polite, refined manner compared to the olden days. In those times murder and mayhem played a more important part in politics. To be a challenger at the polls you had to be a nifty boxer or an expert marksman. A candidate, especially if he ran against the machine, was lucky to escape with his life. I was lucky—I only had my skull bashed and my front teeth knocked out and my nose broken.”

Few aspiring statesmen of our time have enjoyed a resume like that of the Hon. John Morrissey, who once told the United States House of Representatives: “I have reached the height of my ambition. I have been a wharf rat, chicken thief, prize fighter, gambler, and Member of Congress.” At times he seemed hard-pressed to separate his various metiers. Once, when irritated during debate, he roared, “If any gentleman on the other side wants his constitution amended just let him step into the rotunda with me.” It was not an empty threat.

Yet Morrissey was enormously popular, simply because he was his own man. His early career hinged on the electoral customs of his day. Each party and faction printed its own ballots. Voters brought a ballot to the polls and dropped it in the box. This simplicity permitted elaborations, exploited by Morrissey and his contemporaries, that are now almost fully comprehended and forbidden by the Election Law. There were repeaters, who voted more than once, either through multiple registrations or under names not their own. Morrissey was a gifted campaigner. “As an organizer of repeaters,” said the great William M. “Boss” Tweed, “he had no superior.”

The Hon. Timothy D. “Big Tim” Sullivan once explained his specialty, the bearded repeater. “When they vote with their whiskers on, you take ’em to a barber and scrape off the chin fringe. Then you vote ’em again with side-lilacs and mustache. Then to the barber again, off comes the sides and you vote ’em a third time with just a mustache. If that ain’t enough, and the box can stand a few more ballots, clean off the mustache and vote ’em plain face.” This made every man “good for four votes.”

A repeater needed some savoir faire. Up in Albany, a scruffy fellow once gave his name to the poll clerks as William Croswell Doane. “You don’t look like Bishop Doane,” a clerk objected. “Fuck you, man,” the repeater replied. “Gimme the goddamn ballot.”

Another technique was the “cannon” ballot, so named because just a few could blow the opposition sky-high. A contemporary of Morrissey’s wrote, “Ballots were easy to get, and we took plenty. Each candidate could get all he wanted. Why, kids even played with them. I got huge stacks of the ballots and carried them home to Mary.”

“Mary, put your irons on the fire,” I told her. She put three or four irons on the coal stove, and when they were nice and hot, we went to work on the ballots. We folded the ballots in sets of ten…and then Mary pressed the bundles of ten until they were thin enough to slip through the slit in the ballot boxes.

I distributed these ballots to my…workers and they slipped in ten at a time while the organization’s men thought they were doing a smart thing by piling in two at a time…One of my repeaters went to the polls twenty times and dropped in ten ballots every time. It was wonderful to see how my men… [preserved] the sanctity of the ballot [to] stop the corruption of Tammany Hall.

A poll clerk vigorously shook the box before opening it for the count, separating the cannon’s individual sheets to prevent its detection.

The Irish-born Morrissey apparently spent his youth learning to fight in barrooms and riverboats. He made his metropolitan debut in the Arena, Captain Isaiah Rynders’s saloon at 28 Park Row, across from City Hall. The Captain was a kind of political consultant, specializing in ballot-box stuffing and general mayhem on a cash retainer basis. Morrissey, whom an Arena habitue had addressed with inadequate respect, asked if any prize fighters were present, took off his cap, and said, “I can lick any man in the place.” Some eight men silently turned from their drinks, grabbed chairs, bottles, and other handy utensils, and rushed him as one. Nonetheless, Morrissey held his own until Rynders hit him under the ear with a spittoon.”

But Rynders, who admired men of spirit, had him carefully nursed until he recovered. Morrissey then became an immigrant runner. He met immigrants at the dock, found them work and shelter, and, after obtaining their pledges to vote the Tammany ticket, helped them obtain American citizenship, a simpler process in those days, that involved merely satisfying a single judge of one’s loyalty to the United States. (The Hon. Fernando Wood, when he was Mayor of New York, once managed to naturalize some 3,500 men in a day by sending them to a judge with preprinted cards requesting his signature as a personal courtesy.)

Once, when armed competitors attempted to drive him from a ship with belaying pins, a commentator described Morrissey clearing the decks “single-handed, like a young Ajax.” Testimony during the Tweed Ring scandals indicated tht the hardworking Morrissey had been convicted of assault with intent to kill and for burglary in 1849, serving 60 days. He was indicted three times in one day in 1857 for three separate assaults with intent to kill. And he was convicted of breach of the peace in 1861 and sentenced to a $50 fine and three months’ hard labor.

Busy as he was, Morrissey continued his professional development as a bare-knuckle boxer under the old London Prize Ring rules, the Marquess of Queensberry having not yet reformed the sweet science. The old rules were brutal: a round ended only when a fighter fell, was knocked down, or was thrown; matches ended when a fighter could not stand up at the beginning of a round. In 1858, Morrissey fought John Heenan, the Benicia Boy, for the Championship of America at Long Point, Canada. They battled for 32 minutes, during which, after Heenan broke his hand on a ring stake, Morrissey beat him into the ground “as a hammer beats a nail.” The New York Times, which found the spectacle a “triumph of brutality,” nonetheless, provided a blow-by-blow account.

Morrissey’s most renowned exploit was recounted by William E. Harding, longtime sporting editor of the late lamented National Police Gazette, in his 1881 biography, John Morrissey: His Life, Battles, and Wrangles, from His Birth in Ireland until He Died a State Senator.

Morrissey, during his visits to New York, became infatuated with a noted Cyprian, Kate Ridgeley, who was a mistress of Tom McCann, a noted rough and tumble fighter…Kate coquettishly pretended to think highly of Morrissey. This inflamed McCann’s jealousy, and when he met his rival in Sandy Lawrence’s house proposed to fight him for an undivided share in Kate’s affections…At the commencement of the fight McCann was successful, and threw Morrissey heavily. As he fell a stove was overturned, a bushel of hot coals rolled out, and Morrissey was forced on them. McCann held him there until the smell of burning flesh filled the room. The bystanders made water on the coals, and the gas and steam arose in McCann’s face and choked and exhausted him. Morrissey then…pounded McCann into insensibility. From that time until the day of his death Morrissey was called “Old Smoke.”

Such a man rose steadily in the world of mid-Victorian New York. He made a substantial fortune and married a beautiful woman. Retiring from the ring in 1859, Morrissey built a clubhouse and bought the racetrack at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., then a genteel watering hole. In 1866, he opened what were reputed to be the world’s most lavish gaming rooms on 24th Street in Manhattan. Some neighbors maintained that his casino lowered the moral tone of the community. Their wives, when the Morrisseys attended grand opera at the Academy of Music, glared at Mrs. Morrissey through mother-of-pearl opera glasses.

On a fuck-you basis, with the help of Tammany, Morrissey ran for Congress from the district in which his casino was located. He won handily and just to be sure nobody missed the point, ran a second time and was re-elected by an even wider margin. To celebrate his second victory, he commissioned a $75,000 pair of opera glasses in diamonds and sapphire from Lemaire of Paris as a gift for his beloved wife. They enabled the delighted Mrs. Morrissey to glare back at her detractors on opening nights.

After the Tweed Ring’s collapse during the early 1870s, Morrissey joined with Samuel Tilden and “Honest” John Kelly to control Tammany Hall. By 1875, he was serving as Police Commissioner, for which his experience with the criminal justice system eminently qualified him. But Tilden was then Governor of New York and running for President, leaving the Hall in the hands of Morrissey and Kelly. Their ambitions clashed. Kelly purged Morrissey, who then, having nothing better to do, won election to the State Senate from Tweed’s old district. Honest John’s followers said that only the district which had elected Tweed would send a vicious thug, a rowdy prize fighter, and a notorious gambler to the State Senate. These criticisms annoyed Morrissey because they hurt his wife’s feelings.

Accordingly, in 1877 he ran for the State Senate from the Seventh District, the most reputable in the City. Tammany orators denounced Morrissey as a gambler, prize fighter, ballot-box stuffer, and burglar. It was also said that when he had been in Congress, he had a percentage in Washington’s leading illegal faro game. All was for naught: Morrissey won by a huge majority.

He had defeated the respectables and the machine politicians alike. But Morrissey did not long enjoy his triumph. He had contracted pneumonia during his last campaign and, failing to shake it off, died at Saratoga on May 1, 1878, at the age of forty-seven. Over 15,000 mourners, including the Lieutenant Governor and the Attorney General, saw the dead statesman to his grave in St. Peter’s Cemetery, Troy, New York, where he lies with his family.