City of Smoke – Page 3 – New York in History and Anecdote

Inspector Byrnes, Inventor of the Third Degree

New York’s first great police detective was Thomas F. Byrnes. A largely self-educated Irish immigrant, Byrnes joined the force in 1863. He rose to sergeant by 1869 and captain by 1870. In 1878, the Manhattan Savings Bank, which was in his precinct, was robbed. Byrnes took the robbery as a personal affront and tracked down the criminals through hard, thorough, gritty detective work. Two years later, the newly promoted Inspector Byrnes took command of the Detective Bureau, which he made among the most efficient and absolutely secret in the world. After the state legislature reorganized the Detective Bureau to his specifications in 1882, his power was immense.

A master self-publicist, Byrnes published Professional Criminals of America (1886), a minor classic, still in print, which no student of American history should be without. Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s son, wrote a series of tales taken “from the Diary of Inspector Byrnes.” He described Byrnes as “handsome…large and powerful in every sense of the word. His head is well shaped, with a compact forehead, strong nose, and resolute mouth and chin, shaded with a heavy moustache. His figure is erect, his step light, his bearing alert and easy. His eyes are his most remarkable feature… They have in moments of earnestness an extraordinary gaze. His voice is melodious and agreeable, but he often seems to speak between his teeth, and when aroused his utterance acquires an impressive energy.”

Other journalists, though less adoring, were also impressed. Lincoln Steffens described Byrnes as “simple, no complications at all—a man who would buy you or beat you, as you might choose, but get you he would.” Jacob A. Riis met Byrnes while working as a police reporter for the New York Tribune. In his autobiography, The Making of an American, Riis describes Byrnes as tough, effective, unscrupulous, autocratic, and utterly ruthless. He believed thieves had no rights a police officer was bound to respect. Above all, he was a ferocious and imaginative interrogator. Byrnes coined the phrase “third degree” to describe his methods of eliciting useful information from criminal suspects. He had no scruples about torture and did anything necessary to make suspects confess. Anything.

In February or March of 1891 an interviewer asked Byrnes’s opinion of the London police’s handling of the Whitechapel murders: the savage mutilation of East End streetwalkers attributed to Jack the Ripper. The Chief Inspector commented that the London police had sent him a photograph of the Ripper’s most famous letter, the signature boldly scrawled across the page, with its return address, “From Hell.” According to The New York Times, Byrnes “said it would be impossible for crimes such as Jack the Ripper committed in London to occur in New York and the murderer not be found.”

This was published about six weeks before the night of April 23, 1891.

Water Street, in downtown Manhattan, was then lined with low watering holes and dance halls, catering to what Luc Sante’s Low Life calls “a highly elastic clientele of sailors.” Herbert Asbury noted in The Gangs of New York that practically every house on Water Street contained at least one dive. He wrote “at one time, some tenements had a saloon, dance hall, or house of prostitution on every floor.”

The East River Hotel stood at the southeast corner of Catherine Slip and Water Street. Sante describes the hotel as a crimp joint, used by “operators who specialized in drugging and robbing sailors, sometimes arranging for them to be shanghaied about tramp boats, if they survived.” Asbury also says that sailors were robbed and killed there in their sleep, and their bodies disposed of through trapdoors opening into underground passages that led to the docks.

Between 10:30 and 11 p.m. on April 23, 1891 an aging whore flounced into the hotel with a john in tow. Her name was Carrie Brown, but she was known familiarly as “Old Shakespeare” because she knew (and would recite for a bottle of swan gin) the major female role in Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice. She claimed to have been a celebrated actress yer younger days.

The john signed the hotel register as “C. Knick.” Mary Miniter, an assistant housekeeper, caught a glimpse of him. She later described him as having a foreign appearance, about 32 years old, 5 feet, 8 inches tall, slim build, long sharp nose, heavy mustache of light color, and wearing a dark-brown cutaway, black trousers and a dented black derby. Even so, Miniter claimed she did not get a good look at him: he seemed “anxious to avoid observation.” Old Shakespeare took the key to Room 31.

Around 9 the next morning, Eddie Harrington, the night clerk, saw the key for Room 31 had not been returned. He went upstairs and knocked. Then he took out the master key.

C. Knick was gone, and no one had noticed his departure. Carrie Brown’s remains were on the bed. The coroner determined she had first been strangled. Then the murderer had mutilated her body in a frenzy of stabbing and cutting. Dr. Jenkins, who performed the autopsy, thought the killer had attempted to carve the abdomen out of her body.

Rumors of the killing swept the city. By the next morning, even The New York Times had splashed the story on its front page:

Choked, Then Mutilated

A Murder Like One Of Jack The Ripper’s Deeds

Whitechapel’s Horrors Repeated in an East Side Lodging House

Worse still, the Times repeated Byrnes’s boast that the Ripper murders could not have happened in New York without the criminal’s arrest within thirty-six hours. This was precisely not the take Byrnes wanted on the story. His men fanned out into the Fourth Ward.

By April 25, among the numerous men under arrest was George Frank, formerly known as Ameer Ben Ali, also known as Frenchy, an Algerian Arab who professed to neither speak nor understand English. On the night of the murder, Frenchy, an habitue of the East River Hotel, had occupied Room 33, across the hall from Room 31.

Five days later, Chief Inspector Byrnes triumphantly announced that Frenchy was the killer. He admitted Frenchy had not been C. Knick. However, Byrnes alleged that after C. Knick had left, Frenchy had crept across the hall, robbed and killed Carrie Brown, and crept back into his own room. There were blood drops on the floor of Room 31 and in the hall between Rooms 31 and 33; blood marks on both sides of the door to Room 33, as if the door had been opened and closed by bloody fingers; blood stains on the floor of Room 33, a chair in that room, the bed blanket and the mattress (apparently, the East River Hotel did not provide sheets). Blood had been found on Frenchy’s socks. Scrapings from his fingernails indicated the presence of blood. His explanations of how the blood came to be on him had been found false.

Frenchy was arraigned on April 30 and held in the Tombs until his trial opened on June 24, 1891. As he could not afford an attorney, the court appointed Abraham Levy as his counsel. Abe Levy would conduct some 300 homicide defenses, making him a legend of the criminal bar: this was his first. The court had found an interpreter from his own village in Algeria, so Frenchy could participate in his defense. District Attorney DeLancey Nicoll and a chief assistant, Francis Wellman, prosecuted. Byrnes and four officers testified for the prosecution. According to Edwin Borchard, so did numerous witnesses “from the lowest stratum of New York life, to prove that Frenchy had been living a sordid life, and, particularly, that he was accustomed to staying at the East River Hotel and to wandering from room to room at night.”

Three medical experts testified that a chemical analysis of his fingernail scrapings and of the blood stains on the bed in Room 31, the hallway, the door to Room 33, inside Room 33 and on his socks showed “intestinal contents of food elements, all in the same degree of digestion—all exactly identical.” They inferred from this that the bloodstains resulted from blood flowing from the abdominal injuries of Carrie Brown.

By contrast, the defense, lacking the resources to conduct a thorough investigation, had to rely on the defendant, who was a dreadful witness. Frenchy sometimes seemed to understand English; at other times, he claimed not to understand questions even after they had been translated into his native dialect. He consistently denied killing Old Shakespeare, but the prosecution (Francis Wellman later wrote in The Art of Cross-Examination) “badly tangled” Frenchy “time and time again upon cross-examination.” Frenchy was convicted of second-degree murder and, on July 10, 1891 sentenced to life imprisonment in Sing Sing.

The belief on the street was that Frenchy had been framed. There were two rumors. One was that the murderer, a blond sailor, had sailed for the Far East. The other was that Old Shakespeare really had been murdered by Jack the Ripper. Although most of the Ripper murders were committed during the late summer and autumn of 1888, Frances Coles, also known as “Carrotty Nell,” was butchered in February 1891: only two months before Carrie Brown took C. Knick upstairs. Steamers had reduced the travel time from London to New York to roughly a week. Asbury suggests many investigators believed that Jack the Ripper had accepted Byrnes’s challenge, and that the police had arrested Frenchy to save Byrnes’ professional honor.

Nearly eleven years later, in 1902, Gov. Benjamin B. Odell received a pardon application for Frenchy, based on new evidence. Apparently, a man who matched the description of C. Knick had worked for several weeks in the spring of 1891 at Cranford, New Jersey, about fifteen miles from the city. He had been absent from Cranford on the night of April 23, 1891 and disappeared entirely several days later. Among the objects left in his room were a brass key bearing a tag with the number “31” and a bloody shirt. The key matched the keys to the East River Hotel. After all, the murderer had locked the door to Room 31. No evidence had ever connected Frenchy to the key.

Moreover, Jacob Riis submitted an affidavit based on direct observation. When he had visited the hotel on the morning after the murder, before the coroner’s arrival, he had not found blood on the door of either room or in the hallway. The Governor inferred from the affidavits of Riis and other observers that the bloodstains, which had been found by the police only on the day after the murder, had been made at the time of the visit of the coroner and the crowd of reporters when the body was examined and removed. Even the police had testified that there was no blood on or near the lock or knob of the door to Room 31, which presumably the murderer had unlocked, opened, closed and relocked. Yet Frenchy’s guilt was premised on evidence suggesting he had passed out of Room 31 dripping blood on the floor, wearing bloody socks, and then smeared blood on the door, floor, and bed of Room 33.

Between the weakness of the old evidence and the strength of the new, the Governor’s mind was made up. On April 16, 1902, after an imprisonment of ten years, nine months, and ten days, Frenchy was ordered released. Borchard reports that the French government arranged Frenchy’s return to Algeria.

Thomas F. Byrnes retired from the force in 1895 after three years as chief of police. He died in 1910.

No one really knows who killed Polly Nicholls, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes or Mary Jane Kelly in the fall of 1888, or Carrotty Nell in February 1891. Nor do we know who killed Carrie Brown.

New York Press, September 4, 2001

Common Sense: Tom Paine, Pt. 1

He started as a fourteen-year-old corset-maker, and would be a sailor, tax collector, schoolteacher and Fleet Street hack. His parents’ generosity gave him eight years’ schooling; he made himself a political writer of force and eloquence comparable to Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, and wrote three of his century’s bestselling books, all of which remain in print. The most notorious radical of his time, a feminist and abolitionist, his name inspired fear, contempt, and admiration on two continents.

He held office in three different countries and was elected without his knowledge and on reputation alone to the legislature of a nation whose language he never learned to speak. He died in squalor, denied the vote by his neighbors in the country for whose sake he had marshaled the English language and sent it forth into battle. Nearly two centuries after his death in Greenwich Village, Thomas Paine is more alive through his thoughts and words than are most men and women who breathe.

At the time he became famous, Paine was about five feet, nine inches tall, slim and well proportioned, with a mass of dark, wavy hair, good skin, a high forehead, and a bold nose. Most observers noted his uncommonly large, brilliant, and animated eyes. Deeply shy, Paine was nonetheless a witty conversationalist, perhaps because he listened well.

Thomas Pain (he did not change the spelling until 1774) was born at Thetford in Norfolk, England on January 29, 1737. His father was a Quaker corset-maker, his mother an Anglican and the daughter of an attorney. His grammar school taught him history, mathematics and science. It was enough. Even then an omnivorous reader, he believed along with most intelligent people that “every person of learning is his own teacher.”

Paine began working in his father’s trade at fourteen. He loathed it and ran off to join a privateer, the Terrible, commanded by one Captain Death. Though his Quaker father caught him the first time, Paine ran off again to the King of Prussia. He jumped ship a year later to make corsets in London and Sandwich. He then joined the Excise, the equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and about as popular as the modern agencies are now. He was fired for a careless clerical error, taught school, and then finagled another exciseman’s post at Lewes, in Sussex.

Meanwhile, Paine taught himself about science, philosophy, and politics, a remarkable accomplishment in an age before free lending libraries. He read Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, and as he wanted to effectively communicate his ideas, imitated their crisp, plain style. He believed plain language could communicate complicated ideas. As John Keane noted in Tom Paine: A Political Life, Paine aspired to “avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet.” His prose became concise, rigorously excluding the superfluous, and using no more words than necessary—a simplicity not only elegant but thrillingly modern. He also argued in a local debating club, where he revealed astonishingly radical views: he denounced dueling, slavery, war, and monarchy and favored equality for women.

Taproom oratory was one thing, organizing his fellow excisemen to demand higher wages was another. The Board of Excise found an excuse to fire him.

At thirty-seven, Paine was surviving in London as a Fleet Street hack when he met Benjamin Franklin. Then the London agent for Pennsylvania, Franklin suggested Paine’s opinions might be more welcome in America and provided him with an introduction.

On November 30, 1774, Paine landed in Philadelphia. In January 1775, he became managing editor of Pennsylvania Magazine. His first article called for the abolition of slavery. However, Paine was a sound professional journalist as well as a radical: he wrote on science, commerce, trade, and literature as well as politics. Good writing attracts readers, and during his first three months as editor, he increased the magazine’s paid circulation by nearly 150 percent.

Paine’s radicalism made him a separatist almost immediately. On January 10, 1776, barely a year after his arrival, he published Common Sense at two shillings a copy. The pamphlet is short: perhaps fifteen minutes’ reading. He exposed the claims of George III (“the Royal Brute of England”) to a degree of power over the colonies that he did not possess in England, showed the necessity of breaking away from the corrupt British government, and called for a constitutional republic. The Englishman had an American grandeur of vision: “We have it in our power to begin the world all over again.” He also had a sense of the nation’s special promise: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all Mankind.”

To be sure, the pamphlet is also scurrilous, abusive, seditious, and sparkling. Paine’s sinewy prose seized the time, communicated his sense of urgency, hammered his points home:

The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. It is not the affair of a city, a country, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent… It is not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of continental union, faith, and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full-grown characters.

Common Sense sold out in its first two weeks of publication. By the first week in February an edition had been published in New York. By April, it had come out in Salem, Hartford, Newport, Lancaster, Newburyport, Albany, and Providence. Over the course of the next year, the pamphlet was brought out in England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland and reviewed in Dubrovnik and St. Petersburg. Paine wrote (and he did not exaggerate), “the number of copies printed and sold in America was not short of 150,000.” It was the greatest sale of any publication since Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. It transformed the American debate from taxation to independence and converted George Washington to the cause of independence.

Here in New York, Common Sense was wildly popular. In March 1776, Samuel Loudon, a printer, published The Deceiver Unmasked, an attack on Paine by the Rev. Charles Inglis, loyalist assistant rector of Trinity Church. Late one night, a gang of some forty revolutionaries—either Liberty Boys led by rebel leaders Isaac Sears, Capt. John Lamb, and Alexander MacDougall, or militants from the Mechanics Union led by its chairman, Peter Duyckinck—stormed the print shop, destroyed the press, seized every copy of Inglis’ pamphlet, and burned them on the Common. The Declaration of Independence, approved six months after publication of the tract, though drafted by Jefferson and revised by Congress, reflected the sea change in American politics wrought by Common Sense.

After Washington’s withdrawal from New York, Paine marched with the retreating army from Fort Lee to Trenton, New Jersey. From notes jotted down on the road, Paine composed a new pamphlet, published a week before Christmas 1776: The American Crisis. Its opening lines are immortal:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

In the late afternoon of Christmas Day, American officers assembled their troops into squads and read them the pamphlet. Then they marched for the Delaware which they crossed that night in open boats, to fall at dawn upon the Hessians at Trenton. In combination with Washington’s victory, the pamphlet’s effect was astonishing: recruits flocked to Washington’s force. (The opening lines “were in the mouths of everyone going to join the army,” Charles Biddle later wrote.)

Congress then appointed Paine secretary to the Committee on Foreign Affairs. An able administrator, he held office for two years until he publicly exposed a crooked arms deal with France, outlining the graft taken by Silas Deane, the American agent, and his partner, the rakish courtier Caron de Beaumarchais. Yet, even as the ingenious and unscrupulous Beaumarchais ripped off the Americans with one hand, he was writing The Marriage of Figaro with the other. A decade later, Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, transformed his brilliant play into the perfect opera.

Paine now learned an eternal truth: No one likes whistle-blowers. Fired by Congress, he was hired as clerk of the Pennsylvania state legislature. He either drafted or helped draft the assembly’s proclamation of the emancipation of African-American slaves. He published new issues of The American Crisis as needed and even served as a diplomat, negotiating a new loan from the French in 1781. He was not unrewarded for his services. Congress granted him $3,000 as a token of his unpaid arrears of salary as a committee secretary; New York granted him a house and farm at New Rochelle; the University of Pennsylvania granted him an honorary degree; and Pennsylvania granted him 500 pounds.

In 1787, having developed a plan for a long bridge with a single span of 400 to 500 feet (like many of the Founding Fathers, he was strongly interested in practical engineering) and finding Americans unwilling to construct it, Paine decided to visit France and England for a few months to raise money for a full-scale trial of his scheme. He sailed for Paris from New York on April 26, 1787, expecting to be away for a few months at most. He would not return for fifteen years. His adventures had only begun.

New York Press, February 6, 2001

The Jay Street Connecting Railroad

Acommercial for the last season of Sex and the City showed Sarah Jessica Parker doing an elegant balancing act in stilettos along old steel rails set in a Brooklyn cobblestone street. I recognized the location: I had been there myself.

Around 1994, attending to business down in the old

Acommercial for the last season of Sex and the City showed Sarah Jessica Parker doing an elegant balancing act in stilettos along old steel rails set in a Brooklyn cobblestone street. I recognized the location: I had been there myself.

Around 1994, attending to business down in the old industrial district between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges once known as Vinegar Hill, now re-christened DUMBO (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), I came across an abandoned railroad. Steel rails ran through the cobbled streets, with here and there a spur turning off the main line into a factory or industrial loft. In some cases the line ran straight into the blank wall of what had become a luxury apartment building. Of course, there were no trains. The many asphalt and concrete patches over the rails showed the line to be long abandoned.

This had once been the Jay Street Connecting Railroad—JSC for short. You can see on the Port Authority’s New York Harbor Terminal map for 1949 where the JSC and the harbor’s many other railroads ran: They stand out bright red against the elegant expanses of blue water and buff-gold land. Like the yards, piers, and terminals that fringe the waterfront, they’re the color of Monopoly board hotels. You can see the short line’s spaghetti tangle of tracks (at a scale of one inch to 400 feet) on the Port Series maps published by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. According to the Interstate Commerce Commission’s records, the JSC operated from 1904 to June 1959.

From the Port Series map alone, the JSC seems to have been among the shortest railroads in the United States, with a main line no more than a half-mile long. It began in the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge, just north of New Dock Street, in what is now the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park. It then ran north along Plymouth Street. At Adams Street, the main line swung west for a block, toward the East River, and then north into John Street, finally terminating amidst the complex of piers, warehouses, and factories between Jay, Bridge, and Gold Streets owned by Arbuckle Brothers, the family firm that made Yuban Coffee and owned the little railroad.

In its life and death, the short line’s history illuminates change: in industrial technology, in the regional economy, in the neighborhood it served (named Vinegar Hill by an 1820s developer to commemorate a fierce battle during the Irish rebellion of 1798). For example, Empire-Fulton Ferry Park exists today only because the railroad used that open space for team tracks: an open-air freight terminal where the crews of horse-drawn teams and wagons (and later trucks) could unload cargoes from freight cars directly into their vehicles. Unlike most railroads, the JSC had no direct connection with another railroad. On the map, it seems as solitary as a Lionel train set on a kitchen table. In fact, it interchanged with other railroads by car floats: long, flat-decked barges with railroad tracks on them for transporting freight cars about the harbor. This was not unusual: at one time, New York’s railroads used tugboats and barges to move over 5,300 freight cars every day about the harbor, providing direct service to pier heads in all five boroughs.

From the 1830s onward, the harbor handled almost half of the nation’s foreign trade while serving the largest manufacturing region in the United States. Numerous railroads tapped into this business by building to the Jersey side of the Hudson River: the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Jersey Central, the Reading. As Thomas R. Flagg notes in New York Harbor Railroads, serving New York was not easy. The area is divided by rivers and bays. Building direct railroad connections in and about the harbor was technologically challenging and prohibitively expensive. Until 1910, when the Pennsylvania Railroad built the huge Pennsylvania Station complex, tunneling both the Hudson and East Rivers, and 1917, when Hell Gate Bridge brought the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad from the Bronx into Long Island, Brooklyn, and Long Island had no direct rail connections to the rest of the country. (Even then, the Pennsylvania’s Hudson tunnel was only for passenger trains, being too small for freight.)

During the 19th century, Brooklyn’s waterfront saw explosive industrial growth. Factories and warehouses were built at the water’s edge, many with their own piers. From the 1880s, most railroads used car floats to carry freight cars between waterfront freight yards in, say, Jersey City or Weehawken, and waterside freight terminals in the five boroughs. Cars with Manhattan- or Brooklyn-bound freight were shunted toward float bridges, with steel structures attached at their land end by hinges and the other end either floating freely with the tides or suspended from an overhead framework. A tugboat hauling a float loaded with freight cars shoved it up to a float bridge. Once the float was pinned to the bridge—secured with toggle bars and heavy ropes—a locomotive pulled the cars from the float, one at a time to prevent capsizing, replacing them with cars from the yard. Then the tugboat hauled the car float to another terminal to repeat the process.

The JSC was created by Arbuckle Brothers, once synonymous with Ariosa and Yuban coffees, a huge wholesale grocery firm founded before the Civil War: Even the railroad’s locomotives were painted in Arbuckle’s signature orange and black. In 1860, Arbuckle Brothers operated a single store in Pittsburg; within two decades, it would be among the largest importers of coffee and sugar in the United States. This was due largely to John Arbuckle, an amazingly imaginative man, who devised a sugar-based glaze to keep roasted coffee beans from going stale. He then invented a machine that graded, filled, weighed, and sealed roasted coffee beans in paper packages of uniform weight and quality. One machine replaced 500 people who had previously done the same work by hand. The machine even labeled the bags. By the 1870s, Arbuckle was shipping its coffee across the country in brightly colored one-pound bags. Cowboys had a passion for it—some call Arbuckle’s Ariosa “the coffee that won the West.”

By the turn of the century, Arbuckle’s owned a factory and warehouse complex on the waterfront north of the Manhattan Bridge, with ocean-going freighters docking at its three piers to unload Colombian coffee beans for its roasters. Believing that a railroad would be more efficient in shifting cargoes among the buildings, John Arbuckle started what became the JSC in 1904. On realizing the railroad might profit from serving neighboring businesses, Arbuckle’s extended it along Plymouth Street, eventually reaching North Dock Street around 1920.

From the beginning, the JSC relied on import-export traffic from the steamship lines at its piers and freight cars interchanged by car float at its Jay Street float bridge. Short trains of two or three cars constantly rumbled through Vinegar Hill for delivery to factories and warehouses along the right of way. Goods requiring delivery to other parts of Brooklyn were unloaded at the team track by express men with wagons and trucks.

The JSC’s identical steam locomotives, respectively numbered 1 and 2, were powerful six-wheel switchers ordered new in 1906 from the world’s largest locomotive builder, the Baldwin Locomotive Works. Short wheelbases let them shove boxcars along the railroad’s extremely sharp curves into its customers’ warehouses and industrial lofts. The railroad also had its own barn-red tugboats, with unusually tall pilot houses (so that their captains might see over the tops of the boxcars on their floats) and slender stacks painted in Arbuckle Brothers orange and black.

Other railroad freight terminals, similarly interchanging freight cars by car float, lined the shores of the five boroughs. The Bush Terminal Railroad, serving the massive industrial complex built by Irving T. Bush at the beginning of the 20th century, was the largest. On a 200-acre Brooklyn lot, Bush constructed fifteen industrial lofts (each six to eight stories high), eight steamship piers, more than 100 warehouses and a railroad that, at its busiest, used eight locomotives and even provided commuter service into the complex.

By the 1930s, the JSC had replaced its aging steamers with an offbeat collection of cheap, second-hand gasoline and diesel-electric locomotives from three different builders, as diverse as a sampler box of chocolates. Most were literally unique, built to demonstrate some manufacturer’s pioneering technology. Oldest and freakiest was Number 3, the second-oldest gasoline-powered freight locomotive in America. It was essentially a shack housing a 175-horsepower engine on a flatcar, built by General Electric in 1915, a generation before anyone believed internal combustion would replace steam in powering American transportation.

Arbuckle’s began selling their properties during the Great Depression. Eventually, even Yuban Coffee (the name comes from “Yuletide Banquet”) went to what is now Kraft Foods. The railroad soldiered on, enjoying a booming business during World War II. Then change came to Brooklyn’s waterfront and the JSC. Coal for home heating and industrial use, once the single largest category of harbor railroad freight, vanished with the adoption of oil and gas heat. Suburbia demanded better roads and highways: the consequent construction of a right of way maintained at taxpayer expense made motor trucking more flexible and economical than railroads and car floats, which had to pay for their equipment and pay taxes on it as well.

In 1955, Sea Land Service, Inc. pioneered containerization at its Weehawken docks. Within a generation, stevedoring—the labor-intensive break-bulk or piecemeal system of unloading ships we see in films such as On the Waterfront—had been replaced by intermodal containers: standardized trailer-sized steel boxes that could be freely shifted with a crane from one mode of transportation to another-from ship to flatbed trailer, say-within two or three minutes. Containerization’s efficiency, combined with construction of the Port Authority’s container ports in Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey, nearly destroyed Brooklyn’s seaport. Finally, the factories themselves began relocating from the city. In any case, car float service was profitable only with cheap labor. As labor unions pressed for better wages, building, operating, and maintaining fleets of tugboats and car floats had become astronomically expensive almost overnight.

As late as 1955, the JSC was busy enough to need yet another second-hand diesel. But within four years, its business shriveled away. On June 27, 1959, the railroad was abandoned. Its equipment was scrapped on site or sold. It was the first harbor terminal railroad to fail. Today, the sole survivor is the New York Cross-Harbor Railroad, which operates the remains of the former Bush Terminal and New York Dock railroads in Brooklyn and a daily car float across the Upper Bay to CSX and Norfolk Southern at Greenville, New Jersey. On land, the Cross-Harbor interchanges with the South Brooklyn Railway, another tiny railroad, surviving by the skin of its teeth, which once, legend says, attempted to haul a dead whale by flatcar to the Coney Island Aquarium. The whale proved too big for the tunnel south of Fourth Avenue, but that, as they say, is another story.

Of the JSC, only the rails in the street remain. About a year and a half ago, I noticed that my local New York Sports Club displays a huge poster of a buff runner sprinting up a Brooklyn street near the Manhattan Bridge. There are rails embedded in the cobblestones beneath his feet. The photographer used them to focus the viewer’s attention on the runner.

New York Press, April 16, 2003

Bill the Butcher

My first “Old Smoke” column recounted the adventures of the Hon. John Morrissey, Congressman and heavyweight boxing champion of the United States, who once, according to the Philadelphia Bulletin, told the House of Representatives that he “had reached the height of my ambition. I have been a wharf rat, chicken thief, prize fighter, gambler, and Member of Congress.” This was some twelve years after his indictment for the murder of William “Bill the Butcher” Poole, the 19th-century anti-Catholic street-fighting man whose memory, until recently, survived only among readers of Herbert Asbury’s masterpiece, The Gangs of New York. Now, thanks to Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated film, freely adapted from Asbury’s book, Bill the Butcher is now far better known than during his own lifetime.

Or after a fashion, anyway. A few days ago, my wife pointed out a New York Post article about a recent ceremony held in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery: a granite headstone was placed at Poole’s hitherto unmarked grave, inscribed with Poole’s legendary dying words: “Good-bye, boys, I die a true American.” The article even had someone playing “Taps” over the old reprobate—a gesture that Green-Wood’s president, Richard Moylan, seemed anxious to justify to audiences for the film, which sets Bill’s death, at the climax of the movie, in the midst of the Draft Riots of 1863.

“He was a bad guy, really,” Moylan observed in his capacity as an historian. The riots in question comprised a week of unrestrained mob violence—burning, looting and lynching—directed predominantly at the city’s black population. “We did it for all those who lost their lives in the riots,” the Green-Wood president explained.

The trouble with using Bill Poole to commemorate those killed in the 1863 riots is that Poole was murdered in February 1855, some eight years before. Bill the Butcher had as much to do with the Draft Riots as Bob the Builder. As an artist, of course, Scorsese isn’t trying to present history or depict Poole as an historical person. His interest in the figure lies elsewhere, in truths far more profound than one finds in the recitation of mere fact.

But there’s a disingenuous quality to the little incident at Green-Wood. Moylan claimed the Butcher’s gravestone was about history. To me, it seemed all about promoting tourism and making money.

More than six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds, William Poole stood out in an age of small men. He began his career in the Bowery Boys, New York’s most important street gang. Unlike today’s gangsters, the Boys were working men—whether laborers or self-employed small businessmen like Poole, who was a butcher by profession as well as avocation. They were also, as Asbury wrote, “the most ferocious rough-and-tumble fighters that ever cracked a skull or gouged out an eyeball.” Here, too, Poole stood out, for he fought like a berserker.

By the mid-1850s, Poole had drifted into freelance political enforcing. His personal gang controlled the Christopher Street waterfront. Militant supporters of the Know-Nothing party (so called because its members answered all questions about the movement from outsiders with the phrase, “I know nothing”), Poole and his men bitterly opposed Irish-Catholic immigration, hating the immigrants as cheap labor competing for their jobs and loathing the politicians who pandered to the immigrant vote.

New York City’s Nativists were not all thugs. The Know-Nothings had elected James Harper—a partner in the Harper Brothers publishing house—mayor for one term. In other states, they elected governors, congressmen, and state legislators. Regaining City Hall through ballot box stuffing and terror seemed entirely possible. Seen in this light, Bill the Butcher was a pioneer in using street fighters to dominate a nominally democratic society. Two generations later, the same idea would occur to Benito Mussolini.

Poole emerged from the shadows after joining forces with political boss Captain Isaiah Rynders. The Captain, a former riverboat gambler and knife fighter, operated his political organization, the Americus Club, from a bar on Park Row across from City Hall. A one-time U.S. Marshal, Rynders was a virulent racist who left the Democratic Party during the 1850s for the Nativists. Among his new friends was Bill Poole.

It was during this time that young John Morrissey charged into the Americus Club and challenged every man in the bar. Asbury states that Poole was among the dozen or so thugs who accepted Morrissey’s challenge with a flurry of mugs, clubs, and bung starters. Rynders was moved by Morrissey’s audacity and courage (Morrissey convalesced in his best bedroom, complete with attending physicians and nurses) and even offered him a job. Morrissey declined, largely because he detested Bill the Butcher.

The Butcher then announced he would seize the ballot boxes at an upcoming election. Some honest and wealthy citizens, knowing the police would not enforce the election law, retained Morrissey. Before the polls opened, Morrissey had stationed some fifty men in and about the building, ordering it held to the death. As Asbury writes, “He also let it be known that there would be no adverse criticism if Bill the Butcher’s bullies were permanently maimed, and that ears and noses would be highly regarded as souvenirs of an interesting occasion.”

Poole and his men rushed the building around noon. On observing Morrissey and his welcoming committee, the Butcher paused, glaring at the Tammanyites. But hatred did not overwhelm Poole’s common sense: the Butcher knew how to count, and so he left with his men. This made Morrissey’s reputation, and Tammany permitted him to open a small gambling house without undue police interference, which soon made him a wealthy man.

Street fighting between Tammanyites and Nativists was usually about power: sometimes it was even about sports. Poole’s death stemmed from a boxing match between Tom Hyer, the Young American and Nativist brawler, and Yankee Sullivan, beloved of Tammanyites and Irish Catholics. One of Sullivan’s fans, an ex-Bowery Boy and ex-cop named Lewis Baker who had, as a judge observed, “a most unaccountable passion for disorderly scenes and associates,” got into a bar fight with Hyer, who had a knack for that kind of groin-kicking, bottle-smashing, eye-gouging, window-breaking work. After a cop refused to intervene in what he considered a dispute among gentlemen, Hyer (bleeding from gunshot and stab wounds) beat and kicked Baker senseless and left him in the street.

Baker’s troubles only began, however, when he ran into Bill Poole in a Canal Street drive called the Gem. Poole had once beaten Yankee Sullivan senseless himself and, feeling that Baker had been disrespectful to Hyer, nearly finished the job the Young American had begun. This time, the cops interfered. Poole left the bar insisting that whatever might remain of Baker after their next meeting would “scarcely be worth the attention of an undertaker.” Thereafter, Baker went out only with a bodyguard, usually one Paudeen McLaughlin, whose disposition, Asbury notes, “had been particularly murderous since his nose was chewed off during an affray at the Five Points.”

Some time later, Poole and Morrissey met in a Broadway watering hole. Morrissey wagered $50 in gold that Poole could not name a place where Morrissey would not meet him in a fight. Poole named the Christopher Street pier—his home turf. Mrs. Morrissey had not raised any fools, and Morrissey handed Poole the money. He then asked for another location. Poole suggested the Amos Street dock (at the end of today’s West 10th Street). They agreed to meet at 7 o’clock the next morning. Morrissey arrived with a dozen men. Poole did not show. Two hundred of his men did, however, beating Morrissey and his men until, as Luc Sante notes in Low Life, “a delegation of Tammany politicians” rescued them.

Poole and Morrissey next met on February 24, 1855 in Stanwix Hall, a newly opened bar on Broadway near Prince Street. Morrissey was playing cards when he heard Poole. Morrissey strode up, spat in Poole’s face, and drew a pistol. It misfired. Poole drew his own pistol. Either Morrissey or Mark Maguire, a friend of Morrissey’s, then asked Poole, “You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man, would you?” Poole swore and threw his pistol on the floor. He picked up two carving knives from the free lunch counter and, hurling them into the bar, invited either Maguire or Morrissey to fight it out. Both declined. After all, Bill the Butcher knew the use of knives, and he was famous for throwing a butcher knife through an inch of pine at twenty feet. Then the cops arrested them both and released them almost immediately outside the bar.

Morrissey reportedly went home to 55 Hudson Street for the night. Poole, however, soon returned to Stanwix Hall. Baker, McLaughlin, and several other Tammany sluggers were there. McLaughlin jostled Poole. When Poole turned, the noseless Tammanyite spat three times in his face and challenged him. Poole slapped five $10 gold pieces on the bar, offering to fight whoever would cover his bet.

Then one Turner, another Tammanyite, flung open his cloak and drew a Colt revolver. While trying to aim at Poole, he shot himself in the arm, screamed and fired again, hitting Poole’s leg. The Butcher fell, and Baker, placing his own pistol against Poole’s chest, shot him in the heart and abdomen. Poole scrambled to his feet, probably on pure adrenalin, and grabbed a carving knife from the bar. The Tammanyites fled as one. Poole screamed that he would tear Baker’s heart from his living flesh. As Poole’s legs gave out, he flung the knife at Baker, and the blade was quivering in the doorjamb as the Butcher collapsed to the floor.

Everyone surrendered except Baker, who hid in Jersey City until March 10, when he sailed on the brig Isabella Jewett for the Canary Islands. The authorities remained passive (after all, Baker was an ex-cop) until George Law, a wealthy Nativist, lent his clipper yacht Grapeshot to the police; they overhauled Baker about two hours off Tenerife and brought him back in irons. Baker, Turner, Morrissey, and McLaughlin were indicted and repeatedly tried for murder. The prosecution was abandoned only after the third hung jury.

Bill the Butcher lived fourteen days after the shooting. According to Asbury, his doctors found it unnatural that he should live so long after taking a bullet in the heart. Certainly he had time to compose his last words. He died with Hyer and other friends about his bed. They gave him a hero’s funeral, with thousands lining lower Broadway as a half-dozen brass bands and more than 5,000 men marched in his procession from Christopher Street to Whitehall Street, whence his remains were ferried to Brooklyn. Asbury observed that new plays were hurriedly written and current productions revised so that as the curtain fell, the hero could drape himself in an American flag and cry out, “Good-bye, boys, I die a true American,” to thunderous applause.

That, too, was all about money.

New York Press, March 5, 2003

Conman of the Century

The luxury apartment building at 1155 Park Ave. was brand new in 1915. Among its first tenants was Maude King, a boozy, scatterbrained wealthy widow from Chicago. She rented three neighboring apartments on the tenth floor for $9,000 a year. Mrs. King lived in one, her sister lived

Mrs. King had met Means in the spring of 1914. Within a few weeks, Mrs. King placed all her affairs in Means’ hands. He was six feet tall, weighed more than 200 pounds, and was bald, with a round face, dimpled smile, sharp chin, and beaming eyes. Jolly and good-natured, with a smooth Southern style, he was surprisingly attractive to women. Behind his genial facade was an artist–a scam artist, a swindler for the joy of the perfect swindle, proud of his imaginative, plausible lies.

Born in Concord, North Carolina in 1879, he went to New York in 1902 as a salesman for Cannon mills. He lived in a rooming house on West 58th Street and then an apartment at 105th Street and Columbus Avenue. A natural salesman, Means soon earned more than $5,000 a year in salary and commissions at a time when a seven-room apartment on Riverside Drive rented for less than $200 a month and good theater tickets cost less than a dollar. Shortly after meeting Mrs. King, Means quit Cannon mills to work for private detective William J. Burns. Before retiring in 1909 to start his agency, Burns had been chief of the Secret Service. He was tough, skillful, and relentless, and he had no ethics to speak of. He soon realized that Means was just the man for rifling a desk, bribing an informant, or tapping a telephone.

The United States remained neutral at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The British government secretly retained Burns to investigate German activities in New York. The Germans, in ignorance, offered Burns a contract to investigate the British. Burns refused their offer but referred them to Means, who became a nominally independent operative merely to handle the German account. Until America entered the war in 1917, Burns and Means played a mutually profitable game, each feeding the other information about his respective client. Means apparently took the Germans for up to $100,000 a year as Secret Agent E-13.

By the spring of 1917, Means had burned through Mrs. King’s ready cash. Mrs. King’s husband had left $10 million in trust to the Northern Trust Company of Chicago to support an old men’s home. Means forged a new will that left the entire estate to Mrs. King and, easily persuading her of its authenticity, submitted it for probate. In late August Mrs. King vacationed with Means and his family in Asheville, North Carolnia. On August 29, Means and Mrs. King went rabbit hunting. He returned carrying her mortally wounded body, claiming that she had accidentally shot herself in the back of the skull.

The local prosecutor, who found this improbable, indicted Means for murder. Unhappily, he then allowed Northern Trust to hire New York lawyers to help prosecute Means. The defense counsel successfully played on local antipathies toward outsiders, winning an acquittal on December 16, 1917. Thereafter, Means boasted of having been accused of every crime in the penal code, from murder on down, and convicted of none. After the phony will was rejected by the courts, Means returned to New York where, having been evicted from 1155 Park Ave., he rented a Staten Island house and worked for Burns.

On March 4, 1921, Warren Gamaliel Harding became president of the United States. Harding’s administration would yield massive scandals: at least two suicides, numerous convictions, three disgraced Cabinet officers, and new revelations and trials for nearly a decade after the president’s sudden death in 1923. Amidst it all, Harding’s mistress, Nan Britton, would publish her memoirs, memorable for the pathetic image of the lovers’ frantic couplings amidst the overshoes in a closet.

Harding’s campaign-manager-turned-attorney-general, Harry M. Daugherty, appointed Burns Director of the Bureau of Investigation. As Francis Russell observes in The Shadow of Blooming Grove, Burns ran the Bureau as he had run his agency. He didn’t care about search and seizure, considered wire-tapping and break-ins all in a day’s work, and freely employed former criminals and men of ill repute.

On November 1, 1921 the Department of Justice hired Gaston B. Means. Now he had a badge, telephone, official stationery, an office, and access to Bureau files. The underworld contacts developed during his years as a detective now became a source of riches. He peddled Justice documents—reports, correspondence, miscellaneous papers—to the persons they concerned. He claimed he could provide protection for bootleggers from enforcement of the Prohibition Act and fix prosecutions and destroy evidence. He said he was the bag man for Burns and Daugherty; sometimes he said the payoffs were going to the Republican National Committee for President Harding’s reelection. Eventually, he claimed to be working directly for the president.

Almost none of this was true. No claim of Gaston Means can be credited without independent evidence. Means met Daugherty once, in a Justice Department hallway. He never met the president or visited the White House. But Means had the sociopath’s genius for intuiting what people wanted to hear. In particular, criminals want to hear that everyone is on the take. Moreover, Burns’s thuggishness and Daugherty’s moral ambiguity—the touch of sleaze that had made him a power in Ohio politics and steered Harding to the presidency—heightened Means’s plausibility.

He also gained the confidence of Daugherty’s closest friend, Jess Smith. One of the Ohio Gang, the coterie of small-time, crooked pols around Daugherty, Smith was a successful retailer, a kindly, slightly absurd, probably homosexual crook. Smith and Daugherty became so intimate that, as most historians of the Harding administration note, Daugherty could not sleep without Smith’s reassuring presence just beyond his bedroom’s open door. Like Means, Smith peddled Daugherty’s influence to bootleggers and other petty criminals. Neither man ever intended to deliver the goods.

For the moment, the cash flow was amazing. Means’s federal salary was seven dollars a day. He and his family lived in a Washington townhouse with three servants and a chauffeured limousine.

Means was suspended in February 1922. He had stolen a huge supply of essential government licenses and permits, many bearing the forged signatures of high-ranking government officials. He sold them even as he continued selling non-existent protection, picking up $50,000 here, $11,500 there, $13,800 somewhere else.

By early 1923, Daugherty was receiving so many private complaints about Means that Burns could no longer protect him. In May 1923, he appointed a special counsel to investigate and prosecute.

Then the president learned of Jess Smith’s remarkably dissolute personal life and informed Daugherty. The attorney general told Smith that he would have to go back to Ohio. On Memorial Day morning, one of Daugherty’s assistants found Smith lying on the floor of the apartment that Smith shared with the attorney general, a revolver in his hand and his brains in a trash can. Now the scandals began to break.

Means was indicted for larceny, conspiracy, and some 100 violations of the Prohibition Act, even as the Senate began investigating Daugherty. One member of the investigating committee, Sen. Burton Wheeler of Montana, spent weeks with Means reviewing his testimony. On March 14, 1924 Means appeared in the committee room with two large accordion cases that, he said, contained his diaries of his government service (these had been concocted during the winter of 1923-24 to document his innocence). He testified that he had collected millions in kickbacks on government contracts for aircraft, war claims settlements, and illegal liquor permits as well as protection money. It all went to Jess Smith for distribution to Daugherty and other Cabinet officers. He was completely at ease, marshalling his stories with utter self-confidence, even fishing papers from the bags and reading them to the committee. It was a masterful performance.

And he took Daugherty down. After all, Means had been the Bureau director’s right-hand man. On March 28, 1924, after Daugherty refused to open Justice files to the Senate committee, President Coolidge demanded his resignation.

The committee was concerned that Means’ testimony was verified only by his documents, which they had never seen. Means stalled handing them over. He claimed that his files had been taken by men claiming to be assistant sergeants at arms of the Senate. No one believed this. The Senate then learned the Bureau had staked out Means’s house on the night in question. The agents saw no one entering or leaving except Means and a newspaper reporter, who had each been empty-handed.

On June 17, 1924 Means went on trial. He was convicted and sentenced to two years; subsequent trials added two more years; even the IRS came after him for non-payment of income taxes on the graft he claimed to have handled.

While in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, Means met May Dixon Thacker, the sister of novelist Thomas Dixon, whose The Klansman had been transformed by D.W. Griffith into The Birth of a Nation. Mrs. Thacker, whose literary outlet was True Confessions, promised to help Means tell his story. After his release, Means spent day after day dictating to her. Every night, after Mrs. Thacker went home, Means and his wife roared with laughter over the lies he’d invented.

The Strange Death of President Harding was among the best-selling books of 1930. With the same accumulation of detail that had lent plausibility to his cons, Means claimed to have served as Mrs. Harding’s private investigator, breaking into Nan Britton’s apartment to steal her diaries and Harding’s love letters. Mrs. Harding was madly jealous of Britton; moreover, she knew of the Ohio Gang’s machinations. Coming to believe that only death could spare her husband shame and dishonor, Means claimed that Mrs. Harding had poisoned her husband.

Means raised some interesting points. The president died during a nationwide speaking tour. Supposedly, his illness stemmed from ptomaine poisoning after eating crabmeat. No one else in the presidential party, including the aide who ate the crab with him, became ill. The only person with the president when he died was Mrs. Harding. Finally, the physicians’ verdict of apoplexy was no more than an opinion, as the president was not autopsied.

Despite his literary success, Means still needed more money. When the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in March 1932, Means persuaded Evalyn Walsh McLean, a wealthy heiress whom he had known back in Harding’s time, that he was in contact with the kidnappers and could recover the child for $100,000 ransom. She gave him the money. He never delivered. Means was arrested in Washington, DC, on May 5, 1932. He claimed that the Lindbergh baby was still alive. This took audacity, especially after Col. Lindbergh had identified the child’s corpse. Means got 15 years, serving most of his sentence at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth. Increasingly desperate for attention, he was claiming to have killed the Lindbergh baby by the end. On December 12, 1938, still in prison, he died of a heart attack.

New York Press, July 2, 2003

Celestial Railroad

Those led by dreams shall be misled, O King.

-William Sharp, “The Immortal Hour”

Acentury ago, the railroad was the cutting edge of practical technology, moving freight and people as the Internet now moves information and thought. One of the last and most spectacular railroad promoters was Arthur Stilwell. Some called him a visionary. Only toward the end would he reveal how visionary he was.

Stilwell was born in Rochester on October 21, 1859. Hamblin Stilwell, his grandfather, once brought Arthur to dinner with Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. When the old rogue asked the six-year-old what he wanted to do when he grew up, the boy replied, “I’m going West to build a railroad.” At fourteen or fifteen, Arthur ran away from home. He worked as a hotel clerk and a printer while selling advertising, insurance and even his own patent medicine: Stilwell’s Specific. At nineteen, he married Jennie Wood, his childhood sweetheart. They were inseparable for the rest of their lives.

Stilwell was a born salesman: he believed in himself and his products. His charm, energy, and enthusiasm made him radiate optimism. Tall and powerfully built, his blond good looks were enhanced by impeccable grooming and tailoring. Even as an adolescent, he wore bespoke suits: he ran away from home in part because his father wanted him to wear clothes off the rack.

He was already a Travelers Insurance vice president, drawing a phenomenal $8,000 salary, when he devised a real estate promotion. In 1886, he moved to Kansas City, established the Real Estate Trust Company with his life savings of $25,000, and successfully implemented his plan. Stilwell understood that railroad service skyrocketed real estate values. His first railroad promotion literally walked into the office: one of his associates came by on a Tuesday complaining that his railroad franchise–a permit to build a railroad–would expire Friday night for lack of construction. Stilwell glanced at the franchise, boarded the next train for Philadelphia, and formulated his plan on the train. On Friday morning, he persuaded Drexel, Drexel and Company, investment bankers impressed by Stilwell’s successful real estate operations and extraordinary charisma, to invest $300,000 in the Kansas City Suburban Belt Railroad. He telegraphed his partner at noon. Construction began within minutes.

Stilwell’s railroad promotions all involved watered securities. This meant the par value was greater than their actual worth. For example, he sold his investors six percent Suburban Belt bonds nominally worth $1,000 for $660, tossing in twenty shares of $100 par value common stock as a bonus. The trust company’s commission was the odd $16. The railroad thus received $600 cash for securities apparently worth $3,000. Of course, they were only so much fancy wallpaper until the railroad succeeded.

Stilwell, not yet forty, was rich. What his friends did not know was that the financier was literally a visionary: he believed in spirits and omens, heard voices, and saw visions. Their message, however, was how to combine real estate development with railroad construction and make money.

Stilwell had a hunch. He glanced at a wall map. Kansas City, though 1400 miles from the East Coast, is only 800 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Cheap north-south rail transportation would bring wheat, corn, and lumber at competitive prices to Southern seaports. He organized the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf Railway–the Pee-Gee for short–raised his first $3 million, and began driving south, “straight as the crow flies.” As his tracklayers moved toward the Gulf, Stilwell sold millions of dollars worth of securities in the Pee-Gee and its numerous subsidiaries and affiliates. In 1898, he would be president of fifty-two corporations.

Stilwell’s gift for public relations was amazing. For example, he began promoting real estate development at Mena, Arizona, the halfway point on the line, while the Pee-Gee was forty miles away. He announced that the Pee-Gee would be in Mena in forty days. He claimed no one in human history had ever laid an average of a mile of track a day. This was an outrageous lie. The Union Pacific had regularly laid five to ten miles of track daily some thirty years before. However, the reporters didn’t know that, didn’t check their facts, and no one bothered telling them, either.

His track gangs began laying a mile a day, every day, to a barrage of Stilwell media releases in the Eastern and European press. His clipping service kept his investors informed and the investors kept up the flow of funds. On August 19, 1896, forty days to the day after his boast, Arthur Stilwell rode the first steam locomotive into Mena.

The Pee-Gee’s last spike was driven on September 11, 1897. Its Gulf terminal was a new city, modestly named Port Arthur. Although his railroad was fundamentally sound, it was overextended: In the fall of 1900, a Wall Street ring headed by John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates forced the Pee-Gee into receivership and Stilwell out of a job through a court order granted by a federal judge in a hearing held at the judge’s home at 2 a.m. over an unpaid $40 printing bill.

On February 10, 1900, Stilwell announced he would build a railroad from Kansas City to Topolobampo, Mexico, a Pacific seaport 500 miles closer than San Francisco. The Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway would unlock the riches of Mexico’s northwest while carrying through traffic from the East on a faster route to the Orient.

In fact, the Orient crosses a land of unrelenting loneliness, drought, blizzards, and locusts from the Staked Plains across miles of alkali desert to Chihuahua City. After that was the hard part: crossing the Sierra Madre to the Sea of Cortez. His engineers found this part of the line alone would require thirty-nine bridges, eighty-seven tunnels and three complete loops over itself to descend 300 feet in 122 miles through five climatic zones.

Nonetheless, the Mexican government granted the Orient a subsidy of 5000 silver pesos per kilometer, a ninety-nine-year title to its right of way and free importation of construction materials for five years. Stilwell placed numerous stories about the Orient in leading magazines and newspapers. He spoke at luncheons and dinners along the route and in Europe, where he sold millions of dollars’ worth of stocks, bonds and notes, based on his record with the Pee-Gee and other promotions.

Then came the revolution. One of Stilwell’s contractors was part of it. Stilwell had met the man face to face in 1907 and disliked him immediately because he smelled of hair oil. He had been born Doroteo Arango. At sixteen, he killed the man who had raped his sister, then made his way as a bank robber and thief. He was probably the only cattle rustler with the bravado to list himself in a city directory as a “wholesale meat dealer.” Mexicans still honor his 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, as their country’s only victory in the 20th century against the North Americans. He was Pancho Villa.

In late 1910, Francisco Madero, a liberal revolutionist, took up arms against longtime President Porfirio Diaz, who had fixed one election too many. In April 1911, Villa joined Madero. Diaz left Mexico before the end of May. In a Kansas City Star interview, Stilwell complained that the revolutionists were blowing up bridges and tearing up track. Villa also robbed the Orient’s payrolls, killed its employees, and wrecked its trains.

Investors stopped buying Mexican securities. The Orient ran out of money only two-thirds complete. The peasants began calling the railroad “El Kansado” (from cansado, “the tired one”). On March 7, 1912, the Orient went into receivership and Stilwell was again out of a job. One accountant observed that $28 million had been raised and spent on a railroad worth no more than $8 million as scrap. Virtually every dollar raised by Stilwell for the Orient had gone into its construction. He had simply underestimated his expenses and operating profit. He later argued that even if the stockholders lost $20 million, the West and Mexico saw $250 million in increased property values. This is not what the investors wanted to hear. The Orient alone represents one-tenth of all foreign investment lost during the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican government completed the line across the Sierra Madre only in 1961, at a cost of $88 million. Topolobampo remains a fishing town.

Stilwell and his wife moved to France. Now his energy flowed into writing. He wrote Cannibals of Finance: Fifteen Years’ Contest with the Money Trust (1912). Stilwell never admitted responsibility for his failures. He even justified the Orient: a sound idea, honestly financed, with great potential. It was not his fault that crops failed, the Mexican Revolution broke out, and the money trust’s machinations cut off the railroad’s credit. (One hears the same thing from today’s dotcom promoters, who blame their investors for refusing to pour yet more money into unprofitable schemes.)

Stilwell’s writings reflected an increasing interest in the occult. His introduction to his novel The Light that Never Failed, a title that owes something to Kipling, alleged all his schemes-real estate promotions, railroads, coal mines, seaports, ship canals, trust companies-resulted from visions and plans received from the spirit world through messengers he called “brownies.” The faintly favorable reviews of the novel were inconsequential beside the massive publicity focused on the brownies. He would later claim to have foreseen World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the return of the Jews to Palestine. Apparently, no one asked why he had not foreseen the Mexican Revolution. One can only imagine what the Orient’s investors felt at learning their railroad had been the stuff that dreams are made of.

In 1922, the Stilwells returned to the United States. They lived in a luxurious apartment at 305 West End Ave. On September 26, 1928, Arthur Stilwell died after a brief illness. Two weeks later, Jennie Stilwell stepped from a window of their twelfth-floor apartment. She left a note to her sister-in-law: “I must go to Arthur.” Some claim he died worth about $1,000. As he had requested, his body was cremated and the ashes flung to the four winds.

New York Press, April 17, 2001

Sheridan’s Ride

Greenwich Village’s Sheridan Square is not named for Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who wrote The Rivals. The statue of General Philip Sheridan, for whom the square is named, is around the corner in Christopher Park. And the only nearby battle was the Stonewall Riot at 53 Christopher Street in June 1969. Sheridan’s statue, erected in 1936, is so poorly executed one might not know the subject without his name on the plinth. The sculptor was one of those of whom Hilaire Belloc observed, “We dream in fire and work in clay, and some of us puddle in butter with our toes.”

One can forgive bad public art if it is bad on a truly grand scale—the kind of stuff that Peter Fleming describes so well in Brazilian Adventure: “Victory has got a half Nelson on Liberty from behind. Liberty is giving away about half a ton, and also carrying weight in the shape of a dying President and a brace of cherubs. (One of the cherubs is doing a cartwheel on the dying President’s head, while the other, scarcely less considerate, attempts to pull his trousers off.) Meanwhile an unclothed male figure, probably symbolical, unquestionably winged, and carrying in one hand a model railway, is in the very act of delivering a running kick at the two struggling ladies, from whose drapery on the opposite side an eagle is escaping, apparently unnoticed. Around the feet of these gigantic principals all is bustle and confusion. Cavalry are charging, aboriginals are being emancipated, and liners launched. Farmers, liberators, nuns, firemen, and a poet pick their way with benign insouciance over a subsoil thickly carpeted with corpses, cannon balls, and scrolls.”

The works of Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) are—sadly—a cut above this. Her genius was for small, subtle, vivid animal sculptures, and she is not forgotten: the National Museum of Women in the Arts sells a reproduction of her Yawning Jaguar in genuine hydrostone for $99.99 online, shipping and handling extra. Huntington’s large sculptures combine her superb technique with overblown romantic bombast. She studied with Gutzon Borglum, whose megalomaniacal later works include Mount Rushmore and the Confederate monument on Stone Mountain, Georgia. (Borglum began what became the world’s largest bas-relief, three acres of Lee, Jackson, and Davis on horseback, all at least nine stories high.)

In 1923, Anna Hyatt married Archer Milton Huntington, who bankrolled the Hispanic Society of America. Understandably, then, her flamboyant El Cid Campeador dominates the society’s forecourt at Audubon Terrace, between 155th and 156th Streets. An admirer wrote, “The Cid gloriously bestrides his mount, he carries himself with exactly the flourish that is associated with his legend, and from the tips of his feet to the hand clenching the staff of his flaunting banner he is magnificently alive.” Mrs. Huntington added four statues of seated warriors about the base, surrounded by heraldic lions, stags, does, bears, jaguars, vultures, and wild boar, and then, energies unquenched, designed the bases of two nearby flagpoles, carved with “muscular men and frantic horses entangled in desperate struggle, kneeling monks and churchmen, and statuettes symbolic of the arts.” On the rear walls of the forecourt are equestrian bas-reliefs of Don Quixote and of Boabdil, Granada’s last Muslim king, who has reined up to turn and gaze at his lost city. On its base is engraved a verse by Mr. Huntington:

He wore the cloak of grandeur. It was bright
With stolen promises and colours thin,
But now and then the wind—the wind of night—
Raised it and showed the broken thing within.

Mrs. Huntington’s genius sometimes overwhelms. Yet if she had sculpted Sheridan’s statue in Christopher Park, we would recognize the subject. He is better represented in the bravura statue by Borglum at Massachusetts Avenue and 23rd and R Streets in Washington: having pulled up his warhorse Rienzi, Sheridan has turned in the saddle, hat crumpled in his gloved right hand, ready to roar out his orders and turn the tide at Cedar Creek.

Philip Henry “Little Phil” Sheridan, who never lost a battle, was short—about 5 feet 5 inches tall, with a long torso, stumpy legs, and, as Lincoln quipped, “such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping.” After eight years’ active duty, Sheridan was still a second lieutenant in 1861. Within a year he would be a general. Like most great American commanders of the past, he would be unwelcome in today’s Army, corrupted by Robert McNamara and his successors into a puddle of political correctness.

Sheridan was quick-tempered and blunt: West Point suspended him for a year after he assaulted a cadet officer with a bayonet and his fists. Ten years later, Major Generals Sheridan and George H. Thomas—the latter justly called the Rock of Chickamauga—were conferring in a day coach when a Southern railroad conductor spoke to Little Phil with “less than adequate respect.” Sheridan wordlessly rose, beat the conductor senseless, threw him off his own train, returned to his seat, and resumed the conversation, “no explanation given and none required.”

Yet Sheridan’s planning reflected a deliberate, thoroughly professional mind. He had been a quartermaster, one who marshals men and supplies, and the discipline took. His commands fought hard, but never without food, clothing, shelter, or ammunition.

Perversely, he became immortal for the day he was surprised. In the fall of 1864, Sheridan was campaigning in the Shenandoah Valley, transforming the breadbasket of the Confederacy into a wasteland, where “crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their own provender.”

Before dawn on October 19, 1864, the Confederate Army of the Valley, Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early commanding, fell upon Sheridan’s encamped army at Cedar Creek, Virginia. Like Sheridan, Early was tough, irritable and profane. Always outnumbered, always outgunned, he was audacious and imaginative. Three months before, he e had terrified the Union when he had reached the gates of Washington, having slipped his command through the Army of the Potomac. Now he had surprised Sheridan’s army and hoped to stop the campaign of destruction.

He shattered the Union’s left and center. The entire Eighth Corps, nine thousand strong, panicked and ran. The attack happened so quickly that a goodly number of federal troops fled in their underwear. The rebels were looting Sheridan’s tents as the sun rose over the Shenandoah Valley.

Little Phil was not there. He was returning from a conference in Washington. He had reached Winchester, Virginia, and Thomas Buchanan Read’s most famous poem, “Sheridan’s Ride,” begins there:

Up from the South at break of day,
Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,
The affrighted air with a shudder bore,
Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain’s door
The terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar,
Telling the battle was on once more,
And Sheridan twenty miles away.

When called at dawn on October 19, in Winchester, “twenty miles away,” Sheridan heard distant artillery fire. He thought it part of a reconnaissance in force he had ordered before departing for Washington. He stepped outside around 9 a.m. The guns seemed louder. He mounted his warhorse Rienzi and met his cavalry escort. Then, puzzled, he dismounted and put his ear to the ground. What the ex-Indian fighter heard was the continuous roar of full battle and the sound was approaching. His army was in retreat. Now he trotted forward. As he crested a rise, Sheridan suddenly saw, in Maj. George “Sandy” Forsyth’s words, “hundreds of slightly wounded men, throngs of others unhurt but utterly demoralized, and baggage-wagons by the score, all pressing to the rear in hopeless confusion.” He received reports as Rienzi walked forward at a measured pace. A conventional commander might have regrouped just outside Winchester, gathering stragglers into a defensive line. Instead, he ordered the stragglers collected and funneled back up the turnpike toward the front.

Then he spurred Rienzi toward the sound of the guns. At his right, an orderly carried Sheridan’s personal battle flag, bearing the two stars of a major general.

But there is a road from Winchester town,
A good broad highway leading down…
Every nerve of the charger was strained to full play,
With Sheridan only ten miles away.

It was a brilliant Indian summer morning. Rienzi stretched his legs, leaving most of the escort in the dust. The Newtown crossroads were jammed with supply wagons and caissons. Sheridan took Rienzi over the wall and into the fields.

Then, striking his spurs with a terrible oath,
He dashed down the line ’mid a storm of huzzas…

Sheridan thundered through the files of retreating men, most wounded only in their pride. He roared, “Come on back, boys, face the other way, we’ll give ’em hell, God damn them, we’re going to lick those fellows out of their boots,” among other things. A witness of Sheridan’s verbal skills wrote he “didn’t spare anybody in the bunch and included all their kinfolk, direct and collateral. It was a liberal education in profanity to hear him.” And it worked. Thure de Thurlstrup’s painting, Sheridan’s Ride, now at Brown University, shows Sheridan at full gallop, the pennant whipping in the breeze, as the stragglers stop, stare, begin cheering and turn around.

South of Newtown, he regained the road to find the Sixth Corps standing fast in line of battle. Not everyone had run away. General Alfred Torbert rode up, saluted, and said, “My God, I’m glad you’ve come.” Sheridan rode out before the troops, wheeled Rienzi and shouted, “Men, by God, we’ll whip them yet. We’ll sleep in our old tents tonight.” The men roared back. He found his three corps commanders conferring nearby. Brigadier General Emory murmured that his men were ready to cover the retreat. Sheridan spat his reply: “Retreat! Hell, I just got here!”

It was 10:30 a.m. His men hungry and exhausted, Early’s assault had bogged down. Major General John Brown Gordon, who had broken Sheridan’s left that morning, begged to renew the attack. Early replied, “This is glory enough for one day.” Sheridan brought up his reserves and regrouped. At noon, he rode the length of his own front, as biographer Roy Morris Jr. put it, “swinging his hat in his right hand to give the soldiers a glimpse of his familiar bullet-shaped head.” Their thunderous cheers rolled down the line with him. At 4 p.m., 200 Union buglers sounded the charge. Sheridan smashed into the Confederate left, turned it and then rolled up Early’s line. By 5:30 the fighting was over. Sheridan’s horsemen pursued the rebels into the night.

Cedar Creek was Sheridan’s greatest triumph. At 9 a.m., he was beaten; by sundown, he had driven the enemy from the field. Within a week, Read’s poem was a bestseller. The horse gets the best lines:

I have brought you Sheridan all the way
From Winchester, down to save the day!

“Sheridan’s Ride” was recited in high schools for nearly a century.

On April 1, 1865, Sheridan personally commanded the charge at Five Forks, leaping Rienzi over the rebel breastworks into, as Morris noted, “a group of astonished southerners like the angel of death,” forcing General Robert E. Lee from Richmond. On April 6, he forced six generals and 10,000 men to surrender at Sayler’s Creek. On April 8, he blocked Lee’s last line of retreat. Around 1 p.m. on April 9, Grant and Sheridan rode up to Wilmer McLean’s home at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, where Lee waited in the parlor.

The performance of Sheridan and his men during the first nine days of April 1865 is nearly unparalleled. As Grant said, “Sheridan has no superior as a general, either living or dead, and perhaps not an equal.” Little Phil was then 34 years old.

Rienzi died in 1878. Sheridan had his body preserved. Today, in the Smithsonian’s Hall of Armed Forces History, Rienzi stands, saddled as he was that golden October morning:

Here is the steed that saved the day
By carrying Sheridan into the fight,
From Winchester, twenty miles away!

New York Press, August 29, 2000

The Man Who Did Not Invent Baseball

Abner Doubleday,” baseball historian Harold Peterson wrote, “didn’t invent baseball. Baseball invented Abner Doubleday.” Even Ezra Warner’s Generals In Blue, the biographical dictionary of Union generals, says Doubleday is more famous “for the canard that he originated the game of baseball than his military career.”

Most Union generals were forgotten in

Abner Doubleday,” baseball historian Harold Peterson wrote, “didn’t invent baseball. Baseball invented Abner Doubleday.” Even Ezra Warner’s Generals In Blue, the biographical dictionary of Union generals, says Doubleday is more famous “for the canard that he originated the game of baseball than his military career.”

Most Union generals were forgotten in their lifetimes. We might not remember Custer were it not for the Little Big Horn. We would not remember Abner Doubleday save for an incident fourteen years after his death.

He was born on June 26, 1819, at Ballston Spa, New York, whose promoters believed it would become America’s Baden-Baden once the world knew of its alkali, sulphur, and warm springs, “good for the treatment of rheumatism, gout, liver trouble, blood ailments, dyspepsia, and even cancer.” Soldiering ran in the family. His grandfather fought for independence. His father, Ulysses Freeman Doubleday, had been mustered into the militia in the War of 1812 and was twice elected to Congress as a Jacksonian Democrat. Both of his brothers became colonels of volunteers in the War of the Rebellion.

Abner graduated from West Point in 1842. His classmates included seven future Confederate generals, including James Longstreet and Earl Van Dorn. Doubleday served in the Seminole and Mexican Wars without disgrace or distinction. In the spring of 1861, he was assigned to duty at Charleston, South Carolina. Apparently Captain Doubleday fired the first Union shot in reply to Confederate artillery fire at Fort Sumter.

The Union army in 1861 consisted of 1,098 officers and 15,259 enlisted men. There were only four generals. Within months, the army would explode to 2.5 million men. Generals were needed to command them and, as the history of the war indicates, sometimes anyone would do. Doubleday went from captain to brigadier general commanding a brigade of the First Corps, Army of the Potomac.

On the first day at Gettysburg, when Major General John Reynolds was shot dead from his horse by a rebel sniper, Doubleday took command. He fought competently throughout the day, maintaining his line in good order despite being pushed through Gettysburg to the low hills beyond. There, on orders from Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, he anchored his line on Seminary Ridge.

General George Meade, the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, had known Doubleday in the prewar army. As he lacked confidence in Doubleday’s initiative, Meade relieved him of command. He held no further field command and served on staff in Washington to the end of the war. In 1865, he was brevetted major general for his services and survived the postwar reductions of the army to become colonel commanding the 35th Infantry, from which he was retired in 1873.

Doubleday established San Francisco’s first cable car company. A good writer, he published Reminiscences of Fort Sumter and Moultrie in 1876 and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg in 1882. He died in Mendham, New Jersey, on January 26, 1893. He is buried at Arlington. His statue stands at Gettysburg. That is not why we remember him.

The word “baseball” does not appear in any of his diaries, memoirs, or articles. At least one historian speculates the word may never have passed Doubleday’s lips. Nonetheless, an egotistical sporting goods king made him baseball’s bastard father some fourteen years after his death.

The origins of baseball are obscure. It may have been based on rounders, an English schoolboys’ game, which may in turn be a form of cricket. It is mentioned as early as 1744 and described in some detail in the second edition of The Boy’s Own Book, published in 1828. There are many versions of this game, which has no official rules: the number of players on a side, the number of bases, the distance between them and so forth, varied from place to place. One consistent element was that fielders might put out a runner by hitting him with a thrown ball between bases. It has been summed up as “a pickup game that was played by children.”

Albert Goodwill Spaulding had been a pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings. From 1871 to 1875, he won 207 games and lost only fifty-six. He then became a manager, an executive, and finally a sporting goods manufacturer. Spaulding was a bigoted enthusiast. He believed baseball a purely American invention, innocent of foreign derivation, so when sportswriter Henry Chadwick published an article in one of Spaulding’s publications, The Baseball Guide of 1903, that baseball was based on rounders, Spaulding published a rebuttal in his 1905 Guide, calling for a commission to investigate baseball’s origins.

He selected his own commission. Its chairman, A.G. Mills, had been president of the National League; two members were U.S. senators. The research, if one can call it that, was performed by James Sullivan, a hack writer for Spaulding’s American Sports Publishing Co.. The commission received a letter from Abner Graves, an eighty-year-old retired miner in Denver. Graves claimed he had been a childhood playmate of Abner Doubleday. While living in Cooperstown in 1839, he had seen Doubleday directing a crowd of boys in a game with a limited number of players and distinct teams on each side.

“Doubleday called the game Base Ball,” he recalled, “for there were four bases in it. Three were places where the runner could rest free from being put out, provided he kept his foot on the flat stone base. The pitcher stood in a six foot ring. Anyone getting the ball was entitled to throw it at a runner between bases, and put him out by hitting him with it.”

His testimony was later “verified” by an object among his personal effects: a rotting baseball. Somehow, people assumed Doubleday must have touched it. Mills claimed to believe the letter, although he ignored Graves’s statement that Doubleday’s rules had permitted a player to put out a runner between bases by hitting him with a thrown ball. In fact, Mills claimed Doubleday had eliminated this practice.

The commission’s official report, dated December 30, 1907, recognized the General as the inventor of baseball. However, as Ralph Hickok writes, “…there were, and are, a lot of problems with the story.” There is no evidence Doubleday was ever in Cooperstown. He was educated in Auburn, New York. In 1839, he was at West Point, which then had no summer vacations. He never claimed to have invented baseball. He may never have seen a game. His obituary in The New York Times does not mention baseball. These facts were no problem for Spaulding. The commission’s report was accepted as gospel for decades.

In 1936, the baseball industry, the state of New York, and the village of Cooperstown began constructing the National Baseball Hall of Fame. It was scheduled to open in 1939, the centennial of Doubleday’s alleged invention of the game. The state put up signs along the roads declaring Cooperstown to be the birthplace of baseball. The post office even issued a commemorative stamp.

Amidst the commotion, one Bruce Cartwright wrote a letter of his own. He claimed his grandfather, Alexander H. Cartwright, a native New Yorker, had invented baseball in 1845 and provided his grandfather’s diaries to prove it.

Cartwright and some friends had been playing ball for a few years before they organized the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club on September 23, 1845. Cartwright and a friend, Daniel L. “Doc” Adams, drafted what became the first codified baseball rules. Fines were established for misconduct: profanity, 6¢; arguing with the umpire, 25¢; disobeying the team captain, 50¢.

To be sure, there were some differences. They caught the ball barehanded (it was much lighter and larger than today’s); there were no balls or strikes: the batter could stand at the plate all day until the pitcher threw the right kind of ball; and a ball caught on the first bounce was an out. The Knickerbockers played at least fourteen intraclub games before their first real match against “the New York Club” at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken. They lost, 23-1.

Other teams sprang up within months. By 1854, there were at least a half-dozen in the metropolitan area. By the late 1850s, more than 100 teams flourished in and around New York City alone. There were teams from Buffalo to Cleveland, Chicago, California, and even the Minnesota Territory.

Meanwhile, Cartwright left New York on March 1, 1849, for the California gold fields. He traveled overland and, as his descendant Alexander Cartwright IV has written, he “walked most of the way. He took a few balls and bats along with him on the excursion, and became a kind of baseball Johnny Appleseed, planting the seeds of the game across the land.”

He is said to have played with miners, storekeepers, Indians,and settlers at frontier towns and Army posts along the way. He hated California and left San Francisco within five days for the Sandwich Islands (now called Hawaii). He spent the rest of his life there, becoming a successful businessman and founding the Honolulu Fire Department (he was chief for nine years). He also taught the Hawaiians how to play baseball. He died in 1892. A street is named after him, as is Cartwright Field, a small ballpark, and there is a bronze plaque in his honor at Honolulu’s City Hall.

As the Hall of Fame was being built, Robert Henderson, a New York Public Library researcher with a passion for baseball, presented his own evidence that baseball was derived from rounders. Most commentators agree his evidence was conclusive. Besides, even the Cartwright claims rest in ambiguity: the Delhi, New York, Gazette for July 13, 1825 has a notice listing the names of nine men challenging any group in Delaware County to a game of baseball at the home of Edward B. Chace for $1 a game. There are references to some kind of organized sport called baseball in Rochester and Genesee, New York, by the 1820s. By the 1830s, there were organized baseball clubs in Philadelphia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. We do not know the rules by which they played, but the name is the same.

The Hall of Fame opened at Cooperstown in 1939. The so-called “Doubleday baseball” is still on exhibit. Baseball is the village’s biggest business, bringing some 350,000 visitors a year. Local merchants still promote the Doubleday legend. The annual Hall of Fame game is still played on Doubleday Field. As recently as 1995, Montrew Dunham published Abner Doubleday, Young Baseball Pioneer. Alexander Cartwright was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939 for his contributions to the game. Doubleday, who has a monument in the Hall itself, has never been inducted.

New York Press, July 25, 2000

The Commodore

In 1802, Uriah Phillips Levy ran away to sea at the age of ten. He returned two years later, as he had promised his mother, to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Then he was apprenticed to a Philadelphia ship owner. To Levy, it was life and death. A square-rigger has more than 200 ropes, each with a distinct name and function, and Levy had to know them all. To confuse a clew line with a halyard, or a lee brace with a weather backstay, could mean the end of the ship and everybody in her.

Within nine years, as Levy wrote, “I passed through every grade of service–cabin boy, ordinary seaman, able-bodied seaman, boatswain, third, second and first mates, to that of captain…” In 1809, while he was on shore leave in Tortola, a British press gang seized him. He was carrying his papers. However, a Royal Marine sergeant sneered, “You don’t look like an American to me. You look like a Jew.” Levy replied, “I am an American and a Jew.” “If the Americans have Jew peddlers manning their ships, it’s no wonder they sail so badly,” the Royal Marine replied. Levy hit him full in the face.

Hitting a Royal Marine in the face is almost invariably a mistake. When Levy came to in the brig of HMS Vermyra, the officer of the watch was shoving a New Testament at him and demanding he swear himself into the Royal Navy. Levy refused, saying, “I am an American and I cannot swear allegiance to your king. And I am a Jew, and do not swear on your testament, or with my head uncovered.” He somehow gained an audience with Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, who agreed his papers were valid and released him.

In 1811, at nineteen, he became master and part owner of the brig George Washington. He nailed a mezuzah outside his cabin door. When the United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812, Levy entered the U.S. Navy as a sailing master. Levy was captured when his ship was taken by a British warship. He was imprisoned at Dartmoor for sixteen months, during a winter so cold the Thames froze solid to the bottom. He learned French and fencing; he failed only in organizing a congregation among the prisoners for want of a minyan.

On his return, he was assigned to USS Franklin. At a ball in June 1816, Lieut. William Potter, an anti-Semite, bumped into Levy three times. Levy slapped Potter. Potter shouted, “You damned Jew!” Levy replied, “That I am a Jew I neither deny nor regret.” The next morning, Potter sent Levy a written challenge. On June 21, 1816 they met in a meadow in New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia. When asked if he had anything to say, Levy recited a Hebrew prayer. Then he suggested they abandon the matter as ludicrous. Potter called him a coward. “You’re a fool,” replied Levy, who was a crack shot.

They stepped off twenty paces. Potter shot and missed four times. Each time, Levy fired into the air. Potter fired a fifth time, nicked Levy’s ear, screamed, “I mean to have his life,” and began reloading. Perhaps sensing Potter might be finding his range, Levy then took aim for the first time that morning and squeezed the trigger. Potter was dead before he hit the ground.

Within a month, Levy had an argument with a Marine officer in the Franklin‘s wardroom, ending when the two men were separated after the Marine called Levy a damned Jew. Each was court-martialed for ungentlemanly and unofficer-like conduct, found guilty, and sentenced to be reprimanded by the Secretary of the Navy. It was the first of Levy’s six courts-martial. Nonetheless, on March 5, 1817, President Monroe signed Levy’s commission as a lieutenant. He was the second Jew to become a naval officer and would be the first to make the Navy his career. He was then assigned to duty in USS United States. Her captain, William Crane, wrote a letter to his superior officer finding Levy personally objectionable. Crane court-martialed Levy within the year for a petty infraction, sentencing him to be dismissed from the service; President Monroe ordered the decision reversed.

In USS Guerriere, Levy was court-martialed on February 12, 1819, for his language in rebuking another officer and sentenced to be dismissed from the service. Again, Monroe reversed the decision. In USS Spark, he was court-martialed on June 8, 1821 for calling another officer “a great many unsavory names.” This time he was sentenced to reprimand by his commanding officer.

After seven years in the Navy, he had been court-martialed four times, and he was not yet 30 years old. Despite his professional skill, efficiency, and courage, he was proud, arrogant and self-righteous. He was also a Jew with no tolerance for anti-Semitic insults. Last, he was a crusader for an unpopular cause: the abolition of flogging in the Navy.

Levy saw his first flogging on United States. A sailor had been sentenced to twelve lashes on each of three charges. After the man was tied to a grating, the boatswain took the first swing with a cat-o’-nine-tails. By the fifth stroke, the man’s flesh had opened. By the twelfth, his back was a mass of chewed flesh, and his blood dripped down onto the deck. After each stroke, the boatswain ran the cat’s tails through his fingers to comb out the bits of flesh clinging to the leather. After the twentieth blow, the boatswain took up a fresh cat. At the thirtieth lash, the sailor passed out. A bucket of salt water was splashed over his back and he received the final lashes.

Levy, utterly revolted, found it barbarous and degrading. He claimed it was also ineffective because it embittered rather than reforming the criminal. His fellow officers found this subversive to discipline. Thus, Levy became doubly a pariah.

Nonetheless, six years passed before his fifth court-martial, aboard USS Cyane. He was found guilty of using bad language and challenging two other officers to duels and sentenced to be “reprimanded publicly on the quarterdeck of every vessel of the Navy in commission, and at every Navy Yard in the United States.” In 1838, he was ordered to Pensacola to take command of USS Vandalia. The sloop barely floated and its officers and crew were a congregation of thieves, misfits and drunkards. Within six months, he rehabilitated the ship and her crew and took her to sea.

He abolished corporal punishment aboard Vandalia. Instead, he resorted to public humiliations. A man caught stealing was forced to wear a wooden sign lettered “Thief” and a man found drunk on duty would wear a bottle-shaped sign lettered “A Drunkard’s Punishment.” I was unable to find what he did in cases of sodomy.

Three years after taking Vandalia to sea, the Navy court-martialed him for his “cruel and scandalous” methods of punishment. The court-martial ruled that Levy be dismissed from the service. President John Tyler reportedly laughed aloud when he read the report. The President asked whether substituting such punishments for twelve strokes of the cat merited Levy’s dismissal from the service. He mitigated Levy’s sentence to one year’s suspension. Then he promoted Levy to captain.

Meanwhile, Levy’s real estate investments on Duane and Greenwich Streets in Manhattan made him a wealthy man. His means let him indulge his interests, including his admiration for Thomas Jefferson. In 1833, he commissioned a statue of Jefferson which now stands in the Capitol rotunda. His gift of a full-sized bronze copy is still in the Council chambers in New York City Hall. On May 20, 1836, he bought Jefferson’s home, Monticello, for $2,700. Levy would not let his hero’s mansion fall into ruin. He slowly restored each room, often repairing and rebuilding them himself, and recovered many of Jefferson’s original furnishings. When he was done, he opened the house to the public.

In 1855, Congress enacted the Naval Reform Act, largely to rid the Navy of superfluous officers. A board of fifteen senior officers met secretly to purge the Navy list. One of the victims was Levy, who was cashiered for “inefficiency.” Congress then amended the law to permit dismissed officers to present their cases before a board of inquiry. In November 1857, Levy had his hearing. A long string of officers testified against him: their vague, fact-free testimony failed to conceal their detestation of the Jew as well as the man. Levy presented thirteen active duty and nine retired naval officers, who testified to his competence, courage, and effectiveness. He then presented fifty-three character witnesses, including former secretary of the Navy and historian George Bancroft, governors, senators, congressmen, bank presidents, merchants, doctors, and editors. Bancroft confirmed Levy had been purged “because he was of the Jewish persuasion.” The hearing massively embarrassed the Navy.

On December 19, 1857, Levy began his testimony, which required three days. It was magniloquent: “My parents were Israelites, and I was nurtured in the faith of my ancestors.” He boomed on to his main theme: “I am an American, a sailor, and a Jew.” At the end, there was a moment’s silence before the explosion of the cheers, the hats flung in the air, the wild applause. On December 24, 1857 Levy was restored to active duty.

On Feb. 21, 1860, forty-three years after President Monroe had made Levy a lieutenant, President Buchanan gave him command of the Mediterranean Fleet. With command came the Navy’s highest rank: commodore. The American fleet and frigates from Sardinia and Russia boomed out a thirteen-gun salute in the harbor at La Spezia as the pennant bearing a single star ran up the main mast of his flagship, The USS Macedonian.

On July 14, 1860, the Commodore saluted the Stars and Stripes and walked down the gangplank for the last time. Yet his country had use for him: President Lincoln apparently suggested to Gideon Welles, the secretary of the Navy, that Levy’s unique experience of the military justice system should not be wasted. The old sailor’s last assignment has a distinctly Lincolnesque humor: president of the Naval Court-Martial Board.

In the late winter of 1862, Levy came down with pneumonia. He died in his house at 107 St. Marks Place on March 22, 1862. Four days later, after Rabbi Lyons of Shearith Israel conducted services at Levy’s house, the Navy paid him honor, if only to ensure he was dead. Six sailors shouldered his coffin down the stairs to the hearse. Three companies of Marines snapped to attention. USS North Carolina‘s band struck up the “Dead March” from Saul. Three captains and three lieutenants served as his pallbearers.

His will reflects his generosity and his vanity. He must have been proud of the clause that reads: “I give, devise, and bequeath my Farm and Estate at Monticello, in Virginia, formerly belonging to President Thomas Jefferson…to the people of the United States…” He also must have loved the clause that allocates funds for his monument in Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn: “A full length statue, in Iron or Bronze of the size of life at least, standing on a single Block of Granite sunk three feet in the ground, and in the full uniform of a Captain in the United States Navy, and holding in its hand a Scroll on which it shall be inscribed ‘Under this Monument,’ or ‘In Memory of’ Uriah P. Levy, Captain in the United States Navy, Father of the law for the abolition of the barbarous practice of corporal punishment in the Navy of the United States…”

The Navy’s official website for naval history includes Levy’s portrait in full dress. However, his career is not described.

New York Press, September 12, 2000

The Rights of Man: Tom Paine, Pt. 2

In 1789, two years after Thomas Paine’s return to Europe with a prospectus for a 500-foot long single span bridge (like all his business schemes, it was a nonstarter), the King of France called the Estates-General into session for the first time in nearly 200 years to increase taxes. Despite their limited agenda, the members publicly demanded greater reforms. In July, a Parisian mob seized an ancient fortress turned minor prison. The fall of the Bastille, though unimportant in itself, revealed to the world the French monarchy’s inability to maintain public order.

Paine, like most democrats, rejoiced at the events in France. Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament whom Paine knew well, did not. Intelligent, ambitious, a practical politician, Burke had been secretary to the Prime Minister and paymaster-general. Burke, who disdained ivory towers, elevated his pragmatism, which he called empiricism, to philosophy: “Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations.” Burke saw society as a living organism, infinitely complex in its relations, representing an exquisite balance of social forces resulting from centuries of effort, not to be trifled with. Thus, the French Revolution, its leaders ignorantly disdaining tradition in favor of untried philosophical abstractions at any cost, horrified him.

On November 1, 1790, Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France. More than a pamphlet, Reflections was perhaps the first modern conservative polemic. The Irishman attacked the revolution as puerile agitation for mindless radical change:

No difficulties occur in what has never been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition.

Paine replied in his Rights of Man. He hit hard, even dismissing Burke’s career thus: “As he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.” He contrasted Burke’s compassion for the King and Queen of France with his apparent indifference to the impoverished and tax-burdened French people: “He pities the plumage, and forgets the dying bird”; Paine denounced aristocracy as “a kind of fungus growing out of the corruption of society.”

The book was good journalism, too: Paine’s research into British government finances paid off in exposures of uncontrolled government spending on no-show jobs and luxuries for the royal court. A fact-based attack on profitable government corruption is more dangerous than any invocation of abstract liberty. Paine was indicted for offenses against the dignity of the Crown, having suggested that George III who periodically went mad was barely competent to be a constable.

The French Republic had granted honorary citizenship to Paine and other American revolutionaries for their services to liberty. At the French elections in September 1792, four constituencies elected Paine to the National Convention. He had not known of his nomination, let alone his election, and did not speak French.

At a gathering later that month, William Blake, poet and visionary, drew Paine aside and told him not to return home. The literature suggests Blake, who often saw angels and demons, had foreseen Paine’s impending arrest. Paine took his advice and left for Dover, whence he sailed for France some twenty minutes before a dusty king’s messenger galloped up with the warrant. The convention seated him amidst wild applause.

It soon faded. King Louis XVI had been deposed and then indicted and tried for treason. The radicals sought death. Paine, who loathed violence, argued for imprisonment and exile. Translator in tow, Paine energetically lobbied his colleagues and even opposed the death penalty in a brief, carefully memorized speech in French. Despite the radicals’ strength, deputy after deputy rose, admitting they voted with Paine because they believed him incorruptible, disinterested, and humane. Paine lost by one vote. When he attempted to overturn the sentence, Paine, with prepared remarks in his translator’s hands, stood nearly alone to plead for the King’s life. He argued the republic should not stain its hands with blood and recalled that Louis had helped America shake off the “tyrannical yoke of Britain.” However, with Paine’s first words, the demagogue Jean-Paul Marat, self-proclaimed “Friend of the People,” rose and bellowed that Paine spoke as a Quaker, not as a revolutionary.

Paine was a political animal: one of those for whom politics alone is the breath of life. He could schmooze brilliantly, and even after opposing the King’s death he successfully lobbied the French government to release detained American sailors, ships, and cargoes. This irritated the American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris. (Morris, a politician by occupation, was an amorist by avocation. Legend has it he had lost one leg in love’s cause: as the wife of an acquaintance entertained Morris on the second floor of her house, her husband prematurely returned. Morris climbed naked through the bedroom window, slipped, fell into the courtyard and broke his leg. Gangrene ensued, requiring amputation.)

Morris apparently viewed his appointment as a sinecure, providing an income sufficient to satisfy his needs, and did not overexert himself. Paine, finding Morris useless, asked him, “Do you not feel ashamed to take the money of the country and do nothing for it?” Morris would make him pay for the remark. Toward the end of 1793, as the revolution moved further left, Maximilien Robespierre’s new government imprisoned Paine as an oppositionist. Morris did nothing. He convinced President Washington that he had done everything possible for Paine. He even falsely advised Robespierre that Paine was not an American citizen.

While imprisoned, Paine wrote The Age of Reason, a secular analysis of the Bible. Paine was a deist. He acknowledged a divine creator, yet discarded organized religion and its theology in favor of a “natural morality” or “religion of nature,” a code of beliefs and conduct founded on the “repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and disposition to good ones.” Paine found the notion of the Bible as the Word of God blasphemous: “When I see throughout the greatest part of this book scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices, and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonor my Creator by calling it by his name.” The Old Testament was filled with “obscene stories and voluptuous debaucheries.” The New Testament was internally inconsistent. Christianity was “a system…very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears.” St. Paul was “a manufacturer of quibbles.” The Book of Revelation required a revelation to explain it. Tales of miracles, instead of proving a system of religion true, merely showed it fabulous.

Happily for Paine, as Hesketh Pearson noted, “not all miracles were fabulous.” When a jailer marked Paine’s cell door for death, it had been momentarily open, flush against the wall. When closed, the mark was inside the cell. Thus, “the destroying angel passed by.” In August 1794, James Monroe became the American minister. He won Paine’s release and cared for him in his own home.

The Age of Reason, published shortly after his release, garnered its author widespread denunciation as atheist and blasphemer, from critics who obviously had not read the book. Paine returned to the United States after Thomas Jefferson became president. When he reached New York City in March 1803, his supporters hailed him with a formal dinner at the City Hotel. On moving to the New Rochelle farm granted him after the American Revolution, Paine found that his neighbors shunned and insulted him in public, local preachers denounced him from their pulpits, and the local paper vilified him. Paine leased the farm and largely remained in the city. He had begun drinking heavily during the French Revolution and now lived on bread and rum, often skipping the bread.

At the elections of 1806, Paine went to vote in New Rochelle, which remained his legal residence. The election inspectors held that as neither Gouverneur Morris nor President Washington had claimed him as an American during his imprisonment in France, the United States had determined he was not a citizen. The author of Common Sense was turned away from the polls. Worse, when he sued, his case was dismissed. He asked Jefferson to help him. Apparently, there was no response.

Thereafter Paine lived here, moving from 85 Church Street to 63 Partition Street (now Fulton Street) in 1807 and to 309 Bleecker in 1808. He wrote prolifically for two newspapers, The American Citizen and the Public Advertiser. In old age, his vanity, fueled by a sense of being “the neglected pioneer of a successful revolution,” made him nearly unbearable. He became uncouth: his body odor was “absolutely offensive and perfumed the entire apartment.”

Nearly crippled by gout, Paine drank even more to deaden the pain of his body and his loneliness. Strokes left him an invalid. He became incontinent, with bedsores infected by the urine he involuntarily passed in bed.

Religious fanatics broke into his rooms to seek his deathbed conversion. Finally, in May 1809 he begged Marguerite Bonneville, the wife of his French publisher, to care for him. She rented a house for Paine at 59 Grove Street, adjoining her own. There he died on June 8, 1809. He had asked to be buried among the Quakers: even they rejected him. Two days later, he was buried on his farm. Madame Bonneville and her son; Wilbert Hicks, an old friend; and two black men who had not known Paine but wanted to honor him for his opposition to slavery were the only persons at the graveside. Neither France nor the United States sent a representative.

In 1817, an English admirer of Paine’s, teh radical journalist William Cobbett, landed in New York. A a vigorous, blunt, self-educated John Bull of a man with an undeferential damn-your-eyes attitude toward authority, Cobbett had left England under threat of arrest. The Americans’ disdain of Paine amazed him. He dreamed of raising money among radicals in England to build there a mausoleum for Paine’s body. Cobbett persuaded Madame Bonneville to permit exhumation. When Cobbett returned to England in 1819, Paine’s body went with him.

The money was never raised. Paine’s remains were lost and never found.

New York Press, February 20, 2001