Author: William Bryk

Wilson Mizner, Champion Wiseacre

Much to my embarrassment,” Wilson Mizner admitted, “I was born in bed with a lady.” His second passion was theft. One of his few heroes, Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith, the criminal boss of Skagway during the Gold Rush of 1898, observed, “When I see anyone looking in a jewelry store window thinking how they would like to get away with the diamonds, an irresistible desire comes over me to skin them.” Mizner never resisted such desires.

His third passion was the wisecrack. Mencken called him “the sharpest wit in America since Mark Twain” and said that he spun off more jests, as casually as a man tossing away a cigarette butt, than any other citizen of the United States. Our loss is that, as John Burke, one of his biographers, wrote, “many of his best quips vanished into a bellow of laughter…and a swirl of cigar smoke and whiskey fumes.”

Still, a few survived:

“I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.”

“A fellow who tells you that he’s no fool usually has his suspicions.”

“If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you copy from two, it’s research.”

“A dramatic critic is a guy who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.”

“The difference between talking out of turn and a faux pas depends on the kind of bar you’re in.”

“I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your effort to believe it.”

“I can judge a man by what he laughs at.”

“I never saw a mob rush across town to do a good deed.”

“Hollywood almost made a good picture once, but they caught it just in time.”

Mizner had great presence: he was six feet, three inches tall, over two hundred pounds, and impeccably tailored (he patronized Bullock & Jones of San Francisco, whom he stiffed). He had left home at seventeen, twelve years before his 1905 arrival in New York. After playing piano in a whorehouse, he landed in the medicine show business. Dr. Silas Slocum, creator of Doc Slocum’s Elixir, needed a talker to reel off learned-sounding phrases in Latin. “Let’s hear you speak a piece of it,” Slocum commanded. Mizner thundered a string of Spanish curses and obscenities, picked up while his father was American minister to Guatemala. “You’re hired,” the doctor declared.

In 1898, Mizner headed for the Klondike with his girlfriend, Rena Fargo. A brunette singer and dancer, Rena proved useful among a horde of men deprived of female company. Guys would do things for her that they wouldn’t do for Wilson.

Mizner went to Alaska to prospect among the miners’ pockets. He believed the providers of essential services such as whores, pimps, dive keepers, madams, and gamblers, were far more likely to strike it rich. He became a faro dealer. He knew something about cards. (An assistant district attorney once asked how long he had been playing chemin de fer. “Since infancy,” Mizner replied.) Rena, pretending to be a stranger, had amazing runs of luck at his table.

“Once,” Mizner said, “I dealt the coldest of decks involving just fifty-two aces and I have never set eye on a more larceny-haunted set of faces than those before me when they picked up their cards. They were like gents with an uncomfortable chaw of tobacco at a funeral. Each one began a mental race to determine how to keep calm and get rid of the extra ace…Each one figured it was an imperfect pack, but the only interest was not in correcting it, but in making it work, once.” They all bet furiously then one-by-one discarded and drew. “As each one discovered he had drawn an ace,” Mizner continued, “I was afraid my appendix would burst, but I did not move a line of my conniving face. Every one of them believed he had picked up his own discard. Hope would not die.” They laughed—a little too heartily—when they realized they had been had.

Eventually, the time came to depart from the North: the local paper now had a society column and the red lights no longer blazed like fireflies on a July night. Lace curtains had gone up and signs like Ye Olde Whore Shoppe had come down.

His brother, Addison, had broken into New York society as a fashionable architect. Harry K. Thaw’s murder of Stanford White left a place Addison hoped to fill. (Addison himself was no slouch in the field of carnal recreation, and at least commentator observed, “Thaw shot the wrong architect.”) At a horse show, Wilson found Addison amid his friends from the Four Hundred.

“Where are you stopping, now that you’re in town?” Addison asked.

“In a cathouse at Broadway and Forty-second Street,” Wilson boomed truthfully. “I just sit there all day reading my beloved books and smoking opium.”

Wilson met Myra Yerkes, the estranged wife of Charles Tyson Yerkes, the traction magnate. Thanks to peroxide, she was still blonde. Her mansion, modeled after a Roman villa, was furnished in Imperial Bad Taste. She had the social style of a steam calliope.

Mr. Yerkes died in December 1905 before he could divorce Myra, and she married Wilson in January 1906. It lasted six months. Addison called to find Wilson lying on a rococo bed once owned by King Ludwig of Bavaria, wearing long woolen underwear and rolling a brown paper cigarette. “Why did you do it?” Addison inquired. “The service is good here,” said Wilson. He rang a bell and his valet, a former Barbary Coast bouncer, entered bearing a silver salver. On it were two whiskies, one for Addison and one for the valet, and a loaded hypodermic containing a soupcon of morphine to ease the pain of being a rich woman’s consort.

Myra paid Wilson’s bills but refused him folding money. She even hired detectives to keep him from stealing. (“It’s a damned unpleasant experience to be stopped by two Pinkertons when you’re walking out of your own house with a lard can full of jewels.”).

Yerkes had left his paintings to the city of New York. The city government, aware of Mizner’s reputation, let him know he would be personally responsible for any missing paintings. Mizner understood New Yorkers couldn’t resist a bargain in hot merchandise. After putting a small army of starving artists to work copying the masterpieces in Yerkes’s collection, Mizner set up the Old Masters’ Art Society at 431 Fifth Avenue. Then he circulated the rumor that “a bargain in genuine old masters was available to anyone who didn’t mind owning something which nitpickers might classify as stolen property.”

He never claimed the works on sale in his gallery were originals. Only his confidential manner, conspiratorial tone, and frequent glances out the shop window indicated the purchaser was joining a plot against the city treasury. He even managed to sell several copies of the Mona Lisa. A few years later, he would revive the gallery, but by then there was too much competition. He was outraged when forced to sell Leonardo’s The Last Supper for $65. (“I’ll be damned if I sell it for less than five dollars a plate.”)

After his divorce, he managed the Rand Hotel, which catered to crooks, whores, pimps, kept women and their keepers, and the card sharps working the Atlantic liners.

The card sharps were extraordinary. Even Mizner couldn’t beat them. Once, he spread out a hand containing four queens, “which had come into his possession by no accident.” His opponent, of whom Damon Runyon later said, “If you give him a box of soda crackers he can deal you four of a kind,” displayed four kings. “You win,” Mizner said, “but those are not the cards I dealt you.”

Mizner required his guests to observe a few simple rules: “No opium smoking in the elevators…Guests must carry out their own dead…Guests jumping out of windows will try to land in the net placed around the third floor.” A story in the New York Morning Telegraph said, “If a man named Butler or Francis subscribed himself as ‘Harrison’ on the register, Mr. Mizner never gruffly called his attention to the error, but with the courtliness of the old school affected not to notice it.”

Mizner then worked on Broadway. In 1909, with George Bronson Howard, he created The Only Law, perhaps the first hard-boiled play. A year later, he met Paul Armstrong, another graphomaniac. They squabbled over Mizner’s work habits and Armstrong’s plagiarism (after listening to the eulogy at Armstrong’s funeral, Mizner said, “If Paul was up and about, he’d say that speech was his.”) Yet their creations, The Deep Purple, The Ocean Greyhound, and Alias Jimmy Valentine, were all highly profitable.

Mizner’s companions created a number of informal societies out of their friendships. These included the Correspondence School of Drinking—which had as its slogan, “Learn to Cirrhose Your Liver in Six Easy Lessons”—and the Forty-second Street Country Club, where lifting a shot glass or a sucker’s wallet was an athletic event. Mizner claimed that the Club had nine holes. The first hole was an iron drive into the back room of George Considine’s Buffet. There were succeeding holes at Rector’s, Shanley’s, and Churchill’s, with the long fifth up to Pabst’s at Columbus Circle, where a flag was tied to the cash register, followed by a short pitch to Reisenweber’s, a magnificent straightaway to the Plaza bar, a dog’s-leg to Roger’s Restaurant on Sixth Avenue, and a short ninth into Jack’s, at Sixth Avenue and Forty-Third Street. Few finished the course, but a couple of foursomes started off every week.

He was fond of the Hong Kong flute, i.e. the opium pipe. In 1900, you could buy narcotics without a prescription over the counter of a drug store. Patent medicines containing opiates in some form were offered for relief of headaches, female troubles, general aches, various pains, and “that tired feeling.” Famously, even Coca Cola had a little cocaine blended in the original, true recipe. Mizner also used other poppy by-products. One winter’s night, when he was presiding over a faro game in a hotel, a newcomer entered, shaking the snow off his fur collar. Mizner turned to the bellhop. “Boy,” he said, “take my nose and hang it out the window.”

Later, he graced the Florida real estate boom, where, in the litigation that followed its collapse, he testified: “I did not tell this man that he could grow nuts on that land,” Mizner explained, “I told him he could go nuts on that land.”

And, when the time came to make like the faithful and depart, taking his ancient Packard limousine, he went to Hollywood, where he became a non-writing screenwriter.

He collaborated on Little Caesar and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. When Anita Loos, who loved him, wrote the screenplay for San Francisco, she based the antihero Blackie, played by Clark Gable, on Mizner and his “insouciance and illicit charm.”

He became the resident wit at the Brown Derby, “touching the cigarette of wit to the thin skins of the self-impressed.”

According to Edward Dean Sullivan’s The Fabulous Wilson Mizner, Wilson once appeared at a floodlit premiere driving a battered and rachitic Model T. “What shall I do with your, uh, car, sir?” asked one of the magnificently clad doormen. Mizner handed him a bill of sale. “Do with it?” Wilson bellowed. “That’s not my car. It’s yours. I’m giving it to you. And you can do with it whatever you like.”

On his deathbed in 1933, asked if he wanted a priest, Mizner replied, “Bring me a priest, a minister, and a rabbi. I want to hedge my bets.”

To this day, people are still stealing his best lines. He would have enjoyed that.

New York Press, January 6, 1999

Napoleon’s Older Brother

On August 19, 1815, the Commerce, an American brig of 200 tons, Captain Misservey commanding, raced through the Narrows under full sail after outrunning two British frigates in the lower Bay.  Someone—Misservey never said who—had paid him 18,000 francs in gold to depart immediately from Bordeaux for New York, and

On August 19, 1815, the Commerce, an American brig of 200 tons, Captain Misservey commanding, raced through the Narrows under full sail after outrunning two British frigates in the lower Bay.  Someone—Misservey never said who—had paid him 18,000 francs in gold to depart immediately from Bordeaux for New York, and some say the ship had sailed without receiving her cargo of cognac.

On July 24, she had made an unscheduled stop off Royan, at the mouth of the Gironde.  That night, several passengers boarded from an open boat.  Misservey did not examine their papers closely, including those of the dignified middle-aged man called the Comte Surviglieri. Under the circumstances, perhaps ignorance was best.

Napoleon Bonaparte, second son of a Corsican notary with noble pretensions, who within twenty years had gone from receiving a lieutenant’s commission to crowning himself Emperor of the French, had made his last play. On March 1, Napoleon had escaped from Elba; nineteen days later he had entered Paris in triumph. Within weeks, he had raised an army against the European powers (they had proclaimed him an outlaw—literally, “one beyond the protection of the law,” a man whose murderer would go unpunished), and taken the field by June 12.

He had not quite the Grand Army that had triumphed from Lisbon to the walls of Moscow, but it had him. He was in Belgium within three days. On June 16, the forces under his personal command smashed the Prussians at Ligny. If he struck swiftly, smashing his enemies one by one before they could unite… After all, he had done it before.

The luck ran out. On June 18, sick and worn out, he fought the British and the Dutch at a Belgian hamlet, little more than some buildings by the road, called Waterloo. At the last he sent the Imperial Guard up the hill, drums rolling, and they broke, and night and the Prussians came, and it was over.

Many had compromised themselves during Napoleon’s two decades in power. Some went to the wall. Others, like the man who called himself the Comte Surviglieri, went into exile. He took rooms in Mrs. Powell’s boarding house just off City Hall Park, on Park Place, west of Broadway, under the name “Monsieur Bouchard.” The New York Evening Post reported rumors of the arrival of a mysterious Frenchman.

One afternoon, the gentleman who now called himself Monsieur Bouchard strolled down Broadway.  Another Frenchman, an ex-grenadier who had served with the imperial armies in Spain, was walking up. The veteran glanced at Bouchard, who gazed back with polite reserve. Then the old soldier fell to his knees, bawled out “Majesty,” and kissed the hands of Bouchard, whom he had recognized as His Most Catholic Majesty Jose I, King of Spain and of the Indies.

That had been merely one of the lives of Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother.

Joseph had been born in 1768 at Ajaccio—the capital of Corsica—and, after realizing he did not have a calling to the priesthood (neither celibacy nor chastity ran in that family), earned a law degree at the University of Pisa and returned to Corsica to practice law.

For all its sound and fury, the French Revolution—which began as Joseph completed his studies—had involved merely the violent substitution of one elite for another, accompanied by a massive transfer of wealth to the new class. In the politics of their time, the Bonapartes were extreme leftists, a pose that proved most profitable: Napoleon was a general by the age of 25; Joseph was elected mayor of Ajaccio in 1790 and then a deputy to the National Assembly.

But Joseph understood which Bonaparte was in charge. A wealthy, powerful uncle, on his deathbed, said to him: “You, Joseph, are the eldest, but Napoleon is the real head of the family. Never forget it.”

Neither man did. After 1795, no one did.  As head of the family, Napoleon devoted considerable effort to placing his brothers in good, high-paying jobs.  He placed Joseph with the army in a clerical post paying 6,000 francs a year. At this time, Joseph met the girl of his dreams. Julie Clary was short and horse-faced; she was also kindhearted, intelligent, and heiress to her father’s fortune; and she adored Joseph Bonaparte. In its own way, their marriage was a success: they had two daughters; she would become a queen; and she would be with him at the end.

In 1797 he served as French ambassador to the Papal States, insisting on a salary of 60,000 gold francs. (The paper franc had become wildly inflated; the gold franc was worth 75 paper francs in 1794, 2,000 in 1795 and 80,000 in 1798.) All the while, Joseph was making a fortune through commodities speculation, using insider knowledge from his brother.

In 1799, Napoleon overthrew the Republic, instituting a military dictatorship.  Five years later, in 1804, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon emperor. As Napoleon then had no son, Joseph was nominated as his heir, proclaimed a prince of the empire, appointed Grand Elector (the emperor’s representative in the Senate), and given the Luxembourg Palace as his residence. Joseph being Joseph, he held out for an annual allowance and expense account totaling more than 1.3 million gold francs. Around this time, Napoleon complained of him and of his other brothers, “…my brothers are nothing without me; they are great only because I have made them great.”

On December 2, 1804, Napoleon’s coronation was held at Notre Dame. Before setting out for the cathedral, Napoleon took  Joseph by the arm and whispered, “If our father could see us!” In Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the ceremony, Joseph appears at the extreme left, dressed in a white silk tunic and a flame-colored, ermine-lined mantle, wearing a velvet hat with turned-up brim and ostrich plumes.

In 1806, Napoleon had Joseph proclaimed King of Naples, where he proved quite popular. Two years later, in May 1808, Napoleon invited the Spanish royal family to visit him in France, at Bayonne, just beyond the northeastern-most border of Spain. That they accepted the invitation is proof that brains had been bred out of them. They found a large French army at the Spanish border and a genial emperor who firmly suggested the abdication of King Charles IV and his son, King Ferdinand VII, in favor of Joseph. Proof that courage, too, had been bred out of the Spanish royals is that both men signed the papers. It is as if a corporate executive was being transferred from one division to another.

Initially, Joseph seems to have been persuaded by his brother’s propagandists that the Spanish people wanted him. He found they loathed him as a foreigner. Within days, Madrid was torn by riots put down by French troops, which Goya’s brush would make immortal.

Joseph found the streets empty and the windows barred against him. The only persons who welcomed him were soldiers of the French occupying armies and collaborators on the French payroll. The Spanish nationalist propaganda painted Joseph as a monster, a lecher and a drunk-Pepe Botellas (Joey Bottles), the Intrusive King. The Spanish resistance would cost millions of francs and hundreds of thousands of lives. It would bleed the French Empire to death.

If intentions were realities, Joseph would have been a good king. He was kindly and affable, and enough of an old Revolutionary to decree constant social improvements: universal suffrage, representative bodies in local, provincial and national governments, and universal free education for boys and girls (the latter was truly revolutionary in Spain). Today, the Prado, Spain’s greatest museum, quietly admits that King Jose founded it by decree in 1809.

But despite his uniforms and medals, Joseph had never commanded troops in battle. Only in 1812, when Napoleon shifted his first-rate military talent from Spain to the Russian campaign, did Joseph become supreme commander of imperial forces in Spain. The result was a succession of disasters, the loss of Madrid and the final, grotesque defeat on June 21, 1813, at Vitoria.

Joseph commanded some 57,000 men and more than 150 guns. His Anglo-Spanish opponents would have to ford the River Zadorra to advance against him. But the King neither ordered the river bridges burned nor even create a plan of battle, being distracted by one of his mistresses.

The British broke through the French lines. Around 1 p.m., the King ordered a general retreat. Neither he nor his staff had planned for an orderly withdrawal, as any competent commander might have done.  Thus, his soldiers simply turned and ran.  A British cavalryman, Capt. Windham of the 14th Light Dragoons, galloped alongside Joseph’s coach and fired his pistols into its near window. The Intrusive King extruded himself from the other side and, as a guard stopped a bullet that had been meant for him, leapt onto a gray, clapped spurs to its sides, and rode for his life.

In her biography of Wellington, Elizabeth Longford describes how the victorious British were distracted by loot. “It was as nothing the world had seen since the days of Alexander the Great: 151 cannon, just on two million cartridges, immense quantities of ammunition.” The French army’s payroll, some $5 million, had arrived at Vitoria just before the battle. Nearly all of it vanished, probably into British pockets.

Joseph also lost his state papers, his private correspondence (including some interesting love letters that provided general amusement when published), and the crown and regalia of a king of Spain. His large silver chamber pot was taken as a trophy of battle by Captain Windham’s regiment, now the King’s Royal Hussars, which nicknamed it “The Emperor.” For nearly two centuries, the regiment has required distinguished visitors at its mess dinners to use the pot for drinking toasts in champagne, after which it is placed ceremoniously on the visitor’s head.

Joseph and 55,000 men sprinted over the Pyrenees to France, as well as some 12,000 Spanish families—collaborators who followed him into exile. Napoleon ordered him to his estate at Mortefontaine, where he passed his time in playing music, shooting, boating, sulking, and fornication. At last, Joseph was appointed lieutenant general of France, the traditional title of a protector of the realm, with responsibility for the defense of Paris. Naturally, Joseph surrendered Paris to the Allies nearly without a shot. Upon Napoleon’s first abdication, he exiled himself to Switzerland.

When Napoleon returned from Elba, Joseph returned to Paris (after burying five million francs’ worth of uncut diamonds on his estate). Amazingly, he was appointed prime minister. It is unclear whether he did anything during his brief tenure. After Waterloo, as the imperial regime collapsed about him, he rejoined Napoleon at Rochefort, while  Joseph’s agents had chartered the Commerce to transport them to America.

A few days before his arrival at Rochefort, Joseph had been mistaken for Napoleon, arrested, and then released. Now, Joseph offered to remain, impersonating his brother while Napoleon sailed for America. Whether Napoleon thought this beneath an emperor’s dignity or resisted owing Joseph a favor is unclear. He refused and surrendered to the British, believing they would grant him asylum in England. He was wrong. Two months later, they landed him at the island of St. Helena, 1,200 miles off the Angolan coast, where he remained a prisoner until his death in 1821. In 1818, Joseph financed a substantial attempt to rescue Napoleon. As one might expect from anything to which Joseph lent his talents, it failed.

Once Joseph’s presence in New York was exposed, the press lionized him as an heroic figure of the Napoleonic adventure, a version of events with which he happily agreed.  Joseph spent seventeen happy years in America. He purchased Point Breeze, an estate near Bordentown, New Jersey, in the summer of 1816. He frequently entertained his neighbors, who found him polite, unpretentious, and kind. He imported the first company of ballet dancers seen in the United States. He was also denounced by the high-minded ladies of the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance for serving champagne at breakfast.

Queen Julie had remained in Europe and, despite Joseph’s frequent requests, never came to America with their daughters. But he did not lack for companionship. He kept one mistress at his hunting lodge in upstate New York—Annette Savage, a Quaker girl whom he had met in Philadelphia. Their daughter, Caroline, grew up to be a striking beauty and Joseph both gave her a dowry and paid for her wedding (one of the most elaborate ever seen in Watertown). Alas, her improvident husband lost everything and she ended up teaching French in Richfield Springs.  Joseph also maintained a principal mistress, Madame Sari, and fathered yet another child by Madame Lacoste, a Creole lady whom he was rumored to have bought from her husband.

Under Napoleon’s Law of Succession of 1804, Joseph would succeed to the imperial throne if Napoleon’s descent failed. In 1832, after Napoleon’s sole legitimate son died at Vienna, Joseph became the Bonapartist pretender. Later that year, after seventeen happy years in America, Joseph called on President Jackson to thank him for the hospitality of the American people.  He then returned to Europe, where he was reunited with Queen Julie, and yet again assumed a role his brother had created for him.

Joseph died in Florence in 1844 with Julie at his side, and by his express command was buried wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece, Spain’s oldest, most distinguished, and most noble order of chivalry. He had awarded it to himself.

New York Press, December 21, 1999

Big Bang on Wall Street

Around 11:55 a.m. on Thursday, September 16, 1920, an old single-top wagon, drawn by an elderly dark bay horse, plodded westward on Wall Street. It stopped about seventy-five feet from Broad, near the offices of J.P. Morgan & Co. at 23 Wall Street.

The day was lovely: clear and

Around 11:55 a.m. on Thursday, September 16, 1920, an old single-top wagon, drawn by an elderly dark bay horse, plodded westward on Wall Street. It stopped about seventy-five feet from Broad, near the offices of J.P. Morgan & Co. at 23 Wall Street.

The day was lovely: clear and blue with no humidity and a temperature of sixty-nine degrees. The stock market was up. In NYPD, Jim Lardner and James Repetto note that police presence was thin in the area that day. According to Sidney Sutherland’s “The Mystery of the Wall Street Explosion,” in Liberty magazine for April 26, 1930, much of the police force was on duty at a Brooklyn transit strike; some officers, including the one assigned to the Broad and Wall intersection, had been ordered “a few blocks north to help herd the paraders in a procession of colored folk.”

Trinity Church struck noon. The sidewalks filled with brokers, clerks and receptionists heading for lunch. At 12:01, a bomb of roughly 100 pounds of TNT, resting on the wagon floor above the left rear axle, exploded in “a blinding sheet of saffron-green light.” Five hundred pounds of fragmented sash weights piled about the bomb tore into the passersby like shrapnel. A nearby automobile flipped 20 feet into the air. Thousands of plate-glass windows shattered over a half-mile radius, their fragments tinkling from sill to ledge to pavement. A pillar of brownish-lemon smoke soared heavenward. Awnings twelve stories above street level caught fire.

The explosion blasted the façade of J.P. Morgan & Co. The bank’s windows burst inward in a blizzard of razor-sharp shards. Two metal fragments nicked the statue of George Washington on the Subtreasury steps. Thomas Joyce, the chief clerk, working at a window facing Wall St., died instantly.

Next door, the massive iron bars across the Assay Office’s windows bent. The Stock Exchange’s huge windows fell to the trading floor. Trinity Church trembled. Thirty people were killed instantly, some mere scarlet blots on the pavement. (Ten more would ultimately be added to the casualty list.) A woman’s head, still wearing a hat, stuck to 23 Wall’s façade. A messenger lay decapitated, a package of securities smoldering in his hand. An eyeless clerk, his feet blown off, tried to crawl. Two hundred lay wounded. One of the carthorse’s hooves lay in a pool of blood; a witness recalled how the pool had sparkled in the sunlight.

The terrified crowds now ran toward the shambles, even trampling the dead to see what had happened. On the floor of the Stock Exchange, where running is forbidden, the president strode to the rostrum and rang the gong to close the day’s trading. The Curb Exchange, whose brokers transacted business on the Broad Street sidewalk roughly 200 feet south of Wall, adjourned less formally when the brokers ran off.

Police and firemen then cleared the way for ambulances. Half a dozen officers, guns drawn, stood before the Assay Office and Subtreasury. Forty minutes after the explosion, federal troops from the Governor’s Island garrison  were double-timing into Wall Street, rifles loaded and bayonets fixed.

The horse had been torn to fragments; of the wagon and harness, as reported in Liberty, the cops gathered up “a few spokes, a strap or two, an armful of splinters and canvas, a piece of the shafts, an axle and hub cap, and a handful of bolts and nuts.” The NYPD reconstructed both horse and rig with the help of veterinarians, livestock experts, and wagon builders. Their description reads:

HORSE—Dark bay mare, fifteen and three-quarters hands, fifteen years, about 1,050 pounds, long mane and stubby foretop, clipped a month before, scars on left shoulder and white hairs on forehead.

SHOES—Hind shoes marked JHU and NOA, about half an inch apart. Front shoes had pads, circle in center reading ‘Niagara Hoof Pad Co., BISON, Buffalo, N.Y.’

HARNESS—Single set of heavy wagon harness, old and worn and frequently repaired. Turret rings originally of brass, one broken; the other silver mounted and evidently belonging originally to coach harness.

WAGON—Single top, capacity one and one-half tons, red running gear, striped black with fine white lines. Three-foot wheels on front; four and one-half on back, of Sarvant patent. Body 5 feet 6 inches high, 53 inches wide, about eight feet from ground to top of wagon.

Between the 11:30 and 11:58 mail collections, just before the explosion, someone had deposited crudely printed circulars in the post box at Cedar St. and Broadway. They read:

Remember we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you.

They were signed “American Anarchists Fighters.”

While the Secret Service and the nascent FBI chased Reds, the NYPD went to every sash-weight manufacturer and dealer in America to find the source of the shrapnel; they visited nearly 5000 stables in every town along the Atlantic seaboard to track the horse; they checked hundreds of wagon manufacturers and harness makers to identify the wagon.

According to Sutherland, the letters on the shoes symbolized the Journeymen’s Horseshoers’ Union and National Horseshoers’ Association: in effect, they bore the union label. More importantly, the blacksmith who made the shoes had been trained abroad. The police concentrated on immigrant farriers.

The De Grazia brothers ran a smithy at 205 Elizabeth Street. Dominick De Grazia identified the horseshoes. A detective had him make another pair. They were identical, “a defect in the anvil appearing on the top plates of both the sample shoes and those worn by the dead horse.”

Dominick said a man driving a horse and a wagon matching the police description had asked him to tighten a rear shoe. Noticing a slight crack in the hoof, the farrier suggested new shoes, which Dominick made and nailed to the hooves within 20 minutes. The De Grazias said the driver spoke with a Sicilian accent, was 25 to 30 years old, about 5-feet, 5-inches tall, and weighed about 165 pounds, with broad shoulders, deep chest, black hair and mustache, and soft, well-kept hands.

Dominick examined the hoof when the cops brought it from Bellevue’s pathological laboratories. He found the crack. There the trail ended. The NYPD examined ten tons of broken glass, analyzed steel fragments that might have contained the bomb, and reconstructed some twisted bits of tin into two five-gallon containers from the Atlas Can Company of Brooklyn. After searching the company’s records, the NYPD questioned all of Atlas’s customers. None identified the containers.

A small iron ball lightly struck a city street sweeper, standing four blocks from the explosion. The NYPD, finding a number engraved on the ball, identified it as the knob to a Victor military field safe manufactured in Cincinnati. The manufacturer’s records showed the safe’s initial delivery to the U.S. Army barracks at Jeffersonville, Indiana. An NYPD detective tracked the safe to Omaha, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., France, and Hoboken. There the trail ran out. The Army had not recorded the safe’s disposition, whether sold to a junk dealer or dumped in a vacant field.

Eyewitness descriptions of the driver conflicted. Most resemble the man seen by the De Grazias. He was also Jewish or Italian, an “East Side peddler” type, or a “greasy fellow.” One noted a broad Scots accent. He had as many ethnicities, religions, and modes of escape as eyewitnesses. Some saw two or three drivers.

NYPD detectives visited every garage in the metropolitan area to check the hours of departure and return and the errands of all vehicles, motor-driven or horse-drawn, on Sept. 16. Some eyewitnesses said the wagon was lettered EXPLOSIVES, DYNAMITE, or DU POWDER WORKS. Hercules Powder and Aetna Explosives had no vehicles carrying explosives that day in the city. Dittmar Powder’s wagon had not gone below 45th Street. Du Pont had sold its last horse-drawn powder wagon in 1918.

Edwin P. Fischer, a graduate of City College and New York Law School and a championship tennis player, was an occasional inpatient at mental hospitals. Two weeks before the explosion, he had told his tennis club’s caretaker that either “We” or “They” were blowing up Wall Street Fischer, then predicted a Wall Street explosion on September 16 to a stranger on a Hudson Tube train.

Between September 11 and 13, he mailed postcards from Toronto to friends and acquaintances advising them to get out of Wall Street as soon as the gong struck at 3 p.m. on Wednesday. On the morning of the 16th, Robert Pope, his brother-in-law, having heard of the postcards and concluded Fischer was having a breakdown, caught up with him in Niagara Falls. On learning of the explosion, Pope persuaded Fischer to see the police.

Fischer arrived at Grand Central wearing two business suits for warmth and tennis whites underneath in case he had a chance for a game. The police questioned him at Bellevue. He said he had received the messages “through the air.” Realizing Fischer was merely demented, the cops soon released him to the Amityville Asylum, from which he emerged after two months. The warnings are otherwise unexplained.

The feds and the NYPD arrested or interrogated thousands of suspects, such as Florean Zelenska, a Romanian who possessed radical literature and had worked for a gunpowder company. They questioned Alexander Brailovsky because he was of Russian extraction and “said to be a Trotsky-Lenin agent.” Wolfe Linde, a radical turned stool pigeon, was reported near Wall and Broad on the morning of September 16. He disappeared to Warsaw. Several detectives brought him back. His alibi was perfect.

The NYPD had linked Pietro Angelo to the Gimbel Brothers bomb plot of April 1919. Mail bombs addressed to national figures in packages with Gimbel’s return address were detected when held for insufficient postage. Angelo’s alibi for September 16, 1920, was perfect. Nonetheless, the United States deported him to Italy, where he tossed a bomb into the crowd at an opera, killing thirty-nine.

The NYPD gave up around 1940. The north façade of 23 Wall Street, with its scars up to an inch deep, is unrepaired. John Brooks quoted an old Morgan partner: “There’s no particular feeling of martyrdom in leaving them there. It’s the practical thing to do. After all, replacing those great blocks would be inordinately and unnecessarily expensive. And besides, it’s right and proper that they should stay there.”

New York Press, March 6, 2001

Our Dear Queen

The Royal Governors of the Province of New York, the men who ruled here in the names of Britain’s kings and queens before the Revolutionary War, are forgotten. Place-names recall some. Fort Tryon Park bears the last royal governor’s name. Staten Island’s Dongan Hills commemorates Col. Thomas Dongan

The Royal Governors of the Province of New York, the men who ruled here in the names of Britain’s kings and queens before the Revolutionary War, are forgotten. Place-names recall some. Fort Tryon Park bears the last royal governor’s name. Staten Island’s Dongan Hills commemorates Col. Thomas Dongan, who granted the Charter of Liberty and Privileges that would have extended religious freedom to non-Anglican Christians.

One more remains on the fringe of popular memory because of an oil portrait, painted by an unknown artist. Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, hangs in the galleries of the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West at 77th Street. The captain general and governor-in-chief of the Province of New York and Territories depending thereon in America and vice admiral of the same from 1702 to 1708 has a faintly arch expression. The face is full, even bloated, with a double chin and heavy jowls, sensual lips and a suggestion of 5 o’clock shadow. The man whose choice of summer residence gave Governor’s Island its name toys with a delicate fan and wears, as one commentator observed, a woman’s exquisite blue silk “gown, stays, tucker, long ruffles, cap, etc.” If nothing else, the noble Lord’s taste in clothing adds a new shade of meaning to the closing line of Cornbury’s gubernatorial proclamations, proudly set in large type letters below his printed name: “God Save The Queen.”

The label affixed to the portrait’s frame bears a quotation from Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England, published in 1847: “Among other apish tricks, Lord Cornbury [the ‘half-witted son’ of ‘Henry, Earl of Clarendon’] is said to have held his state levees at New York, and received the principal Colonists dressed up in complete female court costume, because, truly, he represented the person of a female Sovereign, his cousin… Queen Anne.”

Only in the last decade has anyone questioned the identity of the person portrayed (Cornbury was also accused of tyranny, oppression and corruption, but those charges receive less attention). Perhaps there is only scandal rather than substance—if one considers crossdressing statesmen grounds for scandal at all. Patricia U. Bonomi’s delightful The Lord Cornbury Scandal (1998) notes that throughout Cornbury’s life and for some seventy-three years after, no one suggested the existence of his portrait dressed as a woman. In 1796, Horace Walpole and two literary friends were trading old gossip while visiting a country house. Walpole, a notorious gossip whose father had been prime minister, claimed Cornbury had once opened a session of the New York assembly dressed as a woman, defending his conduct because, as the representative of Queen Anne, a woman, he ought in all respects represent her as faithfully as possible. George James Williams, another guest, described a portrait of Cornbury dressed as a woman, which seems to have been the portrait on display at the Historical Society.

Bonomi argues that Cornbury’s historical reputation as a transvestite rests upon four letters written by three political opponents—Robert Livingston, Lewis Morris and Elias Neau—between 1706 and 1709. None claimed to be a firsthand witness or named a single witness of Cornbury’s crossdressing. Bonomi further notes that the Grub Street press, the scandalmongers of the day, apparently printed nothing that even hinted Cornbury was a transvestite. She further argues that as the lingua franca of politics at that time was defamation (charges of sexual misconduct and perversion were commonplace), exposing the Queen’s cousin as a transvestite would have received wild publicity.

Of these three agitators, Lewis Morris, lord of the Manor of Morrisania (now in the Bronx), seems the prime mover. Morris was money-honest. None denied it. He was also ambitious, manipulative, obstructive and vain. He had schemed for years to transform the proprietary colonies of West Jersey and East Jersey—in effect, two huge private developments—into a unified royal colony, directly under the Imperial government in London, with himself as royal governor. He was frustrated when Queen Anne appointed Cornbury governor of New Jersey. Within a short time, Morris began plotting Cornbury’s removal, motivated largely by his personal frustration. Yet Morris’s assessment of Cornbury, as “a wretch who by the whole conduct of his life has evidenced he has no regard for honor or virtue,” has prevailed.

Cornbury has been unkindly handled by American historians who, even today, seem more fascinated by his personal habits than his policies. Perhaps the greatest blot on his name is, as a political opponent claimed, that he dressed “publiqly in womans Cloaths Every day.”

Cornbury was born in 1661. His grandfather, the first earl of Clarendon, had been lord chancellor of England under King Charles II; his father, the second earl, had been lord privy seal under King James II. A paternal aunt was the first wife of James II; two future queens, Mary II and Anne, were his cousins.

After his matriculation at Oxford and his further education at Geneva, Switzerland, he entered the Royal Army and won a seat in Parliament, then an unsalaried post. As his ancestors’ extravagance had encumbered the family’s estates, he entered politics to obtain salaried offices, which was as common a practice then as as it is now.

In 1688, Cornbury’s uncle, King James II, a Catholic, was overthrown in the “Glorious Revolution” by his Protestant daughter Mary, who was also one of Cornbury’s cousins, and his son-in-law, Prince William of Orange, who would become King William III. Cornbury was a colonel commanding the Royal Regiment of Dragoons; he deserted James for William and Mary almost immediately, bringing part of his command with him.

In 1701, William appointed Cornbury governor of New York. Shortly thereafter, William’s successor, Queen Anne, another Cornbury cousin, with whom Cornbury had always been close, appointed him also governor of New Jersey. Most historians have argued this was mere patronage. Yet New York was too economically and militarily important even then, and neither William (who disliked Cornbury, as he did most people) nor Anne (who was prudish and incorruptible) would have given a responsible post on the fringe of the Empire to an incompetent.

Contemporary letters and journals indicate Cornbury was highly intelligent, literate and urbane; affable in public, with something of the common touch; a generous host; a good husband; a brave and competent soldier; and an Imperialist, which is to say he favored strong rule from London in the interests of the Empire as a whole, rather than the interests of the colonies themselves. He was passionate about political and religious questions. He was brusque with persons he believed dishonest or incompetent.

When Cornbury arrived in New York in 1702, the colony was still divided by Leisler’s Rebellion. Jacob Leisler had briefly seized power from the aristocracy in New York during the unrest stemming from the Glorious Revolution. The British government regained control and tried him for treason, and he was hanged and beheaded before a howling mob in 1691. His adherents, the Leislerians, were one of the two dominant parties in colonial politics. Although Cornbury found the Anglophile anti-Leislerians more sympathetic, as most royal governors had, he was conciliatory to all factions in distributing both public appointments and invitations to his receptions and dinners (no one denied Cornbury was a gracious and generous host).

In Cornbury’s time, religious toleration in New York meant merely tolerating religions other than the established churches, the Church of England and the Dutch Reformed Church. Cornbury freely entertained non-Anglican ministers at table. However, the law required that all preachers obtain a license from the governor before preaching to public assemblies and, while he granted a license to anyone who applied, he strictly enforced the law against all who did not. Nor did he permit the use of churches and chapels built with public money by unlicensed preachers. One Presbyterian minister, Francis Makemie, who had enjoyed Cornbury’s hospitality, refused to obey the law and was prosecuted for it: Cornbury’s enemies called his enforcement of the law an act of tyranny.

His record as governor was ordinary. He built a new fort at Albany and planned harbor defenses for the Narrows, which were left incomplete due to lack of funds. Local defense was locally financed, and in common with most royal governors in British America, as Cornbury’s term continued, he had progressively harder relations with the popularly elected provincial assemblies, who were unwilling to raise revenues for colonial defense against the French or the Indians.

Cornbury built a summer house on the high ground at the northeast corner of Nutten Island, several hundred yards off the Battery in Lower Manhattan. The cost of labor and materials was approximately £100, according to the records checked by Bonomi; Morris and his allies claimed that Cornbury had appropriated £1,500, all the money set aside for harbor defense, to build it.

In April 1707, the New Jersey assembly, controlled by Morrisites, opened an investigation of Cornbury’s conduct and drew up a list of grievances. The speaker of the house, Samuel Jennings, read the list in Cornbury’s presence, and the assembly sent a copy with supporting affidavits to London, petitioning for relief from “the oppressions they groan under by the arbitrary and Illegal Practices of his said Excellencie.” Cornbury presented substantial written evidence in opposition to the charges, which eventually were not sustained. However, they provided ammunition to Cornbury’s political opponents in London, who had gained power through a shift in the balance of parties in Parliament. Cornbury was relieved in 1708.

In common with most governors of New York until the early 19th century, Cornbury incurred personal debt to pay public expenses, such as military supplies. After 1706, the New Jersey assembly refused to pay Cornbury’s salary, and the New York provincial treasurer delayed payment of his salary and warrants. Accordingly, once news of his relief arrived in New York, his creditors had the New York sheriff arrest Cornbury for debt. This was fairly ordinary, too: Cornbury’s predecessor had also been arrested for debt, and his successor was threatened with debtors’ prison because he had borrowed money to feed refugees. However, the county sheriff permitted Cornbury to depart before discharging the debts he had incurred on behalf of the government.

Cornbury returned to London in July 1710. Queen Anne formally addressed him as her “Right Trusty and Entirely Beloved Cousin.” She granted him a residence and named him a privy councilor in 1711, first commissioner of the Admiralty in 1712, and envoy extraordinary to Hanover in 1714. He died on March 31, 1723, and was interred in Westminster Abbey. The media reported his death without comment on his character or reputation.

As noted above, Bonomi found only four contemporary documents attributing transvestitism to Cornbury, all written by political opponents, and no suggestions in contemporary journals or newspapers that the Queen’s cousin wore drag. The charges of corruption were vague and never proven.

Cornbury’s enduring reputation, then, indicts the laziness of historians over the last two centuries. Neither George Bancroft nor Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, ever thoroughly examined the original sources in describing Cornbury—the work historians are expected to do. Thus, the label on the portrait became the unquestioned truth, and the received knowledge—that Cornbury was a transvestite and a corrupt, incompetent governor—accepted at face value.

In 1995, the New-York Historical Society placed a second descriptive label by the portrait, admitting, “Recent research done on the painting has called the identity of the sitter into question.” The noble Lord is also commemorated in the Cornbury Society, of Vancouver, British Columbia, an organization of heterosexual crossdressers. Obviously, some of us still print the legend.

New York Press, October 16, 2001

Honore Jaxon, Professional Rebel

In December 1951, a ninety-year-old man was evicted from 157 East 34th Street. The building’s former live-in janitor and furnace tender, his old age and ill-health had precluded satisfactory performance and the landlord had fired him. Out on the sidewalk, his books and papers, neatly tied and wrapped in brown paper, were piled six feet high, eleven feet across, and forty feet long.

Major Honoré Joseph Jaxon told reporters that

I
n December 1951, a ninety-year-old man was evicted from 157 East 34th Street. The building’s former live-in janitor and furnace tender, his old age and ill-health had precluded satisfactory performance and the landlord had fired him. Out on the sidewalk, his books and papers, neatly tied and wrapped in brown paper, were piled six feet high, eleven feet across, and forty feet long.

Major Honoré Joseph Jaxon told reporters that he was a Canadian half-breed, born of a Metis Indian maiden and a Virginian adventurer. The rest of his story was a vague farrago of treason, rebellion, and Indian wars in the Canadian West, and apparently no one put much stock in it. His photograph in the Daily News showed a bearded, decrepit old man with a thousand-yard stare.

Jaxon moved to the offices of the Bowery News, Harry Baronian’s legendary paper of “the basement of society.” After Jaxon sold two tons of newspapers and magazines for scrap, the rest of his collection—mostly books and papers on Indian history, life, and customs—were carried to his new residence, according to The New York Times,  by “gentlemen of the Bowery, led by one called Bozo.” Less than a month later, Jaxon died at Bellevue Hospital. His papers went to a city landfill.

Some of his story was fudge. He was not half Indian, nor had his father been a Virginian. But nearly seven decades before he had fought in Louis Riel’s North West Rebellion, serving as Riel’s personal secretary. He had also been tried for treason. He had generally spent his life serving revolutionary causes, and the lost mountain of his books and papers had documented the colorful, tragic history of the old Canadian West. It may, as the Ottawa Citizen wrote a few years ago, “have contained some of the secrets of one of the blackest periods in the history of Canada.”

Most Americans have never heard of Louis Riel. Few Canadians have not. He was born in 1844 in Manitoba of French, Irish, and Indian heritage. Louis was educated for the priesthood and then the bar. Neither took, and so he returned home.

Manitoba then was part of Rupert’s Land, the vast territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Its people were Metis, descendants of French fur traders and native American women, whose distinct culture blended both traditions. In 1869, the Bay Company sold its lands to Canada. When the Dominion government sent in surveyors, the Metis believed their arrival signaled the loss of their farms and stopped them at gunpoint.

louisreiel_1878In a land of illiterates, a little education and a gift for mob oratory go a long way. Riel’s rise in late 1869 was meteoric. In October he became secretary of the Metis National Committee and by November had become such an irritant that Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s prime minister, discussed the possibility of bribing him into silence. By December Riel was president of Manitoba’s provisional government. He seized Fort Garry (now Winnipeg), where he established his capital. His troops closed the border. Riel then negotiated Manitoba’s admission to the Confederation as a self-governing province rather than a mere territory.

Things fell apart when Riel’s government executed Thomas Scott, a militant anti-Catholic, for inciting an armed uprising against Riel. Macdonald sent in the militia. Riel’s guerrillas drove them out. At Macdonald’s request, the Imperial government in London sent out Colonel Garnet Wolseley with British regulars. The model for General Stanley, W.S. Gilbert’s modern major-general in The Pirates of Penzance, Wolseley was idiosyncratic but effective: his dawn assault on Fort Garry in August 1870 found it abandoned and Riel riding for the border.

Though in exile and under indictment, Riel was elected to Canada’s House of Commons in October 1873. Parliament immediately expelled him. He was re-elected in January 1874, expelled again that April, and re-elected yet again the following September. This was becoming absurd. On October 15, 1874, Her Majesty’s government outlawed Riel for five years. It was merely the first-act closer.

Honoré Joseph Jaxon, who would be among Riel’s most fervent supporters, was born William Henry Jackson in Toronto on May 13, 1861. His parents were well-educated English-speaking Canadians. Jackson began his university studies at sixteen. When his father lost his business in a fire, the family took a homestead in the Northwest Territories near the proposed right of way of Canada’s first transcontinental railroad, the Canadian Pacific. Jackson joined them, helping his father sell farm machinery. He had a sentimental affection for Indians: he was moved by the thought of once-proud natives subsisting on mice and gophers, dependent on handouts from the very people who had destroyed their way of life. Yet his daily dealings with the white settlers made him aware of their grievances, too.

In 1882, in what seems to have been the kind of saturnalia of corruption more common in the New York State legislature than a British colonial assembly, the Canadian Pacific persuaded the federal Parliament to change its proposed route across the West. Suddenly, the Jacksons and other settlers who had purchased land along the proposed line found themselves 250 miles from the new route, leaving them unable to ship their products or import machinery and tools. Jackson started an anti-government newspaper, the Voice of the People. His firebrand editorials made his reputation: within weeks, he was acclaimed secretary of the militant Farmer’s Union. On July 28, 1884, Jackson issued his manifesto detailing the settlers’ grievances: unjust taxation, improper regulations and laws, government-subsidized monopolies, and high prices on imported goods.

canadian-pacific-trainThen, after fourteen years’ exile, Riel returned. He had been teaching at a mission school in Montana when a Metis delegation arrived. The provincial government had not kept Manitoba intact for the Metis, now outnumbered by white immigrants. The government’s procrastination over granting land to the Metis and its refusal to recognize them as a distinct people had revived discontent. Worse, Eastern speculators had been granted Metis-held lands and authorized to evict them.

In July 1884, Riel arrived at Batoche, Saskatchewan. He met Jackson, who fell under his sway. Jackson so identified with the Metis that he even converted to Catholicism. At Baptism, the English Canadian took the names Honoré Joseph Jaxon, thus reinventing himself as a French half-breed.

Riel began a speaking tour of the Metis settlements with Jaxon as his personal secretary. In December, Riel sent a petition to Ottawa. Even then, Macdonald still thought Riel could be bought off. But in March 1885, Riel was again elected president of a provisional government.  As the president’s personal secretary, Jaxon was the provisional government’s bureaucracy, generating exhaustive political, military, and government correspondence.

Riel’s troops cut the telegraph wires, stopped the mails, and seized government stores and ammunition. Then, on March 26, 1885 Metis soldiers, commanded by Gabriel Dumont, defeated the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Duck Lake.  Dumont, a forty-eight-year-old trapper and guide, was a born general.  He could neither read nor write, but spoke six languages and had been a warrior, horseman, and crack shot from the age of fourteen.

On the day after the defeat at Duck Lake, Major-General Frederick Middleton, CB, the head of the Canadian land forces, arrived at Winnepeg, having been sent West on the news of Riel’s return.  Middleton was stout, short, red-faced, and white-mustached; he had been a professional soldier for over forty years and had not expected active duty when he had taken command in 1882.  But behind the facade of a good-natured Colonel Blimp (he loved ice-skating) was a daring and imaginative officer who had been repeatedly cited for valor and recommended for the Victoria Cross during the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

Middleton realized that the North West Rebellion was no petty native uprising. He immediately ordered three thousand troops sent west and as they arrived began advancing on Batoche. Dumont fought him to a standstill with fifty mounted riflemen at the Battle of Fish Creek on April 24, 1885. Middleton’s troops, being at best half-trained militia, were shaky and he had to lead from the front, repeatedly exposing himself to enemy fire. At the end of the day, Middleton withdrew. It was the last and greatest victory of the Metis in their struggle against modern civilization.

Middleton calmly regrouped while awaiting reinforcements and supplies. Then he attacked Riel and Dumont at Batoche on May 9, 1885. As this made Jaxon’s paperwork irrelevant to the provisional government’s immediate survival, Jaxon went on active duty. He would later claim a cavalry major’s commission.

Despite overwhelming odds, the rebels held out for three days. After his surrender, Riel stood trial for treason as the sole cause and instigator of the rebellion. (Government policy clearly played no role in the Metis’s discontents.) Riel openly rejected his counsel’s argument that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. With fiery eloquence, he characterized the revolts as the acts of a people made desperate by political and corporate power: the Metis as a society were small but even so had rights; Canada, though far greater, “had no greater rights than them, because the right is the same for all.”

Riel was convicted. On November 6, 1885, he was executed at the Northwest Mounted Police barracks at Regina, Saskatchewan. The man hanged for a traitor is today honored as a freedom fighter, the Father of Manitoba, the People’s Hero. His life has inspired biographies, histories, novels, plays, and an opera.

Gabriel Dumont fled south across the border, where he was welcomed as a political refugee and—being between gigs—rode for a while with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. After he received the Queen’s pardon in 1888, he returned to Canada and resumed his life as a farmer and trapper. Major-General Middleton was knighted, received a purse of $20,000, and retired a lieutenant-general in 1892 to become Keeper of the Crown Jewels. He died in his headquarters in the Tower of London in 1898.

After the surrender at Batoche, Jaxon was detained incommunicado. At least one Canadian historian, Howard Adams, has argued that Jaxon was silenced to suppress the extent of support for the Rebellion among white settlers. Jaxon was an uncooperative prisoner: he almost escaped once after bathing, racing naked across the prairie with Canadian cavalry in hot pursuit. Finally, at a trial that lasted a half-hour, he was adjudged not guilty by reason of insanity. He escaped a Fort Garry insane asylum within weeks and re-emerged in Chicago, where, surprisingly, he spent the next two decades as a successful, politically-connected general contractor, building sidewalks and lobbying for the cement and construction industries at City Hall and the state Capitol. He also lectured before women’s clubs on life among the Indians.

The Battle of Duck Lane

Yet the contemporary press strongly suggests that Jaxon was active in the political fringe, too. According to The New York Times, he “narrowly escaped being arrested as a principal conspirator…” after the 1886 Haymarket Riot. In June 1894, he marched on Washington with Jacob Coxey’s army of the unemployed. Embrey Howson’s Jacob Sechler Coxey sketches Jaxon as a “Canadian half-breed complete with blanket and tomahawk.” The Times, which detested the whole notion of Coxey’s “petition in boots,” fingered Jaxon to be the leader of an “Anarchistic plot” to blow up the Capitol, the White House, and the Treasury, War, and Navy buildings at Washington. The paper went on to allege that since his escape into the United States, Jaxon had been “engaged in mysterious conspiracies against the English government.” As late as 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt blasted Jaxon for supporting the Industrial Workers of the World.

Later that year, Canada pardoned Jaxon. He returned to tour the West, photographing its vanishing ways of life, and began collecting books, documents, and letters on Riel’s rebellions, the Metis, and the Canadian Indian peoples.

Up until 1911, Jaxon was still dabbling in international revolutionary politics, delivering a spellbinding address to the British Trades Union Congress’s annual conference as the representative of a Mexican revolutionary party. At some point around World War I, he retired to New Jersey, where he briefly edited a left-wing newspaper. In 1919, he relocated to Staten Island and in 1922 to The Bronx. By now the old revolutionary was no more than a gadfly. (The Daily News called him  “a thorn in the side of authority.”) He lived at 1383 Eastern Boulevard, a granite outcropping on the Bronx River. There he built a “palace” out of ammunition boxes, orange crates, and scrap wood, fencing it with boards and corrugated tin.

In February 1942, City health officials hauled Jaxon into court on the grounds that his residence was a rat-infested fire trap without running water. Jaxon argued that it was a fort, perfect for defending against “enemy submarines that might travel up the Bronx River.” The old man had lost none of his genius for resistance: it took four years before the city was able to force him to move, whereupon he took the custodian’s job on East 34th Street.

In his obituary, the Times printed the legend: Jaxon had been born in Montana, the son of a French pioneer settler and a Metis Indian girl, father a fur trader sufficiently wealthy to send him to University, and so on. Jaxon’s reinvented self had overcome his reality.

Mr. Dana of The Sun

The slogan cast on the bronze-green clocks jutting from 280 Broadway has outlived the newspaper that coined it: “The Sun Shines For All.”

The slogan cast on the bronze-green clocks jutting from 280 Broadway has outlived the original and the new versions of the newspaper that coined it: “The Sun Shines For All.”

The Sun was founded in 1833 by Benjamin Day, a twenty-three-year-old printer. He produced a racy, sensational paper, which, according to Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, focused on “fires, theatrical performances, elephants escaping from the circus, women trampled by hogs.” In August 1835 (as recounted in a recent issue of McSweeney’s), Day began a series of bogus articles recounting life on the moon as supposedly revealed by a powerful new telescope. Circulation exploded. At the height of the moon hoax, The Sun’s circulation was 20,000 a day—larger than any other newspaper in the world.

By the late 1860s, The Sun had become stodgy. Then in January 1868, the forty-nine-year-old Charles Anderson Dana took over. Slender, balding, heavily whiskered, and staunchly conservative, Dana championed the working poor (The Sun’s press room was a union shop) and African-Americans. (While in South Carolina during Reconstruction, he was invited to a black regiment’s military ball, which had been snubbed by the state’s corrupt carpetbagger governor; Dana accepted and later wrote of those present, “There was also a fair sprinkling of whites, but not enough to mar the pleasure of the company.”)

Though an innovator whose paper freshly defined the news and its presentation, Dana refused to install modern typesetting machines. He loathed illustrations: newspapers were for reading. But The Sun first published the photographs of Jacob Riis, probably because despite his prejudices Dana knew good stuff on sight. He disdained advertising, supplementing The Sun’s financing with circulation receipts to preserve its independence of businessmen and politicians. If a good story came in late, he might even rip out advertising to insert it.

Nearly all who worked for him found him warm, generous, and good-natured, as The Sun and its people were family to him; but his opponents and competitors found him spiteful and petty.

Dana was born August 8, 1819, in Hinsdale, New Hampshire. He clerked in an uncle’s store until he had saved enough to matriculate at Harvard in 1839, where he spent two years before his money ran out. He then lived for five years at Brook Farm, Bronson Alcott’s transcendentalist utopian community.

In 1847, Dana joined Horace Greeley’s Tribune, which assigned him to France and Germany for the revolutions of 1848-9. He became the paper’s managing editor (arguably the first journalist to hold the title), met most of the American intelligentsia, and hired Karl Marx as a European correspondent. (Marx contributed on and off to the Tribune for decades.) But Greeley sacked Dana in March 1862. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton then hired him as the government’s military observer to investigate the conduct of the Civil War in the field, and he became one of Stanton’s most trusted and influential agents.

Within a few years of taking over the paper, while tripling its readership to 120,000, Dana had transformed The Sun into what Joseph Pulitzer called “the most piquant, entertaining, and without exception, the best newspaper in the world.” For Dana, writes Allen Churchill in Park Row:

Life was not a mere procession of elections, legislatures, theatrical performances, murders, and lectures. Life was everything: a new kind of apple, a crying child on the curb, a policeman’s epigram, the exact weight of a candidate for President, the latest style in whiskers, the origin of a new slang expression, the idiosyncrasies of the City Hall clock, a strange four-master in the harbor, a vendetta in Mulberry Bend: everything was fish to the great net of Dana’s mind.

The Sun’s editorial standards became so high that it could neither be criticized nor disregarded. First, printing a four-page paper with all the news of both hemispheres required condensation, which required superior writers. He emphasized developing style, for he was obsessed by grammar and usage. A literary critic once sent Dana samples of his better columns. They were returned. The writer searched for some indication to Dana’s reaction. “Finally,” Churchill writes, “he found a black line of exclamatory outrage under two words in one column. The offending words were ‘none are.’”

Every edition of The Sun had to be perfect. A reporter sent out on a story had to return to the office to write it in longhand from his handwritten notes. Then Dana studied and analyzed the story. He cross-examined the reporter to explore its shadings and nuances. Then, Dana might fire him for using “balance” in the sense of “remainder,” the kind of subtle solecism Dana specialized in finding. Finally, he was unconcerned with respectability. Under Dana, The Sun felt free to keep no opinion to itself.

The Sun was published on Park Row, then the city’s media center. Its offices were at Printing House Square—a tiny triangle formed by Park Row, Frankfort Street and Nassau Street featuring a statue of Benjamin Franklin—in a shabby six-story building that had once been Tammany Hall. Visitors climbed a spiral iron staircase to the city room, emerging to find Dana’s office and beyond it a huge loft containing the paper’s departments. As Churchill observed, “…it perpetually resembled a madhouse…[filled with] shouted conversation, loud profanity…angry pressmen demanding copy…copy boys [scampering] about in answer to furious shouts from editors and reporters.”

The room was filled with cigar and pipe smoke; older reporters made expert use of the large brass spittoons “strategically placed about the wooden floor” from amazing distances. Out of this chaos came the newspaperman’s newspaper, “The Sun, [sparkling] like its name, with humorous stories, pathetic stories, bits of vivid description.” Though the writing is lean and concise, most Sun stories read like essays. As one contemporary wrote, “The Sun could evolve a classic out of a dogfight, an epic out of a football game, invest a tenement house eviction with pregnant pathos, or make an account of a fire vibrant with drama.”

One did not publish such a paper without interesting personalities. The staff included multimillionaires, Communists, lawyers, fishermen, poets, society men, former diplomats and future congressmen. Dana’s first managing editor, Amos Cummings, had a predilection for profanity. The Tribune had fired him as political reporter for his written response to two orders written by one of its subeditors and apparently posted on the paper’s bulletin board: Order 756: “There is too much profanity in this office.” Order 757: “The political reporter must have his copy in at 10:30 PM.”

There are several versions of Cummings’ response, all censored. He probably wrote something like this: “Order 1234567: Everybody knows —— —— well that I get most of the political news out of the Albany Journal, and everybody knows —— —— well that the ——— Journal doesn’t get here until 11 o’clock at night, —— —— it, and anybody who knows —— —— about anything knows —— —— well that asking me to get this —— —— out at half past 10 is like ——— asking a man to sit on a —— —— window sill and dance on the roof at the same time.”

In 1882, a cub reporter asked city editor John Bogart to define news. It is said that Bogart pulled on his pipe for a moment, or, more likely, paused to swig from a bottle of whiskey (when asked about drinking habits in the city room, one editor quipped, “We were not milk addicts”). Then he said, “When a dog bites a man, that’s not news; when a man bites a dog, that’s news.”

John B. Wood, Dana’s night editor, omitted needless words. Candace Stone wrote in Dana and The Sun,

Every few minutes boys came up to him on the run, bringing sheaves of yellow paper… To one batch he would scarcely give a glance before tossing it contemptuously into the basket at his feet. Another batch he would subject to merciless mutilation, seemingly sparing neither the dignity of the stateliest paragraph nor the innocence of the most modest part of speech as his terrible blue pencil tore through the pages leaving havoc in his wake. His only pause was to project a violent stream of tobacco juice in the direction of a distant cuspidor.

As for Dana’s editorial page, as Stone observed, “There was much in that page which ought to please everyone; there was much in it which cannot but grieve judicious readers. But whether it was right or wrong, and it could sometimes be both on the same question within forty-eight hours, it was almost invariably amusing. It is difficult not to believe that Dana’s main purpose was not to make it just this—always incalculable, always individual, frequently a little shocking, but always interesting.”

“Sometimes,” wrote Stone, “he used Titania’s wand; sometimes he used a red-hot poker.” Sometimes people responded. His paper did not appear in the libraries of the fashionable clubs, including the Century Association, the home of literary pre-eminentos, where, if a copy was found, some members were known to pick it up with fire tongs and drop it in the fireplace.

Dana wrote most potently during the Gilded Age, the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. Dana, who knew Grant, entitled one editorial: “The Presidency Office Holders’ Candidate For President: USELESS S. GRANT.” Dana then listed 34 relatives of the President who were in, or aspiring to, places on the federal payroll, ranging from the President’s father (U.S. Postmaster at Covington, Kentucky) to James S. Wadsworth, “son of the sister of the mother of the President’s wife,” who had been nominated for U.S. Marshal at New York, “but rejected by the Senate on account of his bad character.”

Dana’s reporters also exposed the Washington Safe Burglary Case, a scandal with a contemporary tone. The private secretary to the President, the solicitor to the U.S. Treasury, the chief of the U.S. Secret Service, the heads of the D.C. police and a number of congressmen and contractors conspired to burglarize the office of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, seize books of accounts belonging to an accused corrupt contractor, plant them in the home of his accuser and arrest the accuser as responsible for the burglary. The U.S. attorney arranged the employment of professional burglars to dynamite his own safe while the police stood outside to prevent possible interference. When the second break-in, to plant the books, failed, one of the burglars was arrested and signed a confession charging the accuser with hiring him to commit the crime.

Dana grew more acerbic with age. He thought nothing of calling the New York Journal, a third-rate paper known as “the chambermaid’s delight” (and edited by Joseph Pulitzer’s forgotten older brother Albert), “a newspaper edited for fools by fools.” Of course, journalism was rougher then. Both James Gordon Bennetts of the Herald, the Elder and the Younger, were horsewhipped in the street. William Cullen Bryant, poet of “Thanatopsis” and “To a Water Fowl” and editor of the Evening Post, waylaid a rival, whip in hand, after the fellow printed an editorial addressed to Bryant: “You lie, you villain, you sinfully, wickedly, basely lie.”

Dana’s editorials attacking Joseph Pulitzer and his World were cruelly personal. Yet Pulitzer was now the innovator. The Sun began slipping. By 1886, circulation had fallen from 137,000 to 85,000. Still, the paper continued, becoming ever more polished. Dana’s associate Francis P. Church wrote its most famous editorial in December 1897. Instructed at an editorial conference to reply to a letter of inquiry from an eight-year-old girl, Church was unenthusiastic. But he shrugged and, probably after a good slug from the bottle in the lower right-hand drawer, took up his pencil:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to our life its highest beauty and joy. Alas how dreary would the world be if there were no Santa Claus… There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance, to make tolerable this existence… The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.

But Dana would never read it, having died some two months before. His death was front-page news in every paper across the country save one. The Sun published its announcement of his death as he had directed in ordinary body type at the top of the editorial column on page two:

CHARLES ANDERSON DANA, Editor of THE SUN, died yesterday afternoon.

— New York Press, September 21,1999

Subterranean Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York Press, September 26, 2000

Bet-A-Million Gates

Who’s Who in the United States often rewards the casual reader because it reveals how its subjects view themselves. In the 1905 edition, the great J. Pierpoint Morgan modestly calls himself a banker and William Randolph Hearst a publisher. John W. Gates bluntly calls himself a capitalist. He lists no honorary doctorates, philanthropies, or hobbies. A reckless bravo who won and lost fortunes on the toss of a coin or the turn of a card, he had entered American folklore as “Bet-a-Million” Gates, who flinched at no stakes and feared no odds.

Who’s Who in the United States often rewards the casual reader because it reveals how its subjects view themselves. In the 1905 edition, the great J. Pierpoint Morgan modestly calls himself a banker and William Randolph Hearst a publisher. John W. Gates bluntly calls himself a capitalist. He lists no honorary doctorates, philanthropies, or hobbies. A reckless bravo who won and lost fortunes on the toss of a coin or the turn of a card, he had entered American folklore as “Bet-a-Million” Gates, who flinched at no stakes and feared no odds.

In 1905 Gates was stumping back and forth on the platform beside his private railroad car at Kansas City Union Station when a man introduced himself and invited Gates to play a game—any game—with him. Gates said he didn’t plaly for small sums, and anyway he was leaving in five minutes. “Show me the money,” he said. The challenger took out $40,000 in one-thousand-dollar bills. Gates reached into his pocket, took out a $20 gold piece, and tossed it into the air. “Call it,” he said. The local called heads. Both looked at Gates’s wrist. It was tails. Gates grinned, pocketed the bank notes, and stepped into his car. The loser became a local celebrity: the man who had lost $40,000 in forty seconds to “Bet-a-Million” Gates.

Gates was born poor in 1855 in Turner Junction, Illinois, passing through which, on his American tour, Charles Dickens had written, “Nothing ever has or ever will happen there.” Gates grew up a fat, angry troublemaker, driven by envy and class resentment. He was expelled from Sunday school for robbing the collection box. In his early teens, when he and his gang were skinny-dipping, a group of girls from school sneaked down to the riverbank, stole their clothes, threw them on the roof of the schoolhouse two hundred feet away, and ran back to tease the boys. Gates strode stark naked out of the river and “waved himself” at the girls as he went for the clothes.

In 1873, Gates watched a demonstration of how a new invention, barbed-wire, restrained cattle. Colonel Ike Ellison, who owned a wire mill at De Kalb, Illinois, offered him a salesman’s job at thirty dollars a month plus commissions. He took it: being on the road as a traveling salesman would be more fun than staying behind the dry goods counter in Turner Junction.

By day, Gates produced rodeos in the plazas of dusty cowtowns, building arenas of barbed-wire that restrained the wildest steer. At the end of his first week in San Antonio, he had sold every piece of steel in his possession except his corkscrew. By night, he was doubling and tripling his commissions at poker, for even then he possessed what Arabs call baraka, the true luck.

Within a decade, he had built his own wire mills, become Ellison’s boss, and become famous for his willingness to wager the largest stakes on the weirdest things: the weight of the next man to enter the room, or which raindrop would first reach the bottom of the window.

He won the nickname Bet-a-Million after his horse, Royal Flush, won the Steward’s Cup at Goodwood, an exclusive English race track. The wire services claimed he had won $1,000,000 (he had actually pocketed only $600,000). Gates loved newspaper publicity. His wild betting and extravagance were great copy beloved of desperate editors and a public clamoring for details of his incautious spending.

Once, to surprise his wife, Gates bought a townhouse near the Waldorf for $300,000. With the residence came the former owner’s personal valet, Francis, whom Gates instructed to furnish the premises. Pausing only for a quick one at the Waldorf bar, Gates and Francis visited the Wildenstein Gallery in search of paintings for the downstairs rooms. They were shown a vast assortment of paintings in the academic style—the taste of the time—largely battle scenes of the Napoleonic Wars, all in massive gold frames.

“What do you think of them, Francis?” asked the master. “Are they the McCoy?”

“I believe them to be authentic and of reputable genre,” said Francis.

“Tell the fellow to pack them all up and send them over.”

He became richer still by buying industrial lame ducks cheap and combining them into new corporations, overvaluing their assets, and manipulating the price of the stocks with insider information. Some of his companies became famous, such as Diamond Match (the match trust) and Nabisco (formerly National Biscuit, the cookie trust). He helped finance the Plaza Hotel, and when it opened in 1908, he and his wife rented a lavish apartment for $40,000 a year.

He became squat, even saurian, with a huge dragoon mustache, and his language was coarse. His private life was a succession of whores, “artist’s models,” and actresses. His manners were boorish and his personal relations a matter of gruff discourtesy, save where he might profit by a show of good manners or generosity.

His taste in interior decoration, lacking the disciplined self-restraint of Ludwig II of Bavaria, consisted largely of exploding gold over every imaginable interior surface and the display of biologically correct bronze nudes.

He was a denizen of the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, holding court in a leather arm chair at a heavy oak table in the oak-paneled Men’s Bar. On days when the stock market was quiet, he played bridge for $100 a point. The journalist Albert Stevens Crockett wrote in his memoirs of a young politician who, invited to sit in on one of Gates’s card games, assumed that Gates’ statement that they were playing for “one a point” meant a dollar. The young man walked away from the table a winner, expecting a check for $330. He nearly fainted when he received one for $33,000 in the next morning’s mail.

And Gates ate, diligently packing on the poundage. It was the 1890s, the age of the lobster palaces such as Rector’s, Jack’s, Churchill’s, Shanley’s, and Bustanoby’s, restaurants of lavish decor and food of heroic quantity, variety, and expense. A late exemplar of that kind of eating was Henry George—not the social reformer, but the 300-pound head carpenter of the old Metropolitan Opera. One Christmas Day, Mr. George wandered into Bleeck’s, where he sat down to a dozen double Southdown mutton chops, a four-pound chateaubriand, and two roast capons topping five pounds each. When he ordered a Kentucky ham and six mince pies for dessert, Bleeck instructed the waiter to cut him off. “I don’t want him dead on the premises,” he explained. Mr. George shook an angry fist at the management and stamped across the street to the Greek’s, where “they wouldn’t turn away a man hungry at Christmas!”

Early in 1896, Gates learned that J. Pierpont Morgan was negotiating with Andrew Carnegie to create United States Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation. Gates hated Morgan: they distrusted each other; they had clashed in the stock market; but most importantly, Morgan was suave, masterful, and secure, the kind of aristocrat that aroused Gates’s Jacobin instincts.

Gates merged seven Illinois barbed wire factories into the Consolidated Steel and Wire Company. A few months later, he added seven steel mills and created the American Steel and Wire Company of Illinois, issuing $24,000,000 in beautifully engraved stock certificates. Less than a year later, having repeated this process in the East, he had his new company, American Steel and Wire of New Jersey, buy up the old for $36,000,000. Only old fogies sneered at the old firm’s fifty percent increase in value within eleven months. To the younger generation, it was undoubtedly the synergy of the plants with Gates’s executive talents.

Gates’s private car was rolling through Ohio one night when one of his associates glanced out the window long enough to recognize where he was. “There’s a nice plate mill in the next town,” he told Gates. “Why don’t we stop off and buy it?” Gates and his men, all of whom had been doing things with cards and bottles, located the home of the mill owner and routed him out of bed long after midnight. They suggested $200,000 as a fair price and offered to write a check then and there.

“But my plant isn’t worth $200,000 and anyway it isn’t for sale,” protested the sleepy owner. “Why don’t you gentlemen sober up and go home?”

“Let’s not be small about it,” Gates said. “We’ll make it $350,000.”

Morgan finally invited American Steel & Wire to join U.S. Steel. Gates, knowing Morgan needed wire mills, named an unreasonable price. Negotiations were joined.

Now, the skin of Morgan’s nose was affected by an incurable acne rosacea, which left it red, enormously swollen, and pustulous. Morgan had learned to live with it, his self-loathing channeled into a hatred of mirrors and photographers, although an occasional disgusted glance from a passerby still disturbed him.

Gates and his partners stumped into J. P. Morgan & Company for the final talks. Morgan had delegated the job to Judge Elbert Gary, U. S. Steel’s president and, by coincidence, a childhood acquaintance of Gates. Immediately noting the snub, Gates cocked his head and, referring to Morgan, asked Gary, “Where’s Livernose?”

Around 5 p.m., Gary slipped out of the room to advise Morgan to deliver an ultimatum. Morgan strode in. He neither greeted Gates nor shook his hand. He said, “Gentlemen, I am leaving the building in ten minutes. If by then you haven’t accepted our offer, we will build our own wire plant.” Then he left the room.

Turning to one of his partners, Gates said, “Well, I don’t know whether he means it or not.” “He does,” came the reply. “Then we’ll sign,” Gates said. American Steel & Wire’s market value was only $60,000,000; U.S. Steel paid $110,000,000 for it. Gates then asked for a place on the board of directors. Morgan refused, “It is impossible. You have made your reputation and we will not be responsible for it. Good day, sir.” Gates needed four days of steady drinking to regain his composure.

They tangled again during the Northern Pacific corner of 1907, when E. H. Harriman (backed by the Schiffs) and James J. Hill (backed by Morgan) fought for the railroad’s control. Gates sold short at 110, agreeing to deliver shares for future delivery. Gates believed once the issue of control was resolved, Northern Pacific would go down. But Harriman and Hill between them had purchased 78,000 more shares than actually existed. There were no shares for future delivery.

On one terrible day, Northern Pacific closed at 1000. The short-sellers had to liquidate everything: stocks, bonds, gold. The securities market collapsed. Thousands of speculators and dozens of brokerages were wiped out. Gates lost nearly everything he had made in the American Steel and Wire deal.

Gates brooded over his misfortunes, “snarling like a trapped wolf whenever anyone mentioned the great J. Pierpont, even by implication.” Months passed. Then he devised a plan.

Morgan dominated southeastern transportation through the Southern Railway. Its greatest potential competitor was the Louisville & Nashville. The railroads cooperated through a pooling agreement.  But if another person bought control of the L&N, the agreement could be abrogated and Morgan made to sweat blood.

Secretly, Gates and his partners began buying L&N stock through intermediaries. On Monday, April 14, 1908, Morgan, aware of the purchasing through not of the purchaser, caused the L&N to issue 50,000 shares of stock and  dump them on the market in a lump, hoping to break the demand. Gates bought it all.

That evening, J. P. Morgan & Company announced its surrender. Morgan bought out Gates at his price. The bank announced it had “consented to take control of the stock…purchased (by Gates)…solely to relieve the general financial condition and not for the benefit of any railroad company.” Gates made $7,500,000 for himself and more for his associates. A few days later, when Gates handed Diamond Jim Brady a check for his share of the profits, $1,250,000, Brady shouted, “I consent to receive this money solely for the purpose of relieving my general financial condition.”

It was Gates’s last big deal. In 1911, he died suddenly while in Paris, where he had gone for a rest. His only son, Charlie, a good-looking man without an ounce of brains, preferred booze and babes to business. In 1913, Charlie traveled to Cody, Wyoming, for a reunion with his old friend, Colonel William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. A single evening in the company of that accomplished drinker finished him. He died the next morning aboard his private car, Bright Eyes. “I didn’t know he was a tenderfoot,” Cody murmured. “I never should have ordered those last six bottles.”

New York Press, October 20, 1998

The Primitive American

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A few kind words,” the Mayor replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York Press, December 26, 2000

The Missingest Man in New York

Every August 6 for more than three decades, an attractive older woman entered a Greenwich Village bar that had been a restaurant back in the Jazz Age. She sat alone in a booth and ordered two cocktails. She raised one, murmured, “Good luck, Joe, wherever you are,” drank it slowly

Every August 6 for more than three decades, an attractive older woman entered a Greenwich Village bar that had been a restaurant back in the Jazz Age. She sat alone in a booth and ordered two cocktails. She raised one, murmured, “Good luck, Joe, wherever you are,” drank it slowly, rose, and walked out leaving the other drink untouched.

Thus Stella Crater mourned her vanished husband, Justice Joseph Force Crater, who had become famous on August 6, 1930 by disappearing, as the Daily News later said, “efficiently, completely, and forever.”

Born to Irish immigrants in Easton, Pennsylvania in 1889, Joe Crater worked his way through Lafayette College and Columbia Law School. He opened his office at 120 Broadway (The Equitable Building, a huge white marble pile that was once the largest office building in the world) and joined the Cayuga Democratic Club, the power base of Tammany district leader Martin Healy, where Crater spent thousands of hours organizing election workers and representing the club in election law cases. He also married Stella Wheeler, whom he had represented in her 1912 divorce.

In 1920, State Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Wagner Sr., who would become a United States senator in 1926, appointed Crater his secretary. Joe was also an adjunct professor at Fordham and New York University law schools. But most of his income came through his law practice, which was enriched by his political connections.

At first, he received the usual minor appointments from the courts: receiverships, refereeships, guardianships. Over time, Crater’s pieces of pie were cut large. In February 1929, he was appointed receiver in foreclosure of the Libby Hotel. Four months later, the hotel was auctioned for $75,000 to the American Mortgage Loan Co. Two months after that, the City of New York condemned the hotel, paying American Mortgage Loan $2,850,000—a profit of $2,775,000 on its two months’ investment of $75,000. Cynics suggested that American Mortgage Loan’s managers knew about the city’s plans before buying the building.equitable-building1

Crater could afford a new apartment: a two-bedroom cooperative at 40 5th Avenue. He became president of the Cayuga Club and Martin Healy’s right-hand man. And on April 8, 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to a vacancy on the state Supreme Court (actually the lowest among New York state courts, comparable to superior courts in other states).

Politics had everything to do with it. That and ability: even the respectables at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York supported Joe’s appointment. He was forty-one—young for a Supreme Court justice in New York—a well-tailored 185-pound six-footer, with fleshy features and slicked-down iron-gray hair that made him seem older than he was. He was also a fine pianist, a good dancer, and he liked theater.

When the courts recessed in June 1930, the Craters went to their summer home in Belgrade Lakes, Maine—six miles from the nearest telephone. In July, they read that New York County District Attorney Thomas C.T. Crain was charging Healy with selling judgeships. Crater seemed undisturbed then, although he went away for two days in late July to confer about Healy’s legal problems.

On Sunday, August 3, one of the locals dropped in with a message that the judge had received a long-distance telephone call at the town’s drugstore. Crater went into town to return the call. When he returned, he told Stella he had to go to New York for a few days. “I’ve got to straighten out a few people,” he reportedly said. Then, promising to return for her birthday on Saturday, August 9, he left for the city.

Crater arrived at their apartment on Monday. He gave the maid a few days off and saw his doctor about an index finger that had been crushed in a car door some weeks before. On Tuesday, he worked in his chambers at the New York courthouse at 60 Centre Street.

On the morning of August 6, he spent two hours going through the files in his chambers. He had his personal assistant, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him amounting to $5150, worth roughly $50,000 in today’s money. He and Mara went by cab to the Crater apartment with locked briefcases containing five large portfolios, which Mara left on a chair. The judge then dismissed Mara for the day.

He bought a ticket for that night’s performance of a new hit comedy, Dancing Partners, at the Belasco Theater on W. 44th Street. He had dinner nearby at Billy Haas’s chophouse, with two friends—William Klein, a lawyer specializing in entertainment law, and Klein’s girlfriend, Sally Lou Ritz, a showgirl generally considered to be one fine-looking babe.

panama-hatAfterward, the trio stood on the sidewalk chatting and laughing. Although the curtain had gone up on Dancing Partners, Crater seemed unhurried. Between 9 and 9:15, he hailed a passing cab. Klein later recalled it was tan. Crater waved his Panama out the window to his friends. On the record, no one saw Joe Crater again. Someone called for the ticket at the Belasco’s box office. No one knows if that person was Crater.

At first Stella had been miffed about Joe missing her birthday but assumed he had been detained on political or legal business. His friends and colleagues thought he was in Maine. After a week Stella began telephoning friends of Joe’s in New York. Simon Rifkind, who had succeeded him as Wagner’s secretary, reassured her that everything was all right. Eventually the judge would turn up.

The Supreme Court opened on August 25. Justice Louis Valente telephoned from New York to ask whether Joe was still in Maine. His fellow justices arranged a discreet inquiry. On September 3, when the inquiry proved fruitless and the court remained one justice short, the police were notified. Joe Crater became front page news, with the tabloids suggesting he had been murdered, vanished with a showgirl mistress, or disappeared to avoid the Healy scandal.

In October 1930, District Attorney Crain empaneled a grand jury to dig into bankbooks, telephone records, and safety deposit boxes. None of those inquiries led anywhere. Mrs. Crater, bewildered by her husband’s disappearance, revolted by the sensational press coverage, and enraged by Crain’s suggestions that she knew her husband’s whereabouts, refused to go before the grand jury and remained in Maine, outside of his jurisdiction.

The grand jury was dismissed on January 9 1931, after hearing hundreds of witnesses and taking 2000 pages of testimony, concluding: “The evidence is insufficient to warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, or as to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is a sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of a crime.”

Mrs. Crater returned to 40 5th Avenue on January 18. Three days later, while going through her dresser, she found four manila envelopes in a hidden drawer containing Crater’s will, which left everything to her, plus $6619 in cash, several checks, life insurance policies worth $30,000 and a three-page note, listing twenty companies or persons who supposedly owed the judge money. On the bottom of the list was penned a note: “Am very weary. Love, Joe.”

The police had already searched the apartment several times, and although Mrs. Crater insisted that they could not have searched the hidden drawer that held the newly discovered documents, this incident merely deepened the mystery.

The investigation lasted for years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some said he was the victim of amnesia, some that he had simply run away with a secret lover. Other theories linked the judge’s fate to organized crime. Crater had known Arnold Rothstein, the man believed to have fixed the 1919 World Series, as well as other criminals. Perhaps he had known too much about something-or-other and had to be silenced. There were whispers that Jack “Legs” Diamond had done the job and buried the body in the sub-basement of the Diamond-controlled Peter Barmann Brewery in Kingston, New York.

No one ever found anything illegal in Crater’s role as receiver of the Libby Hotel. Yet there were those who persisted in believing some party to the transaction had not received his share of the profits and had taken it out on Joe. Others thought he had been abducted and slain by a criminal gang disappointed with one of his rulings. A few thought he had been murdered by some stickup man who had successfully disposed of the remains.

Emil K. Ellis, who represented Stella Crater in litigation against her husband’s insurance company, argued that Crater had been murdered in a blackmail scheme engineered through June Brice, a showgirl. Ellis said the large sum of money her husband had withdrawn the day before he disappeared was probably a payoff. He believed a gangster friend of the showgirl then killed the judge when he refused to give her more money. One incident lent this plausibility: on the evening of his disappearance, Judge Crater had been seen talking to Brice, who vanished the day before the grand jury had convened. (In 1948, investigators working for Ellis tracked her to a Long Island mental hospital: she was hopelessly demented.)crater-article

Others tied Crater to Vivian Gordon, a prostitute and blackmailer found garroted in Van Cortlandt Park, up in the Bronx, on February 26, 1931. The tabloids, ever true to form, suggested that “a red hot diary” found in her apartment listed her wealthy politician and businessmen friends, including Joe Crater. Gordon had been due to testify before a special state commission investigating the Healy scandal. Even that came to nothing: Healy was acquitted three times.

Yet Crater’s actions from August 3-6 seem to foreshadow his disappearance. He purged his personal files, obtained a large amount of money and wrote the letter describing the debts owed to him found five months after his disappearance. Police Commissioner Edward Mulrooney simply expressed common sense when he said, “Crater’s disappearance was premeditated.”

Herbert Mitgang, in The Man Who Rode the Tiger: The Life and Times of Judge Samuel Seabury, notes that Seabury’s investigation of the Healy scandal (which led to other investigations, ultimately forcing the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker) found Crater had raised more than $20,000 shortly before his disappearance. This was equal to a Supreme Court justice’s annual salary. There was, as many noted, a Tammany tradition that anyone granted a judgeship paid a year’s salary to the party leadership. Roosevelt-haters whispered that Franklin Roosevelt’s friends had killed Crater, because his possible grand jury testimony about the sale of judgeships to swell party funds would hurt FDR’s presidential hopes: “Mr. Roosevelt hoisted himself into the presidency on the body of his friend,” as long-time Crater researcher Alice Amelar once told The New York Times.

Sightings of Judge Crater were reported all over the country, and for a while the police followed up every lead. He was seen on trains and on ships, driving a taxi in a dozen towns, panning for gold in California and Alaska. He was sighted in the South Seas and in the French Foreign Legion. In the 1950s, a Dutch clairvoyant “sensed” Crater’s body buried near Yonkers, and in 1959, Westchester authorities dug up a Yonkers backyard in search of Crater’s bones.

Eventually, detectives would interview more than 300 people and review thousands of letters, telegrams, and depositions. They never found a trace of Crater or the papers that he had taken from his files.The state of New York declared Joe Crater legally dead on June 6, 1939, nine years after he went missing. Stella Crater sued three insurance companies to collect her husband’s death benefits. Eventually, the insurance companies settled.

And Crater became a cultural figure, “the Missingest Man in New York,” the butt of nightclub jokes (“paging Judge Crater…”). As late as the 1960s, the name of Judge Crater was invoked as a symbol of the missing. His name even became popular slang: to “pull a Crater” is to vanish.

Stella Crater remarried, divorced, and never stopped looking for her husband. The police closed the case in 1979. On the record, no one knows what happened to him. In this life, no one will.

New York Press, June 25, 2002