Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  Retaliating, Boss Tweed and his lieutenants devised a scheme to buy The Times for $5 million and thus silence it. In response, the newspaper printed an editorial that said “no money” could induce the hard-pressed owners to sell a single share of stock to Tammany “or to anyone associated with it or indeed to any person or party whatever until the struggle is fought out.”

  Historians have calculated that, at a minimum, Boss Tweed and his cronies stole $75 million from the city. After being indicted and convicted, Tweed uttered an unforgettable line as he entered prison. When the warden of the Blackwell’s Island penitentiary asked his occupation, Tweed drew himself up and said: “Statesman!”

  After Boss Tweed’s reign, Tammany leaders attempted to reform their old practices. Instead of “Boss” before the names of the Grand Sachems, the word “Honest” appeared—thus such leaders as “Honest John” O’Neill and “Honest John” Kelly. These sobriquets, however, did not save some of the leaders from spending time behind bars.

  The most powerful Tammany Sachem in the twentieth century was Charles Francis Murphy, who ruled the Hall from 1902 to 1924, a time when Jimmy Walker was making a name for himself as a party loyalist while representing New York City in the State Assembly and Senate in Albany. In the same years, F.D.R. served as a state senator and assistant secretary of the Navy; he was the vice presidential nominee in 1920, and made the “Happy Warrior” speech nominating Al Smith for president at the Democratic convention in 1924.

  Murphy, a respected saloonkeeper, got himself appointed to the lucrative post of docks commissioner of the busy Port of New York. In the four saloons he owned, decorum was the rule and no women were allowed. Personally, he was considered a good family man who could never be accused of such everyday vices as smoking or drinking.

  Al Smith and jimmy Walker both admired Murphy’s democratic touch. Rather than appearing at the hall itself in the evening, “Silent Charlie” often kept office hours under a street lamp on Second Avenue and Twentieth Street, in the Gashouse District where he grew up. There the people could pay him their respects and request a boon. He had three short answers: “Yes,” “No,” and “I’ll look into it.” Murphy once explained why he measured out his words so carefully: “Most of the troubles of the world could be avoided if men opened their minds instead of their mouths.”

  Financially, Boss Murphy was in fine shape. In the course of his tenure as docks commissioner, he banked a million dollars. New York, after all, was a busy and lucrative port—especially for the commissioner. After dining at Delmonico’s Restaurant in midtown with his acolytes and the city’s rich and powerful, the “Commissioner”—a title he cherished long after he was out of office—often relaxed on his large estate in Hampton Bays, where he built his own private nine-hole golf course.

  Nine holes, not eighteen. Obviously, Murphy was a frugal man; after his magnificent funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, it was discovered that he left an estate amounting to $2,170, 761.

  Big Tim Sullivan, an ally of Silent Charlie Murphy, controlled his own fiefdom on the East Side of Manhattan below Union Square. Sullivan was also known by his original nickname, Dry Dollar (from his habit, in the days when he too was a saloonkeeper, of carefully wiping the bar before anyone placed money on it). He was a leader who took care of his constituents, including judges he had put on the bench. In turn, they took care of him when his friends were involved in bankruptcy and other litigation.

  Big Tim also looked out for Arnold Rothstein. Sullivan “licensed” Rothstein’s gambling establishments. In return for immunity from police raids, a percentage of Rothstein’s income from his clubs went to the Tammany leader.

  What Big Tim Sullivan could do best was win elections. He once admitted to a crony that the best “repeaters” at the polls were men who wore whiskers:

  “When you’ve voted ‘em with their whiskers on, you take ‘em to a barber and scrape off the chin fringe. Then you vote ‘em again with side lilacs and a mustache. Then to a barber again, off comes the sides and you vote ’em a third time with the mustache. If that ain’t enough and the box can stand a few more ballots, clean off the mustache and vote ‘em plain face. That makes every one of ‘em good for four votes.”

  It’s easy to think of the era of Tammany dominance as an unbroken chain of corrupt, money-driven, antidemocratic governance. And it is true that certain temptations persist whenever one party controls local nominations and elections. After all, even in the 1990s, New York politics had to concern itself with ferreting out organized crime in local, monopolistic industries. Actually, Tammany changed with the times. In later years, it even had its own reformers. Boss Murphy’s successor, between 1924 and 1929, was George W. Olvany, who had a comparatively clean reputation and came in at the strong suggestion of Al Smith.

  It was said that Olvany was the only member of the Board of Aldermen who had remained seated when a youngster poked his head into a meeting and shouted, “Alderman, your saloon is on fire!”

  Olvany was a Greenwich Village boy who somehow avoided membership in the Hudson Dusters, the local barefisted gang, and instead played with Jimmy Walker and went to church with Al Smith. He progressed through the clubs to become deputy fire commissioner, sheriff’s counsel, and (for six months) a criminal court judge. No sooner did he step into the leadership of the Hall, however, than he began to make party professionals long for Silent Charlie Murphy.

  Olvany’s trouble was that he had a big mouth, into which he often put both feet. For instance, in the apostolic publication World’s Work, he wrote with Celtic pride: “The Irish are natural leaders. The strain of Limerick keeps them at the top. They have the ability to handle men. Even the Jewish districts have Irish leaders. The Jews want to be ruled by them.”

  Nor did Tammany veterans appreciate Olvany’s righteousness and bragging about Jimmy Walker’s clean government: “If there is the slightest suspicion of grafting fastened upon anyone in our organization, his resignation is demanded at once. We will not tolerate it for a moment I state with positive conviction that New York is the best-governed city in the world. There is less corruption in New York than in some cities one-tenth its size.”

  Whether this was wishful thinking or foolish political boasting, most of Olvany’s colleagues in the organization undoubtedly would have disagreed. For the most important “clean” Tammany man at the time, Al Smith, was too smart and too honest to boast As governor and as a Democratic standard-bearer for president, Smith had attained national stature.

  In many ways, Smith was a fighting governor, who blazed the trail of social legislation that Franklin D. Roosevelt would follow when he became governor. Smith took special pride in the state’s Labor Department, which set higher safety standards in factories and encouraged compensation claims by the 400,000 workers in the state who were injured in industrial injuries every year. That same attitude was evinced in the stronger labor laws that Governor Roosevelt carried from Albany to Washington.

  At the height of his power in the 1920s, Smith was also admired beyond the borders of his own country. One of the keenest assessments of him was made by André Siegfried, a French political scientist, in his 1927 book, America Comes of Age. Siegfried wrote:

  “Al Smith has attained national prestige, partly by his honesty and his ability, but mainly owing to his origins in the slum quarters of New York. The enormous mass of immigrants rightly look upon him as their mouthpiece, for he is Catholic, though not the tool of the Church; a man of the people in every fibre and yet not an extremist; and above all he proclaims a new Americanism in which the Nordic Protestant tradition counts for nothing. In spite of his crudeness, this Irish-American stands for the best in the non-Anglo-Saxon community, and the foreign population feels for the first time that he gives them access to power and honors.”

  When Walker pledged to be “a Tammany Hall Mayor” who would always follow the Hall’s “leadership and advice,” Smith, who particularly disliked Walker’s philandering because it harmed the
Democratic party’s image—and his own presidential aspirations—warned him to change his ways, or else. As a longtime friend who grew up in the same culture, Smith told him bluntly:

  “Jimmy, the wind is getting stronger and you’re going to be blown sky-high.”

  In the past, reformers had usually challenged Tammany’s chokehold on the city from outside the confines of the Hall. Edwin L. Godkin, the founding editor of The Nation, wrote: “The three things a Tammany leader most dread are, in the ascending order of repulsiveness, the penitentiary, honest industry and biography.”

  One such quixotic “biographer”—the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, who was also a busy member of the Society for the Prevention of Crime—blamed Tammany for the city’s rampant vice in the gay 1890s. He correctly surmised that payoffs to the police and public officials were necessary for the brothels and gambling dens to be tolerated.

  Delivering a sermon on St. Valentine’s Day—a time normally associated with thoughts of love rather than kinky sex—Dr. Parkhurst aroused his parishioners as he addressed them in fire-and-brimstone language:

  “There is not a form under which the Devil disguises himself, that so perplexes us in our efforts, or so bewilders us in the devising of our schemes, as the polluted harpies that, under the pretense of governing this city, are feeding day and night on its quivering vitals. While we fight iniquity, Tammany shields and patronizes it; while we try to convert criminals they manufacture them; and they have a hundred dollars invested in manufacturing machinery to our one invested in converting machinery”

  Dr. Parkhurst’s own adventures while searching for evidence in the nether regions of organized sin helped lighten the mood of his parishioners and all New Yorkers who enjoyed reading about his peregrinations. Parkhurst insisted on witnessing New York’s vice up close and in person.

  What Dr. Parkhurst saw while touring the dens of wickedness for weeks shocked him out of his wits. To look like a patron, he disguised himself by wearing checked black-and-white trousers, a red flannel scarf, and a slouch hat. He did not have to add false whiskers; he wore his own real ones. Dr. Parkhurst discovered ten-cent whisky saloons frequented by children; opium dens; “tight houses” (so called because the ladies there cavorted in skimpy skivvies); and five-cent lodging houses frequented by derelicts who emerged only at election time as Democratic voters for a bottle of booze.

  Dr. Parkhurst visited Hattie Adams’s famous brothel, where a “dance of nature” was performed by five young ladies, each dressed in a demure Mother Hubbard gown. The ladies then doffed all their garments and frolicked around the room bare-assed, playing leapfrog. In the spirit of fun, they jumped over Dr. Parkhurst’s accomplice, Charles W. Gardner, a detective hired for $6 a night to show him the town.

  The good Reverend watched the naked women without flinching, slowly sipped his beer, and took notes. When Hattie herself pulled on Dr. Parkhurst’s whiskers, he bristled and warned her not to attempt any further familiarities.

  The crusading Dr. Parkhurst demanded of Gardner, “Show me something worse!”

  After downing a fortifying drink of Cherry Hill whisky in a saloon on Cherry Street, “he acted as if he had swallowed a whole political parade, torchlights and all,” the detective said. They moved on to the Golden Rule Pleasure Club on West Third Street, where Dr. Parkhurst was greeted by Scotch Ann, an imaginative madam who escorted him to a row of cubicles, offering him a variety of sexual games that were forbidden in the Good Book, sometimes leading to death by stoning.

  “In each room sat a youth whose face was painted, eyebrows blackened, and who spoke in the high falsetto voice of a young girl,” Parkhurst discovered. When Scotch Ann explained what unusual pleasures awaited him in the cubicles, the clergyman decided that he had seen enough.

  “Why, I wouldn’t stay in that house for all the money in the world!” Dr. Parkhurst declared, and fled past Scotch Ann into the clean night air.

  Speaking out against the vice purveyors, Dr. Parkhurst described them and their Tammany protectors as “a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot. Anyone who, with all the easily ascertainable facts in view, denies that drunkenness, gambling and licentiousness in this town are municipally protected, is either a knave or a fool.”

  Despite Parkhurst’s brave undercover work, no significant changes were made in the vice-ridden Tenderloin, the sporting-house area in the West Twenties and Thirties between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. It was called the Tenderloin by an otherwise honest police captain, Alexander S. Williams, who decided to pick up a little graft by leaving a quiet residential neighborhood and transferring to the district. “I’ve had nothin’ but chuck steak for a long time,” he said, “and now I’m goin’ to get a little of the tenderloin.” Because of his liberal use of the nightstick, Captain Williams was nicknamed Clubber. The reformers found that the cops increased arrests of street prostitutes and saloon girls because they could not be shaken down as easily as brothelkeepers. But the police made sure that the houses of ill-repute on their beat were not raided. The brothels run by Hattie Adams, Scotch Ann, and scores of other enterprising madams all over town were accepted by the city fathers as a “legitimate” part of the underground economy.

  As for Dr. Parkhurst, he kept hammering away in his sermons at the seamy side of life in New York. In 1918, he retired as pastor of Madison Square Presbyterian Church and began writing a newspaper, column for one of his old enemies, William Randolph Hearst. In 1927, at the age of eighty-five, he married his longtime secretary (his first wife had died six years before). Dr. Parkhurst lived to see a reform administration take over City Hall in 1933. That year, at the age of ninety-two, he expired.

  Another fierce Tammany “biographer,” overlapping with Jimmy Walker in Manhattan politics, was Fiorello H. La Guardia, affectionately known in the tabloids as the Little Flower. As much as Walker, ethnic New York flowed in his veins. Fiorello was born at 177 Sullivan Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the son of Italian immigrants—a Jewish mother, Irene Luzzatto Coen, from Trieste, and an Italian agnostic father, Achille La Guardia, from Foggia. He was raised on military posts in the West, where his father was an Army bandmaster. At the age of nineteen, Fiorello joined the U.S. Consular Service and was stationed in Trieste and Budapest, where he acquired a knowledge of French, German, Italian and Croatian. La Guardia could campaign and curse in a half-dozen languages, and he was able to do both in the linguistic mosaic of Manhattan.

  After becoming a lawyer, he ran for Congress as both a Progressive and Republican in the Tammany-controlled Twentieth Assembly District, which lay mostly on the East Side of Manhattan, and also included East Harlem. He scored an astonishing victory and was elected in 1916. When the United States entered World War I, he learned to fly and enlisted in the Army’s fledgling Aero Service, rising to the rank of major overseas. All his life, he was proud to be called Major.

  After the war, he accepted an offer to run for president of the New York City Board of Aldermen, and won again—the first Republican to do so. In Boss Tweed’s day, the aldermen were referred to, with some justification, as the Forty Thieves. Things hadn’t changed too much in the city’s legislative body in the 1920s; it was among the aldermen that La Guardia observed the excesses of the Tammany machine close up. He exposed the fact that a Tammany leader’s son obtained for $7,500—and without bidding—a city pier contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. After a brief stint as president of the board, La Guardia was reelected to Congress in 1922, becoming the leading House liberal in fighting against Prohibition, racism, and the prevailing doctrine of laissez-faire for big business.

  As a Republican in both New York and Washington, La Guardia was the odd man in. “I stand for the Republicanism of Abraham Lincoln,” he explained, “and let me tell you that the average Republican leader east of the Mississippi doesn’t know any more about Abraham Lincoln than Henry Ford knows about the Talmud.” The crack against Ford referred to his anti-
Semitism.

  La Guardia’s short temper and voluble style sometimes troubled even his admirers. His close friend Adolf A. Berle, Jr., a Columbia law professor who was a Roosevelt Brain Truster, once said of him, “If Fiorello was a demagogue, he was a demagogue in the right direction.”

  When Mayor Walker ran for a second term in 1929, his opponent was Congressman La Guardia. Could Fiorello stand a chance against the Tammany machine and the popular mayor? La Guardia thought so. “There’s a long shot winning in Saratoga every day,” he said. “There is one thing I know how to do and that is to beat Tammany Hall.”

  Citing his record as a vote-getter, La Guardia’s loyal Italian followers recited:

  Seven times he’s won elections,

  Seven times he’s reached the top.

  He is proud he’s an American,

  And he’s proud he is a Wop!

  The Hearst newspapers supported Mayor Walker. While most of the other New York dailies leaned toward the Republicans during elections, The New York Times offered its readers an independent balance sheet of Jimmy Walker’s assets and liabilities in its inimitable, objective style:

  THE MAYOR HE MIGHT BE

  If the people of this city were asked to sum up the official character of Mayor Walker nine out of ten of them would dwell upon his great personal charm, his talent for friendship, his broad sympathies embracing all sorts and conditions of men, his ready wit, his brilliance as a speaker at every kind of gathering or function, his skill as a politician, his gift for winning support from the most unlikely quarters. These estimates of the Mayor are true enough, but they ignore certain things in him which he usually keeps in the background, but which mark him out as a man naturally fitted for a great executive position.