by Thai Jones
By 1914, ten years after the McClure’s series had ended, most readers assumed that Tarbell had misunderstood—or at least misrepresented—him. The scars were largely effaced. “It is the picture of the diabolical Mr. Rockefeller that has been gradually fading from view,” an editor decided, “while that of the simple and human Mr. Rockefeller has been growing clearer and more distinct to the public eye.”
In the first days of January, he even went so far as to invite a reporter to join him in a round of golf. They toured his course and, violating all that was hallowed, they discussed serious matters while they played. “We are all socialists in a sense,” said Rockefeller. “No man liveth unto himself. The interests of one are the interests of all.” Not that he saw a social upheaval on the horizon. “Revolutions come and go,” he observed. “This talk of political revolutions has been rampant since I was a boy.” At last, the newsman asked what counsel the old squire would offer the coming generation. Rockefeller paused, and when he answered, he spoke slowly and with care: “My advice to the young man at the opening of a new year is to go straight and to do the best you can to make a success for yourself … If you make mistakes remember it is human to err, but try again, and try harder. Above all things be honest, honest with yourself and with those with whom you deal.”
* * *
“SO THE NEW year opens in hope,” proclaimed the Times on January 1, “with the certainty of good things, good business, and carefree minds.” Lately, the nation had been hounded by the baying of critics, the protests of labor radicals, the carping from liberal reformers. Those days, the editors predicted, were over. “We have passed through a phase, uncomfortably prolonged, of resistance to the law. The new phase is that of obedience to law’s commands, the hooting down of the agitator.”
The ecstatic celebrations with which Americans welcomed 1914 were no reflection on the previous twelve months. “On the contrary,” a Life editor insisted, 1913 “was easily one of the best old years that we have ever seen, and that is saying a good deal.” The newspapers proffered retrospectives, covering entire pages with charts, tables, and coded maps. All in all, the documentation of progress was irrefutable. “Each year contains fewer grafters, fewer trusts, fewer magnates, fewer of everything that is bad,” continued Life, “and more virtue, more generosity, more amiability, more serums and more of everything that is good.”
It had been a remarkable year for harmony. Local fighting had wracked the Balkans for a month or so in the early summer, but no more trouble was expected from the region. The great powers were more congenial than they had been for years. “The war cloud has disappeared from European skies,” proclaimed the Herald, while the Times cheered “the growing rapprochement between Germany, France, and England.” In the United States, 1913 saw the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which became a national celebration of unity and reconciliation. Plans were also in place to commemorate one hundred years of amity between English-speaking peoples: A century had passed since the British had burned the White House during the War of 1812. “What 1914 may disclose no man knows,” the Post acknowledged, but none could deny that “1913 is ending with good hopes of peace.”
Fifty-one black Americans were lynched in 1913. “This is the smallest number in any year since these grim records have been kept,” announced Booker T. Washington. A mere eighty-eight people were executed legally by the states, with New York leading the way by putting eleven criminals to death. Americans donated $170 million to charity in 1913, and the captains of industry had been particularly generous. John D. Rockefeller was most beneficent of all, distributing $11 million of his private fortune to the commonwealth.
New York’s live poultry market showed astounding increase. All the butter packets consumed by metropolitan residents, lined up end to end, would have stretched halfway round the earth. Only 302 people—including 149 children—were killed by automobiles in the streets; 108 others were run down by streetcars, and 132 more perished beneath horse-drawn wagons.1 Pauper burials at the potter’s field on Hart Island, in Long Island Sound, declined by nearly a thousand to 6,744. Infant mortality dropped substantially, to 102 deaths for every thousand children born—a rate, said the secretary of the Babies’ Welfare Association, with which “those engaged in caring for the health of infants had every reason to be gratified.”2
The city itself was a statistical wonder. The second-largest metropolis in the world—its population of five and a third million lagging behind only London’s seven—it was the fastest-growing, most densely populated place on earth. Its harbor and rail system handled nearly half the national commerce. The municipal budget, around $160 million in 1910, was equivalent to one fourth of all federal expenditures. The city elected twenty-two congressmen to the House of Representatives. The mayor disbursed more than four times as much money as did the governor in Albany; municipal expenses were greater than those of any state in the union and larger than the next fifteen biggest cities combined. Each year, New York’s revenues, mostly from property taxes and commercial fees, dwarfed the incomes of such corporations as Standard Oil or the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Municipal government directly controlled the lives of thousands of citizens. The city employed eighty-five thousand public workers, a staff twice as large as the federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. Municipal jails held more than five times as many prisoners as filled the federal prison system. The city also kept twelve thousand wards in its alms-houses and charity hospitals. Years before New York established its state constabulary, the city police force topped ten thousand men, more than could be mustered by any state militia.
Unremitting growth had led to a state of permanent revolution. “New York has had a history,” a visiting Londoner wrote in the Times, “but it is overlaid and obliterated by the raucous present.” The previous generation’s marvels—the Tower Building, Everett House, the Fifth Avenue Hotel—had already been demolished and replaced. The Woolworth Building, Grand Central Terminal, and the Williamsburg Bridge were newly completed. Twelve thousand sandhogs blasted and drilled miles of new railroad tunnels through the boroughs and beneath the rivers. Harried residents lived with the frequent echo of dynamite: “One rushes to the window at the first explosion with a mind revolving disaster,” the Times continued. “There is no disaster of any kind. It is just New York growing; New York tearing down something big to make way for something bigger; New York expressing with all the violence of shattered rock its eternal dissatisfaction with the thing that is, its eternal aspiration toward the new and better.”
Broadway and the Woolworth Building.
Such progress in industry and science was to be expected; the United States, after all, was a Christian nation, with the greatest and most vital economy in the world. What made the year especially notable were the advances in politics, a field in which Americans, chagrined by endless revelations of corruption, had long felt inferior to their European contemporaries. The 1912 presidential election had swept the mainstream far to the left; everyone was a Progressive now. Even partisans had difficulty distinguishing Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” platform from Progressive Theodore Roosevelt’s promise of a “New Nationalism,” while Socialist Eugene V. Debs and Republican William Howard Taft had offered more and less, respectively, of the same. Inaugurated in March, Wilson was following his success with the tariff by directing his energy against the monopolies. Those who had opposed him were acknowledging that he was making headway on the good work of reform, while acolytes credited him with returning “responsible, representative government” to Washington.
These unprecedented gains were fragile, however, and so political contests in 1913 became referenda on reform. Every race—“the election of a university regent in Michigan, or a judge in Illinois, or a mayor in Louisville, or a special election for a congressman in a remote district in Maine”—was scrutinized for larger implications on the national mood, the fate of the Republican Party, the strength of the Socialists. “Politics to
day,” suggested Current Opinion, “like modern art, has a distinct ‘futurist’ quality—one can read into it almost any kind of meaning.” With the stakes so dear, New York’s mayoral race had taken on national importance, becoming “one of the most heated and enthusiastic ever conducted in the city.”
Reformers were preaching uplift at every railroad junction, farming village, and mill town in the country. Chicago, Boston, New Orleans—all were as corrupt as they could be. But New York’s fight was different. Its machine was the Machine. “In the American political lexicon,” an analyst noted, “Tammany Hall and municipal misgovernment are interchangeable terms.” New York’s struggle had become synonymous with the whole push toward urban improvement. “If the hold of the strongest and most unscrupulous of municipal machines upon the greatest city in the country can be broken, no lesser task for municipal regeneration is impossible.” In short: “If Tammany can be defeated no city need give up hope.”
During 1913, the need for reform in New York was imperative. The reigning boss, Charles Murphy—that “terrible ogre of American politics”—wielded more authority than any of his predecessors could have imagined. And worse, he made no secret of it. “A nod from Murphy,” it was said, “and kingdoms fall.” When the governor he had chosen showed unwonted independence, Murphy had him impeached by his handpicked legislature. For the mayoralty, he nominated another of his creatures, Edward McCall, a candidate with nothing but loyalty to recommend him. “Not since the days of Tweed,” claimed the Outlook, “has Tammany displayed such confidence in its own power.”
The Democratic political machine, known as Tammany Hall, had been a scourge to middle-class reformers for generations.
In a city of millions, there were scandals for every temperament: outrages ordinary and unique, sentimental and pecuniary. Pickpockets lifted billfolds, aldermen snatched district seats. Builders of railroads and aqueducts filched municipal lands. The Canal Board and Highways Department embezzled civic funds. The Public Service and Interstate Commerce commissions conspired with the industries they had been tasked to scrutinize. Ministers seducing parishioners, doctors’ wives murdering their husbands’ patients, gun battles on the East Side. Grand juries impaneled, ubiquitous. The state treasurer slit his own throat rather than face investigation. “Graft, graft, graft,” declared a witness in a corruption case, “it was a story of graft, graft, graft everywhere.”
The Machine had crossed too far into hubris. Most of the press corps, leading civic groups, a united front of Republicans, disaffected Democrats, and Independents all stood together against Murphy’s gang. Calling themselves the Fusion Party, they put aside ancient grudges and combined “without regard to party politics.”
Then, in mid-July, Fusion announced its nominee and hope vanished. “Of what possible use is it to discuss the candidacy of Mr. John Purroy Mitchel for Mayor of New York?” wondered a Times editorial. He was obviously an impressive young man—“Spectacularly, preposterously, young,” in fact—but his inexperience made him susceptible to “the adoption of fads and nostrums.” He would “embark the municipality upon a sea of Socialist adventure.” At Tammany Hall, celebration. Once again, the organization’s enemies had blundered; Fusion’s nomination, they expected, would “make things easier” for their man, McCall.
Mitchel ignored the lamentations and began preparing a “smashing statement” of purpose. People who doubted him couldn’t conceive of the inner force he contained. On a South American vacation he had contracted a fever that left him susceptible to devastating headaches. It was agony when they struck. He never complained, but his friends watched him sit through aldermanic sessions pallid, perspiring, crushing the blood from his strong hands, yet refusing to adjourn the meeting before all business was complete. The same degree of will barricaded his passions behind a temperate exterior. “He wanted to hit the ceiling,” recalled Frances Perkins, whose husband had a position in the administration. “He wanted to be dramatic. He wanted to be Irish.” He did none of these things. “He is the possessor of an unusually analytical mind,” an associate said, “which is always under perfect control.”
The strain he felt was tensile and apparent. “When he sits, he sits as if he were just about to spring up,” a correspondent wrote in Everybody’s magazine. “When he walks across a room, he marches. He is nerve. He is wire.” Finding release in the strenuous life, he enjoyed vanishing for days at a time on hunting and canoeing expeditions in the Adirondacks. “It’s the greatest thing in the world to make a man forget matters that agitate his mind,” he told a reporter for the World. “Then when the call of the city comes and you get back to New York, with its skyscrapers, its noise and its bustle, you have washed out your brain, so to speak, and can see things in their right perspective.” Mitchel was as aggressive behind the wheel as he was restrained in most of his other pursuits. “He would drive a car sixty-five miles an hour on a straight stretch of road,” a friend recalled, and at least once during his mayoralty he was pulled over for speeding. In the city, dancing allowed for some physical fulfillment. His advocacy of the tango even became the subject of censure from religious leaders, but he refused to abandon it. “Yes, I dance now and then,” he asserted, “and if some of those who criticize me for doing so would dance too, their dispositions might be improved.”
But no amount of exercise could soothe his ire over Tammany. His abhorrence for Murphy stemmed from long acquaintance. In fact, everything but John Purroy Mitchel’s own determination to avoid it had steered him toward a Tammany career. His grandfather, John Mitchel, was a legendary Irish demagogue who wrote revolutionary tracts against the English in the days of the potato blight. After five years of exile in Australia, he escaped to New York, where he was hailed and feted at City Hall. He shook so many burly Gaelic hands during his first week in America that he had to wear a sling to protect his arm. On the other side of the family, Henry Purroy, Mitchel’s maternal grandfather, had gone into politics early, exhibiting “a great capacity in ‘machine’ methods” and rising to become the chairman of Tammany’s General Committee.
With this ancestry, Murphy would have offered him the spoils of the city, but Mitchel had a “hatred of expediency” and instead forged a career of opposition. For nearly a decade, he had been lashing out against corruption. As assistant to the Corporation Council, commissioner of accounts, and then president of the Board of Aldermen, he had conducted inquiries that resulted in the disgrace of several borough presidents. When a Tammany messenger offered a judgeship if he backed off, his response was to the point: “Tell Murphy to go to Hell!” Whatever post he occupied, he was usually the youngest man ever to have done so. By the time of his Fusion nomination, he had become “that new thing in municipal history in America—a municipal expert.” Progressives around the country took notice. Woodrow Wilson watched his success “with growing interest.” Even the Times, suspicious of his youth, had to acknowledge that “there is probably no man in an administrative office in this city to-day who knows more about the detail of municipal government.”
Mitchel’s candidacy was announced only a few months before the election, and he conducted a “whirlwind” campaign, speeding from borough to borough in his red automobile, often making several speeches a day. His opponents attacked him as a stooge to business, a traitor to the party, a “better-than-thou Democrat.” Worried that his orations were beyond the capacity of his audience to understand, he practiced simple words and worked hard to use them. But his topic was straightforward enough. For Mitchel, the main focus, as always, was the Machine. “The issue is Murphy,” he told audiences in Washington Heights and the Lower East Side, Chelsea and Flatbush. “We want non-partisan administration in place of petty politics, party spoils and pull. Would Murphy give you that?”
In the early days of the effort he performed dynamically, “with crisp, incisive declarations, emphasized by flashing eyes and telling gestures.” But soon he wore down, becoming worrisomely gaunt. By October, his voice was going. He�
�d grown hoarse, he explained to a crowd, from “telling Mr. Murphy what I think of him.” Then his headaches returned and he had to give up speaking altogether. After several days’ rest, “evidently suffering from the strain of the campaign,” he reentered the fray but had to stand aside while proxies gave his orations. Advisers feared that he presented a distant, somber image. “The electorate chiefly knew him as a man who held and applied convictions as to economy and efficiency,” one magazine concluded. “These are not magnetic convictions.” A variety of strategies were considered to make him appear more personable. “If possible,” advised one of his strategists in a personal memo, “be a ‘fan’ and go prominently to one at least, of the World Series ball games.” Another observer reminded the candidate “that he should ‘look pleasant’ when being photographed. Most of his published photos are so stern as to belie his personality and suggest an utter lack of humor.”
In the final week before the election, Progressives roused themselves for a last great push. Contributions filled Fusion’s accounts. More than a thousand concerned citizens aided the effort, giving nearly $130,000; a large minority of the donors could have been found in the latest edition of Who’s Who in New York. They were lawyers, bankers, and business executives. The Rockefellers—father and son—gave $3,000.
On Election Day, November 4, additional police officers were stationed at the polling places to prevent fraud. Down on the Lower East Side, Charles Murphy cast his ballot and posed for photos. Mitchel spent the afternoon motoring through Westchester County with his wife and some friends. That night he hosted Arthur Woods, a leader in the local Progressive Party, and a few others for dinner in his home on Riverside Drive; the returns sputtered in through a custom stock ticker. The gathering grew more cheerful as each ward reported. He had won. Tammany was smashed. Half a million celebrants cheered in Times Square; they paraded through Harlem. At ten P.M, the mayor-elect traveled to his campaign office in the Fifth Avenue Building, on Madison Square. Hundreds of supporters pressed in on him, grabbing at his clothes, trying to touch his hands. “I have but one ambition,” he told the crowd in a rasping whisper, “and that is to make New York City the best governed municipality in America.”