Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  That glitter and glamour were just illusions, though.

  The more beautiful the city became, the more difficult it was to manage, and the magnificence of the town’s appearance began to take on dark hues. Despite its marvelous façade, the city’s plunge into chaos continued in the 1850s. Gotham did have six hundred omnibuses, but they ran without a permanent schedule, were very overcrowded, and often broke down. Ten years after it was created, the city’s water system, supplied by Croton Reservoir, was still mismanaged and insufficient, dockworkers still engaged in fisticuffs with each other, fire department crews still battled other crews at blazes that caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, shoplifters still looted the towns’ department stores, people still starved. Garbage still piled up in front of restaurants, bars, and residences, and its foul odor wafted through the air of the congested neighborhoods. The city’s street-cleaning service was so poor that businessmen pooled their money and hired their own street cleaners. Fewer than half the city’s children went to schools; many of the rest turned into lawless street urchins. New steamships blew up; trains jumped off their tracks; horses bolted and raced through city streets. Abortionists still flourished, brothels made a fortune, and diseases still swept through the city’s neighborhoods, killing hundreds. The economy was up and down, and the poor felt seething animosity toward the rich.

  Yet none of these troubles had any impact at all on the inefficiency of the police and the rising crime wave.

  Crime was a separate world in New York City. Poverty or unemployment did not affect it. Civic measures did not curb it. The complete mismatch between crime and all other city issues was a historical aberration. This worried Captain George Walling, who had grown a beard and was now in charge of one of the city’s most overcrowded police precincts. To make the force work better, he streamlined his chain of command, became a micromanager who oversaw the work of his men, instituted new law enforcement practices, cracked down as hard as he could on illegal businesses such as loan sharking and prostitution, and worked with neighborhood and religious leaders to curb crime. He believed in the reforms started by Mayor Wood and told his men to do so, too. Like all the police, though, overworked and overworried, Walling was concerned about the crime tide.

  All of the police captains, such as Walling, and politicians, such as Wood, were constantly under pressure from civic organizations to eliminate crime. Residents of the city complained bitterly that they did not just fear being mugged, robbed, or perhaps killed but feared the way that crime was overcoming them and their families, like some dense poisonous gas spreading through the streets and claiming everybody. Their complaints were endless. They wanted to know why the police did not try a second and third method of cracking down on crime if the first did not work. Why didn’t the police keep in touch with law enforcement officials in other cities to get ideas on how to curb crime? Why did the police ignore prostitution, gambling, and drinking? Why were little children allowed to become part of criminal gangs and leaders of pickpocket rings? Why did the police and the city council permit women to form counterfeit rings and theft rings? Why no prosecution of abortionists? Was there no morality at all in New York City? Why couldn’t Captain Walling, or Mayor Wood, with his considerable powers, end crime?

  Everyone who visited the city seemed to have been warned about thieves and murderers. The police force could not seem to catch anybody; the patrolmen all had their hands outstretched for a bribe. Stories filled the newspapers every day about crime. People who were in no danger at all always sensed that they were. One woman visiting the city disembarked from a train and waited for her bags to be taken into a hotel by a porter. She stood next to a huffing horse and watched the porter intently, as did the other hotel arrivals. “I saw people making distracted attempts, and futile ones, as it appeared, to protect their effects from the clutches of numerous porters, many of them probably thieves,” she said.8

  In the late 1850s, crime was everywhere. Mayor Wood held all power over the police department; the police chief did not. That annoyed Captain Walling, who otherwise admired Wood. The inability of the chief to run his department, always bowing to the mayor or state legislature, continued for years and became a fatal weakness. When he retired, Walling said that “time and time again have I attempted, one way or another, to have fuller power placed in my hands, but for the last four years during which I was superintendent, my position was that of a mere figure-head.… A man who is held responsible for the actions of certain subordinates in any public department, should have absolute control over those under him.”9

  Why did the city’s crime problem grow? Many pointed their fingers at corruption and incompetence at City Hall. Visiting Scotsman William Chambers asked many New Yorkers what the causes of the city’s problems were. “One uniform answer—maladministration in civic affairs. You could not take up a newspaper without seeing accounts of unchecked disorders, or reading sarcasm on official delinquencies,” he wrote in 1853, the year before Wood was first elected mayor.10

  Criminals seemed to be able to do whatever they wanted and planned their escapades in the shadowy alleys of downtown bars or on the busy docks. Four or five of them planned a daily series of robberies of stores, vendors, and passersby. Street gangs outlined an entire weekend of activities at their favorite tenement hovel. Some designed strategies for robbery and murder, and others collected guns and knives. Women put together theft rings in neighborhoods or stores. Burglary rings of three, four, five, and more men designed careful robberies. Ten-year-old pickpockets decided what type of civilian to target, and twelve-year-old whores wrapped their dresses as tightly around their breasts as they could. Farther downtown, over expensive drinks, elegantly dressed Wall Street brokers dawdled over lunch, planning stock fraud and securities theft.

  And nobody seemed able to stop them.

  * * *

  Fernando Wood paid little attention to his critics. He saw himself not only as the city’s chief administrator but as its goodwill ambassador and head cheerleader. He began the day before dawn, answering mail and making schedules by candlelight at his lavish mansion. He arrived at work promptly at 9:00 A.M. and faced a crowd of job seekers and aides at his City Hall office. All commented on how crowded the mayor’s office always was, full of city workers, press, lobbyists, and supplicants. He talked to all of them and then read stacks of letters from job seekers, such as one from a Brooklyn man who swore to his brother-in-law’s patriotism (“an upholder of democracy”) and veneration of Wood in an effort to get a patrolman’s job but never mentioned any police skills in a very long letter. Other job seekers complained of the lines of people to see the mayor and asked to meet him in bars late at night. He had always made it a practice to attempt to meet people at night because he believed there was too little time in the day to finish his work. That practice extended back to the 1830s, before he had served in any public office. Sometimes Wood made it to the meetings and sometimes he did not. “Waited for you until 11 O’clock last night,” wrote one man whom Wood stood up.11

  Those whom he did meet in the evening were always grateful. “Our interview last night has only increased my respect for your independent and dignified perseverance in carrying out what you believe to be right and just,” gushed John Sichnbishop, a friend of the mayor’s, in 1859.12

  At night he was off to dinners with Tammany leaders, meetings with police officials, and various receptions, balls, and festivals. He was the chief speaker at the George Washington Day dinner, the Abraham Lincoln Day dinner, and anybody else’s dinner. He went to the Tammany New Orleans Ball one night, the Typographers Ball the next. He not only attended the huge nighttime police parades but led them, waving to the crowds and bowing to their enormous cheers.

  He tackled the problems of the police the way he tackled all others—with panache. He hired a team of doctors and nurses to work full-time for the police to keep his men healthy and on the job. He streamlined the chain of command in the police force, visited captains
on a regular basis, listened to complaints from cops and citizens, and read all newspaper accounts of police activity. He wanted to reward police who did good work with medals, but there were none. So he created his own set of medals and handed them out frequently.

  One thing he did not get, and wanted badly, was the elimination of the police board, established in 1853, and the installation of himself as the sole head of the police. He argued, unsuccessfully, that two of the men on the board were judges and therefore incapable of running that board. As a politician, he incredibly maintained, he alone was objective and qualified to do that. He tried to get the Board of Aldermen to elect him the lone autocrat in the police department, vowing to clean up the department once and for all. They refused.

  Wood did not see New York City as others did. To the mayor, New York was an Emerald City, a fabulous urban mecca, a real-life Babylon. It was full of glamour and elegance and money. It featured hundreds of tall, trimasted sailing ships, powerful locomotives, sleek omnibuses and carriages, lavish parties, rich receptions, gaudy weddings, and picnics in the park involving the best-dressed people in the world sipping varieties of champagne. It was a massive collection of fabulous building blocks, and on top of them all, by himself, a big smile on his face, his arms outstretched, he stood, the emperor of it all.

  The public was just as leery of Wood as the head of the police force as it had been of all previous mayors. He was worse, they thought, because he not only lied about his intentions, which was obvious to all, but was sneaky. His entire administration was full of secret meetings, closed-door meetings, and unannounced meetings. He would hold a meeting and then lie about what happened at it or, walking out of the meeting, say that there had been no meeting. People liked him, but no one trusted him, despite all of his posing, waving, and bowing.13

  Politically, Wood backed immigrants running for any office to snare the immigrant vote for himself. He backed one man who had few qualifications for a post because the man was related to Herald editor James Gordon Bennett and Wood was certain that his endorsement would bring Bennett’s endorsement for him as mayor. All of these maneuvers paled in comparison to his duplicitous work with the police department, though. He assessed hundreds of policemen a percentage of their salaries as “donations” to his campaign fund. He raised over $10,000. He again solicited the services of street gang rowdies who wrecked his opponents’ campaigns. He furloughed hundreds of police on Election Day so that there would be no law enforcement on the streets to hold back his disruptive street gangs. Someone should have complained about this, right? They did. The complainants were none other than the members of the Police Commission. To answer them, Wood simply suspended the entire commission for several days prior to the election, Election Day, and a few days after ballots were cast.

  Wood was enormously popular, but there were people who complained about the way he campaigned and charged that he won the election by fraudulent means. His defense? He wrote later that “the dissatisfaction towards myself has almost entirely subsided.”14

  He was a visionary, the mayor argued, and as such asked the city for huge increases in spending for street paving, hospitals, public education, and the police department. The police department deserved more money than anybody else, he said with unrestrained passion, because its record was flawless. It provided excellent service to a city of some 600,000 people, made tens of thousands of arrests, and was far better organized and productive than it had been five years earlier. Critics said the extra budget money would go into somebody’s pocket, most likely Wood’s.

  Wood said that these increases were natural and obvious to anyone who had lived in New York for more than a few years. The population was growing rapidly, and more people meant more services, and that meant higher costs. “The increases in people have been so rapid that local legislation has hitherto been unable to keep pace with progress,” he said.

  As mayor, he asked the citizens of New York to start a grassroots movement to abolish the city charter and return all political power in the city to the city—and to him, as the mayor. “The object of government is simple,” he told the city at meeting after meeting. “It is to govern in the public interest, for aiding the many without threatening the few.”

  And as for the charges that he was trying to make himself the emperor of New York City? The humble mayor responded that only if he was given full power could he correct “every municipal wrong.”15

  By the end of 1856, Wood had become not just the mayor but the political strongman in the city. He achieved the seemingly impossible in early 1857 when he became, at the same time and for the first time in history, the mayor and the head of Tammany Hall. He was, on any day of the week, the most powerful man in the history of New York City.

  And he never forgot to remind the people of that.

  Wood was a figure of great controversy, Tammany Hall was constantly criticized, taxes soared, the police were corrupt, and the crime rate rose rapidly; yet New York and its mayor seemed to be islands of calm compared to other metropolises. San Francisco did not have a mayor until 1850, and had no police force. The city was run by vigilantes for several years. When Mayor Ephraim Burr was elected in 1850, ten thousand heavily armed vigilantes guarded voting booths to ensure his success.

  The people of Boston were unable to elect a mayor at all. There were seven elections from mid-1844 to mid-1845 to select one, but nobody won. Finally, Thomas Aspinwall Davis squeaked into office, but he became ill soon after his inauguration. He resigned due to poor health, but the city council would not let him leave and insisted he remain in office. He did, but the work of being mayor killed him several months later. The city council then had to rush out to conduct its eighth election for mayor. Davis’s death left disorder throughout the city.

  In Baltimore, Mayor George William Brown told all he was a rock-solid supporter of the Confederacy when it was founded in 1861. The Union army arrested him, his entire city council, and the police chief and tossed them all into prison, where they remained until the war was over four years later. The city had to scramble to elect a whole new government to run a town riddled with robberies, political crises, and financial troubles.

  In New York, Wood had a big problem, though, and that was the newly elected, heavily Republican state legislature, most of whose members hated him and were determined to do all that they could to drastically cut his power or, if possible, make him completely powerless. There was no better way to do that than through the police department, whose members the mayor saw as his personal army.

  Governor John A. King started that pogrom right way, in his inaugural address, in which he stated that “experience renders it quite certain that the Legislature will hesitate to entrust the management of that [New York] system to the Mayor alone.”16

  Wood said those measures would “materially affect the municipal interests of the city—not only the public, but the Democratic Party is to be made the victim.”17

  Wood delivered a strident inaugural address of his own and told the crowd, obviously targeting state legislators, that “if the ship must go down, let those who drive her on the rocks take the helm and command—I will not.”18

  The mayor had his work cut out for him.

  * * *

  One of Wood’s major reform movements was the curbing of the city’s prostitution industry, something for which he needed the police department.

  Prostitution had spread throughout the late 1840s and 1850s, and the police had done little to stop it. Mayor Wood did not think it possible to eliminate all prostitution. It seemed safe and secure within private homes; he just wanted to stop the public nature of it. The city was awash in hookers. Whores populated just about every street corner, hotel lobby, and theater in the city. They sashayed throughout town and drummed up business as the police watched. Just stopping the public solicitation of whores would help rid the city of something that tarnished it in the eyes of tourists and visitors, and residents, too. So, in 1855, he urged the police to pick up
and jail any single woman they thought looked like a prostitute.

  The decree started a firestorm.

  “I think his policy dangerous and bad,” Strong told friends. He said that the new policy meant that any woman waiting for her husband, or on her way to meet a friend, could be arrested and incarcerated. “If the policeman did make a mistake, the morning would find her in disgrace for life, maddened perhaps by shame and mortification,” he wrote.19

  Wood soon abandoned his plan.

  The mayor’s plan might have been short-sighted, but his goal was not, said Captain Walling, He and his fellow captains were as exasperated as the mayor every time they saw whores roaming the streets or smiling at them in the theater. No matter how hard the captains told their men to crack down on prostitutes, they did not. They were paid off, and the captains could not seem to stop the bribes.

  In Wood’s first administration, the police had to fight the sexual war not only against the prostitutes but against some of the most noted men and women in the city, who formed the bizarre “Free Love League,” also called the Progressive Union Club, an organization whose leaders were in favor of open sexuality wherever people found it. The society met biweekly. It won much press attention but attracted the police, too, who raided the meetings and arrested many of the six hundred members of the league. It faded within a year.20

  The always ebullient Wood was all things to all people. In his first inaugural address, the new mayor described himself as “a man of honor, a friend of labor and industry and a protector of the poor.” He was, he told his audiences, not the politician the voters believed him to be at all. “My mind & time is so occupied with municipal affairs that politics is almost forgotten,” he wrote William Marcy, and he promised the public that one of his major programs was a complete reform of the police department.21

  That reform, though, did nothing except give Wood more power over the police than any mayor in the recent history of the city. Many within the police department fumed about his power and his use of it. “He … assumed full control of the force, which resulted in its being used for political purposes. He failed to give satisfaction and was ridiculed and condemned,” wrote Captain Walling.22