Now, amazingly, thirty-five years later the railroads were ramping up, attempting to assert their claim of ownership over the entire length of the Buffalo River itself. Feldman entered into conflict with the railroad companies over the question of whether the Buffalo River should be closed as a public highway, quite an outrageous maneuver on their part to say the least, thereby usurping its use in the future as a publicly navigable stream. He loudly charged that the railroads were endeavoring to force the city forever to abandon the Buffalo River. The legal attorneys for the railroads immediately turned to signing a public letter denying Feldman’s charge and denouncing him in the most bitter of terms.
In response, Feldman produced letters exchanged between railroad attorneys that confirmed their engineering of the barefaced scheme.
For the tens of thousands of citizens who regularly utilized the Buffalo River, the idea of the railroads attempting to wrest control over it was mind-bogglingly entitled. It was no different, they said, than trying to claim ownership of the falls at Niagara or the clean winds blowing across Lake Erie.
It was bad enough that the railroads refused to build much-needed train depots, demanding that taxpayers’ money be used for such, or that they refused to install any safety devices at dangerous rail crossings. But the city’s streets were yet being increasingly spider-webbed with fresh rails, far more than had ever been approved or legally licensed by the city.
The railroads commandeered public streets at will, streets built and maintained by citizen taxpayers, convinced of their entitlement of eminent domain and inattentive to any protest or challenge. Rails were laid on quiet residential streets so close to dwellings as to endanger the occupants inside and prevent their safe movement around their own perimeter. Giant locomotive trains demanded passage through downtown streets thick with pedestrian and street traffic. Shoppers, school children, businessmen, horse carriages and trolley cars were continual casualties of drunken and imperious engineers, switchmen and brakemen who demanded their right of way as if it were predestined by the Almighty Himself. It was without question a get-out-of-the-way-or-get-killed situation.
It was recalled that in the planning for the Pan American Exposition of 1901, the railroads refused to expand Buffalo’s Central Exchange Street Station, despite the expectation of 6 million visitors to the Fair. The railroads’ proposal to handling these vast crowds was to extend their tracks into teeming residential neighborhoods so that their trains could pull directly onto the exposition grounds where they expected that travelers would directly unload right into the fair itself. Never mind these travelers would be loaded down with heavy luggage, would be tired from their journey, would want a room to rest their heads, and that such an intrusion into the neighborhoods along the route would result in choking smoke, round-the-clock noise, garbage, ashes, flying burning cinders, traffic chaos at street crossings and increased injuries and deaths due to inevitable accidents. After a long battle, in which Alderman Sullivan was one of those willing to acquiesce to the railroads’ ludicrous demands, the railroad interests angrily and resentfully were compelled to make other arrangements.
Almost daily, newspapers reported mournful stories of so-called “accidents” which in reality were acts of manslaughter; of children playing or rail employees working by the tracks cut in half or crushed to death due to the actions or inactions of drunk or criminally negligent switchmen, arrogant brakemen and distracted engineers. In the United States in 1904 one person was killed every seven minutes in a rail incident—over 200 people every day. Railroad tracks invaded every portion of the city. On streets approved for a but single line there could be found as many as ten additional illegal lines surreptitiously, aggressively installed. Rail gangs would descend upon a street in the middle of the night and within a day have it torn up with rails installed. Even mansion-lined Delaware Ave. with its multitudes of powerful millionaire inhabitants was not off limits to blatant takeover by the railroads. The Aldermen’s Street Committee discovered that entirely apart from the 240 tracks or switches that were covered by permits, there were at least 150 additional tracks or switches within the city which various railroads had laid without ever applying for permits or seeking the consent of the Common Council.
One glaring instance that the Committee discovered was at the Bailey Ave. crossing of the Erie Railroad. Commissioner Ward’s list revealed that railroad track installation permits for only three tracks had been granted, yet the Erie installed 26 tracks across Bailey Ave.
Amidst the clamor of the railroads’ newest round of aggressive demands, the Buffalo Express printed an anonymous interview with a blame-assigning railroad engineer nearing retirement, himself admitting guilt:
“I have been railroading for 25 years,” said an old freight engineer yesterday, “and I can’t remember when so many accidents happened through the criminal negligence of brakemen and switchmen. That accident on the Wabash a few days ago is the worst case of the kind I know of in the way of loss of human lives. “I’ve railroaded out West, and there is no place in this country where a fellow can make more money. I would be out there now if I hadn’t been playing seven-up in my cab with a stranger instead of looking after my brakemen. You see I got interested in the game and forgot to send out my flagman.
A passenger-engine come up behind us, and before it could be stopped had knocked the daylights out of my cab. My two brakemen and the stranger were killed. I was pretty badly shaken up myself, but I pulled through all right and then came East, where I have been ever since. Of course, as in the Wabash and other wrecks recently, the blame was all heaped on to the dead flagman, and the engineer got off with a good deal of sympathy from the public.
The officials of the road, however, knew who was to blame in my case, and I was black-listed so that I couldn’t get a job until I had changed my name and altered my appearance. The freight or passenger engineer who will pull into a siding and not see personally that the switch is properly turned ought to be strung up. Far too often they go into the office of the operator and sit down, merely trusting to the brakeman to see that the switches are all right. I’m an old man now and can’t get around so lively as I used to, but all the same, every time I pull into a switch I know for a certainty it is closed after me. When I have a new man on the crew, I go back myself and see that it is all right before going into the office for my running orders. The engineer is the responsible man on the train. The company pays him $125 a month for looking after their property. The brakeman gets only from $40 to $60 a month, so that you can easily figure out who should be disciplined in case of an accident attributable to a brakeman or switchman’s carelessness. Probably railroad accidents of the kind mentioned would be scarcer if a few lazy engineers were indicted for manslaughter instead of irresponsible brakemen.”
It was Feldman’s crusades against the railroads and the gang of waterfront aldermen and their cohorts that roused Buffalo citizens to a realization of the level of corruption infecting the lower house aldermen that led to the scathing condemnation of them handed out by the Municipal League. This corrupt element in politics and public life—the element made up of politicians who regard office-holding as a commercial proposition to enrich their own bank accounts and who were the eager agents of the corporations and contractors—had at stake their own fortunes and interests. With them there was only the coldest of sentiment involved, no question of right or wrong, no consideration of the public interest.
And so Sullivan, Kennedy, Gorman and Collins put aside their historic differences and ancient grudges against Fingy Conners and joined their past and future enemy in ridding the city of the curse of a fearless, fair, civic-minded, and aggressively honest candidate in the race for the office of Mayor.
Unable to utilize his newspapers to expose any supposed wrongdoings of the virtually spotless Feldman, for the man was entirely free of scandal, Fingy rather launched an endless attack on its rival organ, the Buffalo Express, in retaliation for its ardent support of Feldman.
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bsp; Fingy was not able to besmirch Feldman’s honor or refute factual claims made by Feldman due to there being so much supporting historical evidence proving Feldman’s unceasing endeavors in disburdening the city of its political and corporate criminal element. Out of desperation the Courier loudly criticized the demise of what it termed the “once-admirable and honest character of the Buffalo Express” for its support of the enemy.
Fingy had nothing on Feldman, but as was his usual custom he publicly and gleefully boasted exactly the opposite, telling anyone who would listen that he “had the goods” on the Republican candidate. His solitary so-called exposé turned out to be that back in 1900 as a civil attorney Feldman offered to take a case for a client against the city on a contingency basis, asking for 25% of any damages won, but if the case were lost he would charge the client nothing. Fingy made a valiant effort to spin this historically accepted legal arrangement, which allowed poor people without the resources to hire an attorney to secure proper representation, as its one and only “proof” of Feldman’s purported dark and evil underbelly.
Fingy Conners had long past proven himself a dedicated practitioner of the dictum that any lie, no matter how senseless, stupid or egregious, repeated over and again with ceaseless energy and passion would eventually be accepted by an unthinking sheep-like public as truth. In his newspapers, with no proof whatsoever, he daily repeated empty character assassinations against Feldman in front page news stories, coupled with nonsensical editorials, both of which were as full of bluster and innuendo as they were devoid of any real substance.
Feldman was not afraid of openly exposing and attacking the amoral antics of elected politicians, but tackling Fingy Conners was a different story; it could well prove downright dangerous.
In a city that for twenty-five years had suffered under the oversee of dictator Conners, a man who had his nose in everyone’s business and his thumbless hand in every pocket, and who still preferred to solve his thornier conflicts by dispatching his hired gangs of violent $10 thugs rather than his costly attorneys, Feldman had his family to worry about. All things considered he nonetheless believed that right would ultimately win out.
Feldman was convinced that the voter, robbed blind and emotionally depleted by decades of corruption and graft, exhausted by Fingy Conners’ criminal interference in almost every facet of their daily lives, would weigh the many proofs of his moral crusade against Conners’ deplorable history as well as the city’s aldermen’s despicable record of malfeasance, and a new era of morality and progress befitting a metropolis as bounteously blessed with spectacular natural assets as Buffalo would dawn to the benefit of the working man.
The fortuitous appearance amid the political muck of such a crusader candidate, one of irrefutable moral, upstanding, and supremely qualified essence as Charles Feldman, was an unprecedented and blessed opportunity.
The Conners-Aldermen coalition would not stand for any such curse.
Unbeknownst to its citizens at that time, the election of 1905 would prove to be a penultimate turning point in the history of Buffalo, a city of once-prodigious promise. It was a juncture at which the voters would have to decide to either place their future in the hands of the one man that might well correct the corrupt, wrong-headed decades-long course of their corrupt city’s destiny, or continue to hand over its future to the self-same thugs who’d spent the previous quarter century violently wrestling control of it from its very inhabitants.
Fearing the kind of vote-fixing, ballot-buying, police cooperating, pugilist-hiring, head-bashing election-kidnapping insanity instigated during the 1893 election by the Conners-supported Sheehan Machine, Feldman implored the editors of Fingy’s’ rival newspapers to resurrect that very story. He asked that they remind their readers of the degree of criminal electoral chicanery of which Conners and Sullivan were capable.
Feldman had enlisted the help of the widow of saloon-owner Nick Stafford who died as a result of a beating at the hands of Fingy Conners’ half-brother William Hurley during the infamous 1893 election. The Widow Stafford was yet entirely bitter over the police allowing Fingy Conners to personally lead his gang up Louisiana Street to invade her late husband’s saloon on election eve 1893, destroying the property, shooting a customer named Meaghan in the head, and beating her husband so badly to a pulp that he never recovered. Left in dire straits, the widow was forced under pressure to sell the wrecked house at a significant loss, only to discover later that its purchase had been orchestrated by an agent of Fingy Conners who had warned off other potential buyers. She personally accompanied Feldman to the offices of the editor of the Buffalo Express to help him make his case, but that organ, the editor fearing physical retaliation, was willing to go only so far in its opposition of Conners.
Fingy was a determined and ardent rewriter of history. Even as he continued with his violent methods he toiled tirelessly at reframing his image in the public eye, even insisting that the rival media refer to him in print as “the Hon. William J. Conners.” In her campaign to find some meager justice for her dead husband as well as to help a genuinely honorable candidate defeat her spouse’s murderer, Mrs. Stafford’s pleas to the Express ultimately fell on deaf ears.
The New York Times wrote:
From the very morning “Fingy” Conners found himself the boss of his (dockworker) gang, he became a “climber.” The subsequent story of his life may be written in two main divisions: The first years were devoted to an untiring quest for wealth, and the record of those years shows that Conners didn’t care much by what means it was acquired.
Since he has become rich and powerful he has been engaged in an equally persistent fight for social recognition and the respectability that could only be won by the blotting out of his early years from the memory of others. In this he has not quite succeeded, and his chagrin is reflected in the wrath he displays whenever anything like a faithful narrative of his early life appears in print.
Feldman’s many allies each had their own personal apprehensions concerning retribution at the hands of Conners and were as selective as they were conservative in their methods of their support of him. There was no more efficient way for Feldman to deliver his reform message to the public than Buffalo’s dailies. To Feldman it just seemed common sense for them to want to resurrect the long list of Fingy’s past sins to refresh the memories of his many victims and reinvigorate their opposition to him. But as Feldman himself had often stated, “Despite what the popular songs would have us believe, it is not love that makes the world go ‘round, but rather it is fear.”
A City On The Brink: It’s Now Or Never
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On the evening of October 8th, 1905 Charlie Feldman was received with unprecedented enthusiasm and optimism by a standing room only crowd at the Oddfellows Temple at Williams and Jefferson Streets. It was said to be a record breaker in municipal campaigns in the city.
Sick to the bone from decades of extremes in graft, corruption and betrayal by city officials both elected and not, Buffalo was in 1905 an illustrious municipality poised on the brink of greatness.
Charlie Feldman had appeared seemingly out of nowhere as a mayoral candidate. He was drafted by desperate Republicans willing to break from the party line and driven by the city’s dreamers’ dream of a better place to live for their children and grandchildren. Feldman accepted the Republicans’ nomination provided there were no conditions placed upon him whatsoever.
He would not tolerate party bosses or partisan nonsense. He was independent in the deepest sense of the word and wholly committed to changing the city’s fortunes for the better. Bribery, favoritism, and cronyism would be brought to a halt. The city would prosper given its reclaimed fortunes, finally free of the criminal element and back room dealings that always left the common citizen in the lurch.
Candidate Feldman entered the hall from the back to wild applause and the shoutings of citizens standing on their seats. The Uncle Sams of the Seventeenth Ward led the way clad in their unifor
ms of red, white and blue and headed by a drum corps. Instead of the expected rehearsed oration the citizens were spoken to from the heart extemporaneously and without any accompaniment of written notes.
“I will be absolutely frank with you. I did not wish to be nominated for Mayor and I certainly should not have accepted this nomination if I had not been permitted to say that the nomination would be accepted without promises, pledges or agreements of any character whatsoever, and that I might be permitted to make a campaign in this city as my judgment would dictate and without regard to what some political machine might dictate and that if elected I should have a free hand.
“I have lived in this city all my life. My parents were born here and they have lived here all their lives. I have seen this city grow from a comparative village to one of the largest municipalities of this country. I know its people and I know the citizens of this city. I think I know their hopes and their expectations. They ask nothing unreasonable; they ask nothing unfair; all that the people of this city desire is an honest, efficient and economical government.
Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins Page 19