Hearst’s diabolical scheme made the political machinations of the previous decade’s Sheehan brothers from Buffalo, William J., corrupt Lieutenant Governor of New York State, and John C., corrupt Police Commissioner of New York City, look saintly by comparison. Hearst was out to nullify the American two party system by refusing to declare himself faithful to any party, despite having in the past labeled himself a Democrat. He made his position clear and definitive by denying allegiance to any partisan doctrine. His goal was to neutralize the Democratic party in every state and replace it with a new party, which for want of a better name might be called the Hearst party. Whether Hearst succeeded or failed in his bid to become governor of New York State, it was said that would have no effect on his grander scheme of elevating himself to the office of President of the United States.
He initiated his run for governor by at first proclaiming himself the candidate for the Independence League and taking a solemn pledge that he would continue Independent, only to go back on his word and embrace the Democrats down the line, seemingly running as a candidate of both parties simultaneously. Additionally he ran his campaign in defiance of the laws of New York State limiting campaign contributions—he refused to open his books to investigation.
As frosting on the cake he hired as his campaign manager none other than Fingy Conners.
Hearst, in a reciprocal arrangement with Fingy, secured for Conners a fortune in cash along with the office of Chairman of the Democratic Party of New York State. The former front runner for that office, P. E. McCabe, who had been promised the position by the state leaders in Albany, was persuaded to drop out when Hearst offered to put up half a million dollars as a “campaign contribution.”
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Fingy did his best to rally Hearst voters and allies through his newspapers and personal arm-twisting, but as election day approached the tide turned decidedly against Hearst.
As late as October 19, 1906, Alderman John P. Sullivan, still tenuously allied with Fingy Conners and toeing the party line supporting Hearst, presided over a tepid rally at St. Brigid’s hall in Buffalo’s First Ward extolling the supposed virtues of candidate Hearst. Hearst was prettily painted there in bright colors as a friend and ally of laboring men—the very same men who populated the audience—despite a raft of opposing historical evidence giving a lie such a claim.
Some First Ward’s voters’ habitual loyalty to Sullivan seemed to have by association translated to reluctant support for the alderman’s chosen candidate William Randolph Hearst at first. Nevertheless these men, most of them employees of Fingy Conners, never allowed recollections of their boss’ decades of mistreatment of them and their families stray very far from their minds. Indeed where they sat on this night was exactly the venue from which they had rebelled against Fingy Conners during the infamous Scoopers Strike of 1899.
The day following the Hearst rally, the Niagara Falls Gazette’s publisher, Sherman Morse, former city editor of the Buffalo Evening News, having attended Sullivan’s meeting and terribly troubled by it, thought it prudent to remind the people of Western New York exactly what kind of vile beast William Randolph Hearst’s campaign manager was.
Fingy Conners seethed in his office at the Courier newspaper, gripping the Niagara Falls Gazette so tightly that his ruddy knuckles whitened. He had once tried to steal Morse away from the Buffalo Evening News for his own Courier newspaper and failed, unaware at the time of how much Sherman Morse despised him.
Despite Fingy Conners’ urgent pleading, Hearst had made precious few public appearances during his campaign, convinced that his name alone should be enough to win the people’s vote. Fingy’s cohort Hearst thus mutated into a universally unpopular candidate. At the same time Conners found himself raked over the coals by the unearthing of the muck of his own odious past. If there was anything Fingy despised most it was seeing his old sins resurrected in print. Never mind the fact that what he should have felt instead was daily gratitude that he had not as yet been subjected to any uncensored, unabridged, fully vetted or legally-binding accounting of his endless misdeeds, much less an assassin’s strike. Those sins that had not been preserved in the public record out of fear of mortal reprisal had nevertheless been burned indelibly into the public’s unforgiving mind.
On the front page of the Niagara Falls Gazette, October 20, 1906, in bold headlines, strategically timed to best impact voters’ considerations, Sherman Morse laid it all out in black and white:
ARGUMENT BY BULLETS:
BUFFALO’S BLACK TUESDAY
Conners, Now Appealing to the Workingmen For His Candidate,
Exhibited His Hatred For Honest Laborers Through
His “White Slave” System and a Reign Of Terror.
New York, Oct. 20 —W. J., better known as “Fingy” Conners, the chairman of the Democratic state committee, to whose influence, next only to that of Boss Murphy, Mr. Hearst owes his nomination on the Democratic ticket, is notorious among workingmen throughout the state as the employer of the infamous padrone system in the conduct of the enormous stevedore business on the Buffalo docks. In this business he employed scab labor and waged bitter warfare against union labor. As the proprietor of a string of water front saloons his workingmen were partially paid in drink checks redeemable only at his saloons, and men who refused to accept these checks were summarily fired. Conners is known as a bitter foe to union labor in Buffalo and throughout the state.
These differences over the drink checks culminated in a bloody and murderous assault on the union workingmen on June 13, 1899, which is still known in the homes of union workingmen in Buffalo as “Black Tuesday.”
A band of Conners employees who had stood with him in the strike of the union scoopers were gathered on the deck of the steamer Mather, discharging at the Minnesota ore dock. They were under the leadership of David J. Nugent, nephew-in-law of Conners and were armed to the teeth. In the hold beneath were sixty ore handlers, all union men.
Without a word or warning the scabs opened fire on the union men with their revolvers and before the firing ceased over two hundred bullets were rained on the heads of the defenseless workmen, who protected themselves as best they could with their shovels used as shields. When the captain of the boat attempted to attract the attention of the police by blowing a whistle, Nugent leveled a revolver at him and forced him to drop the signal cord.
Three of the defenseless union men were shot, and one of them, John Malyek was thought to be mortally wounded. Nothing but the shovel shields prevented a wholesale slaughter. The police arrested sixteen of the firing party and Conners met them at police headquarters ready to bail them out but the district attorney, Thomas Penney, could not be “handled” and refused to admit the men to bail while one of their victims was at death’s door.
Conners’ storming and bluffing was of no avail and the sixteen men under arrest were remanded and subsequently indicted. But the district attorney who had been appointed by Governor Roosevelt was met with every trick in the prosecution known to the law by Conners’ attorney, helped by Conners’ two newspapers. Then the matter took on a political complexion, and the partner of Conners’ counsel was urged by the Conners following for the district attorneyship, and his name was jammed through the convention and Mr. Penney was named as his opponent by the Republicans. Before the election the district attorney secured the conviction of Conners’ nephew for the murderous assault on the union workingmen.
At the election the Republican Penney defeated the Conners candidate for district attorney by a majority of 10,500, although the democratic candidate for mayor at the preceding election received a majority of 9,000.
Just previous to the shooting Bishop Quigley of the Roman Catholic church and public sentiment had forced Conners to abolish the white slave system by which his employees were paid off in his saloons. The only excuse offered for the shooting of the union men was that they were accused with calling the Conners workmen “scabs.”
The Catholic Union and Times
worked for the abolition of the Conners padrone and white slave systems, and in this connection said editorially:
“Mr. Conners cannot afford to trifle with the moral sense of this community. Public opinion demands that this wholesale degradation of labor along the docks shall cease: that half starved wives, wailing hungry children, shall not have a father crazed by drink sent home every Saturday night to turn an already desolate home into a hell on earth; that these same children shall not be deprived of both food and education. We warn the grain contractors that fake promises will not go.
“Had the crime on the Mather occurred in the middle ages people reading of it today would “thank God that they did not live in those terrible times,” but we have an atrocity almost unexampled in depravity occurring in the city of Buffalo in the closing years of the century and the enlightened government of the United States.”
No more meetings with laborers in support of Hearst were scheduled. What had previously been only lukewarm public support for W. R. Hearst turned icy cold.
According to secretary of the Workingman’s Political League, S. J. Oberwager, as quoted in the New York Times, the selection of Fingy Conners as State Chairman had alienated untold numbers of voters in the state, especially in Buffalo. The Buffalo representative of the W.P.L. wrote in his report to Oberwager, “Hearst’s selection of Conners as State Chairman…has lost the Democrats thousands of labor votes in this city alone. Labor men here will not stand for Conners on any proposition.”
Come election night, Charles Hughes emerged victorious as New York’s new Governor.
One week following the election, for the first time in New York election history, the public learned about the campaign expenditures of both sides. The Minneapolis Journal stated that each side spent over a million dollars all told. Most large contributions came from those who wanted to see Hearst squashed. J.P. Morgan and Levi P. Morton each gave $20,000 to Hughes. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller each gave Hughes $5,000. Hearst on the other hand financed much of his campaign himself with his mother’s money. The Journal stated “…Mr. Hearst appears to have done the most of the spending himself. He gave $57,000 to ‘Fingy’ Conners, state chairman, and spent about $200,000 more getting the nomination.”
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With the damning Niagara Gazette tucked under his arm, Alderman Sullivan headed for Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, chewing his cud. Some pedestrians upon seeing him crossed to the other side of the street. Once again to his detriment, despite his promises of never again, he found himself self-destructively allied with Fingy Conners. The chickens were coming home to roost. Uncharacteristically, he was both conscience-stricken and angry with himself. He felt used once more, a pawn in the game played by his own beloved party, the entire statewide organization having recently been commandeered by the chronic thorn in his side Fingy Conners at the behest of Hearst. Never mind that Sullivan was a Democratic leader. He wasn’t the Democratic leader. Fingy now was.
In actuality JP Sullivan thought William Randolph Hearst no better than a pile of maggot-infected garbage. Forcing his well-practiced smile the previous night at the Hearst rally, it was all JP Sullivan could do to not lose his supper as he praised the smug scumbag publisher to the ward’s working men—his men, hungry men, men he liked, men he admired, men who trusted him, men who had given him their votes unwaveringly for the past sixteen years, men who JP himself had worked alongside during his own years as a dock laborer, men who, JP had no doubt, Hearst would have gleefully defecated all over had he been elected.
Waiting at the top of the church steps Mike Regan smiled at him. The two had worked in tandem for years to promote the church’s various events, fundraisers and pet projects. Most recently they were in charge of organizing a glorious homecoming. The police chief was excited.
Regan had for the past few days been embroiled in a controversy. It was demanded that police officers be dispatched to act as guards around the perimeter of the monument dedicated to assassinated President William McKinley under construction in Niagara Square. The presence of officers was deemed essential so that they might ward off the hordes of souvenir hunters who lay in wait night and day to grab at what they might. There was much arguing as to the cost of such a round-the-clock guard.
Comparably, the task at hand was a pleasure and a reprieve. Father Richard O’Connell, pastor of Our Lady Of Perpetual Help, was scheduled to return on Sunday from Rome where he had met with the Pope.
The two cohorts had cooked up a doozy of a homecoming.
“It will be the grandest reception ever seen in the district,” Alderman Sullivan stated in the Buffalo Express.
“It will beat anything anywhere all hollow,” sang Chief Regan to reporters in his Irish lilt.
A grand parade was planned featuring the 74th Regiment Band and Drum Corps up to the Central Station and back again to the church where a reception was to be held. Esteemed members of the congregation were set to deliver an address of welcome and Father O’Connell was expected to say something in response and then be surprised with the gift of new vestments that the Sunday School teachers planned to present him. Music and fireworks, speeches and banqueting were slated. No stone had been left unturned to make the occasion one to be long remembered. Following all the jollification the great gathered crowds would file into church to witness their pastor celebrate benediction.
Even as the alderman and the chief spoke, the church was being beautifully decorated with flowers and palms banking the altar; around all were entwined the papal colors. The parish was to have the celebration all by itself and expected to cast all other parishes in the depths of envy by the parade commanded by Police Chief Michael Regan as grand marshal and headed by many platoons of police. That is, until the reporters called with the news: Father Richard O’Connell was dead.
Wails of grief rose up along the riverfront as the shock of the news spread like wildfire, until a second call was received saying that Father O’Connell was not dead, that the disquieting rumor had resulted only from an unintentional misquoting of a simple sentence. In fact he was fine and dandy and the wailing was quickly replaced by resumed joy and anticipation and everyone proceeded with their plans for the homecoming.
All the while Chief Regan exchanged telegrams with O’Connell in New York City, the jist of which were an attempt by the Chief to nail down the priest as to his time of arrival on Sunday so that the planned parade could carry on. Several telegrams passed between them. Frustratingly, none revealed to Regan which train the priest had decided to come on despite the chief’s repeated and pointed requests for exactly that information. Regan began to wonder what exactly was going on with O’Connell.
Finally at 3 p.m. on the Sunday of the priest’s planned arrival Regan was forced to cancel the band and call off the parade to which so many and so much had been committed, owing to the mystery of O’Connell’s arrival hour.
O’Connell ultimately arrived on the 8 p.m. Lackawanna train, vacuously unconcerned about the enormous inconvenience he had caused so many, and proceeded directly to the church which was packed to the doors. Despite having been kept waiting in doubt and at length, his parishioners welcomed him wildly. Chief Regan put on a cheerful façade in his welcoming speech despite the abnormality of O’Connell’s behavior.
Following Regan’s oratory, Father O’Connell rose to thank all concerned for the wonderful honor bestowed upon him. His smile was irregular, his gaze somewhat vague. There were curious gaps in his speech which made the people uncomfortable. O’Connell looked around quizzically more than once as if momentarily puzzled by the goings-on. As the priest spoke the Chief scrutinized him, this man so dearly beloved. Suddenly, like a bolt, Regan was stricken by a chill that penetrated to his very marrow upon recognizing the familiar manifestation of non compos mentis.
His own father had exhibited the same when his end time was nigh.
Chairman Conners, Windbag
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On October 2, 1906, the New Yor
k Times had headlined, CONNERS OF BUFFALO DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN. A quote from Conners ran as the sub-headline: “I Ain’t No Speechmaker,” Says He, “But I’ll Be On The Job.”
The Times called him the “Political boss of Buffalo and Father of the Hearst boom in Erie County.” His election by the members of the New York State Democratic Committee as their leader was unanimous, except for one loudly shouted “No!” from the angry mouth of Charles F. Hulihan, a proxy holder for a committee member from Lawrence County, and a member of the Patternmaker’s Union and the Workingman’s Democratic League. He told reporters he opposed Conners because of his attitude to organized labor in a New York Central strike in 1891 and in the Buffalo dock strike of 1899.
Conners was asked if he was hostile to organized labor and if he had used strike breakers in the New York Central Strike which affected his workmen, as Hulihan had accused.
“Not at all,” the Times quoted Conners as stating. “There’s nothin’ to it. All my men are union. I don’t know of the New York Central strike this fellow talks about, so how could I have been either in or out of it?”
The meeting was held in a parlor at the Hoffman House Annex with outsiders far outnumbering the committeemen. Half a dozen members, knowing the agenda and unwilling to put their name on a vote for Conners, never showed up at all and failed to give their proxies to anyone. Another dozen also did not show up, but handed their proxies over to the willing, the bought, or the coerced.
Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins Page 23