Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins

by Richard Sullivan

  Automobiles and carriages in abundance drove up and down the street and were well looked after at the cross streets and turns, every one of which three policemen had been detailed. Anything was an attraction. The Salvation Army, marching for a couple of blocks from Genesee to Eagle streets, caused the crowd to halt. The army had a band and singers and was applauded. If three policemen passed abreast they were applauded. Even Alderman Sullivan, waving his hat to the crowd to be quiet and allow Morphy to sing, had been applauded. Sullivan in fact was there to the very end. He was the last of the Old Home Week committee on deck. As he left the reviewing stand he announced “It’s all over. It began in peace; ended in peace and was a glorious and successful week.”

  There was some fear that on the closing night of the carnival there might be some riotous scenes. Police Chief Regan and his men were ready for any disturbance but none came—the crowds were not so disposed. There were no outbreaks of hooliganism. The remarkable record of the previous days had been maintained. Among citizens and visitors, many had remarked on the seeming miracle of the virtual absence of rowdyism, thieving and trouble-making in the tremendous jams of people that clogged Main Street.

  The arranging for the licensing of the various concessions in such a way that only orderly sales of decent articles were possible helped the police considerably in preventing rowdyism. In one instance, an offer of $300 for a concession to sell the miniature feather dusters known to the hoodlums as ticklers had been turned down by the committee. In other examples, hundreds of dollars were refused for the concessions that would have tended to encourage vulgarity and rudeness in the crowds.

  Mammoth crowds beget mammoth confusion, turmoil, chaos—perhaps even panic, injury and death. Yet nothing of the kind happened in Buffalo during Old Home Week. Not one person was seriously hurt on account of the carnival. There was jostling, squeezing and at times excited scurrying at street corners, but not one fatal injury occurred. This is a remarkable record for seven days of celebration, each day of which attracted a gathering of one hundred thousand people or more.

  1908: Collier’s Magazine

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  Lord Northcliffe of the London Sunday Times called journalist Will Irwin “the greatest reporter in the world.”

  Irwin had borrowed money from his high school teacher for his tuition to attend Stanford University, where three weeks before his graduation, the prankstering beer-swilling political activist got himself expelled. However when all was said and done he recovered well.

  In 1901 Irwin got a job as a newspaper reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle. Then in 1904 he moved to New York to work as a reporter for the New York Sun. His coverage of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 for the Sun was the stuff of legend, for he reported the entire business from the comfort of his office chair at the Sun’s offices in New York City. Utilizing minimal material gleaned from telegraphic bulletins and relying on his personal knowledge of the layout of San Francisco, he constructed more than 70 columns of copy over the space of a week.

  By 1907 he was writing for Collier’s magazine, whose editor Norman Hapgood had become intrigued by a crude dock walloper turned millionaire turned Chairman of the Democratic Party of New York State by the name of Fingy Conners:

  “FINGY” CONNERS

  The Democratic State Boss of New York, who “looks like a prize-fighter and talks like a tough”—Dock scrapper, freight contractor, millionaire. The record of how he split the scalp of a Pole laborer, and jumped from cowhide boots through brogans to spats—Bruised but victorious.

  By WILL IRWIN

  WILLIAM J. CONNERS measures up as one of the most powerful figures in the convention at Denver which is nominating a candidate for President of the United Slates. He is chairman of the Democratic State Committee of New York, and, with Charles F. Murphy, controls completely the party in the largest of the States. The New York delegation, which he dominates, composes 78 out of the 1,002 delegates to the Denver Convention.

  The Buffalo docks, thirty years ago, were as Hibernian as a potato. Those were the days when the peasant Irishmen, new to liberty, a great, stalwart, energetic people, disorderly from the very excess of spirit within them, were still living in colonies by themselves. The A.P.A. spirit still raged in the land, a protest against the religion and customs of the uncomprehended newcomers. Although the Irish colonies of Manhattan Island were breaking up, although the new generation was already making its inextricable mixture with the native people, the region of small cottages, tenements, little stores, overshadowed by the great Buffalo grain elevators, held a colony that was Irish of the Irish—holds it even now for that matter. The Buffalo dock region is a survival of earlier days, as though an ichthyosaurus should come hopping down the street. It formed a busy, wild city ward. At the head of the lake region, it included the human flotsam and jetsam of the waters which banks up always on a sea terminal, as well as that permanent population of splendid virtues and splendid possibilities in disorder. Turbulent labor troubles, turbulent social upheavals, turbulent politics, were its brand and mark.

  On the Ohio Basin, center of all this region, stood a little saloon cocked up on trestles over a culvert—a bar downstairs, a few rooms, used for a sailors’ boardinghouse, upstairs; and the sign over the door—but lately changed—read: “William J. Conners.”

  The proprietor, “Fingy” Conners, had a reputation as the stoutest man in a free fight, the merriest roisterer on a spree, the toughest keeper of a tough saloon, of all the dock region. In these late twenties of his, he was a thick-set, strong young tough, with an accent that shook his cheeks, a coarse face, good-humored enough as his early photographs show—but the kind of face withal that would cause one to shrink in a dark street. When he was not needed behind the bar, he used to “mix” with the loungers about the front of his place, exchanging the jokes of the street, shaking dice, scheming over the cheap politics of his ward. At the first sign of trouble from drunken longshoremen or scoopers, he used to plunge into the thick of war with that joy and delight in a scrap which had made him the terror of the wharfs before he acquired property and became a saloon man. If they were too many for him, he reached for the bung starter: if that failed, he took to the methods of Chinese highbinders. There were no rules in his scrapping. When life in his own saloon became too peaceful and wearisome he sallied forth at the head of his toughs, among whom he was king by right of might, to clean out the saloon of some dirty Democrat—for he was a Republican at the time.

  In his little saloon over the culvert, the Republican heelers of his ward planned and executed their colonizing, their stuffing, their pasting—all their devices for increasing returns. From his place on the morning of primaries issued his gang, to beat and riot and repeat. He was already deep in politics, you see—not as an aspirant for office, but as a small boss.

  The fortune which raised Connors to this dizzy eminence among his kind had come to him through a series of disasters. His parents were Canadian Irish; his father had been successively a lake sailor, a stonecutter, and finally when he had saved enough money, owner of that same little saloon over the culvert. William J. Conners, only son of that marriage, was born in western New York in 1857. He had one sister, afterward a Mrs. Hayes, and two half-brothers named Hurley. He had gone to the public and parochial schools; at the age of eleven or twelve he had plunged into life as steward’s assistant on one of the old lake passenger steamers. It is on record from his own lips how he earned and saved his first dollar above his salary. “I was luggin’ a supper from the galley to the first cabin,” he said, “an’ I spilled a bowl of soup on me pants. I stood ready to bawl, w’en a deck passenger said he’d give me a quarter for the remains. I took me quarter an’ me bastin‘ from the steward. After that I used to spill a little soup on meself every day to prove it was an accident, and do business with the deck passengers.” He served on the lake steamers until he grew into the dawn of his great physical strength. Then he took a job piling cordwood for the railroad; an
d at the age of seventeen or so, he graduated to be a dock laborer and a longshoreman. He drank with the boys; he established a kind of rude chieftainship in his own gang, and he fought—from the tradition which lingers his life in this period must have been a long shindy. One of his defeats came near costing the Democracy of New York a State chairman. Working on Blake’s coal trestle, far above the water, he fell out with Mickey Fletcher, another dock scrapper. Fletcher punched him fair and full in the jaw, at once knocking him out and toppling him into the lake. When the bridge gang pulled Conners out, he was senseless and half-drowned.

  By that time he had lost his thumb and won his nickname. Several stories are afloat on the docks, but this is the accepted version: He and a playmate were boasting, back and forth, of their nerve. “Aw, I bet you,” said the playmate, “you ain’t got the noive to let me chop you fingy.” “I’ll bet you ain’t got the noive to chop it,” said the child Connors. They got a cleaver. Connors laid his hand down on the block—and they both won. Down the street ran Jimmy Connors, waving the bloody stump and yelling: “He chopped me fingy! He chopped me fingy!” For the rest of his career, Fingy Connors fought with a crippled left hand.

  The Conners family lived in their own small cottage down by the docks. Mrs. Hayes, whose marriage had turned out badly, was at home with her parents. The house took fire in the night. The inmates got out alive, but Mrs. Hayes ran back to rescue her sewing-machine—and the roof fell on her. The shock of this disaster killed Mrs. Connors. Only a year later the elder Conners died. Fingy, sole survivor of the family except his baby niece, inherited the saloon, the insurance on the cottage, the life insurance of his parents and his sister. So he became a saloon-keeper, with extra money in the bank.

  His first investment was another saloon. Across the Ohio Basin stood a haunted house, avoided by the neighbors after dark, on the market for a song. Fingy Conners bought it, turned the old parlor into a barroom, the upper apartments into lodgings for lake sailors. “They’ll lay that ghost for me,” said Fingy. No sooner had he set the place going and proved that no ghosts wanted to stay in a Conners saloon that one of the periodical, violent strikes ran along the Buffalo docks.

  Handling Freight at the Docks

  Out of this strike came his golden opportunity. Not only did he win the spendings of idle men—as the saloonkeeper always does in a strike—but he conceived the idea which made him rich and great. No one had thought yet of contracting to handle freight at the docks. The lake steamer companies hired their own longshoremen as they needed them, and stood the burden of the strikes. Conners, with his experience, his influence in a certain kind of politics, and his general leadership among dock laborers, approached the companies and offered to unload their freight at a fixed rate. He got the contract from the Union Steamboat Company and managed to handle the men so well that he had no strikes. By methods all his own—there float many unconfirmed tales of these methods—he brought in company after company. Now only one dock in Buffalo employs any other contractor. Unloading freight and getting it upon inland carriers includes three separate shifts—from the vessel to the docks, from the docks to the warehouse and from the warehouse to the cars. At first merely a dock handler, he absorbed the other two processes. More, through twenty years of steady commercial progress, he absorbed the freight-handling business in most of the other lake ports. His string of establishments stretches from Buffalo to Milwaukee. He says that he is the largest individual employer of labor in the country; and, in fact, he does have from 4,000 to 6,000 men on his weekly payroll. This, in brief, is the story of the Conners fortune as he started it and nursed it along.

  His methods—well, there are stories. “Brains is as cheap as ten-penny nails,” he said once; “I can buy brains.” The standing charge against Conners in business is that he buys certain brains which are not for sale in open market. He has met fierce competition in business as he has in politics; he has usually come out beaten and bruised, but a winner. His enemies charge that he always bought the local freight agents of the carrying lines. He denies this; but once he gave the lie to his denials. A transcontinental railroad had sent up a new agent and the shippers of Buffalo were giving this man a banquet. Conners was there. Whenever, for any reason, he grows enthusiastic, the accent of civilization sloughs off and he becomes again the dock tough. Within a minute after he had risen to speak he was directing his remarks to the new agent: “You t’inks yous is Hell,” he said, “but I’ll get yous. Yous don’t know it, but I will. I always gits ‘em. Wot you’ll learn is that I am It and yous is Nit.” This gem of bribery shines out from his waterfront wisdom: “If they finds it out on you, yous is done. If they finds it out on me, I done right.”

  Scrapper and “Mixer” Too

  He was a king among the dock men before he became an employer, he understood them. After a fashion, too, they liked him. Not only was he an admirable scrapper, but he was—and is, a good “mixer.” He liked to loaf away an evening in a saloon, to play the crude practical jokes which appeal to his primitive sense of humor, and to exchange the gossip of the parish. So he was little bothered by strikes; and when strikes did threaten, he had a method of his own for heading them off. A power in the cheap politics of his own ward, a lesser power in the politics of Buffalo, his pull ran straight into the Labor Council. Whenever whisperings against him circulated about the docks, he would get his saloon henchmen together and send them among his longshoremen to form a union—his own union officered by his own secret agents. That union would apply to the council for recognition as the only Simon-pure and sanctioned organization among the dock laborers; and the power of Conners would pull it through. So he held the men in line while he climbed up and up—until the day when he turned the eye of his ambition upon the grain-handling business.

  Until this time he had been a freight handler only; he had never tried to get the grain business, largely because it was run on a peculiar system. Whenever a grain ship arrived at an elevator, the steamboat company would go to a “boss shoveler” and hire from him his gang of “scoopers.” This boss shoveler was usually a graduate scooper, promoted to own a small saloon. He did none of the work himself; it was his part to furnish the brains and clerical force. When the job was done, he collected from the company and divided the sum pro rata among the men, reserving for himself a share a little larger than that of any other individual. The system was sometimes a little awkward in practice; and this leadership of a saloon-keeper in industry was not always a good thing for the laborers. But it worked very well on the whole; and to the docks it was as though it had always been and always would be.

  When, in the middle nineties, Fingy Conners went after the grain-handling business, he doubtless wanted something besides mere profits. In both business and politics he kept an organized force of toughs who beat up his enemies, worked his deals, formed his unions. He needed to provide for them; and these boss scooper saloons were good berths. He convinced the grain carrying companies, who saw how he had straightened out the system of freight handling. Out went the old boss scoopers who had grown gray in the service, and in went his own henchmen, his scrappers, his toughs. At first they worked along in the old way.

  Trouble broke out at once. The men found that they were making less out of a week’s work than they used to. The boss shovelers attributed it to the uncertainty of readjustment; but the pay envelopes continued to shrink. Political enemies went among the men, persuading them to put spies on the business. They found that, in certain elevators, the boss scoopers were stuffing the rolls with dummy names. Of forty scoopers enrolled on one job, say, ten would be dummies. When, on Saturday night, the boss scooper handed the pay envelopes over the bar, he would hold out the envelopes of the fictitious ten, remarking that those fellows would call later for their money. Other causes of complaint arose; this was the main one.

  The men clamored, threatened to strike, made so much trouble that neither the heelers nor the boss shovelers could hold them down. So Fingy Conners installed the wa
ge system—a thing which had been in his mind, probably, from the very first.

  Then an evil which had already become a cause of complaint grew until it dwarfed all other issues. The boss shovelers were creatures of Conners, owing their positions to him. Their wholesale trade in liquor, cigars, and beer made a big piece of business. It was charged, and never disproved, that the boss shovelers bought these supplies just where Conners ordered them to buy, and that Conners got an agent’s commission on every box of cigars, every keg, every bottle. It is certain that the shovelers bought their beer of one brewery exclusively—that brewery in which Conners was a director. Always this saloon feature had been a fault in the grain handling at Buffalo; it remained for Conners and his men to render it intolerable.

  So, if you were a scooper on the Buffalo docks, the way to the heart of the shoveler, your immediate boss, and the heart of Conners, his boss, ran across the bar of a saloon. Your pay came over that bar, minus the brass checks issued for the drinks you had consumed during the week. The boss shoveler knew exactly how much you were doing for his business. These boss shovelers, and the big boss of all the shovelers, became so greedy that the man who took all his wages home on Saturday night stood no chance for work. And this pressed hard upon the women and children—whoever won, they lost. In most dock families the father and provider that came home without a “load” came home also without his job.