In the winter of 1898-99 the grumblings against this system grew into open protest; in the spring, when the grain-handling season was at hand, the scoopers formed a union—one of their own this time—and struck against Conners and his boss shovelers. The very origin of this strike was toll to the kind of politics which Conners has always played. Rowland B. Mahany, a brilliant Irish lawyer, had represented Buffalo for two terms in Congress. On his third nomination, Conners threw in against Mahany the power of his two newspapers and pounded him out of politics. “An’ Mahany,” runs the dock tradition, “he swore that for every dhirty dollar it cost Conners to bate him, he wud make Conners spend a hundred.” Some one quoted this to Conners. “Rats!” he said; “w’en I want Mahany, he’ll come in a hack.”
Naturally an agitator, naturally a drifter with currents, Mahany took hold of the rebellion on the docks, crystallized it into a violent revolution against Conners, and interested the public outside of the ward. Like a good politician, he perceived that the moral side of the case—the condition of the women and children —was his best card with the public. He interested all the clergymen of Buffalo, and especially the Catholics. It was a Catholic matter after all, since most of the scoopers were Irishmen—rough and violent, but faithful sons of their Church. Father Cronin, editor of the “Catholic Union and Times,” swung in with Mahany to make that fight for Irish homes.
Then began a curious strike. The bruisers and toughs of Conners gathered from all the lake ports to harass the union men to “persuade” their leaders, and to defend the strike-breakers, mainly Poles, Italians, and Negroes, whom Conners—all his fighting blood up by this time—rushed in from New York and Chicago. Both sides did violence, but the non-union men most of all. Three times the Conners heelers cleaned out and demolished saloons in which the union men gathered; every night some striker or other was beaten up or thrown into the canal. That Conners sanctioned all these acts, so harmful to his cause, is improbable. He had too much practical sense for that. He was working through toughs and they had to have their sport now and then. The union men fought back. They killed a nephew of James Kennedy, the ally of Conners in the dock work. Mahany has always declared that this was a little mistake on the part of his own crowd. He had warned James Kennedy, on penalty of death, not to cross the line into the First Ward. The union men, taking young Kennedy for his uncle, killed him for the name.
Conners made representations and promises to the parish priests who supported the strikers. He did not fulfill them; it became plain that he was only playing for time. The Protestant clergymen backed with enthusiasm the Catholics; it seemed that all the moral force of Buffalo was fighting with the strikers. And at last, when it became certain that Fingy Conners had no intention of reforming his system, Father Cronin sprang his grand coup. The union leaders called a meeting of the strikers and their fellow dock workmen in St. Bridget’s Hall. The meeting was as turbulent, as one might expect. They are big, rude, fighting men, these dock laborers; it is hard to get a hundred of them together without some kind of fight; and Father Cronin had nearly a thousand. Father Cronin spoke first, telling them plainly what the Church must think of that system. “The diamonds he wears,” he said, “are (the) crystallized tears of your women.”
When he had finished, a commotion of cheering started at the back of the hall and another man in clericals pushed his way to the platform. The strikers rose in a body when they saw who it was—Bishop Quigley, then head of the diocese, now Archbishop of Chicago. The men remained standing as he faced them and, in a clear, dispassionate address, set the situation before them. He finished by advising them—and such advice from him was equivalent to a demand—never to work for Conners again until he had utterly given over the grain business.
That episode, unique, I think, in the history of American labor troubles, beat Fingy Conners. Every one in Buffalo knew that, and the grain-carrying companies best of all. They had supported him in halfhearted fashion. Now they withdrew their support and took the business out of his hands. A committee of citizens, headed by the Bishop, met with the carrying companies and arranged a new system—a return to the conditions which prevailed before the advent of Conners, but minus the boss scooper and his saloon.
Free with the Revolvers
The bulldog Connors did not acknowledge defeat at once. No more did his henchmen. For weeks they ranged the docks, making trouble. A month after the strike a gang of them exchanged insults and bricks with some union ore-handlers, who were unloading the steamer Mather. The Conners thugs, beaten off with chunks of ore, went to a scooper saloon, gathered their comrades, and returned to the vessel. The union gang was working far down in the hold of the Mather. The Conners men made a rush; Dave Nugent, Conners’s nephew-in-law, put a pistol at the head of the captain and threatened to blow out his brains if he gave an alarm; the heelers drew their revolvers and fired at will into the hold. It was dark down there; that and a miracle saved the lives of the ore-handlers. But three were wounded—one crippled for life. For this little prank several Connors followers suffered the fearful penalty of a $250 fine.
Connors, nursing the sullen resentment of an animal which has been beaten in a fight, visited the First ward to put a period to the strike. He had his gang at his back. Down the street came a Pole, a union leader among his countrymen. Conners called to him; the Pole, thinking that this was the invitation for a parley, approached. Conners was carrying a heavy, crooked cane. He hooked the crook about the Pole’s neck, jerked him over close, and split his scalp with two blows of the staff.
These ruthless, primitive fighters lose hard; it was a year before Conners acknowledged himself beaten; and the next stage of his fight showed his audacity—it took a Conners to conceive it. He went to Montreal, at the head of the canal system, and tried to arrange with the city authorities to build grain elevators there, so diverting the oceanic grain traffic from Buffalo—his own city, his own country. Through a year of bickerings and plots he fought for this project, and lost in the end. Those who know the inside of this deal say that he lost more through a series of accidents than through the honesty of the Canadian officials. But lose he did; and Mahany had made good his boast.
So much for the business career of Conners. Of course, this is only the main thread. He had whirled at many things; ice manufacture, brewing, street railways, stocks—but his freight business is the backbone of his fortunes; and his tactics in advancing that business are typical of his methods.
Early in his active life Fingy Conners crossed lines with another man who had business with the lake carrying trade, and whose career in politics was a replica in silk of what Conners’s career had been in fustian. One likes to think, for the picturesqueness of the idea, that Fingy Conners received the first impulse of his political ambition from Mark Hanna. Certainly Hanna has been the model of his later career, the man whom he quotes openly and whom he must admire secretly; and certainly, at about the time when he met Hanna, one finds in him the dawn of a political ambition too large for the confines of the First Ward. He had been always in politics of a sort; ward politics had been inextricably mixed with his business ventures. For value received, he used to send his henchmen from his saloons to fight the battles of the Republican machine—he has been twice a Republican and twice a Democrat. In 1882 he ran for Alderman on the Republican ticket, was quite handily beaten, and settled back to be a boss instead of a candidate. In the early nineties he switched his allegiance and lent his forces to the Democrats. Their first job was to punch Mickey White, the perpetual Republican candidate in the ward, out of politics.
Losing His Ward
When his larger ambition dawned, he took less and less interest in his own ward. He hung about the uptown haunts of the politicians; he became a figure in the barroom of the Iroquois Hotel, where his talents as a mixer and his naive toughness got him friends and attention of a sort. The ward was slipping away from him; after the episode of the grain strike he lost it entirely. Now, when he ventures down there to lo
ok after his dock business, they throw bricks at him and turn wash-water over his automobile. Alderman John P. Sullivan, recognized Democratic boss of the ward, rules largely through his sworn hatred for Connors. Perhaps Conners permits this situation to be, simply because he will not expend the energy needed to change it. “Put Sullivan and Connors in a closed room,” says an observer of life in Buffalo, “and Sullivan would jockey rings around him. But when he had done it, Connors would rise up and throw him out of the window.”
And Connors saw, likely enough, that the saloon-keeper, king in small-ward politics, is less than a serf in national affairs. He pulled gradually out of the saloon business. The old establishment changed its sign from “William J. Connors” to “Nugent’s Hotel” and then to “Hurley’s Hotel.” Learning slowly, but always learning, he took on certain appurtenances of respectability. The ward saw him travel from cowhide boots to brogans, from brogans to kid shoes, from kid shoes to spats. He tried, with some success, to shake off that tough accent into which he lapses, nowadays, only when he is joking or when he is stirred. From the first time that the newspapers noticed and denounced him, he conceived a strong idea of the press as a power. So, in the middle nineties, he looked about for a newspaper.
“It’s to leave to me lads,” he said to one friend. “Everybody roasts me; now I wants to heat a pan,” he said to another. In 1895 he bought the Buffalo “Enquirer,” an evening paper. Two years later he added the “Morning Courier.”
The Floating Boss
He was still a floating boss, Democratic or Republican, as it suited him and his interests. In the early years of his social rise be backed a Democratic candidate with one of his papers and his Republican opponent with the other. “I plays bot’ ends, an’ I’m the middle and I can’t lose. See!” he said. In the first McKinley campaign he was a Republican in national politics. Shortly after that he shifted to the Democratic Party, where he rested; where, it is to be presumed, he will rest. He went out after larger game at once; he fought for position and power as he used to fight on the docks—ruthlessly, powerfully, with his eye solely on the object and with no consideration of the means. When, in the home councils of his party, Fingy Conners took the platform and swept his lordly eye over the cowed and beaten Democrats under him, he was only a logical evolution from the old Fingy Connors in his Ohio Basin saloon—ready, at the first sign of opposition, to vault over the bar and restore discipline with fist or bottle or bungstarter. He bullied his way to the front in his own county until Tammany saw him and perceived his uses to Charlie Murphy. By processes which run with the complexities of New York politics, he came to be State chairman; came at last to that night when he sat in his hotel room, having disrupted the Democratic Party in his own State, and smiled stoically on the enraged McCarren men shaking their fists under his nose, and asked them what they were going to do about it, anyhow.
The social rise of Fingy Conners will live in Buffalo tradition. When he moved out of the ward he bought the Goodyear house in the suburbs, and improved it after his own fashion. The center of composition in his landscape garden was the word “Conners” spelled out in white rocks on the lawn. A general of Buffalo society, passing in her carriage, inspected it through her lorgnettes. “Is this a railway station?” she asked. He moved, later, into Delaware Avenue, the Fifth Avenue of Buffalo. It was a social sensation, this remove of Conners. At about that period a street-car company made a raid on Delaware Avenue. Just at midnight the racket of two hundred picks, forty sledge-hammers, and a traction engine burst upon the sleep of wealth and respectability. The mistress of one house woke her husband: “What do you suppose it can be?” The husband turned over: “Either one of Mickey’s poker parties breaking up or Fingy Connors moving in.” Two months later some one saw Fingy Conners at Johnny Wood’s saloon, taking a morning drink and confiding in the bartender. “Gee, Pete, dose Delaware Avenue folks is clannish!” he said. Once he presented his newspaper pass to the conductor of an Erie train. This person did not look to the conductor like “William J. Conners, proprietor Buffalo ‘Courier,’ ” and he said so. Connors, heated, roared at him. At the next station the conductor wired to the proper authorities: “Man representing himself as William J. Conners presents Conners’s pass. Think he is a fake. Looks like a prize—fighter and talks like a tough.” Back came the answer: “That’s him.” The following is the classic story of Conners: He “made” the Buffalo Club. At the next evening entertainment he appeared in a proper dress-suit and shirt, festooned down the front with a set of large diamond studs and a diamond watch-fob. His friends in the club, trying tact, lured him into a haberdasher’s, where one bought a simple set of pearl studs, remarking that no gentleman wore jewels in his shirt bosom. “Glims?” said Fingy, catching the point instantly, “I notice that them as has ’em wears ’em.” One day, talking over things in general he fell to boasting, and dropped two bits of Conners wisdom. Speaking of his relations with the Democracy of New York City he said: “I fixes it up for ’em so it looks like the little w’ite mice wot runs out of your sleeve an’, w’en they grabs for ’em, runs in again, an’ I gits ’em w’en they grabs.” Also: “So help me Gawd, there ain’t nuttin’ can come between me an’ Charlie Murphy. They don’t make nuttin’ as thin as that.”
His Face of Power
These may all be mere tradition and embroidery, like the stories about Lincoln; but each one serves to show some aspect of the man. He is now fifty-one years old. No man whom I have ever met looks more what he is. His full head of bristling, wiry hair, black in his youth, is quite gray. The face underneath is solid and hard and tough beyond description—broad, overloaded with muscle rather than fat or puffy, reddish brown from the descending circulation of that full blood which fed his mighty young thews. His short, hooked nose, fine at the point, broad at the wings, sticks out from the plane of his face at a most aggressive angle. His chin is round, solid, and deeply dented. His heavy eyebrows are set high up above the eyes; and in the intervening space occurs a pad of fat which rolls over the eyeball, covering completely the upper lid. But for this pad, his Irish, violet-blue eyes would seem large; as it is, they appear small and shrewd. His mouth, in repose, is wide, thin lipped, tight shut, and turned down at the corners—a snapping-turtle mouth. When he is roused, when he opens it to roar, it gapes as round and menacing as the muzzle of a cannon, to show the short, scrubby teeth of the fighting man. He dresses rather well in these days; he has passed from the era of diamonds to the era of London fabrics. When he tries to “throw a front,” his accent is passable, although his grammar stumbles, and he betrays himself by ignorant handling of long words. In his correct and proper moments, for example, he is likely to say “carefulness” when he means “care.” But get him excited—especially rouse the fight in him—and the old, tough dock-scrapper comes bobbing to the surface. I had talked to him an hour about his business and he had done passably well. Suddenly I suggested that my published opinion of Conners might not agree with his own. His mouth flew open, his short neck craned forward, and this came out: “Say anyt’in’ about Conners but nuttin’! W’en you say Conners it means sometin’ or you wouldn’t say it! See!”
He has risen from a cabin boy, son of a small saloon-keeper, to his million dollars and his dominance in State politics. Where lies his secret? It could not have been luck; the rise has been too steady. It could hardly have been exceptional shrewdness. In some of his business deals, notably the ice combination with Charlie Murphy, lately exposed by Jerome, and the Hamburg Boulevard deal, he has figured as a high-class unscrupulous “come-on.” Basically, I think, it is that heroic faculty, that king quality, so indefinable and so powerful over men. Beyond that, it is his ruthless fighting force. There are no rules in his fighting, any more than there used to be in his slugging days on the Buffalo docks, unless it be the bull-rule—rush and gore and never go back.
◆◆◆
Detective Jim Sullivan’s plans for the future were abruptly interrupted.
Detec
tive Sergeant James Sullivan is still confined to his home. No. 16 Hamburg Street, with a broken leg which he sustained by falling on an icy walk. Mr. Sullivan was crossing the walk at North Division and Washington streets late Monday afternoon when he slipped and fell to the pavement. He was removed to his home, where it was found that his right leg just above the ankle had been fractured. Detective Sullivan will be confined to his bed for several weeks.
— Buffalo Courier
It was the last thing he needed—endless hours to lie there in bed and just think. Mull over. Rehash. Ponder, reflect, speculate, regret, worry. The telephone was in the front hallway adjacent to the parlor, out of his reach. When he thought of something in relation to any of the active cases he was working on, he had to resort to writing it down in a letter to mail rather than instantaneously speak to the appropriate person and immediately get things moving. Besides urgent work-related things he had the time now to consider those things he had put on the back burner, people he hadn’t gotten back to, promises made but not yet kept. He tried quieting his mind by reading, but after an hour or two his eyes ached. He slept on and off but never long enough or peacefully. It took such arduous effort to get upright from the chair or bed to use the chamber pot that he cut down on drinking liquids despite his thirst. Even when he was able to navigate around the house on crutches he found the exercise maddeningly awkward. The access to the telephone that he had so craved in the early days of his recuperation turned out to be a curse once he became more mobile as calls came in all day long from other detectives, his superiors, judges, the County Clerk. It was a grueling slog to get up and make it to the telephone. Be cautious of what you wish for. He’d read those words somewhere. Now he was living them.
Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins Page 40