Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  This was a polyglot society. In the last years of the nineteenth century, New York was home to men and women from more than fifty nations: a city of immigrants, still growing at the rate of 20,000 new citizens a month. “Every four years,” it was observed, “New York adds to itself a town the size of Boston,” and by 1898—when the five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island combined to form a single vast metropolis—it was already the largest Jewish city, the largest Italian city, and one of the two or three largest German cities on earth.

  New York was, in consequence, a city of neighborhoods, more so even than it is today. Wealthy Germans lived out in the suburbs, in Williamsburg and Bushwick, and poorer ones in “Kleindeutschland,” the blocks that lay east of Bowery—itself an earthy mile-long paradise for “tourists, sailors, slummers and others in search of a good time,” packed with saloons, theaters, and dance halls. Italians gravitated toward “Little Italy” or Greenwich Village, Jewish families to the Lower East Side or the districts north and east of Central Park, blacks still mostly to the “African Tenderloin” on the Upper West Side, the Chinese to a densely crowded district just to the north of City Hall.

  But it was wealth, more even than race or class, that determined the patterns of New York life. The richest and most eminent citizens lived, as they had done for years, in the center of Manhattan, along Fifth Avenue and Madison. They formed a self-selecting social elite consisting principally of families whose prominence extended back a century, together with a leavening of new money in the form of Vanderbilts and other robber barons. The truly wealthy lived in mansions amounting sometimes to châteaus and were fiercely conformist, devoting themselves to business and to play. Only a handful dirtied their hands by dabbling in politics; when Theodore Roosevelt, who had been born a New Yorker, resolved to turn his hand to public service, he did so with the greatest hesitation, and as late as 1900—just before his election as vice president—still hardly thought of himself as a statesman at all. Politics were, indeed, rarely discussed in polite society. “Topics tolerated in other homes were banished,” one writer on the social scene explained. “Food, wine, horses, yachts, cotillions and marriages were the only acceptable subjects.”

  The rest of New York’s people lived less privileged existences. To the north and south of Central Park dwelled the professional classes, who made up perhaps a third of the city’s population and led mostly law-abiding lives: managers, brokers, bookkeepers, small businessmen, and clerks who worked hard, labored to improve themselves, and yearned for respectability. To the east and to the west—strung literally and metaphorically along the edges of Manhattan—the working classes eked out livings of a more precarious sort. Poor, itinerant, and mostly recent immigrants, they lived crammed by the tens of thousands into dingy, dangerous tenements that lined both sides of almost every street and stretched below Fourteenth Street into portions of the city where the overcrowding was worse even than in Bombay—524 souls per acre in 1890, a figure that continued to rise until it topped 700 a decade later and was equivalent to half a million inhabitants per square mile.

  This was life lived on the borders of endurance, on wages that seldom amounted to more than a few dollars a day. A single tenement measuring 25 feet by 100 and built six stories tall (the maximum height permitted by the city’s zoning laws) would be divided into twenty-four minuscule apartments, with one toilet shared by thirty people. The front room of a typical two-room residence did duty as a kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedroom, and though some were well lit and ventilated, most were not. There were no gardens and no playgrounds; children’s games were played on rooftops or in the streets. Women hung out of windows or gathered on the steps to gossip, but most maintained a certain distance from even their closest neighbors, if only because pride forbade them from confessing the extent of their misery when times were bad. According to Owen Kildare, a New York reporter who had grown up in one of the city’s poorest districts, apartment doors would be opened not merely for ventilation but to demonstrate to neighbors that food was being cooked within. When money was tight, the doors stayed closed and “there [was] no feast, just the tea and the bread and scheming how to explain this unwelcome fact to the neighbors.”

  For all this, even life in the Manhattan slums represented an advance on what millions of new Americans had known in Europe. The better places actually appeared palatial to those more used to life in rural Ireland or the ghettos of czarist Russia. “We rented an apartment in a workers’ district,” recalled Leon Trotsky in his memoirs, “and furnished it on the instalment plan. That apartment, at $18 a month, was equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: electric lights, gas cooking range, bath, telephone, elevator, and even a chute for garbage.”

  Charley Becker, when he first came to New York in 1890, probably arrived in the city with little more money than most dwellers in the city’s tenements; a few tens of dollars were probably all that he could save, or even borrow from a family that was hardly wealthy. But he enjoyed considerable advantages over the majority of immigrants. He was an American citizen, had no dependents, and could have gone back to his village easily enough. In John Becker, moreover, he had his own guide to life in Manhattan—one who knew how to rent a place to live and get a job.

  Becker’s first task would have been to find lodgings. Virtually all unmarried New Yorkers of the period took a room in a boardinghouse or found a tenement family to take them in. (“Two-thirds of New York boards,” the saying went, “and three-thirds takes in boarders.”) Where he stayed remains unknown, though it was surely not one of the city’s casual lodging houses, which catered solely to the poor.*5 Becker’s first home in Manhattan was probably one of the small, family-owned boardinghouses that proliferated in the city and were generally run by working-class women who needed extra income in order to supplement their husbands’ uncertain wages. Although often disappointingly threadbare and uncomfortable, boardinghouses of this sort provided meals, did their guests’ laundry, and offered a mending service. And in return for their few dollars a week (at least according to the gossip of the day), young, good-looking male guests such as Becker could hope to enjoy more personal attention from the landlady or her daughters, the operation of a guesthouse being regarded as a useful way of meeting likely husbands.

  Finding work in a city as crowded and as hard-edged as New York was a good deal more difficult than finding a room, but Becker secured a position as a clerk working at Cowperthwait’s, a renowned furniture store on Chatham Square. It was a decent job; clerking was white-collar work, rarely well paid but infinitely more respectable than manual labor. The hours clerks worked were good by the standards of the time—generally from 7:30 in the morning until 4:00 P.M., which meant that they could visit a bar or watch a baseball game before returning home to supper. And the prospects were, if scarcely dazzling, at least acceptable: perhaps a supervisory position in a decade or so, and eventually a senior clerkship bringing with it a salary of $1,200 a year.

  For Becker, nonetheless, life at Cowperthwait’s seems to have held little appeal. He resigned his position at the store less than a year after leaving Callicoon, perhaps because he found the job too tedious or fell out with a superior. But it is probably no coincidence that Charley’s departure from Chatham Square coincided more or less exactly with John Becker’s appointment as a New York policeman. Perhaps the elder brother’s reports of life in uniform were enough to persuade the younger man to join him. It seems clear enough, in any case, that Becker began preparing himself for a police career within a few months of arriving in New York. Between 1891 and 1893, the brawny young man took work as a baker’s assistant, a door-to-door clothing salesman, and as a bouncer in a German beer garden off the Bowery. All these were necessary preparations for an application to the force.

  To most casual observers, the idea that an ambitious would-be policeman might benefit from two years of casual employment, concluding with a spell spent
pitching drunks out of a bar, seems utterly absurd. Only a few years later, a position as a saloon bouncer—an occasionally dangerous job associated, in New York dives such as John McGurk’s notorious Suicide Hall,*6 with numerous disreputable practices—would have been enough to disbar a man from a career with the police. It was not even an attractive line of work. A job in the liquor industry, in the 1890s, meant laboring long hours for low pay at a time when even an experienced bartender took home little more than $500 a year. But one thing could be said of the saloons along the Bowery where Becker guarded doors: They were the best possible places to attract the notice and the patronage of the politicians who controlled New York’s police.

  Bartenders and saloonkeepers had played a vital part in the running of the city for more than a century. They were helped on their way by a sharp decline in the number of patricians and respectable businessmen willing to take a hand in local government—as early as 1850, it was said that the best way to break up a political meeting was to burst into the council chamber yelling, “Your saloon’s on fire!”—and tended to be natural leaders: gregarious, well connected, and on good terms with everyone from the local bigwigs to the beat policeman. Many served informally as “locality mayors,” an important but amorphous role bestowed on neighborhood fixers who “had the ear of the ward heeler, the district boss and the precinct chief, and could get erring sons out of jail, arrange for permits and variances to fly easily through the machine, and could take on spokesman tasks, as with the press, for the neighborhood at large.” Their saloons made ideal meeting places and were used for decades as makeshift political headquarters and as hangouts for the street gangs that were all too often loosely allied with one political party or another. The most powerful had the sort of political pull known at the time as “positively gravitational.” “Silver Dollar” Smith, a saloonkeeper and pimp who got his name from the gimmick of setting a thousand silver dollars in the concrete floor of his saloon, liked to boast that he more or less ran the Essex Market Court House from his premises across the road. And Barney Rourke, a highly influential figure in the Third Election District, was so important to the politicians of the day that when President Chester Arthur visited New York and Rourke sent a message regretting that he was too busy to go uptown that day, Arthur made his way into the slums instead, and their meeting was held in the back room of Rourke’s saloon.

  Seen from this perspective, Becker’s choice of employment makes sudden sense. The casual jobs he took in bakeries and selling door-to-door offered the chance to save the money he would need. And work as a bouncer gave him the opportunity to meet the sort of men who could readily secure a coveted nomination to the New York Police Department, not to mention daily opportunities to impress them with his physical prowess. By swapping a position in the back room of a furniture store for one in front of a Bowery saloon, Becker—guided no doubt by his brother—made sure that he would be seen in all the right places by all the right men. More than that, he put himself in the perfect place to get a Manhattan education: a detailed understanding of how the city really worked.

  For much of the nineteenth century, America’s principal towns were ruled by great political machines.

  Chicago, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and, of course, New York each developed organizations capable of delivering votes to pliant officials, and each found itself in thrall to the powerful local “bosses” who evolved to control them. The machines were, for the most part, incorporeal, unofficial, and unorthodox, and they flourished best in fast-changing immigrant societies, in which many voters had no long-standing allegiance to the politicians who vied for their support. They worked primarily by the manipulation of patronage, exchanging jobs and other favors for votes, and soon grew into powerful organizations. The machines employed violence and coercion to achieve their aims—the most obvious of which were securing wealth and power for those who ran them—and continued to do so well into the early years of the twentieth century. But their leaders understood that not even the grossest election frauds could keep a genuinely unpopular administration in office. Holding on to power meant keeping popular support—and that was best achieved by tackling problems that county and local governments otherwise ignored. By the time that Charley Becker arrived in New York, it was widely recognized that the simplest way for voters in America’s great cities to solve problems with the collection of rubbish, arrange for potholes to be fixed, obtain coal if short of money, and even find work when unemployed, was to solicit the help of a machine politician. The machines offered what amounted to a social safety net in cities where being poor, homeless, or jobless might otherwise have been intolerable—all in return for support at the polls.

  Machine politics had come into existence at the tail end of the eighteenth century, and reached its apogee after the Civil War. In New York its earliest manifestations can be traced to the 1780s, and by the end of the nineteenth century several competing machines coexisted in the city. But one of these stood out among the rest, famous and notorious in equal measure, and known not merely in Manhattan but around the globe. This was the Democrat political club based in a large, square brownstone on East Fourteenth Street, just off Union Square: a building known to its members as the Wigwam and to an incredulous world as Tammany Hall.

  The Society of St. Tammany, to give the organization its proper name, was founded in 1786 and named after a Native American chief. It was controlled by thirteen senior officials known as “sachems,” but much of the machine’s real power rested in the hands of its district captains. Each captain took responsibility for an election ward, and each was expected to maintain his own organization, supervising the activities of the dozens of ambitious and hardworking minor politicians who managed Tammany’s affairs along single streets or in a handful of city blocks. Over the years, as the society grew larger, it penetrated deep into the fabric of New York, particularly in the immigrant quarters south of Fourteenth Street. Even the poorest and most marginal inhabitants of a well-run district knew their block leader by sight, and the strong roots that the society thus developed throughout Manhattan secured it power.

  It took the best part of a century to build the Tammany machine. As early as the 1840s, it became infamous for promoting cronyism, corruption, and lawlessness on a heroic scale. But the Hall only really came of age a decade later, during the mayoralty of wily Fernando Wood, a longtime member of the Wigwam who perfected election fraud on a wide scale, harnessing the power of Manhattan’s violent street gangs in the Democratic cause and deploying their members to threaten and coerce voters, intimidate officials, and even steal the ballot boxes in exchange for virtual freedom from arrest. At much the same time, Tammany’s numerous appointees to the City Council perfected the practice of colluding in order to hand New York’s business to favored contractors. Corrupt councilmen would lease out the city’s property to allies at knock-down rates or arrange for heavily padded quotes to be accepted, then split the difference between the bid price and the real one with their partners. The members of this council got so many things done so crookedly that they became known as the “Forty Thieves.”

  Wood’s malign genius provided Tammany with the tools it needed to remain in power. But it was one of his successors, William Tweed, who really epitomized the excesses of the Democrat machine. Under Tweed—a remarkable figure, larger than life, who stood six feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds—small-time crooks became suddenly untouchable, and friends of the Wigwam were granted governmental sinecures. The comedian “Oofty-Goofty” Phillips was made clerk to the water board; a criminal by the name of Jim “Maneater” Cusick became a court clerk.

  Such placemen made possible the staggering corruption and graft that turned Tweed into a wealthy man. Under the boss’s rule, New York spent $10,000 on a $75 batch of pencils, another $171,000 on tables and chairs worth only $4,000, and $3.5 million on “repairs” to the brand-new Criminal Courts Building behind City Hall that had already cost twice what the United States h
ad paid for the whole state of Alaska. By the time of his eventual exposure, in 1873, it was calculated that the total stolen by Tweed and his cronies had exceeded $50 million.*7 Of this, no more than $800,000 was ever recovered.

  Tweed’s disgrace changed Tammany forever, for the Hall survived only by reinventing itself. The old boss’s crude and blatant methods were abandoned, and Tammany took to painting itself as a reforming organization. It helped that Tweed’s successor, the felicitously named “Honest John” Kelly, had spent the last few years in Europe and so bore no responsibility for the phenomenal boondoggles that had shocked New York. But as Tammany recovered its confidence under Honest John’s calming leadership, it also began exploring better ways of making money.

  Outright fraud involving padded contracts went out of fashion; it was simply too risky now to steal the people’s taxes in this way. Instead the Hall sought other sources of income. The sale of jobs continued and indeed was regularized. The machine also raked in vast sums by auctioning off franchises to run city utilities, notably the elevated railways. Increasingly, substantial contributions to Tammany’s campaign funds also came from assessments levied on New York’s vice trade, which was milked unmercifully for years. Kelly’s greatest triumph, though, was to reach an accommodation with his political enemies, who controlled many of Manhattan’s uptown wards. During his years in office, Tammany made several concessions to the rival Custom House machine, which boosted the Republican cause in much the same way that Tammany promoted the Democrats. Slivers of patronage granted to the Custom House further minimized the prospect of exposure.