CHAPTER 2
KING OF THE BOWERY
CHARLEY BECKER WAS NOT a native New Yorker. He had been born, in July 1870, on a farm some eighty miles from Manhattan and grew up in what was one of the poorest districts of upstate New York. His upbringing was harsh: The Becker farm was isolated, the land barren, the living uncertain, the family itself austerely religious. He was the youngest child in a family of ten, born to a father who died when Charley was only four years old. He appears to have shown no sign, in his youth, of hating life in the tiny, closed community where he grew up—a place that offered few real opportunities and little to look forward to except a life of backbreaking work. But he left home at the first opportunity, aged only twenty, and headed straight for the city. For Becker, New York offered the temptations and rewards that his birthplace never could.
Becker was a third-generation American. His grandfather, Heinrich Becker—born in Hesse-Kassel, in the western reaches of Germany, at the tail end of the eighteenth century—was a wood turner. His father, Conrad—also born in Germany—was a farmer who wrested a living from a parcel of land in a desolate spot in the western reaches of Sullivan County, on the border between New York State and Pennsylvania. Even in 1870 the district was still frontier country: barely settled, scarcely tamed. There was only one real town, Callicoon Depot on the Delaware River: a ramshackle settlement, with a population of fewer than six hundred, so unprepossessing that even a local writer promoting the place as a summer residence for city folk admitted that it had “no claim to beauty.” The hinterland, meanwhile, consisted largely of impenetrable forest, filled with panthers and deer and dotted here and there with tiny settlements so small that they were scarcely even hamlets.
Callicoon had its advantages, of course: The air was clear, the water pure, and the little town nestled in the foothills of the Catskills, shielded from the worst of the winter winds. But it was notorious, in equal measure, for the poverty of its soil. The Becker farm, two miles south of the tiny village of Callicoon Center, stood—the first historian of the district noted—“in the woods beyond the bounds of civilization,” and after paying for his land, Heinrich had “but little, if anything, left except his wife and children.” Foul weather reduced the family to near starvation on several occasions; wild animals devoured their crops; and when a harvest was brought in, the only means of transporting it to market was on the elder Becker’s back, “a journey which required three days for its performance. There was no road better than a trail through the woods, which was made visible only by marked trees.”
It was not until the 1870s—by which time Conrad Becker had six sons to help him on the land—that the farm became at last productive. A sliver of road, snaking through the forest, now ran the seven miles to town, and the Depot had in turn been linked to New York by rail. Even after Charley’s birth, however, his father and grandfather were both forced to work occasionally as carpenters in order to earn money. “No one,” the future policeman wrote of his childhood home, “can do more than make a base living on it, and a poor one at that.”
The sheer effort required to extract a living from the Beckers’ impoverished plot is eloquently illustrated by the fact that not one of Conrad’s sons remained at home to take over the farm. The three eldest of the Becker boys—Franklin, Howard, and Paul—abandoned Callicoon for California, and of them only Paul ever returned. The roguish fourth son, Jackson, fled soon afterward, preferring (as a member of his family recalls) a rootless existence spent “variously as a broker, a searcher for gold, an osteopath or probably a chiropractor, and a con man.” The fifth, John, left home around 1888, seduced by the lures and snares of New York City.
Charley himself thus came to manhood in a home where there were few male influences. His father died, aged fifty-two, in 1877. His octogenarian grandfather followed five years later. And of his numerous brothers, only John was close enough in age to be a friend. Brought up by a widowed mother, the pet of several older and unmarried sisters, Charley experienced a relatively solitary childhood. Neighbors remembered him as an able, decent child who worked hard and never seemed to get into trouble. According to Baltazer Hauser, who owned a farm adjoining the Becker property for sixty years, “Charles Becker was one of the most honest and best boys I ever knew.” Another local resident had similar memories. “Becker’s people were the very best of neighbors,” recalled Philip Huff, the son of a local lumberman, “and Charley Becker was an honest and very bright boy. I never knew him to do anything wrong or get into trouble of any kind.”
Only one of Becker’s early acquaintances, indeed, had a bad word to say of him. “There was,” Hauser confessed, “only one thing about him that could be criticized; that was that he was headstrong. He would always do the right thing or quit.” It was this mulishness, perhaps, that prompted the boy to leave the village as soon as he turned twenty. His brother John—a year his senior—was planning to join New York’s police department, and it may be that his encouraging reports persuaded Charley to take his chances in Manhattan. In the autumn of 1890, Becker packed a bag and hitched a lift to Callicoon Depot. From there the great metropolis was just a train ride away.
The New York, Ontario and Western Railway took the best part of three hours to clack and rattle Becker into the heart of the city. For much of the journey, the engine threaded through the same wooded, unspoiled countryside in which the farm boy had grown up. But as the little steam train with its smoke-smeared carriages began to puff its way along the Hudson River, the view through its grimy windows changed. Farms, woodland, and open spaces receded from view, to be replaced by a seemingly endless parade of houses and apartment buildings, offices, saloons, factories, warehouses, and wharves, sprawling out to the horizon in all directions. For a boy brought up in a village of perhaps two hundred people, it must have been an overwhelming sight. And these were simply the outskirts of the greater conurbation to the south: New York.
It was already possibly the greatest city on the planet. London was bigger, Paris and Vienna more cultured. But no rival could match Gotham for vigor or the sheer pace of its growth. Seen from the perspective of just over a century, the New York of 1890 still seems in most respects quite modern. True, the first subway was still fourteen years away, Grand Central Station would not be completed for more than two decades, and—in the absence of refrigeration—elections could still be won and lost over the cost of ice.*3 The city’s tallest building was Trinity Church, at 284 feet, and its most ambitious office tower soared a mere eleven stories. But New York was changing with astonishing rapidity. Steel-frame construction and the safety elevator—the twin inventions that made skyscrapers practicable—were about to add a third dimension to the city. Downtown Manhattan’s unique steam heating mains had been laid in 1881, the Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883, department stores had begun springing up along Sixth Avenue, and the cat’s cradles of telephone wires festooning the streets announced the introduction of modern communications.
The electric light, meanwhile—introduced to New York in 1880—had transformed the old gaslit thoroughfares, and cable cars and elevated railways made their appearance almost simultaneously. The former, which traveled along tracks at street level and were powered by endless steel belts, had severe drawbacks, among them lethal momentum. (“Once a motorman gripped the cable,” one critic of the system explained, “his streetcar was jerked along at thirty miles per hour, far faster than horses. Speed couldn’t be varied at corners, so cars whipped passengers around spots like Dead Man’s Curve at Union Square, gongs clanging wildly.”) The latter, a product of the Rapid Transit Act of 1875, proved more successful and soon took the place of the city’s old-fashioned horse-drawn trams, at least on routes running north and south through Manhattan. By 1890, El lines ran along—or rather over—Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth avenues, their trains puffing their way from stop to stop at twelve miles per hour and linking hitherto-distant suburbs such as the Bronx to the great shopping and entertainment districts downtown. Overhead tracks girdled the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn with long lines of fragile-looking iron pillars that plunged the streets beneath them into shadow, and the trains themselves spewed out noise and ash as they chugged along, their progress marked by clouds of soot that swirled briefly over the heads of passing New Yorkers before settling like grimy snow upon the pavements. With the lines complete, it became possible to leave home in Washington Heights, in the far north of the city, and reach Wall Street in less than an hour.
Industry flourished in the crowded city. Manhattan was a center of the tobacco, print, and textile trades, the last of which employed as many as 80,000 workers—most of them in sweatshops of the nastiest and most exploitative kind—and shipping from all over the world crowded into New York’s magnificent harbor, bringing cargoes of raw materials for factories, coal for power, and labor, in the form of boatloads of immigrants. By the time the American Tobacco Company opened its new offices there in 1890, Manhattan was already home to eighty of the United States’ hundred largest companies and could claim to be the country’s economic hub.
The New York that Charley Becker found when he first came to the city was, in short, not merely an impossible dream for the millions of new Americans who arrived by sea but a pungent lure to the out-of-towners who rolled in by rail, the city that offered everyone everything:
Wall Street supplied the country with capital. Ellis Island channeled its labor. Fifth Avenue set its social trends. Broadway (along with Times Square*4 and Coney Island) entertained it. Its City Hall, as befitted an unofficial Capitol, welcomed heroes and heroines with keys and parades and naval flotillas, and paid farewell respects to national leaders by organizing processions along Manhattan’s black-draped streets. New York, moreover, was the nation’s premier source for news and opinion; like a magnet, it attracted those seeking cosmopolitan freedom; and as the biggest city of the biggest state it exercised extraordinary influence in national politics.
The product of a century of rapid change was clear to see. In 1800 the northern edges of New York fell roughly along Houston Street, no more than two miles from the southern tip of Manhattan. By 1890 the city had swollen to engulf the entire island, twelve miles long and two miles wide, and spilled onto the mainland to the east. Not every inch of ground was covered yet; rickety shantytowns and even grubby little farms still survived in the shadow of the fashionable Dakota Apartments, just completed on the Upper West Side, and streets in several outlying districts, laid out in anticipation of future construction, remained for the time being nearly empty, with only a building or two dotted along their lengths. Yet the speed with which New York had grown still amazed outsiders. The city’s population had risen from less than 75,000 in 1800 to 1.6 million nine decades later; that of the neighboring borough of Brooklyn from a mere 4,000 to 800,000. When the British novelist Arnold Bennett visited the Bronx a short while later, he was shown around “an area where five years previously there had been six families, and where there are now over two thousand.”
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 had 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.
The Hall’s relationship with crime was regularized and brought to a high state of efficiency by Kelly’s successor, Richard Croker. It was no coincidence that the new boss was a former street brawler and petty gangster who had once been tried for murder. Croker, who ran Tammany from 1886 until 1902—and thus had charge of the machine when Becker arrived in New York—was a far more genuinely menacing figure than the affable Boss Tweed. He was utterly ruthless, almost entirely self-interested, and victory in three successive elections made him virtually untouchable.
Still, Tammany was far from an entirely malign influence, even at the apogee of Croker’s power. A good deal of effort was poured into programs for better schooling and social relief, which immeasurably improved the Hall’s standing in the densely populated wards downtown. The machine also became ever more intimately concerned with the affairs of immigrants. “There is,” the boss himself boasted to the British journalist W. T. Stead, whom he met on a transatlantic liner,
no such organization for taking hold of the untrained friendless man and converting him into a citizen. Who else would do it if we would not? Think of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners dumped in our city. They are too old to go to school…. They are alone, ignorant strangers, a prey to all manner of anarchical and wild notions…. Tammany looks after them for the sake of their votes, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there by which so long a row could be hoed so quickly or so well?
If there was one ward boss who embodied the best and the worst of Tammany Hall, who was admired as much as he was feared, who was generous with his time and money and yet remained engaged in almost every kind of vice, that man was “Big Tim” Sullivan.
The tallest, best-proportioned, nicest-looking, most beloved district leader that New York ever produced, Sullivan ruled like a king over a ward that encompassed Charley Becker’s first workplaces as well as most of the heaving slums south of Fourteenth Street. His district ran from the Bowery east to the tenements of the Lower East Side and had been organized so competently that it became the greatest Democratic stronghold in the city. Tim always knew every detail of his prospects intimately. In the run-up to one election early in his career, he discovered that there were three die-hard Republicans living in one part of his ward, and he reported back to Croker accordingly. When the ballots were counted and the district’s vote was found to stand 395 to 4 in favor of the Democrats, Sullivan was outraged. “They got one more vote than I expected,” he told the boss. “But I’ll find that feller.”
Tim had been born, in 1863, on Greenwich Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s most noisome slum. His father died when the boy was only four, and his mother remarried a violent alcoholic. The family lived miserably in a crowded wooden tenement, taking in boarders to survive, and it is scarcely surprising, in such circumstances, that the future politician received little formal schooling. Tim took part-time jobs from the age of seven, at first working as a bootblack with a stand in the local police station house—a fine spot from which to learn the realities of life downtown. Soon afterward he began hawking newspapers, progressing eventually to a position as a sort of wholesaler and organizer of younger boys. A natural leader, Sullivan did what he could to help the desperate, starving, and sometimes parentless children who looked up to him. Owen Kildare—who was orphaned in infancy and thrown onto the streets, aged seven, when his foster mother acquired a lover—recalled that when he first ventured timidly down Theater Alley, where the newsboys gathered, it was the adolescent Sullivan who approached him, advanced him a nickel as working capital, and “taught me a few tricks of the trade and advised me to invest my five pennies in just one, the best selling paper of the period.”
At eighteen, Sullivan went to work for a newspaper distributor, a job that considerably broadened his horizons. On occasion he found himself required to go as far uptown as Central Park, this at a time when some slum dwellers lived out their entire lives without ever going north of Fourteenth Street. By now Tim stood over six feet tall, and his height and “round handsome face, bright smile and piercing blue eyes” made him physically imposing, an important asset for aspiring politicians of the day.
Big Tim was an archetypal ward boss. He surrounded himself with men he could rely on—mostly members of his extended family; his principal aides were his brothers Paddy and Dennis,*8 his half brother Larry Mulligan, and cousins named Florrie, Christy, and “Little Tim”—and operated not from one of the newfangled Democratic clubhouses then springing up throughout the city but in the old style, dispensing help and patronage from a chain of dubious saloons. One of his earliest establishments was the headquarters of the Whyos, at the time Manhattan’s most notoriously violent street gang and a useful group to have on one’s side come election time. When he finally became respectable, Tim moved out of his saloons and into a suite at the Occidental Hotel on the Bowery: a grand four-story structure, popular with actors and noted for the vast erotic fresco, depicting Diana bathing with a group of nymphs, that adorned the ceiling of its bar.
Big Tim’s most celebrated trait was his generosity. He was known to rise at dawn to lead gangs of the unemployed uptown to find laboring jobs on public works, and he served a vast annual Christmas dinner to as many as 5,000 Bowery bums, on one occasion spending $7,000 to set out a spread comprising 10,000 pounds of turkey together with hams, stuffing, potatoes, 500 loaves of bread, 5,000 pies, 200 gallons of coffee, and a hundred kegs of beer. In the summer months, he organized elaborate clambakes in Harlem River Park. These daylong celebrations served a twofold purpose, cementing the Sullivan clan’s reputation among the tenement poor while providing Big Tim and his cronies with an excuse to shake down businessmen and saloonkeepers along the Bowery—each of whom was expected to buy sheaves of five-dollar tickets.
All in all, there was—as Alvin Harlow, the Bowery chronicler, observed—“never a more perplexing admixture of good and evil in one human character than in that of Timothy D. Sullivan.” Tim’s friends were loyal to him for life, and he was certainly capable of extending genuine kindness to men who could do him no conceivable good. Once, observing that an elevator attendant he’d met in Albany had never been to a “grand occasion” in his life, Tim spent $3,000 on a banquet for the man, with assemblymen and judges as guests, and a favorite dispensation was to grant a loyal supporter the right to organize a benefit in his own favor. These functions generally took the form of balls—“rackets,” they were called, because of the noise they generated. With Sullivan around, the recipients of this signal honor never had trouble selling tickets, and “Commodore Dutch,” a young Bowery bum employed to watch the goings-on in Tim’s saloons, at one time cleared $2,000 a year from the “Annual Party, Affair, Soirée Gala Naval Ball of the Original Commodore Dutch Association.” Yet this was the same Sullivan who was reported, on oath before a committee of the state assembly, to have personally beaten up opposition voters on election day, who loudly announced that if a Republican opponent dared to send in student volunteers to watch the polls, “I will say now that there won’t be enough ambulances in New York to carry them away,” and whose most vocal supporters were once described by the New York Herald as “bullet-headed, short haired, small eyed, smooth shaven, and crafty looking, with heavy, vicious features, which speak of dissipation and brutality, ready to fight at a moment’s notice.”
Of course, the licensed excesses of the Sullivan clan, and the violence unleashed by their supporters, would scarcely have been possible had New York possessed an independent, vigorous police. But if Charley Becker learned one thing from the months he spent standing at the door of a Bowery saloon observing all the comings and goings on that famous street, it was that the city’s thousands of patrolmen were far from independent. Manipulating polls could be done only with the tacit agreement of the local precinct captains and the studied negligence, if not the active connivance, of hundreds of beat policemen. Collecting graft from the gambling houses, brothels, and late-opening saloons, and guaranteeing their proprietors the right to run unmolested, also required control of the police.
It was New York’s tragedy that its police department had long been vulnerable to such manipulation. The city had a lengthy history, extending back at least a century, of shameless exploitation of the police. Thousands of men had won promotion as a result of their zealousness in carrying out orders from the machines; many ordinary officers, perhaps even the majority, saw themselves as acolytes of a political party first and as patrolmen a distant second. And if Becker wished to join their ranks, his first step was to acknowledge this truth.
Becoming a policeman, in the early 1890s, was largely a matter of connections. A prospective recruit knew someone who knew a district leader, or perhaps he came to the attention of a ward activist while working in the beer halls of the Bowery. At that point, soundings would be taken and loyalties assessed. Then, if all was well, the man received an introduction to one of New York’s police commissioners.
In theory, potential new recruits could also apply to the department through a committee called the Civil Service Board. The board was highly respectable—it was an independent and upstanding body, a product of the reform movement of the 1880s that was committed to appointing men on merit. But its application process was rigorous. In one three-year period, its members considered 815 applications from would-be recruits, referred a mere 229 of these candidates to police surgeons for a physical examination, and eventually offered jobs to 135. The four commissioners, meanwhile, accepted 856 requests for nominations and granted 778. Men applying to the Civil Service Board, in other words, had a one-in-eight chance of getting onto the force. Men who had the support of a commissioner got their appointments through in nine cases out of every ten.
The explanation for this spectacular discrepancy was simple: The commissioners took bribes. This was hardly surprising; they were part of the political establishment so comprehensively tainted by Tammany Hall, and a product of the mutually advantageous accommodation between the Democrats and their rival Republicans that had plunged the city into a morass of corruption. For $250 to $300 per man in Becker’s day (half to a quarter of a full year’s pay), recruits of the approved political persuasions were shepherded gently through the NYPD’s appointment process. And—since the number of men anxious to join the police always exceeded the number of vacancies—the commissioners had little trouble in ensuring that their candidates met the broad requirements of the force, which included stipulations that applicants stand at least five feet seven inches tall and weigh at least 130 pounds. But favored men got special treatment. Tammany Hall paid a tutor to “cram” loyal Democratic candidates for the not-too-tricky entrance tests, and there were cases of men who failed the physical examination being sent back to the surgeons time and again until—sometimes at their fifth or sixth appearance—the doctors finally passed men with incurable infirmities such as poor eyesight, acute rheumatism, or curvature of the spine. Occasionally, when a recruit was a renowned partisan of one faction or the other, even greater allowances were made. A single felony conviction was supposed to bar a man from ever joining the police, for instance. In practice, however, a number of New York patrolmen had convictions for burglary or theft.
The advantages of this system were obvious, not least to the commissioners themselves. New York got policemen who had lived in the city long enough to be politically connected and thus knew their districts well. And—at an average of three hundred new recruits every twelve months—each member of the four-man Police Board received tax-free bribes amounting to $22,000 a year, a sum large enough to be a temptation to even the most affluent among them. So lucrative was the post of commissioner, in fact, that the men who held it could afford occasional indulgences. Favored political candidates might receive their nominations free of charge. Particularly outstanding recruits were also sometimes ushered in without request for payment. New York’s famous “Broadway Squad”—a body of policemen assigned to patrol the most fashionable stretches of the celebrated street, made up entirely of handsome, physically imposing men—got several of its best recruits this way. Since the chief purpose of the squad was to keep pickpockets and sneak thieves away from respectable citizens, escort well-to-do ladies across the street, and in general reassure New York’s upper classes that the city was properly policed (thus, hopefully, blinding them to excesses elsewhere), such apparent indulgences were no doubt considered investments.
Charles Becker’s police patron was one of the four commissioners sitting in 1893: a well-known New York merchant by the name of John F. McClave. McClave, who was in his fifties, first joined the board in 1884. He was one of two Republicans who shared power with a pair of Tammany Democrats. He was also thoroughly corrupt—a failing unsurprising in a man of previously modest means who found himself exposed to considerable temptation. As a police commissioner, treasurer of the Board of Police, a trustee of the Police Pension Fund, and a member of the committee on repairs and supplies, McClave saw numerous opportunities to channel funds into his own accounts. He took them.
How Becker made McClave’s acquaintance is not known. Ordinarily the would-be policeman would have been recommended to him by a district political leader, or perhaps been befriended by one of Manhattan’s “buffs”: businessmen who made it their job to help the police, expecting favors in return. The most influential of these men—they were usually middle-ranking politicians such as aldermen, state senators, or assemblymen—protected and assisted individual patrolmen and even controlled, to some extent, promotions to the higher ranks. Whatever the truth, McClave’s willingness to promote Becker’s career implies two things: that the Callicoon farm boy had Republican leanings, which would have made him a comparative oddity in a police department still dominated by Tammany, and that Becker had no scruples about paying for his job rather than taking the more honorable but risky course of applying through the Civil Service Board.
In this, of course, the novice patrolman was no different from most of the men then serving with the police department, and the truth was that his physical attributes alone would have made him an impressive candidate in any era. Whether or not Becker really needed McClave’s support to obtain an appointment, however, the commissioner at least ensured that his young protégé made swift progress with his application. Becker parted with the $300 he had saved in the autumn of 1892, a little more than a year after his older brother joined the force. Thanks no doubt to McClave, his case received favorable consideration. His appointment was confirmed that November. By Christmas the new recruit was in training. And by the beginning of February 1894, he was in uniform.