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PUBLIC LIBRARY '* ' v, ;/; '<; % ,' /-'V,"?,' *,% ^Mgjjjm i /. /")yl<* Mt f'?^* ^ f^'lf ^^^^^^^H V(/ x/ ^'' ^ /'''^A^'^X ^^.^BBBBBBBI V^ 5 7 )'S^ J " ''^ ^!>$ * |Y^ fj V 4V il> Vl \f{ f *'-- , >- v , .v.*r -) MASKS IN A PAGEANT OTHER BOOKS BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE THE REAL ISSUE THE COURT OF BOYVIIXE STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS IN OUR TOWN A CERTAIN RICH MAN IN THE HEART OF A FOOL THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME CALVIN COOLIDGE (Published by Macmillan Company) WOODROW WILSON, THE MAN, His TIMES AND His TASK '(Published by Houghton-Mifllin Co., Boston) THEODORE ROOSEVELT. M4SKS 6 in a Pageant By WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY I 9 2 8 All rights reserved* COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY THE MACMELLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1928. SET XTP BY BROWN BROTHERS LINQTYPERS PRINTED IN THE UNITED 8TATBS OF AMERICA BY THE CORNWALL PRBSS INTRODUCTION PROBABLY life is mostly subjective. It is what you think it is ; which means that life is organized memories. And the kind of organization one gives to his memories makes his personal equation his individual character. Life at its simplest is many-sided, and one's memory must put its beads upon scores of different strings assorted experiences related in other ways than by chro- nology; the work-string and the love-strand run through every life. Each may break into smaller chains of remembered things, associated things, as work and love pass through the years. Everyone does many kinds of work, tinkers at odd trades to live or to play. As I think back and through my forty working years, counting these work-beads of memory, they fall into many kinds of linked successions. One is politics. There, as in all the other forms of passing business and diver- sion down the long line, faces appear, dim or vivid, dull or significant which recall the day's work. By a twist of fancy these beads of memory become masks in a pageant a merry procession of men marching across my consciousness parallel to other pageants that set out from home, from the printing office, from the work desk; pageants of printers and reporters, of story-tellers and poets, musicians and wandering minstrels of festive youth; pageants of the dear and blessed ones who still walk near me, and those whom I "have loved and now have lost a while/' vi INTRODUCTION **s^*r**r^in*s~*J^~^rT*s-**s**s**s^*^*S^^ This book will set down some account of masks in my pageant of politics. When I was a boy of eight, my father, an old-fashioned hereditary Democrat, took me a hundred miles or so to a Democratic State Convention. I remember the red, sweating, bewhiskered faces of those high-collared, oratorical gentlemen in that con- vention, clamoring futilely, but with abiding faith in their protest, against the evils of the day Grant's recon- struction, the padded pension rolls, the debased currency. Ten years later, as a reporter, I was writing about such conventions for a country paper, and on election day I was sitting on the box of the town hack, a pink-faced youth, directing the driver to the homes of recalcitrant voters. I sat as a delegate in a county convention and wrote political editorials before I could vote. I was a Republican then. My mother, who was a "black aboli- tion Republican," had survived my father, and maybe she colored my political thought. But even then I was bedev- iled by seeing both sides. All my life the two sides of every political proposal have stood giggling before me so that I never could be as bitter as I should be to con- vince the suggestible. This cheerful, complacent idiocy in times of stress has often annoyed my deeply passionate friends. Once when we were going over a magazine article that I was to write about President Taft, Theo- dore Roosevelt took my hand as I left him and cried: "And now, you old boulevardier," such was his sar- castic counter to my swipe at him as Daniel Boone, "don't hold the knife edge of your balance so perfectly poised in this piece that your readers won't see your bias. 1 ' And I paused on the threshold of my going to tell him of old Captain Schilling, state senator from Brown INTRODUCTION vii s^^s-*-s**s-***r<^~^r**s^^f***^r*^^r*^^ County, Kansas, into whose safely Republican district I had been shunted by the State Republican Committee to make a speech. The battle-scarred old captain whis- pered moistly in my ear as he was about to introduce me most fulsomely as some sort of Galahad of reform: "And now, Bill, for God's sake don't get too damned conscientious in this speech I" So much for background; now for the figures. They were selected for their news value when the chapters were written. These chapters are for the most part a reporter's notes elaborated. To illustrate: In 1900, William Jennings Bryan was running for President. McClurefs Magazine asked me to write an article about Bryan. Since then, as a reporter, I have seen Bryan in every National Democratic Convention where he has appeared, or where his name was presented. I came to know him well. I have written many articles about him always I have written as a reporter. From these articles the chapter about Bryan was prepared. Simi- larly, the chapters about Mark Hanna, Senator Platt, Richard Croker, have grown from articles written as news if what is called a timely magazine article is news. Certainly it cannot be called literature. For it is with- out much perspective, and reflects only the emotion of an hour. And in assembling these reporters' notes I hope to preserve the emotions of some passing moments in the last forty years, so that one who shall really write the story of these times in the calm wisdom of another clay may find here a sense of what/ these figures were in the flesh; of how the particular kinds of men they were affected their peculiar times. For they were strong men, accounted great in their days, and rightly so probably. via INTRODUCTION ^**S**S~*,t*iS^r+ > j^S~*s->^*S**'^^ For they did affect political tendency if not as directors of events, at least as more or less conscious dramatic interpreters. Eight Presidents of the United States are considered in these pages. I knew them all; Grover Cleveland least, Theodore Roosevelt best. With each of them I had a reporter's relation, with six of them McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, and Cool- idge, political relations and with Roosevelt I cherish the memory of a friendship that was precious to me. It is a long time ago since I stood, a young reporter, on the station platform at Lawrence, Kansas, or it may have been Topeka, and saw, and even heard across the throng, President Harrison as he was making his "Swing Around the Circle.' 1 Since then the liberal movement in world politics has had its rise, its day of power, its hour of tragedy and its passing. The liberal movement sought to make government an agency of human welfare. One of the major mistakes of the liberal leaders was that they sought to make government the only agency of human welfare. They forgot that masses who require the stimulation of a just prosperity for their happy well- being must themselves first learn to love justice in their own hearts before they can get much out of prosperity except food and clothes and shelter. Liberal govern- ments brought much prosperity to Christendom, dis- tributed the prosperity with something like equity only to find that the classes they had improved materially were just as greedy and dull as their oppressors had been in the days before liberalism broke the rusted chains of eco- nomic feudalism. Government helped as an agency of hu- man welfare; it failed as the only agency. The men who figure in these chapters that follow were all related to INTRODUCTION ix "''XXN'-X^-N^V^VVS^XN^^ the American liberal movement, one way or another. As pre-Populist agrarianism, liberalism defeated President Cleveland in 1888. As Populism it fused with the Dem- ocrats and contributed to President Harrison's defeat in 1892. Advocating an expansion of the currency, wild, new liberalism overwhelmed Cleveland's second adminis- tration and offered Bryan to a panic-stricken world. Mark Hanna and William McKinley checked the panic. Roosevelt came, respectabilized and coordinated the lib- eral policies. They swept Taft out of office. Wilson accepted liberal leadership. War conquered Wilson, but he rallied; and in "one supreme intellectual struggle, wherein he was hampered by a heavy armor of moral defects, Wilson intriguing clumsily, sometimes puerilely, but always for the glory of God lost his soul to save the peace of the world. That peace, whatever it may be worth, was the first-fruit of the world's liberal move- ment in the last quarter of the old century and the first quarter of the new. It is true that prosperity followed the debacle of liberalism after the World War. Also, through modern mass production, in that day prosperity distributed the products of industry with much show of fairness among various kinds of workers. How the steel-throated gods of Mammon must have rattled with ironic laughter at this spectacle of deadly mechanical equity, rising where the prayers of the pious liberals once rose in the fond hope that spiritual progress would follow social and industrial justice! But there are higher gods who always smile and wait. To-morrow also is a day. So behold, gentle reader, the cat out of the bag. You are now forewarned that these chapters are written by an opti- INTRODUCTION ^^x%^vx^x>^*^^^^rf^w^^^*^h/>x^rf^^^^NX>^wrVi' mist; alas, by an idealist. Pause, turn back, or expect the worst. It will be a vague, wistful idealism. All idealism is that if it is sane. The materialistic view of life is simple because it is at any time easy to demonstrate the thesis of materialism, even its pragmatic reality, statisti- cally, or actually by any rule of thumb. The materialistic philosophy holds dogmatically that things are bad; so probably will be worse. The premise is unassailable, the conclusion may not be logically gainsaid. And yet in these two words lies the idealist's creed. For in that nebulous, indefinable hope he is convinced with Job that his redeemer liveth, that life is worth while, that dreams come true, that man's visions are God's reality. Well, that's that. I have tried to picture these masks faithfully in the pageant of politics. They were men half beast and half god, with the two elements continually battling within them. They were typical of their times, incarnations of various phases of the democratic spirit. Each had his delusions about truth upon which his career was founded, and from which delusions, curiously, came much of his strength. For instance, Harrison and Wilson cherished Calvinistic gods, created in their own image. With these gods they defied the world. In a measure Cleveland and Bryan, also Presbyterians, witched with the same icons. But Cleveland seems to have heard the voice in the clink of a gold reserve, and Bryan was fooled by the ballot box. Although it is the best machine yet devised to get at popular opinion of the hour, Bryan never realized what nonsense and confusion can come out of the ballot box; never knew that it was an invention of the devil just before they put him in chains. So Bryan always was listening at the little hole INTRODUCTION xi s^r\xx^l'Nx>^VXXy'^^''NJ'"y/>Jxr^^^/^^^^ in the top of the box, sedulously convinced that what he heard there was the voice of God. Roosevelt set up "the average man" as his serpent in the wilderness, and poor Harding, who had no mind of his own, tried to follow what he called the Best Minds. So they go the long, swiftly-moving line masks in a pageant; masks that I saw, that I scrutinized eagerly, but alas! only with eyes of clay that never could see clearly, much less convey the truth to a mortal heart that never could quite understand. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION v PART I THE OLD KINGS CHAPTER. CROKER I. THE RISE OF A CAVE MAN 3 II. THE TROGLODYTE KING AND His KINGDOM . . 14, PLATT III. THE BLIND EARTHWORM IN POLITICS ... 30 IV. THE USE AND ABUSE OF EARTHWORMS ... 44. PART II THE EARLY STUARTS HARRISON V. OUR HAIRY ANCESTORS 63 VI. THE "RUDE BARBARIANS AT PLAY" .... 75 VII. FANFARE FOR THE "PLUMED KNIGHT" ... 91 VIII. A HAPPY ENDING 101 GROVER CLEVELAND IX. "His ACCIDENCY" . . . 108 X. His EXCELLENCY 118 XI. His OBSTINACY 129 XII. "His COMPLACENCY" 146 xiii XIV CONTENTS CHAPTER McKINLEY XIII. A CITIZEN BECOMES A POLITICIAN . . . XIV. A POLITICIAN TURNS STATESMAN . . . XV. AND THE STATESMAN TURNS TO MARBLE XVI. AND So MOUNTS His PEDESTAL , . . PAGE 152 162 172 181 PART III TWO WARWICKS MARK HANNA XVII. "HE SHAMBLES FORTH IN COSMIC GUISE" 191 XVIII. "THE CELT Is IN His HEART AND HAND" 201 XIX. "MINE ANCIENT HUMOR SAVES HIM WHOLE" . , 209 XX. "OR MATCH WITH DESTINY FOR BEERS!" 217 XXL "Lo, IMPERTURBABLE HE RULES!" . . 225 BRYAN XXII. THE BOY ORATOR OF THE PLATTE . . . 233 XXIII. DANTON 245 XXIV. THE LONG, HARD TRAIL 258 XXV. THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR . 271 PART IV THE GREAT REBELLION THEODORE ROOSEVELT XXVL "A HAPPY GENTLEMAN IN BLOOD AND LINEAMENTS" *...,,. 283 XXVII. CHILDE ROLAND AND His DARK TOWER . 287 XXVIII. JUST BEFORE THE BATTLE 295 XXIX. THE CAPTURED CITADEL 302 XXX. INSIDE THE DARK TOWIR . . . . , 315 CONTENTS xv CHAPTER XXXI. XXXII. XXXIII. XXXIV. XXXV. TAFT WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT WOODROW WILSON OUR FIRST FOLK MYTH .... FATE SMILES AT OUR HERO . . . OUR HERO RISES IN POWER AND GLORY THE MAN WHO WOULD BE GOD . PAGE 327 345 352 360 376 PART V THE RESTORATION HARDING XXXVI. ENTER THE WALKING GENTLEMAN . .389 XXXVII. THE STAGE SETTING AND SOME PROPERTIES 397 XXXVIII. IN WHICH THE PLOT THICKENS . . . 404 XXXIX. THE BIG SECOND ACT 412 XL. EXIT THE WALKING GENTLEMAN . . . 419 XLI. THE TRAGEDY 424 COOLIDGE XLII. WHAT DEMOS WISHED ON Us XLIII. THE WIZARD OF A NEW ORDER 435 448 PART VI THE YOUNG PRINCES OF DEMOCRACY ALFRED EMANUEL SMITH XLIV. ALFRED EMANUEL SMITH . . XLV. WILLIAM HALE THOMPSON WILLIAM HALE THOMPSON . . . . 463 . 480 PART I THE OLD KINGS ''Suffer not the old king under any name" Thomas Collier Platt and Richard Croker were two bosses who grew to perfect flower in the last quarter of the old century. "They were the real rulers of their realms, and typical of their times. CROKER CHAPTER I THE RISE OF A CAVE MAN To the generation who will read these lines the name Richard Croker means almost nothing. Yet for a quar- tej of a century Richard Croker's name was a power in American politics, a power of the first order and his kind still rules. It is interesting now only as one looks back to see how he and his kind once lived. Finite judgments often are biased by immaterial evi- dence. The thrush, the oriole, the bird of paradise, are esteemed by society, while the unlovely hell-diver is despised. Nature has no favorites. All her creatures are equally beloved; in God's kingdom all the subjects are of royal blood. The earthworm is as useful as the lion; the amoeba has full fellowship with man. Con- trasts, being human contrivances, are generally unsub- stantial matters of mere whim and viewpoint. When men contrast their fellows the result must make the angels sigh. Each human contrast is the preference for the oriole over the hell-diver repeated. We say this man is not so good as that man, and this other is not so strong as a fourth one, who may be decried for not being as skilled as the fifth. We forget that the hell-diver does Nature's work in the mud, which is as honorable a station MASKS IN A PAGEANT s**s**s~*s~*s^~r^r^^/-^**s~*s~*s*>s**'^^ as the arbor even if to our finite eyes the arbor may seem more beautiful. So when a man rises full of power, all daubed as to plumage with the muck of the marsh, we measure him by the oriole. When Richard Croker appeared in the 'eighteen-eighties in New York politics, men gasped and tacitly wondered why Croker could not be like Charles Eliot. Whereupon his critics began to throw rocks at the Croker bird, because he was an ugly bird and had low moral sense. Now rock-throwing is fine sport, but it does not help scientists to study the human hell-diver, to find its economic uses, nor to direct its energies toward the general good. This Richard Croker, who- passed out of the American picture in the first decade of the new century, is still important as a type that was, a type that still is, and always will be in American municipal politics, though the type will vary a little. The object of this study is to collect and set down certain data available about the man Croker; to find his family, genus, and species; to ascer- tain what he feeds upon ; what his place is in the scheme of things; that is, what part he and his kind play in the conservation of political and social energy that is slowly forcing the inevitable triumph of u reason and the will of God." Richard Croker was born in Ireland, and popular belief has labeled him Irish. Yet the blood that gov- erned Croker's character was English, not Irish ; for the Croker family came to Ireland about six generations ago from England. The English Crokers were people of quality, and in the family there were a surveyor-general, a poet and wit, a great editor and literary wrangler of parts, and there were such courtiers, barristers, soldiers, THE OLD KINGS ^^^xN^^^^^ m s^^^^rf^^^rf.^^^^>>^^^v'^l*'^^^/ 1 NXNX and citizens as set the stage for the historical plays of the period. Until the last generation each Croker lived a prosperous middle-class gentleman. The fighting devil seems to have been big in all of them. Richard Croker 1 s grandfather apparently nursed a particularly active devil, for the grandfather named Croker's sire Eyre Coot, after Sir Eyre Coot, a dashing Limerick soldier, who fought England's battles all over the world. His bones now rest in Westminster, the wearer of them having grown black in the face with rage and died of apoplexy in the heat of battle at the prospect of defeat. Whatever martial spirit there may have been in Eyre Coot Croker was spent in finding food and shelter for a large family, of which Richard Croker was the youngest member. When the family fell upon evil times, Eyre Coot Croker emigrated with his flock to America. They passed New York, and went to a place near Cincinnati. They remained there but a short time, returning to New York about 1850. The lad Richard picked up a meager edu- cation in the public schools, for the Crokers were Protes- tants, though Richard became a Catholic after he entered New York City politics. In the fifties young Croker entered upon an apprenticeship in the machine shops of what is now the New York Central Railroad. He was in his early teens when he began to learn the machinist's trade, but he was such a strapping youngster that for a long generation in the shops a Croker myth persisted, made up of stories of his prowess. As a blacksmith he could swing a sledge in each hand. They say and there are those who have nursed broken heads to remember Dick Croker that as a young man his legs, arms, and chest were covered with swarthy black hair ; also that he MASKS IN A PAGEANT ^VXN^-^^-^^-^^VX-W *x^^s^^^v^^X^>^^>>^>NXxy^^ not only fought at the drop of the hat, but often jogged the hand which held the hat, being an impatient lad with no stomach for dalliance. He learned his trade thor- oughly. No mere bench worker was Dick Croker. They tell how he built a locomotive with his own hands, put it together, ran it out of the shops, and turned it over to the company after testing its speed on a trial trip. His hands were highly educated, if his head lacked knowl- 'edge of the stuff of which textbooks are made. He had a keen sense of things and their relations which is all that a man gets from college at best. Young Croker took his master's degree in the shops and was graduated as master mechanic, having learned industry, handcraft, and the simpler uses of physical courage. He left his alma mater with the welterweight championship of the institution as a wrestler, a boxer, and a swimmer. He was admitted to full partnership, and soon thereafter to leadership, in a political concern engaged in picking up a more or less honest living, one way and another, known of men as the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang. In the cloistered shades of this institution Croker took post- graduate work in sociology, physics, and political ethics. He availed himself of the rude appliances of the labora- tory, which covered an area of ten blocks, from the Grand Central Station to Madison Square, thence east- ward to the river. The assistant who was managing the political laboratory for Boss Tweed in the vicinity of the Fourth Avenue Tunnel would not supply experimental chemicals to Croker and his fellow-students, and probably otherwise this assistant hindered the intellectual develop- ment of the gang. So the gang set out to find the holy Grail in New York politics and to show Mr. Tweed what THE OLD KINGS .rf'^''%<'^^v<'^^^w'x'Nrf^^^^ l >'NX^/^^ a group of young men of high ideals and nimble fists may do toward attaining the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Croker, being a husky boy, was in due time chosen to run for alderman in the St. Georgian contest with the dragon Tweed. Croker won. Tweed went to Albany and legislated Croker out of office. That was in 1871. Croker ran again. Again he won. Tweed was overthrown. The young academicians of the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang triumphed. Croker took his Ph.D. in the study of mankind, and entered upon the active practice of his profession. The destiny that shapes our ends probably did her most effective day's work in Croker's life the day he joined Tammany Hall. Soon thereafter he became cap- tain of his election precinct The election precinct is the base or unit of the Tammany system. The average citi- zen of the Republic may fancy that the duties of a Tammany captain of an election precinct, in the days of rough-and-tumble politics the days of riot and murder at the polls, in which Croker took a violent hand were solely those of a plug-ugly. Before the days of the Aus- tralian ballot the precinct captain had to sit in the saloon and give out the ballots. Occasionally he had to call upon -the coroner to help the "freeman execute his will." To encourage misdemeanor and to foster felony were only incidents of a captain's annual routine. They were means to an end, and for nearly a century the end and most of the other means have remained the same. Indeed, the office is to-day what it was in spirit before the Civil War, and what in spirit it must be in New York or any larger American city a generation hence. For the success of Tammany depends, and always must depend, MASKS IN A PAGEANT >s**s**j**s**s~*s**s*^*s i *~r*s^^ upon paternalism strongly fraternal. The Tammany which trained young Croker, which trained Charles Murphy, Croker's successor, and which trained Al Smith, Murphy's successor, is a human institution. Therefore it rules, not by its vices but by its virtues, and in spite of its vices. Here is what Tammany taught Croker: To be kind to those in trouble, to look after the sick in the tenements in his precinct, to see that the widows had food and fuel, that the men had jobs and the orphan children clothes, to mourn with those that mourn and to rejoice with them that rejoice. Also Tammany taught discipline. It taught Croker, by a sort of merit system, that election majorities and not excuses are desired, and that to get majorities pre- cinct captains may go far, if necessary may, in an emer- gency, tiptoe right up to the door of the penitentiary, and trust to the efficiency of the organization to pull them back by the coat tails. Croker spent six months in jail, in his youth, charged with murder. The crime was committed in an election fracas, and the jury disagreed. Probably the indictment left no scar upon him, for it was part of his business. Tammany holds an amorphous charter* The Society of Tammany, or the Columbian Order, is a benevolent organization; and Tammany Hall is a political organiza- tion. One set of men belong to both societies so that Tammany's business is the disbursement of benevolence and the collection of votes. Being of a practical turn, the chiefs of Tammany have established a system which converts the smallest amount of benefits into the largest 'number of votes. So district captain Croker, a roystering young man in his day, learned that it pays to be kind, THE OLD KINGS */N^N^^^^rf^Vrf^XNx>*~v^\j^^^^^^\x%x^j^^^w^>^\^ that it pays to be generous perhaps free-handed is a better word that it pays to keep a promise, that it pays to lend a hand. All this he learned in Tammany, which, in spite of its virtues, is a corrupt, un-American survival of feudal paternalistic government. One wonders if it is not destined to live and wax fat in New York so long as atavism makes the European emigrant and his children stagger a bit under their early burdens of citizenship and grope instinctively for the sustaining arm of a king. Also, one may well pause to ask if Tammany is really as "un-American" to-day as it was when the old century closed. Have not our cities grown in a quarter of a century so far across the land and so fast that the Ameri- canism of the nineteenth century may be modified? Is not an urban civilization, with its problems and its changed relations of men, making to some extent a new morality, a modification of the American ideal, which will make the Croker type much more American than he was when Richard Croker lived? Externally the city boss of 1928, differs from Croker, of 1899. But this modern leader, who seems to be a new type, the product of our new urban life, is probably the old Croker bird in the protective color of a changed atmosphere not of a different environment. The courage largely physical that became part of Croker in the shops and in the vestibule of politics, com- bined naturally with the love of kind which he learned in his captaincy. It made him an idol among the lowly. Kings rise from the peasantry with such training; but there was nothing in young Croker's training to teach him moral sense. He saw tributes levied from the saloon, the gambling room, and the brothel, distributed among io MASKS IN A PAGEANT the victims of these plagues. His associates regarded vice as a source of revenue, revenue as a sinew in the arm of political victory, and political victory as the chief end of man. In this atmosphere, tainted with the mal- odorous intrigues of ward politics, Croker's character was formed. He breathed this air into his spiritual nostrils, and it became a part of him; but the pollution which rotted other men merely withered Croker's soul and left his he-strength hobbled only by the criminal statutes. So when he lifted his big, innocent-looking, unflinching green eyes, and looked squarely at the public and advised citizens dissatisfied with the election results to knock down the election judges and drag them into the street, contemporary gentlemen of sedentary habits, who delighted in Emerson, gasped and gave Croker horns and a forked tail in their high imaginings; which was absurd. When Croker ran for alderman in opposition to Boss Tweed's wishes, Croker was elected on the anti-boss ticket and helped to pull down Tweed. Tweed fell, not because he was a thief, but because he did not tell the truth to his fellow-thieves; they found they could not trust him. And Croker learned in Tweed's downfall the one trick which gave Croker power he learned to tell those who trusted him the exact truth and to make a lie the cardinal sin in his code. Those who shuddered at Croker's power in his day shuddered because they fancied it was generated in iniquity. But the truth is that power to control men is always the sign of some strong quality* No man is all good or all bad. Men follow a leader so long as, in their eyes, his virtues outweigh his vices. And the Croker who learned industry in the shops and courage From McClure's Magazine. THE OLD KINGS S/ * V ' N ' N> '' IS '' N ^^ in the gang which was and is the clan in the feudal system of Tammany learned a sort of anthropoid hon- esty in the office of alderman. ^ It is not here contended that Croker developed a New England conscience. He was honest according to his lights, and the Croker illu- mination of that day was a sputtering gas light in the streets. In a simple way he knew that it was wrong to steal funds, either public or private, for stealing requires duplicity, and that was no part of Croker's nature. But probably he did not understand why suc- cessful stealing is iniquitous, further than that it may not pay in the long run. And anyway he held no radical economic ideas; he always contended that. the proceeds of theft were sacrosanct if they were large enough. In those days Alderman Croker's social duties were about the same as* those that confront a New York alder- man to-day, and similar to those that have confronted the gentry for a thousand years. He was patron of the shire. To him the yeomen looked for succor In dis- tress. He stood between the young blades of the tene- ment and their natural enemies, the police. He furnished amusement and recreation for his vassals. It was his part to sit in silence on the top deck of a chartered boat, taking the peasantry to his annual clam-bake, and to receive his subjects there in stately dignity as his hench- men brought them up. Also, he was expected to lend the distinction of his presence to the barkeepers 5 annual ball and to grace the church fair with his dumb, clumsy courtesy. It was all medieval, all like the real Round Table, probably, and all incongruous to the American point of view as Americanism was defined in Puritan terms the quintessence of a rugged individualism in 12 MASKS IN A PAGEANT the latter part of the nineteenth century. Yet the rise of Croker in Tammany from peasant to marauder, from marauder to squire, from squire to liege lord, from lord to chancellor of the exchequer, from but that is antici- pating the narrative ; suffice to say that Croker's rise was not strange; it was typical of the time and the place; indeed, typical of human nature in any time and place which develops the need of an overlord. It was like the rise of Boss Kelly, the rise of Boss Tweed, or the rise of any of the kings of Tammany whose fall has been forgotten in the last hundred years. When in the eighteen-eighties John Kelly rose to the boss's throne in Tammany, Croker was a district leader; that is to say, a kind of a county central committeeman in the political organization, and a Grand Duke in the Tammany social system. Kelly made Croker a privy councilor, and gave him the office and the title of city chamberlain. It may be said to the credit of the system that produced Croker that he conducted the various offices he held coroner, city chamberlain, and fire com- missioner decently and without scandal. No city money stuck to his fingers. As chancellor of the exchequer, Croker was thrown daily with the Tammany nobility. The Irish modification of his English blood in him made him imitative. He acquired a veneer of manners. He ceased to be a "gent." His fists whitened. His clothes grew "mild and lovely," and his voice strident, harsh, and full of strange oaths began to grow "gentle as the, summer breeze" in the days when he was in Kelly's cabinet. As events crowded power on Croker, a lesson of silence, which he learned first in the Tunnel Gang, became more and more a part of his mental habit. THE OLD KINGS 13 , - r^x^^rNx>^f^^'^^r^rfN-'>*'^^>-^^ Croker also made his temper bridle-wise. During the season spent in jail charged with murder he learned some philosophy which never deserted him. There is a fine perspective of the world to be had from behind prison bars that gives a man and Croker got it well a bird's* "eye view of the vanities of this life. Jail makes men silent When John Kelly died in the early nineties the Tam- many crown came to Croker by natural selection. He was made Chairman of the Finance Committee of Tam- nany. That was his office for a decade at the height )f his power. The Finance Committee was composed of ive district leaders out of the thirty-seven in New York. (Jnder each leader were a score of precinct captains, each !)f whom was set over four or five hundred people; the people were divided into tribes of nationality and also subdivided into clans. This organization, which has lothing to do with political creeds or platforms, but :oheres out of greed for public taxes and public privi- leges, is the most perfect voting machine on earth. To the royal head of this system, Croker came as a journey- man who had worked up from bound boy. He was made Icing by grace of his strong right arm, and a steel brain sharpened on a man hunter's whetstone. Passionate and by that token soft-hearted simple as a child, acquisi- fivc, shrewd in a narrow groove like a machine, sordid at the core, and ignorant of civilization as a vandal, Croker came to his throne a troglodyte king over a race of cave men. CHAPTER II THE TROGLODYTE KING AND HIS KINGDOM To know what sort of a ruler he made, one must know his domain. It was first of all a material kingdom. There was nothing so ethical about it as a double ledger entry. For his kingdom was not Greater New York; there are spiritual, literary, and commercial estates in New York that never owed allegiance to Croker. He did not dream that they existed. His kingdom was not even the atmosphere of current political thought in Man- hattan and the Bronx. For Croker cared little for polit- ical 'economy and the trend of political ideas. The king- dom of Croker was the kingdom of loot, and the old vain heathen in his blindness thought it was one of the principalities and powers. To Croker, or to what Croker stood for, ninety thousand men surrendered their sovereign American rights. This surrender was made, as it was made to Kelly and Tweed before Croker and to Murphy and his successors and assigns after him, without let or hindrance. It carried the right of transfer with it. A tremendous power was generated by this abdication. Croker and four others sat in a secr'et conference and nominated men to fill 'every municipal office in New York, from mayor to alderman. Orders came down from this conference to the city convention, to the district conVen- THE OLD KINGS 15 *r<*S<*S*i> l **j**f^^ tion, to the ward caucus. The only thing that went up was obedience. Surveying the power of Croker, one could easily b'elieve that not a policeman walked his beat in New York City except by Croker's grace; not a brick was laid on a public or private work that he might not impudently tear down if the contractor laying it with- held homage to the boss ; that not a wheel turned on any railway in New York, not a car moved up and down an elevator shaft in Greater New York, which by express- ing an idle caprice Croker might not have stopped. Pop- ular government in New York City thrived under th'e Croker regime as lustily as in Constantinople or Bagdad. About that time, a New Yorker, seeking to purge the East Side tenements of vice, sought, not the chief of police, not the police commissioners, not the mayor, but the fountain-head of government in New York, Croker in his council. After introducing the petitioner for reform to his manor lords, Croker said : I want you to give close attention to his statement, and I want that, after you have heard what he has to say, you^ will use every effort to correct all those evils as far as it lies in your power. When the reformer had finished speaking and a com- mittee had been appointed, Croker delivered this ukase: Right here I want to reiterate again what I said three weeks ago, and that is, not a dollar comes into my hands from the land- lords of pool-rooms or houses of ill-fame. If any of you gentle- men have been collecting from these people, you had better get out of the organization. It hasn't any use for you. You disgrace it. I am not talking for political effect. I am talking of what you should do as honest citizens. I hope if this committee should ask any one of you leaders here for information you will appear and do the best you know how to make its work entirely successful MASKS IN A PAGEANT Some one more venturesome than the other barons attempted to say that the evil complained of was neces- sary. Let the undisputed report of a half dozen of the best newspapers in New York continue to describe the royal wrath: Croker bounded from his chair, walked toward the coroner, and pointed his finger at him, shaking it excitedly. "You say you don't know what we can do?" he asked in angry tones, "What you want to do" (raising his voice) "is to act, and to try to do something anyway. You can't stop it, you say. If you do nothing except talk about what you can't do, you can never stop anything. If the people find anything is wrong, you be perfectly satisfied the people can put a stop to it and will. Right will right itself s in spite of wrong. It can be righted If this committee here goes to work with a squad of police. And now let's see whether the police can help us." Emperor William could have used no stronger lan- guage to his Reichstag. The mental attitude of the man who spoke thus was that of dictator. Croker was not giving advice; he was proclaiming an edict. And his proclamation was sincere. The reader must remember that he is not considering a diplomat, nor a che*$ player, DR. PARKHURST'S RIVAL, THE REV. DR. CROKER. THE OLD KINGS 17 w-v <^~~*t**s^t^**s~>*r>*>~**r<*~*^^^ nor even a second-rate politician. Croker was a savage, with a child's mind. Political issues were his toys, and he went from one to another with no thought of design or consequence. Only a year before his retirement did Croker find even a passing interest in his baubles. Dur- ing the first ten years of his reign the nation was stirred deeply by great events, and moved manifestly by the passing issues of the day. Croker, taciturn, grim, unin- terested, furtively concealing his ignorance In stolidity, viewed the panorama of history like an Indian at the show. He had hoarded an untold treasure of golden silence, which in his very latter days he spent like a profligate in wanton speech. Probably some sort of a carnal sense of power had been throbbing in him and awakened a heavy, turgid ambition in this giant and set him to babbling. Bryan's "First Battle" was read to Croker in 1897, when he called the author "Bryant." He was so carried away with the sincerity of the argu- ment that he metaphorically , clapped his hands with delight. He never realized to the end of his days that there might be another side to arguments that pleased him. And Croker's enthusiasm for Bryan was unalloyed. They told Croker how the trusts handicapped young men, and Croker retold the story again and again to every listening reporter during the campaign. It was in the presidential campaign of 1900 that Croker received his highest 'homage. It came from Bryan, candidate for the second time of the national Democratic party. Bryan was still a young man in those (j a y s barely forty. His emotions were keen, and he was emotionalizing his way through the higher walks of American politics, making moral issues out of eco- 1 8 MASKS IN A PAGEANT nomic problems and distributing, as God's Presbyterian viceregent, the white cards of righteousness to such deserving Democrats as followed in his way of light. To others he handed the black curse of his disdain. Millions of Americans of all parties saw in Bryan the Messiah of their pious hopes for a sanctified land. He prayed before battle. He was the prophet of the new day. One night in late September, 1900, Bryan carrie to New York City the Sodom that surrounded Wall Street, the plague spot of Bryan's paradise. He appeared in Cooper Union for a speech. He was to attack the very citadel of sin. He stood on the platform of the dingy old hall where Lincoln had proclaimed his faith a long generation before. The gas footlights of the stage shone on a handsome, youthful figure as Bryan stepped out of the group on the platform to hurl his defiance at the forces of iniquity that encompassed him in the Gomorrah of oppression. He put his left hand on his heart, turned his eager young fac'e slightly side- ways; shook his black poll regally, waved a beatifying gesture to a dull, square-faced man with sagging jowls, covered lightly by a graying, blotched black beard, who hulked heavily forward in his chair supporting his stocky body with two great paws clasped over a cane between his widespread knees. The old man stared at the young orator, stared catwise, unblinking, expressionless, at the supple, bouncing figure. The flashing, passionate eyes of the young man for a smiling moment flicked the unflinch- ing, unresponsive jade of the tiger 'eyes before him. Then the soft silvern voice of Bryan quickened the place. Lifting his pontifical hand over Croker's head, Bryan :alled out: "Great is Tammany, and Croker is Its prophet I" THE OLD KINGS 19 ****J**s**s**f**y+*s~^+^**>*r<*s*~***S**s*^ It was a terrible instant of silence that followed before the tiger's exultant yowl greeted the orator. In that moment, America gasped and Bryan ceased to be a national leader. His broken scepter was crunched in the tiger's grinning jaws. After that, Bryan was only a partisan; a powerful figure, but a shorn Samson. Croker sat immutable as the crowd yelled. But within his heart the cockles glowed. In November Tammany futilely voted for Bryan. Whereat that debt was paid, the book was balanced, and Bryan was forgotten in Tammany 1 Let us look at Croker in another and a lovelier mood. It is in a late year of his reign; Croker is eating dinner in a public place. He sees a city official at a table a few yards away. Calling across the room, he asks: "Well, how is that Murphy boy doing I sent you?' 5 The city official repli'es that the boy is an exceptionally capable young man. Croker is delighted. At the end of his felicitous ejaculations he cries: "Good boy. How much is he getting?" And then: "You just raise him a thousand to-morrow." Croker made no attempt at concealment; used no cipher code, nor yet was he brazen about it. He saw no reason why he should not bestow the money of the taxpayers at his discretion. Was he under an oath of offic'e ? He was not. And if he wished to do a benevo- lence, whose business was it? Absolutely no one's ! To understand the real Croker one should not confuse him with a sort of mythical Croker that hero-worshipers and a kind of devil-worshipers in his day builded out of the red mud of their own ideals. The real Croker was not crafty. He was not even ordinarily shrewd, either in business or in politics. When he Went into Wall Street he was as ignorant 20 MASKS IN A PAGEANT of the methods there as the Mahdi on the desert* The men who played his hand for him needed a friend at the soul of things in New York City, and they knew where the soul of things was. They did not buy Croker. He accepted no bribe. He was true to his Wall Street friends, and his Wall Street friends generally stood by him. He made real-estate investments, and his advance knowledge of proposed public improvements made his investments profitable. He bought stock in city indus- trials, and his friends in office protected his investments, and the stock rose and Croker skimmed off the cream. He frankly acknowledged that what street parlance * called his political pull represented his capital. His whole life in the years of his power was devoted to accumulating this influence, and rather proudly than otherwise he checked on it as an old man would check on his life's savings. To show Croker his moral respon- sibility to the city would have required a galvanic vitali- zation of his moral sense, which was as innocuous as a vermiform appendix. Croker knew only the Tammany Hall he made, an edition de luxe of the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang. During the campaign of 1900 he strung some insolent banners across the line of march of a great Republican parade. The act was the revival of the Tunnel Gang instinct smart, swagger, bullying; not shrewd, not effective. It reflected merely, the mental processes of a boy. "Lain't no statesman," said Croker to the Mazet Com- mittee in 1899. "I am looking out for my own pocket first." This was literally true. And when Croker said it he THE OLD KINGS 21 * / " Si '' > -'* v - / "" s> " v ^''^"**-'' s --'*^^ saw no reason for mincing matters. But a year or so later he grew flabby in his arrogance. A fleshy ambition for wider influence seemed to have turned Croker's head along in the early years of the new century. He fain would have posed as a statesman, and presto- 1 he talked to prove his wisdom. He knew no more of the sentiment of the country, of its geography, of its mental and moral attitude, than a Persian satrap. He did not comprehend the issues of his day even remotely. The words "seigniorage" and "industrial and sociological ten- dencies/' with Croker, were words to be skipped in read- ing aloud, and nothing more. He seriously suggested a compromise with the gold Democrats; he would* have changed the ratio of silver coinage as the silver market fluctuated. The suggested compromise revealed the depth of economic thought which he fathomed. And yet in American politics Croker was for ten years one of the major powers. He had to be reckoned with. His death in the day of his ascendancy would have been a calamity to his city. For no other man in all Tammany who might succeed him was, just at that time, as honest as Croker. Negatively his influence, as a sovereign, was for good, in that the influence of other Tammany leaders without Croker would have been unspeakably bad. The ninety thousand Tammany voters who surrendered their citizenship to Croker might easily have done far worse with it. They might have used it on their own intelligence for instance I This they have never done. If the time ever comes when they do use their citizenship, unrestrained by the intervening agency of faith in Croker' $ heirs or assigns, heaven protect wealth and social order in New York City I Take away the steel hoops of Tammany 22 MASKS IN A PAGEANT from the social dynamite, and let it go kicking around under the feet of any cheap agitator who may come by with his head in the clouds, and then look out for fire- works.* A cautious rascal is safer than a vain dema- gogue. A corrupt king is rather to be chosen than the anarchy of a million hungry, shifty despots. Croker and his kind have their place in the scheme of things. The system that made him a king out of a ruffian grows out of a need for ruffian kings. It is a case of supply and demand. Some natural law governs the relation between the two. In the quarter of a century since Croker left Tammany the veneer of civilization has thickened a little. Educa- tion has helped some. An improved economic status, almost revolutionary in its character, has helped more than education. But education and environment have not made full-sized men out of the urban masses of our great cities. They still are children; still need bosses. Croker will return for generations ; modified, of course, but only as to his skin. Into the Tammany grist-mill, with benevolence and civic corruption for its upper and nether stones, the crop of Ellis Island of the last half of the old century was dumped. The grist came out a kind of citizen; a poor kind indeed, but a better kind than no citizen. And with all the mold of feudalism which the Tammany mill pre- served, the Tammany-made citizen was and is more trustworthy than the citizen that Karl Marx, or Lenin would make, or than that which any red anarchist or impatient socialist would make. And right now, in the *If Tammany would give New York the kind of public schools needed to elevate the public standard of intelligence, of course this statement would not be true. THE OLD KINGS 23 *X'*_*N^-x - ''V' 1 N_'-V.'-V'"s.''^^_'%*"^^ third decade of the new century, with the schools of New York City what Tammany makes them, it is probably a choice between Tammany and the dynamiters* For New York always rejects the middle-class reformer. The good citizens uptown occasionally, in frenzied hours of peni- tence, go so far as to send a few political tracts to the tenements, or to send an officer to kick up a fuss about the number of people who sleep and work in one room a fuss which only irritates the tenements and proves to them for the hundredth time that the reformers are enemies of the poor. The good citizens uptown may even send young men and women to live in the tenements. But the Tammany precinct captains are brothers of the people, flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. The cap- tains understand and are understood. Also, when the Tammany man rises in the world he comes back to his kith and kin, not as a scientist examining bugs, not as an evangelist announcing the last call for social salvation's dining-car, but as a manor lord returning from a long and prosperous journey, with an open hand and a warm heart. Tammany has preached contentment. It has tolerated no Jeremiahs- Its philosophy is eat, drink, and be merry, fight the enemy, and knife the traitor; and Richard Croker, late of the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang, late precinct captain, later district leader, and finally, in the days of his glory, haloed with such divinity as "doth hedge a king," was the same Dick Croker who ran the caucus and blustered about the polls a quarter of * cen- tury before his Tammany coronation. He always did as much for his friend as he would have done in the old days, and the friend's morals interested him no more 24 MASKS IN A PAGEANT than his. love affair or the color of his hair. And here's another reason why, in the American scene, Dick Croker of the Tunnel Gang was safer than the communist to control the mill that was turning the raw material of the steerage into American citizens : Croker desired to be a gentleman. The example is good. For your communist likes his gentleman broiled on a spit and rather underdone. In the closing days of his reign Croker affected foreign travel chiefly in Ireland, where he finally went to live and die a country squire. But when Croker was in America, he lived at the Democratic Club, which may be described as the "St. James" of the Tammany nobility in the days of Tweed, Kelly, Murphy, Croker, and Hylan. There gathered the beauty and the chivalry of the institution. In the evening, justices, counselors, cap- tains of police, the chancellor of the 'exchequer, the lord mayor, the keeper of the buckhounds, courtiers, nobles, and gentry, and his sacred majesty the king, all assembled to pass a quiet hour discussing matters of state. This Democratic Club was for a generation quartered in a high, brownstone structure well up toward Central Park, on Fifth Avenue, where gentlemen passed through the door all day and as late at night as gentlemen might be out of bed. Here were four floors upon which lay thick velvet carpet bought, they told you, by the "Chief," meaning Croker. Complete sets of fat leather furniture and sets of gilded spider-legged chairs and divans, also selected by the "Chief," were placed against the wall, whereon glowing pictures framed in glittering gilt hung exactly on the line, in the shut-up throne-room of a parlor. A library, where were government reports and THE OLD KINGS 25 ,^% - *> v ->^~ v ~vx > >*'>*'v' - xx>^ > >.'-\^'X^ broken sets of editions de luxe of foreign novelists, was conveniently near the card-room, and under the roof was a dining-room, splendid with much fine gold, where the court frescoer had adorned the ceiling with saintly pic- tures of the Democratic fathers, with allegoric scenes in pink and pea-green and blue from American history, and at each corner of the fresco with the smiling, satisfied face of a tiger on an "animated bust." It is necessary to add that this room expressed in terms of form and color the orison that always sang in the king's heart. In the royal palace Croker was treated with the full pomp and circumstance that became a king. *When he entered the dining-room robust conversation gasped into silence until Croker was seated. When he paused before a table the diners rose. When he left a group of cour- tiers and went to a quiet corner, with an unlighted cigar between his teeth, court etiquette required that he must not be disturbed except on pressing matters of the king- dom. When he appeared in evening clothes he would not budge a step to meet any human being. Strangers, let them be who they might President, senators, allies, or messengers of kings had to be brought to Croker for presentation; for the law of the Tunnel Gang get your bluff in first was as the law of those Medes and the Per- sians. This I saw with my own eyes one night in the Bryan campaign of 1900. And all this homage, all this bootlicking, to a mild- mannered, soft-voiced, sad-faced, green-eyed chunk of a man who talked slowly that he might peg in his "seens" and his "saws," his "dones" and his "dids" where they belonged, who had a loggy wit, who cared neither for books, nor music, nor theatrical performances, nor good 26 MASKS IN A PAGEANT win'e, nor a dinner, nor the society of his kind! All this dull obeisance by men of brains and some rudimentary culture to a slow, emotionless, presimian hulk of bone and sinew a sort of human megatherium, who had come crashing up from the swamps splashed with the slime of pre-Adamite wickedness ! He was throned, and dispensed a sort of jungle justice, for more than a decade and a half, while civilization knocked its kne'es together in stupid, terrified adulation! And why? What was the secret of this man's power this man who scorned the esthetic joys that delighted his fellows, and was pleased only with thre'e things: one, the companionship of horses and dogs; two, the faces of children; and, three, stripped to the shaggy skin of him, a plunge in the sea far out beyond the breakers, far out where thefe is room to romp and scuffle and wrestle with danger? What set this barbarian to rule over a free city ? What natural selection ? What survival of the fittest? Is society a knock down and drag out civilization, bloody of tooth and nail? Yet here, up the natural stepping-stones of a political system of a great city, came a primitive man with a simple mind, to which the spectacle of the shifting vitascope of modern life was as m'eaningless as the figures in the kaleidoscope ; and men hailed him chief and bowed before him, and lost their appetite when he frowned, and garlanded him with roses when he started upon a journey. Why? Let us put him on the stand and make him answer. In an interview with W. T. Stead, in 1897, when Stead asked what is the fundamental law of the universe, Croker answered : Sir, the law is that although wrongdoing may endure for a season, right must in the long run come to the top. Human nature THE OLD KINGS 27 >-^-'"*X>^X^^Ny^yX/%/'N*"XXN^N^>^^W^ is so built that roguery cannot last. Honest men come to their own, no matter what odds against them. If you put ten honest men into an assembly with ninety thieves, human nature is such that the ten honest men will boss the ninety thieves. They must do it. They will tell you that Tammany has ruled New York nearly all the time. Do you think we could have done it if we had been the thieves and rogues they say we are? I have been in office nearly all my life. Do you think the citizens would have been such fools as to reelect me if I had been the bad man they say I am ? Things that are rotten do not last. Thieves are not trusted by their fellow-thieves, let alone by their fellow-citizens. It is not by what is bad in them that institutions and parties win, but by what is good. Over against this virtuous preachment of Croker put the evidence of Captain Meakin's Tammany collector and Croker's cohort, Edward Shalvey, before the Lexow Committee (Vol. I, p. 5, 407) : Q. You collected from these several places liquor dealers, policy shops, and houses of ill-fame as you did under the previous captain ? . A. Yes, sir. Q. Did you ever meet with any refusal to pay from the people engaged in this class of business, or did they all pay as a matter of course? A. They all paid as a matter of course. Q. So that, officer, even beneath the terrible frown of the Lexow Committee, the collection went on just the same? A. Yes, sir. Q. The old, old story continued, is not that so? A. Yes, sir. Q. And while, as a matter of fact, exposures were being made as testified to before this Committee since last May or April, the collections continued right along unbroken, did they not? A. Yes, sir. Q. And the captains took the money in the same way ? A. Yes, sir. 28 MASKS IN A PAGEANT That, of course, was Croker 's idea of honesty Tammany's idea, indeed, in that day. How much has that idea been clarified in a generation? on'e wonders. Again, may not one ask, are Croker and his kind the sym- bol of New York? Here was a city whose clearing- house reports showed a buccaneer's treasure multiplied by his fondest dreams, but where, until Croker left the throne, in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, no class had ever graduated from a public high school. Here was a city with a moral intelligence that permitted hun- dreds of its policemen to add blackmail to their duties; a city whose public officers 'exercised a pirate's honor; a community that traded its right of free government for the rule of a boss, not once, but a score of times and still needs its boss as an Oriental village needs its caliph ; a community with the sheer brute force of a giant, whose political history records the giant's low average the dead level of it. This was political New York of a generation ago. It is, more or less, the political New York of to-day somewhat improved in housing, in external beauty, in the statement of its economic equation, but not greatly changed at heart. What was Croker? Croker and the metropolis justified themselves. Croker did not see his owii shortcomings. Indeed, it is a ques- tion whether or not a difference from others of one's species is a shortcoming. Each creature has his place in the economy of nature. When Stead asked Croker : "Mr. Croker, for nearly thirty years you have been up to the neck in the rough-and-tumble of New York politics. For nearly twenty years you have been the supreme boss of Tammany. You are contemplating a serene old age. Looking back over those thirty years, is there not a single act or deed which, in the light THE OLD KINGS 29 >S~**'**S^^S**li**S**/*\S**J*iJ**i**S~*J^^ of your experience, you regret having done, or that you now feel that you should have left undone?" Stead says : "The boss paused. He removed from his lips the cigar of Brob- dingnag, and half closed his eyes for a moment. Then with calm, deliberate emphasis he replied : 'No, sir, not one. I do not remem- ber ever having done anything I ought not to have done, for I have done good all my life.' " Which brings us back to the beginning. Does the hell- diver see mud, and filth, and carrion, and slime-life with the eyes of the bird of paradise? PLATT CHAPTER III THE BLIND EARTHWORM IN POLITICS THOMAS COLLIER PLATT and Richard Croker were contemporary bosses in New York politics during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In so far as New York represented a large unit of American population, and in so far as that unit represented the commercial capital of this continent, New York politics and thes'e two New York politicians were important and somewhat identical; although the two men were deeply antithetical. Platt considered himself a scholar and a gentleman. He controlled Republican politics through the manipulation of men of the middle class, often of the upper middle class, in the interests of men of the top crust. His cohorts and henchmen were well-bred, white-collared, kid-gloved, silk-stockinged, plug-hatted. Emotion played almost no part in his hold upon his fellows. Croker controlled the substratum, the cut well under that which Platt manipulated. The immigrant, and the immigrant's children, followed Croker. The under-privileged were grist for Croker's mill. Croker held his liege lordship because he had a loyal heart, an open hand, and a voice in rage which was as shriveling as the wrath of God. 30 THE OLD KINGS 31 Both were silent men. Croker was grim; Platt was secretive. Croker ruled by force ; Platt by intrigue. Yet each was necessary to the political scheme of things as it was ordained by man and permitted by a kind but c'areless Providence at the opening of this twentieth cen- tury. Now we shall consider Platt. Once upon a time to be exact, in the first third of the nineteenth century there lived in the little country town of Owego, New York, a country lawyer of parts and con- sequence named William Platt a family man to whom was born, in the course of time again to be exact, in 1 834 a son. William Platt named his son Thomas Collier Platt, and educated him after his own heart. The towns- men testified to the fact that the younger Platt grew up a rather bloodless, wobbly-legged, flat-chested, squawky- voiced boy. He came to adolescence amid the best cul- ture and refinement that the day and place afforded, and went to Yale College. There he was a fairly good stu- dent until his vitality began to ebb, and he left in his junior year. He came back to Owego with notions, and started a literary publication which he called the St. Nicholas Magazine. In every man's life there are periods when he thinks he is a born humorist, or perhaps a poet. Platt sowed his literary wild oats in the St. Nicholas Magazine. He conducted; the joke depart- ment. His humor was of the kind that inspires the heathen to tickle the feet of the man in stocks. One sample will do : THE PREACHER (to the profane boatman) : "Sir, do you know where you are going?" THE PROFANE BOATMAN: "Up the canal on the 'Johnny Sands.' " MASKS IN A PAGEANT ^r^^^^^^f^^^^ THE PREACHER: "No, no; you are going to hell faster than any canal boat can carry you!" BOATMAN: "And where are you going?" PREACHER: "I expect to go to heaven." BOATMAN : "No, no ; you are going right into this canal," and with that he pitched him in. He was given to puns and quips and jibes, and, worst of all, to bad poetry. This stanza is offered in evidence : TO STELLA A little star rode all alone Along the azure sky, And sang so mournfully because No other star was nigh. But soon another planet swept Adown the ethereal main, And twinkled at that pretty star, Which twinkled back again. They wove in one their silver crowns And locked their flashing wings, And now no rover of the skies Like happy Stella sings. Now everything has its use, and this poetry bad as it is served its purpose in the world, for it led Tom Platt into politics. Every life has its secret This was Platt's. He was a musician. In his younger days he could play by ear several instruments, and while he lived a myth prevailed in Owego that Tom Platt was handy with the melodeon. Being a rhymer, the inevitable followed. In the campaign of '56 an emotional cam- paign if there ever was one the abolitionists had Tom Platt get up the Owego Campaign Glee Club and organ- ize the Republican party in Tioga County. Old men Harper's Magazine. FROM POET TO POLITICIAN. Mr. Platt in 1853, 1871, and 1873. The last picture shows him as a member of Congress. 33 and women in Owego for a long generation still held in their memories the picture of Tom Platt, a gaunt, loose-skinned youth, rangy and uncertain in the joints, standing at the head of a drove of wild-eyed human long- horns, as if to keep them from a stampede, waving his joist-like arms in rhythm to "down-left-right-up-down- left-right-up s-i-n-g!" And when they began to sing, the choirmen would huddle together like cold sheep, and almost bump heads so that the harmony should be close and effective. And all the time Tom Platt hovered over the group, keeping time with a foot or a finger and chopping out the words of the song with his long, square flail of a jaw, full of delight at his handiwork. For the words of the songs were his. Here is one stajft&a of a song called "The Greeley Pill," set to the tune of "Cap- tain Kidd As He Sailed." Call us drunkards, liars, knaves, We're so sick, oh so sick ; Call us cowards, traitors, slaves, We're so sick. Call us murderers, as you will, Kick and lash us, we'll lie still ; Dr. Greeley, just one pill We're so sick. These lines are printed partly to show how precisely the political ballad has preserved its ethical, metrical, and poetical integrity through the centuries; but chiefly to show that Tom Platt at the age of twenty-one, a callow youth, had all the advantages of a high-toned political education in those good old times which one hears so much about; when aspirations were lofty, when motives were pure, when men were exalted by clear patriotism, 34 MASKS IN A PAGEANT and when the recrimination and abuse so deplorable to-day had not crept into our politics. The song of "The Greeley Pill" certainly reflected a political condition existing in Platt's youth. That condition was his early environment. It formed him, gave him his political color and direction. Platt, as the organizer of the Republican party in Tioga County, used music, which hath charms, but not merely to soothe the savage breast ; with Platt it was a means to an end. The end of the party organizer in a district is not platforms, nor senti- ments, nor aspirations, but votes counted on the tally sheet. Platt sang blithely and in his songs snarled, sneered, and lampooned to get votes. Little of art for art's safee shaped his attitude to the muse. Probably his artistic nature which really was very big in him despite his practical employment found expression when he sang in the church choir. Indeed, Platt sang in the church choir until he was nearly fifty years old. His musical taste abode with him to the end ; he was a patron of the opera all his life. But music and the fine arts were diversions with Platt, not passions. For Platt lived to work. He was elected county clerk of Tioga County in 1859, but during the early sixties he went Into the lumber business, seemingly for his health. He made lumber pay. His health improved. He became presi- dent of an Owego bank, and he had money to invest. He put some of it in the Southern Central Railroad, an Ohio enterprise, and went to Ohio to live. He had been dabbling in politics in Tioga County as the average county banker since Croesus has dabbled by the back door of the bank; not enough to hurt, but just to see that the right man is elected sheriff and treasurer, and THE OLD KINGS 35 VNX>-'''V''"ta<*NXV/'>i'%rf'>- 1 >j'Nyvxv^ that the delegations to the State and congressional con- ventions shall be friendly. In Ohio, Platt was unhappy* Perhaps the thought that the other crowd in Owego was running the Tioga County Convention gnawed at his consciousness. At all events, Platt got his money out of the Ohio venture after the Civil War and came back to Owego. He worked with Cornell and Conkling and Louis F. Payne to give Grant the New York delegation in '68 and '72. As a result he got the Albany habit, and became known about the political hotels at Albany. He used to walk about conventions and whisper things to delegates through the funnel of his hands. In '72 he refused a congressional nomination, but two years later took it, and was elected. At the bankers' convention he was a prominent figure, wearing a Prince Albert coat and fine side-whiskers. Life began to be a serious busi- ness with Platt, and it was a great concession to the amenities of friendship when he relaxed himself to make a pun, a mental tipple of which he was exceedingly fond even into his declining years, but which he ever guarded lest it lead to the inebriety of geniality. His business grew. In the course of things he became interested in an express company, and was elected its president. Platt, who dom- inated whatever he touched, found in Congress neither comfort nor profit. So he left it, and, keeping his clutches on his congressional district and gripping another district, snuggled up closer to Conkling and Cornell and Payne. In 1877, he pushed himself into the king row, and was elected chairman of the Republican State Convention. At that time he was a pleasant-looking, delicately-built man, a bit slab-sided, restless, nervous, acquisitive. His lean face was covered with a scrawny beard. He had a 36 MASKS IN A PAGEANT hard, shifty eye, with a sort of left-over petrified twinkle in it, and his long, broad jaw was the only thing in his face to prophesy his career. He seemed to have had a double ambition : to be a rich man and a successful poli- tician. He had made a good start in his express business, and he was in the last years of his apprenticeship in the manipulation of men. His trade was about learned, and he was getting ready to set up a political business of his own. He began little innocent excursions in state legis- lation with local bills and private bills, turned out some neat and workmanlike laws, and was becoming so impor- tant in state affairs that certain people in his hom'e town hated him. He felt his restless ambition for power an ambition lariated by the provincialism of Owego. Too many persons walked past his box in the post office peek- ing at the corners of the envelopes. So in 1879 Plat* moved to New York City, where one may be up after ten o'clock at night without causing comment* In a crowd he could play his game unobserved; for Platt had an inborn love of the secretive. It finally went so far that he was noncommittal in the presence of strangers about the state of the weather. He fixed his eyes on an appointive place that pleased him, and pounced upon the office of quarantine commissioner of New York, the only appointive office he ever held* He administered his office well, but played politics in it ten hours a day, which left few hours for the express business. His itch for power was overcoming his love for money. He was familiarizing himself with the political situations all over New York State. He kept his grip on the situation in Owego, and the details of the political life in any com- munity came to have significance to him. About this THE OLD KINGS 37 X^-<~w'^-*>-'>^~^-^r^-l^w'NXN-'% - ^^ time he formed a political partnership with Louis F. Payne, a Republican manipulator of some skill and state renown. Platt and Payne were of the same age, reck- oned by years, but reckoned by those political experiences which men describe by winks and shrugs, Platt was a bound boy and Payne a journeyman. After the Repub- licans elected the New York legislature in 1880, Platt and Payne, operating with less than half a score of legislators, went down to Albany to take in the senatorial election. The two herders picketed their legislators to a temporary boom for Platt for senator, and began look- ing about to see how the game was running. Occasion- ally they found a maverick legislator, or traded for one, or removed a brand from a stray, and by the time the general round-up occurred it was apparent that Platt and Payne would have enough votes to throw the sena- torial election where they chose. They chose to hold it. The people of New York, to whom Platt was merely a carpenter and joiner of politics, considered his senatorial candidacy and his statesmanship a bit Pickwickian. And so one fine morning, when the papers announced that Platt was elected United States senator from New York, the people were amused but bewildered. Platt as senator in those days was a dwarf on stilts. He entered the Senate as the political camp follower but not even the creature, and certainly not the ally of his senatorial colleague, the great Roscoe Conkling, the imperious, who was at the summit of his power. We must stop a moment and consider Roscoe Conkling, on'e of the unique figures in American history in the early part of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He was a stage figure, picturesque to a degree. He seem'ed 38 MASKS IN A PAGEANT to be forever wearing a sort of spiritual make-up which glowed through his body. Elaine referred to his turkey- gobbler strut. Yet he had intellectual powers to justify it. A contemporary, Senator John J. Ingalls, of Kansas, once described Conkling thus : His presence was noble and commanding; his voice and elocu- tion were superb ; his bearing and address somewhat too formal, but marked by dignity and grace. His vocabulary was rich and ornamental, sometimes almost to the borders of the grotesque, but fertilized with apposite quotations and allusions that showed wide reading, especially in poetry and the drama. Some hostile critic described one of his speeches as a "purple earthquake of oratory." Had he learned how to forget where he could not forgive there is no height he might not have reached, even the highest in the people's gift. But he would not flatter Neptune for his trident, nor Jove for his power to thunder. In that state of moral typhoid which always follows great wars, an era of profligacy, and of sudden wealth at the price of honor, of Credit Mobilier and Star Route scandals, he was not contaminated. He walked through the furnace with no smell of fire upon his garments.* Platt, in contrast to Conkling, cared little for senti- ment, nothing for political issues he was stalwart and he abhorred the clash and clatter of rhetorical arms that gave Conkling joy. Platt could work only under cover. Daylight politics blinded him. But the very moment he entered the Senate, fate led him to a wide asphalt field under a glaring electric light. Publicity followed him *Read these lines on Conkling's career also by Senator Ingalls: "Patriotic, arrayed always for truth, right and justice, his name is Identified with no great measure, and his life seems not so much an actual battle with hostile powers as a splendid scene upon the stage, of which the swords are lath, the armor tinsel, the ramparts and bastions painted screens, the wounds and blood fictitious; on which victories and defeats are feigned with sheet-iron thunder, and tempests of peas and lycopo- dium, and the curtain falling to slow music while the audience applauds and departs/' THE OLD KINGS 39 w "" >^ - >/^rf>xs - '^<'^ l x^'^Mr^^x^^ days as they used liquor and money and motor cars in a later day. The truth of the story is really irrelevant. The effect that the scandal had upon the man's life is important. The adversity that befell Tom Platt at Albany when the scandal came seemed to curdle his soul. He left Albany, withdrew even from the pretense of the senatorial race, and stole into darkness. All his world laughed, scoffed, and reviled. When he went back to his express office, he was supposed to be a dead man with the lime of shame eating him. But while the grass was growing over him, down in his grave Tom Platt was working out. Every wile of his craft, every nerve of his energy, he summoned to help him. By nature he was indefatigable, and in that extremity he was implacable as well. He was ravening for revenge upon those who had heaped the shame upon him. After two busy years Platt had acquired less than half a dozen votes in the legislature, and with these under his arm he tiptoed out of the graveyard of obscurity back to Albany. About the lobby he assumed the meek disguise of a modest peddler doing business in a small way in a very small wa y i n legislative job work. But he handled his votes dexterously, and he held his growing business in the express office as a base of supplies. At the next session of the legislature, Platt came up with a somewhat larger kit, and with an appetite for vengeance still unsated. At the end of that session he was a power. He gained strength not by buying men, but by owning them, by breeding them and growing them. He worked into the Republican organization till it became his garment; then he cut it to fit him, and no man dared dispute his title. All this he did, working under the surface of things, 42 MASKS IN A PAGEANT burrowing, digging. In those days, very likely, he did not care for power for the sake of power. He seemed to care little for issues, only casually for the measures he furthered. He was interested in winning the game only because, by winning it, he believed that he could destroy his old enemies, and with their destruction he felt he would find some way to wipe the smirch from his name. That came to be Platt's mastering passion, almost a monomania. Untoward fate made him a pessimist. So he scorned to hesitate at means. Ends alone were vital. When, in 1889, Platt became absolute master of the Republican party in New York, when he owned con- gressmen by the score, , he was still unsatisfied. In a measure, he had sloughed off his zest for vengeance. But the habit of work, of incessant political activity, the grinding capacity for the thing before him these were the things that moved him then. He had worked so far that Harrison's Cabinet was directly in front of him. But he could not make it. When he found Harrison's refusal was final, Platt drew some sort of cartilaginous hood of stoicism over his face, and went on burrowing like an earthworm, making New York history. When he appeared in national politics again, in 1892, he was leading the campaign of James G. Blaine Blaine, the man he hated, the man whose friends, Platt claimed, had stained Platt's name at Albany. But Harri- son's affront was fresher than Elaine's; so Platt trans- ferred his hatred to Harrison. The only way Platt saw to beat Harrison was with Blaine. The game was the game, the day's work the day's work! Platt sup- ported Jam'es G. Blaine in the convention of 1892 faith- fully and skillfully. Thus it will be seen that although THE OLD^KINGS^ 43 Platt traveled with the heavy accouterment of luxurious vengeance, he was always willing to throw it off and make a truce with an enemy when the end required it. Platt kept an alliance with an enemy as honorably as he kept it with a friend. And a friend, unless he was a wise friend who knew his man, was probably as insecure with- out Platt's express promise, which he never broke, as an enemy. Platt learned well what the politician, ancient or modern, learns in the alphabet of his education: that it does not pay under any circumstances, nor for any reward nor end, to lie. As a class, no men in the world are more absolutely truthful with their inti- mates than the successful American politicians. Platt's success was won by telling the truth, as well as by hard work. Of course Platt was chary of his word. The man who got a promise from Thomas Collier Platt to do a thing that he disliked to do, accomplished one of the most difficult things in American politics, for Platt was "set" in his way. CHAPTER IV THE USE AND ABUSE OF EARTHWORMS PLAIT'S greatness was never in Washington, but in Albany. His work there was permanent for a genera- tion a long time in politics. And now follows the story of that interesting work. After the defeat of Elaine at the Minneapolis con- vention in '92, Platt wormed into his own terrain at Albany. There he had begun a vast system of political tunnels under the institutions of local state government; he went back to finish it. That was Platt's lifework. He was never a national statesman, not even a national politician. He was provincial in his influence; merely a magnified type of hundreds of earthworms the egoistic forces of life boring beneath the roots of local self- government by cities and states, burrowing silently yet with incalculable power, loosening the soil, sagging vain foundations, putting toplofty visions absurdly awry, changing the aspect of the political landscape. To appreciate the bulk of the work Platt did, it is necessary to consider the situation that he found when he began to work. Approximately speaking, that was in 1880. At that time the legislature of New York State was much like the legislature of other states. Sometimes the majority was honest, sometimes it was stupid, and sometimes it was venal. Perlso^is interested in legislation took their chances, and acted accordingly. Then, of 44 THE OLD KINGS 45 **r*S**S~*S\J~***>*r**s**s**^~*s f ^~^s~**r\ - ^^^N/"^ - >^ w ^ - ^^J^^^ > x^^XJ'^^^^^^^ the agency of the State Central Committee. How Platt got that money is another possibly an important story. The candidate for the legislature who believed in the integrity of his party saw no harm in accepting one hun- dred, five hundred, or one thousand or more dollars from the State Central Committee of his party. And be it said to the credit of the candidates, generally this money was spent honestly if always wastefully considering the standard of the times. But certain things in politics are changeless. For instance, when the legislature is elected a legislator is inclined to abide by the decision of the party caucus on questions that require his vote. If he bolts the caucus, a new man often appears from his district the next session. If a corporation, or an interested citi- zen or business concern has a bill pending before the legislature, it is evident that the person to see about that bill is the man who controls the party caucus. That man is he who sends the campaign expenses to the candidates for the legislature. This was eternally true in politics of the last century. It is occasionally true a generation after. From 1882 until 1902, that particular man to see about New York legislation was Thomas Collier Platt. But why should a corporation seeking privilege or a citizen seeking gain see Platt without a proper intro- duction? A good way to get an introduction was through the treasurer of your company, saying that during the last campaign your company contributed so many dollars to the Republican State Central Committee and that the bearer had a "little matter" before the legislature in which he would be grateful for Senator Platt' s assistance. Upon that basis Platt might be interested. The "little matter" received attention, the necessity of an expensive 4 8 MASKS IN A PAGEANT lobby at Albany was avoided, and if the matter was not too palpably culpable, the wishes of the people in the "little matter" carried merely an academic interest. What we call popular government to-day was abrogated in the gallant days of the old plutocracy by a purchase LATEST ORDERS PROM THE EASY BOS.S' From the New York Herald, 1896. of privileges. The process later became a little more surreptitious than it was in the middle nineties. But bootlegging the sale of privilege still is a profitable and, until the bootlegger is caught, a respectable calling. But a generation ago the privilege seeking corporations or those desiring protection from legislative blackmail THE OLD KINGS 49 /^"'Nx^*'^ - '"^M'> l ^^rf'Nx^-'^N/^/Nx^ v ^^-'N^ learned that it cost less to contribute to the State Central Committees of both political organizations than it cost to keep a lobby at a state capital and be forever harassed by the threat of unfriendly legislation. Also, it was more certain of desirable results. More than that, the people approved the system; for stories of individual corruption, of bribes and scandals, and the salacious gossip that in- evitably arose when a numerous lobby was spending money at a capital, did not arise to "hurt the party." Then, in addition to all that, this money, which the lobby- ists once spent at Albany, was spent under the new dis- pensation for torchlight processions and picnics, for ban- ners and fireworks, out among the great plain people bread and circuses. Hence the contentment! Now this would have been a wonderfully effective and valuable machine if its mechanical perfection had ended right there, but it did not. Platt took it further. When he got a taste for governors, he found out how to use them. There was danger that the legislature might some time be Democratic which would be embar- rassing. So the Republican organization, or Platt whichever you will took as much power out of the hands of the legislature as it, or he, dared and put the power into the hands of the executive. The state boss who controlled the governor, of course appointed com- missions controlling the railroads and the insurance com- panies, the canals and state banks, and as many other financial and industrial concerns as possible, which were sources of revenue to the party Central Committee. So that with a Republican administration in power, and a Republican legislature, Platt might go away and leave the legislature for weeks at a time, and have all his 50 MASKS IN A PAGEANT political interests safe in the care of a dozen commissions. If the Republican state ticket should be defeated at the next election, and the upper house of the legislature remain Republican, and the lower house go Democratic, the law which was the political perfection of the simple legislative thumbscrew would hold Platt's Republican commissioners in office until their Democratic successors were qualified and confirmed by Platt's Republican State Senate 1 Thip' the reader will see that when the Demo- crats beatJKfatt at Albany, they had to make a clean sweep of thejkfgislative and executive branches of the state an unlikely circumstance. And Platt had one resource b# even then. The judiciary was recruited from among the faithful. Too often the judges of the Court of Appeals were Platt's men. A cursory glance at the cap- ital structure of the Platt Legislative Trust and Invest- ment Company would indicate that its stock was a fairly safe investment for New York capitalists looking for anything in that line. Platt established something more than a personal machine. He established or grew up with (which it is, heaven knows) an institution which was as much a part of the government of this country in Platt's day, and certainly as respectable, as the judiciary or the legislature or the ballot box, even though it was not in the constitu- tion of any state. That was the party machine of the last quarter of the old century. This machine was an instru- ment of government. It stood between what at any time might develop into a mad mob at the ballot box and the ever-present greed of strong men drunk with the power of money. This machine furnished the necessary shock troops in the first line of defense, unconsciously set up by THE OLD KINGS 51 >^^^NX^*>v/^/^^^^/^x^w'^-''^^%/'^^ a property-minded nation to defend institutionalized capitalism the Hamiltonian plutocracy. Platt's machine, and, indeed, all party machines in all these states and cities and in the nation in Platt's day, had one immovable check an honest executive. The governor had the state patronage. This power often dominated legislatures. Platt depended on gratitude for favors received as the lever that gave him his power. There is also that gratitude which, as John J. Ingalls once said, is the lively expectation of favors to come. The governor held the lever of that power. If he was independent of the machine, or ambitious to establish a machitie of his own, he could carry out whatever honest plans he had and, unfortunately, a few dishonest ones. But, generally speaking, a man who is strong and inde- pendent enough to ignore a machine is intelligent enough to be honest. The humanness of the governor was the only weakness in the party machine, whether it was Platt's machine in New York or the machine of any other party manager in the land. Platt was always a hoodoo In national politics. He was lucky in but one convention in nearly twenty years, that of 1900; he had no eye for currents of opinion. He was elected to the United States Senate in those years of the middle nineties. When Elaine failed in '92, Platt hitched his wagon to Tom Reed's star in '96, and failed. Platt claimed a crumb of comfort in his auto- biography in the fact that he brought the Republican convention of '96 to adopt the gold standard, but his claim even to that crumb was disputed by Hanna, who declared that Platt was only one of a hundred who helped. MASKS IN A PAGEANT And right here is a sprightly story. When Governor Theodore Roosevelt went to Albany, it was with the explicit understanding that he would confer with Senator Platt about all important gubernatorial appointments. Platt had no other hold on the new governor* The most important appointment to-be made by Roosevelt, accord- ing to Platt's mind, was that of insurance commissioner. Platt desired the reappointment of Louis F. Payne, of blessed memory aforementioned. Roosevelt would have none of Payne. Platt blustered and threatened. Roose- velt was firm. The game was this: If the State Senate did not confirm the man whom Governor Roosevelt named as Payne's successor, Payne would hold over for two years. That was Platt's card; for Platt was supposed to control the majority party in the state. On the other hand, if Platt forced a fight with the governor, "He Wept with Delight When Platt (Jure Him a Smile, there might be in- And Otombled with Fear at His Frown." . -. -New York Zvenmg JournoL terCStmg COmpllCa- ROOSEVELT'S SUPPOSED DILEMMA. tions. Roosevelt THE OLD KINGS *+s*v~^~*^>^'NX^l^^-/^^>^v^>^\^^X^rf^ contemplation of the intestinal phenomenon of his party in New York State. It was a matter of absorbing impor- tance to Platt to know that in the tenth ward in Syra- cuse Bill Jones, who was defeated for a place in the county convention by the John Smith gang, had finally got Tom Brown on his side, and would join in with the Robinson fellows to beat Jim Hughes for ward com- mitteeman, and thereby discredit the Smith gang; or that up in Oswego the fish-eating Irish Democrats had offended the bow-and-arrow French by naming Cahill for recorder, and that there was a chance to "trade in" a Republican over in the eastern wards of the town, and thereby elect an alderman at the next city election. Hun- dreds of these situations found abiding-place in Platt's mind. He knew the factional fights, and the causes of them, in every county in New York. The knowledge of these fights was power. For he played faction against faction in handling men. He had sat in the Central Committee rooms at the old Fifth Avenue Hotel, now a ghost on Madison Square in New York, hearing these stories of the factions, day after day, year after year* Life meant nothing else at the close. The guile of politics was his meat and drink. In the United States Senate, where Platt served after 1897, he cut a small figure. He was a negligible man on the floor of the Senate; and generally of small con- sequence in the Republican caucus. He was for the most part the log-roller, willing to vote for this man's meas- ure if the man would help Platt with some patronage scheme. He took no active interest in the large trend of national events. The social life of the Senate bored him, and he was miserable until the tedious business of 58 MASKS IN A PAGEANT a session was done. Then back at his express office, or sitting at his desk in the Fifth Avenue, he could gloat over his power. He clothed his life with few warm per- sonal friendships. His closest allies when death came were new friends. For he was quarrelsome, petulant, and suspicious at the last, and those who were nearest him were always saying they owed him nothing. He held men by fear rather than by fealty. His tactless manner repelled strangers, whom he was prone to dis- trust; and he required at least lip subservience from his adherents. He was not an "easy boss." Often, as the years overcame him, his lieutenants defied him, and when he could not punish them he made the virtue of gener- osity out of his impotence. But his hate for those who defied him was obsequious, formal, implacable, almost salacious 1 He was always a good judge of human weak- ness, but he could not comprehend strength. He under- estimated Roosevelt, Root, and Odell, because he had no sort of conception of that part of a man which is called the moral nature. And yet in money matters Platt was honest deeply, morally impeccable. Many hun- dreds of thousands of dollars, possibly millions, passed through his hands annually for political purposes, and probably not one penny ever stuck to his fingers. He made no money out of politics. His tastes were simple. He never lived extravagantly. He was proud of the implicit trust the great corporations and their agents put in his financial integrity, and he would not have parted with that pride, the foundation of his self-respect, for all the money in Wall Street. His former friends per- haps may say that he betrayed them, but no man who contributed a dollar to buy oil for Platt's machine ever THE OLD KINGS 59 *s^s~**t\s*ji~