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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
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