Chapter VII: The First Mayor of Greater New York

Edgar A. Whitney, examined by Chairman Lexow: I was in the
gaming-house when the door opened, and Mr. Glennon, the police
wardman, gave the word and said, “Is Mr. Pease in?” I said, “No, sir;
I am taking care of the game while he is at his supper.” He said,
“Come to one side:” he said, “That captain wants this game closed up
until after election time; that if the Tammany Hall ticket is
elected,” he says, “we will protect you for anything from a poker game
to a whore-house.”--Report of Lexow Commission, vol. ii., p. 1603.

The above extract from the evidence taken before the Lexow Committee at the end of 1894, immediately after the election which overturned Tammany rule in New York City, condenses into one coarse but expressive sentence the moral issue usually raised by elections in New York. Whether the latest victory of Tammany will have the same result remains to be seen.

The election of Mr. Van Wyck, the Tammany candidate, as the first Mayor of Greater New York, which has taken place as these pages were passing through the press, is a curious and suggestive comment upon “Satan’s Invisible World Displayed.”

“Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone!” has been the reflection of many a reformer on hearing of the immense majority by which the second city in the world elected to place itself under the governance of the elect of Tammany Hall. But the worst of such an attitude is that Ephraim does not leave other people alone, for in his worship of the false gods he brings down disasters upon other heads than his own. The welfare and good government of the first city in America can never be a matter of indifference to the rest of the world.

Tammany Hall seated its candidate by a majority of votes sufficiently decisive. But although Mr. Van Wyck was 85,000 votes ahead of his nearest competitor, he did not poll a majority of the citizens. If the principle of a second ballot which is established on the Continent of Europe had been the law in New York, the issue would have had to be fought out again in a single-handed fight between Mr. Van Wyck and Mr. Seth Low. In default of such a provision, all that can be said is that at the first election of Greater New York Tammany polled 235,000 and the three anti-Tammany candidates 272,000 votes, making a majority against Tammany of 37,000.

If Tammany be as black as it is painted, the worst thing about the election is not the return of Mr. Van Wyck, but the divisions of his opponents. That Tammany should be beloved of her own progeny is nothing. What is serious is that those children of light who see the evil of Tammany rule should treat it as a matter of trivial importance compared with the passion and prejudice of personalities and parties. If good men do not combine when bad men conspire, the inference is very obvious. Either the conspiracy of the bad men is not very bad, or the good men hardly deserve their name.

The familiar saying of Burke that he refused to draw an indictment against a whole nation may be applied to cities as well as to nations. What is clear enough is that Tammany in the past has discredited democracy. It has done so twice in the most conspicuous and unmistakable fashion.

Under Tweed it became a synonym for Thieving. Under Croker’s government the Lexow Report proved it became an organised system of Blackmail.

What is it to be under Mr. Van Wyck?

That is the question which it is for Tammany to decide.

Mr. Croker professed admirable sentiments as to his resolution to make New York the ideal city of the world. Nothing could have been worthy of the man to whom the citizens have entrusted their destiny. We should, however, have had more right to face the future with confidence had Mr. Croker’s contemplation of the past--and such a past--not been quite so complacent.

Nevertheless it is a good rule that which Cardinal Manning laid down for dealing with those who protest that they have been cruelly misjudged by their contemporaries.

“When a man tells me that he is an honest man,” said the great Cardinal, “I never enter into a controversy with him as to the past. The past is past. And although I may have in my hand conclusive proofs of his guilt, I never refer to the subject. I always say, ‘My friend, you say that you are an honest man. I am delighted to hear it. We will not discuss the past. We might be unable to agree on that subject. But the future is before us. Act as an honest man from henceforth, and I shall treat you as an honest man.’”

The Cardinal’s rule may be invoked in favour of extending the same act of oblivion to Tammany and its Chief.

The account of past misrule placed on record in the Report of the Lexow Committee cannot be effaced from the page of history.

It is a useful and timely service to Tammany itself to popularise the findings of that Committee, if only to remind the men, who are now summoned to make New York the ideal city of the world, of the hole from which they were digged. A vivid remembrance of the horrible pit and the miry clay has ever been regarded as salutary for the pilgrim to the Celestial City.

Nothing is more likely to help Mr. Croker and his men to try to obey the Apostolic maxim to forget the things that are behind in order to press forward to those which are before, than the knowledge that every one can give chapter and verse in support of their belief that New York under Tammany rule in the past really deserved the title of “Satan’s Invisible World.”

On that point there is no longer any room for difference of opinion. To question it is to justify disbelief in the honesty of the sceptic or the sincerity of his professions as a Reformer. But we may well be content to let the dead past bury its dead if, rising upon the wreck and ruin of these evil days, Tammany should now attain to nobler things.

There is at least one great historical precedent justifying a hope that this may be so.

When Madcap Hal succeeded to the English throne, there was the same jubilant exultation among Falstaff, Bardolph and all the roystering crew when Pistol rushed in helter-skelter, crying:--

And tidings do I bring, and lucky joys,
And golden times, and happy news of price.

But the story of their disappointment is one of the most familiar and dramatic scenes in the history of the English-speaking race. The question now is whether Mr. Croker will dare to address his old companions of misrule in the words of Henry the Fifth:--

Presume not that I am the thing I was:
For Heaven doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.

If so we may hope that it may be in New York even as it was in olden time in England, and that it may be said of the era that opened when Tammany elected the first Mayor of Greater New York by 85,000 majority:--

Yea, at that very moment,
Consideration like an angel came,
And whipp’d the offending Adam out of him.

* * * * *

Never came reformation in a flood,
With such a heady current scouring faults;
Nor never Hydra-headed wilfulness
So soon did lose his seat, and all at once,
As in this King.

THE END.