The Matter With New York

I

A COACH and six, splashing through the narrow, muddy streets of colonial New York. Within the coach a British governor. Beside him, the city’s honored guest, Captain William Tew, pirate.

He was a resplendent rascal, this Tew. A band of cloth of silver encircled his blue cap. His blue jacket with big pearl buttons had a border of gold lace. He wore white knee trousers, Oriental in cut, and elaborately embroidered stockings. Round his neck went a long gold chain, round his waist a curiously knitted girdle. From the girdle hung a dagger, its hilt one blaze of jewels.

In those days (Tew arrived in 1694) the coming of a pirate ship set all New York rejoicing. The pirate would lavish presents on the governor, his crew would treat in the taverns, and loot, principally from the far East, would be on sale at infinitesimal prices. On one occasion there were nine pirate ships in New York harbor, and it might be interesting to discover how many heirlooms still treasured by old New York families were purchased then.

Meanwhile, consider the advantage to business. Every pirate ship had to be restocked with food, restocked with rum, restocked with ammunition.

There was also a thriving export trade in ‘goods suitable for pirates’ — rum especially. Leading merchants would buy rum at two shillings a gallon, ship it to Madagascar, and there sell it to the pirates at fifty shillings a gallon. One voyage might yield a profit of £30,000.

Tew dined at the governor’s table. Another pirate, Coates, loaded the governor with presents, gave him his ship to be sold for £8000, and thought nothing of buying favor at a cost, so he said, of £1800 in cash. Sing hey for the good old times when everything went right, and for the sturdy virtues of our ancestors!

II

Probably not one present-day New Yorker in ten thousand ever heard of Tew, or of Coates, or of the corrupt British governor who tolerated both, and the story is now retold, not for its own sake, but because it so glaringly illustrates a spirit that has found expression, off and on, ever since: Don’t bother too much about rascality in high places if rascality in high places enables us to make a little something and have a good time.

It is not remarkable that the spirit should persist. They tell us that the most important period in our lives is the pre-school age, which settles what sort of people we are to be all the rest of our days. So with cities. Chicago is still a frontier town. Boston still witnesses an occasional recrudescence of theocracy. New York under Tammany is the same New York, essentially, as under the corrupt British governor. Circumstances change. The inner spirit remains.

This same New York detests rascality as such — the pure-and-simple rascality that contributes nothing to business and having a good time. We had a case of that in Tweed.

When he and his Ring swindled New York out of a hundred and sixty million dollars, New Yorkers rose in their wrath. Tweed was Tew over again, but with differences major and minor. The minor difference was that he robbed the city itself. Pretty bad — though cities are abstractions, and the average voter feels hurt only in his civic conscience, such as that is. The major difference was that Tweed contributed nothing to the average voter’s profits or to the average voter’s fun. His luxurious town house, his country place, his yacht, his stable finished in mahogany, his dollar-apiece cigars, his blond concubine, and the safe in which he kept funds for the purchase of legislators were all for Tweed; only he and his four merry men gained by the theft of a hundred and sixty million dollars. Business was not freer to do as it liked. New York was not a jollier place to live in.

Years later, New York in a spasm of virtue managed to detest Richard Croker and his crowd. A ‘lying, perjured, rum-soaked, libidinous lot,’ Dr. Parkhurst called them, denouncing the mayor and ‘ his whole gang of drunken and lecherous subordinates.’ A regular pirate crew they were, bad clear through, their income from levies upon vice alone amounting to anywhere from seven to ten million dollars a year.

So, out went Tammany like Tweed, while the Union League Club voted Dr. Parkhurst into membership, and Life cartooned him as a victorious gladiator with one foot on the dead tiger.

When all this happened, a clever East Side politician observed, ‘These reform movements are like queen hornets; they sting you once and then die.’

Clever, yes; but his epigram failed to explain why they die.

Four years more, and back came Tammany, erstwhile virtuous New York celebrating with snake dances, fireworks, rattlers, tin horns, and the roisterous anthem: —

It had, and all over the country people thought they knew why. ‘To the reformers,’ they said, ‘politics is only a passing interest. Give them one big splendid triumph and they feel privileged to fold their hands and rest. To Tammany, politics is a living. While out of power, Tammany will work day and night to get back in.’ Just so, but still missing the point. The point is that Tammany got back in chiefly because Tammany was wanted back in, for Croker had been a much better approximation of Tew than ever Tweed had been. His gang knew how to treat in the taverns, and, directly or indirectly, a large section of the community profited financially. Tammany gave New Yorkers what New Yorkers wanted — a place to have fun and a place where they could conduct their affairs about as they chose. How good Tammany looked after New Yorkers had lived for four grim years under a régime that even went to the extremity of closing saloons on Sunday!

III

New York is growing up, but burnt adults, like burnt children, can learn a lesson. A few months ago another uprising against Tammany began. We perceived that pirates were still with us. They had some awfully disagreeable traits. They ‘framed’ innocent girls. They sold judgeships. In some ways they were worse than Croker and in some worse than Tweed, but at helping us to make a little something and have fun they were as good, almost, as Tew or Coates. Under Tammany we could buy the right to do as we chose; under a reform administration there was no hope of that; so, we reëlected Tammany. Pirates? Of course! But exceedingly convenient, advantageous pirates to have in town, and not infrequently a boon to business.

Two small but typical instances — the case of a large manufacturer and the case of a little Jewish merchant in East Broadway. The manufacturer dumps ashes on the sidewalk. To dispose of them in any other way would cost him fifteen hundred dollars a year. He supports Tammany, as fifteen hundred a year is what corrupt city government is worth to him. The little Jewish merchant keeps open on Sunday, as do his competitors throughout the neighborhood. It is their big day. Under Tammany they can ‘slip something to the cop’ and ignore the oppressive law. Graft is not paid unwillingly. It is ‘good business.’ Even the indirect payment in higher rents and higher prices — results felt by everyone living in New York — is ‘good business,’ for corrupt city government makes New York a jollier place of residence.

Say to the average New Yorker, ‘Corrupt city government is costing you nine hundred dollars a year,’ and he replies, ‘What do I care? It’s worth it,’ meaning, ‘Under corrupt city government I can have no end of fun here. Let the reformers in and they’ll shut down on nude girls in shows, padlock our thirty-two thousand speak-easies, and make this town a bore.’ To the average New Yorker, more than to the average inhabitant of any other American city, distractions of a powerful order are a necessity.

New Yorkers do not like the usual outsider’s comment, ‘It’s a nice place to visit, but I’d hate to live there,’ yet there is something in it, they feel.

They did not come here because they expected to like the place. They came here to make money. For months after arrival they regretted having come. But then what a change! Conversion! Result purely of finding out that, while mere existence here is dreadful, one can have more fun here than anywhere else on earth. An expatriated New Yorker returns from Paris once in a while and says, ‘Why don’t you come over?’ We answer, ‘What do we want of Paris when we are already in New York?’ Keep New York as it is, and we can endure it, subway and all. Turn reformers loose on New York to squelch its gayety, and we might as well be back in Sac City, Iowa, or the humdrum South.

Sydney Brooks understood us perfectly when he wrote of our attitude toward the idealists who make the bulk of those oppressive laws which a decent administration in New York would enforce and which Tammany does not. Nearly thirty years ago his account of us (and them) appeared in the Fortnightly Review, but see how like paragraphs dashed off yesterday the following excerpts read: —

Pandering to the moral sense is one of the daily necessities (or pastimes) of American political life.

The consequence is that the most impossible laws find their way on to the statute book. . . . We are dealing, remember, with a cosmopolitan, feverish, pleasureloving population, pagan in its tastes, its habits, its opinions; imbued with a mercenary view of politics; and always in more or less open revolt against the laws by which the State Legislature (largely elected and controlled by rural votes and notions) attempts to regulate its behavior. It is a population that takes instinctively to the ideal of: A free-and-easy life in a free-andeasy town.

This is an ideal with which Tammany whole-heartedly sympathizes; and one which, for a price, it undertakes to translate into fact. ... In the result, everybody is contented. The law remains on the statute book, a glowing tribute to morality; it is not enforced, so nobody feels its inconvenience; and Tammany grows rich out of the proceeds.

IV

There you have us, pictured to the life — just as we are, and as perhaps we are always going to be. Reform will come and Reform will go, in regular cycles; for, though dearly hating pirates as such, we dearly love what we can get out of them, and even our hatred is apparently a cooler, calmer thing than it once was. As the Seabury investigation proceeds, we become vexed with Tammany, at times exceedingly vexed, but cherish always a deep distrust of Reform. Should it arrive, it would not last long or please us while it did last. That is the kind of New Yorker most of us are. As between pirates and saints, give us pirates.

There are just two ways of coping with us. One is for Albany and Washington to give us laws we can find ourselves inclined to obey. The other is to make this town a sovereign state. Neither the one way nor the other appears likely to be tried, but we are not on that account unhappy. We live along quite as most Americans do, on the whole tolerably enough satisfied with a régime of tyranny tempered by anarchy.