The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

by Alfred Henry Lewis

And I had a plan. I knew what should be the fate of the fallen. I had met defeat; also, personally, I had been the target of every flinging slander which the enemy might invent. It was a time when men would fear my friendship as much as on another day they had feared my power. I was an Ishmael of politics. The timid and the time-serving would shrink away from me.

There might, however, be found one who possessed the courage and the gratitude, someone whom I had made and who remembered it, to take my orders. I decided to search for such a man. Likewise (and this was my plan) I resolved—for I knew better than most folk how the town would be in my hands again—to make that one mayor when a time should serve.

“Come with me,” said I. “You shall have a berth; and I've nothing now to do but seek for it.”

There was a somber comicality to the situation which came close to making me laugh—I, the late dictator, abroad begging a five-hundred-dollar place!

Twenty men I went to; and if I had been a leper I could not have filled them with a broader terror. One and all they would do nothing. These fools thought my downfall permanent; they owed everything to me, but forgot it on my day of loss. They were of the flock of that Frenchman who was grateful only for favors to come. Tarred with the Tammany stick as much as was I, myself, each had turned white in a night, and must mimic mugwumpery, when now the machine was overborne. Many were those whom I marked for slaughter that day; and I may tell you that in a later hour, one and all, I knocked them on the head.

Now in the finish of it, I discovered one of a gallant fidelity, and who was brave above mugwump threat. He was a judge; and, withal, a man indomitably honest. But as it is with many bred of the machine, his instinct was blindly military. Like Old Mike, he regarded politics as another name for war. To the last, he would execute my orders without demur.

With this judge, I left my Sicilian to dust tables and chairs for forty dollars a month. It was the wealth of Dives to the poor broken sailorman, and he thanked me with tears on his face. In a secret, lock-fast compartment of my memory I put away the name of that judge. He should be made first in the town for that one day's work.

My late defeat meant, so far as my private matters were involved, nothing more serious than a jolt to my self-esteem. Nor hardly that, since I did not blame myself for the loss of the election. It was the fortune of battle; and because I had seen it on its way, that shaft of regret to pierce me was not sharpened of surprise.

My fortunes were rolling fat with at least three millions of dollars, for I had not held the town a decade to neglect my own good. If it had been Big Kennedy, now, he would have owned fourfold as much. But I was lavish of habit; besides being no such soul of business thrift as was my old captain. Three millions should carry me to the end of the journey, however, even though I took no more; there would arise no money-worry to bark at me. The loss of the town might thin the flanks of my sub-leaders of Tammany, but the famine could not touch me.

While young Van Flange had been the reason of a deal that was unhappy in my destinies, I had never met the boy. Now I was to see him. Morton sent him to me on an errand of business; he found me in my own house just as dinner was done. I was amiably struck with the look of him. He was tall and broad of shoulder, for he had been an athlete in his college and tugged at an oar in the boat.