The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

by Alfred Henry Lewis

That personage in tax peril was never put to fret in obtaining one to make the oath. If he himself lacked hardihood and hesitated at perjury, why then, the town abounded in folk of a daring easy veracity. Of all that was said and written, of that time, in any New York day, full ninety-five per cent, was falsehood or mistake. Among the members of a community, so affluent of error and mendacity, one would not long go seeking a witness who was ready, for shining reasons, to take whatever oath might be demanded. And thus it befell that the affidavits were ever made, and a reduction of eight billions and more, in the assessed valuation of personal property, came annually to be awarded. With a tax levy of, say, two per cent. I leave you to fix the total of those millions saved to ones assessed, and also to consider how far their gratitude might be expected to inure to the yellow welfare of the machine—the machine that makes no gift of either its forbearance or its help!

Speaking in particular of the town, and what opportunities of riches swung open to the machine, one should know at the start how the whole annual expense of the community was roughly one hundred and twenty-five millions. Of these millions twenty went for salaries to officials; forty were devoted to the purchase of supplies asked for by the public needs; while the balance, sixty-five millions, represented contracts for paving and building and similar construction whatnot, which the town was bound to execute in its affairs.

Against those twenty millions of salaries, the machine levied an annual private five per cent. Two-thirds of the million to arise therefrom, found their direct way to district leaders; the other one-third was paid into the general coffer. Also there were county officers, such as judges, clerks of court, a sheriff and his deputies: and these, likewise, were compelled from their incomes to a yearly generosity of not fewer than five per cent.

Of those forty millions which were the measure for supplies, one-fifth under the guise of “commissions” went to the machine; while of the sixty-five millions, which represented the yearly contracts in payments made thereon, the machine came better off with, at the leanest of estimates, full forty per cent, of the whole.

Now I have set forth to you those direct returns which arose from the sure and fixed expenses of the town. Beyond that, and pushing for the furthest ounce of tallow, I inaugurated a novelty. I organized a guaranty company which made what bonds the law demanded from officials; and from men with contracts, and those others who furnished the town's supplies. The annual charge of the company for this act of warranty was two per cent, on the sum guaranteed; and since the aggregate thus carried came to about one hundred millions, the intake from such sources—being for the most part profit in the fingers of the machine—was annually a fair two millions. There were other rills to flow a revenue, and which were related to those money well-springs registered above, but they count too many and too small for mention here, albeit the round returns from them might make a poor man stare.

Of those other bottom-lands of profit which bent a nodding harvest to the sickle of the machine, let me make a rough enumeration. The returns—a bit sordid, these!—from poolrooms, faro banks and disorderly resorts and whereon the monthly charge imposed for each ran all the way from fifty to two thousand dollars, clinked into the yearly till, four millions. The grog shops, whereof at that time there was a staggering host of such in New York City of-the-many-sins! met each a draft of twenty monthly dollars. Then one should count “campaign contributions.” Of great companies who sued for favor there were, at a lowest census, five who sent as tribute from twenty to fifty thousand dollars each. Also there existed of smaller concerns and private persons, full one thousand who yielded over all a no less sum than one million. Next came the police, with appointment charges which began with a patrolman at four hundred dollars, and soared to twenty thousand when the matter was the making of a captain.

Here I shall close my recapitulation of former treasure for the machine; I am driven to warn you, however, that the half has not been told. Still, if you will but let your imagination have its head, remembering how the machine gives nothing away, and fails not to exert its pressures with every chance afforded it, you may supply what other chapters belong with the great history of graft.

When one considers a Tammany profit, one will perforce be driven to the question: What be the expenses of the machine? The common cost of an election should pause in the neighborhood of three hundred thousand dollars. Should peril crowd, and an imported vote be called for by the dangers of the day, the cost might carry vastly higher. No campaign, however, in the very nature of the enterprise and its possibilities of expense, can consume a greater fund than eight hundred thousand. That sum, subtracted from the income of the machine as taken from those sundry sources I've related, will show what in my time remained for distribution among my followers.

And now that brings one abreast the subject of riches to the Boss himself. One of the world's humorists puts into the mouth of a character the query: What does a king get? The answer would be no whit less difficult had he asked: What does a Boss get? One may take it, however, that the latter gets the lion's share. Long ago I said that the wealth of Ophir hung on the hazard of the town's election. You have now some slant as to how far my words should be regarded as hyperbole. Nor must I omit how the machine's delegation in a legislature, or the little flock it sends to nibble on the slopes of Congress, is each in the hand of the Boss to do with as he will, and it may go without a record that the opportunities so provided are neither neglected nor underpriced.

There you have the money story of Tammany in the bowels of the town. Those easy-chair economists who, over their morning coffee and waffles, engage themselves for purity, will at this point give honest rage the rein. Had I no sense of public duty? Was the last spark of any honesty burned out within my bosom? Was nothing left but dead embers to be a conscience to me? The Reverend Bronson—and I had a deep respect for that gentleman—put those questions in his time.