The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

by Alfred Henry Lewis

Clothed in what was to me the splendors of a king, being indeed a full new suit bought with Big Kennedy's money, I began rattling about the streets with a delivery wagon the very next day. As well as I could, I tried to tell my thanks for the clothes.

“That's all right,” said Big Kennedy. “I owe you that much for havin' you chucked into a cell.”

While Grocer Fogel might have been a trifle slow in hiring me, once I was engaged he proved amiable enough. I did my work well too, missing few of the customers and losing none of the baskets and sacks. Grocer Fogel was free with his praise and conceded my value. Still, since he instantly built a platform in the street on the strength of my being employed, and so violated a new and further ordinance upon which he for long had had an eye, I have sometimes thought that in forming his opinion of my worth he included this misdemeanor in his calculations. However, I worked with my worthy German four years; laying down the reins of that delivery wagon of my own will at the age of nineteen.

Nor was I without a profit in this trade of delivering potatoes and cabbages and kindred grocery forage. It broadened the frontiers of my acquaintance, and made known to me many of a solvent middle class, and of rather a higher respectability than I might otherwise have met. It served to clean up my manners, if nothing more, and before I was done, that acquaintance became with me an asset of politics.

While I drove wagon for Grocer Fogel, my work of the day was over with six o'clock. I had nothing to do with the care of the horses; I threw the reins to a stable hand when at evening I went to the barn, and left for my home without pausing to see the animals out of the straps or their noses into the corn. Now, had I been formed with a genius for it, I might have put in a deal of time at study. But nothing could have been more distant from my taste or habit; neither then nor later did I engage myself in any traffic with books, and throughout my life never opened a half-dozen.

Still, considering those plans I had laid down for myself, and that future of politics to which my ambition began to consider, I cannot say I threw away my leisure. If my nose were not between the pages of a book, my hands were within a pair of boxing gloves, and I, engaged against this or that opponent, was leading or guarding, hitting or stopping, rushing or getting away, and fitting to an utmost hand and foot and eye and muscle for the task of beating a foeman black and blue should the accidents or duties of life place one before me.

And I prospered with my boxing. I think I owned much native stomach for the business, since in my sullen fashion I was as near the touch of true happiness when in the midst of a mill as ever I hope to stand. My heart, and with that word I mean courage, was of fighting sort. While I was exceedingly cautious, my caution was based on courage. Men of this stamp stay until the last and either conquer or fall. There be ones who have courage, but their construction is the other way about. Their courage is based on caution; such if hard bested run away. Should you seek the man who will stand to the work of battle to the dour end, pick him whose caution, coming first in the procession of his nature, is followed by his courage, rather than that one whose caution follows his courage to tap it on the shoulder, preach to it of peril, and counsel flight.

You are not to assume that I went about these boxing gymnastics because of any savageries or blood-hunger dominant in my breast, or was moved solely of that instinct by which the game-cock fights. I went to my fist-studies as the result of thought and calculation. In my slow way I had noted how those henchmen of the inner circle who surrounded Big Kennedy—those who were near to him, and upon whom he most relied, were wholly valued by him for the two matters of force of fist and that fidelity which asks no question. Even a thicker intellect than mine would have seen that to succeed as I proposed, I must be the gladiator. Wherefore, I boxed and wrestled and perfected my muscles; also as corollary I avoided drink and tobacco as I would two poisons.

And Big Kennedy, who had a little of his eye on me most of the time, was so good as to approve. He applauded my refusal of alcohol and tobacco. And he indorsed my determination to be a boxer.

“A man who can take care of himself with his hands,” said he, “an' who never lets whisky fool him or steal his head, can go far in this game of politics. An' it's a pretty good game at that, is politics, and can be brought to pay like a bank.”