So far as that fall’s election went, the Evening Post’s labors were in vain. Because 30,000 registered Republicans, jealous of the reform Democrats, stayed from the polls, Mayor Grant beat the anti-Tammany nominee, Francis M. Scott, by a vote of 116,000 to 94,000. Not only that, but two years later, in 1892, Thomas F. Gilroy, called “a business candidate,” was easily elected to succeed Grant. Before his term was well advanced it was generally admitted that Tammany had become so well entrenched behind the offices that it would be useless to elect a reform Mayor without legislation which would enable him to dismiss nearly all the city officials.
Nevertheless, the spade-work of Mr. Godkin had been so well done that the idea of a “New Tammany” was now laughed at, and the organization was regarded with thorough suspicion by decent elements. His campaign in 1890 brought him letters from Eastman Johnson, Bishop Potter, S. G. Ward, Charles Loring Brace, Gen. Wm. F. Smith, and other public-spirited men. The city began to awake. Other newspapers, notably the World early in 1894, imitated the Post by publishing Tammany biographies which stung the grafters to the quick. On April 4, 1892, the City Club was organized with a Board of Trustees which included men deeply interested in the reformation of the city government, the most prominent being James C. Carter, R. Fulton Cutting, W. Bayard Cutting, August Belmont, and William J. Schieffelin. With the special encouragement of the City Club, more than two-score local Good Government Clubs were shortly founded (Carl Schurz helped establish one among the German-Americans) and although Dana of the Sun contemptuously nicknamed them “Goo-Goos,” they exerted an important educational influence. There was ample basis for suspicion of the city rulers under both Grant and Gilroy. Mayor Grant had sworn in 1888 that two years earlier Croker was “very poor indeed.” But by the end of 1893 he had invested $250,000 in a stock-farm, $103,000 in race-horses, $80,000 in a Fifth Avenue mansion, and drove about in carriages costing $1,700. The Post further stated that Croker paid $12,000 a year to a jockey, and $5,000 to the manager of his stock farm, and that on a trip to the Pacific Coast early in 1894 he made the journey in a private car costing $50 a day. Where did he get the money? Godkin harped continually upon the outrageous appointments made under both Mayors. Thus when in December, 1890, Patrick Divver was appointed a police justice at $8,000 a year, the Post reprinted his biography:
PATRICK DIVVER.—Commonly called “Paddy,” is the Tammany leader in the Second Assembly District. He is the keeper of a sailors’ boarding house, and is the proprietor, or has interests, in several liquor saloons. He is an ex-member of the Board of Aldermen, a race-track frequenter, and the friend and confidant of gamblers. He is on terms of intimacy with “Johnny” Matthews and “Jake” Shipsey, two members of the sporting and gambling fraternity, whose particular methods of gaining a livelihood are unknown to the frequenters of Paddy Divver’s and other rumshops on Park Row, where they are generally to be found.
Within three years, said the Post in 1894, Divver was reputed to be worth $200,000. Among the many other unfit appointments were those of “Barney” Martin, “Joe” Koch, and “Tom” Graham to the police courts, and of “Mike” Daly, John J. Scannell, and “Andy” White to important municipal offices. In 1892–93 the Evening Post, Times, and World repeatedly challenged the methods of conducting the public business in the Building Department, Dock Department, and Street Cleaning Bureau, and in the latter part of 1893 the City Club began collecting evidence of corruption from top to bottom in the Police Department. This corruption, indeed, was almost a matter of common knowledge, for repeated charges were made against police captains, and the bipartisan Police Commission of four shielded the men in the most audacious way. The insurrection of virtue, as Theodore Roosevelt called it, reached a head during 1892–1893 in the charges of Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, minister of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, that the police system was battening upon an extensive blackmail system. The response was immediate; business men and others came to Dr. Parkhurst with evidence that was incontestable; the City Club began demanding an investigation by the Legislature; and Harper’s Weekly, which had defended Tammany a few years earlier, published early in January, 1894, a cartoon which recalled Nast in the Tweed days. Entitled “Tammany’s Tax on Crime,” it showed a line of saloon-keepers, criminals and prostitutes passing before a cashier’s desk in which stood the dummy figure of a policeman, with Boss Croker crouching behind it and stretching forth his hand for the “contributions.” From the public uproar grew the Lexow Inquiry.
For Mr. Clarence Lexow, the Senator who offered at Albany the resolution for an investigating committee and became its chairman, the Evening Post had no respect. It called him “a young country lawyer of very moderate abilities residing at Nyack, N. Y., and dabbling more or less in politics under the guidance of the rather mediocre understanding of Mr. T. C. Platt,” and it believed his interest in the inquiry was as lukewarm as Platt’s own. But it earnestly supported the movement for the inquiry, was disappointed when the committee failed to secure Choate for counsel, and, when Gov. Flower vetoed the appropriation of $25,000 for its work on the ground that it was a partisan body, said that it knew no precedent for such a gross abuse of the executive power save Gov. Hill’s veto of the appropriation for the similar Fassett Committee. The State Chamber of Commerce came to the rescue by advancing $17,500 to cover the committee’s expenses, and John W. Goff, assisted by Frank Moss and Wm. Travers Jerome, proved an admirable counsel.
By the middle of June, 1894, the inquiry had driven one of the four Police Commissioners, John McClave, to resignation and flight. It had been disclosed that the police force had a well-determined tariff of charges for its protection of various criminal trades and practices within the city. Each disorderly house was expected to pay an “initiation fee” of $500 to every new police captain placed in charge of the district, and $50 a month thereafter, besides a contribution to the captain’s “Christmas present.” One keeper of such a house testified that he had been charged $750 within three months. Concert saloons, without a city license, had to pay $50 a month to the captain, while the regular tariff for saloons employing waitresses, and operating without a license, ran from $15 to $25 a month. It is not surprising that the fact was elicited that one captain had paid $15,000 for appointment to his post. For the privilege of selling on Sunday all saloons regularly paid the ward men—the name then given a petty officer—$5. Whenever the inspector of the excise department found a saloon without a city license, he got $5 for overlooking the fact. Tickets to Tammany “chowder parties,” usually distributed among disorderly houses and saloons in blocks of five, were $5 each, and it was gross bad manners to send any back. The push-cart men were expected to pay $3 a week from their pitiful earnings, and the ward-men had miscellaneous sources of tribute which made an appointment to the force worth $300.
Every steamship line landing cargoes at the port had to pay heavy blackmail charges at every stage of its business, and to every official—police, dock, and custom-house—connected with Tammany. The agent of the French Line displayed pitiable embarrassment when called upon to explain an item of $500 “payés a qui le droit.” All merchants who wished to use the sidewalks to display or handle goods paid $25 to $50 annually, it being customary to put this in an envelope and leave it somewhere to be called for. Men who rented their premises for polling booths had to divide the money with the police. But much worse than such grafting as this was the evidence that the police, instead of repressing pure criminality, were actually encouraging it as a source of revenue. Thus green-goods swindlers were allowed to do business on payment of $50 a month to the police captain, policy-gamblers had the same privilege, and receivers of stolen goods shared with the detectives. As a climax, to quote the Post, “Mr. Goff showed us a police justice sitting on the bench, and not merely shielding a regular practitioner of abortion from punishment, but conniving with him in his guilt.”
The news pages, following the inquiry closely, showed how the early bravado of the police force changed within a few weeks to panic:
That which has altered the feelings of the police [wrote a reporter June 16] is the fact that the committee has entered recesses of the corruption system which were believed to be unapproachable. So long as the despised lowest class of criminals was the one drawn upon for witnesses, there was felt little alarm. It was reasoned that the records of the persons sworn would crush the force of their testimony.... But when the “better class” women and the professional criminal, like George Appo, began to squeal, danger was foreseen. Women in the “tenderloin” and other more pretentious districts have been treated fairly from a police standpoint. Where they have paid for protection they got it, or, according to the blackmailers, are supposed to have received it. If there was any abuse of the police power it was not authorized, and must have been the indiscretion of the wardman or the individual patrolman. It was meant that the “ladies,” as they are uniformly called, should be justly and squarely dealt with. Anyway, it is a shock to the guilty to learn that women like “Eva Bell,” who has been protected for years in Thirty-sixth Street, should give the game away and peach as she did on Friday.
Worse than the fickleness of the women is the weakening of the criminal and the gambler to the men who watch such lines of defense give way. Appo, it is said, however, has been ill-treated, has a grievance, and these are taken in account as reasons for his having “thrown down” his fellows.
Mr. Godkin insisted that the source of the corruption was in the higher ranks of the Tammany hierarchy, and in the impracticable administration of the police by a bipartisan board of four instead of a single Commissioner. The reporters declared that the best elements of the force also held its heads to blame: