When Mr. Van Wyck was elected Mayor, Charles F. Murphy was appointed a Dock Commissioner. Report had it that when he went into the Dock Board Mr. Murphy “was worth” perhaps $400,000, accumulated in the saloon business and politics in eighteen years. He had long been known as “Silent Charlie.” Within a few years after his appointment as Dock Commissioner, his fortune, it was said, reached at least $1,000,000. When he became Dock Commissioner, Mr. Murphy nominally assigned his four saloons to a brother and three old friends.
Before leaving the office of Dock Commissioner, John J. Murphy (Charles F. Murphy’s brother), James E. Gaffney and Richard J. Crouch (one of Charles F. Murphy’s political district lieutenants) had incorporated the New York Contracting and Trucking Company. Gaffney was an Alderman. These three men were credited with holding only five shares each of the hundred shares of the company; just who held the remaining eighty-five shares has never been definitely explained. When quizzed later by a legislative committee, Charles F. Murphy denied that he had any ownership or financial interest in the New York Contracting and Trucking Company, and no records could be found proving that he did have any interest.
One of the transactions of this company was as follows: In July, 1901, the company leased a dock at West Ninety-sixth Street, and it leased another dock at East Seventy-ninth Street, paying the city a total rent of $4,800 a year for the two properties. It would appear from a report subsequently made by Commissioner of Accounts William Hepburn Russell to Mayor Low that the average profit from the two dock properties was $200 a day, making a rate of 5,000 per cent. on the investment. This particular transaction of the New York Contracting and Trucking Company, lucrative as it was, nevertheless was modest compared to the company’s subsequent transactions which we shall duly describe.
Certainly by the year 1902, Mr. Murphy showed the most visible evidences of some sizable degree of wealth; he acquired a suburban estate at Good Ground, Long Island, owning, too, in time, among other possessions denoting wealth, a string of automobiles.
This millionaire leader of Tammany Hall was by no means an unpleasant man to meet. He had a certain diffidence and he was not a good talker; his old habit of attentively listening was too strongly fixed. Physically strong, his deep voice and direct, concise manner when he did speak were impressive and always concentrated on the business at hand. He had none of the ordinary vices; he drank liquor occasionally, it was true, but his drinks were sparse and the times far separated. In smoking he did not indulge, neither did he swear, nor gamble at cards, although he was not a stranger to stock market speculations. A communicant of the Epiphany Roman Catholic Church, he attended mass every Sunday, and gave liberal donations to the church. Unlike Mr. Croker, Mr. Murphy never cared to make the Democratic Club his headquarters; every night, when a district leader, Mr. Murphy could be found, from 7:30 to 10 o’clock, leaning against a lamp post at the northwest corner of Twentieth Street and Second Avenue. Everybody in the district knew that he would be there, accessible to anybody who wanted to talk to him. Such were the career and characteristics of the new leader of Tammany Hall—a dictator in fact, yet preserving all of the tokens of democratic accessibility.
Mayor Low’s administration failed to make an impression calculated to influence a majority of voters to reelect him. Quite true, most of his appointees to head the various departments were men of character, administrative capacity and sincerity of purpose—radically different types, indeed, from the Tammany district leaders who were usually appointed to those offices under Tammany administrations.
But in appointing Colonel John N. Partridge as commissioner of police, Mayor Low chose a weak and inefficient man. The demoralized condition of the police administration under Tammany had long been the special target of the reformers’ attacks, and people had expected a wholesome overhauling of that department under Mayor Low. Colonel Partridge’s administration, however, was so disappointing that the City Club was moved to demand his resignation. It criticized Commissioner Partridge for taking no adequate measures to break up the alliance between the police and crime, or to get a proper understanding of the underlying conditions in the police department, and further criticized him for surrounding himself at headquarters with notoriously corrupt officers, one of whom, in fact, was made his principal uniformed adviser.
The City Club’s criticism did not charge that Partridge was personally corrupt, but that he was weak and gullible and was ignorant of real conditions. “Commissioner Partridge and his deputies adopted the idea of ruling the police force according to military ideas. The word of a superior officer was accepted absolutely as against that of a subordinate. In a force where the superior officers had, for the most part, secured their promotions by bribery; where the superior officers were the beneficiaries of blackmailing; and where the honest men, as a rule, remained subordinates—the attempt to instil a spirit of respect among the men for their superiors excited only ridicule, and added to the prevalent demoralization.…”[1]
True as such a general statement was, it has been equally true, as experience has shown, that various other reform police commissioners have vainly tried “to break the system”; temporary figures, commissioners come and go, but “The System” has remained more or less intact. Even General Francis V. Greene, appointed by Mayor Low January 1, 1903, to succeed Colonel Partridge (who resigned the day before the trustees of the City Club’s demand for his resignation was handed in), found this to be a fact, notwithstanding his earnest, conscientious efforts to correct conditions in the police department.
The vote of the body of the police force themselves showed, in 1902, their complete dissatisfaction with conditions. At least 75 per cent. of the police force voted for Low in 1901; a year later fully 90 per cent. voted for Bird S. Coler, Tammany’s candidate for Governor.[2]