Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the New World

‘How do they manage that?’

‘They have a political machine that would take your breath away. They started out by mobilizing the Irish vote — most of the Tammany leaders are Irish — but as there were successive waves of new immigrants — German Jews, Italians, Central Europeans, Russian Jews — they began working with them, too. You have to put yourself in the shoes of those immigrants, Inspector Blackstone. .’

‘Call me Sam.’

‘And you call me Alex. You have to put yourself in their shoes. They’ve left their homelands behind them, and they’re in a new country where they don’t even speak the language. America is so very different, and they simply don’t understand how things work. So they go to their ward leader, who’s a Tammany man.’

‘And what does he do?’

‘He makes things work for them. If they need a pedlar’s licence, he gets them one. If they want to apply for citizenship, he goes through the forms with them. If they want a job, he usually finds them one. If they’re behind on their rent, he pays it. When they can’t afford fuel in winter, he sees to it that some is delivered to them. And all he asks in return is that they vote on a straight Democratic ticket.’

‘Which means that the people from Tammany Hall get elected?’ Blackstone guessed.

‘No, some of them do stand for public office, but more often than not, they don’t want to be elected themselves.’

‘Then what do they want?’

‘They want to be the people who choose the people who are elected.’

‘People who will forever be in their debt,’ Blackstone said.

‘Now you’re catching on, Sam,’ Meade said. ‘Tammany controls the people who have their hands on the purse strings of New York City, and it uses that fact to its own advantage. And both because Tammany Hall is corrupt, and because its web stretches everywhere, every public body in the city is corrupt, too.’

‘Including the police,’ Blackstone said, starting to see where Meade was going.

Meade nodded. ‘Six years back, a special committee headed by State Senator Lexow looked into municipal corruption. The report it produced was 10,500 pages long, and 9,500 of those pages were concerned with corruption in the police department. The police commissioner admitted to the committee that eighty-five per cent of the men joining the police were accepted on the recommendation of Tammany Hall, and in the previous five years, he’d only promoted two men based on merit alone.’

Blackstone whistled softly. ‘That’s bad,’ he said.

‘It gets worse,’ Meade told him. ‘What the commissioner didn’t admit — though everybody knew — was that Tammany had to be bribed to make those recommendations. It would cost a man $300 to be accepted as a patrolman. If he wanted to be promoted to sergeant, that would cost him $2,500. A captaincy was anything between $10,000 and $15,000, even though captains only earned $2,750 a year, and if you wanted to be an inspector, that could be anything up to $20,000. And there were always plenty of men willing to pay those bribes — because they knew just how much they could make through bribery and extortion once they were in their new positions.’

‘But, surely, once the report was published, the whole rotten system was cleaned up, wasn’t it?’ Blackstone asked.

‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’ Meade said. ‘It started promisingly enough. The mayor, who, for once, wasn’t a Tammany nominee, sacked the four commissioners and brought in new ones, including Teddy Roosevelt.’ Meade paused, as if expecting Blackstone to say something, and when the Englishman remained silent, he continued, almost incredulously, ‘You haven’t heard of Teddy Roosevelt?’

‘Can’t say I have,’ Blackstone admitted.

‘He’s a famous man in this country,’ Meade said. ‘Teddy likes to think of himself as a cowboy, even though he’s a native New Yorker. And I guess you could say he’s done just about everything — though none of it for very long. He worked for the Civil Service Commission, he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy — a position he used to start a war with Spain over Cuba-’

‘On his own?’ Blackstone interrupted.

Meade grinned. ‘No, he had some help from the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers, but a lot of it was down to him. When war was declared, he raised his own regiment to fight in it, and after the war, when he was discharged from the Army, he became governor of New York State. Now he’s President McKinley’s running mate in the November election, which means — God help us — that he’s only a bullet away from being president himself.’ Meade paused. ‘That last bit’s a joke.’

‘But not a very funny one,’ Blackstone said.

Meade shook his head. ‘Maybe you have to be American to understand it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the Mayor brought him in to sweep the stable clean, and he tackled that job like he’s tackled most of the others he’s been given — with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and only the occasional pause for effective thought and planning. Do you know that while the other three commissioners walked down Mulberry Street to their new jobs, Teddy ran ?’

‘I see,’ Blackstone said.

‘He did do some good things,’ Meade admitted. ‘He fired some of the worst policemen. He insisted on promotion based on merit — and that worked for a while. But he acted as if he was running a one-man show, and the other commissioners grew to hate him. And he enforced old laws that banned soda fountains, florists, delicatessens, boot blacks and ice dealers from working on a Sunday — so pretty soon the public hated him, too. He left the job less than two years after he’d been sworn in.’

‘And nothing much had changed,’ Blackstone guessed.

‘And nothing much had changed,’ Meade agreed. ‘As a result of the Lexow Report, seventy policemen, including two former commissioners, four inspectors and twenty-four captains, were charged with criminal offences. And despite the fact that they were appearing before Tammany-appointed judges, some of them were actually convicted . But then most of those convictions were reversed by other Tammany judges in the higher courts. So not only did the guilty men get off free and clear, but some of them were even given their old jobs back.’

‘I see,’ Blackstone said again, sounding more troubled this time.

‘You’re wondering how I ever got to be a sergeant, aren’t you, Sam?’ Meade asked. ‘You’re wondering if I’m up to my elbows in filth and corruption like almost everybody else.’

‘It had crossed my mind,’ Blackstone admitted.

‘I used influence,’ Meade said. ‘Not money, but influence.’

‘I see,’ Blackstone said for a third time.

‘No, you don’t,’ Meade contradicted him. ‘My father’s a state senator, but he’s also a lawyer — a very good one, and a very rich one — and when I was studying at Harvard, it was always assumed I’d join the family firm. I assumed it myself — and then I met Patrick O’Brien.’

‘The dead inspector,’ Blackstone said.

‘The dead inspector,’ Meade confirmed. ‘He was a captain then, and he addressed a debating club I belonged to. What he said was that New York City, and the police department in particular, was a cesspit, and was likely to stay a cesspit as long as people like us simply walked past it holding our noses. And I knew immediately that he was right, and that it was up to people like me — people from the patrician class, if you like — to do something about it. So I used my father’s influence to join the police — but only so I could do good.’

‘Good afternoon, Alexander,’ said a female voice.