Alfred Lewis - The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York

It should be said in the beginning that these memoirs will not be written by my own hand. I have no skill of pen and ink, and any relation of length would be beyond my genius. The phrasing would fall to be disreputable, and the story itself turn involved and to step on its own toes, and mayhap with the last of it to fall flat on its face, unable to proceed at all. Wherefore, as much for folk who are to read as for my own credit, I shall have one who makes print his trade to write these pages for me.

Nor shall I advance apology in this. If I plan for the construction of a house, I call to my aid architects and artisans in wood and stone and iron. I am not disgraced for that out of my own hands and head I do not throw up the walls and lay on the roof of the edifice. Why, then, when now I am about the paper-telling of my life, should I blush because I am driven to seek the aid of him who makes an inkpot his profession? I am like a lumber-yard or a stone-quarry, and full of the raw material for this work; but I require one drilled of saw and chisel to carry off the business of my housebuilding.

It would be the thing natural, should you who open these leaves put the question of motive and ask why, when now I am retired, and should be cautious with my threescore years, I come forth with confidences which, aside from the mere sorrow of them, are like to prove less for my honor than I might wish. Why is it that I who have removed my loneliness and my millions to scenes of peace at least, may not leave well enough alone? Why should I return with disclosures touching Tammany and the inner history of that organization, when the dullest must apprehend only trouble and pain as the foolish fruits of such garrulity?

To the cheer of ones still on the firing lines of Tammany effort, let me promise to say no more of them than belongs of necessity to the story of my own career. I aim towards the painting of no man’s picture save my own. Also from first to last I will hold before the face of each old friend the shield of an alias and never for a moment in name or feature uncover him to the general eye.

As to why it pleases me to give the public my Tammany evolution, and whether I hope for good or ill therefrom, I am not able to set forth. There is that within my bosom to urge me to this work, that much I know; the thing uncertain being – is it vanity, or is it remorse or a hunger for sympathy to so ride me and force my frankness to top-speed? There comes one thought: however black that robe of reputation which the truth weaves for me, it will seem milk-white when laid side by side with what Mendacity has invented and Malice sworn to as the story of my career.

Before I lift the latch of narration, I would have you pardon me a first defensive word. Conceiving that, in the theory of politics, whatever the practice may discover, there is such a commodity as morals and such a ware as truth, and, remembering how much as the Chief of Tammany Hall I have been condemned by purists and folk voluble for reform as a fashion of City Satan, striving for all that was ebon in local conditions and control, I would remind the reader – hoping his mind to be unbiased and that he will hold fairly the scales for me – that both morals and truth as questions will ever depend for their answer on environment and point of view. The morality of one man is the sin of another, and the truth in this mouth is the serpent lie in that. Having said this much, let me now go forward without more of flourish or time to be eaten up with words.

MY father was a blacksmith, and he and my mother came out of Clonmel, where I myself was born. There were four to our family, for besides my father and mother, I owned a sister named Anne, she being my better in age by a couple of years. Anne is dead now, with all those others I have loved, and under the grass roots; but while she lived – and she did not pass until after I had reached the size and manners of a man – she abode a sort of second mother to me, and the littlest of my interests was her chief concern.

That Anne was thus tenderly about my destinies, worked doubtless a deal of fortunate good to me. By nature, while nothing vicious, I was as lawless as a savage; and being resentful of boundaries and as set for liberty as water down hill, I needed her influence to hold me in some quiet order. That I have the least of letters is due wholly to Anne, for school stood to me, child and boy, as hateful as a rainy day, and it was only by her going with me to sit by my side and show me my blurred way across the page that I would mind my book at all.

It was upon a day rearward more than fifty years when my father, gathering together our slight belongings, took us aboard ship for America. We were six weeks between Queenstown and New York; the ship my father chose used sails, and there arose unfriendly seas and winds to baffle us and set us back. For myself, I hold no clear memory of that voyage, since I was but seven at the time. Nor could I have been called good company; I wept every foot of the way, being sick from shore to shore, having no more stomach to put to sea with then than I have now.

It was eight of the clock on a certain July night that my father, having about him my mother and Anne and myself, came ashore at Castle Garden. It being dark, and none to meet us nor place for us to seek, we slept that night, with our coats to be a bed to us, on the Castle Garden flags. If there were hardship to lurk in thus making a couch of the stone floors, I missed the notice of it; I was as sound asleep as a tree at midnight when we came out of the ship and for eight hours thereafter, never once opening my eyes to that new world till the sun was up.

Indeed, one may call it in all candor a new world! The more since, by the grace of accident, that first day fell upon the fourth of the month, and it was the near, persistent roar of cannon all about us, beginning with the break of day, to frighten away our sleep. My father and mother were as simple as was I, myself, on questions of Western story, and the fact of the Fourth of July told no news to them. Guns boomed; flags flaunted; bands of music brayed; gay troops went marching hither and yon; crackers sputtered and snapped; orators with iron throats swept down on spellbound crowds in gales of red-faced eloquence; flaming rockets when the sun went down streaked the night with fire! To these manifestations my father and the balance of us gave admiring ear and eye; although we were a trifle awed by the vehemence of an existence in which we planned to have our part, for we took what we heard and witnessed to be the everyday life of the place.

My father was by trade a blacksmith, and one fair of his craft. Neither he nor my mother had much learning; but they were peaceful, sober folk with a bent for work; and being sure, rain or shine, to go to church, and strict in all their duties, they were ones to have a standing with the clergy and the neighbors, It tells well for my father that within the forty-eight hours to follow our landing at Castle Garden, he had a roof above our heads, and an anvil to hammer upon; this latter at a wage double the best that Clonmel might offer even in a dream. And so we began to settle to our surroundings, and to match with them, and fit them to ourselves; with each day Clonmel to gather a dimness, and we to seem less strange and more at home, and in the last to feel as naturally of America as though we had been born upon the soil.

It has found prior intimation that my earlier years ran as wild as a colt, with no strong power save Anne’s to tempt me in a right direction. My father, so far as his mood might promise, would have led me in paths I should go; but he was never sharp to a condition, and with nothing to him alert or quick he was one easily fooled, and I dealt with him as I would. Moreover, he had his hands filled with the task of the family’s support; for while he took more in wage for his day’s work than had ever come to him before, the cost to live had equal promotion, and it is to be doubted if any New York Monday discovered him with riches in his pocket beyond what would have dwelt there had he stayed in Clonmel. But whether he lacked temper or time, and whatever the argument, he cracked no thong of authority over me; I worked out my days by patterns to please myself, with never a word from him to check or guide me.