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

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.

THE BOSS

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CHAPTER I—HOW THE BOSS CAME TO NEW YORK

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      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.

      And my mother was the same. She had her house to care for; and in a wash-tub day, and one when sewing machines were yet to find their birth, a woman with a family to be a cook to, and she of a taste besides to see them clothed and clean, would find her every waking hour engaged. She was a housekeeper of celebration, was my mother, and a star for neighboring wives to steer by; with floor and walls and everything about her as spick and span as scouring soap and lye might make them. Pale, work-worn, I still carry her on the skyline of my memory; and I recall how her eye would light and her gray cheek show a flush when the priest did us the credit of supper at our board, my father pulling down his sleeves over his great hairy arms in deference to the exalted station of the guest. It comes to this, however, that both my father and my mother, in their narrow simplicities and time taken up with the merest arts of living, had neither care nor commands for me. I came and I went by my own clock, and if I gave the business thought, it was a thought of gratitude to find myself so free.

      To be sure I went now and then to my lessons. Anne had been brisk to seek forth a school; for she refused to grow up in ignorance, and even cherished a plan to one day teach classes from a book herself. Being established, she drew me after her, using both persuasion and force to that end, and to keep me in a way of enlightenment, invented a system of rewards and punishments, mainly the former, by which according to my merit I was to suffer or gain.

      This temple of learning to which Anne lured me was nothing vast, being no bigger than one room. In lieu of a blackboard there was a box of clean white sand wherewith to teach dullards of my age and sort their alphabet. That feat of education the pedagogue in charge—a somber personage, he, and full of bitter muscularities—accomplished by tracing the letter in the sand. This he did with the point of a hickory ruler, which weapon was never out of his hand, and served in moments of thickness as a wand of inspiration, being laid across the dull one's back by way of brightening his wits. More than once I was made wiser in this fashion; and I found such stimulus to go much against the grain and to grievously rub wrong-wise the fur of my fancy.

      These hickory drubbings to make me quicker, falling as thickly as October's leaves, went short of their purpose. On the heels of one of them I would run from my lessons for a week on end. To be brief with these matters of schools and books and alphabets and hickory beatings, I went to my classes for a day, only to hide from them for a week; as might be guessed, the system collected but a scanty erudition.

      It is a pity, too: that question of education cannot too much invite an emphasis. It is only when one is young that one may be book-taught,