Читать книгу The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools онлайн

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Tammany Hall is an old-style pirate crew, wearing modern clothing and operating systematically at looting the richest of all modern cities. Its symbol is the Tiger. In the days of my boyhood people still remembered Tammany as it was run by Tweed, who carried off a great part of its cash and sold a great part of its belongings. In my day the chief was a grown-up gangster and bruiser by the name of Richard Croker, who stated to a committee of the state legislature, “I am working for my pocket all the time.” His method was to make systematic collections from the brothels and gambling-dives and saloons; also, of course, from the contractors who wanted to charge half a dozen prices for the paving of streets and the removing of the garbage, and other jobs for which a city has to pay.

Even in my day the Tammany chieftains, like other successful bandits, were beginning to grope their way toward respectability. Every bandit in America wishes to become respectable—the test of respectability being that you get a hundred times as much loot. The financiers of Wall Street—the banks and insurance companies and the New York Central Railroad, which were organized as the Republican party and controlled “upstate”—used to fight the Tammany machine year after year, and be beaten, for the simple reason that Tammany controlled the polling places in the East Side slums, and distributed free coal to the poor in winter and free ice in summer, and therefore could count upon loyal “repeaters” and ballot-box staffers at election time. During my youth, the financiers, finding that they could not oust the Tiger, came to terms with it; such men as Whitney and Ryan, the backers of Tammany, were making so many tens of millions out of traction steals that they left the police graft as small change to their political subordinates.