David von drehle triangle the fire that changed america pdf

Book Report

ACCOLADES FOR DAVID VON DREHLE’S TRIANGLE

New York Times Extended List Best Seller

New York Times Book Review Notable Book

Washington Post Book World Rave of the Year

New York Public Library Book of the Year

New York Society Library Book of the Year

Fresh Air Critic’s Top Book of 2003

Hadassah Top Ten Jewish Best Seller

ALA Notable Book of the Year

Winner of the 2004 Christopher Award

Winner of the 2004 Sidney Hillman Foundation Award

Amazon Top 50 Book of the Year

San Jose Mercury News Best Book

Rocky Mountain News Best Book

Providence Journal Critic’s Choice

Praise for Triangle:

“There are many reasons to praise Von Drehle’s accomplishment. Von Drehle is interested in far more than the tragic events of a single afternoon … [he] has clearly immersed himself in the spirit and energy of a time long ago: the grimy, industrializing, electrifying years when colorful machine politicians battled socialists, suffragists and upright progressive reformers for the soul of an increasingly immigrant city… . Von Drehle has written a piece of popular history that reads like a novel and is rich in characterization and thoughtful analysis. It is a great introduction to the drama that was early-twentieth- century New York.”

—Annelise Orleck, Chicago Tribune

“Urban history at its best: vivid, compelling, meticulously researched. It also provides heartening evidence … that great good can come from appalling tragedy.”

—Geoffrey Ward

“Sure to become the definitive account of the fire. Von Drehle [shows] how revulsion over the fire led directly to legislation ‘that was unmatched to that time in American history.’”

—Kevin Baker, The New York Times Book Review

“Von Drehle’s spellbinding and detailed reconstruction of the disaster is complemented by an equally gripping account of the factory owners’ subsequent manslaughter trial (they got off scot-free), drawing on court records he helped unearth.”

—Mike Wallace, The New York Times

“Riveting … weaves the Triangle into its rightful historical place, emerging from the Eastern European Jewish experience in America to collide with the beginning of the Progressive Era … This story deserves a place as one of the most important chapters in the American Jewish experience.”

—Jo-Ann Mort, Forward

“Von Drehle’s engrossing account, which emphasizes the humanity of the victims and the theme of social justice, brings one of the pivotal and most shocking episodes of American labor history to life.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“It is a powerful and cautionary tale, grippingly told—popular history at its most compelling.”

—Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun

“Von Drehle’s gripping account of this legendary American tragedy is set against the vivid tapestry of immigrant life in New York’s tenements and factories. It tells us the star-crossed stories of individual victims, some of whom had survived murderous pogroms in Czarist Russia only to die needlessly, still young, in a country that was capable of serving them better.”

—Martin Dyckman, St. Petersburg Times

“Von Drehle re-creates this period with complete mastery… . Besides bringing many of these characters to life, Von Drehle shows how pivotal the fire proved to be in the history of labor unions and in the rise of urban liberalism.”

—John C. Ensslin, Rocky Mountain News

“In a gripping, mind-numbing description of the horrific event—the conditions leading up to it, what resulted from it—Washington Post writer David Von Drehle describes the ‘crucial moment in a potent chain of events, a chain that ultimately forced fundamental reforms from the political machinery of New York and, after New York, the whole nation.’”

—Hadassah magazine

“Superb social history … Chapters on the fire are so spellbinding that readers will need air at the end. Von Drehle painstakingly imagines the lives, motives and overseas passage of two teenagers who came to work at Triangle and died in the fire—Rosie Freedman of Poland and Michela Marciano of Italy.”

—Lyn Millner, USA Today

“Behind the fire lay the extraordinary history of sweatshop labor and the fledgling beginnings of union organizing. The heart of Von Drehle’s book is its detailed, nuanced, mesmerizing description of the fire. The descriptions [of the trapped workers], woven into the cogent analysis, … leave a reader staring into space.”

—Vivian Gornick, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Von Drehle ably describes the growth of the garment industry, the lives of its immigrant workforce, the politics of early-twentieth-century New York, and the 1909 strike. But he truly excels in telling the harrowing story of the fire itself.”

—Joshua Freeman, The Washington Post

“Von Drehle’s account of the Tammany transformation is a real contribution to a much neglected chapter of American history. The author shows how the activist workers in the garment sweatshops of Manhattan were as crucial to the progress of the period as the intellectuals who moved into Federal offices in Washington, D.C.”

—Gus Tyler, The New Leader

“An amazing, long-forgotten tale. A riveting history written with flair and precision.”

—Bob Woodward

“Terrific and troubling … Von Drehle demonstrates convincingly how the Triangle case produced major pieces of workplace safety legislation… . Meticulous research furnishes Triangle with the necessary historical authority.”

—Daniel Dyer, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“Von Drehle attaches a name and where possible a story to every one of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory’s victims. The biographical summaries provide the occasion for a reimagination of everyday life in the immigrants’ Lower East Side tenements.”

—Laurence Wieder, The Weekly Standard

“Like the Titanic disaster that took place a year later, the Triangle fire

contains all the melodrama needed to make a blockbuster Hollywood weepy. So it’s part of the triumph of Von Drehle’s book that while paying homage to the dead and the terror of their last moments … he also successfully urges us to look beyond the fire, which lasted a scant half-hour, to the larger political and social world the Triangle workers inhabited… . Gripping narrative history.”

—Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air

“Von Drehle has reconstructed with unprecedented care one of the formative events of twentieth-century America. He has managed to convert dry research into human drama by making us see how much burned in those flames.”

—Samuel Kauffman Anderson, The Christian Science Monitor

“For more than thirty years, historians thought the transcripts lost, but in what is an extraordinary feat of investigative journalism, Von Drehle found them through a “cryptic endnote” in a biographical dictionary entry for Max D. Steuer, the defense attorney in the case.”

—Isabel Vincent, National Post

TRIANGLE

Also from the same author

Among the Lowest of the Dead: Inside Death Row

TRIANGLE THE FIRE THAT CHANGED AMERICA

David Von Drehle

for Karen

Copyright © 2003 by David Von Drehle

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and

retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for

classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc.,

841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Von Drehle, David.

Triangle : the fire that changed America / by David Von Drehle.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9525-8

1. Triangle Shirtwaist Company—Fire, 1911. 2. Fires—New York (State)— New York—History—20th century. 3. New York (N.Y.)—History—1898–

1951. 4. Clothing factories—New York (State)—New York—Safety measures —History—20th century. 5. Labor laws and legislation—New York (State)— New York—History—20th century. 6. New York (N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title.

F128.5.V688 2003

974.7’1—dc21 2003041835

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: MISERY LANE

1 SPIRIT OF THE AGE

2 THE TRIANGLE

3 UPRISING

4 THE GOLDEN LAND

5 INFERNO

6 THREE MINUTES

7 FALLOUT

8 REFORM

9 TRIAL

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX

NOTES

NOTES ON SOURCES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

The “Triangle” company … With blood this name will be written in the history of the American workers’ movement, and with feeling will this history

recall the names of the strikers of this shop—of the crusaders.

Jewish Daily Forward

January 10, 1910

PROLOGUE: MISERY LANE

Manhattan’s Charities Pier was known as Misery Lane because that was where the bodies were put whenever disaster struck. On March 26, 1911, the makeshift morgue at the end of the pier was filled with the remains of more than a hundred young women and two dozen young men, victims of a catastrophic fire in a high-rise garment factory. Some of the bodies—the ones that plunged from windows and down the elevator shaft—were readily identifiable. The ones that remained in the burning loft, trapped by flames and a locked door, were not.

One hundred thousand people lined up outside the morgue that day. Gum- chewing boys and their giggling girlfriends waited alongside stunned or sobbing relatives of the dead. The line stretched down the pier, into the street, around the corner, and out of sight. A policeman at the door to Misery Lane estimated that six thousand people per hour walked past the rows of coffins. Finally, late in the afternoon, some twenty-four hours after the fire broke out, an angry police official ordered his men to purge the queue of ghouls and thrill seekers. “What do they think this is,” he grumbled, “the Eden Musee?” That was the city’s most popular silent movie house.

Dominic Leone was one of the legitimate searchers. The previous morning, two of his cousins, Annie Colletti and Nicolina Nicolosci, and his fourteen- year-old niece, Kate Leone, strolled an easy mile on a brisk spring morning from their East Side neighborhood to their jobs at New York’s largest blouse factory. Later that day, at closing time, a small fire erupted in a bin of scraps. Within minutes, bells and sirens could be heard throughout downtown Manhattan as fire horses charged into the streets with their engines rattling behind them. A plume of smoke rose from the midst of a forest of ten-and twelve-story towers near Washington Square. Onlookers by the hundreds hurried toward the action, and the fastest among them arrived in time to see tangles of bodies, some trailing flames, tumbling from the ninth-floor windows of the Triangle Waist Company.

The entire blaze, from spark to embers, lasted half an hour. But the damage done in this brief, terrible span was plain on Misery Lane. Dominic Leone found Nicolina fairly quickly; her broken body was only slightly burned. The other two—cousin Annie and young Kate—were not so easy to identify. He stood over one narrow pine box for a long time, but no matter how long he stared, the contents did not really look human. The shape was familiar, propped up like a charred princess reclining on a pile of pillows. She could,

conceivably, have been either Annie or Kate—or neither one. Everything recognizable was burned away. The ferocity of the fire was hard to fathom.

All around Leone, bewildered, grieving people stared and murmured over other boxes—hundreds of people studying scores of boxes. They strained to recall a nondescript ring or a heat-damaged comb that might seal an identification. Survivors turned worn shoes over in their hands, hoping for a glimmer of recognition: if they could say This is her shoe, then they could say So this is her body. But there were no such clues in the box at Dominic Leone’s feet.

Finally, his aunt, Rose Colletti, standing beside him, decided that yes, this was Annie. Leone tried again to match the picture of her in his mind with the poor dead girl in the coffin, but he couldn’t. Yet he did not seriously protest when morgue workers closed the box, labeled it with Annie’s name, and prepared the paperwork to transfer the remains to a mortuary.

At home that night, Leone and his Aunt Rose continued to talk about the body in the coffin. After a while, Rose Colletti’s confidence began to fade. The next morning, she returned to the morgue and announced that she had changed her mind. The corpse was not that of her daughter. So the coffin was recalled from the mortuary, restored to the dwindling line of unidentified victims, and reopened.

The Triangle fire of March 25, 1911, was for ninety years the deadliest workplace disaster in New York history—and the most important. Its significance was not simply the number dead. The 146 deaths at the Triangle Waist Company were sensational, but they were not unusual. Death was an almost routine workplace hazard in those days. By one estimate, one hundred or more Americans died on the job every day in the booming industrial years around 1911. Mines collapsed on them, ships sank under them, pots of molten steel spilled over their heads, locomotives smashed into them, exposed machinery grabbed them by the arm or leg or hair and pulled them in. Just four months before the fire at the Triangle, an almost identical fire in a Newark garment factory trapped and killed twenty-five young women, and experts predicted that it was only a matter of time before a worse calamity struck in Manhattan. Yet workplace safety was scarcely regulated, and workers’ compensation was considered newfangled or even socialist.

Disaster followed disaster, but little changed. Then came the Triangle fire. It was different because it was more than just a horrific half hour; it was the crucial moment in a potent chain of events—a chain that ultimately forced fundamental reforms from the political machinery of New York, and, after New York, the whole nation. Around the turn of the twentieth century, America experienced a huge immigration, an almost unprecedented transfer

of labor power and brain power from abroad (especially from Europe) to the United States. The arrivals were met in the cities by contempt and exploitation—but also by a rising spirit of progressivism. In late 1909 and early 1910, new blood and new ideas coalesced in the Manhattan garment district, as immigrant workers and wealthy progressives combined to lead a strike by women’s waist makers that shocked and thrilled the city. This uprising was a trumpet blast signaling the future: a future of women’s rights and labor power and the urban liberalism that would define mid-century civic life.

A few factory owners resisted that strike despite incredible pressure to give in. These holdouts were led by two of the most prominent manufacturers, immigrants themselves: Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. Blanck and Harris refused to recognize the garment workers’ union; instead, they hired strikebreakers, commissioned thugs to beat up strike leaders, and pressured police to arrest young workers on the picket line. This stubborn reaction earned them a footnote in American labor history—until, a year after the strike, their names became far more notorious.

As Dominic Leone wandered through Misery Lane, Isaac Harris brooded in his luxurious town house on the Upper West Side, nursing a badly cut hand. He had injured it the afternoon before by punching out a skylight. Harris had been in his office, negotiating with a salesman for some supplies, when the factory fire alarm began ringing. As Harris rushed into the corridor, Max Blanck appeared, looking befuddled. Blanck had been preparing to take two of his daughters shopping in his limousine. Instead, they ran for their lives. With Harris leading the way, Blanck, the girls, and more than fifty employees skirted flames to reach the roof of their burning building. The villains of the waist makers’ strike and the owners of the doomed Triangle Waist Company were the same two men.

The day after the botched identification of the woman in the coffin, Dominic Leone returned to Misery Lane. Again, he accompanied his Aunt Rose up and down the rows of boxes until they found a body they could claim as Annie’s. That left only Kate still missing. After much reflection, and with growing desperation, Leone decided that a lock of hair in one of the boxes was enough to make an identification.

But who was the girl he had studied so long the day before?

An older man named Isaac Hine stopped that day by the same box, and stood, and stared, remembering Rosie Freedman, his niece. She was an industrious young woman, and a brave one. As a girl of fourteen, after surviving a murderous anti-Jewish riot in her hometown, Rosie traveled alone from Russian-occupied Poland to live with her uncle and his wife in their

small apartment near the Triangle factory. Her timing could hardly have been worse. Soon after she arrived, the American economy collapsed, and after the depression came the strike. Still, every payday, she had sent a portion of her earnings to the family she left behind. Things were just starting to look up in spring of 1911, when Rosie Freedman headed off to work one Saturday morning and never returned.

Isaac Hine lingered a long time over the box. Finally he said: that’s her. Again, the coroner’s men closed the lid.

This book is one more attempt to open up the horror of the Triangle fire, to gaze intently and unflinchingly at it, and to settle on the facts and their meaning. For although Isaac Hine received a small stipend to place a marker on Rosie Freedman’s grave, she is more to us than a name on a stone over a featureless form. She stands, with all the young women she represents, at the center of one of the great and tragic stories of American history. The story begins with a strike …

1 SPIRIT OF THE AGE

Burglary was the usual occupation of Lawrence Ferrone, also known as Charles Rose. He had twice done time for that offense in New York state prisons. But Charley Rose was not a finicky man. He worked where there was money to be made. On September 10, 1909, a Friday evening, Rose was employed on a mission that would make many men squeamish. He had been hired to beat up a young woman. Her offense: leading a strike at a blouse- making factory off Fifth Avenue, just north of Washington Square in Manhattan.

He spotted his mark as she left the picket line. Clara Lemlich was small, no more than five feet tall, but solidly built. She looked like a teenager, with her soft round face and blazing eyes, but in fact Lemlich was in her early twenties. She had curly hair that she wore pulled tight in the back and sharply parted on the right, in the rather masculine style that was popular among the fiery women and girls of the socialist movement. Some of Clara’s comrades —Pauline Newman and Fania Cohn, for example, tireless labor organizers in the blouse and the underwear factories, respectively—wore their hair trimmed so short and plain that they could almost pass for yeshiva boys. These young women often wore neckties with their white blouses, as if to underline the fact that they were operating in a man’s world. Men had the vote; men owned the shops and hired the sometimes leering, pinching foremen; men ran the unions and the political parties. At night school, in the English classes designed for immigrants like Clara Lemlich, male students learned to translate such sentences as “I read the book,” while female students translated, “I wash the dishes.” Clara and her sisters wanted to change that. They wanted to change almost everything.

Lemlich was headed downtown, toward the crowded, teeming immigrant precincts of the Lower East Side, but it is not likely that she was headed home. Her destination was probably the union hall, or a Marxist theory class, or the library. She was a model of a new sort of woman, hungry for opportunity and education and even equality; willing to fight the battles and pay the price to achieve it. As Charley Rose fell into step behind her—this small young woman hurrying along, dressed in masculine style after a day on a picket line—the strong arm perhaps rationalized that her radical behavior, her attempts to bend the existing shape and order of the world, her unwillingness to do what had always been done, was precisely the reason why

she should be beaten.

Lemlich worked as a draper at Louis Leiserson’s waist factory—women’s blouses were known as “shirtwaists” in those days, or simply as “waists.” Draping was a highly skilled job, almost like sculpting. Clara could translate the ideas of a blouse designer into actual garments by cutting and molding pieces on a tailor’s dummy. In a sense, her work and her activism were the same: both involved taking ideas and making them tangible. And the work paid well, by factory standards, but pay alone did not satisfy Clara. She found the routine humiliations of factory life almost unbearable. Workers in the waist factories, she once said, were trailed to the bathroom and hustled back to work; they were constantly shortchanged on their pay and mocked when they complained; the owners shaved minutes off each end of the lunch hour and even “fixed” the time clocks to stretch the workday. “The hissing of the machines, the yelling of the foreman, made life unbearable,” Lemlich later recalled. And at the end of each day, the factory workers had to line up at a single unlocked exit to be “searched like thieves,” just to prevent pilferage of a blouse or a bit of lace.

With a handful of other young women, Clara Lemlich joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in 1906. She and some of her fellow workers formed Local 25 to serve the mostly female waist makers and dressmakers; by the end of that year, they had signed up thirty- five or forty members—roughly one in a thousand eligible workers. And yet this small start represented a brazen stride by women into union business. The men who ran the ILGWU, which was young and struggling itself, composed mainly of male cloak makers, did little to support Local 25. Most men saw women as unreliable soldiers in the labor movement, willing to work for lower wages and destined to leave the shops as soon as they found husbands. Some men even “viewed women as competitors, and often plotted to drive them from the industry,” according to historian Carolyn Daniel McCreesh. This left the women of Local 25 to make their own way, with encouragement from a group of well-to-do activists called the Women’s Trade Union League.

The Leiserson’s strike was Lemlich’s third in as many years. Using her gifts with a needle as an entrée, Lemlich “zigzagg[ed] between small shops, stirring up trouble,” as biographer Annelise Orleck put it. She was “an organizer and an agitator, first, last and always.” In 1907, Lemlich led a ten- week wildcat strike at Weisen & Goldstein’s waist shop, protesting the company’s relentless insistence on ever-faster production. She led a walkout at the Gotham waist factory in 1908, complaining that the owners were firing better-paid men and replacing them with lower-paid women. The Louis Leiserson shop was next. Did Leiserson know what he was getting when the

little draper presented herself at his factory and asked, in Yiddish, for a job? Leiserson was widely known around lower Manhattan as a socialist himself, so perhaps he was complacent about agitators. More likely, he had no idea what was in store when he hired Clara Lemlich, beyond the appealing talents of a first-rate seamstress. The waist industry was booming in New York: there were more than five hundred blouse factories in the city, employing upward of forty thousand workers. It was all but impossible to keep track of one waist maker in the tidal wave of new immigrants washing into the shops.

A socialist daily newspaper, the New York Call, was a mouthpiece for the garment workers and their fledgling unions. According to the Call, late in the summer of 1909 Louis Leiserson, self-styled friend of the workers, reneged on a promise to hire only union members at his modern factory on West Seventeenth Street. Like many garment makers, Leiserson shared the Eastern European roots of much of his workforce and, like them, he started out as an overworked, underpaid greenhorn fresh off the boat. But apparently he had concluded that his promise was too expensive to keep. Leiserson secretly opened a second shop staffed with nonunion workers, and when the unionists at the first shop—mostly men—found out about this, they called a clandestine strike meeting. Clara Lemlich attended, and demanded the floor. A men’s- only strike was doomed to fail, she insisted. A walk-out must include the female workers. “Ah—then I had fire in my mouth!” Lemlich remembered years later. She moved people by sheer passion. “What did I know about trade unionism? Audacity—that was all I had. Audacity!”

She was born with it, in 1886 (some accounts say 1888), in the Ukrainian trading town of Gorodok. Clara’s father was a deeply religious man, one of about three thousand Jews in the town of ten thousand. He spent long days in prayer and studying the Torah, reading and pondering and disputing the mysteries of sacred scripture. He expected his sons to do the same with their lives. It was the job of his wife and daughters to do the worldly work that made such devotion possible. Clara’s mother ran a tiny grocery store, and Clara and her sisters were expected to help.

A memoirist once described life in a similar Russian shtetl. It “was in essence a small Jewish universe, revolving around the Jewish calendar,” he wrote, a place where a wedding celebration might go on for a week and where the Sabbath was inviolate. Twice a week, however, Clara went with her mother to the yarid, or marketplace, and there her life intersected, at least briefly, with the Russian Orthodox Christians who alone were allowed to own and farm the land.

Lemlich’s childhood corresponded with a period of enormous upheaval for Eastern European Jews, a time, as Gerald Sorin has written, “of great turmoil,

but, also, [of] effervescence.” The traditions of shtetl life eroded under a wave of youthful radicalism, which erupted in response to the traumatic decline of the Russian monarchy. It was a very hard time for Russian Jews, a time of forced poverty and violent oppression, but it was also an environment where a girl could assert herself. Clara Lemlich was not content simply to work while her brothers studied and prayed. She hungered for an education. Realizing that she would have to pay for it herself, Lemlich learned to sew buttonholes and to write letters for illiterate neighbors whose children had immigrated to America. With the money she earned, she bought novels by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gorky, among others. But Clara’s father hated Russians and their anti-Semitic czars so deeply that he forbade the Russian language in his home. One day, he discovered a few of the girl’s books hidden under a pan in the kitchen, and he flung them into the fire.

Clara secretly bought more books.

In 1903, Lemlich and her family joined the flood of roughly two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants that entered the United States between 1881 and the end of World War I. This was one of the largest, and most influential, migrations in history—roughly a third of the Jewish population in the East left their homes for a new life, and most of them found it in America. What was distinctive about the emigration was that an entire culture pulled up stakes and moved. It was not just the poor, or the young and footloose, or the politically vanquished that left. Faced with ever more crushing oppression and escalating anti-Jewish violence, the professional classes, stripped of their positions, had reason to leave. So did parents eager to save their sons from mandatory service in the czar’s army; so did the idealists frustrated by backsliding conditions, as did the luftmenschen, the unskilled poor who had no clear way of supporting themselves in a harsh land. Although most of the arrivals in America were met by severe poverty, they kept coming. If their numbers were averaged, they arrived at the rate of almost two hundred per day, every day, for thirty years. They made a life and built a world with their own newspapers, theaters, restaurants—and radical politics.

She would not be able to run very fast in her long skirt, and was no match for a gangster. But to be on the safe side Charley Rose had recruited some help. William Lustig fell in alongside the burglar as they started down the street after Clara Lemlich. Lustig was best known as a prizefighter in the bare- knuckle bouts held in Bowery back rooms. Several other men tagged along, lesser figures from the New York underworld. In their derby hats and dark suits, they moved quickly along the sidewalk, past horse-drawn trucks creaking down the crowded avenue. With each step they narrowed the

distance.

The policemen patrolling the picket line watched the gangsters set off, but did nothing to stop them. The cops weren’t surprised to see notorious hoodlums moonlighting as strikebreakers. Busting up strikes was a lucrative sideline for downtown gangsters. So-called detective agencies were constantly looking for strikebreaking contracts from worried bosses in shops where there was unrest. One typical firm, the Greater New York Detective Agency, sent letters to the leading shirt-waist factory owners in the summer of 1909, promising to “furnish trained detectives to guard life and property, and, if necessary, furnish help of all kinds, both male and female, for all trades.” In other words, this single company would—for a price—provide sewing machine operators and the brawny bodyguards needed to escort them into the factory. “Help of all kinds” might also describe the professional gangsters occasionally dispatched to beat some docility into strike leaders.

The gang’s footfalls sounded quickly on the pavement behind Clara Lemlich. When she stopped and turned, she recognized the men instantly from the picket line. The beating was quick and savage. Lemlich was left bleeding on the sidewalk, gasping for breath, her ribs broken.

Charley Rose had done his job, and no doubt he collected his pay. But Lemlich returned to the strike a martyr and a catalyst. Within days after the beating, she could be found on street corners around the garment district, brandishing her bruises and stirring up her comrades. Everywhere she went, she preached strike, strike, strike—not just for Leiserson’s but for the whole shirtwaist industry.

This violent convergence of the hired hoodlums and the indomitable Clara Lemlich was the clashing of the old against the new. From the summer of 1909 to the end of 1911, New York waist makers—young immigrants, mostly women—achieved something profound. They were a catalyst for the forces of change: the drive for women’s rights (and other civil rights), the rise of unions, and the use of activist government to address social problems. One man who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1880s remembered his mother’s desperation the day his father died. There were no government programs to help her, no pension or Social Security. Yet she knew that if she couldn’t support her children they would be taken away from her to be raised in an orphanage. So she went directly from the funeral to an umbrella factory to beg for a job. Eighteen thousand immigrants per month poured into New York City alone—and there were no public agencies to help them.

The young immigrants in the garment factories, alight with the spirit of progress, impatient with the weight of tradition, hungry for improvement in a

new land and a new century, organized themselves to demand a more fair and humane society.

What begins with Clara Lemlich’s beating leads to the ravenous flames inside the Triangle Waist Company, which trapped and killed some of the hardiest strikers from the uprising Lemlich worked to inspire. Together, the strikes and the fire helped to transform the political machinery of New York City—the most powerful machine in America, Tammany Hall.

Late summer in those days was almost unbearable for the poor in New York. “It sizzles in the neighborhood of Hester Street on a sultry day,” a magazine writer summed up simply. Swampy and feverish, the heat soaked into the stone and iron of the city by day and leaked out again by night, so that it was never gone but was just ebbing and surging like a simmering tide. Heat amplified the smells, the overripe scent of sweaty humans lacking adequate plumbing, the sickly sweet pungency of baking garbage, the sour-earth odor of wet manure from the countless horses pulling the wagons of the city’s insatiable commerce.

So many people in so little space: eight hundred per acre in some city blocks. Flies were fat and brazen and everywhere, because in summer the windows and doors had to be open all the time in hopes that a breeze might find its way down the river and through the crowded streets and among the close-packed tenements and across the back of one’s neck. Along with the flies came the noise of steel wagon wheels on paving stones, the wails of babies, peddlers bellowing, the roar of elevated trains, hollering children, and the scritch-scratch and tinkle of windup phonographs.

Late summer was a season of dust and grime. Half the metropolis, it seemed, was under construction, a new tower of ten or more stories topping out every five days, competing skyscrapers racing toward the clouds, a third and then a fourth bridge stretching across the East River (where a generation earlier there had been none). The hot, damp air was full of dirt, cement powder, sawdust, and exhaust from the steam shovels.

Inside a sweltering, poorly ventilated, three-room apartment, the whole thing no more than four hundred square feet, the air never seemed to stir. It was so stifling inside the tenements that in late summer people slept on the rooftops, on the fire escapes, on concrete stoops, or in the parks. Yet the air did move. The mothers, the sisters, the wives could read the evidence written in gray on the family linens. A white tablecloth—an heirloom or a wedding present from an earlier life across the ocean—would turn dingy within a day or two beside an open window.

Then there was nothing to do but scrounge a penny from the purse and put

it in the gas meter on the kitchen wall. Enough gas would flow to heat water for the laundry. Out came the washboard and up went the sleeves. Late summer was the season of exhausted women with sweat running in streams down their necks and noses, dripping from tendrils of upswept hair, women bent over steaming tubs of water to scrub the grime from the tablecloths, and from the dirty white workshirts of their husbands and sons and brothers, and from their own white aprons and their light cotton shirtwaists. Beside them, inches away, fires roared in coal stoves to heat the irons and warm the starch. Scrub. Rinse. Scrub again. Then the bluing solution, the starch, the isometric muscle strain of wringing the laundry dry. After the hot irons, a day or two later, the grime was back.

Newspapers and magazines frequently published wrenching portraits of the squalor and filth of tenement life. William Dean Howells sounded a fairly typical note in his description of a tenement basement: “My companion struck a match and held it to the cavernous mouth of an inner cellar half as large as the room we were in, where it winked and paled so soon that I had only a glimpse of the bed, with the rounded heap of bedding on it; but out of this hole, as if she had been a rat, scared from it by the light, a young girl came, rubbing her eyes and vaguely smiling, and vanished upstairs somewhere.” In 1909, there were more than one hundred thousand tenement buildings in New York City. About a third of them had no lights in the hallways, so that when a resident visited the common toilet at night it was like walking lampless in a mine. Nearly two hundred thousand rooms had no windows at all, not even to adjoining rooms. A quarter of the families on the Lower East Side lived five or more to a room. They slept on pallets, on chairs, and on doors removed from their hinges. They slept in shifts. Some, especially the women who worked all day and took home piecework from the factories at night, seemed never to sleep at all.

Somehow they kept their dignity even when they had little else, even in the most brutalizing days of summer. Howells noticed this. “They had so much courage as enabled them to keep themselves noticeably clean in an environment where I am afraid their betters would scarcely have had the heart to wash their faces and comb their hair.” A morning glory climbing a trellis outside a third-floor window; tiny rooms painted with a stencil to resemble fancy wallpaper; a starched white tablecloth as crisp and smooth as paper— with signs like these, the poor of New York asserted their humanity.

There were larger signs, too. The summer of 1909 was a season of strikes in New York’s garment district. In August, more than fifteen hundred tailors walked off the job. Then there was a brief strike by the men who ran the buttonhole machines. This activity wasn’t unusual in itself. Garment strikes

had long been a regular feature of a hectic, rapidly growing industry. They were generally brief wildcat affairs, single-shop walkouts designed to grab an owner’s attention long enough to squeeze a raise out of him. But the garment industry had become quite large and had begun to mature, having doubled in size over the previous decade. By 1909 more people worked in the factories of Manhattan than in all the mills and plants of Massachusetts, and by far the largest number of them were making clothes.

After the latest in a string of economic depressions, business was once again brisk, but factory owners were slow to raise pay and improve conditions. Young workers earning “training wages” made as little as three dollars per week, barely enough to cover room and board. Even the most highly paid workers, who earned twenty dollars per week or more, had seen their wages decline with the depression. All of them had to tolerate a highly seasonal business with long idle periods of no pay at all.

This was the climate in which Clara Lemlich was operating, buoyed by the Women’s Trade Union League. It says something about the era that the league was founded by a man, William English Walling, the son of a Kentucky millionaire. As a volunteer social worker in the New York slums, Walling had noticed the legions of women going to work in factories, and heard the general contempt for them among the men who ran the unions. Inspired by the labor socialists of England, Walling created the WTUL in 1903 “to assist in the organization of women wage workers into trade unions.” A subcurrent of sexual concern also energized the league: members worried that young women of the New York slums were being forced into prostitution to support themselves and their families. This problem of “white slavery” was a frequent theme of sensational congressional hearings, sermons, and investigative journalism. Higher wages, the WTUL reckoned, would solve the problem, and the way to get higher wages was to build strong unions.

Walling quickly passed the leadership of the WTUL to women. Pioneering reformers, such as Jane Addams of Hull House and Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement, served as early officers, and a young New York society woman named Eleanor Roosevelt—a niece of the president of the United States—was a member. Still, the early years were frustrating ones for the WTUL. It is a truism of politics that people rarely agitate when conditions are at their worst, and the depression of 1907 left many workers struggling simply to survive. With the revival of the economy a year or so later, however, the WTUL began to find its way, led by a pair of wealthy sisters, Mary Dreier in New York and Margaret Dreier Robins in Chicago. Through the sweltering summer of 1909, WTUL members could be found two or three days each week on the streets of New York’s garment district, unfurling their banners

outside factories at closing time.

In July, some two hundred workers walked out of Rosen Bros., one of the largest waist manufacturers in the city, demanding a 20 percent pay hike. Management refused to negotiate, instead hiring strikebreakers to attack the picket line. When the strikers fought back, the Tammany police force intervened on the side of the owners. This was Tammany’s custom. Strikers, after all, had no money, no “sugar,” to pass around the station house. They added nothing to the stream of graft that powered the political machine. This time, however, nightsticks and jail time did not have the desired effect. The Rosen Bros. strikers held their ground, and after nearly a month, with the busy season pressing down on anxious owners, the workers got their raise.

News of this success spread quickly through the garment district. In August, nearly seven thousand neckwear workers—mostly teenaged girls— walked out of some two hundred shops. Their monthlong strike was a desperate, heroic effort. Many of the neckwear girls toiled in tiny sweatshops crammed into tenements, making neckties and scarves for puny wages. Among their simple demands was an end to work in bedrooms and cellars. Because they were so poorly paid, the strikers had no savings to sustain them, yet they refused to give in, and eventually forced some concessions. The Call, the socialist newspaper, hailed the neckwear strike as a model of what might be possible everywhere. “Disgusted with the misconduct of many a strike, disappointed by defeat after defeat … not a few Socialists have lost faith in unionism,” the Call noted. “A visit to the striking neckwear workers will make these misguided ones see the labor movement in a new light.”

With the WTUL’s support, Local 25 invited waist workers to a rally at which Frank Morrison, secretary of the muscular American Federation of Labor, urged them to build up their union. The turnout was surprising: more than two thousand workers showed up. New York garment workers were famous in the labor movement as dedicated strikers but indifferent unionists, keen on action but hard to keep organized. Some labor leaders wondered whether there would ever be a viable, enduring union in the garment industry. Local 25’s paid membership numbered only in the low hundreds, and its strike fund was nearly penniless. But by then Clara Lemlich had galvanized the Leiserson’s strike, and she could be found on a different street corner each day, proud of her welts and scrapes, belting out exhortations despite her aching ribs.

Two weeks after the beating of Clara Lemlich, in the last days of September, New York City staged one of the grandest extravaganzas the world had ever seen—parades, light shows, fireworks, concerts, lectures, and exhibitions. The festival honored Henry Hudson, the first European to sail New York’s

waters, and Robert Fulton, the steamship pioneer. Exploration and invention were the two faces on the coin of progress, and progress was the spirit of the age. Visitors came from around the globe: women in huge hats and perfect posture, men in stiff collars and slim-legged trousers. An armada was assembled from the world’s navies. Giant balloons rose overhead. Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss made the first airplane flights in New York City skies.

One million people lined the Hudson River, from the Battery to Riverside Park, for the opening of the Hudson-Fulton celebration. They crammed themselves into every available space, jamming the piers, climbing trees, leaning from windows so that “not an inch of standing room was open,” according to the New York Times. Street vendors sold popcorn and sarsaparilla and ice cream served in that recent invention, a crunchy, edible cone. Boys hawked newspapers—New York boasted more than a dozen dailies in English and others in Yiddish, German, Italian, Chinese. A debate was raging on the front pages: Who was first to the North Pole? Was it Frederick Cook, who was holed up at his home in Brooklyn, refusing to offer his proof? Or was it Robert Peary, whose battered ship Roosevelt, fresh from the Arctic, was on its way to New York to join the festival fleet? Beside the news stories, advertisements extolled a luxurious array of products, from silk gowns to hand-pumped vacuum cleaners, from Persian rugs to player pianos, written in prose meant to capture the moment. “Progress is the life of age; betterment the foundation of success,” declared an ad in the Times. “The conception and evolution of the Sterling Playerpiano … is the result of untiring effort and scientific endeavor.”

Up the Hudson River came the armada, a parade of ships forty miles long. Gunboats representing Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and a dozen other nations fired booming salutes, and no one imagined that in a few years they would be shooting at each other. On Seventy-second Street, an estimated ten thousand automobiles crept along toward the river in what was probably the world’s largest traffic jam to date. “A casual glance at the license placards displayed by the automobiles showed that they had come from every state within a radius of 100 miles,” a reporter wrote—a lot of hard driving in a nation with fewer than a thousand miles of paved roads. Civic leaders looked forward to the day when every street would be filled with cars. The automobile was so quiet, with its rubber tires, and its emissions seemed so benign when compared with heaps of green dung in the streets.

When night fell, even more spectators filled the streets and rooftops and riverfronts for the grandest display of electric lights the world had ever witnessed. For the first time, Manhattan and its nearest neighbors were lit up

from end to end—a man-made starburst spanning nearly twenty miles. Searchlights raked the sky. The city’s bridges sparkled as if riveted with diamonds. Fifth Avenue became a “city of light,” a “screen of brilliance,” from the dark blanket of Central Park to the arch in Washington Square. Bulbs highlighted the cornices and columns and carvings of the sumptuous, soaring new hotels near the park—the Plaza, the Netherland, the St. Regis, the Savoy. The commercial towers of Manhattan were “marked out in points of fire,” from the gold-domed headquarters of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World downtown—the tallest building on earth when it opened in 1890, more than three hundred feet high—to the new record holder, just completed: the Metropolitan Life tower on Madison Square, a full seven hundred feet tall. Fifty stories! The clean, classical lines of the skyscraper were transformed that night into “a pencil of light” topped by “a fairy palace, substantial as a sunset cloud” in which the tower clocks seemed to glow. Hundreds of thousands looked on that scene—people who, as children, had strained their eyes to read by the light of a wick soaked in whale oil. Progress wasn’t a theory—it was everywhere they turned. It was a “spectacle [that] will not soon be surpassed in this world,” the Times predicted. Then the fireworks began.

Afterward, revelers streamed through the city, the normal Saturday night crowd swelled by half a million out-of-towners. They headed to Broadway and to the restaurants that stayed open all night: Martin’s, the Marlborough, Maxim’s, Murray’s, the Knickerbocker, Shanley’s, the Cadillac, and the Madrid. Waiters set up extra tables in every niche and kept them full until nearly dawn.

For those who found Broadway too tame, there were big horse-drawn wagons destined for downtown, the “Chinatown rubberneck wagons.” Barkers touted the amazing sights to be seen: mysterious pigtailed gentlemen from the East, opium dens, and all manner of depravity, not to mention the Brooklyn Bridge. “Every wagon was filled as soon as it drew up to the curb.” The wagons passed the Bowery on the way downtown; it was the most notorious street in America, packed with sensations. Police had done a sort of census there a few years earlier and determined that only fourteen of nearly a hundred establishments could be called “respectable.” Farther south, the rubberneck wagons passed prostitutes beckoning from cellar doors and drunks sleeping on sidewalks, while the drivers described in harrowing detail the latest craze among dope fiends—cocaine. Within a few blocks was a neighborhood famous for some of the toughest criminal hangouts in the world, some of them already Gotham legend: Gallus Mag’s saloon on Water Street, for example. Mag was a formidable woman who kept a jar behind the counter full of ears she had bitten off troublemakers. And Sportsman’s Hall,

where the main sport was rat fighting. A champion dog called Jack once killed a hundred rats in the Sportsman’s ring in less than seven minutes. When Jack died, he was stuffed and put on display. The truly rough stuff at Sportsman’s Hall, however, involved seeing how many rats a man could kill with his bare hands and teeth.

Progress had its own political movement: progressivism, a gospel of the new and improved. Progressives supported the vote for women, protection for consumers and workers, trade unionism. More than any platform, though, progressivism was a mind-set. It was pragmatic and scientific. Progressives took the tools of engineers and turned them to the new fields of social work and socially conscious politics. It made no sense to them that there should be millions of poor people groping through dark and stifling tenements in a city of fifty-story fairy palaces and scientifically evolved player pianos.

Just a glance around the city revealed plenty of things to be fixed: filthy housing, unsafe workplaces, garbage in the streets, orphans running wild, widespread vice and corruption. But the progressives did not deal in simple glances. Impelled by the belief that truth drives out error, they dedicated themselves to documenting, firsthand and in great detail, precisely what was wrong. Bright young people from America’s leading colleges flocked to settlement houses, such as Hull House in Chicago and Manhattan’s University Settlement and Henry Street Settlement, to live and work with the poor. Their firsthand reports, full of tables and charts and verbatim testimony, explained what it was like to work in a factory, how many tenement workshops were in a particular neighborhood, how much money a family could earn by picking the meat from nuts by gaslight, and why New York’s slums were so prone to fire. Their findings appeared not only in specialized journals like Survey, but in major magazines like the muckraking monthly McClure’s.

In 1909, the progressive movement was building to a peak. A progressive governor, Charles Evans Hughes, served in Albany, pushing insurance reforms, backing an early version of workers’ compensation (struck down by the courts), and crusading against drinking and gambling. A progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt, had just completed nearly two full terms in which he challenged monopolies, championed food and drug safety, promoted conservation—even sided with labor in a coal strike and dined with a black man at the White House. Roosevelt was scarcely fifty, and few people believed that his political career was over. At the time of the great festival, the young ex-president was on safari in Africa, and the newspapers competed desperately for pictures of him, gun in hand, peering at a freshly killed zebra or jaguar or rhino. With his high boots and astounding certitude, Roosevelt represented so much about the nation: its youth, audacity, appetite, even

arrogance. He was the embodiment of pure possibility.

Tammany Hall, the political machine that had dominated New York for half a century, represented precisely the opposite. Many Tammany leaders expressed nothing but scorn for the progressives. “A reformer can’t last in politics,” said George Washington Plunkitt, the longtime leader of the West Side. Big Tim Sullivan, boss of downtown, agreed: “Reform? There ain’t nothin’ to it.” Rarely did the reformers accomplish anything, Tammany argued, beyond cutting patronage jobs and closing neighborhood saloons. But Tammany also feared them. The progressives wanted a civil service system, in which municipal jobs and promotions were given without regard for politics. This was a bullet aimed directly at the heart of the machine. Plunkitt called civil service “the curse of the nation.” “How,” he once wondered, “are we goin’ to provide for the thousands of men who worked for the Tammany ticket?” As journalist William Allen White observed, “Tammany preaches contentment.” The machine protected the established order—which was, after all, quite good to Tammany.

The Hall was as much a part of New York history as Henry Hudson and the Brooklyn Bridge. It was founded in revolutionary days for philosophical reasons: to oppose elitism and resist British sympathizers. The strange name (officially the Society of St. Tammany) derived from a Delaware Indian chief, Tamamend, and this Indian motif was carried out in the Hall’s fraternal lodge–style symbolism—members were called “braves,” district leaders were “sachems,” the headquarters was known as “the Wigwam.” Tammany might have evolved into a debating club or fraternity and faded quietly from history. But the clash of elitism versus populism turned out to be one of the formative struggles of American politics, and Tammany instead grew into a purely political organization, the Democratic party in New York—and from there into a mighty machine.

As rigidly ordered as any army, Tammany Hall was based on a network of errand boys and block captains—the infantry. Ward heelers and district leaders were the colonels and brigadiers. The boss was the commanding general. Like any army, Tammany placed a high value on loyalty and discipline. Politics, Tammany style, was less a matter of ideas than of hard work and attention to mundane details—what one Tammany boss called “thorough political organization and all-the-year-around work.” Take one East Side district, for example. There, the machine was so efficient that by 3 P.M. on election day, the leader knew the names of every voter who had not yet cast a ballot, and he controlled enough foot soldiers to send each slacker a personal reminder. Picture scores of workers knocking urgently on hundreds of doors in an era before household telephones. Tammany politics were

practical politics, and the most practical question of all was: Who had the votes? A man who could reliably deliver even a few votes mattered more to the Hall than a whole faculty of theorists. To succeed in Tammany, “get a followin’ if it’s only one man,” counseled Plunkitt, the machine’s most quotable sage. “Go to the district leader and say … ‘I’ve got one man who’ll follow me through thick and thin.’” And build from there.

Although Tammany soldiers were known to pay up to two dollars per vote in a tight election, in most cases the Hall paid off with jobs and charity rather than cash. Young men who wanted to become Tammany braves would hang out in saloons or clubhouses favored by the district leaders and wait to be given “a contract.” This was an errand that required quick attention. A fellow might “take a contract” to visit a landlord and reassure the man that Tammany would cover an unemployed voter’s back rent. He might take a contract to alert the madam of a nearby brothel to an upcoming police raid. He might take a contract to hurry over to night court and tell the Tammany magistrate to turn some prisoner loose. And on his way back, he might stop by a funeral home to cover the expenses for a bereaved widow. District leaders welcomed news of constituents in need, and were never happier than when they could be of service. That was how they became district leaders. Plunkitt told of a man whose contract involved waiting at the marriage bureau. Every time a couple came in for a marriage license, he was to alert the district leader, so that the leader—and not some more alert rival—could be the first to deliver a wedding gift. Tammany asked only for votes in return.

Tammany’s little kindnesses solved no social problems, but they did help people through difficult times. Tammany was there with coal in a blizzard, with shelter after a fire. As a result, the machine built up tremendous loyalty among the poor immigrants and children of immigrants who tripled the population of New York between the Civil War and the turn of the century. In summer, Tammany leaders sponsored free boat rides upriver and wagon trains to Westchester for tens of thousands of working people. When the crowds arrived in the countryside, they found long tables piled with food, gambling games for the parents, heaps of toys for the children, lakes of lemonade and beer. At the end of the day there were fireworks. These summer outings were so nice that hardly anyone asked why Tammany didn’t build more parks for picnics back home in Manhattan. In winter, the leaders gave away holiday turkeys, coupons for free shoes and socks, and mountains of Christmas trinkets.

All this was easily financed, as long as Tammany men were elected to office. For the machine was also a model of efficiency in squeezing private profits from the public purse. Tammany skimmed kickbacks from government

contracts, favored its own companies with lucrative city concessions, deployed the police to shake down gamblers and prostitutes. The Hall collected bribes in exchange for licenses, extorted protection money from small businesses, and bloated the city payroll with patronage jobs. Once Tammany men had the jobs, the machine raised government salaries. This pleased everyone who had a patronage job, and everyone who hoped to get one. Then the Hall demanded a cut of the extra money.

Tammany reached a grim perfection under “Squire” Richard Croker, who presided over the garish corruption of the 1890s. While scattering crumbs and lip service in the hungry slums, Croker gave the moneyed interests of the city the conservative government they desired. “Richard Croker was the anti- liberal patriarch of New York’s working class,” a Tammany historian wrote, “a hero to the mob and an invaluable ally to the aristocracy.” Downtown, in the most populous working-class precincts, Big Tim Sullivan and his extended family exercised such complete control that in one late-nineteenth- century election the Democrats outvoted Republicans 388 to 4 in a particular precinct. Afterward, Big Tim told Croker that it was “one more [Republican] vote than I expected there—but I’ll find the feller.” Sullivan’s operation grossed an estimated three million dollars per year from gambling and prostitution graft (roughly fifty million per year in current dollars).

The key to the corruption was a lawless police force. Anyone who wanted a position, from patrolman to precinct captain, had to pay for it. There was a sliding scale of prices, ranging from three hundred dollars for a beat cop’s job to as much as fifteen thousand dollars for a captaincy in a lucrative part of town. (At the time, a thousand dollars was a decent annual wage.) The tribute was paid willingly, because it could be earned back many times over through cuts of the graft from the city’s gambling houses, brothels, saloons, drug dens, bail bondsmen, and so forth.

Croker’s reign came to an end when a crusading minister named Charles Parkhurst began exposing some of Tammany’s worst excesses in a series of scandalous sermons. New York’s upstate Republican leader, Boss Thomas Platt—seeing a chance to crush the rival machine—ordered an investigation by the state legislature. The resulting scandals put a reformer in the mayor’s office in 1901. The Squire fled into exile in England. Cushioned by the millions he had skimmed, Croker lived in a castle and raised racehorses.

There was no picketing at Leiserson’s on Tuesday, September 28, the fourth day of the great festival. Fifth Avenue and every street around it was blocked for the biggest parade in New York’s history. (Everything that week was the biggest, grandest, most spectacular, never equaled …) A reported two million

spectators lined six miles of city avenues. Buildings were festooned with bunting and there was a lusty feeling in the air. Near the Flatiron Building a group of young men sat on the awning of a cigar store. An attractive young woman walked by, and they invited her up. This would have been hard to imagine a few years earlier: an unmarried woman climbing a ladder in public. But now nearly half of all single women in New York worked for wages, supporting themselves and often their families. They could be found, unchaperoned, on the beach at Coney Island, or in the racy “dance academies” doing the latest steps from Vernon and Irene Castle. The young woman started gamely up the ladder. All eyes followed her. When a gust of wind whipped her skirt up almost to her knees, the crowd roared its approval.

Teams of matched horses pulled fifty-two elaborate floats, each one illustrating an important phase or moment in New York history. Column after column of marchers represented the city’s national societies, each with its own brass band: Norwegians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, French, and Irish. “The colored societies, though not largely represented, attracted a good deal of attention,” the Times observed.

Word spread down the long parade route: Charlie Murphy is marching! This was truly news. Charles F. Murphy was rarely seen but often talked about. He was the Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, Squire Croker’s successor as boss of the city. People craned for a look as the Tammany banner passed. First they saw a long column of men with their faces painted red—the Tammany “braves.” They were supposed to be Indians, but most of them were easily recognizable by a familiar blond mustache or shock of red hair. In a city of more than four and a half million, these men—the nuts and bolts and gears and cogs of the city’s political machine—were minor celebrities. Behind the braves came the sachems, wearing silk top hats rather than face paint, for they were men of distinction, some of the most famous individuals in the city: Tom Foley of the Second District, a rotund saloon keeper whose battle with Paddy Divver for the leadership—among the bloodiest elections in city history—was still fresh in many minds. Thomas MacManus of the Fifteenth, known to everyone simply as “The” (as though there could be no MacManus but he). “Battery Dan” Finn, the jolly judge who ran the First. And the baron among barons, Big Tim Sullivan of the Sixth, the beloved, clear-eyed “feller” who stood squarely at the intersection of New York politics and vice, directing traffic and collecting tolls.

Murphy turned out to be a solidly built man with rimless eyeglasses and brush-cut hair. Though he had run the Hall for more than seven years, “it was the first time that many in the crowd had ever seen Mr. Murphy on parade,” the Times observed. The crowd eyed him carefully. So this was the man all

the newspapers hated. The citizens sized up the boss and apparently many liked what they saw, because as he marched past the crowd burst into song. Oh! You! Charlie Murphy! The ditty followed him southward down the island. The boss was plainly pleased by this reception. Elite opinions did not worry him much. “It is the fate of political leaders to be reviled,” Murphy once said, in a rare burst of oratory. “If one is too thin-skinned to stand it, he should never take the job.” But the mood of ordinary voters was the most important variable in his life, especially with an election fast approaching. Amid one of the largest gatherings of ordinary people in the history of New York City, they were cheering and singing his name.

Someone called out: “Tell us yer man for next mayor!” Murphy just smiled.

At age fifty-one, Charles Francis Murphy stood, as much as any man, precisely poised between past and future, one foot in the stifling tenements and the other in the electrified skyscrapers. Born to poor Irish immigrants in 1858, Murphy was classic Tammany material. He grew up in a crowded neighborhood full of Irish and German families, where many of the fathers earned their meager livings at the looming power plant that gave the Gas House District its name. Murphy left school when he was fourteen to work in a wire factory. Later he caulked seams of wooden ships at an East River boatyard. He experienced enough of hard labor to know that he didn’t want a lifetime’s worth. And so—probably after saving up a bribe for Tammany— Murphy landed a job driving a horse-drawn bus for the crosstown Blue Line.

He lived frugally, carrying his lunch with him in a tin pail, and saved enough money to open a saloon on the corner of Nineteenth Street and Avenue A, known as Charlie’s Place. New York in those days had a lot of bars where a man could, in an evening, be poisoned by wood alcohol, serviced by a child prostitute, and beaten to death for the change from his dollar. Charlie’s Place was not like that. Murphy did not tolerate gambling, prostitution, or fighting on the premises. A friend once said, “I would have just as soon thought of telling an off-color story to a lady as I would to Murphy.” He served his customers a schooner of beer and a bowl of soup for a nickel. Only men were allowed.

Upstairs was the headquarters of the Sylvan Club, a social society founded and led by Murphy. Sylvans were popular young men around the Gas House District, fine athletes and fierce Democrats. Sylvan baseball teams, with Murphy at catcher, were perennial champions. Sylvan rowers were smooth with an oar. In 1880, as the presidential election was heating up, Republican leader Barney Biglin challenged the Sylvans to a boat race. On the appointed day, a huge crowd lined the bank of the East River for thirty blocks above One Hundredth Street. Biglin and his three brothers crewed the Republican

boat. The Sylvan crew was led by a sturdy shipyard worker known as Tecumseh. Just before the race was to start, however, Tecumseh got violently ill. Rumors of poison swept through the crowd and fistfights broke out. The scene was on the verge of a riot.

Without saying much, Murphy climbed into the empty seat. The future boss set the cadence and kept it steady as the Democrats went stroke for stroke with the Biglin brothers. Then Murphy poured it on, and the Sylvan boat surged to victory. That night, a happy crowd marched through the shadowy, lamplit streets of the Gas House District, cheering, singing Tammany anthems —and carrying Charlie Murphy on their shoulders.

He was a model barkeep, all ears, and over his bars (eventually he owned four) Murphy met a lot of people. In time, by listening, he came to see how the voters of the Gas House District could be organized and motivated. He performed countless favors, won thousands of friends, and eventually became district leader. Murphy liked to conduct the political business of the neighborhood while leaning against a lamppost on Twentieth Street. Anyone who needed a son out of jail, or a job, or relief from a hassling policeman knew that Mr. Murphy would hear pleas in the flickering glow of the gaslight.

He was a rare man: keen, cunning, patient. When he died in 1924 after almost a quarter-century as boss, Franklin D. Roosevelt pronounced him a “genius.” He was “the most perceptive and intelligent leader” in Tammany’s history, according to one chronicler of the Hall, “with an unsurpassed feel for power and its uses, a superb instinct for timing, and a remarkable ability to cut through surface personalities and judge the prospects and motives of the men beneath. As a political chess player, he never met his match.” When he successfully maneuvered himself onto Squire Croker’s empty throne, Murphy began to realize—slowly, gradually—that progress was inevitable, and that Tammany must be part of it. “He fully understands,” one observer said, “that a political organization cannot survive and grow broader on patronage alone, without political ideas and virtue.”

But how much change was required? What kind? When? Those were more complicated questions. Murphy began with internal change, in hopes of quieting the critics of Tammany corruption. According to George Washington Plunkitt, there were two kinds of graft in Tammany’s world: “dishonest graft” and “honest graft.” Dishonest graft was “robbin’ the city treasury or levyin’ blackmail on disorderly houses, or workin’ in with the gamblers and lawbreakers,” he explained. “Honest graft,” on the other hand, involved the use of inside information and government contracts to enrich Tammany investors. “Supposin’ it’s a new bridge they’re going to build,” Plunkitt said. “I get tipped off and I buy as much property as I can that has to be taken for

approaches. I sell at my own price later on and drop some more money in the bank.”

As district leader, and later as boss, Murphy apparently took his share of “honest” graft. In 1897, Squire Croker appointed him dock commissioner, a lucrative position in which Murphy “set up a system of dock leasing which would later be of great profit to Tammany politicians,” according to Murphy’s biographer, Nancy Joan Weiss. He set up his brother and two associates in the New York Contracting and Trucking Company, which grew rich on no-bid government jobs. Over the years, Murphy’s foes tried without success to prove that he secretly collected money from this company. But just because they couldn’t prove it did not mean it wasn’t true. Somehow, Murphy became a wealthy man, despite the fact that he quit his last paying job at the age of forty-three. He maintained an estate on Long Island, built a private golf course, and vacationed at exclusive resorts.

But Murphy believed that Tammany had to shake free of “dishonest” corruption. When he took control of the Gas House District, “practitioners of ‘skin games’ and corrupt police captains fell by the wayside.” Later, as Grand Sachem, he ousted several corrupt district leaders. Yet he moved cautiously. It wasn’t always clear, in fact, whether Murphy was simply consolidating the dirty business in Big Tim Sullivan’s powerful hands downtown. Sullivan, after all, was the only man in Tammany strong enough to challenge him.

Murphy’s external problems were more difficult. After the turn of the century, Tammany was in danger of losing its base among the city’s poor immigrants. The downtown of Murphy’s youth had been Irish and German and a smattering of “other.” However, the old immigrants began moving up and out, and the New Immigrants, as they came to be known, moved in. These were predominantly Eastern European Jews and, in even greater numbers, Italians.

Of the two groups, Tammany was most interested in the Eastern Europeans. The Italians were, for many years, a transient community, disproportionately male—legions of young men, mostly from the rural south, trying to earn enough money in America to return home and buy a piece of land. Relatively few of them had long-term aspirations in America; therefore, they had little interest in American politics. “It is hard to understand the merriment” of New York’s Italian neighborhoods, one writer declared, “after a walk down from Mott Street, past rickety tenements, dingy hallways, and dark cellars… . Perhaps it is because many of them knew worse alleys in sunny Italy and hope to go back to them some day.” Italian laborers dug tunnels for the subways, lugged iron for the skyscrapers, hammered spikes for the railways. But they rarely voted: their voter registration numbers were the lowest of any ethnic group in New York. Until they voted, they would count little in Charles