Those anti-immigrant and anti-Italian attitudes would wax and wane over the next half century, typically in harmony with the ups and downs of the economy, but they never disappeared entirely, and they would, as much as anything else, shape the future Hellhound of Wall Street.
Unlike most Italian immigrants, who took refuge in the emerging Little Italys on the Lower East Side and in East Harlem, the Pecoras moved to Chelsea, a largely Irish neighborhood. Most likely Luigi, having fled Sicily in the face of religious discrimination, was not keen on re-creating the same social ostracism that had plagued the family there.9
If Luigi’s goal was instant acceptance into American society, he met with little success, especially as far as his third son was concerned. Ferdinand felt isolated in his new home. “Of course, we were in every sense strangers in a strange land,” he recalled. The Irish residents of Chelsea, although themselves relative newcomers to the United States, did not think much of these Italian interlopers. Ferdinand was the only Italian in his school, and his classmates hurled the usual racial slurs at him—wop, guinea, dago.10
In truth, when he was young he was embarrassed at being Italian. Pecora simply wanted to fit in, to shed his foreignness, to become an American like everyone else. Even in the ethnic enclaves, the desire of a newly arrived immigrant child to assimilate was overwhelming. Pecora’s isolation from the larger Italian émigré community made his craving to fit in virtually inevitable. For Pecora, a large part of discarding his minority status seemed to require proving the Italian stereotype wrong, at least as far as he was concerned. If most people thought Italians were unintelligent, he would excel in school. If most thought Italians lazy, he would be industrious. If most thought they were lawless, he would become a lawyer.
In his late fifties, Ferdinand discussed that desire to quickly assimilate to life in the United States in a short radio address for a series called I Am an American. All traces of an Italian or even a New York accent had long since vanished from his speech. His voice was rich and his articulation precise. He had perfected the mid-Atlantic accent of a well-educated, upper-class, urbane American; indeed, his tones and cadences were remarkably similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s. Turning his father’s decision to shun the Italian American community into an asset, he began with a boast of complete immersion in his new culture. He chided residents of ethnic enclaves, “who follow still the Old World ways and customs of life,” and criticized those “who never learned our language well enough to really understand America.” That last bit of phrasing is significant. He didn’t complain that Italians weren’t learning English; he complained that they weren’t learning “our language.” He really did think of himself as an American, not an Italian.11
Pecora’s teachers almost certainly fostered that attitude. Public schools were at the forefront of Americanization efforts when Pecora began to attend them in 1888. As educators saw it, their job was to churn out loyal Americans by forcing children to forsake their cultures. In fact, in his first year at Public School 55 his teachers even made Ferdinand change the pronunciation of his name. In Italian, his surname is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable. But to Miss Anderson, Pecora’s first grade teacher, that did not sound “euphonious.” “Well,” she told him, “it’s easier to say Pe-coŕ-a than Peć-or-a.” And that was the way that he, and everyone else, pronounced it for the rest of his life.12
Compounding Pecora’s isolation was the family’s desperate financial straits. Even when he was still quite young, Ferdinand could see that his family was far worse off than those around it. The Pecoras settled on Ninth Avenue, between 18th and 19th streets. For eight dollars each month, the family rented a basement cold-water flat that was originally intended as a storeroom for the shop above. The building sat in the shadow of the elevated train, the smoke and cinders drifting down on their apartment below. The basement was just one room, but thin partitions walled it off into three small areas. The front was reserved for Luigi’s shoe repair shop, and the family squeezed itself into the little space that was left. The apartment was well below street level, and so dark that they could see only by waiting for their eyes to adjust to the feeble light from the kerosene lamps. The only heat was from the coal stove they used for cooking. The toilet was a pit in the backyard.13
Pecora’s block was something of a borderland. To the south and west stretched a hodgepodge of tenements filled with the Irish working poor, industrial buildings, coal and lumber yards, meatpacking plants, and a bustling water-front. Just north, however, Pecora could see a different New York—a middle-class, Anglo-Saxon New York of tidy, high-stooped brownstones. It wasn’t long before Pecora came in contact with that other New York, when the family began to attend St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, a short walk north from their apartment.
Eager to fit in, Pecora immersed himself in a host of church activities. He helped run the Young Men’s Club. As an organizer of the Reading and Debating Club, he tackled the works of Shakespeare (he was fascinated by the speeches in Julius Caesar). He read all of Dickens’s novels before he was fourteen, along with armfuls of histories and biographies. He excelled in the club’s debates, where he argued about everything from American imperialism to whether Utah’s representation in Congress should be tied to outlawing polygamy.14
Pecora loved being the center of attention in those debates and in the shows the boys put on for the parishioners. He had a strong need for approval, a craving for external affirmation. He began to develop a real love for dramatic performances. It was part of what later drew him to the courtroom. He thrived on the “drama of the law being performed in the trial courts” where he could see “the play of human nature.”15
To get his drama fix when he was young, Pecora began going to the Grand Opera House on 23rd Street. He didn’t have the money for admission, of course, but a classmate’s father worked in the theater and was able to sneak him into the gallery for free. At one point, he even made it onto the stage, appearing as an extra in a production of Julius Caesar, which starred one of the leading actors of the day, Richard Mansfield. It was an “unforgettable experience” for Pecora, and a testament to his need for acceptance and acclaim. As he later recalled, there were “a number of occasions when the applause was terrific when I was on stage and I looked up hopefully, but then I saw Mansfield taking the bows.”16
Most of his friends at St. Peter’s were from, as Pecora called it, the “higher caste” that lived in those “very, very attractive” brownstones in the northern part of Chelsea and occasionally he would be invited to their homes. The visits “instilled” in him “a desire for a better kind of living.” That desire to succeed also came from the church’s rector, Reverend Olin Scott Roche. Before the ministry the plump Roche had a short career on Wall Street, and his sermons were still suffused with the American dream, although he did not define success only in material terms. Young people, he told the congregation, should have aspirations. “The trouble, especially with young men,” he preached, “is that they set limits and bounds to their opportunities and capabilities. That is the reason they do not accomplish all that the Creator has fitted for them.” Roche urged Pecora and the other young men to “help the world, attempt something, achieve something, and receive your reward—the thanks of men and the blessing of God.”17
Pecora bought into Roche’s philosophy wholeheartedly. “Individual initiative,” he told radio listeners years later, “the hope of advancement through one’s own efforts—these elements seem to me the fundamentals of progress in the American spirit.” Pecora’s determination to succeed, however, did little to improve his lot in the short term. In fact, the family’s financial hardship quickly devolved into something much worse. Within two years of settling in New York, Ferdinand’s oldest brother, Nicholas, died of pneumonia. Four years later, Ferdinand’s older brother George drowned in the Hudson River, where the boys used to go to cool off in the hot summers, swimming off a busy pier at the foot of 22nd Street.
At ten, Ferdinan
d was now the oldest of the seven surviving children, and he was therefore expected to help support the family. He began to get up at six thirty in the morning to deliver quart milk cans throughout the neighborhood and after school he would hawk newspapers. When he was just eleven Ferdinand began to spend his summer breaks working in a shoe factory with his father, who had given up his struggling repair shop in the midst of a severe depression. Decades before New York began to enact effective laws regulating working conditions, the factory was brimming with dangerous machinery that frequently lacked even the most rudimentary of safety features. Ferdinand, who worked for as long as fourteen hours a day in those brutal conditions, saw “many sad cases of the workingmen being injured and carried out” of the factory.18
Encouraged by his parents, who had the “strongest desire . . . that all of their children should have as much of the advantages of education as they could possibly acquire,” Ferdinand excelled in school and made long strides toward winning over his originally wary classmates. At the time the New York City public school system only went to the eighth grade, and when Pecora graduated, in 1895, he was both valedictorian and class president. Pecora was clearly smart and driven, and he wanted to continue his education and become a lawyer. Private prep school was out of the question; the free City College was the only realistic option. He sat for the entrance exam in June 1896, when he was old enough to enter, and ended up with the fifteenth highest score in the city.
Pecora enrolled briefly, but he didn’t stay long. At St. Peter’s, Pecora had caught the eye of Reverend Roche, who identified him as one of the church’s “bright boys.” Roche convinced Luigi that Ferdinand should study for the Episcopal ministry, and Ferdinand, the dutiful son, gave up his dream of becoming a lawyer. Through Roche’s efforts, Pecora won a scholarship to attend St. Stephen’s College in Annandale, New York, a classic liberal arts college for young men who planned to enter the Episcopal seminary, since renamed Bard College.19
Pecora enrolled in the tiny school—it had just eighty-five students—in September 1896. But his stay at St. Stephen’s and his pursuit of the Episcopal ministry were nearly as short-lived as his City College career. Just before Christmas of that first semester, he learned that his father had been in a serious accident at the shoe factory, leaving him completely incapacitated. Workers’ compensation was still decades away, and Pecora knew that “next to my mother, I was the only one who had any kind of physical capacity to be a breadwinner.” Without consulting his parents, Pecora gave up his scholarship and hurried back to the city. He was the oldest son and his responsibility was to support his family. Just shy of his fifteenth birthday, Pecora’s college career was over.20
For Ferdinand, leaving school was something of a mixed blessing. His mother was working in a Lower East Side sweatshop, and every night Ferdinand was appalled to see her trudge home bent under great bundles of unfinished work. After making dinner for the family, she would work well into the night stitching clothes. Rosa was exhausted and her face grew deeply lined from the stress and strain. Twenty years later, long after Rosa was able to quit the sweatshop, Ferdinand was amazed that his mother, then in her fifties, looked “far more youthful than she did in those photographs taken of her in the latter part of these so-called Gay Nineties.”21
As a teenager providing the main economic support for his mother and six brothers and sisters, Pecora was under incredible strain. Unless you lived in the tenements, wrote Pecora’s contemporary, the New York politician and labor reformer Robert Wagner, “you cannot know the haunting sense of insecurity which hangs over the home of the worker.” But Ferdinand’s heart had never really been in the Episcopal ministry. This was his chance to return to law. He replied to just two help-wanted ads, both for clerks in law offices, and he quickly landed one of the positions. Over the next twenty years, as he struggled to support his family and help put his younger brothers and sisters through school, Pecora would slowly ascend the legal ranks, first becoming a managing clerk, then going to law school, and finally becoming a member of the bar.22
With his interest in law and his prodigious speaking skills, he naturally turned to politics. In 1896, when he was just fourteen, Pecora had gone to Madison Square Garden to hear William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats’ populist presidential nominee. He came away enthralled with Bryan’s oratorical skill and captivated with his liberal politics. As he remembered in his oral history interview in the 1960s, “Mr. Bryan had the finest voice that I have ever heard on the lecture platform or any platform. He held that big throng just enchanted, partly by the wizardry of his voice I think as well as by the content of his speech.”
Ferdinand gravitated to progressivism instead of the more radical strains of socialism, communism, or anarchism that had gained a toehold in the United States, particularly among disaffected immigrants. Pecora just couldn’t “see any virtue in the fundamental principle of abolishing private property. I am a believer in the capitalistic system. I always felt that if the evils of capitalism could be excised from our economic system that the principle of capitalism is sounder than that of state ownership of the means of production and distribution.” Progressivism did just that; it preserved the essential American structure but tried to smooth off its rough edges. Pecora’s prescriptions reflected his own hard youth. What the country needed, Pecora thought, were “child labor laws; . . . workmen’s compensation laws; [and] factory laws that would provide the workingman with a much safer place in which to do his work.”23
That outlook led him to join the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party in 1912 and, like Norbeck, to support Theodore Roosevelt’s unsuccessful third-party bid for the presidency. He became an active and accomplished stump speaker renowned for his extemporaneous speaking skills. When Pecora asked one political leader for suggestions for what he might say in a speech, the surprised reply was, “Since when did it become necessary for you to prepare a speech?” Indeed, sometimes Pecora could go on for more than anyone would have liked; “Pecora,” Thomas Dewey complained, “was one of the most long-winded men God ever made.” Unlike many great speakers, Pecora could also improvise, although that skill almost got him in trouble a few times. When a promoter mistakenly told a crowd that the well-known rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise was to speak at a rally, Pecora, at the promoter’s urging, pretended to be the rabbi’s assistant so as not to disappoint the gathered throng. Pecora quickly fled the scene after his impromptu speech as the crowd pushed in and began to speak to him in Yiddish. Wise thought the whole episode was hilarious and from then on he called Pecora his “Italian Assistant Rabbi.”24
For all Pecora’s hard work, New York’s Progressive Party was a bust, managing to elect only a handful of state senators and assemblymen. When Teddy Roosevelt decided not to make another run under the Progressive banner in 1916, Pecora had a choice. New York had some progressive Republicans—men like Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia, who was elected to Congress for the first time that year. But Pecora decided instead to join the Democratic Party and support Woodrow Wilson for president. Here, too, Pecora faced a choice. Being a Democrat in New York City in 1916 meant either joining the city’s notorious political machine, Tammany Hall, or becoming an independent Democrat. Most progressives abhorred the political machines, but the latter option probably meant continuing to lose. The ambitious Pecora joined Tammany.25
It was a calculated and pragmatic political decision, although Pecora could still claim that he was not completely abandoning his liberal principles. At the time, Charles Murphy ran Tammany. Murphy was no saint; he had grown wealthy in his stint as Tammany leader, mostly by making sure that his companies won city contracts. According to Murphy’s rather nuanced moral system, those kinds of moneymaking opportunities were counted as acceptable “honest graft.” Murphy clamped down on what he called “dishonest graft”—things like paying the police to look the other way while the bosses ran or profited from prostitution or gambling operations. Murphy’s fine-grained distinctions certainly wouldn’t pas
s muster today, but he was a vast improvement over prior bosses.
Murphy was also no ordinary political hack. He was very much an instrumentalist; all he wanted was to ensure the long-term success of Tammany, and to Murphy that meant making the machine respectable. He recognized, particularly after the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in 1911, which killed 146 largely immigrant workers, that winning the fealty and votes of that burgeoning population was not simply a matter of providing patronage jobs, clambakes, and holiday food baskets. It involved giving them factory reforms and workers’ compensation, providing women’s suffrage and the direct election of senators. And that is just what Tammany did. Following the lead of his protégés, the future governor Al Smith and future senator Robert Wagner, Murphy helped push through the New York legislature some of the most progressive legislation in the country.26
Pecora threw himself into success in Tammany the same way he had thrown himself into winning over his classmates in Chelsea. “Pecora is the kind of man,” one politician described, “who attends practically every dinner that is given.” He began on the lowest rung of the political ladder, working in the local political clubhouse. In Pecora’s case, recognition by the party’s higher ups was not long in coming. With his verbal gifts, Pecora quickly joined Tammany’s Speakers’ Bureau, the crew of young political guns who gave stump speeches around the city on behalf of Tammany candidates. It was the same place where Smith and Wagner had started. Pecora’s political career seemed to be taking off.27
The Hellhound of Wall Street Page 4
