One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611)

by Browne, Arthur

  “I could not have stayed on the job if I lost,” he would remember. “There was no Human Rights Commission, and you couldn’t go complaining to a civil rights group. They would have thought I was a weakling and trampled me. In those days you stood up alone and put knuckle to jaw.”7

  At the six-month mark, Wesley moved up from probationary firefighter to full-fledged member of the department. Around that time, encountering a house fire while off duty in Williamsbridge, he led a woman and six children to safety. The department withheld official recognition. Then, Wesley happened by a fire while walking with a white firefighter assigned to another company in the neighborhood that today is trendy SoHo. Rushing in together, the two men guided trapped people to safety. The department recognized the heroism of Wesley’s partner in the rescue, but Wesley’s valor was chalked up to routine action. It was the same when Wesley rescued a woman and two children from a serious blaze while on duty.

  Brennan, though, kept his commitment to fairness. After the company got a first gasoline-powered rig, he asked Wesley to adjust its placement in the firehouse. Wesley drew on his experience driving a postal truck—experience unmatched by anyone in the company—to flawlessly execute a tight maneuver on a narrow, crowded street. Brennan ordered that from then on Wesley, instead of the company’s senior man, would drive to fires. Someone took revenge by placing Wesley’s helmet on the floor so that the truck crushed it.

  The rig had no cab. The driver sat prominently in view on a high, exposed seat in front of a steam kettle that powered a water pump.8 Wesley could not be missed as he raced to alarms. His visible place of honor infuriated many fellow officers. Once, a chief protested Wesley’s arrival at a three-alarm fire by refusing to issue orders to the company, sidelining the men as others fought the blaze.

  As Battle had predicted, Wesley had moved up on the merits. Many years later, when Wesley and Brennan were retired, Wesley would look back fondly on the decency shown by this one white man who “was the strongest influence in my rising to the rank of battalion chief” and who had “instructed and guided me as if I were his own son.”

  TWO HIGHER POWERS took command of Battle’s future: the Democratic Party’s corrupt Tammany Hall political machine and a ruthless police commissioner named Richard E. Enright.

  Tammany Hall’s roots trace to colonial America. After ratification of the US Constitution, New York upholsterer William Mooney organized a citizens’ group around the theme of patriotic democracy. He called it the Society of St. Tammany, Tammany being the name of a mythical chief of the Lenni-Lenape Delaware Indian tribe. Tammany was celebrated for purportedly discovering corn, beans, and tobacco and for inventing the canoe.

  A growing membership transformed Mooney’s nonpartisan society into a political force. Espousing a philosophy that stood for the common man over the privileged, the organization eventually took control of the Democratic Party, along with governmental power and spoils. Tammany leaders awarded patronage jobs and moneymaking opportunities to members who contributed to the society’s success. They also engaged in excesses—a dip into the treasury here, a fraud on the taxpayers there—that pushed Tammany toward the infamous corruption of William Marcy “Boss” Tweed.

  Tweed stole power by directing underlings to falsify vote counts when necessary, and he stole money through kickbacks on contracts: Vendors sold goods or services to the city government only if they inflated bills by as much as 65 percent and surrendered the overpayments to Tweed’s ring. Estimates of the thefts ranged from $30 million to $75 million in the dollars of those days, with the cost of building a courthouse notoriously topping out at four times the price of the House of Parliament in London.

  Eventually, the law caught up to Tweed. Once accustomed to sporting “a diamond like a planet in his shirt front,” he died in the Ludlow Street Jail.9 Tammany Hall wobbled for a few years after Tweed’s downfall, but his successors soon restored its power, along with less blatantly rapacious plunder—at the center of which was the police department.

  In 1870, Tweed had shrewdly engineered revisions to the city charter that placed the force under a four-member board of police commissioners. The panel was charged with setting policy and naming a superintendent, or police chief, to carry it out. On paper, the structure promised deliberative, independent policing. In fact, the arrangement empowered Tammany to approve or veto potential board members, dictate to superintendents, and introduce to stationhouses the favors and repayments, refusals, and retributions that were the currency of politics. The man who wanted a cop’s steady pay, an easier assignment, or a promotion—or a break when he got into trouble—was well advised to be on excellent terms with his Tammany district leader.

  The system produced William “Big Bill” Devery, who remains, more than a century later, the most flamboyant rogue in New York Police Department history.

  A son of Irish immigrants, Devery was born in 1857 in a room over a saloon on the East Side, a grimy neighborhood seemingly populated in equal proportions by cripples and criminals. His uncle owned the saloon, as well as additional bars that catered to burglars, roughhousers, and thugs. Devery grew up running errands among the drinking spots, and then he followed a natural trajectory onto the force.10 All around him, Irishmen and their boys found opportunity in policing, one bringing the next onboard until the group had hold of a good, secure workplace.

  Just as important, Devery was raised in a household that swore allegiance to the Democratic machine. “I carried my father’s dinner pail when he was laying the bricks of Tammany Hall,” Devery would one day say, apparently remembering construction of the organization’s headquarters.11

  Fully at home, Devery won promotion to sergeant in 1884 and to captain in 1891. Quite likely, he paid his way up the ladder. In 1892, the Mail and Express reported that Tammany had set an informal rate schedule: $300 to join the force; $1,400 to rise to sergeant; and $14,000 to make captain, the last being a truly astonishing figure. Factoring in inflation, it is equivalent in twenty-first-century dollars to $350,000.

  The sum is best seen as an investment that paid handsome returns. Graft was rampant. The higher a man rose in the ranks, the more money he could collect, and cash was plentiful because New York was bedeviled by commerce in sex, gambling, and alcohol.

  To Devery, the vices were simply part of the human condition, none of the business of preachers and none of the business of police—except in taking a cut of the proceeds. This he accomplished with unprecedented efficiency after gaining the rank of captain at the youthful age of thirty-five.

  The department posted Captain Devery at a stationhouse that served the Lower East Side, the world’s most densely populated area, nine square blocks teeming with poverty-stricken Jewish immigrants, mostly from Russia and Poland. They crowded into squalid tenements, labored in garment sweatshops, kept faith in rudimentary synagogues, and patronized twenty-five brothels.

  Devery’s officers met a thick-necked bull of a man. He was five feet ten, had a fifty-inch waist, wore size seventeen shoes, and sported a moustache to do a walrus proud. As legendarily recounted, he laid down the law: “They tell me there’s a lot of graftin’ going on in this precinct. They tell me you fellows are the fiercest ever on graft. Now, that’s goin’ to stop. If there’s any graftin’ to be done, I’ll do it.”

  The bill for a brothel was a $500 “new captain” initiation fee, plus $50 a month. The proprietors of gambling halls paid similar fees, some to offer wagering on horse racing, others to take bets on the numbers. Saloon owners made payments for the privilege of serving patrons at all hours, most importantly on Sunday, the lone day of rest for six-day-a-week workingmen.12

  With money pouring in, Devery gave percentages to his police superiors and to Tammany Hall. The system of payments and protection applied in every precinct so that the vice laws became meaningless. Finally, the ruling-class Protestant elite recoiled. Asserting moral superiority, they held Catholic and Jewish immigrants responsible for debauching the city and set o
ut to restore virtue, both for its own sake and as a means of regaining political prominence over the masses who powered the Democratic machine.

  Devery bore the brunt of the reformers’ assaults. Five years apart, two state legislative committees revealed him to be a lynchpin of organized graft. Two grand juries indicted him on criminal charges, once for neglect of duty, once for bribery. Through it all, Devery made a comic opera of attempts to bring him down. He laughed past legislative interrogations with the answer, “Touchin’ on and appertainin’ to that matter, I disremember.” When juries acquitted him of criminal charges, he lighted enormous celebratory cigars.

  By his brazenness, Devery personified the dark side in a fight for New York’s soul. The struggle’s opposing hero was brash young Teddy Roosevelt. After an accumulation of Tammany scandals, the voters installed a Republican mayor, who appointed Roosevelt in 1895 to the board of police commissioners. His colleagues then elected Roosevelt to serve as the board’s president, and he set out not only to reform the force but also to conquer Tammany—and, still more, to improve the morals of New York at large.

  The public cheered his swashbuckling—for a time. Huzzahs faded after Roosevelt relentlessly enforced the law that barred alcohol sales on Sundays, when the saloons were filled with good citizens enjoying what little time they had for leisure. Starting his second year in office, he marched to boos in the police department’s annual parade, while Devery was a crowd favorite. Roosevelt grew more determined than ever to fire the Tammany grafter. All his efforts came to naught when President William McKinley appointed Roosevelt assistant US secretary of war, ending his tumultuous twenty-three months as president of the board.

  The next mayoral election restored the Democratic machine’s grip on City Hall. Tammany boss Richard Croker took control of the board and engineered Devery’s installation as chief of police, the department’s highest-ranking uniformed position. “Too much praise cannot be given to the police department as presently administered by Chief Devery,” Croker declared as Devery cast aside consistent enforcement of laws and regulations with a showman’s flair.

  Nightly, he ran the department from beside a fire hydrant, known as “The Pump” at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street in the Tenderloin. Often he displayed wads of cash. Captains, politicians, and gangsters came by to conduct business, of which there was plenty. As a noted writer for Harper’s Weekly put it in 1898, “New York is wide open once more. Tammany Hall has at last secured its ‘terrible revenge.’”13

  The New York Times calculated that gambling interests alone were making protection payments totaling $3 million a year—an amount equal to more than $80 million today. Still more astounding, Devery went into the gaming trade directly by joining a syndicate with Frank Farrell, the city’s preeminent professional bookmaker, and “Big Tim” Sullivan, a state senator and Tammany mainstay.

  Often drunk, he brought hilarity to punishing cops found guilty of wrongdoing. He fined an officer who had recklessly fired a gun thirty days’ pay for “not hittin’ nothing,” and he docked a second officer two days for kissing a girl in a hallway while on duty. “I would kiss a girl myself; there’s lots of things I’d do and do do but I’ll never get caught,” Devery said. “And so I herewith fine you good and plenty for getting caught.”

  Most famously, he explained to a third officer the code he expected cops to uphold: “When you’re caught with the goods on you and you can’t get away with it, you want to stand up with nerve and take your medicine. You don’t know nothin’ then. No matter under what circumstances, a man doesn’t want to know nothin’ when he’s caught with the goods on him.”

  Meanwhile, Roosevelt had left Washington to lead the Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill and had then been elected New York’s governor. He took a final stab at cutting Tammany and Devery down to size by signing legislation that abolished the Board of Commissioners and gave the mayor power to appoint a single commissioner. To the relief of reformers, Mayor Robert Van Wyck, a Tammany man, named Civil War Medal of Honor winner Michael Murphy as commissioner, and then, to their horror, Murphy gave Devery full command as first deputy commissioner.

  Devery’s ride ended after Tammany lost the mayoralty in 1901. No longer a member of the department for the first time in almost a quarter-century, he took to civilian life with a hefty wallet. He bought an interest in a racetrack and joined with gambling syndicate partners Sullivan and Farrell in one of the most consequential New York investments ever made. Together, they purchased and brought to the city a Baltimore baseball team that would become the Yankees. Eventually, he would adopt the interlocking letters N and Y that remain the team’s classic insignia.

  LONG INDESTRUCTIBLE ATOP the department, Devery dominated the formative years on the police force of future commissioner Richard E. Enright. After Devery’s ouster, Enright, then a young cop, saw the crowning and overthrow of a succession of commissioners who lacked either the savvy or the political muscle to bring the department to heel. He played a deft insider’s game to win advancement. Promoted to sergeant, he organized a Sergeants Benevolent Association, part labor union, part lobbying firm, part society dedicated to aiding the widows and orphans of deceased members. Enright leveraged the functions to become the one man who spoke for the sergeants, and speak he did, portraying them in flowery orations as noble and graft-free protectors of the public. He furthered his influence by giving the commissioners who came and went a financial incentive to play ball, rewarding one who had promoted ninety-one men to sergeant with a silver loving cup and five hundred pieces of silver tableware.

  As Battle weathered the silent treatment and exile to the stationhouse flag loft, Enright moved on to building a Lieutenants Benevolent Association into a still more potent force. His annual dinners in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel drew the rich and powerful, including President William Howard Taft. Among those who sent regrets were Devery, Andrew Carnegie, and Mark Twain.14

  Enright became a casualty of war when voters threw the bums out. A reform mayor and police commissioner took office in 1914. Committed to tilting at the windmill of a corruption cleanup, the new commissioner established the department’s first internal affairs unit. He called it the Confidential Squad and gave command to a warhorse of a captain known as “Honest Dan” Costigan.

  With Sergeant Lewis Valentine at his side, Costigan identified commanders who were in Tammany Hall’s pocket by raiding gambling houses in their precincts. He also seized the records of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association, infuriating Enright with an investigation that turned up no wrongdoing. The commissioner then denied Enright a promotion to captain, even though by exam score he was at the top of the list.

  Enright would have his revenge. The machine prevailed anew on Election Day 1917, installing as mayor Mike “Red” Hylan, a hotheaded Brooklyn Democrat and former train motorman. Hylan stunned New York by appointing Enright commissioner, elevating him over 122 more-senior officers. With New York’s governor studying whether to remove Enright from office out of that fear he would open the door to police corruption, Devery endorsed the appointment, saying, “It takes a former cop to make the department go. Enright is the boy to do it.”

  In short order, Enright disbanded the Confidential Squad, exiled Costigan and Valentine to grueling posts, and closed the department’s honor roll to Valentine’s partner Floyd Horton, who had been killed in the line of duty. When Devery died in 1918, Enright ordered flags lowered to half-staff, assigned the department’s one-hundred-piece band to play on the day of the funeral, and made sure that a handpicked honor guard escorted his role model’s casket from church to burial.15

  Shrewdly, Enright established a closely held unit to handle sensitive investigations and to enforce the law—or not—as he saw fit. He called the squad the Special Service Division. High on its list of responsibilities were prostitution, gambling, and illegal alcohol sales, the vices where crime, money, and political power intersected. No police c
ommissioner could ignore the statutes, but no police commissioner could enforce them with crusading zeal and expect to stay in office for long. Appointment to the unit was by Enright’s invitation. He needed good cops and good superior officers who were more than that. He needed good cops and good superior officers whom he could trust.

  And now Captain Cornelius Willemse put in a word for the big Negro, Sam Battle, who’d gone undercover to catch a murderer in the Tombs. Enright ordered Battle to report. No one in the department had ever opened a door for him without a fight, let alone a door to the commissioner’s elite unit, but here Enright was saying that Battle had earned a coveted posting. He took the assignment as confirmation that a black man could endure to win his due. He was glad also to serve again as a beacon for others at a time when the post–World War I determination of the New Negro had produced a small surge in African American recruits.

  Edward Jackson secured state legislation that enabled him to join the force after losing an eye on the battlefield. Wesley Redding, son of a high school teacher and a bank worker, emigrated from Atlanta to New York and worked as a Pennsylvania Station railroad cop before joining the department. Emmanuel Kline, son of a freed slave, arrived from South Carolina, studied English at Columbia University and French at the Berlitz School, and served overseas in the 376th Infantry Division. He came home to work as a redcap for Chief Williams at Grand Central and then followed Battle’s path onto the force.

  In 1918, the New York Police Department opened its ranks to a handful of women. They were issued badges but did not wear standard uniforms or perform standard patrol. A unit headed by the department’s first female deputy commissioner focused on the “white slave traffic,” abortions, fortune telling, “wayward girls,” and “domestic relations cases.” In 1919, Cora Parchmont, a graduate of the University of Chicago and a former high school teacher, became the first black policewoman. “We will try to keep unfortunate ones from going to prison instead of aiming to imprison them,” Parchmont told the Chicago Defender.