Ideally, the workers would fall in with the program as easily as the ore gave itself up from the ground. In the words of Frederick Taylor, the renowned efficiency expert who spent much of his career in the steel industry, the perfect laborer was "merely a man more or less the type of the ox, heavy both mentally and physically"-all the better to behave exactly as told, and to do so without complaint.
Much to the dismay of employers, workers refused to play their a.s.signed role. They wanted to earn more money while working fewer hours, in better conditions. When, in the summer of 1892, Carnegie"s second-in-command, Henry Clay Frick, told unskilled workers at a plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, that he intended to lower lower their already meager wages, they responded in an altogether un-oxlike manner. They struck. their already meager wages, they responded in an altogether un-oxlike manner. They struck.
Frick immediately fired all 3,800, then surrounded the plant with a barbed wiretrimmed fence and shipped in 300 armed Pinkertons to protect strikebreakers. As the Pinkertons arrived by barge on the night of July 5, 1892, gunfire broke out between guards and strikers. Nine workers and seven guards were killed, and 163 more seriously injured, before the skirmish ended. Six days later, the governor of Pennsylvania came to Frick"s aid, placing Homestead under martial law and effectively terminating the strike. Frick reduced the mill wage by half and brought in replacements.
"Our victory now complete and most gratifying," Frick cabled Carnegie, who had removed himself to his estate in Scotland. "We had to teach our employees a lesson and we have taught them one they will never forget."
He was right. There would be no more union activity at Homestead for another 44 years. An executive at U.S. Steel, which took over the Homestead plant in 1901, later expressed management policy even more bluntly than Frick: "I have always had one rule: if a workman sticks up his head, hit it."
The steelworkers had been subdued. The ironworkers were another story-a story in which Sam Parks would play a large role. Sam Parks had his own policy: he hit back.
[image]
Sam Parks.
(Courtesy of Wirtz Labor Library, U.S. Department of Labor) SAM I AM.
In a 1902 photograph his power is evident. His face is sharp-boned, his hair slicked back, his moustache dark and thick beneath his prow nose. His expression is flat but his eyes glimmer with intensity. As you stare at them, they stare right back, seeming to take your measure and find you lacking. Even those who despised Parks acknowledged the remarkable force of his character. "In many ways he is a leader of men," said New York District Attorney William Jerome, the man who would devote himself to putting Parks in jail. "He has personal magnetism and the power to convince others that his word is law. He has physical bravery, daring, and a dashing style of leadership. He is a brute, his language is foul, and the man is personally offensive to decent people, but his shrewdness is beyond question."
Parks had arrived in New York in 1895 at the invitation of the George A. Fuller Company, the builders of the Flatiron. He had worked for Fuller in Chicago, and when the company opened an office in New York, it asked Parks to come east and work as a foreman. The exact nature of Parks" relationship with Fuller would later become a subject of speculation. For the moment, Parks was simply another ironworker, albeit a gifted one.
William Starrett, of the legendary Starrett family of builders, recalled working with Parks in New York in the 1890s. Starrett was a young man at the time, recently embarked on a l.u.s.trous career that would lead, in time, to the Empire State Building, and he had been given his first opportunity to supervise a steel erection job. Steel was starting to rise from the hole, but young Starrett, anxious and inexperienced, still had no foreman to run his riveting gangs. Just then, "a long, lanky Englishman tapped me on the shoulder," Starrett recalled years later in his memoir (apparently confusing Parks" Irish brogue for an English accent). "It was Sam Parks, that debonair Robin Hood of the building industry.... Sam produced a pair of overalls, and within an hour his bellowing voice resounded in that deep excavation, and I knew that I had a leader."
Parks didn"t do much in the way of hands-on ironwork after the Starrett job. He"d found his true calling in the work of the union. Just before Parks" arrival in New York, structural ironworkers had reorganized into the Housesmiths" and Bridgemen"s Society. Its members were still bloodied by the strike they"d lost a few years earlier. And they were still making between $1.75 and $2.50 for a 10-hour day while their Chicago counterparts were making $4. Parks was their man.
Within three months of his arrival in New York, Parks managed to get himself elected as walking delegate. The job of walking delegate, common to trade unions at the end of the nineteenth century, was to patrol the job on behalf of the union; to ensure that the men were being treated fairly and that no scabs were sneaking onto union jobs; to find work for the idle; and to provide a decent burial for the dead. In theory, it was useful and reasonable to have such men to act as watchdogs and facilitators. In practice, the position was a breeding ground for the kind of corruption in which Parks would soon come to specialize.
Parks at once dedicated himself to "organizing" Local 2. Another walking delegate, named Ely, later described Parks" remarkable efficacy in the early days of his tenure: "I was organizing on the East Side, but I could make no headway at all. I met Parks who had just started in to organize the West Side and he offered to change places with me. I agreed, and in about six weeks he had the entire East Side organized. Every Friday over three hundred dollars was coming in at the meetings of the union for initiation fees. I met with as little success on the West Side as on the East Side, and Parks changed off with me again. In six or seven weeks, he had the West Side as thoroughly organized as the East Side. How he did it, I don"t know."
How he did it, according to Parks" own account, was with his fists: "In organizing men in New York I talked with them at first nice and pleasant, explaining how they could be better off in a union. Bosses began to learn that I was about and pretty busy; and they had men stationed around to "do" me. But they could not keep me off a job. I sneaked up ladders and elevator shafts, stole up on beams, waited for the men on cellar doors where they ate their dinner. Some did not believe that unions would be good for them; and I gave them a belt on the jaw. That changed their minds."
Parks once claimed to have gotten into as many as 20 fistfights in a single day"s work. "I like a fight," he said. "It"s nothing after you"ve risked your life bridge-riveting at three dollars a day."
Parks soon surrounded himself with an entourage of like-minded lackeys. His group called itself, with grim irony, "the entertainment committee" and convened at a saloon near the union hall, on the northeast corner of Third Avenue and 59th Street. Owned by a man named Bernard Lynch, the saloon served as unofficial headquarters of the Parks faction in the union. And to ensure that their faction was the only only faction, they used the back room of Lynch"s saloon to "entertain" men who hadn"t gotten the full thread of Parks" argument. If a man had the temerity to stand up at a union meeting and question one of Parks" proclamations, they might just attack him on the spot. The union meetings at Maennerchor Hall on East 56th Street frequently degenerated into brawls. One method of intimidation favored by the entertainment committee was to knock a man down, then stand on his face. Eye gouging and rib cracking were also in bounds. In one instance, members of the committee allegedly ripped the flesh off the face of a recalcitrant unionist, scarring him for life. faction, they used the back room of Lynch"s saloon to "entertain" men who hadn"t gotten the full thread of Parks" argument. If a man had the temerity to stand up at a union meeting and question one of Parks" proclamations, they might just attack him on the spot. The union meetings at Maennerchor Hall on East 56th Street frequently degenerated into brawls. One method of intimidation favored by the entertainment committee was to knock a man down, then stand on his face. Eye gouging and rib cracking were also in bounds. In one instance, members of the committee allegedly ripped the flesh off the face of a recalcitrant unionist, scarring him for life.
Parks" tactics were brutal but effective. Union membership swelled from several hundred to 1,500, then to 3,000, then to 3,500, and as it grew so did the union"s power over builders in the city. The more ironworkers who came into the union, the fewer non-union men employers could call upon in the event of a strike. And if contractors tried to remedy a strike by importing non-union men from outside New York, as they often did, Parks" men would pay the unfortunate imports a visit and "entertain" them vigorously.
Parks liked ordering strikes almost as much as he liked hitting people. At any given moment he had up to a dozen jobs tied up around the city. Parks demanded better working conditions and better wages, and he seldom negotiated on his demands. His dim view of negotiation was represented by his prized bulldog, a fearsome-looking creature named Arbitrator. The name was both a joke and a threat. Arbitration, to Parks, was something that came at the end of a leash and had big teeth. Parks had no interest in achieving peace with employers, an opinion he made clear in a short essay he published in The Bridgemen"s Magazine The Bridgemen"s Magazine:...since the sun first arose on a newly erected world there has always been a battle between the strong and the weak, a struggle for mastery between the bulldogs of war and the craven worshipers of the white-winged dove, and it always ended the same way. The worshipers of the bulldogs of war, making the earth re-echo with paeans of victory, while the worshipers of the bird of peace humbly bowed their necks, permitting the collar of bondage to be clasped thereon.... G.o.d helps those that help themselves.Parks" bias against compromise would have disastrous long-term consequences for the ironworkers. In 1902, he fought and killed a proposed agreement between the international union and American Bridge Company, by far the largest employer of structural ironworkers in the country. The agreement offered better terms for ironworkers than any they"d received-or would again for decades to come.
In the short term, though, Parks" tactics paid off splendidly. Builders yielded to his demands. There was so much money to be made in the skysc.r.a.per boom they could ill afford to lose time on an ironworkers" strike. Because the steel frame preceded the rest of the building, ironworker strikes devastated employers. Stopping the steel, Parks understood, was the surest way to a builder"s wallet. He succeeded in raising the prevailing union ironworkers" wage in New York to $2.50 across the board by 1898, to $3.20 by 1900, to $4 in 1902. "By then," Parks later boasted, "we had them all. Why, for 1903, they went to $4.50 without a murmur." He promised to raise the wage to an even $5. "And then we"ll stop," he added drily. "Capital has some rights."
His fellow ironworkers may have disagreed with his tactics, but they couldn"t argue with his results. The more Parks pushed around builders, and the more the builders capitulated, the greater Parks grew in the estimation of his fellow ironworkers. He was "Fighting" Sam Parks, "The Bismarck Among Bridgemen." When he told the men to walk, they walked. "His four thousand ironworkers," observed McClure"s McClure"s magazine, "obeyed like children." magazine, "obeyed like children."
Parks" power expanded still further after the Housesmiths" and Bridgemen"s Union joined the Board of Building Trades, an alliance representing 39 separate trades in New York. Parks quickly worked his way up to become its president. He now held sway over not only 4,000 or so ironworkers, but also 26,000 other building tradesmen, all of whom, it was said, were prepared to strike at his command. n.o.body had ever wielded as much power in the building trades. And n.o.body had ever been as willing to abuse it.
On an afternoon late in the winter of 1902, Sam Parks met with a man named Neils Poulson, president of Hecla Iron Works, in a small unfinished room in the Flatiron Building, still under construction at the time. The men met to discuss a strike that Parks had called on Hecla six weeks earlier. Since Hecla was supplying ornamental iron for the Flatiron, the George A. Fuller Company, the building"s general contractor, was eager to get the strike settled and so had arranged this meeting. Poulson told Parks he"d lost about $50,000 due to the strike, and that the strike was wrong and unjust. "I also told him the way the men were picketing the works and slugging the people at work was illegal," Poulson later recounted. According to Poulson, Parks responded, "I don"t give a d.a.m.n for the union or the law." The only way the strike would end, Parks insisted, was if Poulson paid him $2,000. "I want the money, and the strike won"t stop till it comes.... Don"t you forget I am Sam Parks." Another newspaper gave the quote a more Seussian turn: "I"m Sam Parks, I am."
Exactly when Parks began grafting is unclear. Perhaps he had been doing it all along. Certainly by 1901 it had become a serious habit. Pay up, he would tell a contractor, or he"d pull the men and stop the job. Or, more effectively, he"d call a strike first, then demand a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to call it off. "Seeing Sam Parks" was a common phrase in the building industry, and everybody knew what it meant. If you intended to put up a steel building in New York, you"d better pay Parks. Otherwise, you"d have no ironworkers to build it.
Graft was a profitable calling. On his modest salary of $48 a week, Parks began to collect diamonds, including three large stones mounted on a gold ring he wore on his right hand. He also wore a thousand-dollar sealskin coat, according to one account, and no longer made his rounds on foot but in a hansom cab, accompanied by his bulldog. The legend of his quickly acc.u.mulated wealth grew in the telling. He was said to live in a luxuriously appointed home, where oil paintings festooned the walls and champagne flowed freely. His wife was said to spend her days shopping at department stores and having her nails manicured and her hands ma.s.saged, while Parks sauntered around town squeezing more graft and adding to his fortune of several hundred thousand dollars. Some of this was true, much of it was not.
For the most part, the employers paid up without a fight. Keeping Parks happy was worth a few thousand dollars when millions were at stake. In any case, hardly anyone begrudged a man a little graft in turn-of-the-century New York. Boss Tweed had been dead over twenty years, but Tammany Hall, and the Tammany way of doing things, still prospered in New York City. The muckraker Lincoln Steffens, writing in McClure"s McClure"s magazine in November of 1903, estimated that the Tammany machine pocketed millions of dollars a year in graft. Steffens quoted the ex-chief of police, William "Big Chief" Devery, who once admitted that the police alone took in over three million dollars in one year during his short reign. Devery wasn"t confessing; he was bragging. magazine in November of 1903, estimated that the Tammany machine pocketed millions of dollars a year in graft. Steffens quoted the ex-chief of police, William "Big Chief" Devery, who once admitted that the police alone took in over three million dollars in one year during his short reign. Devery wasn"t confessing; he was bragging.
Graft flourished exceptionally well in New York"s booming building industry. Poorly paid inspectors from the Department of Buildings routinely made side deals with builders to let violations pa.s.s for a fee. (The customary fee was one-half of what the builder would have spent to repair the violation.) What the builder saved, the inspector made, and everybody was happy. Paying graft to unions was accepted practice, too. In many cases, builders initiated payments to union representatives, bribing walking delegates to strike competing firms. In Chicago, always the leader in such matters, they had a fancy term for these collusive payoffs: "trade agreements."
The George A. Fuller Company seems to have profited most handsomely from hardball tactics. Just five years after opening an office in New York, Fuller had grown into the dominant construction contractor in the city. Fuller grew in part because it could deliver buildings faster than any other general contractor. But how did the company manage this? To most people in the building industry, the answer was obvious: Fuller greased the most palms. Few failed to notice that unions, and most conspicuously the ironworkers union, seldom struck Fuller buildings. And no one missed the coincidence of the astonishing rise of the George A. Fuller Construction Company and the timely arrival of Samuel J. Parks in New York City. Many a.s.sumed that Parks was on Fuller"s payroll from the moment he entered the city-that he"d come to the city expressly to do Fuller"s bidding. The truth is probably more complicated. Parks did favor Fuller, going so far as to contribute a gushing letter to The Bridgemen"s Magazine The Bridgemen"s Magazine complimenting Fuller for its "spirit of amity." No doubt the compliment had been purchased. But Sam Parks carried water for n.o.body. He had too much pride for that. Indeed, in the end, it would be pride, not greed, that destroyed him. complimenting Fuller for its "spirit of amity." No doubt the compliment had been purchased. But Sam Parks carried water for n.o.body. He had too much pride for that. Indeed, in the end, it would be pride, not greed, that destroyed him.
An iron contractor named Louis Brandt recalled going to visit Parks in the summer of 1902 with a payment that the walking delegate had demanded to settle a strike. This was typically how it worked: Parks summoned a graftee to his row house on East 87th Street off Lexington Avenue, named his price, then dismissed the man. "Come," he would scoff if one objected to the payment, "we are not children."
Brandt had arrived on this summer day to give Parks $300 in cash. Parks told him to set the cash on a small table. As soon as Brandt put the money down, a young girl walked into the parlor, picked up the stack of bills, and walked back out without a word. It was a strange detail, particularly in light of the fact that Parks had no children of his own-who was this girl?-but it spoke volumes, somehow, of Parks" contempt for Brandt and his ilk. Parks treated them as if they were were children. These were men of means and education. They were men of achievement. They could understand Parks" inclination to line his pockets-they were businessmen, after all-but they could not abide his contempt. children. These were men of means and education. They were men of achievement. They could understand Parks" inclination to line his pockets-they were businessmen, after all-but they could not abide his contempt.
"That man Parks is a duffer," a Chicago union boss would later tell the New York Times New York Times. "There are a hundred men in this town who have forgotten more about working the graft than he will ever learn.... Those who know how to make the unions profitable as business propositions do not have to be ballroom bullies. Parks is ent.i.tled to what he got-not for what he did, which is all right, but for the way he did it, which was all wrong." In other words, if Parks had treated the businessmen with a little more polish and respect as he reached into their pockets, he might have gone on with the graft as long as his brief life permitted.
Strangely, for all of his alleged greed, Parks didn"t seem to care much about money in the end. What drove him was a more subversive and heedless urge. He voiced it in a peculiar little essay published in The Bridgemen"s Magazine The Bridgemen"s Magazine in the late winter of 1903, shortly before his troubles began. The piece contains a stark, almost apocalyptic vision of a corporation like U.S. Steel usurped by a band of roughnecks. in the late winter of 1903, shortly before his troubles began. The piece contains a stark, almost apocalyptic vision of a corporation like U.S. Steel usurped by a band of roughnecks.The Billion-dollar Steel Trust seemed to own the earth and hold first mortgage on the neighboring planets.... But while at the zenith of ambition and when it seemed impossible for anything earthly to shake their power, along comes an unG.o.dly people, illiterate descendants of Tubal Cain, the man that stood before Solomon and demanded his rights; uncouth workers of iron, who invaded the sanctuary, hurled the gilded heifer from the altar and sacrilegiously subst.i.tuted a figure made of solid unpolished steel, mounted to the image of a Walking Delegate.It"s worth considering that Parks probably did not "write" these words, nor any of the words he published in The Bridgemen"s Magazine The Bridgemen"s Magazine. He was an unschooled man and-according to one of his obituaries-as illiterate as the descendants of Tubal Cain. He was also, as he had known for some time, a dying man, suffering from tuberculosis. Given the disease"s long incubation, Parks might have contracted the bacterium before coming to New York. He was, in any case, seriously ill by 1902.
Tuberculosis is a slow, wasting disease that exhibits itself as fever, fatigue, and persistent, wracking cough. These days, strong antibiotics render tuberculosis curable, but at the start of the twentieth century it was the leading cause of death in America. The term "consumption," as it was commonly known, described the course of the unchecked disease; it appeared to consume a body from the inside out. In its most common pulmonary form, bacterium devoured the tissue of the hosts" lungs, causing them to cough up blood. The most obvious effect the disease had on Sam Parks, at least in the early stages, was that it made his skin sallow and his cheeks sunken. But it also seemed to fuel him with a kind of reckless, feverish energy.
In the spring of 1903, Parks began acting like a man possessed. He launched a scorched-earth campaign against the steel-erection companies, ordering strikes with even greater abandon than usual. By late spring, he"d ordered a total of 2,000 strikes. In April, the United Building Trades, under Parks" direction, threatened a general strike in all building trades, pulling 60,000 men from work. The demand: 10 to 20 percent increases across the board, or else a complete shutdown of the building industry in New York. It was a threat so broad, so unreasonable unreasonable, that it demanded a reaction. It got one.
SUMMER OF SAM.
Early in the morning of June 8, 1903, more than a year after his meeting with Sam Parks in the Flatiron, Neils Poulson, president of Hecla Iron Works, paid a visit to the office of the district attorney of New York, William Travers Jerome. Accompanying Poulson was the vice-president of Hecla, Robert McCord. Poulson and McCord presented the D.A. with a cashed check made out to Sam Parks for $2,000. The check was enclosed in an oak frame, gla.s.sed on both sides, so that Parks" endors.e.m.e.nt could be clearly seen on the back. The check had been written to Parks, the men told Jerome, as payment to call off the strike against Hecla in April of 1902.
Poulson and McCord could not have found a more attentive audience for their story than William Travers Jerome. The district attorney was that most rare of turn-of-the-century New Yorkers, a genuine reformer. He"d made his name as an investigator for the Lexow Committee in 1894, snooping out corruption in the police force and Tammany Hall. Behind a well-groomed moustache and wire-rimmed gla.s.ses, he kept his expression tight-lipped and severe. Jerome had had his eye on Sam Parks for some time, and when the men from Hecla called on him on this early summer morning, he began taking sworn affidavits on the spot.
The meeting with Jerome had been carefully orchestrated. After years of infighting, the builders of New York had reached the limit of what they would endure from Parks. That spring, every major building contractor in New York, with the exception of Fuller, had formed an alliance called the Building Trade Employers" a.s.sociation. Pooled together, the a.s.sets of its members added up to more than $500 million. Its explicit vow, as voiced by its president, Charles Eidlitz, was to fight Sam Parks to the finish, however much money or effort the fight required. They would hire detectives and lawyers to investigate Parks and his cohorts, then hand over the evidence, pre-packaged, to District Attorney Jerome. The presentation of this elaborately framed check was merely an opening salvo.
Parks" first arrest came at three o"clock that same afternoon. When police took him into custody at a saloon on East 54th Street, Parks seemed more amused than concerned. "I am glad that I took off my diamond stud before I left home as I have found myself in the hands of the police," he joked. "My only regret is that I did not also leave my rings." When told that his bail was expected to be steep, he brushed aside any worries. "Well, it can"t be too high for me." Police escorted him to the Criminal Courts building downtown, then across the Bridge of Sighs for an overnight stay at the Tombs.
Parks" bondsman arrived the following morning in the voluminous form of William K. Devery-the very same "Big Chief" Devery who"d once bragged about his prodigious grafting in the police force. Devery was one of the most colorful and crooked figures in turn-of-the-century New York, which is saying a good deal. He was an oversized man, fat, garrulous, and somewhat buffoonish, a big cigar forever stuck in the corner of his mouth under a walrus moustache. During his short but profitable tenure as chief of police, Devery enjoyed getting drunk and driving around in a hack, throwing money out the windows. He was gone from the police force by 1901, and out of favor with Tammany as well, but still very much a presence in New York politics. Now railing against the corrupt machine of which he had been such an ill.u.s.trious partic.i.p.ant, he"d launched a race for mayor of New York City. It was Devery"s hope that his friend Sam Parks, who had already arranged his honorary induction into Local 2, would deliver the labor vote. Devery, in return, had promised Parks the powerful position of Manhattan borough chief.
"I"ve got the sugar right here," Devery announced to the press as he arrived to bail out Parks. Devery dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out a roll of thousand-dollar bills. "I"m ready to bail him out every time he"s arrested! I"ll put up the cash for him if I have to fill up this room to the ceiling."
Five thousand dollars later, Devery and a liberated Parks emerged from the City Chamberlain"s office. A crowd of supporters erupted in cheers. "I am glad to help this man, because he is the friend of labor, too!" Devery exclaimed, mounting a nearby bootblack"s stand. "He has gotten higher wages for the ironworkers, who have to risk their lives twenty or thirty stories up in the air without any law to protect them!" Devery then invited everyone in sight to a corner saloon for a few drinks. "I will stick by him," he said of Parks after standing a second round for the house. "He"s a sticker and I"m a sticker and I get stuck on stickers."
"I am not downcast in my predicament," Parks told reporters as he left the saloon later that afternoon. He had been quiet and subdued since his release, and now he wanted to go home. "I have been through many hard squeezes, and I will come out all right."
The following day found Parks arrested on two new counts of extortion. Two days later, he was arrested on a fourth count, this one brought by a skylight manufacturer from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Josephus Plenty. Throughout June, new details of Parks" corruption were daily fodder for the press. "There seems to be no limit to the number of charges," D.A. Jerome told reporters. "If the laboring men knew the facts, Parks would not be trying to get out of jail on bail, but would be glad enough to avoid his a.s.sociates wherever he might be kept."
Jerome underestimated the ironworkers" fidelity. A faction in the union did oppose Parks, but the majority of members rallied to his support, and the more charges that were leveled against him, the more they rallied. In the middle of June, they renominated Parks as walking delegate at a raucous meeting at Maennerchor Hall, then reelected him on June 22. Three days later, in a remarkable display of influence, Parks led 40 walking delegates from various building trades on a parade through midtown Manhattan, shutting down one job after the other. It was, according to a headline in the New York Herald New York Herald, "Parks" Tour of Triumph."
The triumph was brief. In the heat of July, as construction stood frozen by Parks" edict, a grand jury indicted him on all four counts of extortion. He was arrested again later that month, this time for a.s.saulting an ironworker at a union meeting.
One morning in early August, Parks went to buy a horse, in hopes that "fast driving" would revive his failing health. At the very least, a gallop through Central Park might stir a breeze to cool his tubercular fevers. "You don"t know who I am," said Parks as he approached the owner of the Ben Hur Stable on East 25th Street, a man named Doc Field. "I am that notorious walking delegate that you have been reading about in the papers. I"m Sam Parks."
"Never heard of you," replied Doc Field. "I never read anything but the racing news."
By the end of summer, even the likes of Doc Field would be familiar with the saga of Sam Parks. Two days after his visit to the stable, Parks was convicted of a.s.sault. Before he could be sentenced, he returned to court, on August 12, to face one of the extortion indictments that had been brought against him in June.
The trial took just over a week. A team of prominent lawyers, led by a former magistrate named Brann, defended Parks, who carried himself with "impudent swagger" and a sneer on his pale face throughout. Ironworkers were gathered at the courthouse when the verdict came late on the evening of the 21st. As Parks stood, gripping the railing in front of him, the foreman stood and p.r.o.nounced him guilty. Parks swayed slightly, then immediately recovered his composure. "With the old time swing of the shoulders," reported one newspaper, "he pa.s.sed down the aisles, stopped for a moment to smile at friends among the spectators, and then waved his hands with the air of one who merely says "good night.""
For all of his public bravado, Parks sank into moroseness the moment he entered his old cell in the Tombs. He refused to receive visitors, with the exception of William Devery, who later issued a statement on his behalf. The statement condemned the D.A. and the employers. It also faulted the press for its misleading portrayal of Parks as a crook. And it included an epitaph that Parks had written for himself: "Here lies the friend of labor, crushed by capital." Those who wished to see Sam Parks as a martyr didn"t have to wait long for more evidence of persecution. The same day Devery released that statement, the D.A. announced five more indictments against Parks, bringing the total to eight outstanding charges.
When Parks entered the courtroom for sentencing on August 26, the press noticed a deterioration in his condition. His complexion appeared a "ghastly hue." His eyes were sunken, his cheeks were hollow, and beads of perspiration gathered on his brow. The judge took the bench and announced the sentence: two and a half years in Sing Sing.
Local 2 happened to be meeting that night. When word of the sentence got back to the hall, the ironworkers exploded in an uproar. "It"s a lie!" somebody shouted. Less vocally, though, some dared to welcome it as good news. "There will be many happy homes in New York tonight," one ironworker told a reporter from the Daily Tribune Daily Tribune. "Some of us have been out since April, and the feeling has been among many of us that if Parks was out of the way work would start up at once."
Parks" wife, Dora, happened to be visiting him at the Tombs when guards came to remove him. She had spent most of his trial ill in bed, too anxious to appear at court. Now she broke down and threw herself onto her husband, weeping. He held her in his arms and soothed her and told her to be brave. After he was gone, she became so distraught that two prison attendants had to escort her home. It was all over for Sam Parks. Or so it seemed.
HIS LAST RIDE.
The headlines must have seemed a cruel joke to his adversaries: "CROWDS CHEER PARKS BACK FROM SING SING; Wild Ovation for Walking Delegate Released on Bail." Like a creature in a horror movie, a.s.sumed to be slain and dispatched to h.e.l.l but suddenly jumping from the shadows for one last scare, Parks was out of Sing Sing only a week into his sentence. His attorneys, a.s.serting that negative press ruined Parks" chance for a fair trial, won a Certificate of Reasonable Doubt from a sympathetic judge. Parks was granted a new trial. In the meantime, he was free. Like a creature in a horror movie, a.s.sumed to be slain and dispatched to h.e.l.l but suddenly jumping from the shadows for one last scare, Parks was out of Sing Sing only a week into his sentence. His attorneys, a.s.serting that negative press ruined Parks" chance for a fair trial, won a Certificate of Reasonable Doubt from a sympathetic judge. Parks was granted a new trial. In the meantime, he was free.
A large and rambunctious crowd gathered at Grand Central Terminal to welcome Parks back from Sing Sing. No one recognized him as he stepped off the Albany Special. His hair had been shorn, his moustache shaved, and he"d lost considerable weight in the week he was away. His face, according to the Times Times, "was absolutely without color." But then somebody saw him-"Here he comes-there"s Sammy!"-and the crowd erupted in "wild shouts of exultation." A man in a white cap pressed a bouquet of roses into his hands. Parks put them to his nose, sniffed, and smiled.
A few days later, a reporter paid Parks a visit at his home, a six-room flat over a drugstore. He found the walking delegate lying in his bed in a small room looking gaunt and weak. Parks" eyes only lit up when he railed against the D.A. and the press for piling up on him. "Everything in this city goes to extremes," he complained. "They either s...o...b..r over a man or are ready to crucify him." The opulent lifestyle usually ascribed to Parks was nowhere in evidence. The apartment was small and simply decorated with cheap prints instead of oil paintings. Dora Parks was not out on the town shopping or getting her nails manicured. She was cleaning house in a plain dress with the sleeves rolled up, looking "f.a.gged and tired."
On September 7, less than a week after his release from Sing Sing, Parks mounted a white mare at the corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. Rather than rebuff Parks after his conviction, the Board of Building Trades had chosen to honor him as Grand Marshal of its annual Labor Day parade. Parks wore a white cowboy hat and a gold-trimmed sash. Against the dazzle of his costume, his eyes appeared flat, his face haggard, his broad shoulders stooped. He was battling seven indictments, with many more promised by the D.A. He was in the later stages of tuberculosis and probably suffering from fever, nausea, and an overwhelming urge to lie down. And yet here he was, leading a parade down Fifth Avenue. Whatever else you thought of him, you had to admire the man on the white horse for his endurance.
If one of the mysteries of Sam Parks is why he self-destructed-why he let his contempt get ahead of his reason and greed-the other mystery is why the ironworkers stayed loyal to him for so long. It was a mystery that perplexed the D.A. and the press. After all, the ironworkers who were called to strike on Parks" behalf were his real victims. They lost their jobs. Their families were reduced, in some cases, to living on bread and tea. And yet they stuck by him through that long summer. Why?
The solution to the second mystery may lie in the solution to the first. They loved him for his recklessness. They loved him for his unreasonableness, and they loved him as unreasonably as he behaved. He was a dying man with little to lose, and so, in a sense, were they. None of them had a very good chance of seeing their hair turn white. They were all living on the edge, acting now, considering consequences later. Sam Parks wasn"t smooth or silver-tongued as was, for instance, Devery. He was all raw bones and sharp edges. They stuck with him because he was an unpolished roughneck overflowing with a quality they understood even better than endurance: audacity.
As it turned out, however, there were limits to the ironworkers" loyalty. Somewhere in that week between Parks" release from Sing Sing and his march down Fifth Avenue, the ironworkers, if not yet Parks himself, seemed to realize those limits. The parade, as the Times Times put it, was a "fizzle." Less than 9,000 men showed up to march, far fewer than the 50,000 that some union officials had predicted, and significantly fewer than the 25,000 who had marched the previous year. Many of the sympathetic trade unions that had supported Parks and the ironworkers through the summer now chose to stay away. More pointedly, many ironworkers stayed away, too. Only about half the members of Local 2 bothered to show up, a clear indication that support for Parks was rapidly eroding. put it, was a "fizzle." Less than 9,000 men showed up to march, far fewer than the 50,000 that some union officials had predicted, and significantly fewer than the 25,000 who had marched the previous year. Many of the sympathetic trade unions that had supported Parks and the ironworkers through the summer now chose to stay away. More pointedly, many ironworkers stayed away, too. Only about half the members of Local 2 bothered to show up, a clear indication that support for Parks was rapidly eroding.
A few days after the parade, as if to drive home the point, Frank Buchanan, president of the International a.s.sociation of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers, announced his intention to suspend Local 2 from the union, a move he blamed largely on Parks" corruption. The New York Times New York Times responded to Buchanan"s move with a hopeful editorial under a pithy headline: " responded to Buchanan"s move with a hopeful editorial under a pithy headline: "EXIT PARKS."
Not quite. In late September, with a final astonishing burst of energy and spite, Parks boarded a train to Kansas City to attend the seventh annual convention of the ironworkers union. He left vowing to win reinstatement of Local 2 and, while he was at it, to unseat President Buchanan. "I"m a long way from being down and out," he told reporters. "I"m just about waking up." Arriving in Kansas City, Parks immediately took control of the convention with his booming voice and swagger. He demanded reinstatement of Local 2, and the delegates promptly obliged.
Back in New York, news of Local 2"s reinstatement stunned the Employers" a.s.sociation. "There is no use predicting," said one member. "Parks has gone so far that you cannot say what he will do next." A theatrical manager from Syracuse was so impressed by Parks" resurgence that he immediately cabled Kansas City to offer him a speaking engagement of 20 nights, at $500 per night. Parks said he"d think about it, then turned his attention to defeating Buchanan.
Just as it looked as if Parks might prevail and take control of the entire international union, his luck turned sour. Buchanan won reelection on the first ballot by a vote of 43 to 40. "I lose," whispered Parks.
Whatever manic energy had driven him to Kansas City suddenly dissipated. "I"m getting old," the 40-year-old walking delegate told reporters upon his return to New York. "I"ve had enough of it." Parks finally seemed to accept what others had long foreseen: he was beaten. And now, following several false finales, the real one came swiftly. On October 1, in an interview with Harper"s Weekly Harper"s Weekly, D.A. Jerome promised to have Parks back in Sing Sing within six weeks. Parks returned to court on a new graft indictment in late October. The jury took 11 minutes to reach a guilty verdict. "Parks received the verdict with an effort to display stolid indifference," according to the Times Times, "but a tremor ran through his frame and his face was an ashen hue...." The judge sentenced him to two years and three months of hard labor, to commence November 6. The district attorney kept his promise with a few days to spare.
[image]
Sam Parks, September 7, 1903, at the head of the Labor Day parade.
(New York Public Library) The press that had followed Parks everywhere he went for the past five months was there in the smoking car aboard the train to Sing Sing. Parks sat next to a deputy sheriff and lit a cigar. He told the reporters he planned to serve his sentence as a model prisoner and swore that when he came out at the end of his two-plus years he would be done with union politics forever. He took a pull on his cigar. "Boys, I"m up against it. Let me down as easy as you can."
THE WAGES OF SIN.
The official history of the International a.s.sociation of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Ironworkers, published on the union"s hundredth birthday in 1996, absolves Sam Parks of his sins. "Whatever might be said of Sam Parks," it states, "he was a man of his time, who was dedicated to the well-being of his fellow New York Ironworkers. He may have wanted a full wallet for himself, but he wanted his friends to earn sufficient wages to take care of their families adequately."
That is a bit of a stretch. Parks did increase the wages of New York"s ironworkers for a few years, but on the whole, he probably hurt them more than he helped them. A few weeks after Parks" return to jail, the New York Times New York Times estimated that he"d cost the city"s ironworkers about $3 million in lost wages and cost New York"s tradesmen as a whole somewhere between $30 and $50 million. Less quantifiable was the toll his belligerence took on the reputation of the union ironworkers. Employers would have nothing more to do with Parks" old union, and by late autumn, Local 2 was effectively finished. In January of the following year it officially dissolved and divided into four smaller unions, including Local 40, Manhattan"s current local, and Local 31, the predecessor to Brooklyn"s current Local 361. Despite these changes, relations between ironworkers and employers would remain sour for years to come. It"s a legacy, no doubt, that would have pleased Sam Parks. estimated that he"d cost the city"s ironworkers about $3 million in lost wages and cost New York"s tradesmen as a whole somewhere between $30 and $50 million. Less quantifiable was the toll his belligerence took on the reputation of the union ironworkers. Employers would have nothing more to do with Parks" old union, and by late autumn, Local 2 was effectively finished. In January of the following year it officially dissolved and divided into four smaller unions, including Local 40, Manhattan"s current local, and Local 31, the predecessor to Brooklyn"s current Local 361. Despite these changes, relations between ironworkers and employers would remain sour for years to come. It"s a legacy, no doubt, that would have pleased Sam Parks.
On the morning of May 4, 1904, Dora Parks boarded a train at Grand Central Terminal to Ossining, New York. It was a Wednesday, visiting day at Sing Sing, and she never missed an opportunity to see her husband. He had been failing steadily since he entered prison the previous fall and had recently been moved from his cell to the prison hospital. By the time Dora arrived, around noon, he had been dead five hours. She took what was left of his wasted body home with her on the 6:20 to Grand Central. She was a fragile, anxious woman, moved easily to tears by his ordeal. Now that it was over, it must have seemed like more than she could bear. It was: She would be dead, too, within a year.
"What sympathy the news of his death excites belongs wholly to those of his immediate family, who are disgraced by his career, without responsibility for it," stated an editorial in the Times Times the day after Parks" death. "The wages of sin are paid in full at last." the day after Parks" death. "The wages of sin are paid in full at last."
Dora was the Lutheran in the family, and it was a Lutheran funeral she gave her husband. The Reverend Henry Hebler of Zion Lutheran Church-Dora"s church-presided over a small service inside the rooming house into which Dora had recently moved. Then the front door opened and the mourners walked out into the sunlight and the crowd. Many of Parks" old friends were there, and so were some of his old enemies, including President Buchanan of the international union. "Good bye, Sam, old boy," one man murmured as the velvet draped casket pa.s.sed by. "Bad as you were, you did more for us than any other man." One estimate put the crowd of onlookers at ten thousand. A photograph in the New York Herald New York Herald shows a crush of people in the street, dozens deep around the casket. shows a crush of people in the street, dozens deep around the casket.
"All along the line of march, the sidewalks were crowded with sightseers, and women and children occupied every window," reported the New-York Daily Tribune New-York Daily Tribune in the next day"s edition. At the pier at the foot of East 92nd Street, as police held back the crowd, pallbearers transferred the casket from the hea.r.s.e onto a ferry, then embarked for the opposite sh.o.r.e of the East River. The funeral party continued on by carriage, reported the in the next day"s edition. At the pier at the foot of East 92nd Street, as police held back the crowd, pallbearers transferred the casket from the hea.r.s.e onto a ferry, then embarked for the opposite sh.o.r.e of the East River. The funeral party continued on by carriage, reported the Tribune Tribune, "to Middle Village Lutheran Cemetery, Long Island."
A year after Parks" death, a writer named Leroy Scott published a short, melodramatic novel t.i.tled The Walking Delegate The Walking Delegate based closely on Parks" reign in New York. The novel ends with a spirited scene in the ironworkers" union hall. Parks" fictional doppelganger, Buck Foley, knows the police are closing in on him and jumps up onto a piano to make a gallant farewell speech. "What"s past-well, youse know. But what I got to say about the future is all on the level. Go in an" beat the contractors! Youse can beat "em. An" beat "em like h.e.l.l!" As police escort him away, he turns back to the men with a final wave. "So-long, boys," he shouts. Suddenly, just when it seems like the jig is up for Buck Foley, his roughneck allies rush the police. In the melee, Buck breaks free, slips away, and vanishes forever. based closely on Parks" reign in New York. The novel ends with a spirited scene in the ironworkers" union hall. Parks" fictional doppelganger, Buck Foley, knows the police are closing in on him and jumps up onto a piano to make a gallant farewell speech. "What"s past-well, youse know. But what I got to say about the future is all on the level. Go in an" beat the contractors! Youse can beat "em. An" beat "em like h.e.l.l!" As police escort him away, he turns back to the men with a final wave. "So-long, boys," he shouts. Suddenly, just when it seems like the jig is up for Buck Foley, his roughneck allies rush the police. In the melee, Buck breaks free, slips away, and vanishes forever.
The story of the real Sam Parks doesn"t end quite so dramatically, but it does end with a mystery. Why isn"t he where he is supposed to be? Where did his body go when it floated away from the crowd on the pier? It"s almost as if Sam Parks, in death, pulled off a final act of defiance and vanished, like Buck Foley, into the night.
FIVE.
Mondays
(2001).
He stood on a concrete slab near the center of the hole and turned his blue eyes toward the cloudless sky and the 45-ton column slowly drifting across it. Bunny wasn"t the only one looking up. A small crowd of officials from Bovis Lend-Lease, the general contractor, had donned sparkling white hard hats and descended the narrow metal stairs into the gloom of the hole, and they stood near Bunny-but not too near-gazing up at the huge dark chunk of metal hanging from the boom of the kangaroo. Crowds always turn out for the heavy picks, drawn by the ever-miraculous sight of something huge lifted and moved, and perhaps by the remote possibility of witnessing something truly astonishing: a 45-ton spear plummetting from the sky.
The column was among the dozen or so "boomers" that Silvian Marcus and his team of engineers had designed to bear the brunt of the towers" prodigious dead load (the thousands of tons of steel and concrete and drywall and gla.s.s and pipe that would go into making it), plus its relatively light live load (the hundreds of tons of office workers, hotel guests, apartment dwellers, pets, plants, and attendant vermin that would eventually occupy it) and the variable lateral load (wind), and then transfer all this weight and pressure to the schist bedrock below. Bunny stood on the spot where the bottom of the column would land, marking it with his body and occasionally gesturing to Chett Barker, the signalman. His eyes squinted and blinked. He was tired, operating on two hours of bad sleep s.n.a.t.c.hed in the back seat of a Crown Victoria. His T-shirt bore the logo of a restaurant with a slogan inscribed beneath it: "JUST EAT ME."
It was a Monday morning, mid-April, almost two months since Bunny and Jerry and the rest of the raising gang first arrived at Columbus Circle. All four cranes were up, their cables threaded through the sheaves at the tips of their booms, their drums greased and spinning, and steel was finally starting to rise on the north side of the hole. To the ironworkers, the columns were a hopeful sight. Girders would soon link them, then beams would cross between the girders, then corrugated decking would cover the beams, and then they would be on their way out of the hole, and everybody else-other tradesmen, safety inspectors, contractors-would be below. Which is the way ironworkers like it.
There were about 50 ironworkers at Columbus Circle at the moment. Soon there would be double, then triple that number. The ironworkers were pretty easy to spot among the other tradesmen. They tended to keep to themselves, which made them seem more somber (false) and more arrogant (true). Even when they mingled with the others, they stood out. Their faces were broiled and wind-whipped. Their clothing was rust-stained and tattered, its fabric rubbed away by the rough skin of oxidized steel. On their hands, they wore thick cowhide gloves, gauntlet-cuffed. Most of the other tradesmen wore heavy boots with chunky heels, the better to keep their feet from getting pierced or crunched. Ironworkers preferred lightweight flat-sole boots, on the theory that heels were p.r.o.ne to catch on f.l.a.n.g.e-edges and could send a man tumbling.
And then there were the hard hats. The other trades wore bright, clean, bulb-shape hard hats. Ironworkers" hard hats were generally battered and brown. Many were encircled by wide brims, as on a pith helmet, and nearly all were covered with fading decals publicizing the ironworkers" interests and affiliations-jobs they"d worked on, bars they frequented, sports teams they favored. The hard hats of the Mohawks featured a round decal showing the sharp profile of a man surrounded by bright yellow rays of the sun: the Iroquois warrior symbol.
A number of these warrior symbols were conspicuous on the hard hats of the ironworkers standing in the hole near Bunny that Monday morning in April. Of the 50 ironworkers on site, a third were men from Kahnawake, the Mohawk reservation near Montreal that had been supplying New York with ironworkers for nearly 100 years. This group included a second raising gang that had arrived a few weeks earlier. Because it was Monday, they were all, like Bunny, operating on two or three hours of bad sleep.
For the Mohawks, Mondays began late on Sundays, just before midnight, when the ironworkers kissed their wives good-bye, looked in one last time on their sleeping children, and stepped out into the dark. In twos and threes, they loaded into cars and drove out through the quiet streets. A loose convoy of big American sedans-"boomers," as some of the men called them-accelerated down the two-lane stretch of Old Malone"s Highway, then sped south, the lights of Montreal fading behind them. They hit the U.S. border around 12:30. The night-shift patrol knew the Mohawks by sight, knew they did not carry pa.s.sports, and knew they didn"t need them. "Onen," "Onen," some of the border guards would call to them as they waved the men through. It was the Mohawk word for good-bye. some of the border guards would call to them as they waved the men through. It was the Mohawk word for good-bye.
They stopped once or twice along Interstate 87 to change drivers. The pockets of their jackets bulged with sandwiches their wives had prepared for them earlier in the night, and somewhere along the way they pulled them out and ate them, quietly munching in the dark. They tried to sleep, but it was a dank, restless sleep of cheeks pressed against windows and necks cranked at odd angles-the kind of sleep it"s almost better to do without. By dawn, they were awake at the George Washington Bridge. By 6:15 they were at the job site, stretching out their cricks, looking around for a pay phone to call home and wake up their wives and children, already missing them with a peculiar mix of exhaustion and loneliness. Then they grabbed a cup of coffee and headed for the shanty to get ready for work-for the five long days until Friday night, when they"d pile back into their cars and drive home to Kahnawake for the weekend.
It must have been a Mohawk who nicknamed the 12-pound maul ironworkers occasionally haul out: it"s called a "monday." A few dozen swings of a monday could make your muscles scream with exhaustion. The only thing more excruciating than swinging a 12-pound maul was swinging a 12-pound maul on a Monday morning after two hours of bad sleep in the back seat of a Crown Victoria. Mondays sucked.
Bunny stuck out his hand, palm down, and fluttered it. The column slowly descended. When it was a yard or so above his head, he stepped aside, then turned back to grab its flank. Jerry grabbed the other side. Together, pushing and pulling at the steel, they guided the column down onto the footing, matching the eight holes of its base plate with the eight holes of the billet plate on the ground. The moment the plates were flush and the holes clear through, they screwed in the foot-long pins that anch.o.r.ed the column to the concrete footing below. Then Bunny grabbed hold of a f.l.a.n.g.e, dug his toes in, and started to climb.
BEATING THE WOW.
The frame of a steel building is made of two basic structural components: columns columns, the vertical pillars that bear the building"s weight and transfer it to bedrock, and beams beams, the horizontal supports that link the columns and carry the floors of the building. Cross-sectionally-that is, from the perspective of somebody looking straight down their shafts-most columns and beams resemble a three-dimensional uppercase I I. They are comprised of two parallel plates called "f.l.a.n.g.es" (the horizontal lines of the I I) conjoined by a perpendicular plate called the "web" (the vertical line).
Plenty of other steel structural shapes have been tried over the years-the rounded pipe of the old Phoenix column, for instance, as well as various T"s and L"s-but the dual-f.l.a.n.g.e/single-web form of the I I is by far the most common. There are many good reasons for this, the most important being the high strength-to-material ratio the arrangement provides. The is by far the most common. There are many good reasons for this, the most important being the high strength-to-material ratio the arrangement provides. The I I-shape puts the most steel exactly where the piece needs to be strongest. Step onto a beam, the greatest stress will be on the top of the beam, which will squeeze together under your weight (compression) and at the bottom of the beam, which will pull apart under your weight (tension). The center of the beam will experience very little stress. Most of the steel, then, is concentrated on the top and bottom of the beam in the form of f.l.a.n.g.es, while little is wasted on its center.