I am an upstater, born in Troy, NY, and largely raised near Albany. Back then, when America’s local businesses were still run by local businessmen, the Charles Freihofer Baking Company still delivered its wares from its Troy bakeries by horse-drawn wagon, as they had since 1913. Black and red with gold lettering and trim, the wagons came twice a day, bearing hot, fresh-baked bread in the morning, and baked goods—including a once-famous local favorite, raspberry pie (I disliked it: The seeds tended to catch in my teeth)—in the afternoon. The deliverymen took orders, or one could telephone. Or one could simply leave a Freihofer’s sign in the window so the deliveryman would know to stump up the steps with his basket of goodies.

When our parents took us shopping in Troy, the first sight to our right after crossing the bridge across the Hudson were the huge, orange-red brick stables where the horses and wagons were kept. Sometimes I’d see a horse standing in the stable yard, its tail swishing at flies.

Even as a small boy, I had a passion for old ways; and then, as now, I enjoyed finding old practices that had survived into modern times. Learning that the United Traction Company used the same cream and red paint scheme on its buses as it had on its old electric trolley cars pleased me for a week.

But back to the bakeries. The wagons themselves were as modern as they could be, with rubber tires instead of the spoked wooden wheels of only a decade or two before. They were built by the John Guedelhoefer Wagon Company of Indianapolis, which was still making delivery wagons for bakeries and other companies in Indiana and throughout much of the East, even as it was shifting to building customized truck bodies for chassis provided by General Motors. It only disappeared in 1970 when the last surviving family members, all in their seventies, wound up the business.
The wagons, in fact, were something of an advertising device, of a piece with the firm’s home bread boxes, home window cards, board games, and metal or plastic coin banks in the shape of a wagon.

Back when many local television stations did their own programming, the bakery sponsored “Freddie Freihofer’s Breadtime Stories” five days a week on WRGB, Channel 6 from 4:45 to 5 p.m. Freddy was a waistcoat-wearing white rabbit, a Bugs Bunny manqué: the program was announced by its theme song: Freddy Freihofer/ We think you’re swell…/ Freddy, we love/ The stories you tell/ We love your cookies, your pies and your cakes,/ We love everything Freddy Freihofer makes.

Its host, Uncle Jim Fisk, wore a Freihofer deliveryman’s uniform, told stories and shamelessly flogged the cookies, cakes and bread. The audience was full of kids, and although the show was perhaps only a pale imitation of Captain Kangaroo, it was gentle and harmless.

I was often awakened by the clopping hooves, and with the fundamental conservatism of childhood, I felt life would continue in the same way: that we would always live in the big yellow house on Saratoga Avenue and that our bread would be delivered fresh in a horse-drawn wagon—the modern brother of the stagecoaches I watched on Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

None of this would be true. In 1962, The Times Record, the Troy newspaper taken by my family, ran a front-page story on how the wagons would soon make their last run. Freihofer’s milked the change for all the free publicity they could get, and as I had been reading the papers long before I began attending school, I was aware of the impending change. Then, one morning, I was awakened by the sound of shifting gears as a red and black truck, with gold lettering and trim, came up the hill toward our house. And the sound of hooves was no more.

Thereafter, the old stables housed the horseless carriages that had replaced the horses and their wagons. They, too, passed away: In 1972, Freihofer’s ended the home delivery of its goods. From then on, one bought them in the stores, from the same shelves as the Wonder Bread.

Nonetheless, the Freihofer family continued providing a moneyed local leadership with practical business experience. Robert Freihofer, the company’s president for most of the years when I was growing up, not only ran a successful business but raised funds tirelessly the Samaritan Hospital, the Center for the Disabled in Albany and the other local hospitals, charities and arts centers on whose boards he sat.

Ten years after I’d left the Capital District to make my life in the city, the Freihofer family took the easy way out. In 1987, they sold their bakeries to General Foods, which later sold them to Best Foods, which later sold them to George Weston Foods. While Robert Freihofer lived in the Albany area until his death some 15 years ago, by then his children lived in Boca Raton and St. Petersburg on the income from the capital built up through the work of their ancestors and the men who had worked for them.

Today, the traveling executives who view the Capital District as part of flyover land simply run the firm by the book and not from the heart. By the early 1990s, the recipes had been changed to make the baked goods cheaper—I mean, less expensive—to mass produce, with the usual substitution of corn syrup for the more expensive ingredients used when the business had been family-owned. Now the breads, all produced in a single industrial-scale modern bakery in Albany, all taste the same and the cookies aren’t worth mentioning. As with so many businesses in Troy, once one of the most important industrial cities in America, Freihofer’s is little more than a memory: nothing more, perhaps, than colorful labels on interchangeable breads in the local grocery stores.

William Bryk wrote the "Old Smoke" column for New York Press from 1997 to 2003.

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According
to Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York, most 19th-century fences
operated small shops, such as dry goods stores. Of course, these usually discouraged
legitimate customers, who would have been a distraction from the real business
at hand. The earliest reports of fences in New York predate the Civil War. Asbury
notes that Ephraim "Old" Snow, who owned a dry goods store at Grand
and Allen Sts., took pride in handling any kind of stolen property. He was renowned
for once disposing of a flock of stolen sheep, driven overland from a Westchester
farm to the fence’s shop.

Many thieves,
however, disdained subterfuge. For many years, according to Luc Sante’s
Low Life, thieves and fences met at the Thieves’ Exchange, a kind
of open-air market at Bowery and Houston (Asbury suggests Broadway and Houston).
There they openly dickered over prices for stolen loot. Politicians and policemen
somehow always looked the other way.

After the
Civil War, Old Snow and his ilk were, as Asbury wrote, "eclipsed by (a
newcomer’s) brilliant successes." Amidst an underworld dominated by
Christian men, the most successful fence in New York’s criminal history
may have been a Jewish woman. Her contemporaries found this inexplicable, but
it’s actually quite simple: Within the context of her business, she was
scrupulously honest. Moreover, as John Lardner and Thomas Repetto observed in
NYPD, "Like any other successful power broker, she was a first rate
judge of people." At the height of her power, most New York thieves knew
their best chance to realize their ill-gotten gains was to trust Mother Mandelbaum.

Frederika
"Mother" Mandelbaum, also known as Marm, was born around 1830 in the
German principality of Hesse-Kassel. Her name reportedly first appears in police
records in 1862, when she was peddling stolen goods door to door. She shortly
began managing teams of young pickpockets, processing their takings while providing
bail and legal defense. By 1864, she was able to purchase a three-story building
at 79 Clinton St. at Rivington. The ground floor contained a haberdashery managed
with the assistance of her husband, Wolfe, their son and their two daughters.
The back wing of the store ran down Clinton St.: Here she did most of her real
business, managing a massive stolen-goods ring. Eventually, she resold vast
quantities of stolen goods from all over the East Coast to middlemen in New
York and elsewhere through a network of warehouses across the city. From 1862
to 1882, Mandelbaum processed between $5 million and $10 million of stolen property.

Discretion
came with time: After the first few years, Marm rarely went near the swag. An
operative would examine the loot at a neutral location. Her clients understood
that she had first choice from their robberies or burglaries. If she took the
goods, all labels, tags and private marks had to be removed before delivery.
Whatever she didn’t want could go to other fences.

The Mandelbaums
lived on the upper two floors of 79 Clinton St., in one of the city’s most
elegantly furnished private residences. Indeed, it should have been–the
furniture and draperies had been largely obtained from some of New York’s
finest mansions through the efforts of her clients.

Marm weighed
more than 250 pounds–say, at least one-eighth of a ton on the hoof. Asbury
describes her as having "a sharply curved mouth and extraordinarily fat
cheeks, above which were small black eyes, heavy black brows and a high sloping
forehead, and a mass of tightly rolled black hair, which was generally surmounted
by a tiny black bonnet with drooping feathers."

She was
a lavish and generous host. Sante calls her the social leader of the female
criminal set. Her dances and dinners were attended by some of America’s
most celebrated criminals as well as her friends among the politicians and the
police.

Some contemporary
feminist historians see Marm as a heroine for her willingness to help women
criminals get their careers off the ground. One protege, Sophie Lyons, was among
America’s most successful confidence women. Another, Black Lena Kleinschmidt,
became a gifted thief, pickpocket and blackmailer. Lena later moved to fashionable
Hackensack, NJ, where, posing as the wealthy widow of a South American mining
magnate, she became a local doyenne by giving elaborate parties in imitation
of Marm. Meanwhile, according to Asbury, Lena kept up her game by spending two
days a week "in New York replenishing her coffers." Black Lena’s
career ended when a guest recognized a jeweled ring on Lena’s finger (Asbury
stated it was emerald, stolen from the guest’s handbag during a Manhattan
shopping trip; Sante: diamond, burgled some years before).

The Gilded
Age, the years immediately after the Civil War, saw numerous entrepreneurs–Vanderbilt,
Gould, Fisk, Rockefeller–amass enormous wealth through ambiguous means.
Marm was merely less ambiguous. From managing pickpockets, she began financing
and directing the operations of many–Asbury states the majority–of
the city’s gangs of bank robbers, shoplifters and store burglars. And always,
whenever one of her boys got in trouble, she was there to back him up with her
money and connections.

She allegedly
ran a school on Grand St. in the manner of Dickens’ Fagin, where small
boys and girls were taught useful trades by professional pickpockets and sneak
thieves. Asbury claims she also offered advanced courses in burglary and safe
blowing, with postgraduate work in blackmailing and confidence schemes.

According
to Lardner and Repetto, Marm financed one of New York’s greatest bank robberies,
the Manhattan Savings Institution caper of October 1878. Planned by George Leonidas
Leslie, also known as Western George, the heist was three years from concept
to execution. Leslie, although less famous than Jesse James, was more successful
in a business way. An elegant, literate man-about-town, known for his tailoring,
exquisite manners and membership in some of the town’s most select clubs,
Leslie simultaneously commanded a remarkably sophisticated gang of professional
bank robbers. Armed with a practical understanding of mechanical engineering,
Leslie plotted robberies that went far beyond the usual stick-’em-up. They
were sometimes years in the making, usually involving the procurement or creation
of architects drawings of the banks to be robbed and the fabrication of customized
burglar tools for each job. At the height of Leslie’s career, other gangs
consulted him in planning their robberies. In roughly 10 years, Western George
is believed to have organized and conducted more than 100 robberies.

Leslie began
planning the Manhattan Savings Institution in 1875. With Marm’s money,
he was even able to purchase a duplicate of the bank’s vault to test for
its weaknesses. His major concern was cracking the safes within the vault: Using
explosives would disturb the residents of neighboring houses. By bribing a bank
watchman, Patrick Shevlin, Leslie was able to hold practice runs inside the
bank after business hours.

Leslie disappeared
in February 1878. Four months later, a partially decomposed body with a pearl-handled
pistol beside it was found on Tramp’s Rock in the Bronx, near the Westchester
County line. Marm sent Wolfe up to inspect the body. It was Leslie’s. He
had been murdered. Lardner and Repetto suggest either that he had been fooling
with the wife of one of his gangsters, or that he had been indiscreet in conversation.
Asbury and Sante believe it was the latter, and that Leslie had been killed
by his gang as a punishment for talking too much. In any event, Marm paid for
his funeral.

Leslie’s
death was no barrier to the execution of his plan, which worked nearly to perfection.
What they had not expected was that most of the $2.75 million in loot was in
the form of registered bonds, registered in the owner’s name on the books
of the issuing corporations, that could not be freely transferred. As such,
they were merely so much fancy wallpaper to the gang. Only $12,000 was in cash
and $250,000 in bearer bonds, payable to whoever had their physical possession
and hence, freely negotiable. Still, a quarter million was better than nothing.

Unfortunately,
the captain of the local precinct, Thomas Byrnes, was no flatfoot. He interrogated
Shevlin, the watchman. Given that Shevlin had been promised $250,000 for his
help and received only $1200, and further given that Byrnes was both a master
of psychology and of the third degree, Shevlin talked. Byrnes, who would be
the city’s first chief inspector, arrested most of the thieves and their
accomplices, although then, as ever, he couldn’t quite put the touch on
Mother.

Some questioned
Marm’s odd exemption from police action. One of them was New York County
District Attorney Peter Olney. He hired Pinkerton detectives to investigate
because he mistrusted the police. Apparently, Marm was set up. The Pinkertons
reportedly attached identifying marks to property that was stolen by Marm’s
clients. She just didn’t notice.

On July
22, 1884, Marm and her son were arrested at home, and the house was searched.
Marm was released on $21,000 in bail, supposedly secured by her real property.

She was
represented by the finest criminal counsel of her day, William F. Howe and Abraham
Hummel, popularly known as Howe the Lawyer and Little Abe. She had afforded
herself of their services as long before as 1870, when she first put them on
a $5000 annual retainer to keep herself and her own out of jail. Perhaps it
was a measure of her success: She was joining a client list that included Charles
O. Brockway, the counterfeiter; General Abe Greenthal and the Sheeny Gang; Peter
De Lacey, the bookie; various madams, and Western George–all criminals
whom Richard Rovere called "the upper crust of the lower order."

Just before
her long-delayed trial in December 1884, Marm skipped for Canada, with which
the United States then had no extradition treaty, reportedly with more than
$1 million in cash. Strangely, when the authorities attempted to seize the property
that had been pledged for her forfeit bail, they found that its title had apparently
been transferred to her daughters years before. Little Abe had fraudulently
backdated the title documents. He had taken care of Howe & Hummel, too.
Rovere, their biographer, states, "In the course of being interviewed by
the Herald on Mother Mandelbaum’s bail-hopping, Howe and Hummel
were asked if she had left town without settling her account with them. Howe,
replied, according to the story, by looking ‘toward the ceiling and jingling
some silver in his pocket. Lawyer Hummel, also looking heavenward, softly hummed
a tune.’"

Marm lived
in Canada for the rest of her days, dying in Hamilton, Ontario, on February
26, 1894.

Gaston B. Means, March 1924

The luxury apartment building at 1155 Park Ave. was brand new in 1915. Among its first tenants was Maude King, a boozy, scatterbrained wealthy widow from Chicago. She rented three neighboring apartments on the 10th floor for $9000 a year. Mrs. King lived in one, her sister lived in another, and in the third were Mrs. King’s business manager, Gaston B. Means, and his family.

Mrs. King had met Means in the spring of 1914. Within a few weeks, Mrs. King placed all her affairs in Means’ hands. He was 6 feet tall, weighed more than 200 pounds, and was bald, with a round face, dimpled smile, sharp chin and beaming eyes. Jolly and good-natured, with a smooth Southern style, he was surprisingly attractive to women. Behind his genial facade was an artist–a scam artist, a swindler for the joy of the perfect swindle, proud of his imaginative, plausible lies.

Born in Concord, NC in 1879, he went to New York in 1902 as a salesman for Cannon mills. He lived in a rooming house on W. 58th St. and then an apartment at 105th St. and Columbus Ave. A natural salesman, Means soon earned more than $5000 a year in salary and commission at a time when a seven-room apartment on Riverside Dr. rented for less than $200 a month and good theater tickets cost less than a dollar. Shortly after meeting Mrs. King, Means quit Cannon mills to work for private detective William J. Burns. He had been chief of the Secret Service before retiring in 1909 to start his agency. Tough, skillful and relentless, Burns had no ethics and soon realized Means was just the man for rifling a desk, bribing an informant or tapping a telephone.

The United States remained neutral at the outbreak of WWI in 1914. The British government secretly retained Burns to investigate German activities in New York. The Germans, in ignorance, offered Burns a contract to investigate the British. Burns refused their offer but referred them to Means, who became a nominally independent operative merely to handle the German account. Until America entered the war in 1917, Burns and Means played a mutually profitable game, each feeding the other information about his respective client. Means apparently took the Germans for up to $100,000 a year as Secret Agent E-13.

By the spring of 1917, Means had burned through Mrs. King’s ready cash. Mrs. King’s husband had left $10 million in trust to the Northern Trust Company of Chicago, IL to support an old men’s home. Means forged a new will leaving all to Mrs. King and, easily persuading her of its authenticity, submitted it for probate. In late August, Mrs. King vacationed with Means and his family in Asheville, NC. On August 29, 1917, Means and Mrs. King went rabbit hunting. He returned carrying her mortally wounded body, claiming that she had accidentally shot herself in the back of the skull. The local prosecutor, who found this improbable, indicted Means for murder. Unhappily, he then allowed Northern Trust to hire New York lawyers to help prosecute Means. The defense counsel successfully played on local antipathies to outsiders, winning an acquittal on December 16, 1917. Thereafter, Means boasted of having been accused of every crime in the penal code, from murder down, and convicted of none. After the phony will was rejected by the courts, Means returned to New York, where, having been evicted from 1155 Park Ave., he rented a Staten Island house and worked for Burns.

On March 4, 1921, Warren Gamaliel Harding became president of the United States. Harding’s administration would yield massive scandals: at least two suicides, numerous convictions, three disgraced Cabinet officers and new revelations and trials for nearly a decade after the president’s sudden death in 1923. Amidst it all, Harding’s mistress, Nan Britton, would publish her memoirs, memorable for the pathetic image of the lovers’ frantic couplings amidst the overshoes in a closet.

Harding’s campaign-manager-turned- attorney-general, Harry M. Daugherty, appointed Burns Director of the Bureau of Investigation. As Francis Russell observed in The Shadow of Blooming Grove, Burns ran the Bureau as he had run his agency. He didn’t care about search and seizure, considered wire-tapping and break-ins all in a day’s work and freely employed former criminals and men of ill repute.

On November 1, 1921, the Department of Justice hired Gaston B. Means. Now he had a badge, telephone, official stationery, an office and access to Bureau files. The underworld contacts developed during his years as a detective now became a source of riches. He peddled Justice documents–reports, correspondence, miscellaneous papers–to the persons they concerned. He claimed he could provide protection for bootleggers from enforcement of the Prohibition Act and fix prosecutions and destroy evidence. He said he was the bag man for Burns and Daugherty; sometimes, he said the payoffs were going to the Republican National Committee for President Harding’s reelection. Eventually, he claimed to be working directly for the president.

Almost none of this was true. No claim of Gaston Means can be credited without independent evidence. Means met Daugherty once, in a Justice Department hallway. He never met the president or visited the White House. But Means had the sociopath’s genius for intuiting what people wanted to hear. In particular, criminals want to hear that everyone is on the take. Moreover, Burns’ thuggishness and Daugherty’s moral ambiguity–the touch of sleaze that had made him
a power in Ohio politics and steer Harding to the presidency–heightened Means’s plausibility.

He also gained the confidence of Daugherty’s closest friend, Jess Smith. One of the Ohio Gang, the coterie of small-time, crooked pols around Daugherty, Smith
was a successful retailer, a kindly, slightly absurd, probably homosexual crook. Smith and Daugherty became so intimate that, as most historians of the Harding
administration note, Daugherty could not sleep without Smith’s reassuring presence just beyond his bedroom’s open door. Like Means, Smith peddled
Daugherty’s influence to bootleggers and other petty criminals. Neither man ever intended to deliver the goods.

For the moment, the cash flow was amazing. Means’ federal salary was seven dollars a day. He and his family lived in a Washington townhouse with three servants and a chauffeured limousine.

Means was suspended in February 1922. He had stolen a huge supply of essential government licenses and permits, many bearing the forged signatures of high-ranking government officials. He sold them even as he continued selling non-existent protection, picking up $50,000 here, $11,500 there, $13,800 somewhere else.

By early 1923, Daugherty was receiving so many private complaints about Means that Burns could no longer protect him. In May 1923, he appointed a special counsel to investigate and prosecute.

Then the president learned of Jess Smith’s remarkably dissolute personal life and informed Daugherty. The attorney general told Smith that he would have to go
back to Ohio. On Memorial Day morning, one of Daugherty’s assistants found Smith lying on the floor of the apartment that Smith shared with the attorney
general, a revolver in his hand and his brains in a trash can. Now the scandals began to break.

Means was indicted for larceny, conspiracy and some 100 violations of the Prohibition Act, even as the Senate began investigating Daugherty. One member of the investigating committee, Sen. Burton Wheeler of Montana, spent weeks with Means reviewing his testimony. On March 14, 1924, Means appeared in the committee room with two large accordion cases that, he said, contained his diaries of his government service (these had been concocted during the winter of 1923-24 to document his innocence). He testified that he had collected millions in kickbacks on government contracts for aircraft, war claims settlements and illegal liquor permits as well as protection money. It all went to Jess Smith for distribution to Daugherty and other Cabinet officers. He was completely at ease, marshalling his stories with utter self-confidence, even fishing papers from the bags and reading them to the committee. It was a masterful performance.

And he took Daugherty down. After all, Means had been the Bureau director’s right-hand man. On March 28, 1924, after Daugherty refused to open Justice files to the Senate committee, President Coolidge demanded his resignation.

The committee was concerned that Means’ testimony was verified only by his documents, which they had never seen. Means stalled handing them over. He claimed that his files had been taken by men claiming to be assistant sergeants at arms of the Senate. No one believed this. The Senate then learned the Bureau had staked out Means’ house on the night in question. The agents saw no one entering or leaving except Means and a newspaper reporter, who had each been empty-handed.

On June 17, 1924, Means went on trial. He was convicted and sentenced to two years; subsequent trials added two years; even the IRS came after him for non-payment of income taxes on the graft he claimed to have handled.

While in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, Means met May Dixon Thacker, the sister of novelist Thomas Dixon, whose The Klansman had been transformed by D.W. Griffith into The Birth of a Nation. Mrs. Thacker, whose literary outlet was True Confessions, promised to help Means tell his story. After his release, Means spent day after day dictating to her. Every night, after Mrs. Thacker went home, Means and his wife roared with laughter over the lies he’d invented.

The Strange Death of President Harding was among the best-selling books of 1930. Told with the accumulation of detail that lent plausibility to his cons, Means claimed to have served as Mrs. Harding’s private investigator, breaking into Nan Britton’s apartment to steal her diaries and Harding’s love letters.
Mrs. Harding was madly jealous of Britton; moreover, she knew of the Ohio Gang’s machinations. Coming to believe that only death could spare her husband shame and dishonor, Means claimed that Mrs. Harding had poisoned her husband.

Means raised some interesting points. The president died during a nationwide speaking tour. Supposedly, his illness stemmed from ptomaine poisoning after eating crabmeat. No one else in the presidential party, including the aide who ate the crab with him, became ill. The only person with the president when he died was Mrs. Harding. Finally, the physicians’ verdict of apoplexy was no more than an opinion, as the president was not autopsied.

Despite his literary success, Means still needed more money. When the infant son of Col. Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped in March 1932, Means persuaded Evalyn Walsh McLean, a wealthy heiress whom he had known back in Harding’s time, that he was in contact with the kidnappers and could recover the child for $100,000 ransom. She gave him the money. He never delivered. Means was arrested in Washington, DC, on May 5, 1932. He claimed that the Lindbergh baby was still alive. This took audacity, especially after Col. Lindbergh identified his dead son. Means got 15 years, serving most of his sentence at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, KS. Increasingly desperate for attention, by the end he was claiming to have killed the Lindbergh baby. On December 12, 1938, still in prison, he died of a heart attack.

As early
as the 1840s, according to David M. Friedman’s A Mind of Its Own: A
Cultural History of the Penis, German physiologist Arnold Berthold was experimenting
with transplanting rooster testicles. Shortly after World War I, Russian surgeon
Serge Voronoff began transplanting testicles obtained from apes into elderly
men who reported "renewed vigor." He eventually performed more than
1000 procedures at $5000 a pop. Gene Fowler, the Hearst journalist who organized
the first known American monkey gland transplant as a publicity stunt to increase
his newspaper’s circulation, had feared being unable to find "a man
who will permit a doctor with a knife in his hand to start fooling around with
his swinging trinkets." Thousands of limp and flaccid men soon proved him
wrong.

Although
his autobiography varied from telling to telling, John Romulus Brinkley consistently
claimed a birthday of July 8, 1885. He claimed to have been born in a log cabin
and graduated from high school in Tuckasiegee, NC. In 1908, while a Western
Union telegrapher in Chicago, he began attending Bennett Medical College. He
dropped out before his senior year. Four years later, Brinkley obtained a Tennessee
license to practice medicine as an "undergraduate physician"–apparently
some kind of learner’s permit. He worked for one Dr. Burke, who was a "men’s
specialist," his office furnished with papier-mache models of the male
organs that depicted the results of indiscretion. Once a prospect had been terrified
by the possibilities of tertiary syphilis, selling him a treatment was easy.
Then Brinkley opened a medical office in Greenville, SC. He advertised in the
local daily, asking "Are You a Manly Man Full of Vigor?" The suckers
came in droves. The Doc gave them injections directly into the hip at $25 a
shot. He claimed it was salvarsan or neo-salvarsan; it was really distilled
water. Two months later, Brinkley skipped town, stiffing both landlord and newspaper.

In June
1913, Brinkley resurfaced in St. Louis, MO, where he received an M.D. from a
diploma mill, the National University of Arts and Sciences, for a few hundred
in cash. It fooled Arkansas, which licensed him as a physician; the Arkansas
license, in turn, persuaded Kansas to license him, too. Doc later obtained a
second M.D. from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City, MO, whose proprietor,
Professor Date R. Alexander, once denounced a reporter for an article claiming
that Alexander sold medical diplomas for $200. "That’s a deadly insult,"
he said. "I never sold one for less than $500."

Brinkley’s
WWI career was brief: one month and five days on duty and one month and three
days in hospital, followed by release as unfit, partially due to multiple rectal
fistulas. Former Lt. Brinkley finally drifted to Milford, KS, which had no sidewalks,
electric lights or water system. However, he was down to his last 23 bucks.
So he rented an old drugstore for $8 a month and began a general practice.

One night,
a man came in, a self-described "flat tire" who claimed to be "All
in. No pep." Somehow, the subject of goats came up. "You wouldn’t
have any trouble if you had a pair of those buck glands in you," Brinkley
said.

The man’s
reply: "Well, why don’t you put ’em in?"

Brinkley
performed the operation in his back room. His procedure involved administering
a local anesthetic and opening the scrotum by incision from both sides. As he
later wrote, he then placed "the glands of a three weeks’ old male
goat…upon the non-functioning glands of a man, within twenty minutes of
the time they are removed from the goat." Within two weeks, his first patient
had "regained his pep." Within a year, the man and his wife had a
healthy child, named Billy to honor the goat. Then another man came in, claiming
the same…kidney problem. Brinkley whetted his scalpel, and the second patient
reported complete rejuvenation. Thousands would follow, and Doc had found his
metier.

The medical
establishment held that a recipient’s immune system would either encapsulate
or entirely reject animal glands. Nonetheless, Doc blandly claimed goat glands
renewed their recipients’ physical and mental vigor; indeed, he eventually
asserted his procedure transformed its beneficiary into "the-ram-that-am-with-every-lamb,"
while curing insanity, acne, influenza and high blood pressure. Numerous patients
publicly swore the procedure worked. Soon, the Doc was charging $750–in
advance. The patient selected his own goat.

By 1923,
Brinkley was also running a radio station. KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best)
broadcast weather reports and live country music. The Doc starred in "Medical
Question Box," in which he read letters from listeners, mostly women, on
their ailments and complaints, and prescribed medications over the air. These
prescriptions were coded, i.e., "Dr. Brinkley’s No. 101," and
only druggists that carried Brinkley’s products could fill them (kicking
back $1 to the Doc for each prescription). He was perfect for radio, with a
warm, down-home-sounding voice and a knack for providing questioners with the
answers they wanted to hear.

Despite
his affability, the Doc was amazingly vain. Sadie Luck, a librarian, later said,
"He autographed everything with his initials. I counted them on his Cadillac
once and, hubcaps and all, his initials were on that car 17 times!" In
1938, vanity finally overcame common sense. Hygeia, the American Medical
Association’s magazine, called him a quack. Brinkley sued for libel and
lost. The AMA then denounced him to the Kansas Board of Medical Registration
and Examination, which revoked his medical license for immorality and unprofessional
conduct.

Worse, the
Federal Radio Commission yanked his broadcasting license after a hearing on
June 20-22, 1930, holding his operations were not serving the public interest.
Some argued that Brinkley’s candor about sex was fatal; others noted the
politically influential Kansas City Star’s radio station was losing
advertisers to KFKB. Of course, the commission might have simply thought him
a fraud and swindler.

Nonetheless,
KFKB had made Brinkley famous. He believed his licenses might be regained through
political influence. Although only 42 days remained until election day, and
it was too late to have his name printed on the ballots, Brinkley announced
his write-in candidacy for governor. As his attorneys had appealed the commission’s
decision to the federal courts, the actual suspension was delayed until the
appeal could be heard. Thus, he stayed on the air throughout his campaign. The
Democrats and Republicans thought him absurd. His name wasn’t even on the
ballot and his platform promised something for everyone: free school books,
free auto tags, lower taxes, better times for the working people, lakes in every
county and increased rainfall.

But Brinkley
was a great salesman, with a knack for anti-establishment rhetoric in a state
sliding into the Great Depression. After several hours daily on the radio, he
stumped the state in his 16-cylinder Cadillac limousine and his private plane.
He drew enormous crowds to mass gatherings that mixed "elements of a fundamentalist
revival meeting with the mood of a state fair." One witness wrote, "The
man glittered. Standing on the platform with the sun shining on his white beard,
his gold-rimmed spectacles, his rings, watch-fobs, cuff-links and tie-pins,
he seemed to glow, wink and twinkle like a…Christmas tree. And, could he
talk!… We hung on every word, our mouths agape… The man was magical,
and his words were wonderful. I didn’t understand any of it."

In the last
days of the campaign, the state attorney general ruled that only ballots bearing
precisely the words J.R. Brinkley would be counted for the doctor. This saved
Kansas for the system. On Election Day 1930, as many as 50,000 ballots bearing
variations on his name, such as Dr. Brinkley or John Brinkly, were discarded.
Even so, the vote was Woodring (Dem.), 217,171; Haucke (Rep.), 216,920; and
Brinkley, 183,278.

Brinkley
relocated to Del Rio, TX, just on the Rio Grande. In the neighboring town of
Villa Acuna, Mexico, Brinkley built a transmitter with towers some 300 feet
tall. XER ("The Station Between the Nations") went on the air with
100,000 watts on October 21, 1931. Eventually, thanks to the Doc’s lobbyists
in Mexico City, the station began using 500,000 watts, then one million watts
(by contrast, the most powerful U.S. stations were limited to 50,000 watts).
XER thus blanketed North America, unrestrained by U.S. regulations.

XER broadcast
folksy lectures from Doc, who answered questions from listeners about anything
from astronomy to religion. Brinkley held forth on his special "x-ray and
microscopical as well as chemical examinations" designed to diagnose properly
"the disease that’s in your body, the disease that’s destroying
your earning power, the disease that’s causing you to keep your nose to
the grindstone and spend every dollar that you can rake and scrape." He
pleaded with those listening, "You men, why are you holding back? You know
you’re sick, you know your prostate’s infected and diseased… Well,
why do you hold back? Why do you twist and squirm around on the old cocklebur…when
I am offering you these low rates, this easy work, this lifetime-guarantee-of-service
plan? Come at once to the Brinkley Hospital before it is everlastingly too late."

XER was
also the first major national radio station for country music, from the Carter
Family to Hank Williams. It had Bible-thumping preachers and astrologers. Entrepreneurs
pitched get-rich-quick schemes: oil wells, real estate deals, lottery tickets,
all spectacular opportunities for enrichment, and 100 percent guaranteed. Frank
the Diamond Man sold genuine simulated diamond rings. There was The Lord’s
Last Supper Tablecloth, and the man who sold false teeth by mail; cures for
hemorrhoids, flatulence and rectal itch.

During the
late 1930s, Brinkley, who increasingly blamed his legal troubles on Jewish doctors,
began broadcasting rabblerousing anti-Semites such as Father Charles Coughlin
and the Reverend Gerald Winrod, the Kansas Hitler. In 1938, while staying at
the Waldorf-Astoria, Doc met William Dudley Pelley, chief of the fascist Silver
Shirt Legion of America, and gave him $5000.

Amidst the
early days of WWII, the Doc opened a flight school. Its XER advertisements falsely
claimed its students would receive draft deferments. Hustling to the end, the
Doc died on May 26, 1942, at the age of only 56. One of his patients summed
him up: "I knowed he was bilking me, but that’s okay. You see, I liked
him anyway."

He was born on April 9, 1869, the second son of Dr. Wilson and Lavicie Catherine Heflin. After his admission to the Alabama bar in 1893, he practiced law for about a year and then found a job as a clerk in the county courthouse. He would not leave the public payroll for nearly 40 years.

For a politician, the ability to entertain an audience may be more useful than intelligence or common sense. Tom Heflin was a great entertainer. He had been a storyteller from childhood, developing a standup comic’s sense of timing, and combined this skill with a great natural instrument, described by the New York World on January 29, 1928 as "a voice of marvelous flexibility and power which he used with conscious and calculated effect. He can be strident when he is denouncing his enemies, or his voice can sink to the soft diapason of an organ when he grows tender."

Heflin’s eloquence was more a thing of manner than content. Derived from the full-blown bombast current in his youth, Tom’s oratory was filled with showers of rhetorical sparks and Roman-candle phrases, rich with alliterative generalities and mellifluous polysyllables that, like fireworks, were meant to glow and expire. One supporter said, "He can take any two words you mention and turn them into the Declaration of Independence, and have enough left over to write the Book of Revelations." Thus, he eulogized Alabama’s leading crop: "Cotton is a child of the sun; it is kissed by the silvery beams of a southern moon, and bathed in the crystal dew drops that fall in the silent watches of the night." Or he denounced his opponents as those who would "tear the stars from the flag of Alabama and leave the stripes as a token of her shame." Whether his audiences were edified or stupefied by his magniloquence is another question.

He dressed the part, affecting white linen or cotton suits in summer, with ivory double-breasted waistcoats. In winter, he wore spats, frock coats and striped trousers. Around a high, stiff collar, Tom knotted a huge flowing bow tie and topped off the ensemble with a black, broad-brimmed slouch hat. And, as was said of Warren G. Harding, "the son-of-a-bitch looked like a United States Senator."

He was elected mayor of Lafayette in 1892, register in chancery of Chambers County in 1894, state representative in 1896, delegate to the State Constitutional Convention in 1901 and Alabama secretary of state in 1902. In 1904, he went to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he remained until 1920. He favored free trade and a progressive income tax, opposed high railroad-freight rates and denounced corporate monopolies. Later, he supported the League of Nations, whose detractors he considered tools of arms merchants.

He also defended lynching as a natural response to interracial rape and called for racial segregation on public transportation. One March evening in 1908, Tom was taking a Washington trolley. As the car stopped, he noticed a negro passenger take a drink of whiskey only a few seats from a white woman. The outraged congressman dragged the negro from the streetcar. Bystanders separated them and Tom climbed back on the trolley. Witnesses later said that the negro cursed at Heflin and reached into his own pocket. Heflin thought he was going to be attacked. Like any self-respecting Southern gentleman of the day, Tom was packing heat, and, drawing his revolver, fired on the man, hitting him in the neck and an innocent bystander in the leg. The police arrested Tom for assault with a deadly weapon. According to Allan A. Michie’s Dixie Demagogues, the conversation at the stationhouse went like this:

"What’s your name," growled the sergeant.

"J. Thomas Heflin."

"Nationality?"

"Democrat."

"What?"

"I’m a Democrat."

"Oh! Well, what’s your occupation?"

"I’m a Democrat."

Eventually, the charges were dropped.

Heflin was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1920 and reelected in 1924. As a freshman senator, he launched a crusade against the Federal Reserve when it raised the discount rate, causing a deflation that threw five million people out of work. Tom denounced this as a deliberate plot of the Money Kings. He told his constituents such anecdotes as: "A man said to a Republican, ‘Harding and his crowd put me on my feet.’ Well, the Republican interrupted him with delight. "You didn’t let me finish," the man said. "When the Democrats were in office, I could afford a car. Now I have to walk."

Tom’s oratory was most attractive when ironic. Once, after Sen. William E. Borah, the self-proclaimed Lion of Idaho, had roared in feigned opposition to a bill to raise senators’ salaries, Tom replied to the old phony in lush prose. "Senator Borah," the Alabamian purred, "reminds me of John Allen, an old soak who pretended he had no taste for the mint julep his wife was preparing. After protesting long enough, John Allen took that mint julep, with frost on the sides of the glass, a bank of sugar an inch deep on the bottom, and three strawberries nesting thereon like so many eggs in a robin’s nest, while the mint leaned lovingly over the rim of the glass; John Allen took that mint julep in his hand, and the amber-colored liquid flowed over the velvet folds of his stomach like a dewdrop sinking into the heart of a rose."

During the 1920s, the Mexican revolutionary government began nationalizing its American-controlled oil industry. Some investors demanded an American invasion to restore their property. Heflin opposed any intervention, charging that the Knights of Columbus were conspiring with Big Oil to interfere with Mexico. The charge was not wholly unfounded. In fact, the Knights of Columbus openly favored the overthrow of Mexico’s anti-clerical regime and wealthy Catholic oil investors financed some of its propaganda. However, Heflin made other accusations of bewildering irrelevance. He charged that a Catholic employee of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving had drawn a rosary on a new dollar bill (it was the filigree work around Washington’s portrait). He even attacked the White House for purchasing drapes of cardinal red, further proof of the Vatican’s long arm.

Heflin began attacking Catholicism across the country, drawing thousands to Klan-sponsored meetings (for $150 to $250 a speech). When the 1928 Democratic national convention nominated the Catholic governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, for president, Heflin brought his campaign to the Empire State, addressing thousands at a meeting sponsored by the United Protestant Alliance in Richmond Hill, Queens amidst posters reading KEEP THE ROMAN MENACE OUT.

Bigotry was one thing; bolting the party was something else. The Alabama Democratic State Executive Committee ruled that only loyalists who had supported Smith in 1928 could enter the 1930 primaries, preventing Tom from seeking the Democratic nomination. After an unsuccessful appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court, Heflin ran as an independent.

The Democrats nominated John H. Bankhead Jr., son of a former U.S. senator. Tom campaigned from town to town, amusing enormous crowds with stories on subjects like Uncle Johnny and the telephone. Uncle Johnny was afraid of the contraption and didn’t believe it would work. One day his friends put a call through to his wife several miles away and dragged him to the telephone. Just as he picked up the receiver, a bolt of lightning struck the building, followed by a blast of thunder. Uncle Johnny was knocked ten feet. "It works!" he yelled. "That was my old woman all right–it sure was." Tom would then say, "It takes a good bolt of lightning to wake up some people. Maybe some of us need a shock like Uncle Johnny to realize that behind the strange doings of Alfred E. Smith is their master’s voice in the Vatican at Rome. The Pope is ready to try again in 1932."

Bankhead defeated Heflin by 150,000 to 100,000 votes. Contending that he had been illegally barred from the primary and that the general election had been fraudulent, Heflin contested the outcome. After an investigation spanning 15 months and costing more than $100,000, the Privileges and Elections Committee found that Bankhead’s nomination was valid, Bankhead was not directly linked to any irregularities and the disputed votes would not have changed the outcome. On April 26, 1932, as the Senate considered the committee’s recommendation against Heflin, he requested permission to speak from the floor. It was an extraordinary request. By now, Bankhead had been seated. Nonetheless, over the fierce objection of the majority leader, the Senate granted Heflin its permission–by one vote. Red-faced with emotion, Heflin held the floor for five hours. As he thundered to a conclusion, the gallery audience, packed with his supporters, jumped to its feet with a roar of approval. Two days later, the Senate voted against Heflin, 64 to 18.

Heflin never lost hope of a comeback. He ran for Congress in 1934 and lost. He scraped out a living on patronage, serving as a Federal Housing Administration special representative and a special assistant U.S. attorney. When FDR nominated one of Alabama’s U.S. senators, Hugo Black, to the Supreme Court, the old war-horse ran for the vacant seat at a December 1937 special election. He lauded FDR as the greatest man who ever lived and attacked the Federal Reserve, the "great money masters of the East (who) shear us with panics like the shepherd does his sheep."

In the last days of the campaign, Tom developed pneumonia. He was delirious in a hospital bed during the voting and did not know he had lost by nearly two to one for several days. "When I told him," his secretary said, "he wasn’t bitter at all. He just said, ‘The Lord takes care of his children, and there are other things to be thankful for!’" By springtime, Tom was out campaigning, this time for Congress, and again he lost. He managed to get his job back at the Federal Housing Administration, where he remained until 1942. Whenever he was in the nation’s capital, he found time to use his privilege as a former senator of access to the floor, often finding a vacant seat and sitting quietly with his eyes closed, listening to the debate.

In his last years, his mind wandered, and he believed himself still a senator and needed in Washington. His relatives occasionally had to come down to the Greyhound station in Lafayette and gently take the old man, dressed in his threadbare frock coat and battered slouch hat, off the Washington bus. He died in Lafayette, AL, on April 22, 1951.

On December 14, 1894, Edward MacDowell performed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl. Although it had been first performed in Boston some five years before, the concerto had not previously been performed here. After all, before the advent of the phonograph and the radio, orchestral music could be heard only in live performance.

Surely there’s
no love lost between Brock and Grove’s editors at the Post, either.
The author of the bestselling Blinded by the Right, after all, did make
fools of so many journalists in that town, revealing that his supposed exposes
about Anita Hill and Bill Clinton–stories with which the journalism pack
dutifully and sensationally ran–were mostly based on fabrications, distortions
and half-truths.

It was no
great surprise, then, when Grove smeared Brock last year after the publication
of Blinded by the Right, floating a piece of Matt Drudge-inspired dirt
about Brock in his column, attempting to discredit him. Nor was it a shocker
when Grove went for a second helping two weeks ago, slamming Brock in an item
about the star-studded D.C. party celebrating the publication of the paperback
edition of the book. Grove once again offered up the Drudge sludge on Brock.
He also quoted a negative review of the book from last year (out of scores of
positive reviews), and ridiculed Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Nevada
Democratic Senator Harry Reid for hosting the release party.

Gossip columnists
have a reputation for stretching facts, and in this instance Grove lived up
to it even better than Page Six on its sleaziest day. He claimed that "many
of Brock’s former allies disputed his stories," as recounted in the
book. But in fact, no major players on the right have spoken up about Blinded
by the Right, let alone refuted it in any detail. They seem afraid of it
entirely. (There was David Horowitz’s distortion-filled slam of the book,
but that hardly constitutes "many of Brock’s former allies."
Nor did the nutty Horowitz dispute Blinded by the Right in a logical,
coherent or honest manner.)

So is Grove
an agenda-driven gossipist, a latter-day Walter Winchell on his own McCarthy-esque
crusade? Or is he simply operating the way gossip columnists everywhere operate–paying
off sources who give him valuable information by taking easy shots now and then
at common adversaries? It’s true that Grove has been romantically involved
with Amy Holmes, a right-wing Stepford-gal pundit (big on teeth, small on brains)
who has worked for at least one individual whom Brock skewers in his book. But
that doesn’t necessarily mean Grove shares her conservative sentiments.
It could also be that Grove has cultivated sources through her and through others
on the right, individuals who give him juicy Beltway gossip, and whom he repays
handsomely.

In other
words, for Grove, whose column is now syndicated across the country–gossip
product he’s got to pump out and sell nationwide–it might not be about
ideology as much as business. I know all about that business, as Grove and I
fed at the very same gossip trough in New York in times past.

But before
I get to that, let’s look at just what kind of crap Grove keeps pushing
about Brock–as well as what he conveniently keeps leaving out of the story.
The openly gay Brock recounted in his book how he and the sexually circumspect
Drudge–darling of many an antigay moralist–went on what Drudge thought
was a date back when Brock was a right-wing hit man in the 90s. Brock wrote
that the lovesick Drudge sent Brock roses days later and expressed that he wanted
the two to be "fuck buddies." Drudge, like the rest of the right,
at first stayed quiet when Brock’s book was published. But after the book
began racing up the New York Times bestseller list, Drudge finally erupted,
running an item on his website stating that Brock had experienced a nervous
breakdown while writing the book and had checked into a hospital (yawn).

Grove ate
it up at the time, quoting Drudge in his column but not reporting the pertinent
fact that Drudge had a motive in delving into Brock’s private medical information.
Grove made no reference to the "fuck buddies" stuff, even in a G-rated
way, and didn’t mention any relationship between Brock and Drudge.

Grove is
a 20-year veteran of the Post. But he previously worked at a very specialized
W. 57th St. p.r. outfit called Mike Hall Associates (I worked there as well,
after Grove had left). That was where Grove learned all about buying and selling
gossip. Mike Hall Associates, which has been around since the 1940s, is a "column
planter." Clients used us in addition to their full-service publicists;
we guaranteed them mentions in gossip columns like Liz Smith, Page Six, Cindy
Adams, People’s "Chatter" Page, and Parade magazine’s
q&a column called "Walter Scott’s Personality Parade," back
when it was written by the late Lloyd Shearer (there was never any Walter Scott).

Our clients
at the time included most of the major film companies, famous hotspots like
the Russian Tea Room, Broadway theaters and producers. Here’s how it worked:
We gave the gossip columnists a bunch of items on a page, each one usually no
longer than a paragraph. Every other item was a "free" item–delicious,
sometimes even scandalous gossip about a celebrity or a politician. The others
were "client" items (which were always underlined, so as to distinguish
them). We got our gossip from a variety of sources around town, as well as in
Hollywood, Washington, Europe and elsewhere, and we’d often pay them off
with screening passes to films or house seats for Broadway shows. If the columnists
used a "free" item, it was understood that they had to use a "client"
item. Sometimes they’d run it in the same column; other times the items
would run days apart. Often we wrote much of Liz Smith’s column, and many
of the columnists used our stuff word for word. We also penned both the questions
and the answers for Personality Parade. From what publicist friends tell me,
the gossip business doesn’t operate much differently today (though the
noted journalist Ed Klein, who pens Personality Parade, said he writes his own
answers to real questions, defending himself in an interview in the Boston
Globe Magazine in 2001, in which it was claimed that some of the published
letters seemed "questionable").

In Washington,
it’s not necessarily "client" mentions that people want in return
for a hot "free" item. They also want little political smears of their
adversaries–including, perhaps, people like David Brock, Tom Daschle and
others. So, from now on, when you read Grove’s column, look for what might
be the "free" items and what might be the "client" items.
You’ll be amazed at what you can figure out.

The Brooklyn
waterfront was once served by something called the Jay Street Connecting Railroad–JSC
for short. You can see on the Port Authority’s New York Harbor Terminal
map for 1949 where the railroad lines ran: They stand out bright red against
the elegant expanses of blue water and buff-gold land. Like the yards, piers
and terminals that fringe the waterfront, they’re the color of Monopolyboard
hotels. You can see the short line’s spaghetti tangle of tracks better
(at a scale of one inch to 400 feet) on the Port Series maps published by the
U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. According to the Interstate Commerce Commission’s
records, the JSC operated from 1904 to June 1959.

From the
Port Series map alone, the JSC seems to have been among the shortest railroads
in the United States, with a main line no more than a half-mile long. It began
in the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge, just north of New Dock St., in what is
now the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park. It then ran north along Plymouth St.
At Adams St., the main line swung west for a block, toward the East River, and
then north into John St., finally terminating amidst the complex of piers, warehouses
and factories between Jay, Bridge and Gold Sts. owned by Arbuckle Brothers,
the family firm that made Yuban Coffee and owned the little railroad.

In its life
and death, the short line’s history illuminates change: in industrial technology,
in the regional economy, in the neighborhood it served (named Vinegar Hill by
an 1820s developer, after the site of a fierce battle during the Irish rebellion
of 1798). For example, Empire-Fulton Ferry Park only exists today because the
railroad preserved the open space for team tracks: an open-air freight terminal
where the crews of horse-drawn teams and wagons (and later trucks) could unload
cargoes from freight cars directly into their vehicles. Unlike most railroads,
the JSC had no direct connection with another railroad. On the map, it seems
as solitary as a Lionel train set on a kitchen table. In fact, it connected
to the nation’s other railroads by carfloat: long, flat-decked barges with
railroad tracks on them for transporting freight cars about the harbor. This
was not unusual: at one time, New York’s railroads used tugboats and barges
to move over 5,300 freight cars every day about the harbor, providing direct
service to pier heads in all five boroughs.

From the
1830s onward, the harbor handled almost half of the nation’s foreign trade
while serving the largest manufacturing region in the United States. Numerous
railroads tapped into this business by building to the Jersey side of the Hudson
River: the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Jersey
Central, the Reading. As Thomas R. Flagg notes in New York Harbor Railroads,
serving New York was not easy. The area is divided by rivers and bays. Building
direct railroad connections in and about the harbor was technologically challenging
and prohibitively expensive. Until 1910, when the Pennsylvania Railroad built
the huge Pennsylvania Station complex, tunneling both the Hudson and East Rivers,
and 1917, when Hell Gate Bridge brought the New York, New Haven & Hartford
Railroad from the Bronx into Long Island, Brooklyn and Long Island had no direct
rail connections to the rest of the country. (Even then, the Pennsylvania’s
Hudson tunnel was only for passenger trains, being too small for freight.)

During the
19th century, Brooklyn’s waterfront saw explosive industrial growth. Factories
and warehouses were built at the water’s edge, many with their own piers.
From the 1880s, most railroads used carfloats to carry freight cars between
waterfront freight yards in, say, Jersey City or Weehawken, and waterside freight
terminals in the five boroughs. Cars with Manhattan- or Brooklyn-bound freight
were shunted toward float bridges, with steel structures attached at their land
end by hinges and the other end either floating freely with the tides or suspended
from an overhead framework. A tugboat hauling a float loaded with Jersey-bound
freight cars shoved it up to the float bridge. Once the float was pinned to
the bridge–secured with toggle bars and heavy ropes–a locomotive pulled
the cars from the float, one at a time to prevent capsizing, replacing them
with cars from the yard. Then the tugboat hauled it back across the harbor.

The JSC
was created by Arbuckle Brothers, once synonymous with Ariosa and Yuban coffees,
a huge wholesale grocery firm founded before the Civil War: Even its locomotives
were painted in Arbuckle’s signature orange and black. In 1860, Arbuckle
Brothers operated a single store in Pittsburg; within two decades, it would
be among the largest importers of coffee and sugar in the United States. This
was due largely to John Arbuckle, an amazingly imaginative man, who devised
a sugar-based glaze to keep roasted coffee beans from going stale. He then invented
a machine that graded, filled, weighed and sealed roasted coffee beans in paper
packages of uniform weight and quality. One machine replaced 500 people who
had previously done the same work by hand. The machine even labeled the bags.
By the 1870s, Arbuckle was shipping its coffee across the country in brightly
colored one-pound bags. Cowboys had a passion for it–some call Arbuckle’s
Ariosa "the coffee that won the West."

By the turn
of the century, Arbuckle’s owned a factory and warehouse complex on the
waterfront north of the Manhattan Bridge, with ocean-going freighters docking
at its three piers to unload Colombian coffee beans for its roasters. Believing
that a railroad would be more efficient in shifting cargoes among the buildings,
John Arbuckle started what became the JSC in 1904. On realizing the railroad
might profit from serving neighboring businesses, Arbuckle’s extended it
along Plymouth St., eventually reaching North Dock St. around 1920.

From the
beginning, the JSC relied on import-export traffic from the steamship lines
at its piers and freight cars interchanged by carfloat at its Jay St. float
bridge. Short trains of two or three cars constantly rumbled through Vinegar
Hill for delivery to factories and warehouses along the right of way. Goods
requiring delivery to other parts of Brooklyn were unloaded at the team track
by express men with wagons and trucks.

The JSC’s
identical steam locomotives, respectively numbered 1 and 2, were powerful six-wheel
switchers ordered new in 1906 from the world’s largest locomotive builder,
the Baldwin Locomotive Works. Short wheelbases let them shove boxcars along
the railroad’s extremely sharp curves into its customers’ warehouses
and industrial lofts. The railroad also had its own barn-red tugboats, with
unusually tall pilot houses (so that their captains might see over the tops
of the boxcars on their floats) and slender stacks painted in Arbuckle Brothers
orange and black.

Other railroad
freight terminals, similarly interchanging freight cars by carfloat, lined the
shores of the five boroughs. The Bush Terminal Railroad, serving the massive
industrial complex built by Irving T. Bush at the beginning of the 20th century,
was the largest. On a 200-acre Brooklyn lot, Bush constructed 15 industrial
lofts (each six to eight stories high), eight steamship piers, more than 100
warehouses and a railroad that, at its busiest, used eight locomotives and even
provided commuter service into the complex.

By the 1930s,
the JSC had replaced its aging steamers with an offbeat collection of cheap,
second-hand gasoline and diesel-electric locomotives from three different builders,
as diverse as a sampler box of chocolates. Most were literally unique, built
to demonstrate some manufacturer’s pioneering technology. Oldest and freakiest
was Number 3, the second-oldest gasoline-powered freight locomotive in America.
It was essentially a shack housing a 175-horsepower engine on a flatcar, built
by General Electric in 1915, a generation before anyone believed internal combustion
would replace steam in powering American transportation.

Arbuckle’s
began selling their properties during the Great Depression. Eventually, even
Yuban Coffee (the name comes from "Yuletide Banquet") went to what
is now Kraft Foods. The railroad soldiered on, enjoying a booming business during
WWII. Then change came to Brooklyn’s waterfront and the JSC. Coal for home
heating and industrial use, once the single largest category of harbor railroad
freight, vanished with the adoption of oil and gas heat. Suburbia’s demand
for better roads and highways made motor trucking more flexible for customer
service than railroads and carfloats. In 1955, Sea Land Service, Inc. pioneered
containerization at its Weehawken docks. Within a generation, stevedoring–the
labor-intensive break-bulk or piecemeal system of unloading ships–had been
replaced by intermodal containers: standardized trailer-sized steel boxes that
could be freely shifted with a crane from one mode of transportation to another–from
ship to flatbed, say–within two or three minutes. Containerization’s
efficiency, combined with construction of the Port Authority’s container
ports in Newark and Elizabeth, NJ, nearly destroyed Brooklyn’s waterfront
even as the factories themselves began relocating from the city. In any case,
carfloat service was profitable only with cheap labor: building, maintaining
and operating the fleets of tugboats and carfloats had become astronomically
expensive almost overnight.

As late
as 1955, the JSC was busy enough to afford another second-hand diesel. But within
four years, its business shriveled away. On June 27, 1959, the railroad was
abandoned. Its equipment was scrapped on site or sold. It was the first harbor
terminal railroad to fail. Today, the sole survivor is the New York Cross-Harbor
Railroad, operating a daily carfloat between CSX and Norfolk Southern at Greenville,
NJ, and the remains of the former Bush Terminal Railroad in Brooklyn. On land,
the Cross-Harbor interchanges with the South Brooklyn Railway, another tiny
railroad, surviving by the skin of its teeth, that once, legend says, attempted
to haul a dead whale by flatcar to the Coney Island Aquarium. The whale proved
too big for the tunnel south of Fourth Ave., but that, as they say, is another
story.

Of the JSC,
only the rails in the street remain. About a year and a half ago, I noticed
that my local New York Sports Club displays a huge poster of an incredibly buff
runner sprinting up a Brooklyn street near the Manhattan Bridge. There are rails
embedded in the cobblestones beneath his feet. The photographer used them to
focus the viewer’s attention on the runner.

From Halleck’s
first major publications in 1819 until long after his death in 1867, America’s
critics sang his praises. Even Edgar Allen Poe, who rarely praised anything
and whose savagery as a literary critic endures in the nickname "Old Tomahawk,"
called Halleck’s verse "the noblest…in all American poetry."
But by the 1930s, Halleck, as the intellectuals might say, had been decanonized:
purged from the body of literature that provides the common currency of intellectual
discourse. The AIA Guide to New York City now describes the statue as
"the prissy and pretentious bronze of a self-styled poet."

Fitz-Greene
Halleck (originally spelled Hallock: He changed the spelling when he was 14
years old) was born in Guilford, CT, on July 8, 1790. His father, Israel Hallock,
had been a Loyalist, serving as a sutler for the British cavalryman and war
criminal, Banastre Tarleton, whose valor was equaled by his zeal for burning
American homes. Israel loved music and literature and was proud of having read
every book in Guilford’s library.

Halleck
was educated in the local public schools. Like his father, he was an omnivorous
reader. (According to John Hallock’s The American Byron, he once
set his room on fire reading by candlelight.) A woman who watched him speak
at the age of seven described him as intelligent, gentle and lovable. It was
around this time that he seems to have begun writing verse: a schoolmate remarked,
"He couldn’t help it." One notebook of juvenile verses, dated
1802, is augustly entitled, "The Poetical Works of Fitz Greene Hallock."
At 15, after Halleck finished his schooling, Andrew Eliot, a kinsman, hired
him as a clerk and taught him double-entry bookkeeping. Within a few months,
Halleck’s abilities and character led Eliot to entrust him with managing
the store. He joined the local militia company and, despite his dislike of flag-waving
patriotism, took his duties seriously enough to be promoted to sergeant.

Halleck’s
horizons broadened in 1808 when he first went to New York on business. He caught
a play at the Park Theatre near City Hall, the kind of thing he later described
as a departure from "Connecticut principles." He remained living at
home for three more years, but the die was cast. He earned money for the move
by teaching arithmetic, writing and bookkeeping to his neighbors. In May 1811,
Greenwich Village became his home; within several months, Jacob Barker, a banker
with offices on South St., hired him as a clerk: Halleck worked for Barker for
the next 21 years. With the outbreak of the War of 1812, he enlisted in the
Iron Grays, a local militia company. Samuel Swartwout, Halleck’s commanding
officer, would later win distinction as America’s first public official
to embezzle over $1 million. Halleck served as a part-time soldier in and around
the Village and the Battery until the news of peace reached New York in February
1815.

Although
Halleck was discreet, his correspondence betrays a strain of misogyny: he seems
to have cordially disliked women and believed that most of his male friends
had married only for money. By contrast, Halleck’s relationships with men,
as reflected in his letters and verse, were often quite passionate, even making
allowance for the florid terms in which the 19th century portrayed male friendship.
His most emotional poems were all addressed to men: a dashing Cuban guest in
Guilford, a French roommate in Greenwich Village. The closest relationship in
his life began in 1813 when he met Joseph Rodman Drake, a native New Yorker
who was studying medicine. Accounts of their first meeting all agree that Halleck,
who found Drake "the handsomest man in New York," grasped his arm
and said, "We must know each other." Soon they were inseparable. Their
intimacy survived Halleck’s lone journeys to the Southern states and even
Drake’s marriage.

Between
March and June 1819, Drake and Halleck published a series of anonymous essays
and verses in the New York Evening Post called "The Croaker Papers,"
after their pseudonyms, Croaker and Croaker Jr. (Drake and Halleck, respectively).
The Croakers captivated local readers, poking fun at prominent figures and offbeat
local customs. Today, with their subjects forgotten, the Croakers seem tedious
and their satire irrelevant. Yet they were extremely popular in their day and,
once the authors’ identities were revealed, made them both well known.
Collections of the Croakers remained in print for another 50 years. In late
1819, Halleck published "Fanny," his longest poem, a mock-epic considered
"an amusing satire on the fashion, follies, and public characters of the
day," renowned for its "sparkle of wickedness and fun." Two editions
sold out within 18 months: Now Halleck was famous.

Drake’s
health failed during the spring of 1820. Halleck watched over him "with
more than a brother’s love" until he died on September 21, 1820. At
the graveside, Halleck murmured to a friend, "There will be less sunshine
for me hereafter, now that Joe is gone." Fifty years later he still grieved.
Halleck intermittently wrote verses to commemorate his beloved friend. One of
them, "On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake," which is considered his
finest work, remained a popular high school recitation piece into the 1920s.

When Halleck
published an edition of his poems in 1827, including "Alnwick Castle,"
"Burns," and his verses on the Greek War of Independence, the Byronic
"Marco Bozzaris," he came to rank among the city’s leading writers,
a peer of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant.
Yale elected him an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, and Columbia College
gave him an honorary degree. His works were reviewed across the country and
in Europe; he was constantly anthologized.

All the
while, Halleck maintained a career as a successful business executive. In 1832,
John Jacob Astor hired him as his confidential secretary after Jacob Barker’s
bank failed. Astor was then the richest man in America. Within months, Halleck
became Astor’s chief executive officer, conducting the day-to-day management
of Astor’s business affairs across the United States. Astor found Halleck
supremely efficient: he paid the poet $5,000 a year at a time when a skilled
laborer’s annual income might be $350.

In some
respects, Halleck was a surprisingly modern figure in his apparent lack of prejudice,
something that may reflect his revulsion to the Puritan heritage of his birthplace.
The surviving papers of many leading New Yorkers, such as Philip Hone and George
Templeton Strong, show strong, even violent distaste for the Irish, Catholics,
Native Americans, nearly any foreign-born immigrant and negroes. Halleck’s
do not. Moreover, Halleck apparently had many friends and acquaintances outside
his worlds of business, society, and literature. Dr. Thomas Nichols wrote in
his autobiography that, "I was walking on Broadway one day with the poet
Halleck, when he stopped, turned back, took off his hat to, and shook hands
with, this negro, then a white-headed old man. After a few words with him, he
rejoined me and told me his story." Apparently, Halleck had realized moments
after passing the old man that he was a friend and gone back to greet him.

Above all,
Halleck possessed the evanescent quality of charm, and one difficulty in describing
his personality is that many of his friends called him charming without ever
elaborating upon what he did that made him so.

Wealth and
literary fame made Halleck a public figure: he was naturally among the leading
New Yorkers who signed the city’s letter of welcome to Charles Dickens,
dated Jan. 24, 1842. Dickens described Halleck as "a merry little man"
(odd, considering that at five-nine, Halleck was tall for the time). Perhaps
Dickens was preoccupied. He was obsessed with the United States government’s
refusal to recognize foreign copyrights, owing to which American publishers
routinely pirated Dickens’ enormously popular books without paying a cent
in royalties. This subject seems to have dominated Dickens’ dinner conversation,
and there is childlike hurt and disappointment in his complaint that Halleck
had nothing to say to him about international copyright law.

When John
Jacob Astor died in 1848, he was worth roughly $20 million. In his will, he
appointed Halleck a trustee of the Astor Library, leaving him only an annuity
of $200. Halleck’s friends were more appalled than he; the poet expressed
gratitude for having been remembered at all. At 60, though, he could no longer
afford to live in New York. He returned to Guilford, where he lived frugally
with his sister Maria in a rented house.

Few Guilford
residents knew Halleck, but many disliked him. He was known to drink. He disliked
Puritanism (his poem "Connecticut" is an extended attack on the harshness
and bigotry of the Puritan fathers) and took no part in politics. (He boasted
that he had never voted for a president and claimed he had voted only twice–"once
for an assistant alderman and once for a ten dollar bill: both of which proved
counterfeit.") Also, he was a bachelor. Many locals believed that men had
a duty to marry and propagate. Even Halleck’s elegant wardrobe, accumulated
over the course of his 40 years in New York, seemed to them evidence of extravagance
and degeneracy. And as he composed verse aloud while walking, there were those
who thought he was out of his mind. A visitor once observed that Halleck’s
polite greetings to passersby were often snubbed. The poet seems to have taken
it all humorously, believing, perhaps, that good manners were their own reward.

Halleck
visited New York several times every year. In October 1867, he did so for the
last time. A "whoreson cold" that had been dogging him deteriorated
into pneumonia. On November 19, 1867, during a conversation with his sister,
she turned away for a moment and, when she looked back, he was dead. Three days
later, he was buried beside his father’s grave in the Guilford cemetery.
Only a few friends from New York learned of his death in time to attend the
service. Fewer locals came. Most stayed away, believing that to be seen at the
funeral of a man who had been known to knock back a few now and then might lead
to gossip.

In 1870,
Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Senator Charles
Sumner of Massachusetts traveled to Guilford to dedicate a monument to Halleck.
A century later, the Guilford library committee decided not to name a room at
the public library after him because of his reputation for drinking.

In fact, Maria had never been a nun. She was a runaway from a Catholic home for delinquent girls, and her child’s father was no priest, but merely the boyfriend who helped her escape. Nevertheless, Awful Disclosures became an overnight bestseller, echoing as it did the most popular anti-Catholic slanders of the day and reflecting the savage hatred of the Irish with which they went hand in hand. It was the cultural climate that partly led to John Joseph Hughes, fourth bishop and first archbishop of New York, becoming what one reporter called "the best known, if not exactly the best loved, Catholic bishop in the country."

John Hughes was an Irishman, an immigrant and a poor farmer’s son. Though intelligent and literate, he had little formal education before he entered the seminary. He was complicated: warm, impulsively charitable, vain (he wore a wig) and combative (he once admitted to "a certain pungency of style" in argument). No man accused him of sainthood; many found him touched with greatness. He built St. Patrick’s Cathedral and founded America’s system of parochial education; he once threatened to burn New York to the ground. Like all archbishops and bishops, Hughes placed a cross in his signature. Some felt it more resembled a knife than the symbol of the redemption of the world, and so the gutter press nicknamed him "Dagger John." He probably loved it.

Born on June 24, 1797, in Annaloghan, County Tyrone, Hughes later observed that he’d lived the first five days of his life on terms of "social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire." Then he was baptized a Catholic. British law forbade Catholics to own a house worth more than five pounds, hold the King’s commission in the military or receive a Catholic education. It also forbade Roman Catholic priests to preside at Catholic burials, so that–as William J. Stern noted in a 1997 article in City Journal–when Hughes’ younger sister Mary died in 1812, "the best [the priest] could do was scoop up a handful of dirt, bless it, and hand it to Hughes to sprinkle on the grave."

In 1817, Hughes emigrated to America. He was hired as a gardener and stonemason by the Reverend John Dubois, rector of St. Mary’s College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, MD. Believing himself called to the priesthood, Hughes asked to be admitted to the seminary. Father Dubois rejected him as lacking a proper education.

Hughes had met Mother Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, a convert to Catholicism who had become a nun after her husband’s death and occasionally visited St. Mary’s. She saw something in the Irishman that Dubois had not and asked the rector to reconsider. So Hughes began his studies in September 1820, graduating and receiving ordination to the priesthood in 1826. He was first assigned to the diocese of Philadelphia.

Anti-Catholic propaganda was everywhere in the City of Brotherly Love. Hughes’ temperament favored the raised fist more than the turned cheek. So when, in 1829, a Protestant newspaper attacked "traitorous popery," Hughes denounced its editorial board of Protestant ministers as "clerical scum." And after scores of Protestant ministers fled the 1834 cholera epidemic, which Nativists blamed on the Irish, Hughes ridiculed the ministers–"remarkable for their pastoral solicitude, as long as the flock is healthy…."

In 1835, Hughes won national fame when he debated John Breckenridge, a prominent Protestant clergyman from New York. Breckenridge conjured up the Inquisition, proclaiming that Americans wanted no such popery, no loss of individual liberty. Hughes described the Protestant tyranny over Catholic Ireland and the scene at his sister’s grave. He said he was "an American by choice, not by chance…born under the scourge of Protestant persecution" and that he knew "the value of that civil and religious liberty, which our…government secures for all." The debate received enormous publicity, making Hughes a hero among many American Catholics. It was noted in Rome.

Dubois, who had left St. Mary’s to become bishop of New York, suffered a series of blows to his health. Hughes was barely 40. Nevertheless, in January 1838, he was appointed co-adjutor bishop–assuring him the succession to Dubois–and was consecrated in the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott St. To the older man, it was a terrible humiliation to see a man he had deemed unqualified for the priesthood succeed him. When Dubois died, in 1842, he was buried at his request beneath the doorstep of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral so the Catholics of New York might step on him in death as they had in life.

Hughes’ first order of business to gain control of his own diocese. Under state law, most Catholic churches and colleges were owned and governed by boards of trustees–laymen, elected by a handful of wealthy pew holders (parishioners who couldn’t afford pew rents couldn’t vote), who bought the property and built the church. When, in 1839, the trustees of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral had the police remove from the premises a new Sunday school teacher whom Dubois had appointed, Hughes called a mass meeting of the parish. He likened the trustees to the British oppressors of the Irish, thundering that the "sainted spirits" of their forebears would "disavow and disown them, if…they allowed pygmies among themselves to filch away rights of the Church which their glorious ancestors would not yield but with their lives to the persecuting giant of the British Empire." He later said that by the time he had finished speaking, many in the audience were weeping like children. He added, "I was not far from it myself."

The public schools were then operated by the Public School Society, a publicly funded but privately managed committee. They favored "non-denominational" moral instruction, reflecting a serene worldview that Protestantism was a fundamental moral code and the basis of the common culture. In fact, as Hughes biographer Father Richard Shaw pointed out, "the entire slant of the teaching was very much anti-Irish and very much anti-Catholic." The curriculum referred to deceitful Catholics, murderous inquisitions, vile popery, Church corruption, conniving Jesuits and the pope as the anti-Christ of Revelations.

Bishop Dubois had advised Catholic parents to keep their children out of the public schools to protect their immortal souls. But Hughes understood the need for formal education among the poor. He demanded that the Public School Society allocate funds for Catholic schools: "We hold…the same idea of our rights that you hold of yours. We wish not to diminish yours, but only to secure and enjoy our own." He concluded by warning that should the rights of Catholics be infringed, "the experiment may be repeated to-morrow on some other."

On October 29, 1840, a public hearing was held at City Hall, with numerous lawyers and clergymen representing the Protestant establishment and Hughes the Catholics. Hughes opened with a three-and-a-half-hour spellbinder. The Protestants spent the next day and a half insulting Hughes as an ignorant ploughboy and demonizing Catholics "as irreligious idol worshippers, bent on the murder of all Protestants and the subjugation of all democracies," according to historian Ray Allen Billington. The City Council denied his request.

With elections less than a month away, Hughes created his own party, Carroll Hall, named for the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. He ran a slate of candidates to split the Democratic vote, thereby punishing the Democrats for opposing him. The Democrats lost by 290 votes. Carroll Hall had polled 2,200.

In April 1842 the Legislature replaced the Public School Society with elected school boards and forbade sectarian religious instruction. When the Whigs and Nativists had the King James version declared a non-sectarian book, Hughes set about establishing what has become the nation’s major alternative to public education, a privately funded Catholic school system. He would create more than 100 grammar and high schools and help found Fordham University and Manhattan, Manhattanville and Mount St. Vincent colleges.

Anti-Catholicism had gained legitimacy by the 1840s. Now the Nativist movement included not only Protestant fundamentalists who saw Catholicism as Satan’s handiwork, but also intellectuals–like Mayor James Harper, of the Harper publishing house–who considered Catholicism incompatible with democracy. All hated the Irish. Harper’s described the "Celtic physiognomy" as "simian-like, with protruding teeth and short upturned noses." Their cartoonist, Thomas Nast, caricatured the Irish accordingly.

Between May and July of 1844, Nativist mobs in Philadelphia, summoned to "defend themselves against the bloody hand [of the Pope]," ransacked and leveled at least three churches, a seminary and nearly the entire Catholic residential neighborhood of Kensington. When Hughes learned a similar pogrom, beginning with an assault upon Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, was planned in New York, he called upon the Catholic manhood of New York to rise to the defense of their churches and he armed them. A mob that stoned the stained glass windows of the cathedral found the building full of riflemen, and the violence went no further. Hughes later wrote that there had not been "a [Catholic] church in the city…not protected with an average force of one to two thousand men–cool, collected, armed to the teeth…."

Invoking the conflagration that kept Napoleon from using Moscow as his army’s winter quarters, Hughes warned Mayor Harper that if one church were attacked, "should one Catholic come to harm, or should one Catholic business be molested, we shall turn this city into a second Moscow." New York’s buildings were largely wooden, and the city had burned twice in the previous century–there were no riots.

On July 19, 1850, Pope Pius IX created the archdiocese of New York, a development reflecting the growth of both the city’s Catholic population and the influence of Hughes himself. Having received the white woolen band of an archbishop from the hands of the Supreme Pontiff, Hughes embarked on a new project, "…a cathedral…worthy of our increasing numbers, intelligence and wealth as a religious community." On August 15, 1858, before a crowd of 100,000, he laid the cornerstone of the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 5th Ave. and 51st St. He would not see it finished. On January 3, 1864, death came for the archbishop.

After Maria Monk gave birth to a second illegitimate child, her Protestant champions quietly abandoned her. She became a prostitute, was arrested for pickpocketing and died in prison. Her book is still in print.