John Francis Hylan

• 1. Introduction

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  John Francis Hylan arrived in New York City in the winter of 1887 with $3.50 in his pocket, a few sets of clothes, and a $2 train ticket. He crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, saw men building an elevated railroad, climbed onto the structure, and talked his way into a job before the day was out. He had never seen an elevated railroad before. Within a generation, he would be the mayor fighting to keep that same city's subway fares from rising. How did a farmhand from the Catskills become the 97th Mayor of New York City? What did he actually believe about power and money? And why did his successor appoint him to the bench with the quip that the children could now be tried by their peer?

• 2. The Catskill Roots

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  Hunter, New York, in 1868 was a place where a 60-acre farm in the mountains still carried a $1,500 mortgage that the family struggled to service every six months. Hylan was born there on the 20th of April that year, the third child and the oldest son. His father had emigrated from County Cavan, Ulster, Ireland at the age of seven and later served as a corporal in the 120th New York Infantry, known as the Ulster Regiment, during the Civil War. His mother's family reached back even further into American history; her maternal grandfather, Jacob Gadron, fought among Lafayette's forces in the American Revolution.

  Hylan's mother was Methodist, but he was raised Catholic. He wrote throughout his life about the words she spoke as he left home, quoting them years later as being "indelibly imprinted on" his memory: "Be honest, be truthful, be upright, and do by others as you would have them do unto you." His only surviving sibling, his sister Mary, died on the 10th of July 1911, struck by an automobile.

  The farm required Hylan to work long hours as the oldest boy. The school district was so poor that only one family could afford the required grammar or history book, which Hylan occasionally borrowed. School ran just four to five hours a day for five months of the year. In his teenage years, he earned extra money each spring by working for the Catskill railroad, digging earth and tamping it beneath the tracks to stabilize them after winter. That job on a mountain railroad, barely noticed at the time, would shadow his entire adult life.

• 3. Climbing the Elevated

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  On the 11th of March 1888, the day of the Great Blizzard, Hylan reported for duty at the East New York station of the Brooklyn Union Elevated Railroad. He had already talked his way into a laborer's position by claiming experience with the Catskill railroad. He was making $1.50 a day for heavy stoker work. Two years of that, then work as an engine hostler, and then he passed the required test to become an engineer, a moment he later described as "one of the happiest moments of his life." At $3.50 a day, he said he had "finally landed on the right side of the engine cab."

  The hours were punishing: 13-hour runs on weekdays, 12 hours on Saturdays, and 11 on Sundays. Even so, he found stability. He went back to Hunter and married his childhood sweetheart, Marian O'Hara. They settled in Bushwick, the Brooklyn neighborhood where they would spend most of the rest of their lives. From his engineer's wages, Hylan regularly sent $75 every six months to cover the semiannual interest on his family's farm mortgage, and eventually paid off the entire principal before he left the railroad.

  The ambition that drove him from the farm had not stopped at the engine cab. A near-accident with a railroad supervisor ended his railroad career abruptly. Hylan maintained it was the supervisor's fault; regardless, he was fired. His membership in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers allowed him to travel to Syracuse at no charge, and he passed the bar exam shortly after, taking the earliest available sitting.

• 4. From Law to Tammany

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  Hylan mortgaged the family farm again to raise $500, the startup cash he learned a law practice required. He opened an office on the corner of Gates Avenue and Broadway in Bushwick and made $24 in his first month. He eventually formed a partnership with Harry C. Underhill, an attorney who had written a treatise on evidence. Underhill handled the office work; Hylan tried the cases. The firm won a notable ruling that the Brooklyn Heights Railroad Company had to offer free transfers at all junctions.

  Before law school, his education had required a detour through the Long Island Business College to prepare for his Regents exam, because his earlier schooling had been too thin. He enrolled in New York Law School, where Woodrow Wilson, then teaching Constitutional Law, was among his professors. He graduated in October 1897 and clerked for Long Island City attorney James T. Olwell.

  His path into politics was partly accidental. One of his most important future contacts, John H. McCooey, the future Brooklyn Democratic Party boss, was a postal clerk when they first met. Hylan was sending money orders to his parents for mortgage interest payments. The connection held. Hylan stayed active in organizations ranging from the Foresters of America to the Twenty-eighth Ward Taxpayer Association, building the network of appearances that anyone with political ambitions needed. He kept up his union membership in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers even after he became mayor. The turn toward higher office came during the volatile citywide elections of 1903, in which Brooklyn Democrats clashed publicly with Tammany chief Charles Francis Murphy over the nomination of George B. McClellan Jr. for mayor. Hylan made his first move for party advancement in the turmoil that followed.

• 5. Mayor of New York

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  Hylan won the 1917 mayoral election, a four-sided contest, by defeating the reformer John Purroy Mitchel and restoring Tammany's hold on City Hall. He entered office with the backing of Tammany and of William Randolph Hearst. He was also the first Democratic candidate to win a significant portion of the African American voter base. Re-election came easily in 1921, with a wide plurality that carried many Brooklyn Democrats into office alongside him.

  His defining issue in office was the subway fare. He pushed for the construction of the Independent Subway System, which would later be absorbed into the New York City Subway. Robert Moses later recalled that Hylan ran much of a mayoral campaign on a single stump speech: keeping the five-cent fare in place. When Moses helped him draft a different speech, Hylan reached the intended climax, a Revolutionary War-inspired call for "the spirit of 1776," but read the year digit by digit, saying "one-seven-seven-six," and missed the effect entirely.

  On the 30th of December 1925, one day before the end of his second term, Hylan resigned from office to secure his eligibility for a $4,205 annual pension from the city. By that point, a committee appointed by Governor Al Smith had issued a report sharply criticizing the administration's handling of the subway system. Tammany backed State Senator Jimmy Walker for the Democratic nomination instead of Hylan, and Hylan lost. Walker then appointed him as judge of the Queens Children's Court. The 14-mile Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island had already been renamed for him in 1923, over the objections of political opponents.

• 6. The Invisible Government Speech

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  In 1922, while still serving as Mayor of New York City, Hylan delivered the statement for which he is most often remembered today. He named names. At the head of what he called "the real menace of our Republic" were, in his words, "the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers." He called this network "a giant octopus" that "sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation."

  Hylan charged in that speech that these banking interests virtually ran the United States government for their own purposes. He said they controlled both political parties, wrote political platforms, and used the major newspapers and magazines in the country to remove any official who refused to cooperate. The press, he argued, functioned as a club: public officials who resisted were either submitted into silence or driven from office.

  The speech was not a one-off remark. After leaving City Hall, Hylan spent considerable time writing and speaking against what he called "the interests," arguing that industrial concentration had handed great power to a small number of individuals who used it to impoverish working people. Walker's quip about appointing him to the children's court became more famous than almost anything Hylan himself did in office. But the 1922 speech outlasted the joke. It remains the clearest record of what Hylan believed was happening beneath the surface of American politics, delivered not from the margins but from the mayor's office of the country's largest city.