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  None of this was possible, of course, without steam. One deck below the W. & A. Fletcher engine were two huge boilers and an entire hold compartment full of several tons of coal. The age of steamboat travel had dawned nearly a century ago on the very waters where the Slocum now floated. In 1807, Robert Fulton became the first person to successfully apply steam power to a boat when he piloted the Clermont 150 miles up the Hudson River to Albany. Fulton’s triumph announced the arrival of the industrial age, when new technology would allow man to defy nature—in this case, the relentless downward flow of a major river. More precisely, it ushered in a new era, decades before the railroad, of steam-propelled travel. And with each passing decade, subsequent inventors and engineers made enormous improvements in steamboat power, efficiency, speed, and safety. By the time of the General Slocum’s launch in 1891, massive steam-driven ocean liners routinely crossed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, carrying thousands of passengers and tons of cargo.

  Much of the Slocum’s mechanical format was visible for all to see. Mounted amidships just aft of the smokestacks stood a tall steel tower surmounted by a diamond-shaped lever. Attached to one end of the lever was the engine’s twenty-foot-high piston rod. Attached to the lever’s other end were two drive rods that led to the paddle wheels (see diagram). As the rhythmic pulses of steam from the boiler caused the piston rod to move upward and downward six feet in each direction, it moved the lever, which in turn moved the wheels. Despite its deceptively simple appearance, it was a highly complex system of energy generation and transfer, the product of more than two centuries of refinement in engineering.

  For its first five seasons the General Slocum enjoyed a reputation as one of the city’s finest passenger steamers. On weekends and holidays from late May to early October, it made two round-trips from Manhattan to Rock- away, a popular seaside retreat in outermost Queens on Long Island. At fifty cents for a round-trip, New Yorkers of every class enjoyed the two and a half hours (75 minutes each way) about the commodious Slocum almost as much as the intervening time at the beach. On weekdays and special occasions such as the annual international yacht races off Sandy Hook, groups paid top dollar to charter the steamboat.

  But in that era of incessant advancements in technology and cutthroat competition between passenger lines, the Slocum’s reign as the city’s top steamer was short-lived. What had been cutting-edge technology and the very latest in first-class appointments in 1891 were by the mid-1890s rather unexceptional. Newer, bigger, faster steamboats with far more luxurious accommodations such as full dining rooms, lounges, and dance floors now commanded the attention—and dollars—of the city’s swell set. By 1896 the Slocum had slipped to the second-tier rankings of steamboats, still very respectable and profitable, yet considerably less so than the day she went into service. The boat rarely sat idle during the peak season, only now it was chartered by middle- and working-class groups like unions, fraternal societies, and churches.

  Today it was the latter, a church group bound for Empire Grove on Long Island Sound. An hour after the captain awoke, the steamer buzzed with activity as the crew prepared it for the excursion. Tons of coal and water were brought aboard along with ample food, drink, and ice. Deckhands spiffed up the boat’s appearance using mops and rags and then hosed the whole boat down. Most crews used their own boat’s fire hose and pump for this morning ritual, but not on the Slocum.For as long as anyone could remember, they had used a hose and hydrant from the pier. And it was just as well, for anyone could see that the Slocum’s weathered fire hoses were not up to the task.

  It took only fifteen minutes or so to complete the wash-down. Cloudy gray torrents of water spilled from the boat’s scuppers, carrying away layers of salt, seagull droppings, coal soot, and traces of fine cork dust. The latter fell every day from the twenty-five hundred tattered life preservers slowly disintegrating in their racks above the decks. Minutes later, the deckhands cast off lines and the Slocum headed down the Hudson River to a pier where more than a thousand passengers awaited, eagerly anticipating a day of fun at the shore, safe from the dangers of the city.

  EMPIRE CITY

  Not long after the Slocum glided down the Hudson for its scheduled rendezvous with its church group, a ferry pulled away from its landing in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. Jammed to the rails with rush-hour commuters, the craft moved slowly through the brackish water. In twenty minutes it would reach the landing on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, deposit its cargo of hundreds, and return for another load. Every morning hundreds of thousands of men and women of every profession and class made their way to the Empire City in this manner over the harbor, or across the Hudson and East Rivers. Every evening the process was reversed as dozens of ferries slowly drained off a sizable portion of Manhattan’s workforce, taking them to their homes in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey.

  Most of the passengers on the ferry that morning lived permanently outside of Manhattan. But it being June 14 and the beginning of the summer season, some were professional men commuting from summer cottages rented for one or more weeks along the Jersey Shore. Among them was George B. McClellan, Jr., the mayor of New York City and son of the controversial Civil War general of the same name. Commuting to his office at city hall via the Hudson River ferry was an entirely new experience for him. Only yesterday he and his wife had moved into a seaside cottage at Long Branch for the duration of the summer and early fall. The idea had been his wife’s, for she was worried that the mounting stress from the day- to-day rigors of office would ruin his health. They could certainly afford it on McClellan’s annual salary of fifteen thousand dollars. As an added plus, the move would give them a chance to mix with the finest kind of New York society, since in the words of one guidebook, “The Branch” had been “for many years the most fashionable summer resort in the vicinity of New York.” Residents of the area’s fine hotels and private cottages, the guide continued, divided their days between “bathing in the morning, driving in the afternoon, and dancing in the evening.”

  At thirty-nine, McClellan, known as Max to his friends, was one of the youngest men to occupy the mayor’s office. Born in late 1865 while his parents were in Dresden during a three-and-a-half-year tour of Europe, he enjoyed an upbringing that was both comfortable and focused. His parents, nurses, teachers, and professors at Princeton instilled in him the habits and attitudes of an aristocrat, or what democratically inclined Americans preferred to call a gentleman. Like others of his class, he attended an Ivy League college (Princeton) where he studied history, art, and languages as well as literature, math, and science. This grooming plus a steady stream of famous personages into the McClellan household from the worlds of business and politics brought him to understand that he belonged to an American nobility, not an inherited status as in Europe, but one secured through the acquisition of wealth and training. With this status, he was informed, came certain obligations, chief among them public service. For Max, of course, there would be an additional requirement of no small magnitude— that he win the presidency and redeem the honor of the father to whom he was so devoted.

  Until recently, he had seemed well on his way to doing just that. After a stint as the youngest man to serve as president of the New York City Board of Aldermen followed by several terms in Congress, McClellan’s name was bandied about in 1900 as a possible Democratic nominee for vice president, perhaps even president. His youth (he was only thirty-five) and modest national profile caused the boon to fizzle, but his journey to the White House seemed only a matter of time. Three years later the gentleman politician threw caution to the wind and ran for mayor of New York. He hoped the high-profile job would give him the national exposure he needed to secure the Democratic nomination in 1904. Such a scenario seemed firmly grounded in reality, for the current occupant of the White House, Theodore Roosevelt, first gained national recognition as an anticorruption crusader while serving as New York’s commissioner of police from 1895 to 1897. Four short years later he had mana
ged to ride that fame, boosted by his “Rough Rider” exploits in Cuba in 1898, into the governor’s office, the vice presidency, and, courtesy of an assassin’s bullet, the White House.

  The one big difference between McClellan and Roosevelt was party affiliation. As a Democrat, McClellan’s political aspirations required that he join the most notorious political machine in the nation, Tammany Hall. Political machines operated in most American cities in this era, but none could hold a candle to Tammany when it came to corruption, nepotism, bribery, and voter fraud. Active as a political organization since the 1820s, Tammany achieved international ignominy during the reign of Boss William Tweed, whose corrupt exploits in the early 1870s were stupendous even by New York standards. “Tammany Hall,” thundered one outraged statesman in 1876, “bears the same relation to the penitentiary as the Sunday-school to the church.” Reformers and readers of Lincoln Steffens’s muckraking series “Shame of the Cities” in McClure’s magazine that year saw little evidence that much had changed a quarter century later.

  Nonetheless, when McClellan entered city hall on January 1, 1904, he was confident that any negatives derived from his association with Tam- many could be overcome by a successful first six months in office. If by July 1904—the month when Democrats would convene in St. Louis to choose their nominees for president and vice president—he had shown himself to be a successful proponent of efficient and effective government, he might yet be nominated. Certainly there would be no denying him the nomination for governor of New York State in 1906. The New York Times agreed. “Mr. McClellan is yet young,” the editors wrote in January 1904, “and he might go very far if, cutting altogether loose from evil Tammany influence and bad Tammany men, he would assert himself positively and mightily as a Mayor determined to enforce the laws impartially and to be guided by no other considerations than those of the public interest. … It is not merely a duty that confronts Mayor McClellan; it is an opportunity. As Mayor of this city he could make a reputation that would attract the attention of the whole country.”

  As of June 14 the young mayor had been in office exactly five and one- half months. Yet already the job had begun to overwhelm him. In large measure this was due to the day-to-day struggle of municipal politics. Steering a middle course between Tammany corruption and goo-goo idealism had proven far more difficult than he ever imagined. He had underestimated the power and resourcefulness of Tammany boss Charles Francis Murphy and found himself increasingly at odds with him. This was no small matter, for Murphy had the power to make—or break—a McClellan-for-president boon.

  McClellan’s sagging spirits also stemmed from the sheer enormity of his job, a fact made abundantly clear this morning as he approached the city from the waters of the harbor. There before him off the ferry’s bow loomed the southern profile of his domain, a colossal urban civilization of 320 square miles and home to more than 4 million people. Like many a corporation in its day, the city owed its vast size to a megamerger only six years earlier that had dissolved forty surrounding towns with names like Flushing, New Brighton, and the country’s third-largest city, Brooklyn, into one City of Greater New York. Consolidation, as it was called, ended once and for all any talk that New York would surrender the title of the nation’s largest city. Gotham had taken the upstart city of Chicago by its broad shoulders and shoved it firmly back into second place. The ebullient attitude of the city was best expressed by the New York Sun on January 1, 1898, the day the merger took effect:

  All hail to the new New York which comes into being to-day!… Long before the lives of many of those who read these lines are spent it will be the foremost capital of the world in population, in wealth, and in commercial and financial power. Nor can we doubt that there is to be developed a city which will surpass in grandeur any which has yet been builded by man. All hail the imperial city!

  All, it seemed, except for the man charged with running it. New York’s population exceeded that of every state in the union save Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The same could be said for its annual budget of more than $100 million. Thousands worked for the city in dozens of departments, from street sweepers and toll takers to schoolteachers and engineers. And six years after consolidation, the mayor and other officials still wrestled with the challenge of knitting together the economies, bureaucracies, and transportation systems of the five boroughs into a single, efficient unit.

  More than the sheer number of people there was, of course, the diversity. Up ahead off the ferry’s port rail stood the twin totems of the city’s heritage as the great melting pot of the world, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Today, as on every day, thousands of newcomers would arrive on transatlantic steamers in hopes of starting a new life in America. Indeed, that very morning the city’s papers informed the mayor and his constituents of a fare war among the transatlantic steamship companies that promised a surge in immigration. “Ten-Dollar Rate,” proclaimed a Times headline, “Brings Myriads of Immigrants.”

  His city was famous for being what writer Edwin Hill called “the great whirlpool of the races.” And it had been since colonial times, when one visitor in 1643 counted eighteen languages among New Amsterdam’s five hundred residents. Three hundred sixty-one years later it was the most racially, ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse population on the planet. Fully 75 percent of the city’s population were immigrants or the children of immigrants in 1904.

  Other revealing glimpses of the massive and complex municipality passed before the mayor as his ferry moved steadily toward Manhattan. Directly off the ferry’s bow loomed the tip of Manhattan island, a place now known as the Financial District. Its principal place of worship, a brand- new New York Stock Exchange built at a cost of $3 million, was hidden behind a phalanx of recently constructed buildings called “skyscrapers.” The first skyscrapers in the early 1880s had astonished the public by reaching the unthinkable height of ten stories, but in 1904, the city boasted no fewer than eighty skyscrapers, at least a dozen of which exceeded three hundred feet in height. “It is as if some mighty force were astir beneath the ground,” commented Harper’s Weekly in 1902, “hour by hour pushing up structures that a dozen years ago would have been inconceivable.”

  An equally extraordinary feature of the Empire City was wholly invisible that morning not only to McClellan but to all save the several thousand workers engaged in its construction. Begun four years earlier and now nearing completion, the “subway” was the largest municipal public works project ever undertaken in American history—larger than all but a handful of state and federal projects for that matter. Starting beneath McClellan’s office at city hall, it ran to northern Manhattan, then under the Harlem River into the Bronx. Skeptical New Yorkers could scarcely believe the claims of IRT officials who predicted a fifteen-minute commute from Harlem to city hall (possible, they claimed, because of a brilliant mass transit innovation: a second set of tracks for express trains). Proof would come on opening day, sometime in late 1904.

  Eventually the mayor’s ferry scrunch-thudded its way into a V-shaped landing near the foot of Rector Street in lower Manhattan. As soon as the gangways touched the pier they were covered with hundreds of commuters scampering to work or to still another mode of transportation like a trolley or elevated train that would take them uptown. City hall was about one mile to the northeast, and McClellan, a man fond of walking several miles each morning from his home in Washington Square, welcomed the oppor tunity to stretch his legs. The first portion of the walk was anything but pleasant, as it took him from the reeking waterfront along narrow streets lined with tenements, warehouses, and factories. But within minutes he reached the cemetery of Trinity Church (wherein rested notables like Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton), turned left onto Broadway, and headed north to where two-thirds of a mile distant in the center of a small park stood city hall.

  STORIES

  Outside McClellan’s office, the area around city hall swirled with frenzied movement and sound. Thousands upon thousan
ds of Gotham residents were on the move, walking briskly along sidewalks that lined traffic-choked streets. They bunched at corners, as if waiting until their collective numbers reached a critical mass, and then burst across the streets through small fissures in the long lines of trucks, wagons, cabs, streetcars, and carriages. None seemed to notice the cacophony of sounds—police whistles, streetcar bells, vendors’ shouts, horses’ hooves— coming at them from every angle. With serious expressions on their faces, they leaned forward and moved in a determined manner that made clear they were not out for a stroll.

  It was, in short, an ordinary, sunny Tuesday morning in the middle of June. The area around city hall was a transportation hub, and every day hundreds of thousands of commuters passed this way. “The rush and turmoil of traffic here,” announced a popular guidebook, “are indescribable.”

  For some it was simply a place to hurriedly transfer between ferries, elevated trains, streetcars, and hansom cabs. For others the city hall area was their destination, for in 1904 this was the city’s central business district as well as its political center. Wall Street and the financial industry lay a few blocks to the south. To the east and west were the city’s Hudson and East River waterfronts, flanked by countless factories and warehouses. To the north still more factories, shops, and office buildings. In every direction were restaurants, saloons, and newspaper stands. And right there in the immediate city hall area was Newspaper Row, the media capital of the nation.