Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/787

 NEW YORK BUILDING TRADES PARALYSIS OF 1903 757

"business agent" met and enthusiastically voted to continue his salary of $48 per week, even though he should have to serve the entire sentence of two and one-half years.

All this is simply the Tammany idea transferred to the industrial field. Parks was the typical ward heeler, and the ward heeler's followers seldom worry if he makes himself rich at the expense of city contractors or the city treasury, so long as he is liberal in his distribution of largess. No doubt the majority would prefer that he get his living honestly, but his "good qual- ities" are in very close evidence and very practical, and buy him an easy pardon for the others. It is not that they love clean hands less, but full hands more ; and it is only just to recognize the influence of necessity and dull monotony when this choice is presented to some of the least-favored groups of the wage-earning population, en masse. But it is exactly this kind of pot-logic that makes the success both of the political and of the labor demagogue. Here we find Parks and all of his kind.

It has been reported that this man's record as a labor leader in New York includes the ordering of more than five thousand strikes in the last seven years an absurd exaggeration. Prob- ably a few hundred would cover all of any real importance. However, he has not been idle in this respect by any means, nor in a practical solicitude for his own pocket. The interrelation of both these lines of activity appears in his systematic campaign of extortion, laid bare last June, and resulting in his first con- viction on the specific charge of obtaining $200 from an employer by threatening a strike. That he was able to attend and virtually browbeat the September convention of the struc- tural iron-workers in Kansas City was due to his release from prison on a "certificate of reasonable doubt," permitting a new trial. Extortion of a "fine" from the Tiffany studios, for past unfriendliness to labor, is the particular offense which again took him behind the bars.

Parks's defense was that booty obtained in these ways was not for his personal benefit, but for the union cause. What is the true inwardness of this ? Take, for example, the case of