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By Root 8369 0

dollars. Big Bill Howe and Little Abe Hummel were as odd a pair, in their way, as Fisk and Gould were in theirs, and equally at the top of their field—the newly specialized profession of criminal law. Howe, like Fisk, was given to gaudy attire and clusters of diamonds and was also a master showman. In the courtroom his inspired rhetoric or ready tears worked wonders for his clients, famous and shady alike. The Gould-like Hummel—small, tidy, and precise—sported not gems but a death’s head watch charm and was master of the more subtle legal maneuvers.

Behind the lawyers were policemen and politicians. The Gilded Age witnessed an elaboration of the linkages between crime and politics established before the war. Politicos turned to gangsters for an election-day supply of muscle power and repeaters. Bill Varley’s joint was not only the resort of well-known burglars, it was also election headquarters for the energetic campaigns of electoral fraud waged during 1868 and 1870. Bribery and corruption of law enforcement officers became as commonplace as it was in the mainstream business world. The newly professionalized underworld nexus of criminals, fences, lawyers, police, and politicians would grow and deepen in coming generations, but the fundamental structure had been put in place.

57

The New York Commune?

Since the war, New York’s elite had been spellbound by Paris, glittering capital of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. Shedding centuries of anglophilia, they had passionately pursued all things French, from apartment houses to mansard roofs, from boulevards to ball gowns, from the cancan to the Crédit Mobilier. Now, in the summer of 1870, they were riveted by the rise and fall of the Paris Commune.

Bismarck’s rising empire had declared war on France, crushed Napoleon’s troops, and captured the emperor himself. (In Kleindeutschland enthusiasm for Prussian victories reached delirious levels.) Napoleon and Eugenie’s empire reeled, then toppled. The mass of Parisians demanded a republic that would fight on. They got a provisional government, led by haut bourgeois republicans, that only reluctantly prosecuted the war. The Prussians laid siege to Paris and, over the ensuing bitter winter, starved and froze it into submission. In January 1871 the provisional government agreed to an armistice and gave way to a new government, chosen by rural Frenchmen, dominated by landed gentry and royalists and headed by Adolphe Thiers, who accepted a humiliating surrender. But when Thiers’s troops tried to disarm the Parisian national guard, they failed, and he and his government fled the city.

Power passed to the Commune of Paris. Its officials were primarily professionals; its chief supporters craftsmen, laborers, and poor women, who were particularly active in street demonstrations. Within days Thiers’s army launched a second siege of Paris. In May, after bombarding the city’s fortifications, his troops entered the city and attacked the barricades the people of Paris had erected around their quartiers and arrondissements. In the next gruesome week of street fighting, Thiers’s forces made free use of incendiary shells, and the Communards burned great swatches of the city to slow the advancing troops. At the climax, vengeful troops slaughtered thousands of Parisians out of hand, and maddened and despairing Communards shot those they had held as hostages—including the archbishop of Paris—and torched hated public buildings. The victors, urged on by a frightened and frenzied bourgeois press, launched a “Communard hunt,” assembling new-made corpses in great piles at which wealthy women gleefully poked with parasols. “Trials” found thirteen thousand guilty and meted out sentences of death, imprisonment, forced labor, and deportation. Final body count: seventy hostages, 877 soldiers, and over twenty-five thousand Parisians.

New York radicals supported the Parisians. The American sections of the International expressed sympathy for the fight against the Thiers government, and Victoria Woodhull led a dramatic march in memory of the Commune. Exiles