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rule—spelled the beginning of the end for McLaughlin’s reign. Within weeks of Schieren’s accession it was noted that Remsen Street, where McLaughlin lived, had gone from being the cleanest street in Brooklyn to the one least visited by sanitation men. McKane suffered a far harsher fate. His enemies compelled Governor Flower to bypass the Kings County DA and appoint two special prosecutors (Edward Shepard and Benjamin F. Tracy, leaders of the Brooklyn bar), and in January 1894 McKane was convicted of election fraud and sentenced to six years’ hard labor in Sing Sing. To complete the overthrow of ring rule, the dissidents pushed for and won, in May 1894, the annexation of Gravesend by Brooklyn, transferring to central authorities control over its patronage and police—and jurisdiction over Coney Island, which reformers like St. Clair McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, believed would bring an end to the “wholesale licensing of every form of bestial immorality.”

In Manhattan, too, machine Democrats would be driven from office by a Republican-dominated reform coalition, with an investigation of the New York City police department serving as the springboard to victory. Tammany had assumed that the Rev. Parkhurst’s spectacular challenge had been effectively squelched back in 1892. However, the dogged vice reformer, with the aid of powerful Chamber of Commerce supporters, got Republican party boss Thomas Platt (a regular attendant at Parkhurst’s Madison Square church) to launch a probe into Democratic municipal corruption. The work of the investigating committee, chaired by Republican State Senator Clarence Lexow of Nyack, was momentarily foiled when Tammanyite Governor Flower vetoed its funding appropriation, but the Chamber of Commerce rescued the inquiry by agreeing to cover its costs.

By March 1894 the Lexow Committee, operating out of the Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street, was poring over evidence accumulated by Parkhurst’s City Vigilance League. It went on to dig up a good deal more dirt over the course of nearly a year’s rooting about in the city’s underworld. Eventually 10,576 pages of testimony compiled from 678 witnesses made clear the price Tammany had exacted for protecting outlawed interests. Politicians and police officers had been systematically shaking down saloons, brothels, abortionists, and gambling dens. Some policemen justified the practice as a way of making back the money they had been forced to ante up to buy their jobs in the first place. Others, like Clubber Williams, pointed to prevailing upper-class mores, cheerfully admitting he had made no attempt to close disorderly houses in the Tenderloin because, “well, they were fashionable.” Williams also admitted to having a halfdozen large bank accounts, a yacht, and a Cos Cob, Connecticut, estate; he told Lexow he’d made his money speculating in building lots in Japan. Not all police witnesses were so chattily cooperative. One police captain, the soon-to-be-notorious William S. Devery, turned aside most questions with the insouciant assertion that “touchin’ on and appertainin’ to that matter, I disremember.”

Police corruption was matched by police lawlessness: investigators turned up evidence of involvement in counterfeiting and confidence scams, pervasive election frauds, voter intimidation, and the systematic brutalizing of newer immigrants: clubbings of Eastern and Southern Europeans in Irish-American-dominated police stations were so routine they were known colloquially as “slaughterhouses.” The poor suffered additionally from police collaboration with landlords, strikebreaking employers, and assorted racketeers. The Lexow exposures received nationwide press coverage, sharing headlines with depression-era strikes and marches of the unemployed.

Parkhurst, who attended every session, was thrilled by his vindication. Now he longed to go farther and overthrow Tammany itself. He was seconded in this ambition by the mercantile and financial titans of the Chamber of Commerce. These gentlemen saw in the police scandals and the depression an opportunity