High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (10 page)

Parks’ tactics were brutal but effective. Union membership swelled from several hundred to 1,500, then to 3,000, then to 3,500, and as it grew so did the union’s power over builders in the city. The more ironworkers who came into the union, the fewer non-union men employers could call upon in the event of a strike. And if contractors tried to remedy a strike by importing non-union men from outside New York, as they often did, Parks’ men would pay the unfortunate imports a visit and “entertain” them vigorously.

Parks liked ordering strikes almost as much as he liked hitting people. At any given moment he had up to a dozen jobs tied up around the city. Parks demanded better working conditions and better wages, and he seldom negotiated on his demands. His dim view of negotiation was represented by his prized bulldog, a fearsome-looking creature named Arbitrator. The name was both a joke and a threat. Arbitration, to Parks, was something that came at the end of a leash and had big teeth. Parks had no interest in achieving peace
with employers, an opinion he made clear in a short essay he published in
The Bridgemen’s Magazine
:

 

…since the sun first arose on a newly erected world there has always been a battle between the strong and the weak, a struggle for mastery between the bulldogs of war and the craven worshipers of the white-winged dove, and it always ended the same way. The worshipers of the bulldogs of war, making the earth re-echo with paeans of victory, while the worshipers of the bird of peace humbly bowed their necks, permitting the collar of bondage to be clasped thereon…. God helps those that help themselves.

 

Parks’ bias against compromise would have disastrous long-term consequences for the ironworkers. In 1902, he fought and killed a proposed agreement between the international union and American Bridge Company, by far the largest employer of structural ironworkers in the country. The agreement offered better terms for ironworkers than any they’d received—or would again for decades to come.

In the short term, though, Parks’ tactics paid off splendidly. Builders yielded to his demands. There was so much money to be made in the skyscraper boom they could ill afford to lose time on an ironworkers’ strike. Because the steel frame preceded the rest of the building, ironworker strikes devastated employers. Stopping the steel, Parks understood, was the surest way to a builder’s wallet. He succeeded in raising the prevailing union ironworkers’ wage in New York to $2.50 across the board by 1898, to $3.20 by 1900, to $4 in 1902. “By then,” Parks later boasted, “we had them all. Why, for 1903, they went to $4.50 without a murmur.” He promised to raise the wage to an even $5. “And then we’ll stop,” he added drily. “Capital has some rights.”

His fellow ironworkers may have disagreed with his tactics, but they couldn’t argue with his results. The more Parks pushed around builders, and the more the builders capitulated, the greater Parks
grew in the estimation of his fellow ironworkers. He was “Fighting” Sam Parks, “The Bismarck Among Bridgemen.” When he told the men to walk, they walked. “His four thousand ironworkers,” observed
McClure’s
magazine, “obeyed like children.”

Parks’ power expanded still further after the Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Union joined the Board of Building Trades, an alliance representing 39 separate trades in New York. Parks quickly worked his way up to become its president. He now held sway over not only 4,000 or so ironworkers, but also 26,000 other building tradesmen, all of whom, it was said, were prepared to strike at his command. Nobody had ever wielded as much power in the building trades. And nobody had ever been as willing to abuse it.

On an afternoon late in the winter of 1902, Sam Parks met with a man named Neils Poulson, president of Hecla Iron Works, in a small unfinished room in the Flatiron Building, still under construction at the time. The men met to discuss a strike that Parks had called on Hecla six weeks earlier. Since Hecla was supplying ornamental iron for the Flatiron, the George A. Fuller Company, the building’s general contractor, was eager to get the strike settled and so had arranged this meeting. Poulson told Parks he’d lost about $50,000 due to the strike, and that the strike was wrong and unjust. “I also told him the way the men were picketing the works and slugging the people at work was illegal,” Poulson later recounted. According to Poulson, Parks responded, “I don’t give a damn for the union or the law.” The only way the strike would end, Parks insisted, was if Poulson paid him $2,000. “I want the money, and the strike won’t stop till it comes…. Don’t you forget I am Sam Parks.” Another newspaper gave the quote a more Seussian turn: “I’m Sam Parks, I am.”

Exactly when Parks began grafting is unclear. Perhaps he had been doing it all along. Certainly by 1901 it had become a serious habit. Pay up, he would tell a contractor, or he’d pull the men and stop the job. Or, more effectively, he’d call a strike first, then demand
a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to call it off. “Seeing Sam Parks” was a common phrase in the building industry, and everybody knew what it meant. If you intended to put up a steel building in New York, you’d better pay Parks. Otherwise, you’d have no ironworkers to build it.

Graft was a profitable calling. On his modest salary of $48 a week, Parks began to collect diamonds, including three large stones mounted on a gold ring he wore on his right hand. He also wore a thousand-dollar sealskin coat, according to one account, and no longer made his rounds on foot but in a hansom cab, accompanied by his bulldog. The legend of his quickly accumulated wealth grew in the telling. He was said to live in a luxuriously appointed home, where oil paintings festooned the walls and champagne flowed freely. His wife was said to spend her days shopping at department stores and having her nails manicured and her hands massaged, while Parks sauntered around town squeezing more graft and adding to his fortune of several hundred thousand dollars. Some of this was true, much of it was not.

For the most part, the employers paid up without a fight. Keeping Parks happy was worth a few thousand dollars when millions were at stake. In any case, hardly anyone begrudged a man a little graft in turn-of-the-century New York. Boss Tweed had been dead over twenty years, but Tammany Hall, and the Tammany way of doing things, still prospered in New York City. The muckraker Lincoln Steffens, writing in
McClure’s
magazine in November of 1903, estimated that the Tammany machine pocketed millions of dollars a year in graft. Steffens quoted the ex-chief of police, William “Big Chief” Devery, who once admitted that the police alone took in over three million dollars in one year during his short reign. Devery wasn’t confessing; he was bragging.

Graft flourished exceptionally well in New York’s booming building industry. Poorly paid inspectors from the Department of Buildings routinely made side deals with builders to let violations pass for
a fee. (The customary fee was one-half of what the builder would have spent to repair the violation.) What the builder saved, the inspector made, and everybody was happy. Paying graft to unions was accepted practice, too. In many cases, builders initiated payments to union representatives, bribing walking delegates to strike competing firms. In Chicago, always the leader in such matters, they had a fancy term for these collusive payoffs: “trade agreements.”

The George A. Fuller Company seems to have profited most handsomely from hardball tactics. Just five years after opening an office in New York, Fuller had grown into the dominant construction contractor in the city. Fuller grew in part because it could deliver buildings faster than any other general contractor. But how did the company manage this? To most people in the building industry, the answer was obvious: Fuller greased the most palms. Few failed to notice that unions, and most conspicuously the ironworkers union, seldom struck Fuller buildings. And no one missed the coincidence of the astonishing rise of the George A. Fuller Construction Company and the timely arrival of Samuel J. Parks in New York City. Many assumed that Parks was on Fuller’s payroll from the moment he entered the city—that he’d come to the city expressly to do Fuller’s bidding. The truth is probably more complicated. Parks did favor Fuller, going so far as to contribute a gushing letter to
The Bridgemen’s Magazine
complimenting Fuller for its “spirit of amity.” No doubt the compliment had been purchased. But Sam Parks carried water for nobody. He had too much pride for that. Indeed, in the end, it would be pride, not greed, that destroyed him.

An iron contractor named Louis Brandt recalled going to visit Parks in the summer of 1902 with a payment that the walking delegate had demanded to settle a strike. This was typically how it worked: Parks summoned a graftee to his row house on East 87th Street off Lexington Avenue, named his price, then dismissed the man. “Come,” he would scoff if one objected to the payment, “we are not children.”

Brandt had arrived on this summer day to give Parks $300 in cash. Parks told him to set the cash on a small table. As soon as Brandt put the money down, a young girl walked into the parlor, picked up the stack of bills, and walked back out without a word. It was a strange detail, particularly in light of the fact that Parks had no children of his own—who was this girl?—but it spoke volumes, somehow, of Parks’ contempt for Brandt and his ilk. Parks treated them as if they
were
children. These were men of means and education. They were men of achievement. They could understand Parks’ inclination to line his pockets—they were businessmen, after all—but they could not abide his contempt.

“That man Parks is a duffer,” a Chicago union boss would later tell the
New York Times
. “There are a hundred men in this town who have forgotten more about working the graft than he will ever learn…. Those who know how to make the unions profitable as business propositions do not have to be ballroom bullies. Parks is entitled to what he got—not for what he did, which is all right, but for the way he did it, which was all wrong.” In other words, if Parks had treated the businessmen with a little more polish and respect as he reached into their pockets, he might have gone on with the graft as long as his brief life permitted.

Strangely, for all of his alleged greed, Parks didn’t seem to care much about money in the end. What drove him was a more subversive and heedless urge. He voiced it in a peculiar little essay published in
The Bridgemen’s Magazine
in the late winter of 1903, shortly before his troubles began. The piece contains a stark, almost apocalyptic vision of a corporation like U.S. Steel usurped by a band of roughnecks.

 

The Billion-dollar Steel Trust seemed to own the earth and hold first mortgage on the neighboring planets…. But while at the zenith of ambition and when it seemed impossible for anything earthly to shake their power, along comes an ungodly people, illiter
ate descendants of Tubal Cain, the man that stood before Solomon and demanded his rights; uncouth workers of iron, who invaded the sanctuary, hurled the gilded heifer from the altar and sacrilegiously substituted a figure made of solid unpolished steel, mounted to the image of a Walking Delegate.

 

It’s worth considering that Parks probably did not “write” these words, nor any of the words he published in
The Bridgemen’s Magazine
. He was an unschooled man and—according to one of his obituaries—as illiterate as the descendants of Tubal Cain. He was also, as he had known for some time, a dying man, suffering from tuberculosis. Given the disease’s long incubation, Parks might have contracted the bacterium before coming to New York. He was, in any case, seriously ill by 1902.

Tuberculosis is a slow, wasting disease that exhibits itself as fever, fatigue, and persistent, wracking cough. These days, strong antibiotics render tuberculosis curable, but at the start of the twentieth century it was the leading cause of death in America. The term “consumption,” as it was commonly known, described the course of the unchecked disease; it appeared to consume a body from the inside out. In its most common pulmonary form, bacterium devoured the tissue of the hosts’ lungs, causing them to cough up blood. The most obvious effect the disease had on Sam Parks, at least in the early stages, was that it made his skin sallow and his cheeks sunken. But it also seemed to fuel him with a kind of reckless, feverish energy.

In the spring of 1903, Parks began acting like a man possessed. He launched a scorched-earth campaign against the steel-erection companies, ordering strikes with even greater abandon than usual. By late spring, he’d ordered a total of 2,000 strikes. In April, the United Building Trades, under Parks’ direction, threatened a general strike in all building trades, pulling 60,000 men from work. The demand: 10 to 20 percent increases across the board, or else a complete shutdown of
the building industry in New York. It was a threat so broad, so
unreasonable
, that it demanded a reaction. It got one.

SUMMER OF SAM

Early in the morning of June 8, 1903, more than a year after his meeting with Sam Parks in the Flatiron, Neils Poulson, president of Hecla Iron Works, paid a visit to the office of the district attorney of New York, William Travers Jerome. Accompanying Poulson was the vice-president of Hecla, Robert McCord. Poulson and McCord presented the D.A. with a cashed check made out to Sam Parks for $2,000. The check was enclosed in an oak frame, glassed on both sides, so that Parks’ endorsement could be clearly seen on the back. The check had been written to Parks, the men told Jerome, as payment to call off the strike against Hecla in April of 1902.

Poulson and McCord could not have found a more attentive audience for their story than William Travers Jerome. The district attorney was that most rare of turn-of-the-century New Yorkers, a genuine reformer. He’d made his name as an investigator for the Lexow Committee in 1894, snooping out corruption in the police force and Tammany Hall. Behind a well-groomed moustache and wire-rimmed glasses, he kept his expression tight-lipped and severe. Jerome had had his eye on Sam Parks for some time, and when the men from Hecla called on him on this early summer morning, he began taking sworn affidavits on the spot.