AROUSING A CITY AGAINST ITS GANGTERS
Richard, Livy S.
Arousing a City Against Its Gangsters Editor Marlen E, Pew of the Philadelphia "News-Post" Sets Going a Revolt Against the Corrupt Ring That Still Holds Sway in "the Quaker City" By LIVYS....
...Later Hartman came back, grabbed Rose, and ran her to the station house where she was locked up for the night...
...His courage is inspiring others...
...This story is true in all but the mamo of the boy...
...His efforts finally got him a job as crrand boy for a dyeing and cleaning establishment...
...The shaking down of vice is common...
...It was announced immediately that a bill containing virtually the same provision will pass in the next Congress...
...There will be bigger doings soon...
...After a day's hunt he saw a sign, "Boy Wanted," and was taken on by a firm manufacturing ladies' hats...
...They were inexcusable, as all an editor has to do is to hunt news and clean the rollers and set type, sweep the floor and pen short Items, and fold papers and write wrappers, and make the paste, and mail the papers, and talk to visitors, and distribute type, and carry water, and saw wood, and read the proofs, hunt the shears to write editorials, and dodge the bills, and dun delinquents, and take cussings from the whole force, and tell our subscribers that we must have money—we say that we've no business to make mistakes while attending to those little matters, and getting our living on hopper tail soup, flavored with imagination, wearing old shoes and no collar and a patch on our pants, and obliged to turn a smiling countenance to the man who tells us our paper ain't worth a dollar anyhow, and that he could make a better one with his eyes shut...
...Pew, with two small children, were left atone, newcomers in a strange community...
...would be rejected it will be seen that the purpose of this bill is simply to relieve the congestion in the congested districts of the United States where this recent immigration is mostly found and to relieve us of that type of immigration that is transient in its character, that which is not at all adapted to aid in building up and maintaining American institutions...
...So for three weeks he spent his mornings looking for work and his afternoons gathering wood to sell for kindling...
...And the gang this time knows that it is to be a REAL fight, NOT a SHAM battle...
...Education and Work...
...The Democrats control the House...
...It soon developed, of course, that back of Carey was the whole jungle system of capitalized privilege and blackmailed vice...
...This was how Carey and his gang backers went about it...
...But Pew's arrest and the stir it made caused the bar association to take the matter up and it is now going through the motions of a probing...
...Philadelphia has twenty-eight, magistrates...
...His parents had just "taken it for granted" that he would go to work after graduation...
...Already things have happened: One of Pew's charges against Carey was that he had paid $25 to a henchman named Boyd, a juror sitting in a street railway damage case, to "bang" the Jury...
...At the end of two weeks during which he had been paid $4.00 a week, he left because "a feller who had been there four years was getting only $6 a week...
...Rose screamed...
...So raw was this frame-up that other newspapers broke their accustomed silence...
...The situation of which It is typical has given mo-iTjeiiMim in several countries of Europe and America to a movement which has variously manifested itself in the employment agency, the vocational guide and the vocational educator.—Winthrop D. Lane, in The * * * A Humble Apology "We apologize for all the mistakes made In former issues," humbly remarks the editor of the Corning Gazette as be wipes his hands and leans the towel up in the corner...
...Pew invited the gang to sue...
...This was $1,000 more bail than was required in the case of Henry Clay, a former gang director of public safety, whom a jury recently convicted of having been in a conspiracy with contractors to defraud the city of $200,000...
...Rose Gowberg is a respectable girl The older newspapers in Philadel phia pay little attention to such incidents...
...No...
...Seventeen-year-old Rose Gowberg, at a window, saw the woman fall and rushed out with a glass of water...
...with power to fine, imprison or release...
...All this time Mrs...
...Hartman one night, on the street, beat up a woman with whom his brother lived...
...Boyd's confession, sworn to, had been placed before District Attorney Rotan, a Pen-rose-McNichol creation, and he bad refused to move, claiming the case was covered by the statute of limitations...
...A fact which spells the doom of the festering old system...
...The fight for legislation is now on at Harrisburg...
...Harry Hartman, fireman, is a heeler of Jim Carey, the "bloody Fifth" ward boss for the Penrose-McNichol gang who is also a city magistrate...
...The campaign for a freer Philadelphia, however, is only in the skirmish stage now...
...It was nine and one-half hours before friends could be notified, the magistrate located, bail supplied, and Pew released...
...Another result is a real movement to do away with the present magistrate system and substitute a municipal court...
...The revelations became the talk of the town...
...Pew tore the lid off and called spades spades...
...Houston Post...
...They denounced the manner of the arrest A deluge of protest resulted...
...The editor is Marlen E. Pew, a fighter for the common good...
...He received no answer to his first ap plication for a job...
...When the Senate Rose To Its High Duty Continued from page 4 ten years there has developed a stream of immigration fostered by manufacturing trusts seeking cheap labor and by steamship companies reaching out for increased traffic which created a condition expressed by Professor Jenks in a recent letter to President Taft in the following words: "The figures collected by the Immigration Commission * * * prove beyond doubt that in a good many cases these incoming immigrants actually drive out into other localities and into other unskilled trades large numbers of American workingrnen and workingmen of the earlier immigration who do not get better jobs, but, rather, worse ones...
...Indeed, he kept up a galling fire of facts so hot that bluffing would no longer do and Carey had to sue...
...But the House, 223 to 114—only fifteen votes lass than the required majority—refused to override the President's veto, and this measure will not become a law at the present session...
...The illiteracy test contained in the bill simply reaches that latter type of immigration and it is estimated that it will reduce its numbers to the extent of one-third who are now coming...
...They happened quickly...
...They paraded the facts...
...fifteen years and five months, graduated from a public grammar school in New York...
...He wanted to know about the brand of justice that Carey represents...
...The newspaper is the News-Post, only nine months old...
...RICHARD WHAT a free newspaper, with a brave editor, can do to arouse a community, and how a gang-system strikes back, are now being most vividly shown in Philadelphia, still "corrupt" in spots but no longer contented...
...Anybody on the inside will charge that no more than three of them are fit to sit The others are grafters, in league with the wolves and rats who make up the PenroseMcNichol machine...
...And the fight was on...
...In school he had been fond of arithmetic, and from childhood had wanted to become a bookkeeper...
...He happened to be home for dinner one night recently, and his wife rose in her place, and began: 'Children, we have with us tonight—' and Clubman has had a grouch ever since...
...Meanwhile the country waits for a measure that should have become a law without delay...
...Said Senator Dillingham, "When I say that the old immigration is entirely different and that only a fraction of two per cent...
...Pew asked by what right a law-breaking fireman used the machinery of justice to vent a grudge...
...It has never had a fearless editor on its trail before...
...Bail in real estate amounting to $500 in each warrant was demanded — $6,000 in all...
...At the end of one week the boy who had had the job before came back and John was "fired...
...After a week and a half "another feller said, 'Come along and learn carpentry,'" so John got a job sandpapering the sides of boxes with a machine...
...These are some of the immediate results of the editor's nine and a half hours in jail...
...They are rallying around it...
...If it fails to act, the play of publicity will continue...
...Pew featured it...
...In the words of Professor Jenks, this bill is in accord with the best authority and the best thought of the day and is based upon the long and patient investigation of "the one body of men that has really made a thoroughly sound, scientific study of the question...
...so he hurried home, afraid to meet the elevator man During the next three weeks John old five different kinds of work...
...For once, staid Philadelphia was forced to take notice...
...Releases signed in blank are carried by gang heelers for the benefit of politically valuable crooks, thus virtually turned into licensed criminals...
...Pew's paper and the jolt to public opinion caused by the manner of his arrest are converting talk into action...
...He sketched a few facts in Carey's public career...
...President Taft's objection does not weigh in the face of the excellent provisions of the bill as a whole...
...When Hartman started to drag the reviving woman away...
...Five dollars a week were the wages...
...For Pew is determined that this rich corporation, which is one of the cancerous centers of Philadelphia's corruption, shall be brought to book...
...For the common people at last have found a newspaper in their interest that can't be bluffed or bought...
...She fainted...
...Jury fixing in behalf of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co., a corporation long the football of politicians and now Morganized but still charging 8-cent fare if you get a transfer, has been a gang specialty, known of all but never punished...
...Those facts hurt...
...Twelve warrants were fixed up in a gang lawyer's office one morning, sworn to before a gang magistrate at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and could easily have been served on Pew at his office before he left it at 5. Instead, without notice, a constable pulled Pew out of bed at his home at midnight, dragged him four and a half miles across the city and thrust him in a cell amidst groaning drunks...
...For years Philadelphia has heard talk for municipal courts, with clean judges working systematically, as in Chicago...
...a Twilight Zone On the last day of last January John Pamello, aged...
...One afternoon he reversed the elevator suddenly and burned out the fuse...
...Distinguished Guest "Clubman and his wife don't speak...
...Before leaving he had been lucky enough to get a promise of a job with a millinery firm...
...Carey sued Pew's paper for $50,000 damages to his "character...
...Pew's nine and one-half hours in jail promised to end in a revolution...
...Pew's paper is the first to hit straight, and hard at the big grafters highest up...
...Next day Magistrate Jin bound her over in $200 to keep the peace...
...The Senate acted wisely and in the best interests of all in passing the bill over his veto...
...Our story starts in a sordid row in the underworld...
...There were threats of daily suits for criminal libel...
Vol. 5 • March 1913 • No. 9
