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Squat, scrubby-bearded, stiletto-eyed Dick Croker was a crook. A highlight of his rule came when the Rev. Charles Parkhurst of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church disguised himself as a Bowery tough and undertook a personal investigation of New York's vice conditions. Dr. Parkhurst's fellow crusader on this foray reported later that Parkhurst had sat "with an unmoved face" in a brothel, watching a troupe of naked prostitutes play leapfrog while Madam Hattie Adams playfully tweaked his whiskers.
In his later years Croker got "an achin' for style." He went to England, saying: "I am out of politics, and now I am going to win the Derby." He bought a stud farm, Glencairn, near Dublin, where he played the role of country squire on and off for the rest of his life; in 1907 his horse, Orby, at 100 to 9, won the Epsom Derby.
At 73, Croker married Bula Benton Edmondson, 23, of Oklahoma, who was said to be a direct descendant of Sequoyah, the Cherokee Indian chief (newspapers carried the bride's Indian name as Kotaw Kaluntuchy). At the wedding her hair was done in Indian style. Said she: "I have been inspired by the example of Pocahontas." When Croker died, at 80, he was buried at Glencairn near the bones of Thoroughbred Orby. He left some $5,000,000 to Kotaw Kaluntuchy Croker.
CHARLES F. MURPHY, Croker's successor, came out of New York's Gas House district, took a job as driver on the "Blue Line" horse cars, saved $500 and opened a saloon. He sold a schooner of beer and a bowl of soup for 5¢ and refused to serve women customers. Named Tammany leader of the Gas House district, Murphy took station by a Second Avenue lamppost at 9 o'clock each evening, ready to transact business, personal and political, with all comers. In the year 1910, as Tammany's Boss, Murphy won control of both city and state; he was the first Tammany leader really to do so. When Murphy died in 1924 (while making plans to boom Al Smith for President), Mayor Jimmy Walker mourned: "The brains of Tammany Hall lie buried in Calvary Cemetery." And so they did, at least until Carmine De Sapio came along.
"We've got some orators in Tammany Hall," said Plunkitt, "but they're chiefly ornamental . . . The men who rule have practiced keepin' their tongues still, not exercisin' them."
But Tammany had its full share of silver-tongued orators, and the greatest of them was William Bourke Cockran ("the Mulligan Guard Demosthenes"), who in 1895 befriended young Sandhurstman Winston Churchill. Through later years Churchill mentioned "the great American orator Bourke Cockran" so often that Lady Churchill threatened to walk off the platform if she heard the name again. A typical flight of Cockran's soaring speech: "The dweller in the tenement house, stooping over his bench, who never sees a field of waving corn, who never inhales the perfume of grasses and of flowers, is yet made the participator in all the bounties of Providence, in the fructifying influence of the atmosphere, in the ripening rays of the sun," etc., etc. Cockran's language was unequaled, said Churchill, "in point, in rotundity, in antithesis or in comprehension."