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.Stewart had been born a slave and served as a lieutenant in the 73rd U.S.Colored Infantry in the Civil War.During Reconstruction, he represented Tensas Parish in the Louisiana state legislature.In addition, he had been a businessman, a deputy sheriff, and a watchman at the New Orleans customs house.By the 1890s, with increasing violence against blacks in the South, Stewart found himself in New York City, where he no doubt used his Republican political connections to land a patronage position in the New York immigration service.Now he was out of a job.While men like Stewart took the fall, McSweeney and his allies, including John Lederhilger, dodged a bullet and resumed their jobs.Powderly had been foiled and so had his attempt to use the immigration service on behalf of McKinley and the Republican Party.Just after the conclusion of the Campbell-Rodgers investigation, Powderly wrote to an ally that if only he could control the Immigration Bureau without meddling from superiors, he could “pave the way for Republican success in many a doubtful place, and do it without detracting from the usefulness of the Bureau.” He promised McKinley that if only he were allowed a free rein, he could strictly enforce the immigration laws and win more support for the president from labor men, since Powderly’s Immigration Service would be looking after their interests regarding contract labor.Powderly wanted to help both American workingmen and McKinley, but he believed that personal enemies stymied his mission at every turn.The reason, he felt, was that the Immigration Service was filled with Democrats and the Treasury Department was rife with anti-labor men.With McKinley up for reelection in 1900, Powderly became obsessed with the belief that McSweeney and his allies were working for a Bryan victory.Some of Powderly’s friends ventured close to paranoia.James “Skin the Goat” Fitzharris and Joseph Mullet arrived in New York in May 1900, having left Queenstown, Ireland.They had been part of a group called the Invincibles, Irish Republicans who carried out the infamous 1882 Phoenix Park murders of Lord Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke in Dublin.Having served eighteen years in prison, the two men were now free and headed to the United States for a visit.The sixty-year-old Fitzharris, dapperly attired in a blue serge suit and green scarf with a pin bearing the face of Irish hero Robert Emmett, and the younger Mullet, a hunchback, were quickly detained.Their case clearly came within the 1891 law barring the admission of criminals; the only question was whether their crime was of a political nature or not.A Powderly ally named A.J.You believed that the detention of these two men had McSweeney’s fingerprints all over them.“You can readily see what an alarm will be sounded by the Irish people if these parties are held for investigation by our force and the hellish purpose conceived by the Deputy Commissioner [McSweeney] in having this order issued over the signature of the Commissioner,” You fretted.“How easily the holding up of the Irish immigrants or foreigners can be turned with a free hand against us and especially directed against yourself as the head of the Immigration Services.”When the Treasury Department finally decided that the crimes of the two men were not politically motivated, “Skin the Goat” and Mullet were sent back to Ireland, but only after they spent an unhappy month in detention.Mullet wrote to Commissioner Fitchie to complain about their treatment, calling their month in detention worse than their eighteen years in a British jail.In the latter, at least, the Irishmen were kept apart from the other convicts and treated like political prisoners, while in New York, Mullet and Fitzharris were forced to “mix with the scum of Europe.”A Democrat who had kept his job under a Republican administration thanks to new civil service regulations, McSweeney knew that his civil service classification could be overturned at any time, so he went out of his way to ingratiate himself with New York Republicans.In what was probably as shrewd an assessment as he ever made, Powderly noted that McSweeney was known always to be “a most ardent McSweeney man.” Whatever the case, McSweeney proved himself a consummate survivor and political operator.Powderly could have learned a few lessons from him [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]