(Excerpt from Public Papers of Charles Seymour Whitman, Go...)
Excerpt from Public Papers of Charles Seymour Whitman, Governor, 1915 I shall not attempt in this inaugural address to the people nor in my first message to the Legislature to lay out any comprehensive plan. I intend to take up each subject for separate study and from time to time to deal with it by message or otherwise as may seem best. My primary purposes will be to secure compe tency, efficiency and economy in the administration of the affairs Of the State, effective methods to deal with the spirit of lawlessness, reform in the administration Of criminal justice, and adequate legislation to meet the legitimate demands of all classes. The confusion naturally attending a change of administration, the pressure of current work that cannot be postponed, and the uncertainty created by the approaching constitu tional convention will inevitably delay the consum mation Of some measures. But with the co-operation Of my colleagues and the Legislature and the support of the people, I hope to be able to recommend effective and lasting reforms and to secure their introduction as speedily as is consistent with adequate study and due care. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(Excerpt from Public Papers of Charles Seymour Whitman, Go...)
Excerpt from Public Papers of Charles Seymour Whitman, Governor, 1915 I shall not attempt in this inaugural address to the people nor in my first message to the Legislature to lay out any comprehensive plan. I intend to take up each subject for separate study and from time to time to deal with it by message or otherwise as may seem best. My primary purposes will be to secure compe tency, efficiency and economy in the administration of the affairs Of the State, effective methods to deal with the spirit of lawlessness, reform in the administration Of criminal justice, and adequate legislation to meet the legitimate demands of all classes. The confusion naturally attending a change of administration, the pressure of current work that cannot be postponed, and the uncertainty created by the approaching constitu tional convention will inevitably delay the consum mation Of some measures. But with the co-operation Of my colleagues and the Legislature and the support of the people, I hope to be able to recommend effective and lasting reforms and to secure their introduction as speedily as is consistent with adequate study and due care. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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Charles Seymour Whitman was born on September 29, 1868 in Hanover, Connecticut, the fourth child of John Seymour Whitman, a Presbyterian minister of modest means, and Lillie (Arne) Whitman. The father was a seventh-generation descendant of John Whitman who immigrated to Massachusetts from England in 1635.
He received his early education in local schools and attended Williams College for a year. In 1890 he graduated from Amherst College, taught Greek and Latin for a time at Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, N. Y. , and received his LL. B. from New York University in 1894.
When a reform-minded Republican, Seth Low, became mayor of New York in 1902, he found a job in the city corporation counsel's office for Whitman, who had been active in his neighborhood Republican club while he eked out a living in private law practice. On Low's last day in office in December 1903 (Tammany Hall had ousted the reformers once again), the mayor appointed Whitman as a magistrate, the city's lowest judicial rank. As the result of a squabble between two Democratic factions, Whitman was the compromise choice for chief of the city's Board of Magistrates in March 1907, thus achieving his first real political visibility as he approached his fortieth year. Almost immediately, he set about making headlines by conducting a drive against payoffs to local police by bail bondsman and the keepers of after-hours saloons. Members of the city's Police Department were then regarded as mere creatures of Tammany Hall, which had arranged most of their appointments and used them as collectors of graft. As the most visible examples of the evils of Tammany, it was the police who were recurrently the objects of sensational investigations by reform groups, whose leaders would then run for office on the claim of having cleaned up the city. Virtually every New York reform politician from the early 1890's through World War I had made his reputation as a crusader against police corruption. On a municipal level, the issue had the same passionate, sure-fire appeal that the pursuit of Communist subversives had for later political generations. Although Whitman was defeated when he ran for a city judgeship in 1907, he had identified himself with the right cause, and in January 1910 he took office as the successful reform candidate for district attorney of New York County. His first year in this office was uneventful, but during this period he established a mutually convenient alliance with Herbert Bayard Swope, then a young reporter for the New York World, who had previously shown less interest in his newspaper career than in the company of the city's leading gambling-house owners. By 1911, however, after Swope decided to take his reporting career seriously, Whitman began to feed him stories about what was going on in the district attorney's office, and, in return, Swope headlined Whitman's role as a demon crime fighter. Late in 1911, the police commissioner appointed a lieutenant, Charles Becker (who had a long record as a grafter), to head a strongarm squad charged with cleaning up gambling operations in the city. Anxious to make points with the commissioner, Becker raided some of the city's biggest gambling houses, including that of Arnold Rothstein, one of Swope's closest friends. During the same period, a small-time Lower East Side gambler named Herman Rosenthal was making trouble for both the police and gambling-house owners by complaining about police payoffs, thus imperiling the traditional arrangement by which the gamblers, having paid off the police, were left to conduct their business without interference. On July 14, 1912, in a front-page interview written by Swope, Rosenthal declared that Lieutenant Becker had once been his partner in a gambling house. Whitman publicly rejected Rosenthal as an unreliable witness. Early on the morning of July 16, however, after Rosenthal was shot down near Times Square by four gunmen, Swope routed Whitman out of bed and persuaded him to go to the police station and take charge of the case. It was a critical moment in both their careers. For the rest of his life, Swope would say that it was the Rosenthal murder, on which he worked hand-in-glove with Whitman for the next three years, that got him started toward his editorship of the World. And in 1915, the New York Times, then a Whitman supporter, noted that Whitman's "entire political standing is based upon the convictions in the Rosenthal murder case. " The case made Whitman a national figure. During the six months following the crime, the Rosenthal murder story was on the front page, usually in the lead position, of 75 percent of the editions of the World. In William Randolph Hearst's New York American the score was 80 percent. The story was also widely covered in other parts of the country. A murder that was the result of a quarrel among local gamblers would have attracted little interest; it was the involvement of a corrupt policeman that made it such a sensational event. Although the prosecution conceded that Becker had never laid eyes on the four gunmen before the crime, he was arrested for murder. The four gunmen, who were later electrocuted (they were known as Gyp the Blood, Whitey Lewis, Lefty Louie, and Dago Frank) had admittedly been hired to do the job by local gamblers who were Rosenthal's avowed enemies. Whitman immediately clapped four of the gamblers in jail and gave them a grant of immunity from the murder charge in return for their written agreement that they would testify that Lieutenant Becker had ordered them to arrange the murder. Becker was convicted in October 1912. Fourteen months later, in a six-to-one decision, the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, overturned the verdict. In a scathing attack on the judge and the prosecution, the court held that Becker had not had a fair trial. In a second trial, however, before a new judge, with Whitman again handling the case, Becker was again convicted. A few months later Whitman was elected governor of New York on the strength of his fame as the man who had brought Becker to justice. "Whitman for President" clubs sprang up around the country, and Woodrow Wilson was quoted as saying that he assumed Whitman would be his opponent in the next election. By the time the Becker case reached the Court of Appeals a second time not only was Whitman the most powerful politician in the state but the judge in the second trial was a member of the court. There was little surprise when the court declined to find that the two men had failed to conduct a fair trial. Again the vote was six-to-one with four members of the court directly reversing themselves. There was some public protest over the fact that Becker's plea for clemency or a stay of execution on the grounds of new evidence (several of the witnesses against him had now altered their stories) must be made to the governor who had been responsible for convicting him. Whitman declined to delegate his responsibility to a proposed commission of distinguished legal figures, however, and Becker was electrocuted on July 30, 1915. The plaque his wife had attached to his coffin ("Charles Becker. Murdered by Governor Whitman") was removed on orders of the district attorney. During Whitman's remaining three-and-a-half years as governor, his lifelong tendency to overindulge in alcohol (although officially he was a strong supporter of the Anti-Saloon League) came increasingly to public attention, and inevitably it was said that he drank because he was haunted by the ghost of Charley Becker. During his term he made almost no mark on state government, possibly because of his continued preoccupation with his presidential aspirations. In 1917 he crossed the continent on a whistle-stop tour. Al Smith, his Democratic opponent in the 1918 gubernatorial election, charged him with "sitting in the Capitol at Albany with a telescope trained on the White House in Washington. " When Smith won that election, Whitman refused for many weeks to concede the defeat that marked the end of his lofty political hopes. He then returned to New York City, where he practiced law for the next twenty-eight years, never again holding public office.
His portrait was painted in 1921 by the Swiss-born American portrait painter Adolfo Müller-Ury (1862–1947) and is the property of the New York State Capitol at Albany; Müller-Ury had previously painted a portrait of his baby daughter, Olive (the future Mrs Parsons), which was much admired when exhibited, and was given by her to the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island, where it now hangs at Green Animals.
(Excerpt from Public Papers of Charles Seymour Whitman, Go...)
(Excerpt from Public Papers of Charles Seymour Whitman, Go...)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
On December 22, 1908, he married Olive Hitchcock; they had a daughter, Olive, and a son, Charles, Jr. Olive Whitman died in 1926, and in 1933 he married Mrs. Thelma Somerville Cudlipp Grosvenor.
