Word: crokers
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Tammany, said Croker, "looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them, in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there by which so long a row could have been hoed so quickly or so well...
...RICHARD CROKER, born in County Cork, Ireland, the son of Eyre Coote Croker. As a youth in New York, Dick Croker was leader of the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang, was the most feared brawler in town. At 22, Croker voted 17 times one day for a Democratic candidate for constable. Such an enterprising fellow was bound to become Tammany's leader...
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...
...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...
...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...