e: "You are caught with the goods on.
No excuses will go. The Democrats of this district ain't used to dukes
and princes and we wouldn't feel comfortable in your company. You'd
overpower us. You had better move up to the Nineteenth or Twenty-seventh
District, and hang a silk stocking on your door." He went up to the
Nineteenth, turned Republican, and was lookin' for an Albany job the
last I heard of him.

Now, nobody ever saw me puttin' on any style. I'm the same Plunkitt I
was when I entered politics forty years ago. That is why the people of
the district have confidence in me. If I went into the stylish business,
even I, Plunkitt, might be thrown down in the district. That was shown
pretty clearly in the senatorial fight last year. A day before the
election, my enemies circulated a report that I had ordered a $10,000
automobile and a $125 dress suit. I sent out contradictions as fast as
I could, but I wasn't able to stamp out the infamous slander before the
votin' was over, and I suffered some at the polls. The people wouldn't
have minded much if I had been accused of robbin' the city treasury, for
they're used to slanders of that kind in campaigns, but the automobile
and the dress suit were too much for them.

Another thing that people won't stand for is showin' off your learnin'.
That's just puttin' on style in another way. If you're makin' speeches
in a campaign, talk the language the people talk. Don't try to show how
the situation is by quotin' Shakespeare. Shakespeare was all right in
his way, but he didn't know anything about Fifteenth District politics.
If you know Latin and Greek and have a hankerin' to work them off on
somebody, hire a stranger to come to your house and listen to you for a
couple of hours; then go out and talk the language of the Fifteenth to
the people. I know it's an awful temptation, the hankerin' to show off
your learnin'. I've felt it myself, but I always resist it. I know the
awful consequences.

Chapter 13. On Municipal Ownership

I AM for municipal ownership on one condition: that the civil service
law be repealed. It's a grand idea--the city the railroads, the gas
works and all that. Just see how many thousands of new places there
would be for the workers in Tammany. Why, there would be almost enough
to go around, if no civil service law stood in the way. My plan is this:
first get rid of that infamous law, and then go ahead and by degrees get
municipal ownership.

Some of