Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  That 1845 election did not give Tammany control of the city. That would take another decade. Havemeyer would be followed by four Whig mayors before the emergence of Tammany’s Fernando Wood in 1854. Tammany would pick up more members of the Common Council over those ten years, though. It gained so much strength that after Havemeyer’s inaugural speech Tammany power brokers fired seventy city workers and within a few weeks let go of the rest. All were replaced by Tammany men. The mayor was glad to have Tammany’s support but realized quickly that the Tammanyites in office with him had no experience and little skill. Havemeyer complained that now he had to work with an administration full of men who were not only political appointees but who had never been in those jobs before. The constant turnover of city workers, on a grand scale in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, made the running of the city, and the administration of the police, more difficult. When Tammany gained complete control in the late 1850s, there would be little turnover, but the city would be run in a far more inefficient manner by department heads with no experience and workers interested only in lining their own pockets. Mayor Havemeyer fought the Common Council, loaded with his own party’s men, throughout his term, constantly trying to reform its superstructure and ways of doing city business. He had little success.16

  Tammany Hall was despised by many. Everyone knew that the people who ran Tammany created a corrupt government in which the political machine leaders and their friends profited from bribes and embezzled moneys. Few knew how to dismantle Tammany or curb its power. In the early 1860s, William “Boss” Tweed would take over complete control of Tammany and, it was charged, embezzle close to $200 million from the city in both covert and blatantly open schemes.17

  Tammany had been around since the end of the eighteenth century. It was allied to the new Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson and Madison, soon renamed the Democratic Party, because, like the Democratic leaders, it championed the causes of the immigrants, the poor, and the downtrodden. The Democratic Party absorbed huge numbers of laborers, tradesmen, and immigrant workers as it grew. Tammany was the perfect organization for it in New York, where all of its national supporters were represented.18

  The political organization quickly became riddled with corruption. As early as 1809, New York City newspapers began to criticize Tammany for its crooked management.19

  No one resented Tammany’s chokehold on the city more than the honest cops, who served at the pleasure of Tammany leaders. The police knew the workings and politics of Tammany better than anyone else and realized, by the late 1840s and early 1850s, that the city’s political machine had become a monolith and practically unstoppable. The policemen told friends, too, that good men did not step forward to reform the political club because they would be devoured by the machine. Captain George Walling blamed it, and the refusal of others to run against it, for the law enforcement problems of the metropolis. “The ‘gentleman’ is practically debarred from any active participation in politics,” said Walling. “One does not see the merchant princes, nor the great editors in the aldermanic chamber. But we do see the face of the ward ‘heeler’ and the ‘tough.’ [This kind of man] rules by brute force rather than intellect.”20

  Many agreed. James McCabe, a bearded journalist and historian, wrote that the Common Council was corrupt, full of very wealthy men who had no visible means of income. “It does not represent the proud intellectual character of New York; for there is scarcely a member who has the intellect or education enough to enable him to utter ten sentences in good English. There was not a man in this important body who possessed the respect or confidence of the citizens of New York. They were elected by bribery and corruption, maintained their positions by the same means, and enjoyed the favor and protection of leaders of their party.” McCabe, like many others, was exasperated by local city officials. “The property, rights and safety of the greatest and most important city in the land were entrusted to a band of thieves and swindlers,” he added.21

  This did not surprise anybody. As far back as the first days of the century, aldermen had been enriching themselves through bribery and extortion. In 1806, butchers revealed that they had been paying different aldermen to grant them prime locations in the city for their business.22

  William “Boss” Tweed chuckled when asked about Common Council corruption. “The fact is New York politics was always dishonest long before my time. There never was a time you could not buy the Board of Alderman.”23

  Reformers charged that Tammany-appointed workers made a fortune. An inspector in the weights and measures department, as an example, was paid fifty cents to inspect any scale he found. Critics said this meant that some of these workers made $200 a day ($6,000 in today’s money).24

  The result was, Walling and others argued, not just corruption in the city government but a general incompetence. Tax money went into general funds, and no one accounted for its expenditure. Streets in poor condition were not fixed, fire departments not improved. The police force was kept small because the funds simply could not be found to hire more men. Courts did not enforce the payment of debts. Private contractors were given enormous amounts of money to provide city services, such as the company that built and ran omnibuses; at one point in that era more than six hundred omnibuses were in operation in the city, at a huge profit to the contractor.25

  Courthouses were without complete roofs; hundreds of docks were in disrepair. Inadequate public schools dotted the city, and those schools were attended by only half the children in the metropolis. The entire school system was riddled with corruption. As an example, dozens of food emporiums that were paid by the city to supply thousands of lunches for the children pocketed the money and did not send lunches, or, if they did, only a small percentage of the number they were contracted to send.26

  Another citywide corruption scheme involved employee theft of goods and “fences.” Workers in stores with vast quantities of clothing, for example, stole some of it and turned it over to fences for a fee. The fences then sold it to another store. In one case, two attractive shopgirls working at a large clothing store stole thirty-three expensive hats and gave them to a fence, who was arrested. Patrolman William Bell, who uncovered the case, then went to the boardinghouse where the two girls lived, only to find that other members of the theft ring had spirited them away in a carriage. Bell had to go to the Tombs to get an arrest warrant and then went looking for the girls, by then well hidden in the city.27

  Walling, whose unhappiness with the police force grew even more when he was chief after the Civil War, and had to deal with the Tammany politicians all the time, disdained the men he worked for. “The ruling class in New York has its counterpart in the land of the ‘Hindoo’ [India], where the ‘Thugs’ dominate certain portions of the country by the exercise of brute force and criminal violence,” he charged.

  Those men rose to the top because good men stayed out of politics out of sheer fear. “Even if they are not thrown down stairs or pitched out of windows before the voting commences, the ballot boxes are stuffed with impunity, for the simple reason that the law regarding the proceedings at these gatherings has fallen into a state of ‘innocuous desuetude,’” he added.

  Walling said that petty thieves were let go because their victims were afraid to testify against them and considered an appearance in court pointless, since the judge would probably release the thief anyway because he was paid off or the thief had some friend at Tammany Hall. The police magistrates were useless, in addition to being corrupt, Walling said after years of dealing with them. He scoffed that they could not spell simple words, did not know the law, were always in a hurry, and were ever on the lookout for a favor or a bribe.

  The rich and Tammany politicians could buy justice that the poor could not, Walling added, arguing that rich men who committed murder were often released or, at worst, found “insane” by a judge or jury and committed to a hospital but released after just a few months. He told friends that he had studied the records of those hanged for m
urder in New York and found that in most cases they were poor or unemployed.28

  The author of an 1871 report issued by a civic investigatory group, the Committee of Seventy, that reflected back on the 1850s said that “there is not in the history of villainy a parallel for the gigantic crime against property conspired by the Tammany Ring. It was engineered on the complete subversion of government in the very heart of Republicanism. An American city … was handed over to a self-appointed oligarchy, to be robbed and plundered by them and their confederates … forever.”29

  Critics of Tammany charged that the Hall used street gangs to destroy the campaigns of the Whigs, scared Whig voters away from the polls, bought off voters, or, when unable to do that, simply paid election officials to turn in fraudulent reports of Tammany vote pluralities. They did not care who was elected, as long as it was their man. “No honest man took part in these disgraceful acts, and the public offices passed, almost without exception, into the hands of the most corrupt portion of the population. They were also the most ignorant and brutal. [They were] men whose personal character was infamous; men who were charged by the newspaper press, and some of whom had been branded by courts of justice with felonies, were elected or appointed to responsible offices.”30

  They gained control, critics charged, by bribing state legislators who oversaw the running of New York City. Samuel Tilden, who later ran for president of the United States, said in 1871 that $1 million was spent by Tammany to bribe New York state legislators in 1871. He vowed to lead the reform fight.”According to the strength that is given me, if you will not grow weary and faint, and falter on the way, I will stand by your side not only until civil government shall be reformed in the city of New York, but until the state of New York shall once more have a pure and irreproachable judiciary.”31

  He charged that the state legislature gave the Hall whatever it wanted, including the right to make police officer terms, and all city worker terms, four years, and then renewable each four years. Under one incredible new rule, the mayor, no matter how corrupt or incompetent he was, could be impeached only if he himself recommended it.32

  One of the reasons that Tammany was able to wield such power, especially after the elections of the early 1850s, was that Albany would not make the New York City government autonomous. It used the state charter to keep running the city government inefficiently. The mayor did not run the city, and neither did the Common Council. Power was split among several parties, different political machines and clubs, and numerous city departments. Control was desperately uncoordinated, and this permitted corruption and unfair use of power by groups such as Tammany.33

  In a landmark study in 1877, the New York State Commission on Cities blamed the woes of New York City on “the incompetent and unfaithful governing boards, and officials, the introduction of state and national politics into municipal affairs, and the assumption by the state legislature of direct control of city affairs.”34

  This was not news to anyone in Albany or New York City. State legislative domination had been so great that in the 1820s over fourteen thousand municipal jobs in New York and smaller cities, the overwhelming majority, were all political patronage jobs handed out by the state legislature. Part of Tammany Hall’s success later was simply bringing jobs back to the city and away from the state.

  Nowhere was the hand of Tammany felt more in the 1850s than in the running of the police department. The mayor, the Hall’s man, and the aldermen still appointed all of the police. The cops owed their jobs to them, and those politicians owed their jobs to the men who ran Tammany Hall. The leaders of the Hall decided everything involving the police department, and every chief, starting with George Matsell, knew that. To save money, the political organization kept the force small. Police did not bother rowdy customers in certain saloons or brothel customers who were friends of Tammany and paid them off. Police did not investigate contractors who did shoddy work, breaking municipal laws, because Tammany had hired them through the Common Council. Many criminals were never arrested, or were let go when they were, because they were connected to Tammany. Hundreds of Tammany officials, and their friends, committed numerous crimes because they knew they would not be prosecuted or convicted. This increased the crime rate. There was so much corruption in the Common Council in the 1840s and 1850s that the press nicknamed the aldermen “the forty thieves.”35

  Journalists argued that the construction of a new courthouse in New York under Tammany’s rule was the perfect example of its corruption. The state legislature originally appropriated $1.4 million for the courthouse. Tammany allowed contractors to file numerous cost-overrun charges for the construction of the building, not checking any and approving all, so that the final price tag was just over $12 million. Conversely, the cost of building Britain’s Houses of Parliament, many times the size of the courthouse, was just $10 million.36

  Another problem Tammany had in the 1840s and early 1850s was the rising success of New York Whig, and later Republican, William Seward, a popular, charismatic senator and former governor. In 1840, Seward, sensing a larger immigrant wave and more and more Irish in New York City, went out of his way to support programs to keep immigrants in America and help them, especially the Irish, because they amounted to a huge voting bloc that he wanted to hold. He did not want any alliance with the nativists because of their anti-Catholic stand, and that hurt the nativists. He even introduced a bill to the Board of Aldermen to have the city fund parochial schools for Irish Catholics, as the government of Ireland did. The aldermen defeated it, 18–1. Even though they defeated his bill, the leaders of Tammany came to realize Seward was right about the immigrant voting bloc and embraced not just the Irish but any immigrant they could find.37

  The Irish provided a huge bloc of voters for Tammany in each election. The Irish understood the underhanded, crooked election practices of the Hall because they had lived with those same practices back in Ireland. They knew, as Tammany knew, that victory in the elections was not the approval of political policies but simply victory. They knew how to operate in New York, too, quickly getting Tammany leaders to pressure Irish cops to let Irish suspects go and to cajole Irish police magistrates to throw out cases against Irishmen who voted. All of the Irish understood that what was good for Tammany was good for them, and Tammany understood that what was good for the Irish was good for Tammany.38

  To the astonishment of the political club, the Whig Party collapsed as a political organization just after the 1852 national elections, a victim of the national antislavery movement. The Whigs were two distinct parties under one roof, the southern and northern blocs. They battled with each other over the slavery question so stridently in the 1840s that they split in the early 1850s and then died. “The Whig Party is dead and will soon be decomposed into its original elements.… The Whigs have long been nothing but a hoop to keep northern and southern democracy [Democrats] more or less bound together by fear of the common enemy.… If one party dies, the other must perish of inaction,” fretted George Templeton Strong, who despised most of the Whigs he knew.39

  * * *

  For many residents, the economy of New York City was booming. The economic drought caused by the Panic of 1837 had ended around 1842. The shipping industry had grown dramatically since the middle of the 1830s, and by the late 1840s shipping companies in New York did highly profitable business supplying products from northern manufacturers to buyers in southern slave states. Shipping runs from New York to Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and even Gulf of Mexico ports such as New Orleans were among the busiest in the world. The city received millions in port fees and shipping taxes. New York had also become home to the shipbuilding industry, which provided not only tax revenue but thousands of jobs, and jobs that grew as the years went by. The number of banks in New York had increased, and many now had branch offices in various American cities. The stock traders on Wall Street had come to dominate the securities business, and the stock market soared. A foreign observer, James Robertson, said in
the 1850s that New York was “the money market of the states.”40 He put the city’s manufacturing industry value at $105 million. Within ten years, its value would climb to $160 million.41 Real estate had become a thriving industry in the city. The metropolis’s population kept moving northward on Manhattan Island, well past Fourteenth Street. Land speculators bought huge chunks of acreage and then cut them up into smaller parcels and sold them. The people who bought the parcels quickly resold them, and the third owners built large houses that they sold for huge profits. Billionaire John Jacob Astor later said, “Could I begin life again knowing what I know now, and had money to invest, I would buy every foot of land on the island of Manhattan.” By the late 1840s, hundreds of New Yorkers had snapped up thousands of acres in the gold-strike area of California, too. Others created new businesses in the city selling supplies to the thousands of New Yorkers who sailed to California to prospect for gold. The factories grew in size and number as the northern economy gained strength. On the dark side, burglary rings in New York tracked prospectors from California who made a lot of money in gold and upon their return robbed them as they slept. George Templeton Strong wrote, “I wonder whether we’re all going to be ruined and undone by this California business.”42

  However, life for the unskilled laborers did not improve. In fact, in many cases they suffered because the new jobs were all low-paying menial work. The city government, ineffective anyway, cared greatly about the success of the rich and middle class but not very much about the poor and working class. Inattention by city fathers, and no help from Tammany Hall, despite the dazzling speeches of all of its members, meant that the working class did not succeed like the rest of the city. At the same time, the strong economy drove up the prices of land, houses, and rents. The working class was struggling, and many political leaders said that was why many working-class men turned to crime and the crime wave grew yet again.43