by H. W. Brands
Construction camp on the Pacific railroad
National Archives and Records Administration
George Custer’s Black Hills expedition
National Archives and Records Administration
Cattle roundup in the West
National Archives and Records Administration
A well-appointed sod house in Nebraska
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Tenement inspector taking note
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On top of the (tenement) world
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A ragpicker in San Francisco
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Walking the Brooklyn Bridge
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Urban transport 1897
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New York’s Fifth Avenue on Easter morning
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Wall Street at work
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Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s summer home, the Breakers
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George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore
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Scenes from the railroad strike of 1877
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Homestead, 1892
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Ulysses Grant
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Grover Cleveland
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William McKinley
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Booker T. Washington
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Jay Gould
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Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders
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Andrew Carnegie
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J. P. Morgan attacking a photographer
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John D. Rockefeller with his son, John Jr.
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Part Four
THE FINEST GOVERNMENT MONEY CAN BUY
Chapter 12
SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL
Before he became a Dakota rancher, Theodore Roosevelt took a step even more astonishing to his neighbors on New York’s Upper East Side: he entered politics. “The men I knew best were the men in the clubs of social pretension and the men of cultivated taste and easy life,” Roosevelt remembered.
When I began to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of the local Republican Association and the means of joining it, these men—and the big business men and lawyers also—laughed at me and told me that politics were “low”; that I would find them run by saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors, and the like, and not by men with any of whom I would come in contact outside; and, moreover, they assured me that the men I met would be rough and brutal and unpleasant to deal with. I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class.1
Roosevelt chose the Republican party over the Democrats for two reasons. The first was that for a Northern Unionist whose childhood prayers during the Civil War had beseeched the Almighty to “grind the Southern troops to powder,” the Democrats were preeminently the party of the rebellion. The second reason was that for a New York City boy who came of age in the decade after the Civil War, the Democrats were the party of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed.2
There was irony in Roosevelt’s damning the Democrats for disunion and Tammany together, for during the war the Tammany Hall Democrats (named for their traditional meeting place) were the loyal members of the party. Many New York Democrats harkened to Mayor Fernando Wood, who urged that the city secede from the state and the Union to form a political entity poised between North and South. Tammany, by contrast, stood firm for the Union. And none stood firmer than William Marcy Tweed, the man the Tammany Democrats made their chairman at the beginning of 1863.
Tweed was Scot by ancestry, his forebears having borrowed the name of the River Tweed before heading to America in the eighteenth century. Tweed’s father crafted furniture in New York and sent young Bill to boarding school in New Jersey to study accounting. The boy learned quickly, and the father helped set him up in a business that made brushes. At twenty-one he married his childhood sweetheart; the newlyweds moved in with her father not far from the brush factory on Pearl Street.
Like most political parties at most times, the New York Democratic party was on the lookout for fresh talent, and Tweed seemed a likely prospect. His business allowed him freedom to campaign and serve not readily available to wage workers. And his physical presence—he was a tall, burly fellow, with bright blue eyes, a hearty laugh, and a confidence-inspiring handshake—was just what the party historically of the people required. Tammany’s talent scouts invited him to run for city alderman; after hesitating he assented. His first race failed but his second succeeded, and in 1852 the Seventh Ward sent him to join the “forty thieves,” as the aldermen were irreverently but not inaccurately called. Tweed didn’t immediately recognize his own peculiar genius, and the following year he let himself be nominated and then elected to the United States Congress. Few eras in American political history have been more fraught for good and ill than the mid-1850s, with Congress overturning the Missouri Compromise and Kansas dissolving into civil war, but Tweed found Washington boring and he returned to New York after a single term. Thereafter he devoted himself to local politics, which proved to be his true calling. He won election to the school commission in 1856, the county board of supervisors in 1858, the street commission in 1861. In the process he discovered that the offices one held mattered less than the friends one cultivated. When those friends offered to nominate him for chairman of the Tammany general committee, he happily accepted and handily won.
His first task was repairing the damage—literal and figurative—caused by the 1863 draft riots. New York governor Horatio Seymour urged the War Department to suspend the draft in New York, lest more riots erupt. Many New York City officials, heeding their Irish constituents, seconded the appeal. The War Department not surprisingly rejected the idea. Tweed brokered a compromise. Focusing on the part of the draft law that so provoked the rioters—the loophole exempting those men rich enough to pay the three-hundred-dollar commutation fee—he proposed a deal whereby the city would float a loan to pay the fee for anyone whose absence at the front would demonstrably burden his family, and it would pay the three hundred dollars directly to those men who chose to answer the call. Tweed and a fellow county supervisor, Republican Orison Blunt, gathered local support for the plan and took it to Washington. Secretary of War Stanton wasn’t thrilled at this run around the federal law, but neither did he relish having to open a Manhattan front in the war, and he grudgingly agreed. Tweed and Tammany implemented the new policy with hardly a hitch.3
His role in the matter earned him a reputation as a man who could get things done, efficiently and honestly. “The Supervisors’ Committee are now holding daily sessions, and are performing their duties with eminent satisfaction to all parties,” the New York Times editorialized. “No money, no trust was ever more honestly administered than the loan of the Board of Supervisors.”4
Tweed continued to get things done, albeit less efficiently and honestly, after the war ended. By then his hold on Tammany was complete, the product of his demonstrated patriotism and his deft use of patronage. As party boss he controlled hundreds of position
s in the party organization; with these he expanded his influence to the city and county governments. Tammany’s foot soldiers—“ward heelers,” they were called, for the miles they put on their shoes—turned out the vote with verve and imagination. A Tammany loyalist afterward lamented how far things had fallen since the glory days of Tweed. “Elections nowadays are sissy affairs,” he said. “Nobody gets killed any more, and the ambulances and patrol wagons stay in their garages.… It was wonderful to see my men slug the opposition to preserve the sanctity of the ballot.” Art complemented the strong arm. Another Tammany captain explained that the most valued voters grew beards before the balloting:
When you’ve voted them with their whiskers on, you take them to a barber and scrape off the chin fringe. Then you vote them again with the side lilacs and a mustache. Then to a barber again, off comes the sides and you vote them a third time with the mustache. If that ain’t enough and the box can stand a few more ballots, clean off the mustache and vote them plain face. That makes one of them good for four votes.
In fact this functionary was being modest; subsequent investigations revealed some voters casting as many as twenty ballots. And after the voting took place, Tammany operatives counted the votes to ensure the totals came out right. Tweed later declared candidly, “The ballots made no result; the counters made the result.”5
As the grip of Tweed and his friends—the “Tweed ring,” to its critics—on New York City tightened, some of their opponents retreated to Albany to mount a counterattack in the state legislature. Tweed riposted by getting himself elected to the state senate and establishing a branch office on the upper Hudson. “In Albany he had the finest quarters at the Delavan,” journalist and reformer George W. Curtis remembered.
And when he came into the great dining-room at dinner-time, and looked at all the tables thronged with members of the Legislature and the lobby, he had a benignant, paternal expression, as of a patriarch pleased to see his retainers happy. It was a magnificent rendering of Fagin and his pupils. You could imagine him trotting up and down in the character of an unsuspicious old gentleman with his handkerchief hanging out of his pocket, that his scholars might show their skill in prigging a wipe. He knew which of that cheerful company was the Artful Dodger and which Charley Bates. And he never doubted that he could buy every man in the room if he were willing to pay the price.6
To complement his legislative influence, Tweed purchased the services of several judges. George Barnard of the state supreme court became the most notorious of the Tweed jurists on account of his utter shamelessness and wry sense of humor. Barnard examined several attorneys seeking admission to the bar; these included a state senator. A contemporary recalled the conversation:
“Senator, do you know there is such a thing as the State Constitution?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If a proposed bill came up for consideration, which you knew was in violation of the Constitution, what would you do?”
“I would move to suspend the Constitution, same as we sometimes suspend the rules of the Senate to pass a bill.”
“Stand aside,” said the Judge with a smile. “You will make a profound lawyer.”
Next candidate.
“Now, sir, if you had a claim for a client of $50,000 against the City, what would be the first step you would take to recover it?”
“I would go and see Bill Tweed.”
“You will make your mark as a Corporation lawyer.”7
By the late 1860s the Tweed machine was running smoothly. Money greased the gears, collected from all who had to do business with the city. Railroads wishing to extend their lines or refurbish their stations applied for permission from the appropriate board and paid for the privilege; Tweed and his cronies split the bribe. Merchants bidding to provision the city included kickbacks to the ring in their bids. Lawyers trying cases before Tweed judges slipped gratuities to the bench, which passed a portion along. Bankers underwriting bonds for the city and county added a margin for the boss.
The money supported Tammany’s electioneering. Some voters were simply bribed; others responded to the services Tammany provided. Immigrants, especially, needed help adjusting to life in the great city; Tammany guided the greenhorns to housing, jobs, medical care, and other essentials. “I can always get a job for a deserving man,” Tammany wheelhorse George Washington Plunkitt explained. “I know every big employer in the district—and in the whole city, for that matter—and they ain’t in the habit of saying no to me when I ask them for a job.” Emergency assistance was a Tammany specialty. “If there’s a fire in Ninth, Tenth, or Eleventh Avenue, for example, any hour of the day or night, I’m usually there with some of my election district captains as soon as the fire engines,” Plunkitt said. “If a family is burned out, I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up until they get things running again.” All Tammany asked in exchange for its generosity was loyalty on election day. It was rarely disappointed. “It’s philanthropy, but it’s politics too—mighty good politics,” Plunkitt said. “The poor are the most grateful people in the world.”8
Tweed and his cronies considered themselves agents of democracy, and some of them accounted their boodling nothing more than democracy’s price. During the next century American democracy would formally incorporate into the emerging welfare state many of the services provided by Tammany (and similar machines in other cities). When it did, the sponsoring party, typically the Democrats, would be rewarded with much the same loyalty bestowed upon Tammany. But for now Tweed and company were happy to keep their arrangements informal. Plunkitt dismissed much of the peculation as “honest graft” hardly worth noting. “Let me explain by examples,” he said.
My party’s in power in the city, and it’s going to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course it is. That’s honest graft.9
Other graft was less honest, even by Tammany standards, and rather more spectacular. Tweed inherited plans to build a new county courthouse, which had been authorized before the Civil War at an estimated cost of $250,000. The war stalled construction, leaving Tweed and his partners to complete it. He persuaded the city to add another million to the authorization, on grounds that the building should embody the ambitions of America’s greatest city. Construction recommenced, but the additional million didn’t go far enough, and Tweed talked the city into another $800,000, and then another $300,000, and another $300,000, and another $500,000. The striking thing about all this was that there was little to show for the money spent. Civic-minded groups demanded an investigation. Tweed and company patiently explained that they, too, were wondering what had happened to the money and in fact had begun an investigation of their own. But in the interests of transparency they acceded to the second investigation.
Tweed’s cooperativeness should have put the watchdogs on guard, for not only did the investigative committee clear the contractors and the officials involved, it submitted reimbursement requisitions that were shockingly irregular themselves. The total for twelve days’ work came to more than $18,000, including $6,000 to have the committee’s report printed by a publishing company controlled by Tweed. The reformers retreated in frustration lest they line the ring’s pockets further.
Convinced they were untouchable, the ring engineered further appropriations from the city and some from the state. By 1871 some $13 mill
ion had been sunk into the courthouse, which still wasn’t finished.
The details of the fraud were mind-boggling. A furniture maker received $180,000 for three tables and forty chairs (one for each thief). Carpet weavers and layers got $350,000. Plumbing and lighting fixtures totaled $1.5 million. Safes ate up $400,000. The windows of the courthouse cost $8,000 apiece. Brooms and assorted cleaning supplies ran to $41,000. Services were rewarded no less generously. A lithographer received $360,000 for one month’s work. A plasterer got $500,000 for interior work, and then $1 million to repair what he had done. A carpenter made $800,000. Smaller payments went to lesser individuals, including a court clerk whose highest degree was from Sing Sing, an interpreter who couldn’t read or write, and several dead men.
Needless to say, the recipients of this largesse didn’t retain all their booty. The standard kickback was two for one: two dollars to the ring for every dollar the contractor kept. Tweed and his cronies pocketed millions, making them peers in profit of certain magnates of the private sector.10
BUT THE BARBECUE couldn’t last forever. Tweed had long been pestered by Thomas Nast, an editorial cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly who had honed his pen drawing pictures of heroic Union soldiers and dastardly Confederates. He celebrated Christmas in 1862 by showing Santa Claus visiting soldiers in their winter camps. The image attracted sufficient praise that Nast brought Santa back in subsequent years, giving him a round belly, a white beard, and the other characteristics by which the old elf became known. Yet there was always an edge to Nast’s drawings. His first Santa held a dancing doll with a string attached not to its pate but to its neck; the effigy being lynched bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson Davis. At war’s end Nast needed a new villain and hit upon Tweed, who, perhaps from a law of conservation of artistic energy, was drawn to look like an evil twin of Nast’s Santa.
