by H. W. Brands
Nast’s pictures formed an effective counterpoint to editorials by various daily and weekly newspapers, of which New York City then had dozens. In the summer of 1871, the New York Times began publishing specifics of the courthouse fraud, leaked to it by a member of the Tweed ring who thought he’d been shortchanged in the grafting. “The Secret Accounts—Proofs of Undoubted Frauds Brought to Light,” the banner headline proclaimed. The publisher of the Times, George Jones, dribbled the information out over several weeks, partly so he could confirm details of the story but mostly to maintain the boost in circulation the story provided. The ring responded by offering Jones half a million dollars to stop. He rejected the offer both on principle and on a reckoning that the story was worth at least that much to his bottom line. Thomas Nast, lampooning Tweed and the ring more savagely than ever, likewise received an offer of a half million, in his case to study art in Europe for a year or so. Nast took a bit longer to say no—a refusal that dismayed Tweed more than Jones’s had. “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles,” he explained. “My constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.”11
The editorial campaign against Tweed mobilized various aspects of the electorate. Middle-class reformers took offense at the corruption per se, calling the ring a blight on democracy. Persons uneasy with surging immigration interpreted Tweed’s rise as evidence of the pernicious effect of ignorant foreigners. The anti-Catholic crowd—which included the rabidly Rome-baiting Nast—resented the influence of Irish Americans in the Tammany coalition and hoped Tweed’s fall would restore the Protestant Anglo-Saxonism of yore. Tweed’s professional rivals anticipated his ouster as clearing a space for themselves at the trough. Particular politicians, including gubernatorial aspirant Samuel J. Tilden, hoped to leap from Tweed’s back into office.
Tweed strove to appear above the furor. When an out-of-town reporter asked him if the allegations of corruption were true, he responded, “This is not a question one gentleman ought to put to another.” Diarist George Templeton Strong marveled at the man’s composure. “Tweed’s impudent serenity is sublime,” Strong wrote. “Were he not a supreme scoundrel, he would be a great man.” But at least once the mask slipped. “The Times has been saying all the time I have no brains,” Tweed told a correspondent for the rival Sun. “Well, I’ll show Jones that I have brains.… I tell you, sir, if this man Jones had said the things he has said about me, twenty-five years ago, he wouldn’t be alive now. But, you see, when a man has a wife and children, he can’t do such a thing. I would have killed him.”
The anti-Tammany forces rallied against the ring in 1871 state and city elections and landed some stinging blows, but they suffered a setback the following year when Tweed transported roughnecks to Rochester, where the state Democratic party was meeting. Tweed told the convention that the troubles in New York City were a local affair and that for the state party to intervene would simply invite trouble from which Republicans alone would benefit. His thugs nodded ominous assent. The convention backed Tweed’s candidates.
The boss looked toward the 1872 elections with satisfaction, even smugness. Let scandal-seeking editors and dyspeptic reformers rail, he said. “I feel perfectly free to appeal to a higher tribunal, and have no fear of the result.” As things turned out, fear would have been appropriate. The tribunal of the people rousted Tammany from office.12
The defeat left the ring suddenly vulnerable. “Tweed and his gang are doomed,” Samuel Tilden promised. “Before many days pass it will be made so hot for the arch robber that New York will not hold him.” Emboldened prosecutors brought criminal charges and civil suits against the ring, which now lacked the power to fend them off. Several of the conspirators fled to foreign soil; Tweed made his stand in court. He hired the best lawyers in New York, including young Elihu Root, who threw procedural hurdles in the prosecution’s way for more than a year. A first trial ended in a hung jury, prompting rumors that Tweed had bribed one or more of the jurors. A second trial yielded guilty verdicts on over two hundred counts and a cumulative sentence of twelve years—a modest total that evinced the undeveloped contemporary attitude toward white-collar crime. Yet Tweed beat most of this rap, too, for an appeals court determined that the separate sentences shouldn’t accumulate, and he was released after a year in prison.
By now Tilden was governor and aiming for the White House, and he wasn’t about to let Tweed walk. Tilden’s allies rearrested Tweed and brought a civil suit in the name of the people of the state of New York. Tweed made himself comfortable at the Ludlow Street jail, paying for first-class treatment and persuading the warden to let him take dinners at home with his wife and relatives while the jail guards waited outside. During one such dinner Tweed disappeared. A workman’s wagon carried him to the shore of the Hudson, and a rowboat transported him across to New Jersey. He hid there under an assumed name, awaiting the outcome of his current trial. When the jury found him liable for six million dollars in damages to the state, he slipped out of New Jersey aboard a schooner to Florida. A fishing boat transported him to Cuba, still a colony of Spain, which lacked an extradition treaty with the United States. Tweed hoped to cross the Atlantic and disappear. “I should have lived in Spain my whole life,” he said later. “I had designed to go into some quiet part, like Catalonia or somewhere living was inexpensive.”
Unluckily for Tweed, Cuba was in rebellion against Spain, and the insurgents were being armed and reinforced from the United States. The Spanish government wanted the Grant administration to curtail the flow of weapons and filibusters, and to that end it cooperated with Washington whenever possible. Learning that Tweed had left Cuba for Spain, the Spanish government alerted its customs officials to watch for the American criminal. No one in Spain had a photograph of the fugitive, but a recent copy of Harper’s Weekly carried a new cartoon by Nast, showing Tweed in prison stripes stealing New York’s future, represented by two young boys he held by the scruff of their necks. A Spanish subscriber furnished the picture to the authorities, who passed it along to the customs men, who may or may not have believed they were on the lookout for an infamous kidnapper or child molester. In any case they caught Tweed and remanded him to America.13
The story soon ended. Tweed offered to testify against his cronies in exchange for leniency, but he couldn’t generate much interest. Tilden had moved on to other battles, notably a tussle with Rutherford Hayes for the White House, and authorities in New York City were happy to blame Tweed for all the graft and corruption of the previous decade. No one wanted to bargain a plea with him. Anyway, the old boss was ailing. Flight, worry, diabetes, and finally pneumonia broke his once lusty constitution. He died in the Ludlow Street jail in April 1877 at the age of fifty-four.
HARDLY ANYONE NOTICED, for by that time the nation was awash in political scandal. Andrew Johnson had scandalized the country, or at least the North, by defying Congress over Reconstruction and especially over the Tenure of Office Act, a measure designed by its drafters to force a confrontation between the Democratic executive and the Republican legislature. The Republicans won the first round, impeaching Johnson in the House of Representatives. Johnson won, or rather survived, the second round, avoiding conviction in the Senate by a single vote. But the exercise served the purpose of the Radical Republicans in Congress, who seized control of Reconstruction from the emasculated Johnson and imposed their will on the occupied South. The state governments established under Radical Reconstruction promoted the welfare of the freedmen but in the process gained reputations for corruption, eventually tarnishing the whole enterprise with sufficient scandal that the former white ruling classes recaptured power—in a takeover proudly called “Redemption” by its participants and partisans—while the North stood aside.
By then Ulysses Grant was president. Grant made the ideal candidate for the first postwar election: a war hero with indistinct views on most political issues. His personal reputation was unsullied by scandal save what followed fro
m the occasional bender. But Lincoln had absolved Grant of blame, reportedly saying that if he knew what kind of whiskey Grant drank he’d send a barrel to each of his other generals. Grant accepted the 1868 Republican nomination with the statement “Let us have peace.” On that slogan—and that slogan alone, as he declined to campaign or even speak on his own behalf—he swept into the White House over Democrat Horatio Seymour.
For a time Grant avoided most taint of scandal. During his first term—with the exception of the Gould-Fisk gold conspiracy, which touched the Treasury and Grant’s family but not the president himself—the greatest scandals involved members of Congress. Charles Dana at the New York Sun begrudged George Jones and the New York Times their Tweed scoop, and he set his hounds to sniff out something comparable. What they turned up delighted Dana and dismayed shareholders in the Union Pacific Railroad and taxpayers who had underwritten the construction of the transcontinental line. “The King of Frauds,” ran the Sun’s main head on September 4, 1872. “How the Credit Mobilier Bought Its Way through Congress … Colossal Bribery … Congressmen Who Have Robbed the People and Who Now Support the National Robber … How Some Men Get Fortunes … Princely Gifts by the Chairmen of Committees in Congress.” The article delineated the career of Crédit Mobilier, the construction company that did most of the road building for the Union Pacific and collected most of the profits. The existence of the company was neither unusual (other railroads and infrastructure contractors employed similar subcontractors) nor secret (the Sun story was based on public testimony more than a year old). And administration supporters detected a striking coincidence between the timing of the article and the approaching presidential election. Jones’s pro-Grant Times airily dismissed the Sun report as “The Crédit Mobilier Slander.”14
But the story had legs, and after the election Congress conducted an investigation. The charges, adjusted for partisanship, fell into two categories, the first alleging fraud against the public in the construction of the Union Pacific and the second bribery of members of Congress. The fraud charges contended that the railroad had taken the loans and land proffered by the government and converted these into liquid assets siphoned off by the shareholders in Crédit Mobilier. Although these charges would have the longest life, leading to a general impression that the Pacific railroad was a giant swindle, they turned out to be impossible to prove. No one, not even the directors of the Union Pacific, could account for all the resources and funds devoted to the road’s construction. This inability reflected a certain amount of fraud, to be sure, but no evidence was adduced to show that the fraud was much greater than large projects typically produced. (It was incontrovertibly less, as a ratio of theft to expenditure, than the fraud perpetrated by the Tweed ring in New York.) To a large degree the failure to find all the money expended on the Union Pacific simply reflected the scale of the project and the fact that nothing like it had ever been attempted. Huge corporations were a recent and still evolving phenomenon; accounting practices capable of monitoring their activities lagged behind the institutions themselves.
In any event, the second set of allegations—involving bribery of members of Congress—was much juicier. The Sun article included a list of congressmen said to have received shares of Crédit Mobilier. The list included James G. Blaine, James Garfield, Schuyler Colfax, and Henry Wilson, and the number of shares linked to each individual ranged from 2,000 to 3,000. Knowledgeable readers immediately questioned the numbers, as the total said to have been distributed to the congressmen nearly equaled the entire issue of the company. But knowledgeable readers were a distinct minority, and even after the obvious correction was made—the figures represented the par value in dollars of the shares, not the number of shares—the bribery allegation titillated a public attuned by the Tweed scandal and the Gould-Fisk gold conspiracy to think the worst of public officials. Nor were these just any public officials: Blaine was the current speaker of the House, Colfax had been speaker at the time and was currently vice president, Wilson was the current Republican nominee for vice president, and Garfield was chair of the House appropriations committee.
Yet the list of names was riddled with errors, too. Oakes Ames, the Massachusetts congressman who had promoted the Pacific railroad, had compiled a list of congressmen who might be interested in purchasing shares of Crédit Mobilier. Blaine and some of the others on the list had rejected the offer, from propriety, perhaps, but also because it seemed a poor investment. Wilson had accepted the offer but subsequently sold his shares. The fact that the list included not a single Democrat added to the suspicions that the exposé was an election-season ploy.
But as the congressional investigation began, the public learned that there was fire behind at least some of the smoke. The star witness was Ames, no longer in Congress but still connected to the Union Pacific. “You could have heard a pin drop when Mr. Ames produced his red morocco covered memorandum book,” a reporter observed. Ames’s log of the Crédit Mobilier transactions exonerated Blaine; confirmed the involvement of Colfax, Garfield, and some others; and, while narrowing the scope of the scandal, lent it substance it had previously lacked.15
Questions remained, however, as to the degree of culpability of those involved. Ames himself professed to see nothing wrong in what he had done. “There is no law and no reason, legal or moral, why a member of Congress should not own stock in a road any more than why he should not own a sheep when the price of wool is to be affected by the tariff,” he said. Former congressman Benjamin Boyer of Pennsylvania, one of Ames’s investors, adopted a similar view. “I had no idea of wrong in the matter,” he said. “Nor do I see how it concerns the public.… And as the investment turned out to be profitable, my only regret is that it was no larger in amount.”16
Neither could anyone demonstrate, even of those who accepted Ames’s offer, that it had purchased him votes he wouldn’t have received anyway. Pennsylvania’s William Kelley waxed indignant at the suggestion that his support could be purchased so cheaply (prompting speculation that it might be purchased more dearly). But most of the men on Ames’s list were demonstrated friends of the railroad. The Crédit Mobilier shares might have been thanks for past favors rather than, or at least in addition to, enticement to future ones. Whether such thanks was illegal was unclear.
Yet something shady had happened; why else had Colfax, most conspicuously, at first denied involvement? “If Mr. Colfax’s explanation is true, he is the victim of a train of circumstantial evidence almost unparalleled in judicial history,” the New York Tribune jibed. The investigative committee, at a loss as to what to do, rendered its version of a Solomonic judgment. It concluded that Ames was guilty of having given bribes but that no one was guilty of receiving them. Declaring that Ames had brought the House into “contempt and disgrace” and had committed offenses of a “dangerous character,” it nonetheless concluded that the other legislators neither were “aware of the object of Mr. Ames” nor “had any other purpose in taking this stock than to make a profitable investment.”17
The reaction to the report mirrored its ambivalent content. Ames expressed outrage at being singled out. “I alone am to be offered up to appease a public clamor,” he said. He added, “It’s like the man in Massachusetts who committed adultery, and the jury brought in a verdict that he was guilty as the devil, but that the woman was as innocent as an angel.” The New York Herald was upset that the others had got off. “Good government has received a deadly stab,” it said. The previously skeptical New York Times was now even more skeptical of the whole business, but for the opposite reason. “To refuse to censure the holders of that stock is to say that the Congressional standard of morals is not high enough to condemn it.”18
The scandal, however, wasn’t without effect. Several politicians exited the affair badly wounded. Schuyler Colfax never recovered; James Blaine recovered but not fully. Oakes Ames dropped dead months later, from a combination of anger, embarrassment, and arterial blockage.
ALCOHOL AND EXCISE
taxes had long been a problem for Americans, in part because liquor was (and is) so tempting to tax. The Sugar Act of 1764 helped trigger the American Revolution not because it jeopardized the colonists’ candy but because it threatened their rum, into which the sugar—molasses—was distilled. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 provoked George Washington into reprising his role as horseback general, this time against tax-resisting Pennsylvania distillers.
Whiskey retained its popularity after the Civil War with both the drinking public and the taxing public officials. But now a new ingredient entered the cocktail, in the form of industrial capitalism. Distilling had become a big business, and distillers discovered a commensurately large interest in avoiding the taxes the government levied. A group of distillers in St. Louis might not have been more venal than distillers elsewhere, but they had better access to the Grant administration. General John McDonald was an old friend and wartime comrade of the president, and a favorite of Mrs. Grant’s family besides. His connections accounted for his appointment as collector of internal revenue for the St. Louis district, which comprised seven midwestern states. McDonald had friends in St. Louis with allies in distilling; introductions were made and McDonald let out that he shared the whiskey men’s view that their taxes were too high. He agreed to reduce the effective rate by undercounting the kegs; they demonstrated their appreciation monetarily. Doubtless both parties told themselves—accurately enough—that they weren’t alone in their rebate arrangement. But, like John Rockefeller and the railroads during this same period, they agreed that their deal should be kept quiet.
