BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (11 page)

His wife Mary Jane and their eight children seemed mostly to disappear from his public life these days, except his two oldest sons, 24 year-old William Jr. whom he’d now made an assistant city district attorney, and 22-year-old Richard whom he’d installed as manager of the Metropolitan Hotel. Tweed planned soon to renovate the hotel into a showplace. He still ate well, but his extravagance raised eyebrows: “That’s Tweed. Drinks wine at 1 o’clock in the afternoon,” one neighborhood steakhouse owner grumbled. “He’ll come to

a bad end. Never knew a man who drank champagne in the daytime who didn’t.”
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In Albany at the state legislature, Senator Tweed began using his parliamentary muscle to build a unique record as city champion: He sponsored bills to charter the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Stock Exchange, to support Presbyterian and Mount Sinai Hospitals and the Shepard’s Fold orphanage, and to open new streets in crowded Manhattan—extending Lexington Avenue
²⁰
and widening Broadway from 34th to 49th Street. Critics charged graft, but Tweed as usual shrugged off the complaints for lack of proof.
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He made his suite at Albany’s Delavan House one of the capitol’s finest private apartments; he fitted its seven spacious rooms with cut-glass decanters, steel-engraved wall hangings, rose-decorated porcelain cuspidors, and lushly carpeted floors.
Tweed had a penchant for flowers and canaries; they decorated all his rooms.
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He kept a walnut sideboard cabinet always stocked with whiskey, champagne, and cigars to woo the constant stream of visiting politicos, newsmen, and lobbyists.

For his Irish and German immigrant backers, Tweed used his chairmanship of the legislature’s Charitable and Religious Societies Committee to win direct public subsidies for Catholic parochial schools—violating the traditional rule against public funding of religious institutions.
²³
He hid the provision in the back pages of the annual Tax Levy, a long, complex bill that contained the city’s overall budget and tax base and was loaded with pork for districts throughout the state; for upstate Protestants to get their own special favors, they’d have to give Tweed his. Tweed’s victory won him cheers from immigrant wards where it greatly expanded classrooms at a time when public schools barely met the need, but drew protest from Protestants and opponents of church-state meddling. “Papal conspiracy,” some Republicans cried. “Another raid on public schools,” echoed the
New-York Times
, arguing that “no Catholic parent will be permitted to send his child to public schools of the State on pain of excommunication.”
²⁴
Tweed stuck to his guns, though. He enlarged the state’s annual charity appropriation bill, a vehicle used to provide state funding for social needs through private charities, religious and non-religious alike, from orphanages to hospitals to “homes for the friendless” at a time when government services simply didn’t exist. During his three years as chairman, from 1869 to 1871, the number of charities benefiting under it would grow from 68 to 106 and funding itself would top $2.2 million, a six-fold jump over prior levels, including creation of the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital.
²⁵

This came on top of Tweed’s own private charity: lumps of coal at Christmas, food at Thanksgiving, and city jobs by the hundreds for poor breadwinners.

Tweed had his finger in every pie. “Do not forget to put through our fishery law,” Robert B. Roosevelt, uncle of future president Theodore Roosevelt and then a New York’s Fisheries Commissioner, wrote him during the 1870 session.
²⁶
A
New-York Times
reporter identified Tweed by 1869 as master of patronage even on the rich upstate New York canal system: “He appears to take to responsibilities (especially when patronage is to be dispensed) as a duck does to water.”
²⁷

Around this time, Tweed also hitched his star to the proposed new Brooklyn Bridge, a bold plan to construct the longest suspension span ever attempted to that time. Tweed joined the bridge company’s Executive Committee that August; earlier, he claims, he’d helped get the project started by aiding organizers in handing out $65,000 in bribes to New York aldermen—he took none of the money himself—to win their approval for a $1.5 million bond issue, then he paid $8,400 for 420 shares of company stock which would soon swell in value. Tweed had lived most of his life on streets near the East River; he’d seen the bustling city of Brooklyn across the way and knew the river as a swirling, turbulent, bad-tempered barrier where boats and barges frequently collided or sank trying to navigate its treacherous tidal currents. For Tweed, the bridge offered not just “a well-paying dividend stock” but a political jackpot as well. It would take years to build, cost millions of dollars, and employ thousands of workers; “we expected to get the employment of a great many laborers,” he’d later explain, “and an expenditure of the money for the different articles required to build the bridge.”
²⁸

Money flowed to Tweed from all directions. For instance, he had great success helping his Erie Railway Company friends Jay Gould and Jim Fisk terrorize Wall Street. Two of his judges—Barnard and Cardozo, both of the state supreme court—issued injunctions at Jay Gould’s command that struck like lightning bolts through the financial world.
^F
OOTNOTE
29
With rarely any appeal to Albany or to the federal courts under narrow nineteenth century rules, they stood as absolute mandates. Tweed found a kindred spirit in Jim Fisk and they became fast friends. “Jubilee Jim,” a big, playful, outgoing character, had raised himself from poverty in rural Vermont and now savored his role as Wall Street buccaneer. Fisk spent his money producing lavish
opera bouffe
performances in his Grand Opera House, covering himself in diamond pins, and openly supporting his mistress, actress Josie Mansfield, in a New York townhouse. He made her parlor a salon for his closest friends; Judge Barnard reputedly issued one of his injunctions there and Tweed himself enjoyed sharing laughs there with Jim and Josie over oysters and champagne. The “playboy side of Fisk … appealed to Tweed,” Denis Tilden Lynch explained. “[Tweed] was accustomed to associating with men always on their dignity, pretended or natural, and the change amused him.”
³⁰

Tweed’s New-York Printing Company had grown to over 2,000 employees, making it one of the largest such firm in the country based on its city business. His system of forcing contractors to pad their bills with kickbacks had grown dramatically—these days, they gladly paid gratuities to Tweed and friends of up to 35 percent or more for city business. The city comptroller, Richard Connolly, one of Tweed’s “lunch club” buddies, controlled all disbursements of money from the local treasuries and haggled over every penny. Comptrollers stood for election and Connolly had held the post since 1866. Long known inside Tammany as “Slippery Dick” for having more than once sandbagged his friends in backroom rumbles, Connolly often wore a stove-

pipe hat that exaggerated his tall physique. With gold-rimmed spectacles and a clean-shaven face, he had two assets that Tweed appreciated. He was popular: “He was a powerful man in his ward and district, being from Cork, [Ireland],” Tweed would explain years later. Connolly had worked his way up the Tammany ladder from “hurrah boy” to ward leader to county clerk to state senator and had learned bookkeeping managing the New York Custom House’s Statistics Bureau and as cashier in New York’s Bank of North America, making him popular with the rank-and-file braves. “We could not get along without Connolly, and annexed him [into the ring] for the vote he controlled.”
³¹

Richard Connolly.

He also knew graft: His predecessor as comptroller, Matthew Brennan, another popular Irishman, had been a shade too honest. When Tammany dumped him for reelection in 1866 and Brennan asked why, Tweed reputedly blurted out: “why, because you won’t make money yourself nor let others make any. That’s why!”
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Now as comptroller, Connolly held a tight leash on the city till, often taunting political foes by refusing to pay their bills. Even Tweed had to beg like everyone else to get Connolly to cooperate. “The bills of the
Democrat
[a newspaper belonging to Tweed’s friend Brick Pomeroy] certainly come under the head of ‘Arrearages,’” Tweed wrote to Connolly in mid-1870. “The time has come to redeem
my word
. I ask you as a personal favor to me to pay their Bills and when you call on me to reciprocate you will find me as ever ready.”
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The quibbling sometimes drove Tweed to distraction: “Dear Dick: For God’s sake pay ___’s bill,” he wrote after hearing of one argument. “He tells me your people ask 20 per cent. The whole d__d thing isn’t but $1,100. If you don’t pay it, I will.”
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For his friends, though, Connolly kept the money flowing: claims from favorite contractors like builder John Keyser, furniture-supplier James Ingersoll, stationer E. Jones, among others, had gravy enough for everyone. One list of vouchers from this period listed over $3.3 million in claims with no corresponding records showing any city department receiving any of the supposedly delivered goods.
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The wealth trickled down to dozens of Tammany men in local wards and neighborhoods—jobs, contracts, deals, pay-offs. New silk top-hats became the rage, and people starting calling newly-rich politicos the “shiny hat brigade.”

By late 1869, Tweed’s grip had become so firm that he could engineer Oakey Hall’s re-election as mayor literally on a whim. Arguably, Hall didn’t have to run at all in 1869, and no mayoral contest had been announced. Mayors served two-year terms on New York City in the mid-1800s. But Hall had taken the office midway through John Hoffman’s unfinished term in 1868, raising a legal question. Fearing that some unscrupulous Republican might exploit the issue by putting up a last-minute candidate and collaring a friendly judge to issue an order declaring him the winner, Tweed decided not to take chances. Without even telling the candidate, he directed New York’s police the afternoon before Election Day to distribute boxes to all the polling stations in the city for collecting ballots for mayor. Not surprisingly, voters had only one ballot to choose from, Tammany’s.

The mayor himself grumbled to newspaper friends on hearing the decision—especially about his being left in the dark. “Mr. Hall knew nothing of this arrangement until he saw it announced in the morning papers,” the
New York World
explained on his behalf.
³⁶
Hall found the ballots “a most unexpected discovery,” echoed the
New York Herald
, and it “would have been against his wishes had he been consulted.”

Remarkably, nobody objected. The vote stood. The final tally: 66,000 for Hall versus 151 for everyone else.

Tweed’s Democrats that autumn also won an outright majority in both chambers of the state legislature in Albany, a slim four votes in the Senate and sixteen in the Assembly. It wasn’t much, but enough to open the door in 1870 on what Tweed expected to be his crowning achievement: a new governing structure for New York City. Friends and foes alike would call it “the Tweed charter”—it would mark the height of his regime and the start of its downfall.

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Since the mid-1850s, the state government in Albany, dominated by rural “hayseeds,” had intruded deeply into New York City affairs. By 1870, Albany controlled the city’s police force, school board, fire department, docks, and even the city budget—all from a distance of more than a hundred miles away up the Hudson River. Plans to improve urban life, whether by widening Broadway, expanding the Croton Reservoir, developing Central Park, or fixing dilapidated streets or sewage pipes—let alone Tammany’s political designs—sat frustrated as upstate legislators blocked them or demanded pay-offs. New Yorkers almost universally hated this interference: the one cause that united every faction in Gotham was Home Rule.