BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (13 page)

By April 4, he’d won his triumph and reached his height of respectability. The city stood with him, the champion of Home Rule. Eighty-seven leading citizens signed a petition supporting Tweed’s charter, including merchant kings Moses Taylor, C.L.Tiffany, William Vermilye, and Morton, Bliss, and Company, the banking firm of Levi P. Morton, future vice president of the United States.
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Even Peter Cooper, the 81-year-old merchant and philanthropist widely considered New York’s most distinguished citizen whose money had launched Cooper Union—the city’s showplace institute for science and art—and whose factories had built America’s first working steam engine, had grown cozy with Tweed. He and Nathaniel Sands of the Citizens Association—once the sharpest critics of local corruption—both had confided in Samuel Tilden that month that they now considered Tweed safe. “They were convinced that the [Tammany] Ring had become conservative,” Tilden wrote, “that they were not ambitious of more wealth, and that they were on the side of the taxpayers.”
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On the eve of his charter’s final vote in the legislature, Tweed called together all the key players for a formal public hearing of his Committee on Municipal Affairs.
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All the respectables came. “The Committee is met to hear the advocates and the opponents to the charter,” Tweed announced, holding the gavel as chairman. The committee met in Tweed’s suite at the Delavan House; hundreds of city politicians jammed into every corner, aldermen, sheriff’s deputies, police, clerks, and department lobbyists squeezing in among the porcelain cuspidors and walnut liquor cabinets. All the newspapers sent reporters. Only the Young Democrats, humiliated by the Tammany lockout, conspicuously stayed away.

For two-and-a-half hours, Tweed presided with aplomb—over his committee, his legislature, his charter, his hotel suite. Half a dozen city leaders came to speak, and Tweed welcomed them all. “We shall be happy to hear gentlemen representing interests in the city,” he announced.
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He started by calling his lead witness, Horace Greeley, the “Sage of Chappaqua” and firebrand publisher of the
New York Tribune
who a year earlier had blasted Tammany’s strong-arm ballot-box tactics. Now, Greeley appeared in a rumpled black suit on behalf of the Union League Club and stood before Tweed in amiable deference. He spoke for nearly an hour, his trademark white hat and coat folded under his chair, “not as fidgety as usual,” a reporter noted, “the general tone of his remarks were rather favorable than otherwise to the Charter.”
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Greeley offered a few suggestions to amend it, but stressed that they were not meant “in any fractious spirit. Nor do [the Union League members] desire to be understood as enemies of the charter reform,” he explained, “they regard this document as embodying many excellent advances to reform, we are not here to ask you to reject it; we ask you to improve it.”

Tweed answered each of Greeley’s points as he raised them, and the old man seemed satisfied. To his plea to leave the Central Park Commission unaffected, Tweed said: “We don’t desire to change it.” On Greeley’s opposition to state spending for sectarian schools, Tweed replied: “I have seen clergymen of various denominations, and we shall arrange that in a different manner.” On Greeley’s complaint against any person holding multiple city jobs, Tweed demurred: “We thought that more a matter of ordinance than of State law.”

Greeley’s biggest gripe still seemed to be last year’s voting frauds: “I don’t care if any archangel were to make a charter for the city of New York, and then you were to elect by ballot-box stuffers, it would not be possible to have an honest government,” he told the panel, and was glad to hear of the separate election bill moving through the legislature, backed by Tweed.
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His issues addressed, Greeley, the dean of New York journalists, thanked Tweed politely for his “courtesy in giving us this hearing” and the “care and deliberation” behind the document. Then he sat down.
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OOTNOTE
62

Next came Joseph Daly of the Citizens Association who “forcibly but briefly” backed the charter,
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followed by R.F. Andrews of the Republican Union Committee who too was “highly laudatory.”
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It seemed an amiable feast all around. Finally, as the hour drew late, Tweed called one last witness who’d asked for a special chance to address the group: Samuel J. Tilden.
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Tilden, stiff and formal in his high-collar suit, couldn’t have felt comfortable in the cozy roomful of back-slapping politicos. In fact, it doubtless was an awkward moment: He and Tweed personally had barely seen each other since the 1868 election scandals, but neither made any secret of their mutual aversion. For weeks, Tilden had talked up a storm against Tweed’s charter. He denied backing O’Brien and his Young Democrat revolt but passed them advice through a third party,
New York World
publisher Manton Marble.
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He made no secret of meeting with like-minded “reformers,” mostly newspaper editors—Greeley, Marble, Charles Nordhoff of the
Evening Post
, and Jackson Schultz of the Union League. To Denis Tilden Lynch, it was “inconceivable that Tilden, early in the spring of 1870, was not advising Tweed’s enemies” and Tweed certainly knew it.
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Still, Tweed had little fear of Sam Tilden. Tilden came across as an arrogant elitist who always did things halfway; when pushed, he usually backed down. The prior summer, when Tweed was attacking August Belmont—one of Tilden’s closest Manhattan Club friends—Tilden had refused to help Belmont even by signing a letter vouching for Belmont’s campaign work, leaving Belmont stunned at his supposed friend’s “more than ungentlemanly conduct.”
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In February, Tilden had helped found a new New York City Bar Association and given a rousing call to “restore both the judiciary and
the bar …
as it formerly was, an
honorable and elevated
calling.” This was a thinly veiled dig at Tweed’s judges Barnard and Cardozo,
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but soon afterwards Tilden wrote Cardozo a long pleading letter asking special leniency for one of his own clients, Russell Sage, the notorious stock speculator who’d been convicted of usury.
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Tilden had opposed Tweed’s friend Jim Fisk in his litigation against the Union Pacific Railroad but continued to accept legal retainers from Fisk’s Erie Railway partner Jay Gould. Gould, in turn, complained about Tilden’s wishy-washy representation: “I paid you a retainer for Erie R.R. Co. $10,000…. I wish to ask you whether, in view of the foregoing, we are not justified in being surprised to find you against us
without notice
? Please reply and oblige.”
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Tilden had answered Gould in a long letter claiming that the $10,000 retainer was for a single arbitration and arranged “without any agency of mine, and the subsequent payment of it was purely voluntary on your part.”
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He never returned the money.

Even Sweeny, in a rare newspaper interview that autumn, had dismissed Tilden as irrelevant. “He don’t stand in the way of any one down here.”
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Now, Tweed as chairman, presiding over his legislative committee in his own hotel suite, put aside whatever irritation he had and called on Tilden to speak. As Tilden’s flat, nasal voice began to fill the air in the stuffy room, though, Tweed soon found it grating and his patience grew thin.

“At the request of several gentlemen for whom I entertain a high respect, I have come back here [to Albany] to make some observations… I come here, sir, to aid no party of men, nor to injure any party of men,” Tilden began, typically washing his hands of the recent head-knocking between Tweed and the insurgents, placing himself above the fray. “Nothing on earth would induce me to enter upon a career in city politics. I have quite as much in my present avocation as I am able to attend to, perhaps more.” Then, oddly, Tilden looked squarely at Tweed who sat just a few feet away across the cloth-covered witness table. “And let me say here that if I know my own heart I have no feeling of unkindness to any human being. To you, Mr. Chairman—"

"I am sick of the discussion of this question,” Tweed snapped,
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his voice unmistakably sharp as it carried to every corner of the room. Tweed stopped himself; he managed to hold his tongue through the rest of Tilden’s testimony, but his face apparently wore every sign of contempt.
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“I am unconscious of ever having done an unkind act or entertained an unkind feeling,” Tilden went on with his well-practiced calm. “I simply desire to submit a few suggestions for your consideration.”

Once he began it, Tilden’s critique of Tweed’s charter, which he now presented, pinpointed the core paradox in Sweeny’s draft: that it lodged power in a small circle of unaccountable, non-removable department heads. Under it, “you have a Mayor without any executive power” since he’d have given it away to the bureau heads whom he could no longer remove, “you have a Legislature without legislative power; you have elections without any power in the people to affect the Government for the period during which these officers are appointed.”

Tilden stated his piece: “It is in the stagnation of bureaus and commissions that evils and abuses exist,” he said, summing it up. His words had clearly presented the problem, but he’d failed to make an impression on the legislators and made no visible effort to press his point.
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When he finished, he gathered his papers and left the room. One friend noticed how his face had turned “ashy white” from “repressed rage.”
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Within a few hours, Tilden had disappeared from Albany, not staying to lobby privately on the issue. Another observer found his timid performance “typical of the timorous, cringing attitude of foremost Democrats.”
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Years later, after the scandals had broken and Tweed was destroyed, Tilden would boast about how he’d bravely come to Tweed’s own lion’s den that day in Albany and told the truth to Tweed’s face, unmasking his charter as a fraud. For now, though, he simply walked away. “I felt more scorn than I ever remember to have felt for the pusillanimity which characterized the hour…. An intenser [sic.] animosity than was excited against me in the men who grasped an irresponsible despotism over this city, cannot be imagined,” he’d say later. “None of the Ring ever came near me.”
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After the session, Tilden told his friend Henry Richmond that Tweed “would close his career in jail or in exile.”
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Reaching his Gramercy Park home in New York City that night, Tilden scribbled a note to Manton Marble at the
New York World
: “As to myself don’t mention my name in the paper till I see you.”
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“No one was more thoroughly cowed than Tilden” that day, a Marble biographer concluded.
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The next morning,
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Tweed came early to the state capitol. The New York Legislature in 1870 met in the old Capitol Building, a dignified, two-story, granite-columned structure sitting in the southwest corner of Albany’s Washington Park. The senate chamber was arranged so that all 32 senators sat facing each other, their desks forming a circle beneath half a dozen small gas-lit chandeliers. Spectators stood behind them outside an iron rail. With Tweed’s charter the order of business, the building swarmed with people. In the Senate Chamber, they stood “piled twenty deep and with open eyes and mouths took in the whole exciting scene.” Tweed, as the bill’s sponsor, would manage the debate; one newsman scribbled a description of him at his hour of triumph: “Tweed’s good natured face flushed like the rising sun against the white pillar before which he sits while the discussion is progressing. He was as watchful as a cat before a mousehole, ready for a spring the moment any motion was made hostile to the vitality of his measure.”
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By 5 o’clock that day they’d finished. The senators passed Tweed’s charter by a margin of 30 to 2 with no amendments.
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OOTNOTE
All the Republicans supported it, pointing to what they called a good compromise in also winning enactment of the election reform law that day. Governor Hoffman—Tweed’s candidate in 1868—signed the charter within the afternoon and Tweed made a point to take the pen, ink, and blotter that Hoffman used for the event to keep as souvenirs.