BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (21 page)

CHAPTER 8

I PLEDGE MYSELF TO PERSEVERE...

G
EORGE Jones could barely leave his home on West 37th Street these days without getting cross looks and cold shoulders—from his club friends at the Union League, his fellow newsmen on Park Row, or city workers he passed on Broadway or Chambers Street. Even his own
New-York Times
staff, the clerks, writers, and typesetters, seemed to doubt him. He didn’t mind the small slights, like not being invited to the mayor’s City Hall New Year’s reception. Jones’ newspaper’s fight with Tammany had dragged on for almost six months and, so far, he’d taken a public beating. Despite months of bluster, he’d failed to prove his case against Tweed and been embarrassed by the Astor committee’s blessing of Tweed’s finances—a direct rebuke of the
Times
. Other than Fletcher Harper and his young
Harper’s Weekly
artist Tom Nast, Jones counted no allies in the New York press. The other large newspapers held their noses at him; even Horace Greeley, smelling a possible run at the White House in 1872, had turned quiet over Tweed and Tammany.

“Is it a hopeless fight?” Jones’
Times
had asked editorially in mid-January 1871. “Even those who are anxious to see us continue the struggle profess to be in very low spirits concerning the probable result.”
¹

George Jones had gambled heavily on this contest and now saw failure staring back at him, even the prospect of losing control of his newspaper before having the chance to finish. In January, he received a letter from Henry Raymond’s widow, still a 34-percent owner, asking for an accounting. Already, Jones had had to deny two published reports of Tweed’s muscling him out of the
Times
, one in the
Rochester Chronicle
that Tweed had purchased “all the stock” and another in the
Philadelphia Ledger
that Tweed had cornered the shares of recently-deceased director James B. Taylor, both flatly wrong.
²
One
Times
shareholder, Leonard Jerome, a member of the
Times
’ executive committee, had joint real estate holdings with Tweed, and other directors would desert Jones the minute they saw red ink on the bottom line.
³

Around this time, one of his reporters overheard a conversation at City Hall among some Tammany men saying: “I think the deal with Mrs. Raymond will go through.” Jones could only guess what Tweed was plotting against him.

Instead of retreating, Jones had responded to each setback with a new attack. When John Jacob Astor’s committee had blessed Connolly’s financial books just before Election Day 1870, the
Times
blasted them as “fools” and “white washers” who “went like sheep to Mr. Connolly and were shorn,” their committee “a disgraceful fraud,” people who knew it was impossible to judge the city’s books based on just a few hours’ study, making them complicit in any thefts.
⁴
As a result, Astor, Moses Taylor, Marshall Roberts, and their highbrow friends now joined Tweed and Tammany in treating George Jones as a social pariah, someone to snub at clubs and restaurants. Who really ran the
Times
, people asked, conservative George Jones or his hothead British editor Louis Jennings?

Jones probably knew much more about Tweed’s financial doings than he’d been able to print so far. The
Times
later would acknowledge having seen figures from Connolly’s account books as early as November 1870.
⁵
But without hard evidence—actual documents and witnesses to vouch for authenticity—it meant nothing, hearsay at best. Printing detailed charges without proof could subject Jones to severe legal penalties—libel actions placing him in jail and his newspaper under the sheriff’s control.
⁶
Libel laws in the 1800s frequently were used to put newspapermen behind bars; in December 1868, for instance, Jim Fisk had convinced a friendly New York judge to jail
Springfield Republican
publisher Samuel Bowles, visiting New York on Christmas holiday, after Bowles’ newspaper had truthfully disclosed Fisk’s adultery with Josie Mansfield and identified his wife, Lucy, in Boston.

Jones directed his editor Jennings and his staff of newsmen to keep digging, hoping for something to break their way: evidence to come forward, an insider to leak his story, an incriminating scrap of paper to emerge. Readers now expected a daily anti-Tammany slam in each morning’s
New-York Times
to enjoy with breakfast. To wage the daily fight, Jennings brought in reinforcements in the form of 26-year-old John Foord, a recently hired reporter, British like himself, born in Perthshire, Scotland, and trained in the London press. In October 1870, fresh on the job, Foord had painstakingly assembled a list of 1,300 sinecures—people drawing salaries with no visible work—on the city payroll: “the rowdies and vagabonds of New-York, the sneak-thieves and the shoulder-hitters,” he called them in an article headlined “Tweed’s Lambs.”
⁷

Over the next few months, Jennings and Foord looked under every stone: They traced personal real estate transactions by Tweed and his Tammany cronies searching for patterns. In March, they found one: county auditor James Watson, a few months before his sledding death in January 1871, had purchased the Broadway Hotel on Broadway at 42d Street (today’s Times Square), putting down $82,500 in cash and a $100,000 mortgage, just before Tweed had pushed through the Albany legislature a bill to widen the street at that spot. Watson immediately had won a city compensation award of $150,000, a huge windfall publicly listed as going to the property’s prior owner, a Mr. Putnam, who actually had been offered only $50,000.
⁸
“Fraud,” shouted the
Times
, in fact “stupendous frauds.” The story charged that Watson actually held the property for Tammany higher-ups and planned to receive kickbacks from affected neighbors on the block. “It is now known that the Tweedites were to make four to five millions out of the job!” But the article gave no details on how.
⁹

A few weeks later, they shouted fraud again: “Another Street Job”—this time, an extension of Madison Avenue from 19th to 23rd Street with “Tweed & Company Cramming Their Pockets.” The story pointed to land Tweed had purchased nearby on 21st Street just on time to benefit from the work.
¹⁰
“Whenever large quantities of property are being bought by members of the Ring,” the
Times
claimed, “it may be set down as an axiom in our municipal economy that improvements or the construction of public works will soon take place.”
¹¹

When things got slow, Jennings stretched to find daily attacks: Once, he sent a reporter walking across City Hall park to the city’s tax office to ask how much Tweed and Sweeny each paid in local property taxes; when an official refused to answer for privacy reasons, the paper concluded: “No Proof That The Ring Pay Taxes.”
¹²
Other times, he resorted to name-calling: He quoted the proverb “although every Democrat is not a horse-thief, it is quite certain that every horse-thief is a Democrat”
¹³
and ran descriptions of Tweed himself as a “coarse and illiterate man.”
¹⁴
Jennings saved his worst venom for so-called “Tweed Republicans,” prominent Republican officials who gave cover to Tammany Hall by holding high-profile jobs under Tweed. Jennings called them “Republican Traitors” or “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing” and named names—Henry Smith and Benjamin Mannierre of the Police Board, for instance, who “With Mr. Tweed’s chains clanking upon their wrists, they could scarcely be expected to show a spark of manliness.”
¹⁵

Jennings exploited what had become the comic scandal over the movement to built a bronze statue in the city in Tweed’s honor. The original joke had grown into a public furor. “Has Tweed gone mad, that he thus challenges public attention to his life and acts?” the
Evening Post
asked.
¹⁶
Tweed himself had finally squelched the idea in a mid-March letter to organizers: “Statues are not erected to living men,” he conceded, recognizing the political damage. “I claim to be a live man, and hope (Divine Providence permitting) to survive in all my vigor, politically and physically, some years to come…. I hardly know which is more absurd, the original proposition or the grave comments of others, based upon the idea that I have given the movement countenance.”
¹⁷

Jennings and Foord produced dozens of articles during those months of early 1871, but instead of converts they’d won only a few sneers. Why, people asked, was it that only foreigners—British-born Jennings and Foord and German-born Thomas Nast at
Harper’s Weekly
—who complained about Bill Tweed? George Jones recognized that Tammany money stood behind much of the sniping from the other newspapers. Manton Marble’s
New York World
, for instance, had openly opposed Tweed until its advertising revenue from the city fell to $7,588 in 1869, its lowest level in ten years. In 1870, after Marble came to terms with Peter Sweeny, the
World
’s balance sheet had recovered miraculously; its city revenue exploded to $43,527, giving it its second most profitable year ever.
¹⁸

Even worse was the
New York Sun
, Jones’ Park Row neighbor, the paper that had first suggested the Tweed statue and whose part-owner Marshal Roberts had been a member of the Astor committee. That February, the
Sun
issued the ugliest slur yet at Jones and his staff:
¹⁹

“The decline of the New-York Times in everything that entitles a newspaper to respect and confidence, has been rapid and complete. Its present editor, who was dismissed from the London Times for improper conduct and untruthful writings, has sunk into a tedious monotony of slander and disregard of truth, and black-guard vituperation….

“Let the Times change its course, send off Jennings, and get some gentleman and scholar in his place, and become again an able and high-toned paper. Thus it may escape from ruin. Otherwise it is doomed.”

Sun
publisher Charles Dana knew perfectly well the charge against Jennings was false, but that didn’t matter. Even William Cullen Bryant’s
Evening Post
—a staunch Republican journal—had now changed its tune and abruptly let go its editor Charles Nordhoff after Nordhoff had ridiculed the Tweed statue. The
Evening Post
now called Jones and
Harper’s Weekly
“dishonest and disingenuous partisans” whose views counted for little “with honest and intelligent men.”
²⁰

All this made George Jones’ blood hot, but he didn’t reach full boil until mid-March 1871 when he picked up a competitor’s newspaper one morning and saw a column about himself that was not only untrue but malicious: “We are informed that negotiations are in progress for the sale of the
New-York Times
to a company, in which Mr. Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, Cyrus W. Field, A. Oakey Hall, James Fisk, Jr., Jay Gould, Peter B. Sweeny, and William M. Tweed”—a line-up of New York’s wealthiest men, all recent targets of
Times
attacks—“are to be the principal stockholders. The present managers of the establishment will leave as soon as the purchase is concluded.” The new owners planned to throw Jones and Jennings to the wolves. And worse, the story fingered Jones himself as instigating the sale: “We learn, also, that the first overtures for this transaction were made by George Jones, through a third party, to Mr. Sweeny, about six months ago, but that the plan has not been entertained until recently.”
²¹

Jones had to control his temper. If true, this threat could signal disaster; the combination of millionaires and Tammany sharpers could destroy him. Jones knew he could never compete with the likes of Jay Gould and Cyrus Field over pure money. He began to see connections with other rumors he’d heard—that Tweed’s friends recently had contacted small
Times
shareholders offering to buy them out for huge profits. Should this new combination get control of even a single share of
New-York Times
stock, it could file a lawsuit and run to one of Tweed’s pet judges on the state Supreme Court, like George Barnard or Albert Cardozo, to get an injunction putting the newspaper in receivership—just as Gould and Fisk had done to the Erie Railway, the Union Pacific, the Albany-Susquehana, the Gold Exchange Bank, and a half-dozen others, naming one of their friends as receiver.
²²
Even the hint of a stock raid, or of Jones’ showing the “white feather” as they put it, could scare off advertisers, shareholders, and news sources, crippling the paper.