BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (32 page)

There is no evidence actually connecting Tilden to the episode. Tweed, following events from across town, saw a different implication. His friends were abandoning him: first Jimmy O’Brien and now Barnard. It was the beginning of the end. “We owe to Barnard all our troubles,” he’d say much later looking back on these days.
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Tweed, tanned and fat in his dark suit and diamond pin after his summer spent indulging in the comforts of Greenwich, hardly looked the relaxed gentleman that morning. On the contrary, a reporter described him as “fatigued and worn.”
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He closed the door to his inner sanctum, his private office on Duane Street three blocks from City Hall. Inside, he looked around the polished mahogany table beneath gas chandeliers, fresh-cut flowers, and mahogany liquor cabinets to see three dour faces staring back at him: Sweeny, Connolly, and Oakey Hall. How many hundreds of hours had Tweed spent closeted in meetings with these three men over the years? By now, he’d known each for almost twenty years. He knew their wives and families, their bank accounts, their personal quirks and habits—the mayor’s silly puns and tinny laugh, Sweeny’s brooding silences, Connolly’s Irish malarkey. Their unique partnership had come far since the City Hall “lunch club.” Now they shared a dark moment. After weeks of ridicule, vilification, and attacks, they faced ruin. As newspapermen clamored in the hallway and lawyers harassed them with writs and demands, Tweed doubtless skipped the glad-handing, brandy and cigars and got down to business.

He still called this foursome by its formal legal name, the City Board of Apportionment, but everyone else in town had another: “the Tweed Ring,” notorious swindlers of Tammany Hall.

Tweed had pulled his circle together several times that week.
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Now, the morning after Barnard’s injunction, they met again. Tweed had had no trouble recognizing treachery in Barnard’s decree: “That fellow was seized with the idea he would become Governor of New York,” he’d say later.
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Within his own inner circle, it was Connolly who felt the strain most directly. As comptroller, Connolly ran the city’s finances and Barnard’s order had made his job a nightmare. By its terms, Barnard had effectively rendered the city bankrupt. For years, Connolly had financed New York’s operations with debt, bonds and securities. He kept virtually no cash in the treasury. Since Barnard had now forbidden him from raising or borrowing a penny more, he couldn’t issue a single check or warrant. He had no cash to back them up. As a result, construction on city projects stopped, contractors went begging for payment, and thousands of employees, laborers who worked in the streets, the parks, and the stone quarries, all feared losing their pay.

Angry gangs of workmen already roamed the streets. Tweed himself had faced over fifty callers that morning at his Public Works Department office clamoring for appointments.

A newspaperman catching Connolly that morning at his office described the big Irishman as “fatigued and careworn.” Asked about the injunction, Connolly had ducked the question. “I have no opinion to give,” he’d said. “In fact I know nothing about it. I don’t believe it will amount to anything.”
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With legal charges leveled against them in Barnard’s courtroom, Tweed and Connolly both had hired lawyers that week,
⁴⁰
and Connolly was barraged with requests for records from the new citizens’ investigating committee.

The pressure made Tweed a prisoner in his own town. He couldn’t hide; reporters hounded his every step. He picked up newspapers each morning and saw himself portrayed as a criminal and scoundrel. He couldn’t walk down the street or enter a restaurant without strangers recognizing him from the Thomas Nast cartoons. They laughed behind his back and sometimes to his face. Friends kept their distance, embarrassed to be seen with him in public.

Since returning from his summer retreat, Tweed’s private meetings with Sweeny, Connolly, and Hall had degenerated into fruitless melodrama with Sweeny and Hall openly warring against Connolly. They’d all read the
New-York Times
charges and heard the clamoring for their scalps. Someone had to be sacrificed to satisfy the reformers, Sweeny argued, and the mayor agreed. They pointed their fingers directly across the table: Connolly, as comptroller, was the one most directly connected to the now-discredited city vouchers. Why not him?

Connolly didn’t balk at first. By one account, he’d actually agreed weeks earlier to give up his seat. “When the damaging evidences of the frauds were first [printed in the
Times
], Connolly thought he would have to resign and did actually send in his resignation,” an anonymous insider told the
New York Tribune
that week, but the mayor had refused to accept it.
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After that, though, his attitude hardened. Why should he be the scapegoat? When Sweeny pressed him again to quit, he refused flatly. “Gentlemen, to resign would be to confess myself guilty of a crime. I am guilty of no crime,” sources quoted him as saying.
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Tweed must have resented Sweeny’s holier-than-thou sanctimony. Sweeny, having hid for months in his upstate retreat at Lake Mahopac, had barely returned to New York before jumping at the chance to leave again the week before to attend the State Democratic committee meeting in Albany and rub elbows with the state chairman, Sam Tilden of all people. Sweeny left footprints all over town of his backroom flirting with reformers: At the Cooper Union reform meeting, as speakers from the podium blasted Tweed, Hall, and Connolly, they barely mentioned Sweeny’s name at all. Calls from the crowd of “how about Sweeny” or “tell us about Sweeny” went ignored. When Judge Barrett, a reform lawyer, was asked about the rumored Sweeny-Tweed rift, he happily stoked the fire by vouching for Sweeny’s honesty: “Mr. Sweeny was not greedy for wealth,” he said, but only for political advancement.
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Newspapers openly speculated that Sweeny, after forcing out Connolly and Tweed, planned to keep power for himself and take credit for “purifying” Tammany Hall. Tweed couldn’t have missed seeing the articles.

Oakey Hall too now used his long-time friendship with
New York Herald
publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. to plant self-serving stories at Tweed’s expense: “If William M. Tweed and Richard B. Connolly have made enormous fortunes within two or three years the same cannot be said of Mayor Hall,” the
Herald
argued in an editorial that week. “It is generally understood, we believe, that Mayor Hall is not a rich man, though he derives a handsome salary from his legitimate business as a lawyer.”
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But at least the mayor still kept a sense of humor. Asked if he planned to argue the city’s case in the injunction hearings before Judge Barnard, he pointed to the old adage “the man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client” and added: “It would never do to have a fool at one end of the case and a Foley at the other.”
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OOTNOTE
45

Now, sitting around the table in Tweed’s private office, they went at it again. Already that morning, news of Barnard’s injunction had sparked waves of gossip that Connolly or Tweed was preparing to quit. A
Times
reporter had cornered Connolly and asked him directly if he could say anything about it. “Yes you can,” Connolly had snapped. “You can say it’s a ___ lie.”
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The histrionics got worse each time they met. They’d argue, then Sweeny and Hall would huddle in a corner or leave the room as Connolly sat stonily alone at the table. He was no more guilty than the rest, Connolly would insist, and would “sink or swim with his colleagues, but … his colleagues should sink or swim with him.”
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Sweeny tried flattery, browbeating, and threats. He and the mayor made promises: If he resigned, they’d protect him and block any investigations. They’d pick a friendly replacement as comptroller whom they could all trust.

Tweed held his tongue during these arguments, refusing to speak up either for or against his embattled comptroller. The spectacle must have disgusted him, the blatant disloyalty. Tweed recognized that if Sweeny and Hall dumped Connolly, they’d likely try to dump him next. The foursome haggled for hours that day and resolved nothing, just like the day before and the day before that. Tweed certainly thanked his lucky stars when the meeting finally ended and he could go outside and get some fresh air.

That wasn’t the case today, however. Instead, Tweed opened the door, saw Sweeny, Connolly, and Hall all leave to go their separate ways, and stepped out into the anteroom of his Duane Street office. Then almost immediately a newspaperman grabbed him and asked for a private interview. Tweed recognized the reporter as one of the usual crowd from the
New York Sun
, usually a friendly voice. He invited him into his private lair, sat him down, and put on a friendly face. “How are you? Glad to see you,” he said.

“Well, what do you think of the matter, Mr. Tweed?” the reporter asked, starting right in, talking about Barnard’s injunction.
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“Oh, I don’t think it can stand,” Tweed said. “It was just served on me.” The reporter found Tweed in good cheer that day, happy to talk and hear his own voice. He tried to scribble down Tweed’s words exactly. “I wanted to go out of town at 12 o’clock and just at that time the man came with the writ. Well, I told him, ‘That’s what I’ve been waiting for. The sooner the better.’”

“What are you going to do about it?” the reporter asked—deliberately using the language of Tweed’s own mythical boast. Tweed probably squirmed at hearing the fake quote thrown in his face.

“Oh, I shall have special counsel I think… I think I shall have my own counsel. I don’t know though—yes, I think I will.”

“You don’t seem to be very downcast.”

He laughed. “Pooh! I am not afraid. What do I care? They’ll find me there. I’ll have pretty good counsel—pretty good counsel.”

“I saw George Jones yesterday; he feels rather exulting about it.”

“Yes, I suppose he does. They think it’s a pretty good thing probably.” A shadow crossed Tweed’s face at this point—the mention of Jones, the taunting question. The reporter described the look as “contempt.” The question seemed to strike a nerve, a vein of bitterness. After his weeks of careful public silence, Tweed’s tongue took a life of its own. “I would have fought out this thing differently if I had been alone. (With emphasis:) Yes, Sir, I wouldn’t have been so quiet, I can tell you.”

“Did you read the
Nation
,” the reporter asked. “You know they are going to have you lynched?”

“He’s an infamous liar,” Tweed snapped, Godkin’s arrogant lynch threat the last straw. “The man who wrote that knows he’s told a lie, and that he wouldn’t dare to tell me so to my face. (After a pause:) I was born in New York, and I mean to stay here too.”

“You don’t seem to be afraid of a violent death. Are you?” the reporter asked.

“(Stamping his foot)—Well, if they want to come I’ll be there. That’s all I have to say about it. I’ll be there, I’ll be there, Sir. (With a smile.) The TIMES has been saying all the time I have no brains. Well, I’ll show Jones that I have brains. You know if a man is with others, he must do as they do. If I had been alone, he would have had a good time of it. … I tell you, Sir. If this man Jones would have 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. (Clinching his fists.) I would have killed him….”

“I suppose you must be tired of public life, Mr. Tweed.”

“Oh, yes, I am sick of it. I wish I could retire to private life and have nothing more to do with politics. I’m sick of them. Jones wouldn’t have dared to say anything if I had no wife and children.”

Tweed would claim later that the
Sun
reporter had misconstrued him, even if these were his exact words. He’d blame the story’s “typographic display” for distorting his meaning. It’s not that he’d have liked to murder George Jones but for his family duties, he explained.
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He had “Nothing to be ashamed of.”
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Still later, he’d grumble at his own stupidity for the remark, saying: “If I go to murder a man, I want at least to escape the charge of malice prepense.”
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These excuses hardly helped. Within a day or so, every major New York newspaper had printed the verbatim transcript of Tweed’s outburst—how big bad Boss Tweed had snarled and stamped his foot and boasted of wanting to kill George Jones. In a city of brass knuckles that respected strength, he looked like a weak little boy, a frustrated bully breaking under strain.
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