BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (55 page)

Charles Fairchild had left Albany abruptly after finishing his term as state attorney general and set up a legal practice in New York City. Still young, he had plenty of time for his career to recover from his bloody nose over the Tweed affair. He’d been visiting friends in upstate New York’s Madison County, though, when he saw the letter from John Kelly printed in the newspapers. It made such a direct attack on his personal honesty that he felt compelled to answer. Fairchild put pen to paper and scribbled out his own letter to Attorney General Schoonmaker designed for publication in the newspapers, intended both to clear his own name and to drive one last nail into the coffin of the movement to release the old Boss. John Kelly’s claim that he’d broken promises was “false,” in fact “absurdly false,” he wrote. He’d rejected Tweed’s confession not because of politics but because it was worthless. “Of what use to the Attorney General could be a full confession from Tweed! The Attorney General and the public already knew well enough about Tweed’s crimes,” he argued. “Tweed did not offer evidence the use of which would at all justify the consent of the Attorney General to his discharge.”
⁴³

There is no evidence that Fairchild spoke with Samuel Tilden that week before writing or sending the letter, but he didn’t have to. He knew Tilden’s mind on the issue. They’d talked it over many times before. When Fairchild finished, he mailed the letter and, as expected, it caused a public stir. No answer from Schoonmaker ever appeared… just a clear, eloquent silence.

-------------------------

Tweed read Fairchild’s letter printed in the newspapers on the morning of April 2. He pointed it out to his bondsman Charles Devlin visiting him in his room on Ludlow Street and Devlin recalled the reaction: “I saw at once that it was this thing that finally broke him down.”
⁴⁴
All was now in the hands of the Attorney General, but Fairchild’s letter had doomed the case. Freeing Tweed was political suicide.

Foster Dewey, who now saw Tweed almost every day in jail, conceded that the old Boss had told him “as many as five hundred times since his return from Spain that he wanted to die.”
⁴⁵

Tweed read the Bible each day in prison now and made his room a comfortable cocoon, its walls covered with pictures of his wife, his children, and his Greenwich estate, a Brussels carpet decorated with red roses underfoot, a high wooden clock, and chairs upholstered in blue. He enjoyed nights of playing poker with Foster Dewey and old-time cronies from the Seventh Ward who came to visit. He’d stopped eating much; Dewey remembered how sometimes Tweed would sit at the window looking at the busy street and call out names of people he recognized, sometimes one out of every four who passed by. He’d remember the names and addresses of their parents, the businesses they’d owned, the favors he’d done for them, and the interesting events in their lives.
⁴⁶

John Townsend found the scene depressing and started keeping his distance. “I felt I could be to him of no further use [and] I saw he was giving way to despondency.”
⁴⁷
Tweed’s wife Mary Jane had gone to Europe that spring, her own health broken from the years of strain. She’d lost all the sight in one eye and most of the sight in the other; she was practically blind. And traveled under the name “Weed” to avoid any connection with her jailed husband. Their two eldest sons, William Jr. and Richard and their families, went with her, leaving Tweed without their company in his final days. His eldest daughter Josephine and her husband Frederick Douglas—his only children left in the New York area—Foster Dewey, Tweed’s brother Richard, his bondsman Charles Devlin, and the doctors became his daily circle, his last set of companions.

Tweed celebrated his 55th birthday in jail on April 3; by then, his heart condition had worsened. Around this time, he caught a cold, perhaps on his birthday from the prison dampness or perhaps from his final trip to testify at the County Courthouse. The cold worsened into bronchial pneumonia. A few days later, he died.

CHAPTER 23

LEGACY

“ The politicians who make a lastin’ success in politics are the men who are always loyal to their friends, even up to the gate of State prison, if necessary; men who keep their promises and never lie…. Some papers complain that the bosses get rich while devotin’ their lives to the interests of the city. What of it?”

—Tammany leader
GEORGE WASHINGTON PLUNKETT
, 1905.
¹

“ Tammany Hall, for years, has unfairly and unjustly been stigmatized as something sinister and evil.”

—
CARMINE DE SAPIO
, the last Tammany “Boss,” February 1961, ninety years after the fall of Tweed.
²

“ There is no boss over me. The only boss I have is the people of the City of New York.”

—
ROBERT WAGNER
, mayor of New York City (1954-1965) denying charges he followed orders from “Boss” De Sapio, January 13, 1960.
³

“ [I]f Tammany could lay its hands on the State Treasury for four years, it would put the state in debt for generations [as it had] New York City by a succession of municipal administrations sponsored by the gangster-infiltrated Tammany Hall political machine.”

—Future
U.S. SENATOR JACOB K. JAVITS
, running for state Attorney General in 1954.
⁴

T
HE fight for his legacy began almost immediately after Tweed sighed his last breath. “[H]is life, as a whole, was a wretched failure, in every possible way and from whatever point of view it may be regarded,” pronounced the
New York Tribune
the day he died,
⁵
even as hundreds of well-wishers and curious gathered around City Hall and the Courthouse on hearing the news. Reformers could not ignore the reservoir of good will for the dead Boss. “The bulk of the poorer voters of this city to-day revere his memory, and look on him as the victim of rich men’s malice,” E.L. Godkin warned in
The Nation
that week. “The odium heaped on him in the pulpits last Sunday does not exist in the lower stratum of New York society.”
⁶

A
New York Herald
reporter visiting Tweed’s old neighborhood by the East River heard recriminations not against Tweed but against his prosecutors: “It was broadly stated that he had been made a scapegoat.”
⁷
Many agreed with Tweed lawyer John Townsend’s depiction of the state attorneys general as shady cowards. “Schoonmaker had been just as bad as Fairchild was [except] Fairchild failed to [release Tweed] through dishonest motives; Schoonmaker failed to do it because he was afraid.”
⁸

Responsible voices condemned Tweed for his crimes, but the Boss had struck a chord with many by the way he’d carried himself during the last years of his life—despite his acknowledged epic-scale corruption. It created an awkward ambivalence: “Undoubtedly [Tweed] was not a malignant scoundrel,” noted even the hostile
Harper’s Weekly
, whose star illustrator Thomas Nast had been at the forefront of his downfall and continued to draw cartoons of him as a pathetic jail bird, “he was a hearty boon companion, a lover of his friends, and generous to ‘the boys.’ Should he, therefore, not have paid the lawful and not extravagant penalty of offenses that thin and morose men would have paid if they had committed?”
⁹

Tweed’s story of pride, fall, and redemption, its stunning highs and tragic lows, defied snap judgments. Sunday church sermons across the country chewed at the moral lessons. “To prove that this life is an awful peril, I point to the wreck of Friday at Ludlow Street Jail,” Brooklyn’s widely-read Reverend T. De Witt Talmadge told his church flock that week. “Let him that standeth take heed, lest he fall.”
¹⁰
Others pointed to basic compassion for a lost soul. “It is a mercy to him that he has been taken away,” offered the
New York World
.
¹¹

Tweed’s own family kept his funeral low key. The scandal had already shattered their lives, bringing shame on the household and poverty to the door. Tweed’s body was packed in ice and was taken from Ludlow Street Jail to the home of his daughter Josephine on 77th Street. Telegrams went out to family members scattered around the world: Word came quickly from Tweed’s two married daughters in New Orleans, Lizzie and Mary Amelia. Lizzie and her husband John Maginnis started immediately for New York to attend the funeral, but the older sister Mary Amelia claimed to be too ill to travel. Tweed’s wife Mary Jane and his oldest sons William Jr. and Richard wired back from Paris to proceed without them. His two youngest sons, 10-year-old George and 14-year-old Charles, kept away from him in New England boarding schools for the last five years, were not told about their father’s death.

On the day of the funeral, crowds formed early on the street outside the black-draped house where Tweed’s body lay. Stoops around Madison Avenue and 77th Street swarmed with people, men and women both, perhaps a thousand altogether. Most were rough looking, many Irish, “almost exclusively of the poorer classes,” a reporter noted, “drawn from all parts of the City by feelings of gratitude.”
¹²
They stood quietly in the cold, a brief vigil, waiting for a chance to see the old Boss’ coffin go by and say a last hurrah.

Inside the house, the service itself drew just a scattering of old-timers; “the only mourners at Tweed’s funeral were his kinsfolk, a few old friends, and a few poor people whom his bounty had warmed and fed,” a reporter noted.
¹³
Rufus Cowing, the single Republican on the aldermen’s investigating committee, Warden Liscomb of Blackwell’s Island prison, Tweed’s lawyers John Townsend and William Edelstein, his aide Luke Grant from the Ludlow Street Jail, and a handful of retired aldermen, city clerks, and firemen mingled with family members and friends like bondsman William Devlin and Foster Dewey. Everyone else stayed away. Not a single leading politician of the day showed his face, nor any of the reformers, nor any members of the former Ring.

Reverend Dr. Joseph Price, the same cleric who’d married both the Boss himself and all the Tweed children, now an old man with a long white beard and broken voice, led a brief service. Afterward, the family opened the front door and invited the people standing outside on 77th Street to come in and walk single file through the parlor to see Tweed’s body in its open rosewood casket, dressed in black suit and white tie, its head resting on flowers—lilies, roses, violets—with a pillow nearby embroidered to say “Our Father.” Hundreds took advantage of the gesture.

Only eight carriages followed Tweed’s coffin down Madison and Fifth Avenues to the Hamilton Ferry at the foot of Broadway and across to Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. “If he had died in 1870, Broadway would have been festooned with black and every military and civic organization in the city would have followed him,” Coroner Woltman remarked.
¹⁴
One lot owner at Greenwood Cemetery complained about Tweed’s being buried there at all, citing a cemetery rule that forbid “any person … to be interred therein who shall have died in any prison or shall have been executed for a crime.” He backed down only after being assured there would be no “striking monument” erected for Tweed.
¹⁵
The family buried him next to his parents under a simple marker inscribed “To Our Father,” with room left for his wife later on.

The Boss would leave no Tweed dynasty behind him, no Tweed fortune, no Tweed homestead. Instead, for the next century, the family would guard its privacy and disappear into the woodwork. He left no will; he’d long ago transferred any property of value to his children who’d lost most of it in forced sales. They sold the Greenwich estate, held in his wife’s name, in May 1879 to a businessman named Joseph Millbank for a reported $75,000, well below its actual worth.
¹⁶
Tweed’s daughter Josephine lost more money on an insurance scam. She’d purchased a $10,000 life endowment policy on her father back in 1868 at his height. It had cost her $1,000 per year in premiums and was supposed to pay her back the full face value in ten years or at the time of his death if earlier. After she’d paid in $9,000, though, the Knickerbocker Life Insurance Company, which issued the policy, decided to cancel payment, citing a clause that required Tweed to get its permission before he could travel abroad—a provision he broke by fleeing to Spain during his ill-fated jail break. Josephine sued, but the court ruled against her and she lost the entire amount.
¹⁷

The Tweed children chose to surrender only one piece of the remaining property to satisfy their father’s outstanding court judgments, the land in upstate Putnam County he’d purchased in 1870 to secure the city’s water supply. They sent the deed to John Kelly as comptroller of New York City, in gratitude for Kelly’s help in pressing for their father’s release from jail before his death. “[Y]ou were the only officer who had publicly asked that good faith be kept with him,” they wrote him through a lawyer.
¹⁸

After that, the family scattered itself to the winds. The Maginnis daughters stayed in New Orleans; the younger Tweed sons settled in Connecticut, as did William Jr. Many of his immediate family remained abroad: Mary Jane would die in Paris in 1880, barely two years after her husband, as would his son Richard in 1884. The only Tweed descendant apparently to make a public mark in Connecticut was a grandson, John H. Tweed, a World War I Navy flier who became a well-known aviator in the 1920s and helped develop a local field which today bears his name: the Tweed New Haven Regional Airport. Otherwise, they are largely lost to history.

Of Tweed’s inner circle atop the Ring—A. Oakey Hall, Peter B. Sweeny, and Richard Connolly—none spent a day in prison (other than Connolly’s brief arrest in late 1871) but each would carry scars, sheepishly denying his role in the scandals but never escaping the “finger of scorn” that Nast had drawn to follow them through the years.

Oakey Hall ended his run as an actor at the Park Theater in his play “The Crucible” in early 1876 after just twenty-two performances. He gave up acting and would rotate between London and New York during the rest of the 1870s and 1880s. He tried his hand at journalism in brief stints at the
New York World
and a small newspaper called the
New York Truth
, but mostly he supported himself practicing law. His most famous client in later years would be a 25-year-old Russian-émigré rabble-rouser named Emma Goldman, later to emerge as America’s foremost “anarchist.” Charged in 1893 for inciting a crowd of unemployed workers in Union Square to seize bread off the tables of wealthy homes on Fifth Avenue, young Emma gave a gushing description of the elderly lawyer who took her case. “A. Oakey Hall was a great jurist, besides being a man of liberal ideas. He had once been mayor of New York, but had proved to be too human and democratic for the politicians,” she wrote in her memoirs, glossing over the corruption scandal. “[D]istinguished-looking, vivacious, [he] gave one the impression of a much younger man than his white hair indicated.”
¹⁹

Elegant Oakey could not save Emma Goldman from a year in Blackwell’s Island prison in that case, despite what she described as his “brilliant” defense. He dropped her as a client after she ignored his advice not to address the court on sentencing. Hall remained a social butterfly throughout his old age, taking up with an actress named Ella Morgan Davies at one point and, shortly after his wife Kate died in March 1897, marrying for a second time, to a woman named Mrs. John Clifton-Clifton.

All the while, he obsessed over the stain on his reputation from the Tweed scandals. To hear him, you’d think he’d never known Tweed at all, owed him nothing, and had become mayor all on his own. On a trip to London in the 1880s, Hall sued a well-known British writer named James Bryce for publishing a history of the United States, the
American Commonwealth
, that included a description of the Tweed Ring with Hall as a charter member. The suit languished for years before being dropped without trial.
²⁰
Later, back in New York City, he was thrilled in 1898 when Noah Davis, the judge who’d presided over the now-famous Tweed trials twenty-five years earlier, came to his defense. Davis startled a group of retired jurists one night by commenting during an after-dinner speech that “Mr. Hall was innocent of the charge under which he had rested for years. He [Davis] knew … of his personal knowledge of the utter baselessness of the charge.”
²¹