BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (58 page)

The 1950s would see a renaissance with Tammany’s last true “Boss,” a media-savvy powerbroker named Camine De Sapio who’d rise to prominence behind respected leaders like Mayor Robert F. Wagner and Governor W. Averill Harriman. De Sapio would court publicity; his picture would make the cover of
Time Magazine
in 1955 with the Tammany Tiger peering over his shoulder.
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Still, charges of “Bossism” would follow him and prompt a revolt. He too would be undone by a new generation of “reformers” led by Wagner, Eleanor Roosevelt, and U.S. Senator Herbert Lehman. His final defeat would come in 1963 in a race for leader of a Greenwich Village district at the hands of a young firebrand named Edward Koch, later to become Mayor of New York City.

Ironically, of his generation, only Tweed today has an official city building with his name on it: the “Tweed Courthouse” on Chambers Street by City Hall, scene of so many pivotal events in his life: the notorious graft, the “voucher robbery,” and his conviction for fraud and sentencing to twelve years on Blackwell’s Island. Originally budgeted in 1858 at $250,000, costs on this architectural wonder ultimately topped $4 million and perhaps $12 million or more, rich in gravy for all involved.
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The building had become dilapidated, stigmatized for scandal, until the city began a major renovation in the mid-1990s. It spent $85 million to remove eighteen layers of paint, replace the ceiling and external marble cornices, reconstruct the marble and glass-tile floors, and repaint the elegant interior. Today it houses the city Department of Education.

Nobody intended for the gesture to be taken as a tribute or a vindication of the old Boss; the building’s formal name remains simply “New York County Courthouse.” Calling it for Tweed simply reflects what everyone knows: that Tweed built that building, just as he retains a hold on the imagination of the city. His swagger is as much a part of modern New York City as the steel, the concrete, the noise, and the traffic. That’s good enough of a monument for him.

Footnotes

Chapter 1

1. “Honest graft” was defined by Tammany chief George Washington Plunkitt as “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em”—basically exploiting insider influence as opposed to direct stealing from the city treasury. In practice, it amounted to both, but with discretion and moderation.
   

2. Located in the middle of the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, it is now called Roosevelt Island.
   

3. About $60 million in modern dollars. Generally, to compare modern dollars with dollars in the 1860s or 1870s, multiply by twenty.
   

Chapter 2

1. Recent riots had included the 1857 melee between the rival Municipal and Metropolitan police forces as well as sporadic wars between gangs like the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys.
   

2. Tweed’s seventh ward stretched along the East River between Grand and Catherine Streets, east of East Broadway. Today, it is the area between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges near the river.
   

3. Formally called the Native American Party that peaked in the late 1850s, capturing many local offices and running former-president Millard Fillmore for the White House in 1856. After bloody anti-immigrant riots in the late 1840s, one branch, the “Order of the Star Spangled Banner,” had answered police questions by saying “I know nothing,” leading to the nickname.
   

4. It was Fernando Wood, head of Mozart Hall, Tammany’s chief rival among the Democratic clubs, who as mayor in 1861 had proposed that New York secede from the Union and become a “free city” doing business equally with both North and South. Tammany’s army unit, the Tammany Jackson Guard, 42nd New York Infantry, was led by William Kennedy, Tammany’s “Grand Sachem” at the time. Kennedy became an early war hero, dying shortly before the first battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861. A monument to them, a statue of an Indian, stands today at Gettysburg.
   

5. New York City and County overlapped totally in the mid-1800s, and the line between city and county governments was often blurred. The city’s mayor had county functions and the elected comptroller managed accounts for both entities. The state legislature had given the Supervisors added powers in 1857 due to concerns about corruption among the city’s alderman. The overlap would continue until 1898 when the city expanded beyond Manhattan to include Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.
   

6. Early in the war, Orison Blunt had invented an early machine gun called the “pepper-box gun” that could discharge seventy shots per minute operated by a crank handle. Lincoln himself tested it in Washington. Though never mass produced, one of them was sent to the front but captured by rebels before it could make an impact. Blunt discovered it years later in a junk shop.
   

7. Tweed apparently did not meet with Lincoln personally on this trip. The War Department was just a few steps down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, though Lincoln may have been at the Soldier’s Home, his summer residence outside Washington. It’s tempting to savor what conversation might have occurred had Abraham Lincoln, America’s most celebrated saint, had the chance to chat with Tweed, soon to become its most notorious sinner.
   

8. Tweed, of course, was no innocent at war profiteering. By one story, when the city sold the old Harlem Hall in mid-1863, Tweed purchased 300 of its benches for $5 each, then used his influence as a member of the Supervisors’ Committee on Armories to win approval for the county to buy all but 17 of the benches back to use as armory furniture for $600 each, costing taxpayers $169,800 in the turnaround.42
   

9. The process involved dividing a large single drawing into multiple pieces, having multiple engravers make separate wood engravings of each, and then reassembling the pieces for final printing—primitive and time-consuming by modern standards but a major breakthrough at the time. Sometimes, the artist would draw directly onto the wooden blocks in soft pencil.
   

10. The army had arrested five of these state agents; two had already been convicted by military commissions and given life sentences as three others awaited trial. The three were acquitted, but not until months after Election Day, prompting Democrats to complain the whole scandal had been overblown to intimidate Democratic voters.
    

Chapter 3

1. The committee consisted of congressmen William Lawrence as chairman (R-Ohio), Henry Dawes (R.-Ma.), Austin Blain (R.-Mi). Benjamin Hopkins (R.-Wis.), Oliver J. Dickey (R.-Pa) Michael Kerr (D.-In.), and Lewis Ross (D.-Ill.).
   

2. Castle Garden, at the lower tip of Manhattan, served as the principal immigration processing station for New York until Ellis Island opened in 1892. The site—Castle Clinton National Monument—is now the launch point for tourist ferries to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
   

3. Since selling fake naturalization papers violated federal, not state law, Murray as federal marshal had jurisdiction and could by-pass the Tammany-dominated local police and judges.
   

4. Seymour had lost the national electoral count by 214 to 80, capturing only eight states for the Democrats: New York, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, and Oregon. The popular vote margin was closer: 3,012,833 for Grant to 2,703,249 for Seymour.
   

5. All were members of the “Albany Regency” which ran the pre-Civil War party in New York. Martin Van Buren served as vice president under Andrew Jackson and then president from 1837 to 1841; Silas Wright represented New York in the U.S. Senate from 1833 to 1844 until resigning for a term as governor; William Marcy served as governor in the 1830s and later joined the cabinets of presidents James Polk and Franklin Pierce. It was Marcy who first pronounced what became the creed of the 19th century Democratic Party: “To the victor belongs the spoils.”
   

6. These states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Nebraska—held elections for congressmen, governor, and local offices in October. Voters would have to return in November to cast ballots for president. In days before public opinion polls, the early voting was seen as a referendum on the national ticket.
   

7. Such a change of presidential candidates by a party after its nominating convention and just weeks before Election Day would have been unprecedented either before then or since.
   

8. Tweed had increased the committee’s size from 21 to 150 members, making it too bulky for routine decisions while creating more patronage slots for him to fill, and he decentralized the process for choosing local nominees to local ward committees whose memberships he strictly controlled. Tweed had also eclipsed the other political clubs; Mozart Hall now routinely rubber-stamped Tammany’s choices for key positions.
   

9. In 1866 and 1868, the New York Citizens Association led by Peter Cooper had complained of overspending on the County Courthouse being constructed near City Hall. Begun in 1858 with a projected cost of $250,000, outlays by the close of 1868 already approached $3.2 million with an annual payroll of $280,000. Several days of hearings, however, uncovered no evidence of wrongdoing. Similarly, an 1866 probe into Street Department abuses found little evidence and led to the removal of Commissioner Charles Cornell, but not his Deputy, Tweed.
   

10. Around this time, the state assembly was dominated by the so-called Black Horse Cavalry, a loosely-organized group of about twenty members who’d band together to extort bribes, but there is no indication Tweed, a senator, had a direct connection with them.
    

11. Black men were eligible to vote in New York State in 1868 if they paid property taxes of $250 or more—a requirement not applicable to whites. After the 1863 riots, the city’s black population had dropped to just 1.39 percent, just 12,600 people out of about 942,000, in 1870.
    

12. Under this vision, Tweed could take a seat in the U.S. Senate and become the force in a Hoffman presidency, similar to what New York Republican leader Thurlow Weed had attempted with William Seward in 1860 and what U.S. Senator Mark Hanna (R-Ohio) would accomplish with president William McKinley in 1896.
    

Chapter 4

1. The Croton Reservoir, a fortress-like structure covering the site of today’s Bryant Park and the New York Public Library, opened in 1842 and operated for most of the century. Its high walls gave one of the best views of the city. An engineering marvel of its time, it connected to the Croton Aqueduct bringing water into the city from the Croton Dam in upstate New York 41 miles away.
   

2. Hall’s vision included “our river fronts … patterned after the Thames embankments; the Park could be converted into a plaza; Fifth-avenue, from Washington-square to the Central Park, might be covered with concrete in order to afford a safe and comparatively noiseless carriage thoroughfare; our wretched cobblestone pavements could be covered with concrete; Sixth-avenue would be cut through from Minetta-lane to West Broadway; First and Second avenues might be opened to Chatham-square; suspension bridges could be constructed over the channels each side of Blackwell’s [Roosevelt Island] with a center arch resting on the Island, so as to allow railway trains and teams from Long Island entrance into the City [today’s 59th Street Bridge]; the sidewalks of Fulton-street adjoining St. Paul’s Church could be thrown into the roadway for vehicular relief, and Ann-street opened.”
   

3. For instance, when Gould and Fisk’s corner of the New York gold market collapsed on “Black Friday,” September 24, 1869, Cardozo issued an order handing them control of the Gold Exchange Bank, which held millions of dollars of frozen transactions, and ordered the receiver to pay Gould’s brokers and nobody else’s. In a final round of the Erie Railway war, Barnard named Gould himself the company’s receiver to silence protesting stockholders. In another case, Barnard named Tweed’s son, William Jr., as temporary receiver of the Union Pacific Railroad, soon to be embroiled in the Credit Mobilier scandal.
   

4. There’s a story that when Sweeny and Connolly both were young upstarts at Tammany, Connolly fretted over Sweeny’s dour, aloof manner, and decided to teach him charm. One night, he sat Sweeny down and spent hours in a room practicing how to slap shoulders, shake hands, and grin until their hands ached and faces twitched. “Now, if you’ll only do that when you go out among the lads you’ll be a grand success,” Connolly had told Sweeny when they’d finished. “You can talk, but unless you smile, even when you’re condemning your bitterest enemy, it will not have all the effect it should.” Sweeny tried, but soon reverted to his natural gloomy form.
   

5. The Evening Post, a Charter opponent, would blast Greeley for his weak performance: “his sympathies were with Tweed rather than the citizens whose spokesman he was,” he was “wavering and uncertain… simply a fraud, a dishonorable disservice of a clearly implied duty, a gross breach of trust.” The New York Herald would report that Greeley, addressing Republicans the night after his testimony, confused them with “the shambling manner in which he argued now for and now against the bill.” The Tribune replied: “Happily, there are a good many persons… who know these aspersions to be groundless, malignant, and ridiculous.”
   

6. One historian, professor Leo Hershkowitz, points to this vote as evidence that Tweed’s bribery of the legislature for the charter was only a myth. “Historians have universally held in their fairy tales that passage was the result of bribery. Yet at the time there was no such suspicion…. Even though later a desperate confused Tweed ‘admitted’ to his own use of bribery, the buying of votes was really not necessary…. It was not bribery that carried the charter but political maneuvering and expediency. With a vote of 116 to 5 and 30 to 2, was bribery necessary?”
   

7. “Tweed Plaza” is today called “Strauss Square” at the southern tip of Seward Park on the lower East Side, renamed in 1931 for businessman-philanthropist Nathan Strauss, a one-time owner of retailers Macy’s and Abraham and Strauss who also created a system for pasteurizing milk for delivery in New York City.
   

8. Total 1870 taxes (city, county, and school) pre capita in New York were $29.08, compared with $36 in Boston and $30 in Chicago; for that same year, a calculated theoretical ratio of New York taxes to real estate values was 1 to 65, compared with 1 to 40 for Boston, 1 to 54 for Philadelphia, and 1 to 30 for Cincinnati.
   

Chapter 6

1. None less than Brooks Brothers Clothiers supplied 12,000 sets of uniforms early in the war using “shoddy”—ground up rags—that fell apart after a few days. George Opdyke, the Republican wartime mayor, supplied 4,884 blankets to the army and, even while in office, sold over 1,000 carbines for $25 apiece, an estimated $10 above cost. Federal investigations abounded.7
   

2. In a famous incident at the height of the 1868 war with Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railway, Fisk and Jay Gould had used a basement printing press to produce $10 million of secretly-authorized stock and sprang it on the market without warning to drown Vanderbilt’s raid—producing rounds of angry legal counterattacks.
   

3. One exception was the Sixth Ward, the Five Points neighborhood, where only 153 registered voters cast ballots at 5 Mott Street, but Democratic inspectors announced 275 votes for Hoffman versus 5 for his opponent, despite Republican poll watchers who swore seeing at least 30 of their voters cast ballots.
   

4. Twenty years later sitting on a veranda in Saratoga talking with a reporter, O’Brien would dramatize his demand on Connolly to hire Copeland: “Connolly was in a terrible flutter. Perspiration rolled down his face in streams. He didn’t want to give the place and he didn’t want to antagonize me.” But since Copeland joined Connolly’s office in January 1870 before the revolt had grown bitter, the story is probably malarky.