BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (24 page)

During these same months, O’Brien claims he flirted with newspaper editors about selling his story and printing his evidence, but could never close a deal. “I didn’t want to be mangled or distorted,” he explained, and found most editors to be pawns of the hydra-headed Tammany machine: “[I]mmediately after I had dealings with them the members of the ring would come around me or send for me and make all sorts of offers,” he recalled, the editors having leaked his advances back to Tweed and Sweeny. “I couldn’t get the papers to touch the documents. I had them seven months before they were published.” O’Brien claims that he went to see George Jones at the
New-York Times
during this period. “At all events, I think you will find him honest in his dealings with you,” Hugh Hastings, editor of New York’s
Commercial Advertiser
newspaper, had told him. But that meeting too apparently amounted to noting. “I didn’t let him have the papers for over two months,” O’Brien would say later.
²³
But Jones at least had kept his secret.

Jimmy O’Brien seemed frozen in indecision. He knew that once he let go of the Copeland ledgers, he’d have no control over whatever damage they’d cause his former friends or himself. Perhaps a lingering spark of friendship still made him reluctant to burn a final bridge back to Tweed and Tammany. Besides, George Jones’
New-York Times
was a Republican newspaper and O’Brien still considered himself a loyal Democrat.

George Jones, meanwhile, finally got lucky. Early in July 1871, a few weeks after the showy Tweed wedding, he looked up from his desk to see a stranger come to see him in his top-floor corner office of the
New-York Times
. O’Brien, it turned out, was not the only person in town with secret numbers from the county Comptroller’s Office.

Jones and his editor Louis Jennings had taken their fill of abuse from Tweed and his crowd by then. Jones’ stern pledge in March had scared away raids on the company stock but recently they’d heard a new threat: City lawyers were asking questions about the land the
Times’
had purchased in 1857 to construct its new building, the Old Brick Presbyterian Church property on Park Row. Rumor had it they hoped to find a flaw in the legal title, a basis to shut the paper down or evict it from its building.

Jennings, meanwhile, found himself increasingly the target of strong-arm tactics: tough-looking strangers following him on the street making vague threats. Late one night when he was working alone in the
Times
building, a hard-faced man had burst into his office and threatened to “cut [Jennings’] heart out.”
²⁴

To every anti-Tammany attack they launched in the
Times
, a Tammany mouthpiece would respond with flowers and bells: “There is not another municipal government in the world which combined so much character, capacity, experience and energy as are to be found in the city government of New York, under the new charter,” Manton Marble’s
New York World
crowed in mid-June, for instance. “The ten most capable men in the National Administration at Washington would be no match in ability and sagacity for the best ten in the New York City government, although General Grant has the whole country to select from.”
²⁵

By early July, George Jones had been waging his campaign for almost ten months. His mysterious visitor couldn’t have come at a better time. He introduced himself as Matthew O’Rourke, a bookkeeper who’d worked for Richard Connolly in the Comptroller’s Office starting shortly after James Watson’s death in January. He’d seen things that he claimed shocked him. A former military reporter, O’Rourke had noticed large claims under the heading “Armories and Drill Rooms”—half a million dollars for non-existent repairs, exorbitant rents for rooms that were nothing but stable lofts or saloons, and shabby bookkeeping, large sums being directed to a single contractor, furniture-maker James Ingersoll, despite the fact the other companies had filed the claims.

Jones quickly sent for Jennings, who joined them. Did O’Rourke have evidence to support his story? Certainly. Before resigning the job on May 19, he’d made a point to copy several suspicious entries from the city’s ledger books, about two-dozen altogether.
²⁶
He’d tried to tell his story to other newspapers, but none would listen. Finally, he’d visited professor Dexter Hawkins, whom the
Times
had hired to conduct an analysis of the city’s published financial reports a few days earlier, and Hawkins suggested he see George Jones.
²⁷

Jones had been waiting for months for a moment like this. It had taken that long for the first concrete, usable piece of evidence to emerge, a disgruntled city employee willing to speak out and armed with first-hand details. Certainly he was interested in O’Rourke’s story. He asked O’Rourke to help Jennings and Foord write up the material.

On July 8, 1871, the
New-York Times
launched a new phase in its campaign against Tweed and Tammany. Under the headline “More Ring Villainy: Gigantic Frauds in the Rental of Armories,” it presented O’Rourke’s story. It cited “Reliable and incontrovertible evidence [from] a good and trustworthy source” backed by figures “transcribed literally from books in the Controller’s office. If Controller Connolly can prove them to be inaccurate he is heartily welcome to do so.”
²⁸

The numbers, printed in tables, painted an eye-catching picture: $85,500 spent in rent for national guard drill rooms so unfit for use—small, filthy, or dilapidated—that they were never occupied. Each was listed with its street address so readers could see the buildings for themselves. Then it listed a dozen obvious overcharges, such as the city’s renting the top floor of Tammany Hall for $36,000 per year when comparable space could be had for a tenth the price. Jennings’ prose made other examples laughable, such as one stable loft rented for $24,000 per year for soldiers’ drilling where “the ammonia generated in the stables is most injurious to arms, equipment and clothing, and the effluvia arising therefrom are often so offensive as to render the upper part of the buildings unfit for human occupancy.”

“Who is responsible for these frauds?” the
Times
demanded. It listed its full cast of villains: Mayor Hall and Controller Connolly “who pass upon these claims and sign checks for their payment—knowing them to be fraudulent,” Tweed and Sweeny who “pocket their share of the proceeds,” and even the clerks like Stephen C. Lynes “whose agency in these matters is as palpable as it is shameful.”

The story delivered a solid punch, but not more. Jennings could exploit it by repeating the details in subsequent days, but O’Rourke’s leak had provided fuel for just a single day. Connolly and Tweed easily could minimize it. Even if O’Rourke’s embarrassing numbers were true, they reflected a mere pittance, a tiny fraction of the city’s total business, exceptions that proved the rule. Besides, as all New York society knew, John Jacob Astor’s blue-ribbon committee had already decided the issue: Tweed and Connolly were social pillars who ran an honest, thriving city.

• PART III •

REVOLT

CHAPTER 10

JULY

“ [W]e find [the wealthy uptown landowners]are supported by the newspapers. But we know the virtue of a $50 bill when it is wisely employed, and the echo that it will produce…. But no matter, all the clamor of the newspapers is produced by the almighty dollar. However, the noise is of little importance; there is not one of them scarcely worth reading, and the most of them are never read at all.”

—Tweed as a young alderman, complaining about biased newspaper coverage in a contest over a traffic right-of-way. December 29, 1852.
¹

S
UMMER soon turned bloody that year in New York City. Hundreds of quarrymen—gangs of unskilled workers who dug ditches, smashed boulders and piled gravel for new streets being laid near the East River around Yorkville (today’s upper East Side) left their jobs in May and went on strike. They demanded better pay, $2.25 per day, and threatened to beat the tar out of any worker who refused to join them. The strikers marched
en masse
down First Avenue carrying clubs, iron pipes and axes, drawing a crowd of two thousand people to the streets. Club-wielding police rushed to the scene to avert a riot. The first day stayed peaceful; on the next, strikers chose to fight. They battled police around Central Park and beat senseless one gang-member on 76th Street who refused to quit work. The third day, a few striking “shovelmen” returned to their old jobs, but the “rockmen” refused and kept up the daily agitation. For two weeks they paraded and bullied other workers as the pay issue festered. A handful of construction sites began paying the higher wage, but most stood firm.

After that, the strike collapsed in confusion, violence threatening to return any time.
²

All that Spring, New York had been riveted to terrifying news from Europe: France, recently defeated by Prussian armies under Otto Von Bismarck, had sunk into anarchy. Frenchmen had elected a new government to make peace, but dissidents in Paris rebelled. They declared their own republic under the worker-led Paris Commune that attracted support from Karl Marx and socialists worldwide. Already starved after months of Prussian siege, the

Paris Communards defied French national troops sent to crush them. In a bloody three-month siege, they burned buildings and murdered the Archbishop of Paris whom they’d held hostage. When French soldiers re-took the city, they arrested 38,000 alleged radicals and killed an estimated 20,000 in an effort to destroy the Commune movement; they still held about 7,500 for deportation—ultimately to France’s penal colony on New Caledonia in the Pacific.

Images of Paris street violence plastered across the pages of New York’s illustrated journals like
Harper’s Weekly
and
Leslie’s Illustrated
evoked chilling memories of the city’s own draft riots eight years earlier. New York’s elite had little trouble seeing Paris’ bloody Communards in their own Irish laboring class that had already risen once in revolt.

Now, that summer, it threatened to rise again. Early in July, New York’s Loyal Order of Orange—representing immigrant Irish Protestants from Ulster in the country’s North—announced plans for their annual parade on Orange Day, July 12, a landmark anniversary in religious conflict. It marked the 1690 Battle of the Boyne where Protestant King William defeated English Catholic King James II midway between Dublin and Belfast, setting the stage for centuries of Irish internal strife. Each year, New York’s Orangemen celebrated the 1690 Protestant victory by marching down Eighth Avenue carrying Ulster and Orange flags, singing “Boyne Water,” then enjoying family picnics in the city parks. Irish Catholics, who vastly outnumbered Orangemen in New York City, took it as a religious insult and had attacked Orange parades repeatedly since the 1820s. Violence the year before, in 1870, had been the worst ever, with five people killed and hundreds wounded in fights and rock-throwing, but the city had refused to prosecute rioters.

Now, in 1871, Catholics and Protestants planned to fight their battle again, this time on a bigger scale. The Orangemen demanded safety and appealed to City Hall to protect their parade; Irish Catholics vowed to stop them dead in their tracks and expected city police to stand aside.

When the Orangemen’s request for a parade permit reached City Hall in early July, the mayor, Oakey Hall, wanted no part of it. He huddled with Tweed and Connolly and all three agreed: Religion aside—Hall and Tweed being Protestants and Connolly an Irish-born Catholic—each recognized the danger of wide bloodshed as well as the political bonus of siding with their own Tammany Catholic constituents. At the mayor’s direction, police superintendent James Kelso issued General Order Number 57 to ban the parade. Blaming “foreign feuds” for inciting the conflict in the first place, it instructed police “to prevent the formation or progression of the public street procession of the 12th instant [Orange Day, and to] keep all the streets cleared from groups and assemblages.”
³
There would be no Orange march that year.

Barely had the ink dried, though, when protests erupted: Protestants denounced Kelso’s order as a cowardly surrender to a Catholic mob and suppression of free speech. Orangemen had as much right to march in America as anyone else, they argued. Merchants at Wall Street’s Produce Exchange posted a pro-parade petition and backers waited in line for two hours to sign it. Religious loyalties split the city: Two leading Catholics, Archbishop John McClosky and activist Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, applauded Kelso’s order while Protestant Wall Street merchants and Republican newspapers denounced it.
⁴

Refusing to be denied their rights, Protestant leaders decided to take their case to Albany, the state capitol, and Governor John Hoffman, who recently had returned from his summer holiday in Newport, Rhode Island. Hearing their pleas, Hoffman saw a bigger stake in the contest than mere religion or free speech: hanging in the balance could be his own ambition to become president of the United States. He decided to intervene.

Ever since Tammany had put Hoffman in the governor’s mansion in 1868, he’d been preparing to run against President Ulysses Grant in 1872, the centerpiece of Tweed’s own ambition for national status. Hoffman, a handsome German with handlebar mustache and thick dark hair, had won six straight election victories—including two as governor and two as mayor—and remained popular with a wide range of Democrats. Things looked promising: Tammany had plenty of money to spend on winning him the party’s nomination, and Hoffman had begun counting Washington leaders using as conduits New York Congressmen S.S. Cox and Fernando Wood.
⁵
He saw only one shadow on his prospects—his own sponsor, Tammany Hall, and its reputation for corruption. He saw comments like the one from the
Cincinnati Commercial
: “the [Tammany] ‘Ring’ … will be a principal agency in destroying his chances,” its name “ruinous in a national campaign.”
⁶
The
London Times’
Philadelphia correspondent likewise reported: “[Hoffman’s] subserviency to the ‘Erie Ring’ [Tweed, Fisk and Gould] of New York [is a] blur upon his fame that may yet cost him the Presidency.”
⁷

Hoffman already had irritated Tweed that year by flouting his independence. A reporter told of seeing Tweed barge into the governor’s Albany office, angry over Hoffman’s plan to veto one of Tweed’s bills in the state legislature, causing the governor to shoot back: “Senator Tweed, I propose to be governor of the State of New York one term, and to accept no dictation during it.”
⁸

Now Hoffman saw another chance to be his own man. On Tuesday afternoon, July 11, less than twenty-four hours before the planned march, he ordered a special train to rush him to Manhattan. Reaching the city at 9 pm, he spoke quickly with Tweed, Connolly, and Mayor Hall; then he met with police officials. Shortly after midnight, he announced his decision: The mayor had been wrong. Free speech must prevail. The Orangemen must be allowed their parade. “I hereby give notice that any and all bodies of men desiring to assemble and march in peaceable procession in this city tomorrow, the 12th inst., will be permitted to do so,” the governor proclaimed. “A military and police escort will be furnished to any body of men desiring it….”
⁹
He, the governor, personally would spend Orange Day at police headquarters making sure things went smoothly.

Oakey Hall, embarrassed at being overruled, made no effort to hide his quarrel with the governor. “I may … conform my action to that of my superior in office,” he grumbled to a newsman the next morning, “[but] I still preserve my belief that the original order was proper.”
¹⁰

Orange Day came, Wednesday, July 12. At midday, thousands of Catholic Irish workmen left their jobs on the city’s docks, streets, and construction sites—ditch diggers, pipe layers, longshoremen, veterans of the May quarry strikes, reinforced by hundreds of jobless thugs, women, and street children. They flocked downtown under a hot sun and congregated along the parade route on Eighth Avenue. Skirmishes erupted long before the actual march: a group of Irishmen attacked the city armory on Avenue A to loot for guns; police raided the Hibernian Hall on Houston Street where rifles were being handed out, and fifty policemen took positions around the Harper building at Franklin Square.

At 2 pm, the parade itself began, fewer than two hundred Orangemen surrounded by five hundred blue-uniformed policemen reinforced by five National Guard regiments: federal troops under General Pleasanton and state militia under General Shaler. Armed soldiers on horseback led the procession down Eighth Avenue; mobs of Catholics, mostly women and children, screamed at them from sidewalks and windows, heaping trash and abuse on soldiers and marchers alike. Anger on both sides was aggravated by the glaring heat that worsened during the day. When the parade reached 26th Street, the mounted soldiers at the lead found a dense mob blocking their way. They plowed forward, pushing people back as stones and bricks showered them from nearby rooftops. At 25th Street, the crowd forced them to a complete stop. The horse-borne soldiers charged the crowd again, and again were greeted by rocks, garbage, and insults.

Then a gunshot rang out, fired by a hidden sniper or a nervous soldier, it wasn’t clear which. More shots followed. Without orders, a regiment of militiamen raised rifles and shot into the crowd; other militia units fired a second volley, then a third. Clouds of acrid smoke filled the air, blinding soldiers and rioters alike. In the melee, a young girl in an orange dress died instantly from a bullet shattering her brain. Several militiamen fell from bullet wounds; rioters grabbed the body of one soldier to stamp and kick. The shooting lasted only a few minutes. “The sight which was disclosed when the smoke cleared away was heart-rending and terrible in the extreme,” police inspector George Walling recalled. “Dozens of bodies—men, women, and children even—lay upon the ground; the shrieks and groans of the wounded rang out above the noise of the vast mob, now madly trampling upon the weaker of the fugitives in the wild rush to reach a place of safety.”
^F
OOTNOTE
11

After the encounter, the parade continued from 25th Street downtown to Cooper Union, a band playing the Star Spangled Banner as soldiers and Orangemen walked sullenly along the way. Back on Eighth Avenue, at least 38 people lay dead, including three national guardsmen, with some counts putting the fatalities at almost 130—a toll rivaling the 105 killed in the July 1863 draft riots.
¹²
Dozens of police, militiamen, and rioters lay injured or dying in the street.

Conservative New Yorkers celebrated the harsh military response as a great victory. Law had triumphed over chaos, free speech over rabble. “Excelsior,” headlined the
New York Herald
.
¹³
The rioters had been scattered: “They did not even fight with the courage of religious bigots,” one newspaper bragged, but “hid behind chimneys, prowled in ambush in cellars and doorways, [and] skulked behind innocent men, women, and children who had gathered along the sidewalks to look at the procession.”
¹⁴
Irish Catholics especially seethed with anger, feeling betrayed, stamped on by bigoted Protestant-leaning soldiers, their national pride crushed in blood.

But both sides, Protestants and Catholics alike, agreed on the chief villains: Tammany Hall. They blamed the mayor, the governor, and Tweed for their “criminal weakness and vacillation,” as the
Tribune
put it, for causing the debacle.
¹⁵
Why hadn’t Tammany pressured its Irish patrons to avoid trouble, Protestants asked. Oakey Hall, the mayor, became the principal target: he’d seen the storm coming and “instead of reefing down close and endeavoring to weather the gale like a man, he delayed action until the wind split his sails,” one observer wrote.
¹⁶
A newspaper suggested writing an epitaph on the graves of Wednesday’s dead: “Murdered by the Criminal Management of A. Oakey Hall.”
¹⁷