BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (39 page)

With this new evidence in hand, Tilden now played his final card. On October 17, just two weeks before Election Day, he sent a delegation from the Committee of Seventy riding north by train to Albany to meet Governor John Hoffman. Hoffman, by now utterly mortified at his Tammany friends, had spent most of September touring upstate county fairs trying to avoid the scandal. Shown Tilden’s concrete evidence, he gave them what they wanted. A few days later, State Attorney General Marshall B. Champlain took the train down to New York City and visited Tilden at his Gramercy Park home. He showed Tilden a letter he had written and planned to sign the next day appointing a special agent to bring legal action against the Tweed Ring in his name. His choice for the job: 67-year-old Charles O’Conor, the wily old trial lawyer who’d recently boosted his fame by representing former confederate president Jefferson Davis in beating his post-Civil War indictment for treason. O’Conor was also one of Sam Tilden’s closest legal friends.

Tilden had to be thrilled. The governor and attorney general had placed the prosecutorial apparatus of New York State virtually at his disposal. What’s more, representing the attorney general, they could bypass New York City’s Tammany judges and bring cases anywhere in the state—Albany, Buffalo, or wherever they could find a friendly judge.

O’Conor quickly assembled a team of prosecutors and made Tilden an unofficial member. “They will act with promptness and vigor,” Tilden promised reporters when asked about the announcement.
⁷⁰
A few days later, Tilden hosted them all for a meeting at his Gramercy Park home to plot strategy, making his parlor the visible center of the movement. Word began to circulate. Soon, very soon, they’d be coming after Tweed.

CHAPTER 16

PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE

G
EORGE Jones had never seen anything quite like it: a subpoena, delivered by a sheriff’s deputy to his corner office on the top floor of the
New-York Times
building. It demanded he appear before a Grand Jury investigating charges of corruption against Mayor A. Oakey Hall. Jones didn’t quite know what to make of it. On one hand, he appreciated that the law finally was closing its grip on a character his newspaper had labeled a “thief” and “swindler,” but what could George Jones have to tell a Grand Jury? Anything he knew about the affair, he’d either already published in his newspaper or else was none of their business.

Who was the target here, he wondered: the mayor or the
New-York Times
?

One by one, reformers had started dragging Tweed Ring suspects into court through lawsuits filed by the Committee of Seventy. They’d started with the contractors—James Ingersoll, John Keyser, and Andrew Garvey. One reporter had followed Keyser to his house on Second Avenue and found him crest-fallen: “I have nothing to say except that I am sick, worried out, broken-hearted and hunted down.”
¹

Elegant Oakey was the first city official on the reformers’ target list. A few days earlier, Hall had been forced to appear at the Fourth District Police Court on East 57th Street to be arraigned on charges of neglect of duty, a misdemeanor crime. He’d arrived on horseback wearing kid gloves and a tartan cravat and holding a light cane in his hand. “I am here, Sir, to disappoint the malice of my partisan enemies [and] to relieve your Honor and the District Attorney of any responsibility in this matter,” he’d announced to the judge, shrugging off any embarrassment, then waived his legal right to examine witnesses. The judge had released him on his own recognizance.
²

Hall’s arraignment had been only the first step, though. Now a Grand Jury had been called to decide whether to bring formal charges.

George Jones, after getting his summons, walked the half-dozen blocks from the
New-York Times
building on Park Row past City Hall to the Courthouse on Chambers Street, the same building his newspaper had ridiculed all summer as neck-deep in graft. His newspaper also had lambasted the Grand Jury itself as a rigged joke. “There is a new Grand Jury, and it has been packed, depend on it,” it quoted Judge Barrett, a reform lawyer, as complaining.
³
The
Times
had even charged Judge Barnard himself with picking the jury’s members and selecting as foreman General William Hall, the defendant mayor’s uncle, a story that turned out to be untrue.
⁴

Waiting in the lobby of the ornate Courthouse, with its octagonal rotunda, its vaulting skylight, its marble floors, frescoed ceilings, and Corinthian columns, George Jones had plenty of company. He found himself rubbing elbows with all the leading players in the scandal, each having received a similar subpoena: Andrew Green, Samuel Tilden, William Havemeyer, Jimmy O’Brien, among others. Each waited his turn to sit alone before the jury and be asked the same question: Do you have any
personal
knowledge that the mayor had committed a crime by knowingly signing fraudulent warrants. Logically, the question made no sense. Other than seeing his signature on the papers themselves—which the jury could do any time it wanted—the only way anyone could have “personal knowledge” was literally to have been in the room with Hall when he signed them, seen him do it, and heard him explain why. The case against Hall rested on documents. Not surprisingly, not a single witness would be able to say “yes.” Each would awkwardly have to deny having any “personal” evidence against the mayor.
⁵

George Jones had every reason to expect a tough grilling. His
New-York Times
had been the loudest voice blasting Tammany. Newspaper editors had few protections while appearing in court in the 1870s; a spiteful prosecutor easily could throw him in jail for contempt if he refused to talk. Jones knew his only real power lay in the ability of his newspaper to punch back in its columns and in the bank accounts of his friends to pay bail. That October, Jones had seen harassment against his newspaper worsen. One anonymous Tammany tough, speaking through the
Star
, a Tammany mouthpiece,
^F
OOTNOTE
had virtually instructed the mobs of angry unpaid workers hanging around City Hall each day to go and burn down Jones’ and
Times
editor Louis Jennings’ houses. It had printed their home addresses, blamed them for the workers’ lost salaries, and stoked them up with angry untruths: “Jennings was paid $50,000 for his work by the Radical Club and has invested it in a house in Forty-Second Street,” it told its impoverished readers.
⁶

Jones and Jennings each posted extra police around their homes, though no incidents had occurred. Now, facing what looked like a Tammany grand jury run by a Tammany district attorney, Samuel Garvin, and possible jail if he refused to cooperate, George Jones treaded carefully as a guard led him into the private chamber and closed the door. He sat alone in the witness chair facing twenty-one hard-faced, impatient men—the Grand Jurors and the District Attorney—with no lawyer, no notes, and no place to hide. “Mr. Jones, what is your business,” Garvin asked him promptly.
⁷

“I am a publisher,” Jones answered. “Of the
Daily Times
newspaper.”

The jurors had scheduled over twelve witnesses that day and had little time to waste, so Garvin jumped quickly to the central issue: “Confining yourself to the complaint, will you have the goodness to state to the Grand Jury whether you have any personal knowledge as to any appropriation of the public money or misconduct of Mr. Hall in connection therewith that would throw any light on this subject to the Grand Jury.”

George Jones measured his words. “I have the information that all people have who have read the statements and have opinions as to the credibility of those statements; I have no personal knowledge.”

“You have no knowledge of any facts personally connected with this investigation?” Garvin repeated.

“None whatever.”

For anyone else, this simple denial would have sufficed. But Jones and his newspaper had played a special role in the Tammany scandal; the
New-York Times
had been Mayor Hall’s chief accuser for over a year, starting months before its publication of hard evidence with the Secret Accounts. Certainly, its publisher had to know
something
about the mayor he could share. After all, calling a man a criminal with no basis was a crime in New York State, libel, and itself could put a newspaper editor in jail.

One juror interrupted the District Attorney to demand from Jones an explanation: “I have read the editorials, probably two or three months in your paper, on this question; the paper has not ceased almost daily to brand Mr. Hall as a thief. Can you give us of your own knowledge any information that will help us to come to a conclusion that he has proved himself to be a thief?”

Again, those words “of your own knowledge” set George Jones’ on edge. “There is a difference between me as an individual and the newspaper,” he explained, “the newspaper is an impersonality; I am an individual. I do not propose to answer any questions in relation to the paper. I am here as an individual.”

In his twenty years at the
New-York Times
, Jones had never faced this dilemma, nor had any newspaper publisher in America in recent memory. Jones, for years the newspaper’s quiet financier working in the shadow of his flamboyant partner Henry Raymond, was as poorly equipped as anyone on Park Row to navigate this minefield. For the next half hour in the closed-door session, Garvin and the grand jurors peppered him, asking over and again the same basic question using different words and angles, trying to coax a different answer, growing impatient each time Jones repeated the same dry formula. Tell us names of your informants, Garvin asked. Tell us names of the newsmen who wrote each article and each editorial so we can question them. Maybe they’d have “personal knowledge” to share.

Here, too, Jones dug in his heels. Newspapers by the 1870s had already well established the practice of basing stories on anonymous sources. Beyond protecting the source, publishers also hid the names of reporters. “By-lines” on news stories would not become common in the
New-York Times
for another forty years, well into the twentieth century. “I cannot give you the names of any one that furnishes information to a newspaper,” he insisted, and “I do not propose to go into the interior working of the
New-York Times
.”

Jones could only guess how badly he was irritating the jurors with his denials and evasions. After several rounds, he grew tired of the semantics and laid down his marker: “it is known to the whole of this public that moneys have been drawn from the city treasury by the signature of Mayor Hall, for which no evidence has been returned. There is a flood of evidence which is open to you and every gentleman here to see ….. I mean to say if you do not act upon what you have got, you will not act at all.”
⁸

He didn’t convince anyone. The jurors finally let him go, perhaps just as happy to find no evidence against the mayor and be able to point to Jones, the mayor’s chief accuser, as their excuse. In the end, they threw up their hands. By a “nearly unanimous” vote, they would conclude that “A. Oakey Hall has been careless and negligent in the discharge of his duties, in affixing his signature to warrants without giving the vouchers that consideration which the public interest demanded.” But as to any criminal charge, they found the evidence simply too weak since no witness had come forward to testify to the mayor’s criminal intent.
⁹

The controversy didn’t end here. A transcript of George Jones’ supposedly-secret testimony that day somehow leaked from the district attorney’s office. Horace Greeley, Jones’ boyhood friend, got his hands on a copy and saw it as a chance to embarrass his Park Row newspaper rival. He printed the full text in his own
New York Tribune
under the headline: “Whitewashing Hall.”
¹⁰
In an editorial, Greeley, who still considered the mayor a dupe and not a criminal, viciously mocked Jones for his ignorance of any “personal knowledge” of the mayor’s guilt, saying it revealed just how “destitute of any moral purpose of principle” the
Times
had been in its sensational summer exposes. At the same time, he denied any need to protect the newspaper or its staff or sources in the affair. “They should have subpoenaed every reporter employed in collecting information,” he argued; “their spies from the Controller’s office should have been compelled to tell the little they knew.”
¹¹

It was a strange debate between two personalities later considered pillars of American journalism, one eager to undercut the other to exploit a single-day scoop. Thomas Nast, watching the affair from his perch at
Harper’s Weekly
, would draw a cartoon of Greeley applying pails of “whitewash” to the mayor.
¹²

For the mayor too, this hardly ended the issue. There’d be other Grand Juries that would not be so timid at finding reasons to drag him into court.