BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (56 page)

Hall may have badgered the old judge into making the remark. He lived a few more months, until October 1898, and converted to Catholicism shortly before his death. The immense scrapbooks of newspaper clippings he’d saved about himself during his glamour days as district attorney and as Tweed’s mayor of New York City in the 1860s and 1870s today fill many volumes of archives in the New York Public Library, a window on a happier time of his life.
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Dominating its pages, though, is the scandal he claimed to have nothing to do with.

Peter B. Sweeny would return to New York in 1886 after twelve years’ exile in Paris and rent an office on East 41st Street trying to worm his way back into city society, but it never took. A reporter visiting him for an interview in 1889 found Sweeny dressed in carpet slippers and a gray suit and described him as a fit-looking 65-year-old man: “solidly built, [his] head liberally covered with thick hair, showing a sprinkling of the gray dust of time, a bright, clear eye, a sallow complexion, bronzed to a healthy ruddiness by the sun, a short, heavy mustache, and an expressive mouth capable of forming itself into a peculiarly pleasant smile or into one of cynical bitterness.”
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Asked about the famous scandal—as he constantly was—Sweeny had a quick response. He had nothing to do with it; “after seven years of the closest investigation I was publicly exonerated in open court of any imputation in connection with the ‘ring frauds,’” he’d say, pointing to his 1877 settlement with prosecutors.
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In finding a “respectable” skirt to hide behind, Sweeny managed to one-up even Oakey Hall. When George Jones, the
New-York Times
publisher who’d led the paper’s anti-Tammany campaign in the 1870s, died in New York in August 1891, Sweeny sent a letter to the
New York World
the next day claiming that Jones had given him full absolution just before passing away. Sweeny, according to his own story, had visited Jones at his home on West 37th Street and they’d had a long talk about old times in which Jones had commiserated with Sweeny’s supposed suffering and scribbled out a private note to his managing editor saying: “There is nothing against Mr. Sweeny. I wish you would treat him most generously.”
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The story is probably nonsense. George Jones by all accounts never wavered from his conviction in the Ring’s guilt. No note from him ever surfaced, nor had he apparently mentioned the incident to anyone before his death, nor had Sweeny either. Almost nothing about the story rings true except for one thing: Sweeny’s unquenched thirst for a clean name. He’d live another twenty years in the New York area, until 1911. His son Arthur, raised in Paris, would become a respected assistant city corporation counsel. But Sweeny himself would never escape the cloud; he’d be identified even at death as “One of the ‘Big Four’ of the Tweed Ring,” the “Brains” of the operation.
²⁶

Slippery Dick Connolly fared worst of all. Already 61 years old when he fled New York after the disclosures, Connolly got little credit for his role in helping the reformers by turning over the Comptroller’s Office at the height of the 1871 crisis. Craving obscurity, he traveled first to Egypt but even here he couldn’t find peace; Nast’s cartoons had made his face instantly recognizable. An American visitor who spotted him sitting on the piazza at a hotel popular with tourists described him in pathetic terms, “shunned by everybody, with trembling hands and vacant eyes.”
²⁷
Connolly had brought most of his fortune with him into exile, but he reportedly lost the lion’s share speculating in Egyptian bonds. After that, he moved north and spent what money he had left settling into two homes, one in Switzerland and the other in Marseilles along the French Mediterranean. He wasn’t able to enjoy life there either; he soon began suffering from Bright’s disease, a form of kidney failure requiring painful treatments but never healing.

In December 1877, Connolly instructed his lawyers to confess judgment in New York City in the same $6.3 million lawsuit the state had brought against Tweed. He accepted liability for $8 million that included six years worth of interest, an amount he knew he’d never pay. “He was a very old man, worn out by an incurable disease, which was only relieved by frequent surgical operations,” his lawyer told the court at the time.
²⁸
He’d die in Marseilles about two years later.

On the other hand, those who claimed a hand in toppling Tweed’s regime were treated as heroes and amply rewarded. Voters sent Jimmy O’Brien to a term in the United States Congress, though they refused to elect him mayor of New York City. Judge Noah Davis won promotion to chief judge of New York’s state supreme court. Prosecutor Wheeler Peckham went on to enjoy a thirty-year career in private legal practice and editor Louis Jennings of the
New-York Times
returned to England to be elected a Tory Member of Parliament. Andrew H. Green, after stabilizing the city’s finances as comptroller, became New York City’s premier urban visionary, with a hand in creating the New York Public Library (as an executor of Samuel Tilden’s estate), Riverside, Morningside, and Fort Washington Parks, and the Bronx Zoo, and driving the 1898 consolidation that added Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island into modern New York City. At 83 years old, he was shot to death by a jealous lover mistaking him for the elderly man who’d stolen his girlfriend.
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Even Charles Fairchild, the state attorney general who rejected Tweed’s “surrender” and “confession” and lost his job as a result, rose to prominence again in 1885 when President Grover Cleveland asked him to join his administration in Washington, D.C., ultimately as Secretary of the Treasury.

Of all the reformers, though, three names shared top honors in bringing down the Tweed Ring: Samuel Tilden, Thomas Nast, and the
New-York Times
. None of them held positions in government at the time; Tilden was still a private lawyer, through a state party official. The other two had no official power at all. Nast simply scribbled cartoons and the
New-York Times
was just a newspaper. Each would enjoy lavish accolades for a time.

Tilden built a national political career on his fame from the case, bolstered by his defeating the upstate Canal Ring as governor, making him the preeminent crime-fighter of his era. He rode the momentum all the way to the gates of the White House in 1876. Supporters would raise his name for Democratic presidential nominations again in 1880 and 1884 but Tilden had no taste left for it and would send word disowning the efforts.
^F
OOTNOTE
Realistically, his chances for the presidency had suffered a blow in October 1878 at the hands of another newspaper digging ambitiously for a hot story, this time the
New York Tribune
. The
Tribune
that fall managed to unearth and decode secret “cipher” telegrams sent by Tilden’s agents at the height of the 1876 electoral dispute, apparently offering bribes to vote-counters in the contested states: $50,000 for Florida, $80,000 for South Carolina, and $5,000 for the single vote from Oregon.
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Tilden denied knowing anything about it and was cleared of any personal wrongdoing, but the scandal damaged him. No longer could he pose as the pure, untarnished “reformer” above the normal grubby plane of politics, his principal calling card in 1876.

Instead, after losing the presidency in 1876, Tilden went on a long European vacation and then came home to focus on his law practice. In later years, his health failing, he turned to art and philanthropy. He renovated his Gramercy Park home into a showpiece with interior stained glass ceilings and dome, a Victorian sandstone front, and Italianate word-carved fireplaces and moldings. It survives today as home to the National Arts Club, designated as both a New York and a National Historic landmark. On his death in 1886, Tilden willed most of his $5 million fortune and enormous book collection to form what would become the New York Public Library, one of the world’s foremost research centers today. Fittingly, its famous building on New York’s Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street with its stone lions guarding the front gate stands just across the street from where Tweed’s own Fifth Avenue mansion had been a century before.

Critics have given Tilden mixed grades for his role in the Tweed affair. He came late to the crusade; he didn’t throw down his gauntlet until weeks after the
New-York Times
had made the case in July 1871 through its Secret Accounts expose. Up until then, he’d virtually cowered before Tweed’s person and bowed to his machine, giving credence to later charges of complicity with the Ring. But by two surgical strokes—the capture of the Comptroller’s Office and the tracing of the Broadway Bank accounts—he put a fatal dagger in the operation.

His later role as governor, overseeing the prosecutions, stretching the law to keep Tweed behind bars as other Tammany suspects went free, raised eyebrows even during his lifetime. By letting politics and personal malice appear to shade his judgment, he ironically accomplished what Tweed could never do himself. He turned the Boss into a martyr. There had never been a case before like Tweed’s and Tilden had no script to follow but his own instincts.

Nast and the
New-York Times
generally get top honors for bringing down the Boss. Working together, they demonstrated a power of media persuasion never before seen in America, galvanizing public outrage into a potent political force. It set a sobering precedent. Media-made hysteria itself was a mixed blessing: in the right hands it could be a power for reform, but prone to endless manipulation. In 1898, “yellow press” hoopla over the sinking of the U.S. battleship
Maine
in Havana Harbor would take the country to war before anyone knew who’d actually exploded the ship. Even Tweed’s case raised concerns: Nast and
New-York Times
publisher George Jones both had launched their assaults on the Boss long before concrete evidence against him emerged with the Secret Account disclosures. Both wrapped themselves in virtue, but the question remained: Had Tweed been innocent, could anyone have stopped their juggernaut, and would it have been any less effective?

The power of newspapers, magnified by new technologies of visual image and mass steam printing, placed heavy new responsibility on editors and publishers. Nast’s visual images did not depend on facts and numbers to support them, as seen in his ability to place incriminating words in Tweed’s mouth—whether he said them or not—and make them stick by repetition. The
New-York Times
too in chasing the story often mixed fact-finding and analysis with name-calling, slander, and moral grandstanding.

In Tweed’s case, the evidence did finally emerge to vindicate the attacks, and George Jones likely knew from the start it was there, even if he couldn’t print it. His and Nast’s courage in the face of official harassment became the stuff of legend, and it paid dividends: it boosted circulation by gist of a good story and it won the confidence of a generation of readers in a responsible free press. Nast and the
Times
had pioneered a new role for newspapers as independent public watchdogs, far different from the political party lapdogs or attack dogs most had been until that time. Muckraking reporters of the Progressive Era would perfect the model, which remains a standard for investigative journalists to the present day.

The
New-York Times
would barely survive a near-bankruptcy in the coming years to enjoy its new fame. George Jones, now in full control, would show his independent streak again in 1884 by bolting the Republican Party, his traditional patron, to support “reform” Democratic governor Grover Cleveland for the presidency that year. Republican readers and advertisers, furious at the defection, would desert him; circulation would shrink and profits would fall by two-thirds, from $188,000 in 1883 to $56,000 a year later. By 1890, after a brief rebound, costs of constructing a new building sent profits tumbling again.

George Jones’ death in 1891 left the newspaper marooned. After forty years as its financial chief, he alone understood its archaic bookkeeping. He left control in the hands of two heirs, his son Gilbert Jones and his son-in-law Henry Dyer, but neither took to the job. They raised the paper’s price from 2 to 3 cents and lost thousands of readers to the “yellow press” journalism of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. A group of
Times
editors tried to revive the paper’s glory days by purchasing control for $1,000,000 in 1893, but Jones’ heirs kept ownership of the
Times
’ Park Row building and its accounts receivable; imminent bankruptcy placed it under judicial receivership by the mid-1890s.

Rebirth for
New-York Times
came with the arrival of a next-generation founding giant, 38-year-old Adolph S. Ochs, a successful Tennessee publisher who took control with a $75,000 investment in 1896, brought the paper out of receivership, cut costs, gave it a new mission, and soon turned it profitable again. That October, he placed his new motto on the front page: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The modern
New-York Times
dates its lineage from this point. Today, a century later, a direct family descendant of Adolph Ochs, his great-grandson Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., sits as publisher and chairman of the New-York Times Company.