BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (59 page)

Chapter 8

1. Zenger, a German-born printer, was found not guilty by a New York jury in 1735 after being tried for sedition against New York’s royal governor William Cosby, the first major test of press freedom in the American colonies. The “Sedition Act,” adopted in July 1789, defined treasonable activity to include “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” and was used to prosecute editors including Benjamin Franklin Bache of the Philadelphia Democrat-Republican Aurora and grandson of Benjamin Franklin. After the law expired in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson pardoned all those convicted under it and Congress reimbursed all penalties paid.
   

2. Harper lasted one term as mayor, recognized for having started the first New York police organization—the “Day and Night Watch”—and raising controversy by banning sale of alcohol on July 4 and shutting saloons on Sunday. Harper had tried to hide its fingerprints on the Maria Monk book by publishing it through a subsidiary called Howe and Bates, named for two of its employees.
   

3. The New-York Times’ editorial for July 1, 1871 similarly read: “People cry out in outrage. The Ring too have heard it, and what do they do? Thrusting their hands into their pockets filled with money filched from the people they have defrauded and then have the gall and arrogance to ask, ‘Well! What are you going to do about it.’” Note that Tweed himself is not even identified as the speaker in this version.
   

Chapter 9

1. Hall family descendants long after the scandal pointed to this event to show that the mayor and his wife kept social distance from Tweed, that she in particular refused ‘to have Tweed or any of those Tammany politicians in the house.”20
   

Chapter 10

1. In the panic, James Fisk, who among other things had a money-bought rank of colonel in the Seventh Regiment, climbed down from his horse, ran to a saloon on Eighth Avenue, climbed a fence and hid in a hotel on 23rd Street, then changed into civilian clothes, rode a tugboat across the Hudson, and reached Long Branch for a stiff drink by the ocean beach.
   

2. It didn’t help that Hall was quoted blaming the Orangemen for the riot: “I still believe that the Orange procession to be a mischievously contrived one, intended to break the peace for the sake of ulterior effect in exciting the religious passions of the people…. What would police do with ten men who should march down Broadway with a banner on which was inscribed ‘Death to the Pope,’ ‘Down with the religious harlot,’ &c.”
   

3. Jennings told this story to the London World in 1887, though there are other versions of O’Brien’s dramatic leak to the Times. Wingate, writing in 1875, reported that O’Brien came to the Times building that night, but handed the package to Jones, not Jennings, and said: “These are all the figures: you can do with them just what you please,” then left with no further explanation. Harper’s Weekly, in an 1890 profile of Jones, described O’Brien as bringing his evidence to Jones; on learning later that the Times planned to publish it, “he took away the papers, but brought them back in a few weeks, and told Mr. Jones to go ahead” without asking for conditions or compensation. O’Brien himself gave several versions. In the earliest, he claimed Copeland had made the delivery, not him. Years later, in 1891, he’d expand his own role but mix up the chronology, claiming he gave the papers to Jones in Saratoga with Samuel Tilden present, a meeting which did not occur until mid-August that summer, weeks after the disclosures.
   

4. The Times explained the system as working like this: “A man does some work for the City authorities and charges $5,000 for it. When he presents his bill, one of Connolly’s agents says to him, ‘We can’t pay this, but make the amount $55,000 and you shall have your money at once.’ A warrant is drawn for $55,000, and endorsed by the presenter of the bill over to [the Ring’s agent]. He then received five $1,000 bills, and the Ring pockets the $50,000.” New-York Times, July 21, 1871. The proportions are exaggerated, but otherwise it is consistent with what Tweed himself would describe years later.
   

Chapter 11

1. Ingersoll later acknowledged that he’d separated himself from his earlier firm, Ingersoll, Watson, & Company, and gone into business for himself when his partners refused to pay kickbacks to city officials. There was no “Company”—Ingersoll had no factories; he simply purchased the goods he later sold to the city and kept the difference.
   

2. This story, first told by Wingate in 1875 and expanded on by Harper’s Weekly in 1890, is presumably Jones’ account. Like many pieces of Tweed lore, it has no known corroboration—not surprising for an attempted bribe with only two people in the room and one, Connolly, never telling his story publicly. Neither account cited sources, though one of Connolly’s lawyers, Samuel Courtney, did have an office in the building. Given the story’s obvious anti-Connolly slant, a grain of salt is needed: The core facts might be true, but embroidery along the way is apparent.
   

Chapter 12

1. This remark from Hall, testified to by Garvey in 1872 and later embroidered by Tilden into “Who is going to sue?” would become a staple of Tweed lore, a supposed sign of the Ring’s disdain for the coming storm.
   

2. Professor Hershkowitz rightly points out that, given the lack of corroboration, Nast’s talent for self-promotion, and his liberty in making up Tweed quotes, this story deserves extra skepticism. “A million? Nast could have been bought for the proverbial mess of pottage. He was not the most respected individual,” he wrote.35
   

3. This quote too took a life of its own. It morphed into “Let’s stop them d__d pictures… I don’t care so much what the papers write about me—my constituents can’t read; but d__d it, they can see pictures.” Or “But they have eyes and they can see as well as other folks.”42
   

4. One newspaper that played along was the Evening Post: “It is no secret that the most influential of the Democratic leaders desire that Mr. Peter B. Sweeny be the new Controller,” it reported. “They say that Sweeny personally commands more of the public confidence … than any other man whom Mayor Hall would be asked to appoint; that he is not implicated in any of the frauds of ‘the Ring;’ that his administration of the office would be independent, energetic, and thorough, his reports full and unreserved,” so on, so on.
   

Chapter 13

1. Old James Brown held the special distinction of having led the group of New York bankers who’d faced down Jay Gould and Jim Fisk on their abortive corner of the New York gold market; Brown personally had stood on the Gold Exchange floor and sold $5 million in gold to Fisk’s broker Albert Speyers at the market’s peak of $162, minutes before Washington intervened by announcing gold sales from the local sub-treasury, prompting the corner’s collapse on Black Friday, September 24, 1869.
   

2. This oft-quoted Tweed legend, a story Tweed himself told from jail twenty years after the fact, doesn’t quite match the facts. A contemporary account of Barnard’s 1857 nomination contest at Tammany shows no Doyle in the race and Barnard winning a clean plurality on the first ballot. Tweed probably confused the incident with one involving John Hoffman’s nomination for recorder in 1860. In that contest, Hoffman had trailed after the first ballot; then, during the second, a scuffle broke out. According to one account, “a handful of tickets were snatched away by some party, it being understood that Mr. Hoffman was then in the majority.” A few minutes later, Tweed gaveled Hoffman the winner by acclamation. Still, even if wrong on details, Tweed’s story probably had seeds of truth from Barnard’s early career.
   

3. As plaintiff in the case, the reformers had named John Foley, an ex-supervisor and fountain pen magnate. Foley had one of the few Irish names among the Committee of Seventy and, to press his case, he hired three high-priced Irish-named lawyers: Strahan, Barlow, and Barrett.
   

Chapter 15

1. For instance, Green demanded that city employees be at their desks during work hours, forbade them from accepting payoffs from contractors, and barred supervisors from collecting assessments from employee salaries to support politicians—items rudimentary by modern standards but radical at the time. Such civil service reforms would not reach even the federal government until the late 1870s as small pilot programs and not be adopted on a wide scale until the Pendleton Act of 1883 in response to the 1881 assassination of President James A. Garfield.
   

2. Haggerty and Balch both would fight the charges; they’d be held without bail for six months, until March 1872, then released on $5,000 bond and never tried. The voucher robbery remains an unsolved mystery. Hershkowitz, in his examination of city archives in the 1970s, found “order forms” based on the same vouchers and warrants that supposedly had been stolen and destroyed a century earlier. He concluded that the more likely suspects were either (a) the contractors, Keyser, Ingersoll, Garvey and the others, because loss of the original vouchers could have freed them from charges of forgery or bill-padding, or (b) the Committee of Seventy trying to cast suspicion on the Ring.
   

   Tweed himself later would claim fingerprints on the crime, but his story is highly suspect. In an addendum to his 1877 written confession prepared by lawyers and presented to Attorney General Fairchild while bargaining for his freedom, he’d say that Mayor Hall had come to him that weekend and told him that, if the vouchers were not examined, the prosecutions against the Ring could be blocked. Tweed said that, based on this advice, he approached W. Hennessey Cook, a Public Works official, who told him that the vouchers could be gotten and destroyed, just “leave the matter in his hands and he would attend to it.” The story is doubtful because (a) it is uncorroborated and Tweed never testified orally on it, (b) he would have known that copies were kept of the key records, (c) he had not been indicted or arrested yet, and still felt confident about his case, and (d) Tweed was hardly likely to trust Oakey Hall’s opinion on anything so important at this point.
   

   Still, as a crime of incompetence prompted by panic, no suspect can be dismissed solely on logic.
   

3. Tweed turned some of his hardest feeling that week against recently elected congressman Robert Roosevelt, uncle of the future president Theodore: “Why, who is Roosevelt? No one knew him till we brought him to the front and sent him to Congress: he was never at the front before—nobody knew him—we made him.”
   

4. In fact, many of the deposit tickets and account records Tilden took later disappeared and could not be provided for trial. Some turned up later in Tilden’s personal collection. See Box 24, Tilden papers, NYPL.
   

Chapter 16

1. The Star had received $251,000 in city advertising from January 1869 through May 1871, despite having a circulation of only 9,000, making it one of the most highly city-subsidized journals in New York.
   

Chapter 17

1. Around this time, Tweed also faced another blackmail threat from Jimmy O’Brien. O’Brien, through intermediaries, insisted that Tweed purchase half of O’Brien’s outstanding $350,000 claim against the county in exchange for O’Brien’s using his influence with Tilden and the Committee of Seventy to go easy on him. Tweed balked at first but finally agreed. He paid O’Brien $20,000 in cash and the rest in mortgages—over $150,000 altogether. In the end, for his money, Tweed in return got nothing.
   

2. Jay Gould at the time was facing revolt by Erie Railway stockholders and feared that prosecutors would use the bail-bond process to compromise his position, forcing him to drop off Tweed’s bond in November. He would be ousted as Erie president in March 1872.
   

Chapter 18

1. Root would be appointed Secretary of War by President William McKinley in 1899 and Secretary of State by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. He’d win a seat in the United States Senate after that. His 1912 Nobel Peace Prize recognized contributions to several international treaties plus Root’s work as a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague and as President of the Carnegie Institute for International Peace.
   

2. The complicated impeachment affair on New Year’s Day 1872 pitted the outgoing board of alderman—defeated in November voting—against the new incoming “reform” board. The old board voted to impeach Hall that day in order to appoint a new mayor who would, in turn, reappoint them and thus block the new “reform” alderman from taking their seats. Hall, however, frustrated their plan by backing the reformers who promptly rescinded his impeachment. His first criminal trial, in March 1872, had ended in a mistrial when a juror died; his second, in November 1872, had produced a hung jury—five for acquittal, seven for conviction.
   

3. Cardozo’s son Benjamin, two years old at the time, would overcome the family scandal; President Herbert Hoover would appoint him in 1932 to the United States Supreme Court for the seat vacated by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
   

4. Havemeyer would die of heart failure after less than eleven months in office, catching a bad chill after walking two and a half miles on a cold day after his train had stalled during a visit to Long Island.
   

5. Rounding out this peculiar field were Tilden’s friend Charles O’Conor, who put aside his role in the Tammany prosecutions to run for president as a “Straight-Out Democrat” (Democrats who refused to accept Greeley) and Victoria Woodhull, candidate of the People’s Party, the first women to seek the White House.
   

6. Andrew Garvey earlier had claimed that C. Hennessey Cook, a Tweed aide at the Public Works Department, had threatened to kill him if he testified against the Boss, and claimed this was the main reason he had fled the country during the scandal, rather than fear of his own prosecution for fraud. “The job has been put up and I am to do it,” he had Cook saying. “There won’t be any pistol or noose, but you will be got out of the way so that nobody won’t know.” The story has no corroboration. Cook had left the country by this point and could not deny it. Given Garvey’s own indictment for forgery, it should be taken with a large grain of salt.39