BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (9 page)

“State whether your identification with the party machinery is extensive or limited.”

“It is very extensive,” Tweed said with some pride. “I have that reputation, and I think it is pretty well deserved.”

Tweed had every reason to crow at the outcome in 1868. He and his Tammany crowd didn’t really care who sat in the White House as president. Washington, D.C. was far away and Horatio Seymour was Tilden’s friend, not Tweed’s. Instead, Tweed that year had accomplished a masterstroke: He’d taken Tammany’s two most popular figures, mayor John Hoffman and district attorney A. Oakey Hall—the same two who had impressed the public by prosecuting draft rioters five years earlier—and installed them as his new hand-picked New York governor and New York city mayor, respectively. Both owed their jobs squarely to Tweed. Their newly-won control of the Albany governor’s mansion would give Tammany a veto over the state legislature that in turn would tighten its grip on the city.

This latest voting scandal and congressional probe only heightened Tweed’s stature in a city that respected bare-knuckle toughness. The fact that he’d led Tammany’s campaign, used illegal tactics that worked, and gotten away with it, all made him a person to reckon with. He could be excused for looking like a cat who had just eaten a canary.

Key Democratic-Tammany candidates in New York, 1868:

• For president: former governor Horatio Seymour (against Republican Ulysses Grant)—defeated;
  
• For governor: New York mayor John T. Hoffman—victorious;
  
• For seat on the New York Supreme Court: incumbent George Bernard—victorious;
  
• For county board of supervisors: incumbent William M. Tweed—victorious.
  
• For mayor of New York City (to fill the seat vacated by John Hoffman on becoming governor): district attorney A. Oakey Hall. (Elected in a separate contest in December.)—victorious.
  

Things had changed in New York since the Civil War: Tweed no longer worried about his control of Tammany; he’d remade the club in his own image. For starters, he’d given it a new Hall—a three-story “Wigwam” on Union Square opened just that summer with arching windows, marble inlays, and red brickwork elegant enough to outshine even the nearby New York Academy of Music. Its concert room seated 5,000 people under a 35-foot high ceiling with cut-glass chandeliers, galleries, and private boxes; it was surrounded by smoking salons, promenade lobbies, a library, and a life-size statue of a Tammany brave. The building had cost an eye-popping $300,000—a staggering sum paid entirely by Tammany friends—and had received instant respectability that July when Democrats chose it to house their 1868 National Convention. Already, designers were refitting its main hall into a musical concert theater to compete with Booth’s, Wallack’s, Pike’s, and all the city’s best.

At the same time, Tweed had reorganized Tammany’s power structure. He’d made Tammany’s general committee a rubber stamp
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OOTNOTE
and lodged true control in a tiny circle consisting of himself, mayor Hoffman, comptroller Richard Connolly, and Peter Barr Sweeny, the city chamberlain and long-time Tammany strategist. People called this foursome the “lunch club” because they’d started meeting years earlier for strictly social lunches and, over time, had formed a political pact. They still ate together most days in a private City Hall room or at Wingate’s restaurant across the street—Tweed made a point not to miss his meal and a good glass of wine at noontime—but now they used the time to plot strategy and divide patronage while enjoying each other’s company.
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Tammany Hall on the south side of Union Square.

Most newspapers still ignored Tweed. They often confused him with Peter Sweeny as Tammany’s real power,
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but behind the scenes Tweed ran the organization with a firm gavel. As Deputy Street Commissioner alone Tweed commanded over 500 jobs, more than any other department. “[S]anguine, active, and exuberant, social, jovial, and shrewd” was how a newspaper writer described him around this time—a good politician who knew how to keep friends.
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Rubbing elbows at City Hall, riding about town in his private carriage, or holding court at his Duane Street office, Tweed showed every sign of wealth. The year before, his wife Mary Jane had made him a father for the tenth time with a new baby son, George, and they were preparing to move uptown to a new house on Fifth Avenue and 43rd street.
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As a father, Tweed had begun grooming his eldest son, 22-year-old William Jr., by giving him a city patronage job—assistant to State Supreme Court Justice Albert Cardozo. For his next-eldest, Richard, he’d rented out the popular six-story Metropolitan Hotel on Prince Street, one of New York’s largest with 400 rooms, hot and cold running water, and steam heat, and set his son up as manager. Increasingly, though, Tweed had become an absentee husband. He spent his nights huddled with Tammany cronies or sharing laughs at his private clubs—mostly the Americus where he was president.
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Mary Jane seemed to resent this treatment, especially carrying a final child in middle age. She apparently left Tweed for months in 1866 during the pregnancy and moved into their second home, a large estate—two houses on forty acres—that Tweed had purchased in Greenwich, Connecticut where his Americus Club kept its lodge and where he now docked his two steam-powered yachts—the
William M. Tweed
and the
Mary Jane Tweed
.

Tweed made his money from many sources, not the least of it from graft like the usual 15 percent he and his circle skimmed from city contracts through the board of supervisors. These days, contractors now came to Tweed and agreed to pay up to 35 percent on all bills to win city business. Tweed would split these gains with his lunch club friends Richard Connolly, the city comptroller who controlled access to the treasury, and Peter Sweeny.
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Tweed easily brushed away charges of graft that occasionally arose, either pointing to their lack of evidence or painting them as political hot air.
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But it seemed an open secret, a grimy fact about New York City. Its government was corrupt, like its streets were dirty, its traffic clogged, its alleys dotted with brothels and pickpockets—the cost of living in a big city.

Tweed owned a growing real estate portfolio: Just a few months earlier he’d purchased the entire west side of what later would be called Columbus Circle and often bought vacant lots just before major city improvements were announced. Neighbors delighted when Tweed planted his stake on their block, guaranteeing imminent upgrades: “They [Tweed and company] are well paid and paid in advance,” William Martin of the West Side Association put it. “They were supported in the last election by many taxpayers, on the avowed ground… that the great public works on this Island would be vigorously pushed forward, even without our help.”
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Tweed owned the New-York Printing Company along with a group that included James B. Taylor, a principal stockholder of the
New-York Times
, and used his power to make it the exclusive printer for New York County. In 1868 alone, it had provided 105,000 blank citizenship forms to the courts for naturalizing immigrants before Election Day—part of the election scandal.
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In 1867, Tweed also began spending large amounts of time upstate in Albany—150 miles north up the Hudson River—winning a seat in the state senate which met usually from January to April. Mary Jane joined him at first but she found Albany too snowbound and isolated and soon stopped, leaving Tweed to cavort with his cronies. In his first year there, Tweed engineered the selection of a new Assembly Speaker,
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giving him enormous leverage. Here too he found graft: “I found it was impossible to do anything [in Albany] without paying for it,” Tweed explained later; he came ready to play the game.
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He made himself a central player in the Erie Railway War—the high-stakes contest between Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of that rundown line. The battle had shifted from Wall Street to the state capitol when Jay Gould sought legislation to validate some $10 million worth of watered stock he’d issued in the company—a step that even George Barnard called “legalizing counterfeit money.”
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The Gould-Vanderbilt face-off in Albany spawned a titanic orgy of bribes;
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legislators who normally earned $300 annual salaries bid the two sides against each other and demanded pay-offs of $5,000 or more for a single vote. Tweed originally backed Vanderbilt but ultimately sided with Gould and his partner, Jim Fisk.

Gould, having won the war, repaid the debt by giving Tweed and Peter Sweeney seats on the Erie Railway corporate board, a position whose perks included a cornucopia of inside stock–trading tips. This expanded Tweed’s “Ring” to include one of America’s richest and most aggressive corporate powers.

Rumors also started around this time about Tweed’s keeping a mistress, a “small blond” woman he hid away in Albany or at the Americus Club lodge in Greenwich, far from the eyes of Mary Jane or the New York press, but it always remained just talk. If any mistress actually did exist, he kept her well hidden, as a Victorian-era gentleman would. Her identity never came out.
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For Tweed, the 1868 election had presented a rare opportunity. He had ambitious plans, topped by trying to install John Hoffman in the governor’s mansion in Albany. And he faced towering obstacles: The huge popularity of General Grant that would assure a large upstate Republican turnout, U.S. marshal Robert Murray’s crackdown on immigrant voters, and now the collapse of Horatio Seymour’s presidential bid in October. Tammany would have to fight even to protect its own base in New York City.
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As the battle approached, the “Temporary Headquarters of the Democratic General Committee” became the “Office of William M. Tweed. No. 237 Broadway.”
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To win the governorship for Hoffman, he’d need a huge majority in New York City to offset an upstate Republican surge, and Tweed knew exactly where to find the votes—the large enclaves of Irish and German immigrants, Tammany’s core supporters. The problem, however, was that most immigrants who’d come to New York since the 1850s had avoided becoming citizens. During the war, when citizenship meant conscription into Lincoln’s army to face rebel cannon on Virginia battlefields, naturalizations had frozen to a trickle—barely 3,000 a year from 1861 though 1863. Now, in 1868, some fifty to seventy thousand foreign-born Tammany warriors in New York City urgently needed to swear their oaths and get their papers before Election Day.

All that fall, Tweed pressed his organization to get the job done. In October, the New York Supreme Court alone cranked out more than 1,600 naturalizations each day, in addition to hundreds more from the Superior Court and the Court of Common Pleas.
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When Marshal Robert Murray began his crackdown in mid-October, it signaled a new danger: that Republicans would use the scandal as a pretext to challenge all immigrant votes at the polls, legitimate or not—potentially thousands of ballots.
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Murray had begun hiring dozens of assistant marshals and Republican Governor Reuben Fenton had placed the state militia on alert. “Challenge! Sharp challenging will be necessary at every poll,” shouted the partisan
Evening Post
in a typical call to arms, “do not be deterred by threats.”
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The Tammany machine, a juggernaut with its backbone in the local wards and neighborhoods, worked best in this type of pinch. Each of the city’s 340 election districts—about fifteen in each of its twenty-two wards—contained about four hundred eligible voters and each had its own Tammany captain and its own local ten-member committee assigned to visit every single Democrat. The party provided each with $1,000 in cash for Election Day “walking around” money. Three citywide committees oversaw the effort and were responsible for challenging Republicans at the polls.
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Asked once if he’d ever directed anyone to falsify election returns, Tweed could swear that he didn’t have to: “More in the nature of a request than a direction.”
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Instead or giving orders, Tweed’s Tammany gave its braves something to fight for: the chance for a patronage job, respectability, and advancement. “Is not the pending contest pre-eminently one of capitol against labor, of money against popular rights, and of political power against the struggling interests of the masses?” a Tammany circular argued that year during the campaign. It appealed to fear as well: if Republicans win, it threatened, “[t]heir next step will be to bring the Southern negro North to vote down and compete against the white laborer”
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—a lingering raw nerve from the Civil War even though most black citizens had left New York after the bloody 1863 riots.
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OOTNOTE
Tammany also backed the Irish nationalist Fenians and the anti-Spanish Cuban independence movement, both being causes to raise the dander of many immigrant partisans.

In the final days before voting, Oakey Hall, the district attorney who also acted as Tammany’s own in-house counsel, began pressing the legal case: that any immigrant with citizenship papers carrying a valid stamp from a New York court MUST be allowed to register and vote with no questions asked. Then, to fight the U.S. marshals on the street, Tammany created its own instant platoon of bullies: James “Jimmy” O’Brien, New York’s 27-year old, Irish-born sheriff elected on Tammany’s ticket the year before, took the initiative to hire between 1,500 and 2,000 deputies, a force almost as large as the city’s 2,200-man Metropolitan Police. “I feared there would be some trouble, and I thought it would be no harm to have these men as assistant police,” O’Brien later told the congressional investigators.
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“I ordered them to arrest any one who interfered with the voting”
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—that is, anyone who got in the way of Tammany’s immigrants and repeaters.

Finally, on Election Day eve, John Hoffman, the mayor and Tammany’s candidate for governor, lowered the final gauntlet: “Unscrupulous, designing, and dangerous men, political partisans, are resorting to extraordinary means” to disrupt the election, he charged in a formal City Hall proclamation. They were being led by the U.S. marshal, “a violent political partisan,” with “swarms of special deputies” aiming to intimidate foreign-born citizens. Hoffman offered rewards of $1,000 each for the arrest of anyone “intimidating, obstructing, or defrauding any voter in the exercise of his right as an elector,” a call to arms for Jimmy O’Brien and his bruisers.
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On Election Day, the Tammany legions came to work: “[N]ext to the Roman army under Caesar, the organization of Tammany Hall was the most thoroughly disciplined body that the world has ever seen,” Peter Sweeny boasted a few months later. “We had good discipline.”
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Starting at daybreak, Tammany’s legions came out by the thousands: gangs of repeaters, O’Brien’s deputies, Tammany’s vote inspectors, all in orchestrated attack.