“The fact is New York politics were always dishonest — long before my time. There never was a time you couldn’t buy the Board of Alderman…A politician coming forward takes things as they are. The population is too hopelessly split up onto races and factions to govern it under universal suffrage, except by the bribery of patronage or purchase.” – William M. Tweed, 1877
In the summer after I graduated from high school, I spent a tour of duty as an aide de camp at the Republican Party headquarters in Cleveland, then Ohio’s largest city. Having grown up in more rural Southwestern Ohio, this was my first exposure to the big city, its diverse ethnicity and hard-nosed politics. I’ve joked, “Before I moved to Cleveland, my concept of ethnicity was limited to asking whether or not one’s ancestors were from Kentucky.” Here I was tutored in the needlecraft of political tapestry-making, sewing from multi-colored strands of economic interest, race, ideology and national origin. I was but a young bhisti moving my masters’ water hither and yon with faithful dispatch. With the benefit of time and an improved sense of history, I now know that I was experiencing the waning days of an American political tradition: the machine.
My job was akin to what today we would call a headhunter or employment agent. Republicans occupied both the Statehouse and City Hall. No one, and I mean no one, from Cuyahoga County went to work for the state or city without first seeking the patronage of GOP headquarters. Whether it was to run a major state agency or sweep a Cleveland neighborhood street, one secured such an appointment with the endorsements of not only the Republican county chairman, but one’s ward leader and precinct committeeman. It was an operation that ran with impressive Roman military discipline. While my own entry-level responsibilities were limited to managing the paperwork around this vetting process for prospective employees, I was observant enough to understand that a separate, more sensitive operation ran in parallel to mine for those interested in obtaining government contracts.
The brokerage of political favoritism undoubtedly still exists. Like so many things it’s an industry that’s been consolidated, rolled-up, no longer the product of the more natural in-gathering of many smaller constituent parts and units. Cronyism is now an industry of big box retailers, no longer Mom ‘n Pops. Machine politics existed well before the late 19th century, but all powerful string pullers since referred to as a political bosses owe their appellations to the one first known as William Magear “Boss” Tweed.
In Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York, Kenneth D. Ackerman has given us a colorful, well-researched and delightfully readable biography of America’s quintessential machine politician and grand sachem of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s powerful network of influence in New York City and the statehouse in Albany, in the period during and immediately after the American Civil War. Though he never served in a public position above that of state senator or public works commissioner, Tweed ran the switches on the fortunes and livelihoods of everyone from impoverished immigrants, supreme court judges, Wall Street tycoons, legislators, even newspaper editors. In the process, according to Ackerman, “…Tweed and his city ‘ring,’ during a three-year period, had made off with a staggering $45 million from the local treasury — an amount larger than the entire annual U. S. budget before the Civil War.” Ackerman reminds the reader to multiply all dollar references by 20 throughout the book in order to appreciate the full magnitude of the ring’s production in contemporary valuations.
At the center of the story is Tweed and his Ring, including New York City Mayor Oakey Hall, City Comptroller Richard Connolly and City Park Commissioner Peter Sweeny. One might say that as these four represented all of the balances of the public treasury system, they were also able to keep most of the checks. At the periphery of the story is the vast and multi-faceted, late 19th century, City of New York, tethered to the ring by every dollar it supplied in taxes and that it consumed in public works and services. Antagonizing the powerful protagonists of this story were an handful of courageous reformers: George Jones, the first noteworthy editor of the the New-York Times; Samuel J. Tilden, the establishment lawyer and statesman who would ultimately “win” the presidential election of 1876 on the strength of his reputation as a corruption buster; and Thomas Nast, the Harper’s Weekly cartoonist who gave us the iconography of the Republican elephant, Democratic donkey, modern Santa Claus, and the obese, arrogant and conspicuously consumptive Boss Tweed.
Ackerman writes:
“It’s hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed’s system, though. The Tweed Ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury, and the ballot box. Its frauds had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing, and organization.”
In the end it took a combination of human frailty in the forms of fear and greed among a few of Tweed’s close cronies and the remarkable analytical skills of Tilden to bring the Tweed Ring down. Tilden’s famous table depicting the money as it flowed through Tweed’s labyrinthine facade and then into the personal accounts of the ring leaders can only be regarded as a masterpiece of big data analytics, without a computer. Many contemporary auditing best practices in fact have their genesis in Tilden’s table.
George Washington Plunkitt, the later Tammany Hall leader featured in William L. Riordan’s Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, and who was said to have coined the expression “honest graft” was also said to observe, “The politicians who make a lastin’ success in politics are the men who are always loyal to their friends, even up to the gate of State prison, if necessary; men who keep their promises and never lie…Some papers complain that the bosses get rich while devotin’ their lives to the interests of the city. What of it?”
Ackerman writes:
“At its foundation, Tweed’s system had an irresistible political logic: everyone benefited, rich and poor alike, and nobody seemed to get hurt. Money for graft as well as good came mostly from outsiders. Taxes stayed low; Connolly financed city operations mostly with debt, selling bonds and stock to investors in Europe and on Wall Street, pushing off payment until another day.
For the wealthy, Tweed produced dynamism and growth. His regime spent $10.4 million on Central Park up through 1869, and millions afterward. Wasteful and riddled with graft? Certainly. But during this time, the value of real estate in the three surrounding wards more than tripled, from $26.4 million to over $80 million between 1856 and 1866, generating millions in tax revenue, and the total property in the city rose 82.5 percent in the decade from 1860 to 1870 — Tweed’s fingerprints cannot be ignored.”
But Ackerman is no apologist for corruption.
“The problem was, Tweed’s system was based on lies. Stealing was wrong, even then, and Tweed and the others knew it perfectly well. A regime based on it could not last, nor deserved to last. Eventually, the bills came due, the creditors got nervous, and the house of cards collapsed. Meanwhile, democracy itself almost drowned in the process: self-government meant little when elections were won by the side that cheated best.”
The reader still has a hard time loathing Tweed. Though a rascal, Ackerman paints him as a fellow one would probably have enjoyed knowing. He is not the dark and sinister power broker of modern cinematic idiom. Tweed is presented here as man of his word, affable, generous and self-controlled. In the end, he was the only member of the ring to take a fall. Hall plead ignorance to the whole scheme. Connolly turned state’s evidence. Sweeny brokered a crooked “exoneration” for himself. Tweed died in a dank New York City jail dungeon: penniless, diseased and estranged from friends and family.
Boss Tweed loved public works investment. Every tile of new sidewalk, you see, required multiple contractors and suppliers, lawyers and bankers, policymakers and inspectors to effect its installation. In 2009, the Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act disbursing $831 billion to infrastructure, healthcare, education and renewable energy. Many Americans, like me, ask “What have we to show for it?” Could it be that amounts of Tweedian proportion still somehow evaporate through pocket lining, cronyism and favoritism, albeit exercised with even greater elegance and technical sophistication? Where did all that money go?
As Tweed was once inaccurately quoted by Nast as saying, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
Pater Familias
From the Corner of Laurel and Elmo 