Part Four
Chapter 12
Before he became a Dakota rancher, Theodore Roosevelt took a step even more astonishing to his neighbors on New York’s Upper East Side: he entered politics. “The men I knew best were the men in the clubs of social pretension and the men of cultivated taste and easy life,” Roosevelt remembered.
When I began to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of the local Republican Association and the means of joining it, these men—and the big business men and lawyers also—laughed at me and told me that politics were “low”; that I would find them run by saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors, and the like, and not by men with any of whom I would come in contact outside; and, moreover, they assured me that the men I met would be rough and brutal and unpleasant to deal with. I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class.1
Roosevelt chose the Republican party over the Democrats for two reasons. The first was that for a Northern Unionist whose childhood prayers during the Civil War had beseeched the Almighty to “grind the Southern troops to powder,” the Democrats were preeminently the party of the rebellion. The second reason was that for a New York City boy who came of age in the decade after the Civil War, the Democrats were the party of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed.2
There was irony in Roosevelt’s damning the Democrats for disunion and Tammany together, for during the war the Tammany Hall Democrats (named for their traditional meeting place) were the loyal members of the party. Many New York Democrats harkened to Mayor Fernando Wood, who urged that the city secede from the state and the Union to form a political entity poised between North and South. Tammany, by contrast, stood firm for the Union. And none stood firmer than William Marcy Tweed, the man the Tammany Democrats made their chairman at the beginning of 1863.
Tweed was Scot by ancestry, his forebears having borrowed the name of the River Tweed before heading to America in the eighteenth century. Tweed’s father crafted furniture in New York and sent young Bill to boarding school in New Jersey to study accounting. The boy learned quickly, and the father helped set him up in a business that made brushes. At twenty-one he married his childhood sweetheart; the newlyweds moved in with her father not far from the brush factory on Pearl Street.
Like most political parties at most times, the New York Democratic party was on the lookout for fresh talent, and Tweed seemed a likely prospect. His business allowed him freedom to campaign and serve not readily available to wage workers. And his physical presence—he was a tall, burly fellow, with bright blue eyes, a hearty laugh, and a confidence-inspiring handshake—was just what the party historically of the people required. Tammany’s talent scouts invited him to run for city alderman; after hesitating he assented. His first race failed but his second succeeded, and in 1852 the Seventh Ward sent him to join the “forty thieves,” as the aldermen were irreverently but not inaccurately called. Tweed didn’t immediately recognize his own peculiar genius, and the following year he let himself be nominated and then elected to the United States Congress. Few eras in American political history have been more fraught for good and ill than the mid-1850s, with Congress overturning the Missouri Compromise and Kansas dissolving into civil war, but Tweed found Washington boring and he returned to New York after a single term. Thereafter he devoted himself to local politics, which proved to be his true calling. He won election to the school commission in 1856, the county board of supervisors in 1858, the street commission in 1861. In the process he discovered that the offices one held mattered less than the friends one cultivated. When those friends offered to nominate him for chairman of the Tammany general committee, he happily accepted and handily won.
His first task was repairing the damage—literal and figurative—caused by the 1863 draft riots. New York governor Horatio Seymour urged the War Department to suspend the draft in New York, lest more riots erupt. Many New York City officials, heeding their Irish constituents, seconded the appeal. The War Department not surprisingly rejected the idea. Tweed brokered a compromise. Focusing on the part of the draft law that so provoked the rioters—the loophole exempting those men rich enough to pay the three-hundred-dollar commutation fee—he proposed a deal whereby the city would float a loan to pay the fee for anyone whose absence at the front would demonstrably burden his family, and it would pay the three hundred dollars directly to those men who chose to answer the call. Tweed and a fellow county supervisor, Republican Orison Blunt, gathered local support for the plan and took it to Washington. Secretary of War Stanton wasn’t thrilled at this run around the federal law, but neither did he relish having to open a Manhattan front in the war, and he grudgingly agreed. Tweed and Tammany implemented the new policy with hardly a hitch.3
His role in the matter earned him a reputation as a man who could get things done, efficiently and honestly. “The Supervisors’ Committee are now holding daily sessions, and are performing their duties with eminent satisfaction to all parties,” the New York Times editorialized. “No money, no trust was ever more honestly administered than the loan of the Board of Supervisors.”4
Tweed continued to get things done, albeit less efficiently and honestly, after the war ended. By then his hold on Tammany was complete, the product of his demonstrated patriotism and his deft use of patronage. As party boss he controlled hundreds of positions in the party organization; with these he expanded his influence to the city and county governments. Tammany’s foot soldiers—“ward heelers,” they were called, for the miles they put on their shoes—turned out the vote with verve and imagination. A Tammany loyalist afterward lamented how far things had fallen since the glory days of Tweed. “Elections nowadays are sissy affairs,” he said. “Nobody gets killed any more, and the ambulances and patrol wagons stay in their garages.… It was wonderful to see my men slug the opposition to preserve the sanctity of the ballot.” Art complemented the strong arm. Another Tammany captain explained that the most valued voters grew beards before the balloting:
When you’ve voted them with their whiskers on, you take them to a barber and scrape off the chin fringe. Then you vote them again with the side lilacs and a mustache. Then to a barber again, off comes the sides and you vote them a third time with the mustache. If that ain’t enough and the box can stand a few more ballots, clean off the mustache and vote them plain face. That makes one of them good for four votes.
In fact this functionary was being modest; subsequent investigations revealed some voters casting as many as twenty ballots. And after the voting took place, Tammany operatives counted the votes to ensure the totals came out right. Tweed later declared candidly, “The ballots made no result; the counters made the result.”5
As the grip of Tweed and his friends—the “Tweed ring,” to its critics—on New York City tightened, some of their opponents retreated to Albany to mount a counterattack in the state legislature. Tweed riposted by getting himself elected to the state senate and establishing a branch office on the upper Hudson. “In Albany he had the finest quarters at the Delavan,” journalist and reformer George W. Curtis remembered.
And when he came into the great dining-room at dinner-time, and looked at all the tables thronged with members of the Legislature and the lobby, he had a benignant, paternal expression, as of a patriarch pleased to see his retainers happy. It was a magnificent rendering of Fagin and his pupils. You could imagine him trotting up and down in the character of an unsuspicious old gentleman with his handkerchief hanging out of his pocket, that his scholars might show their skill in prigging a wipe. He knew which of that cheerful company was the Artful Dodger and which Charley Bates. And he never doubted that he could buy every man in the room if he were willing to pay the price.6
To complement his legislative influence, Tweed purchased the services of several judges. George Barnard of the state supreme court became the most notorious of the Tweed jurists on account of his utter shamelessness and wry sense of humor. Barnard examined several attorneys seeking admission to the bar; these included a state senator. A contemporary recalled the conversation:
“Senator, do you know there is such a thing as the State Constitution?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If a proposed bill came up for consideration, which you knew was in violation of the Constitution, what would you do?”
“I would move to suspend the Constitution, same as we sometimes suspend the rules of the Senate to pass a bill.”
“Stand aside,” said the Judge with a smile. “You will make a profound lawyer.”
Next candidate.
“Now, sir, if you had a claim for a client of $50,000 against the City, what would be the first step you would take to recover it?”
“I would go and see Bill Tweed.”
“You will make your mark as a Corporation lawyer.”7
By the late 1860s the Tweed machine was running smoothly. Money greased the gears, collected from all who had to do business with the city. Railroads wishing to extend their lines or refurbish their stations applied for permission from the appropriate board and paid for the privilege; Tweed and his cronies split the bribe. Merchants bidding to provision the city included kickbacks to the ring in their bids. Lawyers trying cases before Tweed judges slipped gratuities to the bench, which passed a portion along. Bankers underwriting bonds for the city and county added a margin for the boss.
The money supported Tammany’s electioneering. Some voters were simply bribed; others responded to the services Tammany provided. Immigrants, especially, needed help adjusting to life in the great city; Tammany guided the greenhorns to housing, jobs, medical care, and other essentials. “I can always get a job for a deserving man,” Tammany wheelhorse George Washington Plunkitt explained. “I know every big employer in the district—and in the whole city, for that matter—and they ain’t in the habit of saying no to me when I ask them for a job.” Emergency assistance was a Tammany specialty. “If there’s a fire in Ninth, Tenth, or Eleventh Avenue, for example, any hour of the day or night, I’m usually there with some of my election district captains as soon as the fire engines,” Plunkitt said. “If a family is burned out, I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up until they get things running again.” All Tammany asked in exchange for its generosity was loyalty on election day. It was rarely disappointed. “It’s philanthropy, but it’s politics too—mighty good politics,” Plunkitt said. “The poor are the most grateful people in the world.”8
Tweed and his cronies considered themselves agents of democracy, and some of them accounted their boodling nothing more than democracy’s price. During the next century American democracy would formally incorporate into the emerging welfare state many of the services provided by Tammany (and similar machines in other cities). When it did, the sponsoring party, typically the Democrats, would be rewarded with much the same loyalty bestowed upon Tammany. But for now Tweed and company were happy to keep their arrangements informal. Plunkitt dismissed much of the peculation as “honest graft” hardly worth noting. “Let me explain by examples,” he said.
My party’s in power in the city, and it’s going to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course it is. That’s honest graft.9
Other graft was less honest, even by Tammany standards, and rather more spectacular. Tweed inherited plans to build a new county courthouse, which had been authorized before the Civil War at an estimated cost of $250,000. The war stalled construction, leaving Tweed and his partners to complete it. He persuaded the city to add another million to the authorization, on grounds that the building should embody the ambitions of America’s greatest city. Construction recommenced, but the additional million didn’t go far enough, and Tweed talked the city into another $800,000, and then another $300,000, and another $300,000, and another $500,000. The striking thing about all this was that there was little to show for the money spent. Civic-minded groups demanded an investigation. Tweed and company patiently explained that they, too, were wondering what had happened to the money and in fact had begun an investigation of their own. But in the interests of transparency they acceded to the second investigation.
Tweed’s cooperativeness should have put the watchdogs on guard, for not only did the investigative committee clear the contractors and the officials involved, it submitted reimbursement requisitions that were shockingly irregular themselves. The total for twelve days’ work came to more than $18,000, including $6,000 to have the committee’s report printed by a publishing company controlled by Tweed. The reformers retreated in frustration lest they line the ring’s pockets further.
Convinced they were untouchable, the ring engineered further appropriations from the city and some from the state. By 1871 some $13 million had been sunk into the courthouse, which still wasn’t finished.
The details of the fraud were mind-boggling. A furniture maker received $180,000 for three tables and forty chairs (one for each thief). Carpet weavers and layers got $350,000. Plumbing and lighting fixtures totaled $1.5 million. Safes ate up $400,000. The windows of the courthouse cost $8,000 apiece. Brooms and assorted cleaning supplies ran to $41,000. Services were rewarded no less generously. A lithographer received $360,000 for one month’s work. A plasterer got $500,000 for interior work, and then $1 million to repair what he had done. A carpenter made $800,000. Smaller payments went to lesser individuals, including a court clerk whose highest degree was from Sing Sing, an interpreter who couldn’t read or write, and several dead men.
Needless to say, the recipients of this largesse didn’t retain all their booty. The standard kickback was two for one: two dollars to the ring for every dollar the contractor kept. Tweed and his cronies pocketed millions, making them peers in profit of certain magnates of the private sector.10
BUT THE BARBECUE couldn’t last forever. Tweed had long been pestered by Thomas Nast, an editorial cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly who had honed his pen drawing pictures of heroic Union soldiers and dastardly Confederates. He celebrated Christmas in 1862 by showing Santa Claus visiting soldiers in their winter camps. The image attracted sufficient praise that Nast brought Santa back in subsequent years, giving him a round belly, a white beard, and the other characteristics by which the old elf became known. Yet there was always an edge to Nast’s drawings. His first Santa held a dancing doll with a string attached not to its pate but to its neck; the effigy being lynched bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson Davis. At war’s end Nast needed a new villain and hit upon Tweed, who, perhaps from a law of conservation of artistic energy, was drawn to look like an evil twin of Nast’s Santa.
Nast’s pictures formed an effective counterpoint to editorials by various daily and weekly newspapers, of which New York City then had dozens. In the summer of 1871, the New York Times began publishing specifics of the courthouse fraud, leaked to it by a member of the Tweed ring who thought he’d been shortchanged in the grafting. “The Secret Accounts—Proofs of Undoubted Frauds Brought to Light,” the banner headline proclaimed. The publisher of the Times, George Jones, dribbled the information out over several weeks, partly so he could confirm details of the story but mostly to maintain the boost in circulation the story provided. The ring responded by offering Jones half a million dollars to stop. He rejected the offer both on principle and on a reckoning that the story was worth at least that much to his bottom line. Thomas Nast, lampooning Tweed and the ring more savagely than ever, likewise received an offer of a half million, in his case to study art in Europe for a year or so. Nast took a bit longer to say no—a refusal that dismayed Tweed more than Jones’s had. “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles,” he explained. “My constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.”11
The editorial campaign against Tweed mobilized various aspects of the electorate. Middle-class reformers took offense at the corruption per se, calling the ring a blight on democracy. Persons uneasy with surging immigration interpreted Tweed’s rise as evidence of the pernicious effect of ignorant foreigners. The anti-Catholic crowd—which included the rabidly Rome-baiting Nast—resented the influence of Irish Americans in the Tammany coalition and hoped Tweed’s fall would restore the Protestant Anglo-Saxonism of yore. Tweed’s professional rivals anticipated his ouster as clearing a space for themselves at the trough. Particular politicians, including gubernatorial aspirant Samuel J. Tilden, hoped to leap from Tweed’s back into office.
Tweed strove to appear above the furor. When an out-of-town reporter asked him if the allegations of corruption were true, he responded, “This is not a question one gentleman ought to put to another.” Diarist George Templeton Strong marveled at the man’s composure. “Tweed’s impudent serenity is sublime,” Strong wrote. “Were he not a supreme scoundrel, he would be a great man.” But at least once the mask slipped. “The Times has been saying all the time I have no brains,” Tweed told a correspondent for the rival Sun. “Well, I’ll show Jones that I have brains.… I tell you, sir, if this man Jones had said the things he has said about me, twenty-five years ago, he wouldn’t be alive now. But, you see, when a man has a wife and children, he can’t do such a thing. I would have killed him.”
The anti-Tammany forces rallied against the ring in 1871 state and city elections and landed some stinging blows, but they suffered a setback the following year when Tweed transported roughnecks to Rochester, where the state Democratic party was meeting. Tweed told the convention that the troubles in New York City were a local affair and that for the state party to intervene would simply invite trouble from which Republicans alone would benefit. His thugs nodded ominous assent. The convention backed Tweed’s candidates.
The boss looked toward the 1872 elections with satisfaction, even smugness. Let scandal-seeking editors and dyspeptic reformers rail, he said. “I feel perfectly free to appeal to a higher tribunal, and have no fear of the result.” As things turned out, fear would have been appropriate. The tribunal of the people rousted Tammany from office.12
The defeat left the ring suddenly vulnerable. “Tweed and his gang are doomed,” Samuel Tilden promised. “Before many days pass it will be made so hot for the arch robber that New York will not hold him.” Emboldened prosecutors brought criminal charges and civil suits against the ring, which now lacked the power to fend them off. Several of the conspirators fled to foreign soil; Tweed made his stand in court. He hired the best lawyers in New York, including young Elihu Root, who threw procedural hurdles in the prosecution’s way for more than a year. A first trial ended in a hung jury, prompting rumors that Tweed had bribed one or more of the jurors. A second trial yielded guilty verdicts on over two hundred counts and a cumulative sentence of twelve years—a modest total that evinced the undeveloped contemporary attitude toward white-collar crime. Yet Tweed beat most of this rap, too, for an appeals court determined that the separate sentences shouldn’t accumulate, and he was released after a year in prison.
By now Tilden was governor and aiming for the White House, and he wasn’t about to let Tweed walk. Tilden’s allies rearrested Tweed and brought a civil suit in the name of the people of the state of New York. Tweed made himself comfortable at the Ludlow Street jail, paying for first-class treatment and persuading the warden to let him take dinners at home with his wife and relatives while the jail guards waited outside. During one such dinner Tweed disappeared. A workman’s wagon carried him to the shore of the Hudson, and a rowboat transported him across to New Jersey. He hid there under an assumed name, awaiting the outcome of his current trial. When the jury found him liable for six million dollars in damages to the state, he slipped out of New Jersey aboard a schooner to Florida. A fishing boat transported him to Cuba, still a colony of Spain, which lacked an extradition treaty with the United States. Tweed hoped to cross the Atlantic and disappear. “I should have lived in Spain my whole life,” he said later. “I had designed to go into some quiet part, like Catalonia or somewhere living was inexpensive.”
Unluckily for Tweed, Cuba was in rebellion against Spain, and the insurgents were being armed and reinforced from the United States. The Spanish government wanted the Grant administration to curtail the flow of weapons and filibusters, and to that end it cooperated with Washington whenever possible. Learning that Tweed had left Cuba for Spain, the Spanish government alerted its customs officials to watch for the American criminal. No one in Spain had a photograph of the fugitive, but a recent copy of Harper’s Weekly carried a new cartoon by Nast, showing Tweed in prison stripes stealing New York’s future, represented by two young boys he held by the scruff of their necks. A Spanish subscriber furnished the picture to the authorities, who passed it along to the customs men, who may or may not have believed they were on the lookout for an infamous kidnapper or child molester. In any case they caught Tweed and remanded him to America.13
The story soon ended. Tweed offered to testify against his cronies in exchange for leniency, but he couldn’t generate much interest. Tilden had moved on to other battles, notably a tussle with Rutherford Hayes for the White House, and authorities in New York City were happy to blame Tweed for all the graft and corruption of the previous decade. No one wanted to bargain a plea with him. Anyway, the old boss was ailing. Flight, worry, diabetes, and finally pneumonia broke his once lusty constitution. He died in the Ludlow Street jail in April 1877 at the age of fifty-four.
HARDLY ANYONE NOTICED, for by that time the nation was awash in political scandal. Andrew Johnson had scandalized the country, or at least the North, by defying Congress over Reconstruction and especially over the Tenure of Office Act, a measure designed by its drafters to force a confrontation between the Democratic executive and the Republican legislature. The Republicans won the first round, impeaching Johnson in the House of Representatives. Johnson won, or rather survived, the second round, avoiding conviction in the Senate by a single vote. But the exercise served the purpose of the Radical Republicans in Congress, who seized control of Reconstruction from the emasculated Johnson and imposed their will on the occupied South. The state governments established under Radical Reconstruction promoted the welfare of the freedmen but in the process gained reputations for corruption, eventually tarnishing the whole enterprise with sufficient scandal that the former white ruling classes recaptured power—in a takeover proudly called “Redemption” by its participants and partisans—while the North stood aside.
By then Ulysses Grant was president. Grant made the ideal candidate for the first postwar election: a war hero with indistinct views on most political issues. His personal reputation was unsullied by scandal save what followed from the occasional bender. But Lincoln had absolved Grant of blame, reportedly saying that if he knew what kind of whiskey Grant drank he’d send a barrel to each of his other generals. Grant accepted the 1868 Republican nomination with the statement “Let us have peace.” On that slogan—and that slogan alone, as he declined to campaign or even speak on his own behalf—he swept into the White House over Democrat Horatio Seymour.
For a time Grant avoided most taint of scandal. During his first term—with the exception of the Gould-Fisk gold conspiracy, which touched the Treasury and Grant’s family but not the president himself—the greatest scandals involved members of Congress. Charles Dana at the New York Sun begrudged George Jones and the New York Times their Tweed scoop, and he set his hounds to sniff out something comparable. What they turned up delighted Dana and dismayed shareholders in the Union Pacific Railroad and taxpayers who had underwritten the construction of the transcontinental line. “The King of Frauds,” ran the Sun’s main head on September 4, 1872. “How the Credit Mobilier Bought Its Way through Congress … Colossal Bribery … Congressmen Who Have Robbed the People and Who Now Support the National Robber … How Some Men Get Fortunes … Princely Gifts by the Chairmen of Committees in Congress.” The article delineated the career of Crédit Mobilier, the construction company that did most of the road building for the Union Pacific and collected most of the profits. The existence of the company was neither unusual (other railroads and infrastructure contractors employed similar subcontractors) nor secret (the Sun story was based on public testimony more than a year old). And administration supporters detected a striking coincidence between the timing of the article and the approaching presidential election. Jones’s pro-Grant Times airily dismissed the Sun report as “The Crédit Mobilier Slander.”14
But the story had legs, and after the election Congress conducted an investigation. The charges, adjusted for partisanship, fell into two categories, the first alleging fraud against the public in the construction of the Union Pacific and the second bribery of members of Congress. The fraud charges contended that the railroad had taken the loans and land proffered by the government and converted these into liquid assets siphoned off by the shareholders in Crédit Mobilier. Although these charges would have the longest life, leading to a general impression that the Pacific railroad was a giant swindle, they turned out to be impossible to prove. No one, not even the directors of the Union Pacific, could account for all the resources and funds devoted to the road’s construction. This inability reflected a certain amount of fraud, to be sure, but no evidence was adduced to show that the fraud was much greater than large projects typically produced. (It was incontrovertibly less, as a ratio of theft to expenditure, than the fraud perpetrated by the Tweed ring in New York.) To a large degree the failure to find all the money expended on the Union Pacific simply reflected the scale of the project and the fact that nothing like it had ever been attempted. Huge corporations were a recent and still evolving phenomenon; accounting practices capable of monitoring their activities lagged behind the institutions themselves.
In any event, the second set of allegations—involving bribery of members of Congress—was much juicier. The Sun article included a list of congressmen said to have received shares of Crédit Mobilier. The list included James G. Blaine, James Garfield, Schuyler Colfax, and Henry Wilson, and the number of shares linked to each individual ranged from 2,000 to 3,000. Knowledgeable readers immediately questioned the numbers, as the total said to have been distributed to the congressmen nearly equaled the entire issue of the company. But knowledgeable readers were a distinct minority, and even after the obvious correction was made—the figures represented the par value in dollars of the shares, not the number of shares—the bribery allegation titillated a public attuned by the Tweed scandal and the Gould-Fisk gold conspiracy to think the worst of public officials. Nor were these just any public officials: Blaine was the current speaker of the House, Colfax had been speaker at the time and was currently vice president, Wilson was the current Republican nominee for vice president, and Garfield was chair of the House appropriations committee.
Yet the list of names was riddled with errors, too. Oakes Ames, the Massachusetts congressman who had promoted the Pacific railroad, had compiled a list of congressmen who might be interested in purchasing shares of Crédit Mobilier. Blaine and some of the others on the list had rejected the offer, from propriety, perhaps, but also because it seemed a poor investment. Wilson had accepted the offer but subsequently sold his shares. The fact that the list included not a single Democrat added to the suspicions that the exposé was an election-season ploy.
But as the congressional investigation began, the public learned that there was fire behind at least some of the smoke. The star witness was Ames, no longer in Congress but still connected to the Union Pacific. “You could have heard a pin drop when Mr. Ames produced his red morocco covered memorandum book,” a reporter observed. Ames’s log of the Crédit Mobilier transactions exonerated Blaine; confirmed the involvement of Colfax, Garfield, and some others; and, while narrowing the scope of the scandal, lent it substance it had previously lacked.15
Questions remained, however, as to the degree of culpability of those involved. Ames himself professed to see nothing wrong in what he had done. “There is no law and no reason, legal or moral, why a member of Congress should not own stock in a road any more than why he should not own a sheep when the price of wool is to be affected by the tariff,” he said. Former congressman Benjamin Boyer of Pennsylvania, one of Ames’s investors, adopted a similar view. “I had no idea of wrong in the matter,” he said. “Nor do I see how it concerns the public.… And as the investment turned out to be profitable, my only regret is that it was no larger in amount.”16
Neither could anyone demonstrate, even of those who accepted Ames’s offer, that it had purchased him votes he wouldn’t have received anyway. Pennsylvania’s William Kelley waxed indignant at the suggestion that his support could be purchased so cheaply (prompting speculation that it might be purchased more dearly). But most of the men on Ames’s list were demonstrated friends of the railroad. The Crédit Mobilier shares might have been thanks for past favors rather than, or at least in addition to, enticement to future ones. Whether such thanks was illegal was unclear.
Yet something shady had happened; why else had Colfax, most conspicuously, at first denied involvement? “If Mr. Colfax’s explanation is true, he is the victim of a train of circumstantial evidence almost unparalleled in judicial history,” the New York Tribunejibed. The investigative committee, at a loss as to what to do, rendered its version of a Solomonic judgment. It concluded that Ames was guilty of having given bribes but that no one was guilty of receiving them. Declaring that Ames had brought the House into “contempt and disgrace” and had committed offenses of a “dangerous character,” it nonetheless concluded that the other legislators neither were “aware of the object of Mr. Ames” nor “had any other purpose in taking this stock than to make a profitable investment.”17
The reaction to the report mirrored its ambivalent content. Ames expressed outrage at being singled out. “I alone am to be offered up to appease a public clamor,” he said. He added, “It’s like the man in Massachusetts who committed adultery, and the jury brought in a verdict that he was guilty as the devil, but that the woman was as innocent as an angel.” The New York Herald was upset that the others had got off. “Good government has received a deadly stab,” it said. The previously skeptical New York Timeswas now even more skeptical of the whole business, but for the opposite reason. “To refuse to censure the holders of that stock is to say that the Congressional standard of morals is not high enough to condemn it.”18
The scandal, however, wasn’t without effect. Several politicians exited the affair badly wounded. Schuyler Colfax never recovered; James Blaine recovered but not fully. Oakes Ames dropped dead months later, from a combination of anger, embarrassment, and arterial blockage.
ALCOHOL AND EXCISE taxes had long been a problem for Americans, in part because liquor was (and is) so tempting to tax. The Sugar Act of 1764 helped trigger the American Revolution not because it jeopardized the colonists’ candy but because it threatened their rum, into which the sugar—molasses—was distilled. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 provoked George Washington into reprising his role as horseback general, this time against tax-resisting Pennsylvania distillers.
Whiskey retained its popularity after the Civil War with both the drinking public and the taxing public officials. But now a new ingredient entered the cocktail, in the form of industrial capitalism. Distilling had become a big business, and distillers discovered a commensurately large interest in avoiding the taxes the government levied. A group of distillers in St. Louis might not have been more venal than distillers elsewhere, but they had better access to the Grant administration. General John McDonald was an old friend and wartime comrade of the president, and a favorite of Mrs. Grant’s family besides. His connections accounted for his appointment as collector of internal revenue for the St. Louis district, which comprised seven midwestern states. McDonald had friends in St. Louis with allies in distilling; introductions were made and McDonald let out that he shared the whiskey men’s view that their taxes were too high. He agreed to reduce the effective rate by undercounting the kegs; they demonstrated their appreciation monetarily. Doubtless both parties told themselves—accurately enough—that they weren’t alone in their rebate arrangement. But, like John Rockefeller and the railroads during this same period, they agreed that their deal should be kept quiet.
For a while it was. By the mid-1870s, however, the discrepancy between the number of barrels the distillers were shipping and the number they were paying tax on was so obvious as to elude only the willfully blind. In February 1875 the editor of the St. Louis Democrat, George Fishback, wrote to the secretary of the Treasury, Benjamin Bristow, that the tax evasion in Missouri had gotten out of control. “If the Secretary wants to break up the powerful ring which exists here,” Fishback said, “I can give him the name of a man who, if he receives the necessary authority and is assured of absolute secrecy about the matter, will undertake to do it.… I will guarantee success.”
Benjamin Bristow was a recent addition to Grant’s cabinet. He had served in the Justice Department as solicitor general and had entertained hopes of becoming attorney general. But after Treasury secretary William Richardson came under fire for tax farming—for providing information on tax delinquents to bounty hunters, who then shook down the deadbeats in exchange for part of the payoff—Grant had to replace him. Bristow, with a reputation for belligerent incorruptibility, seemed just the person.
He accepted George Fishback’s offer. Myron Colony, the man Fishback had referred to, was a tireless reporter who knew everyone with anything on the whiskey dodge. He compiled a huge dossier on McDonald, the distillers, and their many accomplices and delivered it to Bristow. The Treasury secretary summoned McDonald to Washington and showed him the evidence against him. McDonald confessed but apparently—testimony differed on this point—requested amnesty in exchange for a promise to collect and hand over all the unpaid taxes. To strengthen his request he warned that prosecution of himself and the distillers would gravely damage the Republican party and the president.
Bristow had no intention of letting McDonald cop a plea, and he proceeded with the investigation. At first he received the support of the president. “Let no guilty man escape,” Grant declared, although adding the curious qualifier “if it can be avoided.” But when the trail led to Orville Babcock, a Grant staffer from the war and currently a White House aide, the president’s resolve flagged. A central part of the evidence was a series of telegrams to Babcock, including one that read:
WE HAVE OFFICIAL INFORMATION THAT THE ENEMY WEAKENS.
PUSH THINGS.
SYLPH
Bristow didn’t know who “Sylph” was or what “enemy” was referred to, and neither did Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont, to whom he took the message. But they concurred that the matter required Grant’s attention.
“We brought the telegrams to the President,” Pierrepont afterward told congressional investigators. “The President called Babcock into the room before us and asked him what it meant.” Babcock answered ambiguously. “The explanation gave me no light at all,” Pierrepont said, “but it seemed to be a satisfactory explanation to the President.” Grant’s low threshold for satisfaction struck Pierrepont and Bristow as part of the problem. “The Secretary of the Treasury and I then both insisted that this was a matter so serious that if he”—Babcock—“could give an explanation which, as he said, was complete and perfect, and if he was perfectly innocent, as he said he was, he should go out there”—before the public—“and make an explanation.… We pressed it as a thing that he ought to do on the spot.” Grant reluctantly agreed. Babcock, cornered, said he would give the explanation Pierrepont and Bristow demanded. But he left without doing so, and in fact never did.19
Instead he and the other conspirators threw up a smoke screen by suggesting that “Sylph” was a prostitute with whom Grant had conducted an adulterous liaison. To pursue the matter would subject the president and especially Mrs. Grant to public humiliation. Bristow and Pierrepont ignored the ruse, and the attorney general prepared to prosecute Babcock, who thereupon requested a military trial. Grant acceded, despite Pierrepont’s express warning that a court-martial would not preclude civil prosecution. Grant packed the three-general tribunal with friends who understood that their job was to acquit Babcock and who did just that.
The case then went to the civil courts. A St. Louis grand jury indicted Babcock and McDonald, among hundreds of others. Grant let McDonald fend for himself but refused to abandon Babcock. Despite the overwhelming evidence against Babcock, the president determined to travel to St. Louis and testify to his innocence. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish and other senior members of the cabinet talked Grant out of the mission; the thought of America’s chief executive under cross-examination made them shudder—for Grant and for the office. Grant contented himself with giving testimony at the White House. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite presided over the session and signed Grant’s deposition.
Grant’s statement effectively stymied the prosecution. Despite the odor that had surrounded his administration since the gold conspiracy, not many Americans considered him personally dishonest. And those who knew him best were most convinced of his integrity. “I do not think it would have been possible for Grant to have told a lie, even if he had composed it and written it down,” Hamilton Fish said. Largely as a result, Babcock was acquitted. Grant might have kept him on the White House staff, but Fish and others convinced the president he was badly damaged goods, and he was forced to resign. (He nonetheless landed appointment as inspector of lighthouses; he drowned on the job in Florida).
Yet many others, including McDonald, were convicted. “Sylph” became to the Grant administration what “Crédit Mobilier” was to Congress; popular opinions differed chiefly over which branch of government was the more venal.20
WILLIAM BELKNAP WEIGHED IN on the side of the executive, but not by choice. Belknap was a handsome man who married three beautiful and increasingly ambitious women. The first died before General Belknap—a veteran of Shiloh and Sherman’s march to the sea—became Grant’s secretary of war in 1869. The War Department post required special skills, not least the ability to get along with Sherman, who commanded both the army and the continuing adulation of many Republicans. The latter constantly tried to push him into politics. Sherman still resisted, to the relief of Grant and the several Republicans who hoped to succeed Grant in the White House. But one never knew with Sherman when his temper might explode and he decide he could run the country better than the fools who currently made a hash of it.
Belknap combined sufficient deference and avoidance to keep Sherman calm, for which Grant was grateful. But Belknap’s second wife—the former Carrie Tomlinson—thought the president’s gratitude ought to take more substantial form. Mrs. Belknap learned that a perquisite of her husband’s office was the right to award concessions for army trading posts in the West. “She asked me one day in the course of a conversation why I did not apply for a post-tradership,” Caleb Marsh, a Belknap acquaintance, subsequently informed a congressional committee. “I asked what they were, and was told that they were, many of them, very lucrative offices or posts in the gift of the Secretary of War, and that if I wanted one she would ask the Secretary for one for me.” Marsh said he thought such favors went to people with important political connections. Carrie Belknap replied that other considerations sometimes tipped the balance. Marsh apparently caught her drift, although his memory wavered with the congressional committee. “I do not remember saying that if I had a valuable post of that kind that I would remember her, but I do remember her saying something like this: ‘If I can prevail upon the Secretary of War to award you a post you must be careful to say nothing to him about presents, for a man once offered him $10,000 for a tradership of this kind, and he told him that if he did not leave the office he would kick him down stairs.’ ” Marsh kept these words in mind a few weeks later when Carrie Belknap informed him that the trading post at Fort Sill in Oklahoma Territory was vacant and that her husband was inclined to grant it to him. In fact the post wasn’t vacant, and the current concessionaire, John S. Evans, wished to keep it. But Marsh didn’t want to operate the post himself, merely to collect the profits, and so he cut a deal with Evans whereby Evans agreed to pay him $15,000 a year, in quarterly installments. This figure was later trimmed to $12,000 after the army decided to reduce the size of the garrison at Fort Sill. “When the first remittance came to me,” Marsh said, “say probably in November 1870, I sent one-half thereof to Mrs. Belknap.”21
The payments—a tidy complement to Belknap’s eight-thousand-dollar annual salary—continued after Carrie Belknap suddenly died only a month later. Marsh comforted the grieving husband and the deceased’s widowed sister, Amanda Tomlinson Bower, who took charge of the Belknaps’ infant son. Marsh suggested that the payments could furnish a trust for the boy. Amanda Bower agreed to oversee the trust. But then the child, too, died, leaving no one to accept the payments but Belknap himself—and Amanda, who married Belknap in 1873.
Compared with the whiskey scandal, which involved hundreds of people and millions of dollars, the pay-for-trade conspiracy was puny. And had the Democrats, again in charge of the House of Representatives after the 1874 elections, not possessed other reasons to investigate the Grant administration, they probably never would have come across the War Department plot. Even then they might have missed the Belknap connection if Amanda Belknap hadn’t insisted on entertaining in a fashion incommensurate with her husband’s salary. But the Democrats did discover the trading post deal, which did directly involve a cabinet secretary. Belknap couldn’t decide what to do—whether to brazen out the investigation or confess. He and Marsh agreed on a code. If Belknap telegraphed, “I hope your wife is well,” Marsh should flee the country, preventing his examination by the committee. If Belknap wired, “I hope your wife is better,” Marsh should meet with Belknap for further consultation.
The committee subpoenaed Marsh. Belknap, still not knowing whether to let Marsh talk, sent the second telegram, and Marsh came to the Belknap home. Amanda Belknap urged him to tell the committee that he and she had engaged in business over the years and that the payments were part of this business—“that all this money I had sent the Secretary was money that she had from time to time deposited with me as a kind of banker,” Marsh later explained. Belknap himself credited the committee with more sense; the members would surely see through such a tale. Half his mind wanted Marsh to take the first ship to France; the other half realized Marsh’s flight would be tantamount to a guilty plea by them both. “He was greatly excited,” Marsh recalled. “He said if I went”—to Europe—“he would be ruined.” Marsh replied that he wouldn’t perjure himself to save Belknap. “I said I would ruin him if I went before the committee.”
In the event, Marsh testified. The information he provided the committee persuaded the House to consider articles of impeachment against Belknap. Grant summoned Belknap to hear the secretary’s side of the story; Belknap broke down and tearfully confessed to the bribery scheme. He implored Grant to accept his resignation, which the president did, hoping this would end the matter.
It ended the matter, but not at once. The Democrats in the House refused to be satisfied with Belknap’s resignation and moved to impeach him. House Republicans, freed by Grant’s acceptance of Belknap’s resignation from having to defend the now-former secretary, joined in a voice vote endorsing the articles of impeachment. A desultory trial took place in the Senate, which failed to convict not because anyone doubted Belknap’s culpability but because a score of senators thought their house lacked jurisdiction over someone no longer in the executive branch. “In this country, by the Constitution, private citizens are not impeachable,” Roscoe Conkling of New York observed, explaining his acquittal vote.22
STILL THE SCANDALS didn’t cease. Grant’s minister to Britain was discovered to have employed his position to promote a mining scheme in which he had an ownership interest. The son of the secretary of the interior received favored treatment with respect to surveying contracts. And Grant’s brother Orvil got paid for a surveying job in Wyoming Territory he didn’t perform. “Did you ever know Orvil Grant to do any surveying in that territory?” the key material witness was asked. “No, sir,” he replied. “I do not think he was ever in the territory.”23
That the scandals climaxed in the summer of America’s centennial struck many as evidence of how far the republic had fallen since the founding. Some observers cited a decline in the morality of public officials. The Reverend De Witt Talmage pointed to William Tweed as a caution against the pride that goeth before a fall. “Alas! Alas!” the minister declaimed from his Manhattan pulpit while Tweed coughed himself to death in the Ludlow Street jail. “Young men, look at the contrast—in an elegant compartment of a Wagner palace car, surrounded by wine, cards, and obsequious attendants, going to his Senatorial place at Albany; then look again at the plain box … behold the low-studded room, looking out upon a mean little dingy court where, a prisoner, exhausted, forsaken, miserable, betrayed, sick, William M. Tweed lies a-dying. From how high up to how low down!”24
Others blamed the competition among the newspapers—not for the misdeeds per se but for the scandal mongering that made the current generation appear especially culpable. Was the Crédit Mobilier affair really worse than the speculation in western land and Revolutionary War bonds that had inspired much of the support for the Constitution? Did Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, those first tempters of the Grant administration, do anything Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, hadn’t dreamed of and gone to prison for? Tweed stole public money but didn’t kill anyone or threaten the nation’s security, unlike his Tammany Hall predecessor, Aaron Burr, who after shooting Alexander Hamilton tried to carve an empire for himself from the American Southwest.
Republicans blamed the Democrats for partisan exaggeration. Every administration had bad apples, the Republicans said. The surprise wasn’t that there were so many in the Grant administration but that there were so few—so few, in fact, that the desperate Democrats had to resort, for their pièce de résistance, to impeaching a man who had already left office.
Yet for all the attempts to explain the scandals away, a feeling persisted that something was different this time. The scoundrels now operated on a scale surpassing anything imagined before the Civil War. The Tweed ring stole not thousands of dollars but millions. The whiskey ring involved hundreds of distillers and revenue agents, not the odd bootlegger and corrupt cop. The pall of Black Friday spread far beyond New York. Corporations were consolidating; criminals were, too.
Then there was the public reaction—or lack of public reaction. To many Americans, the really shocking thing about all the scandals was how little shock they generated. Voters ousted the Tweed ring, but Tammany Hall survived. The Grant administration spat out one crook after another, but the president won reelection in 1872 and voters might well have given him a third term if offered the chance.
Who could blame them? Weren’t the bosses and the operators and the peculators simply employing in the public sector the same values for which Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan were being so richly rewarded in the private sector? “Tweed was the most striking illustration of a very common faith,” George Curtis wrote: “belief in the Almighty Dollar.” Rockefeller and the other capitalists often professed motives of progress and efficiency, but at the end of the quarter and the year the undisputed measure of their success was the profit they amassed. Gould had deprived more people of more money than Tweed ever did, but Gould never went to jail. Rockefeller received more in kickbacks—from railroads—in a week than William Belknap got in his whole life, yet Belknap was ruined while Rockefeller grew richer and richer.25
There was a lesson in this, but the nature of the lesson was hard to discern. Did capitalism inevitably corrupt democracy? Was honesty, whether in business or government, simply outmoded? Buyers were warned to beware in the marketplace; should keepers of the public conscience declare caveat civis and leave it at that? Or should voters just throw the rascals out and start over?