11
The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout.
—WALT WHITMAN,
Democratic Vistas
WHEN the New York caisson hit the water it made such a wave that several tugs standing close by were tossed about in a “very sportive manner” and two men in a rowboat, who had come in close for a better view, were immediately swamped and had to be rescued. Because of the comparatively shallow water in front of the Sixth Street launchways, the caisson had been built with a temporary floor, which was the reason for the wave. Otherwise the launching had gone off perfectly, as expected. Indeed, the engineers had been so confident of success that Emily Roebling and Mrs. William Kingsley had gone along with their husbands and several others on top of the caisson as it was sent hurtling down the ways.
At a large luncheon served in the Webb & Bell offices afterward everybody had been in high spirits. “We are now on foreign soil!” proclaimed John W. Hunter of Brooklyn, one of the stockholders. Everyone cheered. Then Henry Slocum got up and said he and Kinsella had agreed that Kinsella would do the speaking, while he did the thinking. But Kinsella interrupted immediately. Slocum was to do the drinking not the thinking, the editor said, and the laughter was very great according to later accounts.
After that Kinsella reminisced about the days when the bridge was no more than “the shadow in the brain of one man,” as he put it. “When William C. Kingsley [loud applause] was the founder, he put up more of fortune and reputation than any man I ever knew to do in an enterprise at the time so shadowy.” Then Slocum was on his feet again to propose a toast to Kingsley “as the man to whom we are more indebted than to all others.” There was a standing ovation for Kingsley, who said only that he had never made a speech in his life and asked instead that everyone drink to the health of Colonel Roebling. According to one version of the scene, Roebling was “subsequently introduced and loudly cheered, but not threats nor blandishments could coerce a speech out of him.”
The launching of the caisson and the celebrative luncheon afterward took place on May 8, 1871. There was still a great deal to be done, however, before the caisson would be ready for use. By the time it was completely fitted out, towed to position, and sufficiently loaded down so that the men could begin work inside, seven more months would have passed, the year would be nearly over, and by then if anyone were to use the word “shadowy” to describe the early business of building the bridge, it would be for quite different reasons. For by the time the New York caisson would start its descent, the Tweed Ring would have collapsed, something no one would have believed possible in May of 1871.
The year had begun splendidly for Tweed. On New Year’s Day Oakey Hall was again sworn in as mayor of New York and John T. Hoffman as governor. If everything went according to Tweed’s plan, 1872 would see Hoffman elected President of the United States, Hall governor, and Tweed a United States Senator, or at least so it seemed to a number of political observers.
The annual Americus Club Ball in early January had been a triumph. The club stood on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound, at Greenwich, Connecticut, not far from Tweed’s own summer place. It was as sumptuous as any club in the country and the pinnacle of Tammany social life. On the night of the ball the great halls of the clubhouse were described as “a labyrinth of festoons, flowers, fountains, flags, and fir trees.” To the obvious delight of the club president, Tweed, a thousand canaries chirped in gilded cages hung everywhere about the hall, while on the stage before the dance floor there blazed an immense gaslight rendition of the Tammany banner, the familiar snarling tiger’s head of Tweed’s old Americus Six fire company. Vases of cut flowers lined the walls, and fronting the main entrance was a life-sized photograph of the great man himself, hand-colored with crayons. Some six thousand people were there, the papers said, making it “a gala pageant such as is rarely witnessed anywhere in the world.”
But later in the month, on the night of the 24th, a sleighing accident had occurred north of Central Park, in which a man named James Watson had been badly injured. Twenty years before, Watson had been behind bars in the Ludlow Street Jail when the warden put him in charge of the prison records because of his exquisite penmanship. But Watson had advanced rapidly in the time since and was now County Auditor and trusted bookkeeper for the Tweed Ring. A week after the accident Watson was dead and so began the fall of the house of Tweed.
The newspapers made little of Watson’s demise and no one thought much more about it. Such momentous events were taking place elsewhere in the world that public interest in the Ring and its doings had greatly subsided. The Franco-Prussian War, which had begun the summer before in Europe, was coming to a thunderous conclusion. On January 18, in a solemn ceremony at Versailles, the German Empire had been born. Incredibly, France was about to be overthrown. Popular support for the Germans was enormous in the United States and in New York especially. King William I of Germany was described by the papers as an affable, courteous old gentleman and a special favorite of children. Heroic Prussian infantry charged across the illustrated pages of Harper’s Weekly.On January 27, newsboys in the streets were hollering the surrender of Paris. But the bloodshed had continued for months afterward, as civil war broke out within the city, and the New York papers were filled with grisly accounts of hostages murdered by the Communards.
Not until the last of May was Tweed back in the news to any great degree and even then the occasion was a happy one, the publicity just what Tweed wanted. One of Tweed’s daughters, Miss Mary Amelia Tweed, was being married to Mr. Arthur Ambrose Maginnis of New Orleans and the father of the bride and his friends put on quite a show.
The wedding took place at seven o’clock on the evening of May 31, 1871, in Trinity Chapel, where, at the appointed hour, “a richly attired audience” watched Tweed, daughter on arm, come slowly, grandly down the aisle to the tune of Mendelssohn’s march. The bride wore white corded silk, “décolleté, with demi-sleeves, and immense court train.” There were orange blossoms in her hair and she carried a huge white bridal bouquet. But the diamonds were what everyone talked about later. “On the bride’s bosom flashed a brooch of immense diamonds,” said the Sun, “and long pendants, set with large solitaire diamonds, sparkled in her ears.” On the white satin shoes she wore there glittered tiny diamond buttons.
The mother of the bride, attired in salmon-colored silk, also wore “splendid diamonds,” and it was noted that “Mr. Tweed himself wore black evening dress, and a magnificent diamond flashed on his bosom.”
After the service Tweed put on a reception at his Fifth Avenue mansion, where a blue silk awning and a Brussels carpet had been run out to the curbstone and a huge crowd had gathered in the street. The house was ablaze with lights. A fountain played at one corner. Inside, the rooms were a mass of flowers. “Imagine all this,” one dazzled reporter wrote, “lighted up with the utmost brilliancy, and hundreds of ladies and gentlemen in all the gorgeousness of full dress and flashing with diamonds, listen to the delicious strains of the band and inhale in spirit the sweet perfume which filled the atmosphere, and some inadequate notion can be formed of the magnificence of the scene.”
The dinner was catered by Delmonico’s, but the main attraction was a display of wedding presents in a big room upstairs. The gifts lined all four walls and were said to surpass anything seen since the marriage of the daughter of the Khedive of Egypt two years before. There were forty sets of sterling silver. One piece of jewelry alone was known to have cost $45,000. Peter “Brains” Sweeny gave diamond bracelets “of fabulous magnificence,” and Tweed’s two other fellow stockholders in the Bridge Company, Smith and Connolly, proved equally generous. The Herald came up with an estimated cash value of everything on display: “Seven hundred thousand dollars!”
The wedding was the high-water mark of the Ring’s opulence and for Tweed it was a great blunder. The public, dazzled and delighted at first, began to ask questions afterward. How could a man who had spent his whole life working in moderately paid positions with the city live in such style? Where did the likes of Police Superintendent Kelso get money enough to buy a wedding gift that, as the papers reported, was the “exact duplicate” of the one presented by Jim Fisk? People said the wedding was proof positive of the corruption the Times had been making such a commotion over and papers other than the Times took up the cry.
“What a testimony of the loyalty, the royalty, and the abounding East Indian resources of Tammany Hall,” wrote the Herald with bitter sarcasm two days after the wedding. “Was there any Democracy to compare with thy Democracy, in glory, power, and equal rights, under the sun? Never! And it is just the beginning of the good time coming. Don’t talk of Jeff Davis and his absurd Democracy; don’t mention the Democracy of the Paris Commune, as representing true Democratic principles; but come to the fountainhead of Democracy, the old Wigwam, and you will get it there—if you get within the lucky circle of the ‘magic’ Ring.”
So with summer coming on, the public was ripe for disclosures and as chance would have it things had been happening inside the “lucky circle” that would reveal for the first time and in plain figures examples of such outrageous plunder that Tweed’s wedding expenditures would look rather modest by contrast. The pattern of events was like something from one of the popular melodramas of the time, for it was on the very day of the wedding that a man named Matthew J. O’Rourke quit his job as County Bookkeeper, taking with him a package of documents he had been quietly assembling.
O’Rourke was a newspaperman who had been hired two months earlier when the County Bookkeeper of longstanding was moved into the late James Watson’s place as County Auditor. For some strange reason Tweed’s people had not bothered to take O’Rourke into their confidence. Moreover, O’Rourke had long had a claim against the city which the Ring had ignored. So he had very carefully copied down a number of choice samples from the ill-fated Watson’s old account books and these he delivered to the offices of The New York Times.
Watson had been at the nerve center of the Ring. Indeed, if there was “magic” to the Ring, Watson was the unseen assistant who made it work, and as with most grand deceptions the secret was extremely simple.
Watson merely required everyone who received a contract from the city to increase his bills before submitting them by 50 to 65 per cent. Watson paid the face amount of the bill, then the contractor returned the overcharge in cash, and Watson, like a dutiful paymaster, handed it out within the Ring. Among New York contractors it was commonly said, “You must do just as Jimmy tells you, and you will get your money.”
Anyone who knew a little bookkeeping could look at Watson’s voucher records and see what was going on. O’Rourke, for example, judged from what he saw that the Ring had made off with $75 million since 1869.
Watson had worked directly for Comptroller Connolly. Why Connolly had been so careless about whom he let see Watson’s books is hard to fathom. But the books were left so unguarded that the Times soon received a second bundle of figures from a man named William Copeland, who had copied down still further revelations. *
Tweed found out that the Times had the material before any of it appeared in print and he reacted predictably. Figuring that George Jones, publisher of the Times, had his price, like any man, Tweed told Connolly to go see him. Connolly offered Jones five million dollars to kill the story. Jones declined, reportedly saying to Connolly, “I don’t think the devil will ever make a higher bid for me than that.” Connolly persisted. “Why with that sum you could go to Europe and live like a prince,” he said. “Yes,” answered Jones, “but I should know that I was a rascal.”
To Tweed the time seemed also right for silencing Thomas Nast. A well-known banker was selected to call on Nast. The banker told Nast that his artistic talents were much admired by certain gentlemen, that these same gentlemen thought so highly of Nast that they would be willing to put up $100,000 to help him further develop his genius in Europe. Nast asked if he might get $500,000 to make the trip. “You can,” the banker is supposed to have answered most enthusiastically. “Well, I don’t think I’ll do it,” Nast said. “I made up my mind not long ago to put some of those fellows behind bars, and I am going to put them there.” Whereupon Nast was told to be careful lest he put himself in a coffin first. (Later, after the Times opened fire on him, Tweed said that were he a younger man he would have gone and killed Jones personally.)
The Times began running transcripts from Watson’s account books in early July, starting with some armory frauds O’Rourke had copied down. (Ten old stables rented by the Ring for practically nothing had been sublet to the county as armories for $85,000 a year; the buildings had not been used at all, still the county had paid out nearly half a million dollars just for repairs on them.) Later in the month a special supplement was gotten out by the Times documenting the outlandish courthouse swindles, among other things. Two hundred thousand copies were sold out at once. Horace Greeley wrote in the Tribune that if the Times had its facts straight, then Mayor Oakey Hall and Connolly ought to be breaking rocks in a state prison. In the meantime, however, on July 12, the Ring had been dealt still another blow and, quite unintentionally, by some of its most ardent supporters.
July 12 was the day for the annual Orangemen’s Parade, in honor of the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The event had caused a serious riot the year before, in Elm Park. Some two thousand Protestant Irish Orangemen gathered for a picnic had been set upon by about three times as many Irish Catholics armed with clubs and pistols. The police had arrived eventually, but not before several people had been killed on both sides and scores severely wounded. This year, fearing the same would happen again, Mayor Hall had forbidden the Orangemen to hold their parade. (Though himself a Protestant and of English ancestry, the Elegant Oakey was accustomed to reviewing St. Patrick’s Day parades dressed in a green cassimere suit with shamrock buttons, a bright-green cravat, and green kid gloves.) Hall’s decision provoked a storm of protest. The Ring was pandering to the Catholic rabble it was said. New York had come to a terrible pass if decent people were no longer able to parade peaceably without fear of mob violence.
As a result Governor Hoffman, probably acting with Tweed’s consent, if not at his direction, came rushing down from Albany to issue a proclamation saying that anyone who wished to “assemble and march in peaceable procession” was at liberty to do so and would get full protection from the police and the military. It was an immensely popular move. Some 160 Orangemen decided to go ahead with their parade. Four regiments of National Guard were ordered to stand by, including the Ninth, in which Tweed’s bosom friend Fisk was a colonel. Catholic priests called for peace and understanding, while it was rumored that in Brooklyn trained gangs of Irish thugs were getting ready for action.
The line of march was from the Gideon Lodge of Orangemen in Lamartine’s Hall, at Eighth Avenue and 29th Street, downtown to Cooper Union, at Eighth Street and the Bowery. Nothing much happened until the Orangemen reached 26th Street, where the police, marching on either side, had to force a path through a crowd blocking the way. At 25th Street the police were ordered to charge. By then stones and bricks were coming down from housetops. Near the corner of 24th Street a shot was fired. The police said later it came from an upstairs window, but others claimed a rifle went off accidentally among the Ninth Regiment, which had been drawn up at 25th Street, with the comic-looking Fisk prancing about on horseback.
Whichever the case, the bullet took off part of the head of a private in Company K, of the Ninth. Instantly, without orders, the soldiers opened fire into the crowds. The fusillade was very brief. When it was over, two soldiers, one policeman, and a total of forty-six bystanders, including a number of women and children, were dead.
(Fisk had dismounted in the midst of all this and disappeared into a saloon, where, it was later learned, he escaped out a back door, scaled several fences, got rid of his uniform in a house on 23rd Street, then fled as swiftly as possible to Long Branch, New Jersey, the fashionable seashore resort.)
Everyone was furious at the Ring, including most of the Irish Catholics who had long been the very lifeblood of Tammany. Among the Protestants there was angry talk of Irish despotism. “Write on the tombstone of Wednesday’s victims: ‘Murdered by the criminal management of Mayor A. Oakey Hall’” one man commented. Others felt the riot was symptomatic of a larger tragedy. “Behind the folly and wickedness of the Irish,” said The Nation, “there lie American shortcoming, corruption, and indifference.”
The problem was, however, that most of the people who could have organized any sort of movement against Tweed were out of town for the summer. The Times continued its assault day after day, but nothing happened. When Tweed was pressed to comment on what the Times was printing about him, he exclaimed defiantly, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
As it was, nothing would be done about it until the end of the summer, when a mass meeting was called at Cooper Union on the night of Monday, September 4. Former Mayor William Havemeyer presided, thousands attended. In no time the rather refined and reserved-looking crowd was in a fine frenzy. “There is no power like the power of the people armed, aroused, and kindled with the enthusiasm of a righteous wrath!” said Judge James Emott from the speaker’s platform. No more could there be any denying the frauds of the Ring, he said, and in obvious answer to Tweed’s now famous retort, he asked, “Now, what are you going to do about these men?” “Hang them!” shouted voices from the audience.
A so-called Committee of Seventy was organized that night, and included among its membership some of the most distinguished names in New York—Judge Emott, Robert Roosevelt, Andrew Green, who had been a pallbearer at John A. Roebling’s funeral, and Abram Hewitt. Also among them was Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy friend and New York neighbor of Hewitt’s. Tilden was a rather cold, calculating corporation lawyer and a Tammany Democrat of great ambition, who had had little derogatory to say about Tweed prior to this, but who now took charge of the committee and shortly became known as the leader of the entire reform movement.
The campaign to destroy the Ring was on in earnest. On September 12 someone broke into Comptroller Connolly’s offices and stole all the vouchers for the year 1870. The theft was a great mystery according to city officials. But in Harper’s Weekly Nast pictured Connolly, Sweeny, Tweed, and Hall looking highly ridiculous as they proclaimed their innocence and a few weeks later Nast had the same group cowering in the shadow of a gallows.
Secretly, Tweed began transferring all his real estate holdings to his son. Hall tried to get Connolly to resign, while Connolly, terrified the others were about to throw him to the lions, consulted with Tilden, who told him to take a leave of absence and appoint the upright Andrew Green as Acting Comptroller. This was done. Armed guards were stationed in the Comptroller’s office to watch over what remained of the records. The reformers had achieved a beachhead.
Tweed, however, was anything but placid through all this. He had power aplenty still and he had no intention of giving up without a fight. The real test, he knew, the only one that mattered, would be in November, at the polls. His own term as State Senator would expire on December 31.
First he had himself unanimously re-elected chairman of the General Committee of Tammany Hall. Then he went off to the Democratic state convention at Rochester, taking along a gang of New York thugs to remind any wavering delegates where their sympathies lay. Bribes were handed out liberally. Tilden and some other reform delegates put up a fight of sorts, but Tweed was in control the whole time and everyone knew it. He got the nominations he wanted, including his own.
Back on the Lower East Side of New York the day after the convention ended, Tweed stood before some twenty thousand cheering followers, in Tweed Plaza, doffed a little Scotch cap, bowed low, and said the following:
At home again amidst the haunts of my childhood and scenes where I had been always surrounded by friends, I feel I can safely place myself and my record, all I have performed as a public official plainly before your gaze. The manner in which I have been received tonight has sent a throb to my heart, but I would be unjust to myself and unjust to those who have seen fit to entrust me with office if at times like these, when to be a Democrat, when to hold a public office is to be aspersed and condemned without trial, traduced without stint, there was not felt to be engraven on my heart the proud satisfaction that as a public officer, I can go to the friends of my childhood, take them by the hand, take them in a friendly manner, and saying to them, “There is my record,” and finding that it meets with their approval.
For most Americans the evils of the Tweed Ring were the natural outgrowth of the essential evil of big cities. New York being the biggest of big cities, it would quite naturally produce a Tweed. New York simply got what New York deserved was the feeling. The city was mostly foreign-born after all, better than half Roman Catholic. The golden age of representative government had lasted less than a hundred years learned men were saying gloomily. Jefferson had been right about what cities would do to American life. The future now belonged to the alien rabble and the likes of Tweed. “Perhaps the title ‘Boss of New York’ will grow into permanence and figure in history like that of the doge of Venice,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary. Even Walt Whitman of Brooklyn, who celebrated the “power, fullness, and motion” of New York in his Democratic Vistas published that year, wrote savagely of the “deep disease” of America, which he diagnosed as “hollowness at heart.
But if in New York—even in New York—men of principle, men of integrity, education, and property, could rise up and triumph over a Tweed, then perhaps there was hope for the Republic. The idea was a tonic. Numerous other cities had their “mute, inglorious Tweeds,” as E. L. Godkin wrote in The Nation, and other cities would have their own spirited crusades for the restoration of political virtue. Reform groups became the fashion. Committees were formed. Silent indifference to political immorality was no longer acceptable in polite society and Brooklyn was no exception.
As might be expected the impact of things happening so close by in New York was especially pronounced in Brooklyn. The talk that October was nearly all politics. The editors of the Union, in their offices directly below the Bridge Company, wrote that Brooklyn could well use the services of New York’s Committee of Seventy and that there had been “fear and trembling” among certain Brooklyn officials ever since the assault on Tweed began.
That election frauds had made the Honorable Martin Kalbfleisch mayor of Brooklyn two years before was common knowledge. That there would be more of the same this time seemed inevitable. But even Kalbfleisch appeared to be caught up with reform spirit. He had denounced the Democrats and was running for re-election as an independent. So it was a three-way race. The Republicans had a candidate and Boss McLaughlin had put up a former mayor named Powell, a decent enough man, as were most McLaughlin mayors, with the notable exception of Kalbfleisch.
The Democrats appeared to be in trouble for the first time in years. The opposition was calling for the downfall of the Brooklyn Ring along with the Tweed Ring. Kalbfleisch would assuredly take away more Democratic votes than Republican. For McLaughlin, for Murphy, Kingsley, and Thomas Kinsella, these were exceedingly busy times, with much at stake, not the least of which was the total say on how the Bridge Company ought to be run. Nobody who understood the realities of Brooklyn politics seriously thought the Democrats might lose, but at the same time the Democrats were taking no chances.
Then on the 23rd of October there was a horrible accident at the bridge. Two men had been killed, both married men with families. A third was so dreadfully mangled that little hope was held out for him, and five others were badly injured. Until now the bridge had had a perfect safety record. In the two years since construction began there had not been a single serious accident, no injuries to speak of, no loss of life. This was extraordinary, in view of the known hazards, and it was generally taken as a sign of conscientious management.
The Brooklyn tower by then had reached a height of about seventy feet. The day of the accident an eight-ton block of granite was being hauled to the top of the tower by one of the three huge boom derricks mounted there, which were all held in position by wire rigging, like the masts of a ship. Suddenly a socket in one of the guy wires broke and two derricks fell from the tower.
One man, a rigger on the derricks, was struck by a great wooden boom that sheared off half his skull. He was thrown down on the top of the tower, stone dead. “If he had stood still he would not have been injured,” C. C. Martin said later; “but when he heard everything crackling and crashing, he lost his presence of mind and ran out where the derrick was coming down just in time to be struck.”
Another man had been standing on an elevated railroad track that ran along the side of the tower facing the river, about fifty feet above the dock where the stone scows tied up. His job was to shove a little flatcar under the stones as they were hoisted by an engine on the dock, then move them into position to be picked up by one of the derricks on the tower. When the derricks fell, the stone suspended from one of them crashed through the track about twenty feet from the spot where he was standing. It would have missed him, in other words. But seeing it coming, he had fled to the end of the track and leaped off. The fall broke both of his legs and no one knew how much else internally. He died later.
The other man killed instantly was also on top of the tower. He too saw the derricks falling and tried to get out of the way by jumping over a granite block sitting on the masonry. Just as he jumped, the mast of one derrick fell on him, crushing him, face downward, into a crevice in the masonry no more than eight inches deep.
Roebling, Paine, and Collingwood were over on the New York side at the time, but C. C. Martin, who was in his office in the yard below, heard the crash and rushed up the narrow flight of stairs built at one corner of the tower. Martin found several men trying frantically and futilely to move the fallen derrick. The man caught beneath was unconscious but still alive. Martin sent for jacks and levers and in another fifteen minutes had the derrick up and off. The man was pulled out from under; he breathed a few times, as though his awful agony had been eased, then died.
The man’s name was Daugherty and he had been working near Thomas Douglas, the stonemason, who was foreman on the tower. Douglas had started off running in the same direction as Daugherty, but instead of trying to jump the stone block in the way, he had crouched down beside it. As a result the stone saved him. But when Daugherty was struck, his knees came down on Douglas’ back, pinning Douglas so he could not move. In his agony Daugherty kicked Douglas in the kidneys so severely that Douglas would never recover. He lived on for nearly two years after that, working part of the time, but troubled terribly by the injury and gradually growing worse. The story goes that he wanted to live only long enough to know that the Brooklyn tower was finished. When he was told that it had been, he died almost immediately afterward. “He was a splendid man,” Martin told reporters.
But the accident also left a lot of people wondering how well things were being managed by the Bridge Company and at a time when what the Bridge Company needed most was public confidence. The guy wire on the derrick broke because of a defective weld in one socket, as would be learned. The accident had not been caused by mismanagement or the use of shoddy equipment, but a great many people did not know that, or believe it if they did.
An investigation was called for and was conducted by the coroner, with the result that the Bridge Company was entirely exonerated and credited publicly with using the best-quality material and taking every precaution to guard against accidents. “This has been the case from the first and will continue to be,” William Kingsley stated; “no labor or expense will be spared to insure the safety of the employees.” The day before elections the Executive Committee would grant to each of the families of the deceased payments of $250, or a little better than three months’s wages.
But a few days after the accident and two weeks before the elections several hundred reform-minded Brooklynites met inside the Brooklyn Skating Rink to organize their own Committee of Fifty, as they called it, or the Rink Committee, as it would become popularly known—“to investigate charges of fraud, extravagance, and corruption in several departments of the city government.” Also included for investigation was the New York Bridge Company.
As expected, the Democrats won in Brooklyn, but by only a slim margin. They were immediately charged with bringing hired goons over from New York, with buying votes, with using repeaters, fictitious names, all the customary devices. Most of the charges were probably true. That there was fraud at the polls there is no doubt whatever. Later examinations would show that a minimum of six thousand illegal votes were cast. But only five men would be convicted in subsequent trials, all of them quite unknown and unimportant, largely because the Democrats had in their possession some damaging information concerning the prosecuting district attorney.
Powell was mayor now. McLaughlin, Kingsley, and the rest were all still in power. But across the river the election had destroyed the Tweed Ring.
The reformers had gone to work in New York as never before, and they had worked together, Republicans and Democrats. It was their one best and last chance, they believed. Young Men’s Reform Associations were organized. Clergymen called upon their congregations to do their duty. Newspapers and picture magazines described it as probably the most important election ever. On Election Day A. T. Stewart closed his store so every clerk could vote. Four regiments of militia backed up the police to see that everything was conducted properly at the polls and for the most part it was. Among many older, wealthier citizens, however, it was thought that very little would come of all this.
The reform ticket won by an overwhelming majority. Only two Tammany aldermen managed to survive. Tilden was elected to the State Assembly. Of the five Senatorial districts in the city, candidates put up by the Committee of Seventy were victorious in all but one—Tweed’s. But Tweed’s majority was less than half what it had been two years earlier and it had cost quite a sum of cash distributed about the ward. A few days after the votes were counted it was announced that the annual Americus Club Ball would be postponed.
Almost immediately the New York World sent a reporter across the river to interview the man thought to be the brains of the Kings County machine, William C. Kingsley. The World had been notably patient with Tweed all these years and now seemed eager to demonstrate that New York had no franchise on corruption. Kingsley stated categorically that there was no such thing as a Brooklyn Ring. Hugh McLaughlin, he said, lived in the plainest fashion. Why McLaughlin did not even keep a horse, Kingsley said with emphasis, and was probably not worth $100,000. The contrast with Tweed went without saying.
Kingsley conceded that the Kings County Democrats had taken something of a beating at the polls largely because of Tweed’s troubles. “That great tidal wave of corruption in sweeping over the land has damaged us here to a certain extent,” he remarked. But just so nobody misjudged his own motives, he concluded the interview by saying that he would be richer by $250,000 had he never had anything to do with politics.
Sometime soon after that the Committee of Fifty began looking into the management of the Bridge Company. The committee had already searched first for foul play in the management of Prospect Park and failed to turn up much. One or two other investigations were proving equally inconsequential, and among Brooklyn Democrats, the very conscientious chairman of the committee, a man named Backhouse, became the butt of innumerable bad jokes. But with the bridge the investigators believed they were on to something, and chiefly as a result of their curiosity a number of matters that had only been talked about privately before got into print a good deal sooner than they would have otherwise.
Tweed’s prominent role in the business of the bridge, not to mention that of his three Tammany compatriots, Smith, Connolly, and Sweeny, was, of course, an obvious embarrassment to the Bridge Company at this particular time and many Brooklyn people thought that role and its origins needed explaining. But it was Kingsley’s rather ill-defined position in the management of bridge business and how precisely he was being rewarded for his “services” that now became subjects of the keenest interest.
Kingsley was a difficult man to figure. His name was a football in Brooklyn, as Beecher would say. On the one hand he was a force for progress, industrious, respected by the respectable (Murphy and Stranahan, most notably), a good citizen if ever there was one. His firm of Kingsley & Keeney was building the Brooklyn Theater, lately the most talked about new building in town. He was one of the commissioners for the new capitol in Albany. His personal success was obvious. He was a kind and devoted family man. He attended church regularly. He was generous with his money, openly compassionate in times of trouble. When news of the Chicago Fire reached Brooklyn that October, he had been among the very first to do something. Along with Kalbfleisch, Judge McCue, and Isaac Van Anden, he had donated $100,000 to aid the stricken city. This “princely contribution” was announced as only the prelude to Brooklyn’s bounty (which it was) and the Eagle, of which Kingsley was part owner, led the campaign to raise more funds.
Still, there was the political side of the man, as everyone knew, and it was never quite clear just where his business interests stopped and his political interests began. When the Rink Committee people started poking into the financial side of the bridge, it began to look as though his ability to work with machine politicians and to profit thereby was not necessarily limited to the Brooklyn side of the river.
As it happens neither Tweed nor any of the three other directors from New York had been seen in Brooklyn since Tweed’s “troubles” began in early summer. Only that June, Tweed and Hugh Smith had been appointed once more to the Executive Committee and nobody had raised any objections. But neither man, nor Connolly, nor Sweeny, had had a thing to do with the bridge, or a word to say about it, since then, a decision doubtless strongly encouraged in the offices of the Bridge Company.
But as the company’s records would show, Tweed had actually appeared at only a very few committee sessions even before his troubles. Of some fifty-eight committee meetings held between September of 1869, when Tweed came over for the opening session, and July of 1871, when the Times opened its attack on him, Tweed had bothered to show up for just six meetings, including the first one—so very few, as a matter of fact, that anyone examining the records afterward would naturally take a special interest in those he did attend. Tweed’s time was exceedingly valuable after all, as everyone could now appreciate, so whenever he did make the effort to come to Brooklyn he must have had some definite purpose in mind.
The records were only a “synopsis,” the business of each meeting being described in about the briefest, most general language possible, but even so, by looking at those meetings that Tweed attended a pattern emerges. Nearly always some particularly interesting motion was taken up, put forward, often as not, by Tweed himself and, as would be noted, these same motions almost always appeared to be directly beneficial to William Kingsley.
It was on a motion from Tweed, for example, at the Executive Committee meeting of October 27, 1869, when the bridge was just getting under way, that the members resolved to pay Kingsley & Keeney $46,915.56 for lumber. Kingsley would later explain that the lumber had been bought from a Georgia dealer at the request of John A. Roebling, before the bridge began, in order to take advantage of an especially good price. Since the Bridge Company had no money then, Kingsley said, he had made the purchase in advance. So the committee was merely paying back what he had coming to him. Be that as it may, the record showed that Tweed was the one who urged that Kingsley get his money, plus interest, and naturally that left some people wondering.
Much more important, however, was the motion passed at the meeting held on July 5, 1870, a meeting at which Tweed appeared after a notable absence of more than six months. This was the day the commission arrangement that Tweed would later divulge was made official policy by the Bridge Company. The resolution, as recorded then, reads as follows:
Resolved, That fifteen per centum on the amount of expenditure for the construction of the foundation of the towers of the-Bridge on both sides of the river, up to high-water mark, including payments for land, be paid to William C. Kingsley, the General Superintendent, for his services and advances on behalf of this Company, up to the completion of such foundations.
It was customary always to include in the record the name of the member who put forward a motion, but in this case that was not done. The arrangement was not announced in the papers, moreover, the business of the committee still being conducted in private. It had not been discussed at the annual Board of Directors’ meeting a few weeks before or even mentioned, nor would it be when the directors convened again.
Also, quite interestingly, Tweed was back again at the bridge offices in early September to move that “such amounts as due Wm. C. Kingsley up to the present time…be paid, and that hereafter the amounts, becoming due under said resolution be paid monthly.” By the end of the year, expenditures on the bridge totaled $1,179,-521.40. This meant that a 15 per cent payment to Kingsley came to roughly $175,000. A check for this amount was made out to Kingsley January 3, 1871. If Kingsley’s official connection with the bridge was to be dated from the time he was formally appointed General Superintendent in October 1869, slightly more than a year earlier, then his compensation to date worked out to be a very handsome salary—about seven times that of the President of the United States, as would be noted in the papers.
Why Tweed took Kingsley’s interests so much to heart is not known for sure. Perhaps, as was speculated, the early “understanding” with the Ring people also included an agreement that Kingsley would turn over part of the 15 per cent in return for Tweed’s support in the Executive Committee or that Kingsley would merely apply part of the 15 per cent to what the four Tammany men owed him for the bridge stock he had handed over. That way nobody would suffer. Tweed, however, would testify that he himself had made no deals at all with Kingsley.
“Was he to divide the fifteen per cent with you?” Tweed would be asked.
“I had no understanding with him, sir,” Tweed answered, but then added, “I don’t know anything about the rest.” The rest meaning Smith, Sweeny, and Connolly. What they may have worked out with Kingsley on their own, Tweed could not say.
But since such arrangements had been shown to be the common practice of the Tweed Ring, a great many people, rightly or not, would conclude that that was just what Kingsley had agreed to. Moreover, it would also be pointed out that buying bridge stock by installments, 10 per cent at a time, which was all that was required and what Kingsley and most stockholders were doing, then drawing 15 per cent on several million dollars in expenditures, was a most attractive proposition from a business point of view.
Kingsley’s explanation of all this would present a different picture, understandably, but before he felt compelled to speak out publicly in his own defense, some noteworthy changes were made in the arrangement he had with the Bridge Company.
On November 13, just five days after the Brooklyn and New York elections—when it was very clear that Tweed was finished—the Executive Committee resolved that “the claim of William C. Kingsley under the resolution of July 5, 1870” was “hereby liquidated, with his consent.” For his services in behalf of the bridge the General Superintendent was now to receive “an amount not exceeding $125,000, in full.” No explanation for the change was included in the record and again nothing was said of it in the papers.
At the end of November Kingsley returned to the Bridge Company the fifty thousand dollars he had been overpaid, according to this new rule—returned it voluntarily, as his admirers would later stress, since there was nothing in the rule saying he had to do so. Again the record contains no explanation. The “construction” account is simply credited with fifty thousand dollars from Mr. Kingsley.
Presently, sometime in early December 1871, somebody went to the record book containing the old July 5 resolution and made an erasure, changing the “fifteen per centum” Kingsley was to get to read “five per centum.” No mention was made of this in the records. Nothing was said to explain why it was done or by whom.
Kingsley’s compensation as General Superintendent was to be the central issue to come out of the investigation, but serious questions would also arise concerning the company’s methods for purchasing materials. Who exactly decided what was to be bought from whom? Kingsley’s recommendations, so it appeared, always received the unqualified approval of the Executive Committee. Why were no bids advertised for? And more specifically, why had the Bridge Company in the past two years purchased more than $140,000 worth of lumber from the New York & Brooklyn Saw Mill & Lumber Company, or from that firm’s treasurer, a Mr. Ammerman, when, as was no secret, the General Superintendent was part owner of the firm? With how many other firms doing business with the bridge did Mr. Kingsley have “connections”? The impression was that the General Superintendent was deciding what to buy to build this bridge he had so eagerly wanted the two cities to pay for and that he was deciding to buy quite a lot from himself.
The Rink Committee would not be ready to report its conclusions until early spring the following year, 1872. By then Tweed had fallen on terrible times.
The elections had been over only a few days when Peter “Brains” Sweeny resigned his office as President of the Park Board and departed as swiftly as possible for France. Hugh Smith also fled the country, while Connolly by now was doing all he could to ingratiate himself with the New York Committee of Seventy. Only Tweed remained and his arrest seemed a matter of days.
Then it happened. On December 15 Tweed had been indicted by a Grand Jury on 120 counts. The following evening he was arrested by an old confederate, Sheriff Matthew T. Brennan, who came personally to Tweed’s office to conduct the historic ceremony. Touching Tweed lightly on the shoulder, Brennan said, giggling, “You’re the man I’m after, I guess.”
To nobody’s surprise Tweed got out on bail almost immediately. His first night as a “prisoner” he spent in the Metropolitan Hotel, which he owned. But he was forced to resign from the Public Works Department and on December 29 at Tammany Hall he was voted out of power as Grand Sachem.
Because the courts seemed unable to decide whether the county or the state had the right to bring Tweed to justice, it would be another year before he would go on trial. But his world was crumbling all around. On January 6 Jim Fisk was shot down in the Grand Central Hotel by Edward Stokes. Fisk had once swindled the wealthy Stokes out of the ownership of a Brooklyn oil refinery and Stokes for his part had been pursuing Fisk’s mistress, Josie Mansfield, with considerable success.
Tweed was among those at Fisk’s bedside as he lay dying. When Fisk expired at last, Tweed was beside himself. Of all the innumerable characters he had been in league with over the years, Fisk had been the most fun. The papers made much of the broken Tweed and his grief. Ten thousand people turned out to view the last remains of Fisk, lying in state, as it were, in his Erie Railroad office, but none would be so overcome as the former strong man of Tammany. The Eagle described the scene:
Most of all affected was William M. Tweed. He cried like a child. His sobs were heard all over the house and while his hand, trembling as if with ague, continually stroked the broad and placid forehead of his dear friend, his hot tears dropped like a rain shower into the coffin.
For a very large part of the public, Fisk’s murder seemed the just vengeance of the Almighty. From Plymouth Church came the voice of Beecher describing Fisk as “that supreme mountebank of fortune,” “absolutely without moral sense,” “absolutely devoid of shame,” “abominable in his lusts” and proclaiming that “by the hand of a fellow culprit, God’s providence struck him to the ground.”
Tweed’s arrest, the Fisk murder, Stokes on trial, smallpox in Brooklyn, the annual Assembly Ball at the Music Academy (“In the United States there is no pleasanter place than is our city socially…” said the Union); Talmage preaching out against Fielding and Dumas as obscene literature, Bill Cody playing in Brooklyn, the new Metropolitan Museum of Art opening in New York; talk of the upcoming Presidential elections, two thousand skaters on the lake in Prospect Park, and the East River spanned by gigantic cakes of ice—there was ever so much to read and talk about through that winter of 1871-72. But only rarely would there be anything in the papers about the actual building of the bridge. There was plenty of talk certainly about what the Rink Committee might turn up. But when Roebling announced in mid-December that the New York caisson was ready to begin its descent, only a line or two appeared in the papers. Not until later would it be considered a matter of the greatest interest, or would some observers find a certain irony in the idea that the New York foundation for the bridge was being sunk in a sewer.