BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (37 page)

On September 22, just five days after the Connolly-Green-Tilden
coup d’etat
and barely twenty-four hours after the voucher robbery arrests, with anti-Tweed passions at fever pitch in New York City, Tweed’s friends staged a magnificent rally for him. An estimated twenty thousand people
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packed Tweed Plaza at Canal Street and East Broadway, an enormous crowd far larger than at the reformers’ Cooper Union affair weeks earlier, “a human sea, surging, interested, eager, and curious,” as one reporter described it. They poured into the square from surrounding neighborhoods and filled every spot on the sidewalk, lining the rooftops, and crowding within windows of the redbrick buildings of nearby streets.
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Flags waved from a wooden grandstand alongside a huge portrait of the Boss, all framed by gaslights. “Our Choice for Senator: William M. Tweed” or “Tweed- The Old War-Horse,” read the banners in big block letters. Hundreds of Chinese lanterns strung around the square cast bright glowing halos of red, green, and purple. Skyrockets soared from bonfires as local Tweed clubs arrived marching in formation, some led by marshals on horseback.

After a few speeches, Tweed himself mounted the podium to an explosion of cheers, whistles, and applause that echoed through the alleys of lower Manhattan. He wore a dark brown coat and raised his little Scottish cap, standing for nearly five minutes without saying a word, “like a statue, while the storm of enthusiastic greeting ebbed and flowed over the great gathering,” another newsman wrote.
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This night, standing barely half a mile from the East River near streets where he’d lived most his life, surrounded by neighbors, Irishmen from the nearby Five Points, Protestants from Cherry Street, a stone’s throw from City Hall itself, Tweed threw off any shyness and shouted his defiance. “At home again, among the friends of my childhood and among their sons, I feel I can safely place myself and my record, all I have performed as a public official plainly before your gaze,” he roared, his voice penetrating the cool night air.
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“Reviled, traduced, maligned, and aspersed, as man had seldom been, I point proudly to my friends to prove my character and ask only for a full, free, impartial investigation into the official acts of my life,” he yelled, “but no man can do justice to himself standing outside and fighting against those who control the public press… I expect my friends to stand by me to meet this untrue and unjust charge.”

Tweed’s stubbornness brought them to their feet. “Last year my majority [for the state senate] was a mere 20,000. This year I expect 30,000 and will take no less.”
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After he finished speaking, he stepped back from the podium and fireworks erupted all around the square, their glare positioned to illuminate Tweed’s portrait along with the words “Our Choice for Senator.”

Critics like E.L. Godkin of
The Nation
pointed to crowds like this and dismissed them as ignorant, money-bought friends, “hard-fisted bruisers, and crimps, and pimps, and grogery men.”
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Who else would ignore oceans of scandal and applaud a corrupt thief? Godkin pointed to Tweed’s power, his web of city handouts—“offices, sinecures, contracts, public works, untried indictments, suspended sentences, penalties, licenses, ordinances, so on”—as his tool to bribe half the voting population of New York City.
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But even so, Tweed evoked loyalty on these streets with his larger-than-life aura: The Boss. To many, the charges against him seemed unreal, the numbers incomprehensible, a set-up job. At a time when laborers earned $2 per day and $5,000 per year could buy affluent comfort, who could imagine anyone stealing millions? The
New-York Times
stories sounded like fantasy, hysteria, while Tweed had always been their champion in real life, providing jobs, charity, and, through his Tammany clubs, a web of friendship in a cold city.

Tweed faced his first real political test following the scandals two weeks later as the state Democratic Party held its annual convention in Rochester. He girded for battle. Reformers led by state party chairman Samuel Tilden had organized an anti-Tweed coalition led by old-liners like Horatio Seymour, lawyer Charles O’Conor, and Oswald Ottendorfer, publisher of the German language newspaper
Staats Zeitung
. They made no secret of their plan: They wanted to kick Tweed out of the party, strip Tammany of its designation as its “regular” organ in New York City, and replace it with a slate of do-gooders. By month’s end, Tilden’s group counted fully two-thirds of the delegates as being ready to back them in repudiating Tweed.

Tweed knew how to fight back, though. He arrived in Rochester at 10:00 pm the night before the convention leading an army of two hundred Tammany men: delegates, greeters, and strong-arm bullies. He took rooms in the Osborn House hotel where most of the delegates stayed and got to work. He threw open his suite and entertained them all night long with whiskey, oysters, and cigars. On delegate after delegate, he plied his persuasion—fixing them in the eye, touching shoulders, grabbing an arm, sharing a joke. He pledged friendship in one breath while threatening a walkout or hinting compromise in the next. “Go ahead and kick us out if you can get along without us,” he told delegates from Albany, Syracuse, Utica, Buffalo, Westchester, or Yonkers.
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All he wanted was “harmony.” If the party needed to condemn Tweed or Tammany to satisfy the reformers, then go ahead. He had a thick skin; he could take the insults, but leave Tammany alone. Tammany was the party’s strong workhorse crucial to winning statewide elections.

No one knows if Tweed sweetened these appeals with hard cash, promises of jobs, or other bribes. No one really doubted it.

By the time the convention opened the next morning, he’d performed a minor miracle. Despite months of scandal, outrage, and treachery, Tweed had seduced them. Instead of the majority of delegates being ready to shove him out the door, he’d sold them on compromise. He counted only forty out of over a hundred as firmly hostile.
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Tilden would have no choice; he’d have to play along—just as he always did. Tweed had little fear of the starchy state chairman from Gramercy Park; Tilden had always backed down before. Why should things change now?

Tweed stayed away from the convention hall that day, using Brooklyn delegate William C. Dewitt as his mouthpiece on the convention floor, but soon he made his voice clear. Tilden, gaveling the convention to order, faced an embarrassing split. He knew the crowd’s sympathies and, just as Tweed predicted, he straddled. He opened the session with a long speech denouncing municipal corruption but never mentioned Tweed or Tammany by

name. He blamed Republican legislatures for the problem, referred to “vulgar millionaires” grasping for power, and ended by proclaiming that whoever “plunders the people, though he steal the livery of heaven to serve the devil in, is no Democrat.” He pushed the convention to adopt platform planks blasting city corruption and demanding punishment, but he pointed no fingers.

Tweed had no such scruples. As soon as Tilden had finished, he delivered his counterpunch. At his direction, Brooklyn delegate Billy Dewitt jumped up on the convention floor and gained recognition. He asked to read aloud a petition signed by all sixteen Tammany delegates—all of whom had absented themselves from the convention hall that morning leaving a conspicuous block of empty seats. Recognizing the recent charges of corruption in New York City and the need for “harmony,” it read, the Tammany men were voluntarily waiving their right to sit at the convention and pledged their support behind whichever candidates the delegates chose to nominate: a blank check.

A heady applause rose from hundreds of the delegates and spectators packing the stuffy auditorium. Rural hayseed or city slicker, they all got the point. Tweed had graciously spared them the embarrassment of his presence and he’d thrown himself on their mercy. How could they turn him down? Before the noise had faded, Dewitt gained recognition again. He offered a parliamentary motion: Since no delegate from New York City was in the room, he proposed that on any future roll call, “no delegation be deemed as sitting from that locality.”
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He immediately moved the previous question, cutting off debate.

Tilden was stunned. Dewitt’s motion, in effect, would allow Tammany to keep its “regular” party status—since no other delegation could be recognized—without the delegates even having to vote on the issue. Tilden’s own slate of reformers, cultivated over weeks of delicate diplomacy, would have the door slammed in its face. Tilden had heard talk of such a “compromise” but he’d expected the chance to confront it in open debate. Now, standing at the podium, he’d been gagged. This was too smart a move for a small-time hack like Billy Dewitt from Brooklyn. He recognized the fingerprints. Tweed had cheated him.

Dewitt insisted on his parliamentary rights and began taunting Tilden with the rulebook as Tilden stood helplessly on the podium in front of hundreds of onlookers. “The man from Kings [Dewitt] quoted the law to the veteran,” a newsman wrote.
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Mortified at the insult, Tilden still had to concede. Dewitt demanded a vote and a clerk called the roll. When they reached his name, Tilden first voted “no,” then changed it to “yes,” drawing snickers from the crowd. Dewitt’s motion carried by a whopping majority of 94 to 4, a remarkable vindication for the scandal-plagued Boss even if half the delegates hadn’t a clue what they’d just voted for. “This is the perfection of discipline,” E.L. Godkin grumbled of the outcome, “simply and purely an instrument of evil.”
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Horatio Seymour, sitting on the podium and slated to take the gavel as permanent convention chairman later that day, left the hall in disgust, went back to his hotel, packed his bags, and took the next train home to Utica, claiming he had a cold.
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Behind the scenes, state committeeman Henry Richmond was heard “cursing in [Tilden’s] face the absence of all plan and all leadership,” Manton Marble wrote.
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After the session broke up, crowds of friendly delegates swarmed to Tweed’s room at the Osborn House to offer congratulations. Dozens of Tammany men marched in formation through the streets of Rochester behind a brass band, arriving at Tweed’s window to present him a musical serenade. The next day, Tweed flexed his muscle again. Having heard complaints that his heavy-handed tactics had unnerved some moderate upstaters, he allowed three of Tilden’s dissidents to address the convention and present their complaints, so long as the delegates agreed never to allow them a vote on their credentials. Again, the convention marveled at the Boss’ generosity.

The only shadow on his victory came at the end of the second day. As the convention reached its closing hours and began choosing nominees, Tilden again mounted the podium and got the crowd’s attention: “The real point involved in this controversy has not been entirely comprehended by some of the gentlemen from the rural districts,” he started to explain, referring to the speeches by his New York reformers earlier that day. By keeping Tammany as the “regular” party organ in New York City, he said, they were giving Boss Tweed a license once again to steamroll the state legislature by nominating twenty-one state assemblymen and five state senators—New York City’s local quota . Had they no outrage at the scandal?

Several delegates—Tweed’s friends in the room—jumped to their feet at the surprise outburst. Before Tilden could finish even getting the words out of his mouth, voices interrupted him. “Point of order!” “Previous question!” Tilden looked out at the auditorium filled with hundreds of agitated faces, some cheering, others hissing. He listened quietly to a string of objections designed to shut him up, then calmly brushed each aside with a few words.

Allowed finally to reclaim the floor, Tilden drove on with his point. “I am free to avow before this convention that I shall not vote myself for any one of Mr. Tweed’s members of the legislature.” The room erupted again in hoots and howls, cheers and hisses. Criticizing Tweed? By name? Here? “And if that is to be considered the regular ticket, I will resign my place as Chairman of the State Committee and help my people storm this tide of corruption…. I shall cast my vote for honest men.”
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He’d started an uproar. “The excitement threatened to become a riot,” historian DeAlva Alexander wrote in describing the scene.
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After a few minutes, Tilden moved that the convention nominate the entire state ticket—a list of names all acceptable to Tammany—then he walked away. The ticket meant nothing. The real contest would come later and Tilden had laid down a gauntlet. He could do as he pleased.

Tweed himself seemed hardly fazed at the incident; he remained focused on the job at hand. All that day, he was seen scurrying about his suite at the Osborn House, shouting orders, greeting friends, cracking jokes. Asked about Tilden’s outburst and Seymour’s absence, he brushed both off as “troublesome old fools.” As for his own fight with reformers, he seemed to relish it: “I should like some more of the same sort. When I’m under the dog, you’ll hear me howl, not before.”
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