BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (15 page)

On the surface, not a penny looked out of place on the city’s books. Each scrap of paper, each check, voucher, and deposit standing alone looked well in order. The pattern of cash flows emerged only after piecing together records from dozens of accounts in dozens of banks covering hundreds of transactions. As it stood, Tweed and the others could easily deny having gotten a cent. In fact, over a century later, for Oakey Hall in particular, it’s still not clear whether any of the proceeds from the Tax Levy ever reached his pocket. Still, he’d drafted the law, offered the motion, made the appointments, and signed the warrants. Whether he did it for money, for vanity, for Tweed’s promise of the New York governorship, for loyalty to his friends, or out of sheer stupidity, may never be known.

Of all the cash collected by Woodward in his bank account traceable to the city vouchers—a cool $3.6 million—a full 24 percent ultimately would be tracked to Tweed, 7 percent each to Woodward and Watson, and 10 percent to Peter Sweeny. Their actual spoils likely were even more: Andrew Garvey, the plasterer, for instance, later claimed that out of $1,177,413.72 paid to him under the Tax Levy, only $264,660 actually represented work for the city or county. Of the rest, he paid $880,000 to Woodward, about $60,000 represented his contribution to Tweed’s pool for bribing the state legislature, and the rest mostly covered personal favors for the Ring: construction and plastering work on Connolly’s private home at 130 Fifth Avenue, $60,000 on Tweed’s house in Greenwich, and $13,000 on Woodward’s.
¹⁰⁶

In June 1870, Tweed, wealthy to start with, now had money to burn; he sent a check for $96,300 to Smith, Gould, Martin and Company—Jay Gould’s brokerage house—apparently simply to invest.
¹⁰⁷

The financial impact of all this—the bill-padding games on top of the bloated city pay-rolls, street widenings, and park improvements, a torrent of frauds building over time into a huge unseen bulk—began to weigh on the local economy. Taxes for New York property owners stayed low; they paid only two percent of their property’s assessed value in taxes, a level capped by law. By some measures, their burden was less than that of taxpayers in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cincinnati.
^F
OOTNOTE
Many tax bills went uncollected: $907,158.86 in 1870 alone.
¹⁰⁸

Instead, though, the city borrowed. In the single year from January 1869 to January 1870, New York city and county’s total debt rose from $36.3 million to over $48 million; by January 1871, it would top $73 million—primarily in the form of bonds issued by Connolly under dozens of separate accounts and sold to banks, savings and trust companies, and a growing portion placed by private bankers to overseas investors in Europe.
¹⁰⁹
The house of Seligman alone underwrote $2 million of city bonds at 72 percent of face value in 1869, sold through offices in New York, Frankfurt, and Paris. The House of Rothschild in London and Frankfurt and Discounts Gesellschaft in Berlin took up a $3 million issue in April 1870. In 1871, the Rothschild’s secretly brought outright $15 million of 6 percent thirty year bonds through their American agent August Belmont.
¹¹⁰

Nobody seemed to get hurt and nobody was the wiser. The banks and Europeans kept buying the bonds, which they considered safe American investments compared to the railroad stocks being manipulated on Wall Street.

And no one would find out. In January 1870 Connolly, as comptroller, failed to issue his annual report on city finances and would continue to deny requests to see his books for as long as he could get away with it.

• PART II •

CRITICS

Tweed and friends at their height of power, celebrating in an annual ball at the Academy of Music.

CHAPTER 5

PARK ROW

G
EORGE Jones, a quiet, serious man with thick spectacles and a lush dark beard who often ate lunch at his desk alone, had seen
The New-York Times
prosper since he’d co-founded it with Henry Raymond twenty years earlier. Under Jones’s watch, the newspaper’s share value had risen from $1,000 to $11,000 and Jones had heard purchase offers of up to a million dollars—more than ten times the paper’s original value. From the start, Jones had always managed the paper’s money while Raymond, his brilliant journalist friend, managed its content. Now, in 1870, the
Times
boasted the newest and showiest of the large newspaper buildings crowded side-by-side into the neighborhood called Printing House Square. Its five-story structure on Beekman Street and Park Row sported Hoe cylinder presses, marble floors, wood paneling, plate glass, and ceiling frescoes. Jones, from his corner office on the top floor, could look out over a panorama; on clear days, he easily saw City Hall, the spire of Trinity Church, acres of city rooftops, and even the blue Hudson River beyond.

Some older competitors, the
Herald
, the
World
and the
Tribune
, sold more newspapers, but the
Times
held its own in circulation while printing more news on larger pages than any other journal in the city.

But George Jones struggled under a burden these days. Henry Raymond, his friend and partner, had died suddenly the prior June at just 49 years old, placing the whole responsibility now on Jones. For eighteen years, Raymond had shaped the
New-York Times
, conceiving it as an independent journal with Whig-Republican leanings and wide, objective coverage. His death had come as a shock. Jones had been sick that spring and spent the prior winter in Florida to avoid the cold northern winter. “My doctor says peremptorily I must not leave before the 1st of May,” he’d written to Raymond.
¹
Jones knew little to nothing about editing a newspaper. He made “suggestions” on hiring writers or managers, but that was Raymond’s affair.
²
It was Jones’ business to make sure the
Times
had plenty of high-quality paper in stock, that its employees got paid, and its owners made a profit. What’s more, Raymond had died under curious circumstances: A servant had found him lying unconscious in the doorway of his house on West 9th Street well past midnight; whispers had it that Raymond had spent the evening with a well-known actress named Rose Eytinge.
³
He died before dawn. Tongues now wagged all over town, not just about Raymond’s death but also about whether his mild-mannered partner Jones had the stomach to run the paper.

Henry Raymond had been more than a newspaper editor; he was a leading public figure. In an age when publishers felt no hesitation about pursuing political careers, Raymond had served terms in the U.S. Congress, as lieutenant governor of New York State, and speaker of the state legislature, all while editing the
Times
. It was George Jones who’d urged Raymond finally to stop in 1864 and devote himself full time to news. Raymond had learned his journalism under Horace Greeley, first as Greeley’s assistant on his
New-Yorker
magazine, then writing editorials for Greeley’s
New York Tribune
in the 1840s.

Jones felt the absence sharply. Almost 60 years old, he enjoyed a comfortable life, hobnobbing with wealthy friends at the Union League Club or sitting in with Sarah, his wife of thirty-three years, and their grown children. A son of Welsh Baptists, born in a farmhouse in Poultney, Vermont, Jones had come to New York City in the 1830s and learned about newspapers in the business office at Greeley’s
Tribune
. It was there that he met young Henry Raymond and the two found a common spark: the idea of starting a journal of their own. Jones had moved upstate to Albany in the 1840s and made money in banking until Henry Raymond, now a state legislator, approached him again with the idea: “[W]ill you start that paper with me?” Raymond asked. Jones hesitated at first until Raymond explained the new economics of New York City print in the early 1850s. It had become profitable; the
Tribune
itself had cleared $60,000 in 1850, he said, even under Horace Greeley’s sloppy management. Certainly, they could do better.

It was Jones who pulled together the circle of Whig investors who fronted the money to get things started, including $25,000 from Jones’s own pocket. Now, twenty years later, he put up a brave front. Shortly after his partner’s funeral, his old mentor Greeley had dropped by his house—Jones was sick in bed at the time—and asked what Jones planned to do with the newspaper. When Greeley suggested he’d like to buy it, Jones refused. “I shall never sell the Times as long as I am on the top of the ground, and I don’t want to hear anything more about it,” he said.
⁴
But Jones also recognized realities. He knew how newspapers made money, not how they were written. Without Henry Raymond, he’d need a strong editor to survive, and Raymond’s own son Henry Warner was far too young to take charge —still a student at Yale when his father died.

A few days after the funeral, Jones called together the newspaper’s executive committee: himself, New York businessman James B. Taylor, and Brooklyn tycoon Leonard Jerome. They decided to offer the editorship to John Bigelow, a well-known local figure, former American minister to France and past editor of William Cullen Bryant’s
Evening Post
. Bigelow accepted, but he soon found himself over his head and lasted only six months. In August 1869, Bigelow committed a fatal journalistic sin, allowing himself to be tricked by Wall Street speculator Jay Gould over Gould’s scheme to corner the New York gold market. Gould, through an intermediary, had submitted to Bigelow a phony editorial claiming to represent President Grant’s “Fiscal Policy”—suspiciously friendly to higher gold prices. Without checking the source, Bigelow had sent it to the typesetters. Only a last-minute catch by
Times
financial writer Caleb Norvell, who smelled a rat and made a few surgical edits, saved the paper from major embarrassment when the gold corner collapsed in scandal on Black Friday.

After Bigelow came George Shepherd, a strait-laced
Times
editorial writer who resisted the promotion to editor-in-chief. He too threw in the towel after a few months. Only then, in early 1870, did Jones finally find himself a new chief editor he could really trust, a terse writer with a tough competitive edge, an ear for controversy, and a sense of American politics like his own, even if he was thoroughly British.

Louis Jennings, thirty-three years old, tall and trim with crisp mustache, was born in London and trained in the rough-and-tumble English tabloid press, from local country papers in Derbyshire and Manchester to London’s
Morning Chronicle
and
Saturday Review
to finally its flagship, the
London Times
. Since the mid-1860s, the
London Times
had featured Jennings as its premier foreign correspondent. In 1864, it had sent him to India, from which Jennings sent a stream of graphic cables that stunned sedate readers. On arriving in Calcutta, he described how “it takes a steamer three days to get out to sea, the passengers homeward bound feeble and ill, being pent up in close cabins all that time in a river filled with corpses.” His stories on India’s gory Juggernaut saturnalia festival, complete with self-immolations and people trampled to death by immense crowds, caused a political furor.
⁵
After the Civil War, the
London Times
sent him to America to tour the defeated South and explain the turmoil of post-war Reconstruction. Here, Jennings became friends with Henry Raymond; for a time, he lived in Raymond’s New York City home on West 9th Street and they shared a boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., as well.

Raymond saw talent in the young Britisher and began courting him for his own newspaper. When Jennings returned to England in 1867 after his last American assignment, Raymond urged him to write columns for the
New-York Times
giving a London perspective on world events
and made him a regular
Times
contributor. When Raymond visited Europe in 1868 with his 18-year-old daughter Mary, he made a point to cultivate his new friend: “I have seen a good deal of Jennings,” he reported to George Jones from London in July 1868. “He would like very much to come to NY again and join us again, but he makes too much money here. He is sought by all the papers here and can easily make 10 guineas a day by writing by the article…. I don’t believe less than £2000 a year would tempt him to quit here and come over to our side of the water. But I am satisfied that he would be worth that to us if we could afford to pay it. He is living very nicely here and seems to be in every way comfortable.”
⁶

Jennings, though, was ready to jump. He’d grown enamored with America and turned sour on the
London Times
, his old employer, after its years of promising him promotions that never materialized. Raymond’s sudden death had shocked him. “He was the most lovable man I ever knew, and his high principle and conscientiousness could not but make an impression on all who lived with him,” Jennings wrote to Jones from Piccadilly in June 1869.
⁷
Jennings had acquired a special tie to New York City in 1867. He had married a local actress, Madeline Louise Henriques, lead player at New York’s Wallack’s Theater. Now, Louise’s second pregnancy had left her ill and longing to see her family. Late that year, Jennings accepted George Jones’s offer to leave London and join his newspaper as a staff writer. With wife and baby daughter, Jennings returned to America—she to pick up her acting career on Wallack’s stage, he to the editorial rooms at the
New-York Times
.

Jennings made his mark quickly. On November 25, 1869, a new scandal hit Gotham: Daniel McFarland, a jealous, divorced husband, had taken a gun and shot Albert Richardson, a contributor and stockholder of Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
who had been having an affair with McFarland’s former wife. The shooting had taken place in the
Tribune’
s own office; afterwards, Mrs. McFarland had rushed to Richardson’s side and married him on his deathbed. Louis Jennings saw good copy in the gory sex-murder tragedy and had no hesitation about using it to embarrass the
Times
’s Park Row rival, Greeley and the
Tribune
. Newspaper wars made good business, and he convinced George Jones that the story would boost circulation.

Louis J. Jennings, Jones’s choice as the Times’ new managing editor in 1870.

Jennings, on the attack, wielded what even his friends called “the most abusive pen known to post-bellum journalism.”
⁸
In this case, he saw the story’s target not in the murder itself, but the moral depravity of Horace Greeley’s newspaper—a journal that in past years had touted free love, socialism, women’s suffrage, Fourierism, and a host of other free-thinking causes. His jabs so irritated Greeley that the
Tribune
responded with its own attacks against the
Times
; but instead of targeting Jennings, a mere writer, the
Tribune
blasted thin-skinned George Shepherd, still the
Times
’ chief editor. Shepherd wanted no part of the free-for-all and promptly resigned. George Jones, impressed with his new prodigy’s spunk and aggressiveness, gave him the helm.

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