The Epic of New York City (58 page)

As his chief ally Gould picked James Fisk, Jr., a shameless financial buccaneer, who was short and round and merry. “I was born to be bad,” Fisk said of himself. His mustache was “the color of a Jersey cow” and as long and pointed as the spikes of a catfish. Fond of champagne and chorus girls, Fisk was as charming as he was ruthless. He helped the shy Gould by playing host to the important people they set out to capture.

Ulysses S. Grant was President of the United States at the time,
so Gould and Fisk cultivated Abel Rathbone Corbin, who had married Grant's sister. Into their scheme they drew Daniel Butterfield, whom Grant had named as head of the New York subtreasury without really studying his qualifications. Gould and Fisk were unable to involve Grant's private secretary, Horace Potter, but they did entertain the President himself. Fisk called himself an admiral because he owned a fleet of steamships plying the waters off Long Island, and he and Gould took Grant sailing. They tried to worm out of him some hint about the treasury's gold policy. They implied that if the United States kept gold at a high price, this would help sell American grain in Europe, thus aiding the American farmer. Grant kept mum. The plotters decided to go ahead anyway. Corbin wrote an article entitled “Grant's Financial Policy,” and Gould managed to get all but the last paragraph printed in the New York
Times
as an editorial.

Since the nation was on a paper standard, gold was bought and sold as a speculative commodity. The trading took place in the Gold Exchange, established in 1864 on the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place. Everyone called it the Gold Room. In the center of the room stood a fountain containing a bronze statue of Cupid, a dolphin in its arms. A tiny stream of water spouted from Cupid's head to a basin below. A mechanical indicator inside the room and another on an outdoor wall over the sidewalk told the current price of gold. Such was the setting of the most frenetic day thus far in the history of Wall Street.

On September 2, 1869, Gould bought $3,000,000 worth of gold through more than 40 brokers. The price rose 5 points in two days. Because Gould told Fisk that President Grant had forbidden Secretary of the Treasury George S. Boutwell to sell any of the government's gold reserve, Fisk also began buying. As the price of gold soared, other traders became suspicious, and newspapers urged the government to break up the gold conspiracy. Secretary Boutwell hurried from Washington to New York, looked into the situation, but decided to do nothing until instructions arrived from Grant. It was difficult to reach the President, who was visiting a small Pennsylvania town. When at last he heard the news, he became disturbed. Grant got back to Washington on September 22, and that day gold closed at 140½ points. The next day, when it reached 144, the panic began. Throughout the nation, manufacturers and other businessmen, thinking that gold might hit a peak of 200, ordered their agents to buy at any price.

Then came Friday, September 24, 1869—infamous Black Friday.
Brokers in the Gold Room and crowds on the sidewalk outside watched apprehensively as the price of gold went up, up, up. This meant ruin for hundreds of thousands of Americans, because bankers' paper was unsalable except at a high premium, while merchants' paper could hardly be sold at any price. Gold transactions that day amounted to more than $400,000,000. As telegraph lines
dit-dah-ditted
the news across the country, business from Boston to San Francisco ground to a halt. Speculators, merchants, and workers realized that their futures depended on what was happening in New York's Gold Room.

In Washington the President and Secretary Boutwell were kept informed of minute-by-minute developments. When the price reached 160 at about 11:30
A.M
., one man fainted in the Gold Room, and many wept openly. Secretary Boutwell nervously suggested to President Grant that they sell $3,000,000 of the nation's gold reserve. Grant mentioned $5,000,000, but Boutwell wired the subtreasury in New York to sell $4,000,000. Butterfield, the man in charge of the subtreasury, may have tipped off Jay Gould about the selling order, for now Gould switched tactics and began unloading. Jim Fisk, unaware that Gould was doublecrossing him, urged his broker, Albert Speyer, to buy more and more and more. A few minutes before noon, when gold reached its high of 162½, everyone learned that the New York subtreasury intended to sell $4,000,000 worth of gold the next day.

Fortunes were lost. Wall Street brokerage houses failed. Railway stocks shrank. The nation's business was paralyzed. An observer in the Gold Room wrote that “the spectacle was one such as Dante might have seen in the inferno.” Half a dozen men went temporarily mad. A broker, named Solomon Mahler, slunk home and killed himself. A little man with glassy eyes staggered about the floor, croaking, “I'm Albert Speyer! Some people have threatened to shoot me. Well, shoot! Shoot!” Men cursed and screamed and laughed maniacally and dashed from one trading post to another. Their nerves were tighter than the gut of an Indian's bow. Half-moons of sweat stained the armpits of their jackets. From time to time they wobbled to the fountain to dash cool water on their burning faces.

The frenzy inside the Gold Room reached the people on the sidewalk outside, fermenting the crowd into a mob that howled for the hides of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk. A national guard regiment was ordered to stand by to “quell the riot in Wall Street.” But Boss Tweed,
forever loyal to fellow scoundrels, gave the plotters police protection. Gould, who had failed to corner all the gold in circulation but who nonetheless made a profit of $11,000,000, said smoothly, “I regret very much this depression in financial circles, but I predicted it long ago. I was in no way instrumental in producing the panic.” Fisk, who had lost money but soon found a way to repudiate his contracts, spoke with his usual impudence: “A fellow can't have a little innocent fun without everybody raising a halloo and going wild.”

Greedy to the last, neither cared about the suffering they had inflicted on numberless innocents. Tweed didn't care, either.

Monarch of all he surveyed, affecting the grand manner in public, and arrogant to friend and foe alike, Tweed had become giddy with success. A once great city had degenerated into Tweedsville. While the Boss ate oysters at Delmonico's, rode behind sleek trotting horses, cruised aboard his yacht, and beamed on champagne-swilling cronies, New York fell into ruins.

It was filthier than Naples. Dirty streets and defective sewer pipes resulted in abnormally high death rates. Tweed's stables were superior to any tenement in town. Public buildings sagged into dilapidation for want of proper maintenance. Produce was unloaded on rotting wharves. Every day was Mardi Gras for thieves and harlots. The annual tax levy rose from an average of $4.33 per person in 1860 to $25.11 in 1870. Between 1869 and 1870 the city debt soared from $36,000,000, to $97,000,000, and the town teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. G. T. Strong lamented in his diary: “To be a citizen of New York is a disgrace.”

Tweed became arrogant because he became careless, and he became careless because it had been so easy to plunder the city. For example, in a couple of hours one morning Tweed and his henchmen stole more than $5,500,000. Here's how it happened: Under the new Tweed charter the new board of audit consisted of Tweed, Hall, and Connolly. At one of the board's first meetings, on May 5, 1870, the trio authorized the payment of an additional $6,300,000 for the new courthouse they were building. Nearly 90 percent of this sum was padding, and they pocketed the extra $5,500,000. The same day six Negroes were arrested for playing penny poker in the basement of 208 West Thirtieth Street.

When the sands of time begin to run out for any man, it is difficult to detect the first grain, but for Tweed it may have begun to trickle into infinity on December 24, 1869. On that date
Harper's Weekly
published a cartoon showing members of the ring breaking into a big box marked “Taxpayers' and Tenants' Hard Cash.” Fletcher Harper owned this courageous magazine, and George William Curtis was its editor. The cartoon came from the pen of German-born Thomas Nast, who wore his hair crew cut in the fashion of Prussian officers. A fierce handlebar mustache and pointed beard emphasized the virility of this clear-eyed man. A gifted cartoonist and caricaturist, Nast created the symbolic Republican elephant and Democratic donkey, and soon he was to paint some stripes on Tammany.

In the spring of 1870 Comptroller Connolly complained that he wasn't getting a big enough cut of the loot. He told Tweed that other members of the ring would be unable to swindle the city at all without him. Tweed asked what he had in mind. Connolly said he wanted 20 percent instead of just 10. Tweed decided that this could be managed by doublecrossing Mayor Hall and City Chamberlain Sweeny. From that time on, Hall and Sweeny got what they thought was 20 percent of the take, although it was really only 10 percent.

Toward the end of the summer of 1870 James Taylor died. He had been Tweed's partner in the New York Printing Company, which, not surprisingly, did far more business than other printing firms. Taylor also had been one of the three directors of the New York
Times.
While Taylor was alive, the
Times
did not attack Tweed, but now that he was dead, the influential morning paper fell under the control of George Jones, who detested the Boss. Although no one confused George Jones with St. George, he began hunting the dragon.

On September 20, 1870, the
Times
published its first attack—not as a news article on page one, but as an editorial inside the paper. It was written by the
Times'
managing editor, Louis J. Jennings, who wielded his pen like a broadsword. Born in England, Jennings had worked on newspapers in London and India, and years after the Tweed exposé he returned to Great Britain and wound up as a Member of Parliament. Now, day after day, Jennings lambasted Tweed, making such charges as: “No Caliph, Khan or Caesar has risen to power or opulence more rapidly than Tweed I. Ten years ago this monarch was pursuing the humble occupation of a chairmaker in an obscure street in this city. He now rules the State as Napoleon ruled France, or as the Medici ruled Florence. . . .” Jennings dealt mainly in invective because the
Times
lacked enough hard facts to make the kill.

In January, 1871, Jimmy Watson died as the result of a sleighing
accident. His official tide was county auditor, but his unofficial job was bookkeeper and paymaster for the Tweed Ring. The
Times
could howl its head off about the way the city was run, but proof of corruption could only be obtained by access to the ring's books, and no one but Connolly and Watson ever saw these doctored documents. So far the
Times
didn't know that Watson had issued a $66,000 voucher to an imaginary man with the outlandish name of Philippo Donnoruma or that the fellow who had cashed it had signed it with the anglicized name of Philip Dummy. If you're going to bilk the public, you may as well have some fun while doing it. Although Watson's salary was only $1,500 a year, he had become a millionaire and lived in a mansion at 42d Street and Madison Avenue. The sleighing accident happened on January 24 at the corner of 8th Avenue and 130th Street. Newspaper readers tilted their eyebrows and pulled down the corners of their mouths when they read that Watson's mare, killed in the collision, was worth $10,000. For the week that Watson lingered on his deathbed, Tweed kept some of his plug-uglies handy to thwart a last-minute confession.

In the spring of 1871 James O'Brien decided that he, too, wanted a bigger slice of the melon. Tweed had made O'Brien county sheriff. This office paid no salary; but the sheriff was entitled to keep all the fees he collected, and they were enormous. O'Brien panted for power, as well as plunder. He dreamed of displacing Tweed as grand sachem of Tammany and Hall as mayor of New York. O'Brien helped organize a maverick group within Tammany, known as the Young Democracy, only to have Tweed beat its ears off. But when O'Brien finished his profitable term as sheriff, he brazenly submitted a bill for $350,000 in “extras” he claimed the county owed him. Tweed, the granddaddy of grifters, wasn't going to let an upstart get away with a haul like that. He bellowed like a wounded rhinoceros and stamped his foot, and that was that. Or so Tweed thought. O'Brien withdrew his claim and returned to the fold of tweedledum democracy. Secretly, though, O'Brien decided to try to get the goods on the Boss and blackmail him.

After Watson's death a nonentity, named Stephen C. Lyons, was made county auditor, but he soon faded from sight. Matthew J. O'Rourke, former military editor of a newspaper, became the new auditor. Connolly's faith in O'Rourke was misplaced, for he began copying incriminating terms from the secret books of the ring. About the same time O'Brien asked Connolly to find a job for his friend
William Copeland. Connolly thought O'Brien had made his peace with the Boss; after all, the former sheriff was trustee of a group collecting funds to raise a statue of Tweed. So Connolly obliged O'Brien by putting Copeland to work on some books in his office. A spy for O'Brien, Copeland also started copying fraudulent accounts. No one knows if O'Rourke and Copeland were aware that each was playing the same dangerous game.

Copeland fed facts and figures to O'Brien. O'Brien then told the Boss he would publish this proof unless he got the $350,000 he wanted. Tweed apparently considered this a bluff. But soon thereafter O'Brien called at the office of the
Sun
with evidence of the ring's corruption under one arm. No one there would touch this dynamite. O'Brien then trudged to the
Times,
which kept calling for an examination of the city's financial records. If all was well, the paper argued, why object to publication of the figures? The
Evening Post,
which sided with Tweed, protested righteously that Connolly could not open these books because only city aldermen had this power.