Not long before the war New York’s manners were provincial, and not long afterwards the city felt itself one of the world’s great centers. In twenty years, 1850–70, the population grew from a half million to a million. Such large groups were enriched by war contracts, the rise of real estate, and the nation-wide business expansion that the increase in luxury struck every observer. A Four Hundred was taking shape, rich shops were arising, the opera was growing more and more gilded; in 1868, said the Evening Post, the receipts of the score of theaters reached $3,165,000. The Post that year listed ten of the richest men in order—Wm. B. Astor, believed to be worth $75,000,000; A. T. Stewart, Wm. C. Rhinelander, Peter and Robert Goelet, James Lenox, Peter Lorillard, John D. Wolfe, M. M. Hendricks, Rufus M. Lord, and C. V. S. Roosevelt. Their wealth, it told them, had become so great that if they tried they could accomplish enormous benefits for New York—they could sweep away the debasing tenement house system, or shatter the Tammany Ring; and the people believed that public services were the best if not the only justification for such wealth.
The growth in population emphasized the desirability of many diverse improvements. At the beginning of 1867 the Evening Post was demanding a great art gallery, such as we now have in the Metropolitan Museum, and pointing to European collections as models, while later the same year it urged a zoological garden like London’s, there being as yet none in all America. It and the Tribune together in 1871 asked for a single large public library. There were several small ones—the Astor, the Mercantile, the Society Library, and the unfinished Lenox Library—but none was “public” in the sense that it circulated365 books free, while the city would obviously benefit from the union of some of the larger collections. Having been the first to propose Central Park, Bryant applauded the creation of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, for which ground was broken in 1866. Theodore Thomas, who had begun to organize his orchestra early in the war, and immediately afterwards had opened his “summer night” concerts, issued a call through the newspaper for a supporting fund of $20,000. In several editorials in the spring of 1868, the first entitled “Can a City Be Planned?”, the Evening Post suggested that a board of engineers be named to lay out a city plan, determining which areas should be used for retail trade, manufactures, and residence. It was an Age of Innocence in many ways—people wondered at the first concrete sidewalk, laid from Park Row to Murray Street in 1868; they were just learning the use of safe deposit vaults, and elevators were curiosities; but it was an age of progress.
The problem which most pressed upon New York after Appomattox, as after the World War, was housing. Building had stopped during the conflict, and its resumption was slow, but Manhattan had kept on growing at the rate of 30,000 people a year. In the winter of 1866–7 the Evening Post pronounced New York the most costly place of residence on earth. “Houses are so scarce that landlords see tenants running around, like pigs in the land of Cockaigne, with knives and forks in their backs, begging to be eaten; it is a favor to get a decent house at a preposterous rent—at almost any sum, in fact; and we know of families living comfortably in Europe from the rent of a house on one of the favorite avenues.” That spring a great open-air mass meeting was held in protest, and petitions were sent the Legislature for a law basing rents upon the assessed valuation. Those of moderate means suffered more than the rich or the poor tenement dwellers. “Bank clerks, bookkeepers, and salesmen are compelled to go to New Jersey, Staten Island, Long Island, or Westchester to secure attractive and comfortable homes,” said the Post. “New York is practically366 losing the best part of its population.” The practice of sub-letting parts of single houses waxed common.
From this demand for housing there arose an unprecedented real estate boom. Thousands of homes were placed on the market at high prices, and land auctions took place daily. The Evening Post reported that lots in Manhattan and Brooklyn were eagerly bought at unheard-of rates. The neighborhoods of Central and Prospect Parks had become popular for residences, while merchants were purchasing sites for stores on union Square and Fifth Avenue. Lots that fronted upon what is now Central Park West had sold in 1850 for a few hundred dollars apiece, and in 1860 for from $2,000 to $3,000, but in 1867 they were bringing from $8,000 to $15,000. High up on the East Side, at 91st Street, lots now sold at $3,000. When Bay Ridge Terrace was created in 1868 the journal commented upon the rapid growth of that fine part of Brooklyn, which it had already noted to be spreading eastward rapidly. Brownsville and East New York before the war had been quiet farming communities, but now the former had a hundred houses, and the latter had grown with a rush to 5,000 souls.
The northward march of business, causing the demolition of hundreds of old residences, increased the need for new residential construction. When Ex-Mayor Opdyke’s house on Fifth Avenue near Sixteenth Street was sold to James A. Hearn & Son in 1867 for $105,000, and a milliner established herself on the Avenue at Twenty-second Street, the Evening Post devoted an editorial to the transformation. It predicted that all Fifth Avenue to Twenty-third Street would soon be engrossed by business, the new Fifth Avenue Hotel having given the movement impetus. Higher up, residential property had reached amazing prices. A brownstone house at Thirtieth Street had just been purchased for $114,000, while P. T. Barnum had bought one at the corner of Thirty-ninth for $80,000. A fine light brownstone mansion on the corner of Fortieth, building for W. H. Vanderbilt, would cost at least $80,000, the stable and lot included. At Forty-third367 Street a wealthy Jewish congregation was building a synagogue at an outlay of fully $700,000, while ten blocks farther up, where St. Thomas’s was about to be erected, $100,000 had been offered and refused for a plot 100 by 125 feet. Seven houses with brownstone fronts had just been finished on the west side of the Avenue, between Forty-third and Forty-fourth, and were so finely furnished that the front doors had cost $700 each, and the staircases $4,000.
The most serious aspect of the housing shortage was that as yet respectable New Yorkers knew but two modes of residence: one must either take a full single house, or consent to a dismal boarding house. The apartment building was known only to travelers in Europe, and was mistrusted as not being adapted to American individualism.
The possibility of utilizing the multiple-unit type of housing, however, was unceasingly expounded by the Evening Post from the time peace returned, for the editors had lived in the “Continental flat” abroad. An early editorial (Feb. 6, 1866) was called “How to Gain Room.”
It has been suggested frequently that tenement houses scientifically built would be profitable in New York, and a great boon to the working people. But they would be no less an advantage to the wealthier classes, and we wonder that the attempt has not been made first in the best part of town, and with houses calculated to accommodate families of the wealthier citizens, at a somewhat more moderate rent than is attainable now.
Many a family which now occupies a whole house uptown would be content to rent a floor, suitably fitted up after the manner of the houses of Paris and other European cities. Such an arrangement would spare the women of the family the endless and often painful toil of going up and downstairs, from the kitchen to the top of a three-storied house, three or four times a day. It would be far more convenient, and the rents might well make a considerable saving.
The inertia of New Yorkers was to blame, the Post said a little later. “Such a thing as hiring a suite of rooms368 and having meals sent in from a restaurant at a fixed and moderate charge is, we believe, almost if not quite unknown here. As for the ‘flats’ in which thousands of families conveniently and comfortably keep house in France and Germany, they require an arrangement of house architecture not known to our builders.” In the summer of 1867, when the congestion was at its worst, the editors gave publicity to the design of an architect for an apartment house for the “middling classes.” Upon two ordinary city lots, 20 by 100 feet, he proposed erecting a four-story building, containing eight distinct suites of rooms, all as completely isolated from each other as though they were detached houses. There was to be a central stairs, each landing giving entrance to two homes; but every visitor would have to ring below for admission precisely as at the front door of any other houses. Each suite was to contain a parlor, dining room, four bedrooms, bath, and kitchen. For some time the newspaper carried on a veritable crusade.
When the first apartment house was ready, in 1870, one designed by Richard M. Hunt and erected at 142 East Eighteenth Street, the Evening Post rejoiced in it as the harbinger of a new housing era. It was said to be better than most of those in Paris, though the Post thought it lacking in light and ventilation. Each of the sixteen suites had six rooms and a bath, and rents ranged from $1,500 on the lower floors to $1,080 on the upper—G. P. Putnam, the publisher, and others of means lived in it. There was no elevator, but a dumbwaiter enabled the tenants to bring coal up from the basement. The close of 1870 saw the new movement in full swing, with eight houses built or building, and a strong demand for more.
An apartment house on Forty-eighth Street boasted a porter, who lighted the halls, removed garbage, and sent up fuel; the rents were only $40 to $75 a month. A block of flats overlooking Central Park from the east at Sixty-eighth Street gave each tenant eight rooms and a bath, elevator service, black walnut floors, and his own369 kitchen range and hot water heater for $75 to $150. The most pretentious house, however, was building at Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. It was costing a round million, and was to be 125 feet high. “Each suite will have ten rooms, four closets, and eight washbowls,” announced the Evening Post, and rents were to run from $2,000 to $3,000 a year. The journal advised builders to install elevators, and charge as much for the upper as for lower floors.
For several years a marked prejudice against flats persisted. Most New Yorkers believed that in this land of democratic sociability it would be impossible to isolate the apartments and obtain privacy, and that they would soon sink to the level of tenements. The Post did its share in ridiculing these fears, and in pointing out the ugliness of the monotonous blocks of brownstone houses. It denied the common remark, “No house is big enough for two families.” But as it later said, one of the cardinal reasons for the rapid dissipation of the prejudice and popular success of the apartment houses was the building, in the first instance, of costly structures as pioneers in the movement.
By 1874 it thought that the new houses “may now be considered almost perfect.” The Haight Building, at Fifteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, offered thirty flats at $2,000 to $3,000 a year each, with an elevator, an internal telegraph, and a restaurant. Among the notables living here were Henry M. Field, the traveler; Col. W. C. Church, editor of the Galaxy; Prof. Youmans, founder of the Popular Science Monthly, and the Spanish Consul. But the last word in luxury was an apartment building in Fifty-sixth Street, where “the whole house is warmed by steam, and hot water is supplied to all the tenants at the expense of the owner.” The paper’s prediction that ten-story houses with elevators would be more popular than smaller buildings had been completely justified.
Even before the rise of the apartment house came the first sharp attacks upon tenement evils. New York City had no lack of this particular kind of multiple-family370 dwelling, for in 1864 they numbered 15,511, and housed 486,000 persons. They were far from being what we mean by tenements to-day: not until about 1879 was the first tenement house of the now familiar type, five, six, or more stories high, erected. The earlier buildings were comparatively low barracks, many of them converted mansions, shops, and stables, and others “rear houses” in the back yards of old mansions; all without airshafts, and with no complete provision for separating families. The Evening Post fitly called them “The Modern Upas,” for they breathed upon the city the poisons of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and crime. As early as April, 1860, six years before the first legislative inquiry into the housing of the poor, the editors had called shocked attention to police records showing that some 18,000 New Yorkers were veritable troglodytes, dwellers in cellars. It spoke out at the same time against the horrible congestion of the slums. One “rear house” on Mulberry Street had 222 persons huddled together; in Cow Bay, one of the colored quarters, one house held 230 persons; while the notorious Old Brewery at Five Points had sheltered 215 people before it burned. In the Sixth Ward, surrounding the Five Points, sixty-three small structures housed 4,721 persons.
An indignant editorial attack upon the deplorable tenement-house conditions appeared in the Evening Post six months after Lee’s surrender, inspired by a report of the Citizens’ Association. Half the people of New York lived in tenements, and on the East Side they were packed in at the rate of 220,000 to the square mile. The Post estimated that more than 25,000 dwelt in unfit cellars, shanties, or stable-lofts. Of the 15,000 tenements, almost 4,000 had no connection with the sewers. One in three was a perpetual “fever nest,” in which typhus was endemic, while not one in fifteen was what a tenement house ought to be. A single “fever nest” on East Seventeenth Street, almost within a stone’s throw of the Mayor’s home, had sent thirty-five typhus patients during 1864 to the municipal fever hospital, while nearly371 a hundred more had been treated in the building. The public, repeated the Post early in 1867, was astonished to awake from the war to the vast extent of the tenement system, the immense numbers inhabiting such places, and the horrid evils of filthiness, immorality, and sickness engendered by them. “No man has a right to establish a nest of fever and vice in the city,” it said, arguing for new laws and a government agency to regulate the construction and use of tenements.
Simultaneously, the newspaper kept up its old complaints, dating from Coleman’s day, of the lack of due sanitary regulations and activity. Slaughter-houses continued to abound, there being twenty-three in the northern half of the Twentieth Ward alone, some of them draining blood and other refuse for long distances through open sewers. In Forty-sixth Street on the East Side, a single neighborhood was blessed with one slaughter-house, six tripe, three sausage, and two bone-boiling establishments, and in the summer was almost uninhabitable (Sept. 2, 1865). A little later the Post took notice of the nastiness of the harbor. Many sewers emptied into the slips and under the piers, and there being no movement of the water, the sewage decayed until it had to be dredged out. These facts help explain an editorial of 1866 defining the typhus area block by block. It extended in irregular strips from the Battery up the West Side to Cortlandt Street, and up the East Side to Thirty-sixth. Smallpox was endemic throughout a rectangle bounded by Broadway, the Bowery, Chambers, and Bleecker, and in so many additional spots in the lower part of the city that a man could hardly get to his work downtown without crossing infected areas.
In the spring of 1867 the Legislature hesitatingly passed the first act to regulate the erection and management of tenements. Though it was, as the Evening Post said, “much less stringent and particular” than the English laws on which it was modeled, it placed important powers in the city Board of Health organized shortly before, for which the Post had also struggled. All tenants372 of cellars were required to vacate them unless they could obtain special permits, and within two years the Post was rejoicing over a drastic order for the cutting of 46,000 windows in interior rooms. Of course this legislation was only a beginning. In 1878–79 we find the Evening Post vigorously agitating for its extension, and publishing articles upon “The Homes of the Poor” which give a horrifying picture of Mulberry Court and other slum sections. Half of the city’s 125,000 children lived in tenements, and nine-tenths of the deaths among children occurred there. In May, 1878, the “Evening Post Fresh-Air Fund” was founded for the purpose of sending slum children to country homes for summer rest and recreation. The business office collected and disbursed the money raised by almost daily appeals in the newspaper, and the Rev. Willard Parsons took charge of the work of finding farmers to take the children, and of transporting them. Some years later the Tribune took over the Fresh-Air Fund, and still maintains it. In 1879, after a mass-meeting upon the tenement problem at Cooper union, addressed among others by Parke Godwin, then editor of the Evening Post, new regulatory legislation was passed at Albany.
Every one saw that evils in housing could not be corrected without expanding the city’s area, and in the decade after the Civil War the city press paid little more attention to them than to the twin perplexity of transportation. The first talk of a subway had been heard in the early fifties, and was thin talk indeed, although the London underground railway dates from 1853. The Evening Post used to boast that it had been the first journal to propose a steam subway, Bryant having brought the idea home from England. But the real solution of the transit problem, for a period which had no electric traction, lay in the elevated railways which Col. Robert L. Stevens had suggested as long before as 1831. The need grew more and more urgent. When the war ended, transportation was furnished by the horse railways and by eight omnibus companies. The horse-cars were slowly driving373 the buses out of business, the great Consolidated Company, which operated a half-dozen lines, having gone bankrupt in 1864; but there remained 250 of the vehicles, or enough to impede other traffic seriously. The capital invested in them was $1,600,000, for each had six $200 horses, while wages and stabling costs had risen fast.
To find room for the growing population, and to ease the streets of their intolerable burden—these were the two chief arguments for rapid transit. As the Evening Post said in the closing days of 1864, the most desirable parts of the island, the sections abreast of and above Central Park, were largely given up to pigs, ducks, shanty-squatters, and filth. A railroad under Broadway, it thought, would soon change all that. “When a merchant can go to Central Park in fifteen minutes he will not hesitate to live in Seventieth or Eightieth Street; and a resident of One Hundredth Street could reach the business section of the city as quickly by the underground railway as those who live in Twentieth Street do now.” Better live in Yonkers than Harlem, it remarked later. As for the streets, it declared in 1866: “Broadway is simply intolerable to the man who is in a hurry; he must creep along with the crowd, no matter how cold it is; he crosses the street at the risk of his life; and when he journeys up and down in an omnibus, he wonders at the skill with which a wheeled vehicle is made so perfectly uncomfortable.”
A multitude of suggestions for better transit had been brought forward by this time. Some men proposed one or several subways; the Evening Post modestly thought that five were needed, several beginning at the Battery and the rest at Canal Street, and all running to the Harlem. Others favored elevated roads mounted on single pillars in the streets, and still others called for such roads running over the housetops. Sunken railways in the middle of certain streets were proposed, and one powerful intellect devised a scheme for two railways, one on each side of Broadway, running “through the cellars”! To lessen the traffic congestion in Broadway, a college374 professor suggested that the city buy the ground floor of all buildings for a space ten or twelve feet deep on each side, and form an arcade there for foot passengers, yielding the entire street to vehicles. Another professor thought that horses should be banished altogether, and the freight and passenger traffic in Broadway restricted to steam trains. To all the plans objections were made, and were frequently as wonderful in their way. Thus Engineer Craven of the Croton Board demonstrated at length in February, 1866, that no subway could ever be built, because it would interfere with the water supply; and even the Post called his argument “a knockdown blow.”
In the spring of 1867 the Evening Post was regarding hopefully two schemes before the Legislature, one for a “three-tier railroad” (subway, surface, and elevated), and one for a metropolitan underground line. In 1868 the Legislature actually authorized a steam subway from City Hall to Forty-second Street, the incorporators of which included such substantial men as William B. Ogden, William E. Dodge, and Henry W. Slocum, but the enterprise did nothing more than demonstrate the immediate impracticability of the plan. Three years later the Post had swung to the sensible view that an elevated would be better than a subway, for it had been shown that the latter would cost $30,000,000, and no one was ready to invest. Elevated construction had then already begun, and when Bryant died in 1878 there were four lines.
Subordinate to the two main subjects of housing and transit, a great variety of comments upon city affairs can be found in the post-bellum columns of the newspaper. One of the most frequent topics of editorial complaint in the years 1866–68 was the dirty and broken condition of the streets, which New York was paying a former Tammany Judge, James R. Whiting, $500,000 a year to neglect. Just before the war the Post had contended energetically for the introduction of sweeping machines, and now it objected to the contract system. Some city officer, it held, should be responsible. It anticipated Col.375 George F. Waring when it suggested that the city might well “engage an army officer used to drilling and handling a large number of men and accustomed to discipline, and put the streets in his charge, with a simple injunction to keep them clean, constantly, under all circumstances.” Early in the seventies we find the paper defending Henry Bergh, founder of the S. P. C. A., against journals which attacked his efforts to protect dumb animals as fanatical; applauding (February, 1873) the first stirrings of the movement to unite New York and Brooklyn under one government; and raising an agonized outcry over the postoffice which Mullet, the supervising architect of the Treasury, was building at City Hall Park.
That greater city toward which public-spirited men then looked was sketched in an editorial of 1867 entitled “New York in 19—.” The Evening Post hoped that before the twentieth century was far advanced Central Park would be really central, and the upper part of the island as populous as the lower. Brooklyn would have been united governmentally with New York, and physically by several bridges thrown across the East River. There should be a great railway station in the heart of the city, near the chief hotels, and freight stations only on its borders. Retail trade would be scattered, and “the Stewarts of that day will be found on broad, clean cross streets near the Central Park”; while spacious markets would have supplanted “the filthy sheds” in which provisions were then sold. “The streets of New York will be no longer rough and dirty; they will be covered with a smooth pavement like that ... now laid on a part of Nassau Street or covered with asphaltum, like some of the pavements of Paris.” Whoever wrote the editorial might to-day call this much of the prophecy fairly realized. But he went on to picture an adequate system of tenements, comfortable, sanitary, and cheap, managed by public-spirited corporations; a rapid transit system sufficient for all needs; and a shore line equipped with fine piers and basins, modern warehouses, and the best376 loading and unloading apparatus—all of which still belongs to a Utopian vision.
II
The most important municipal questions, however, arose from Tammany politics; and the city which was so sluggish and blundering in sheltering itself and transporting itself was more so in governing itself. The history of the most memorable years of New York’s administration was condensed by the Evening Post in the seventies into a short municipal epic:
In eighteen hundred and seventy
The Charter was purchased by W. M. T.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-one
The Tweed Ring’s stealing had all been done.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-two
The amount of the stealing the people knew.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-three
Most of the thieves had decided to flee.
In eighteen hundred and seventy-four
Tweed was allowed his freedom no more.
This epic starts, as it should, in medias res. An enormous amount of stealing had been done before 1870, and the disclosures of the summer of 1871 were by no means so unexpected as we are likely to think. When A. Oakey Hall was elected Mayor in 1868 on the Tammany ticket, intelligent citizens knew that there existed a Ring of dual character—a corrupt combination of leading Democratic politicians in New York, and a corrupt alliance between them and Republicans at Albany. They knew that the city Ring regularly levied tribute on accounts for supplies, construction, and repairs; and that its head was William M. Tweed, with Peter B. Sweeney, the Chamberlain, and Richard B. Connolly, the Controller, completing its guiding triumvirate. No paper had insisted so constantly upon these facts as the Post. It may claim to have been the leader in the fight against the Ring until the close of 1870, when, with the resignation of Charles377 Nordhoff as managing editor, it relaxed its efforts, and the Times stepped to the front.
Tweed was a familiar figure to all interested in city affairs—an enormous, bulky personage, his apparent ponderosity belied by his firm, swift step and his piercing eyes, grim lips, and sharp nose. He was a man of inexhaustible energy, a fighter as fresh at midnight as at noon. From his little private office on Duane Street, where a faded sign proclaimed him an attorney-at-law, he would sally out on an instant’s notice to City Hall, to Albany, or to some ward headquarters where a revolt was brewing, and assert his authority with despotic effectiveness. By his untiring activity, his imposing physique, and his combination of cruelty, shrewdness, and audacity, he had risen in fifteen years from his original calling of chair-maker to be a multi-millionaire and dictator of the city. The office on which he chiefly founded this success was his seat on the County Board of Supervisors, which he held continuously after 1857.
His lieutenant, Sweeney, or “the Squire,” was later called by an Aldermanic Committee “the most despicable and dangerous, because the best educated and most cunning of the entire gang.” Nast’s cartoons have made us familiar with his villainous look—his low forehead, heavy brows, thick lips, and bushy hair. Yet he was quiet, retiring, cold, averse to mingling with the crowd or with other politicians, and in a measure cultured; he was a ready writer, his mental operations were keen and quick, and he was held in awe by the Tammany satellites, whom he would pass in the street without recognizing by even a nod. Connolly was the most respectable of the three in appearance, looking, with his trim black broadcloth, close-shaven face, and high, narrow forehead, the very part of a business or municipal treasurer. He was really an ignorant Irish-born bookkeeper, who brought to the Ring plenty of low cunning, the product of a mixture of cowardice and greed, and the quadruple-entry system of bookkeeping which it found so useful.
As early as the municipal election of 1863, when the378 Evening Post supported Orison Blunt as a reform candidate against the nauseous F. I. A. Boole, the editors were denouncing “that army of scamps which has so long fattened upon the city treasury.” The paper clearly understood how the Ring had originated. For ten years preceding the war, the Republicans had exercised general control of the State government, and the Democrats of the city. The Legislature step by step had reduced the powers of the municipality by entrusting them to State boards and commissions. As a climax to this process, in 1857, it established the powerful New York County Board of Supervisors, a State body composed of six Republicans and six Democrats. But the grafters of the two parties conspired to defeat these ill-planned efforts at reform, and by 1860 discerning men saw that the net result of the transfer of authority had been simply to create two centers of corruption instead of one, and to implicate both parties. Tweed and his fellow-Democrats on the Board of Supervisors quickly gained control by bribing one of the Republicans, and at Albany—
a bargain [said the Evening Post of Aug. 12, 1871] was made between the most prominent factions in the two parties, the Seward-Weed Republicans and the Tammany Democrats, by which the offices were divided between them, and all direct or personal responsibility for official conduct was destroyed. Tammany managed the city vote, in accordance with this bargain; Mr. A. Oakey Hall, the counsel of the combination, drew up the laws which were needed to carry it out; Mr. Thurlow Weed and his lobby friends passed them through the Legislature, and the New York Times gave them all the respectability they could get from its hearty support, in the name of the Republican party.
Immediately after the war the Evening Post asked for a new Charter as the best cure for the evil. The city should again be allowed to rule itself, the editors believed, and this self-government should be exercised through one party, which could be made to answer directly for all acts of the municipal authorities. “Make the Democratic party clearly responsible in this city for all its misgovernment, corruption, and waste, and the379 people would drive it from power in less than three years.” The existing Charter had four great defects, said the Post in January, 1867: the lack of home rule, the division of the city legislature into two bodies, which impeded business, the failure to withdraw all executive functions from these bodies, and the fact that the Mayor had little real authority or responsibility. “All the successive changes since 1830 have been made upon the same principle of limiting or withdrawing powers that are abused, instead of enforcing an effective responsibility for the abuse. This policy ... has produced the evils which it feared. Never was the administration so ineffective, never was there so much corruption, and never were the people so little interested in choosing their officers with any hope that one class or set will do better than another.”
The charges made by the paper were all general—no guilty men or departments were specified. But it had a pretty clear conception of the extent of the stealing. In April, 1867, it alleged that the city was being robbed of hundreds of thousands in “the monstrous court house swindle”; robbed by the politicians in collusion with the twenty horse railways of the city, of which only three paid the full license tax imposed by law; robbed in the cleaning and repair of the streets; and robbed in the renting and sale of the city’s real estate. In April, 1868, it estimated that the Ring during the previous year had made a half million upon the contracts for the building, repair, and furnishing of the city armories. The failure to name the criminals arose from the inability of even so able a managing editor as Nordhoff to trace the peculations. Since the district attorney, sheriff, courts, aldermen, and even the Legislature were under the Ring’s influence, the secrecy of its transactions seemed impenetrable. Give the city a new government, was the view of the Post, and reform, though not necessarily punishment of the criminals, would follow. “Is New York a colony?” was the title of an editorial in June, 1867. Moreover, the paper was the less concerned to be specific in380 that it believed mere general denunciation of the Ring was having a much greater effect than was the case. “Thieves Growing Desperate,” ran another editorial caption of April, 1868:
The vampires of the city treasury are well aware of the growing determination of the people to make away with them. They must choose between two alternatives. They must either aim at prolonging their privilege of plunder by moderating and disguising their use of it, or they must steal so enormously for the short time remaining as to compensate them for soon losing their chance.
If Tweed saw this utterance, he must have dropped a contemptuous chuckle over it. He was quite resolved to steal “enormously,” but the “short time” which the Post gave him proved a good three years. Far from being desperate, the Ring was just getting its hand in. The graft on the armories, which the Post accurately estimated at already a half million, ultimately reached three millions, and the graft on the courthouse, which the paper had put at hundreds of thousands, rose steadily until it totaled $9,000,000. Tweed was attaining more and more power as the year 1869 opened. He had just been elected to the State Senate, and could now personally superintend every item of the Ring’s machinations at Albany, while his friend A. Oakey Hall was just taking his seat as Mayor.
The Evening Post was quite likely right in its contention that a new and truly good Charter would even at this date have awakened a new interest in city affairs, and a spasm of reform; but a good Charter it was impossible to get. With his usual shrewdness, Tweed at once prepared to use the movement for a better form of city government to make his position secure.
When the legislative session of January, 1870, began—the first Legislature in twenty-four years to be controlled by the Democrats—it was generally agreed that the city would be given another Charter. The Tweed Ring was preparing one; the Young Democrats, an unsavory group who opposed Tweed on strictly selfish grounds,381 were preparing one; and the reform element represented by the union League Club, the Evening Post, the Tribune, and the World, wanted one. “The true democratic doctrine of city government,” insisted the Post, “is that power ought to be simple, responsibility undivided and direct.” The proposed Charter of the anti-Ring Democrats, the so-called “huckleberry Charter” of the “hayloft-and-cheesepress” up-Staters, was defeated. Then, at the beginning of February, Tweed and Sweeney suddenly sprang their own instrument, and made it clear that they would push it rapidly through. It was patently vicious. As early as Feb. 3, the Evening Post attacked it sharply. It pointed out that it embodied none of that simplification of powers and responsibility which the Post had long advocated; that too many city departments would be governed by boards, not single heads; that the Common Council retained its executive functions; and that the four-year term which it gave the Mayor and his lieutenants was, under the circumstances, dangerous.
But four days later a far more powerful attack was published. The Evening Post would in any event have kept up its campaign with growing vigor, but it had found an unexpected helper and adviser in Samuel J. Tilden. Bryant later wrote:
It was in February of the year 1870 that Samuel J. Tilden came and desired an interview with the senior editor.... He seemed moved from his usual calm and quiet demeanour. His errand, he said, related to the Charter which Tweed and his creatures were trying to get enacted into law. If that should happen, it would give the city, with all the powers of its government, into the hands of men who felt no restraint of conscience and who would plunder it without stint. The city would be ruined, he said, if this Charter, conceived with a special design to make speculation easy, passed, and it was altogether important that the Evening Post should resist its passage with all the power of argument which it possessed, and prevent it if possible. He then, with his usual perspicacity, pointed out the contrivances for misusing the public funds which were embodied in the bill.... The Evening Post did not require Mr. Tilden’s exhortations to oppose382 the bill, but we proceeded, by the help of the additional light given us, to hold up the Charter to the severest censure.
The Post in a series of editorials absolutely riddled the Tweed Charter. It aimed its main fire, however, at the heart of the document—its creation of a Board of Special Audit with financial powers so huge that millions could be stolen by the mere nod of four or five men, and so well entrenched that only by new State legislation could these men be reached. This Board was to be composed of the Mayor, Controller, Chamberlain, and Presidents of the Supervisors and Aldermen, so that Tweed, Oakey Hall, and Connolly were certain of places on it. It would seem that those who ran might have read the perils concealed in the Tweed Charter; while the bribery employed to pass it was so colossal that it is hard to understand how it was even temporarily concealed. It is believed that a million was spent in corrupting legislators; the chairman of the conference committee on the Charter admitted later that he took $10,000; and it was shown that Tweed bought five Republican Senators for $40,000 each. Yet many of the best people of New York looked on complacently while the Republicans joined hands with the Democrats, and the Charter passed both houses by enormous majorities.
The Evening Post was powerfully aided in combating this iniquity by Manton Marble of the World and Dana of the Sun. The Tribune was upon the same side, though Greeley did not fail to indulge his unsurpassed faculty for wabbling; he went to Albany and said that if he could not get the Charter amended, he would take it as it was, while his journal continued attacking it. The union League Club energetically opposed it. But the Citizens Association, under the universally esteemed Peter Cooper, was convinced that the Ring had become conservative, and would now stop stealing and take the side of the taxpayers. The Times, with similar blindness, hailed the passage of the Tweed Charter as a signal victory for reform, saying (April 6):
383
If it shall be put into operation by Mayor Hall, with that regard for the general welfare which we have reason to anticipate, we feel sure that our citizens will have reason to count yesterday’s work in the Legislature as most salutary and important.
And Tweed saw that Oakey Hall lost no time in appointing him head of the Department of Public Works, and otherwise putting it into operation.
Indeed, the Boss now stood at the apex of his career. One of his creatures, John T. Hoffman, was Governor, another was Mayor, and he, Hall, and Connolly formed a majority of the Board of Special Audit, with authority, as the Post said, “to do almost what they please.” Almost penniless ten years before, Tweed now had a fortune of more than $3,000,000, and his career had entered upon a period of dazzling splendor. He acquired a fine mansion at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, and at his summer home at Greenwich, Conn., the very stalls of his horses were mahogany. He had flashing equipages and gave glittering dinners; he and his retainers fitted up the Americus Club, in Greenwich, where each member had a private room, in princely style; and when his daughter was married that summer her gown cost $4,000 and she received gifts worth $100,000. The voters most impressed by all this were the poor voters among whom in winter Tweed scattered gifts of coal, provisions, and money. The Ring did not forget its family connections. Not even President Grant, remarked the Post, had such a taste for nepotism. One of Tweed’s sons was Assistant District Attorney and another was Commissioner of Riverside Drive; while four of Sweeney’s relatives had fat places.
As Samuel J. Tilden later sarcastically noted, the Times was unlucky enough on May 5, 1870, to boast of “reforms made possible by the recent legislation at Albany.” That May 5 was the day on which the Board of Special Audit ordered payment of $6,312,500 on the Court House, ninety per cent. of it graft.
But such barefaced looting of the city as had now been carried on for years could not be continued without arousing384 public anger, and the storm soon burst. The share of graft which the Ring exacted from public contractors had already been shoved up to 85 per cent. The frauds perpetrated in the city election of May 17, 1870, were so flagrant that observers gasped. A suspicion that the city’s debts were rising by leaps and bounds grew into conviction. The Evening Post and Tribune continued their warnings and attacks, and early in the fall the Times fully joined them.
How long these assaults would have continued essentially futile, had it not been for a dramatic episode, it is hard to say. This episode grew out of the fact that the Ring, being greedy, made enemies in its own camp. One of the chief was James O’Brien, who was sheriff 1867–70, and had a large personal following. O’Brien distributed his money lavishly while he held office, and retired from a post worth $100,000 a year as poor as when he entered it. To recompense himself, he presented a claim for $200,000 to the Board of Special Audit, and this body, which did not fear him now that he was out of office, rejected it. Tweed knew that it was a mistake, but was overruled. It happened that in December, 1870, the County Auditor, a loyal servant to Tweed, was fatally injured in a sleigh accident, and as a result of some transfers which followed, one of O’Brien’s friends obtained a position in the County Bookkeeper’s office. There he discovered the bogus accounts used in stealing millions during the erection of the Courthouse, and placed transcripts of them in O’Brien’s hands. In vengeful spirit, the ex-sheriff in the early summer of 1871 brought them to the office of the latest recruit to the anti-Tweed ranks, the Times, and the Times made admirable use of them.
It would be pleasant for historians of journalism to record that one of the great New York newspapers itself conducted an investigation into Tweed’s looting of the city and fully exposed him. If any managing editor could claim the credit which has to be given an overturned sleigh and a jealous ex-sheriff, he would be immortal. Why, when the Evening Post and Tribune had been attacking385 the régime of graft for years, did they not cut into the tumor? We may lay part of the blame on journalistic timidity, and the lack at that time of a tradition of investigative enterprise in journalism; but the chief answer lies in the care with which the Ring guarded its secrets. It had seemed for a moment the previous fall to invite inquiry. Connolly, with a parade of injured virtue, asked six eminent business men—William B. Astor, Moses Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts, and others—to inspect his books, and these six, who commanded public confidence, had reported on Nov. 1 “that the financial affairs of the city, under the charge of the Controller, are administered in a correct and faithful manner.” But the Ring’s real misdeeds were kept under cover.
The vigor with which the Post attacked the Ring slackened during the early months of 1871. Bryant was engrossed in his translations from Homer. Nordhoff quarreled with Isaac Henderson over what the latter thought the undue violence of his denunciation of Tweed, was offered a long vacation with pay on the understanding that he should look for another place, and resigned the managing editorship to Charlton Lewis, who for a time was more cautious of utterance. But by the 1st of July we find the Evening Post as vehement as ever.
It was particularly aroused against the Ring by the bloody Orange Riot of July 12, 1871, one of the most disgraceful of the city’s outbreaks. The previous year an unprovoked attack had been made upon an Orange picnic at Elm Park by some Irish Catholics who broke down the fence, assailed men, women, and children with revolvers and stones, killed three outright, wounded eleven mortally, and seriously injured forty or fifty. The Orangemen in 1871 prepared to celebrate Boyne Day by a parade, as they had a perfect right to do, and by July 10 it was rumored that the hooligans meant to attack them again. That day the Post published a warning editorial, saying the city authorities must prepare to quell the mob “by the quickest means.” But Mayor Hall and Superintendent of Police Kelso issued orders that the386 police should disperse, not the assailants, but the Orange procession; and this made the Post furious. It meant that the Tammany Ring, “with a cynical contempt for law and order, have taken the part of the mob.” Very properly, Gov. Hoffman overruled Mayor Hall, and directed that the Orangemen be protected in any lawful assemblage. On the 12th the parade formed, and began its march under a strong escort of police and militia. The more turbulent Irish element was out in force, lining the route threateningly. As the parade passed along Eighth Avenue near Twenty-sixth Street, a shot was fired by an Irishman from a second story window at the Ninth Regiment, and was the signal for other shots and a shower of brickbats and stones. The order to fire was given, the Eighty-fourth Regiment—according to the Post—was the first to respond, and before the mob was dispersed the street was full of the dead and dying. The Evening Post had nothing but praise for the militia, nothing but abuse for the city government. Bryant penned a ringing editorial upon Tweed:
New York, like every great city, contains a certain number of idle, ignorant, and lawless people. But these classes are not dangerous to our peace, either by their numbers or by their organization. They are dangerous and injurious only because they are the tools of Tweed, Sweeney, Oakey Hall, Connolly, and the Ring of corruptionists of whom these four persons are the leaders. Depose the Tammany Ring and all danger from the “dangerous classes” will cease. It is because these know themselves to be supported by the Ring, because they are employed when they want employment, salaried when they are idle, succored when they commit petty crimes, pardoned when they are convicted, and flattered at all times by the Tammany Ring, that they have become so audacious and restless....
The Tammany Ring purposely panders to the worst and most dangerous elements and passions of our population. It cares nothing for liberty, nothing for the rights of the citizen, nothing for the public peace, for law and order; it cares only to fasten itself upon the city, and chooses to use, for that end, the most corrupt and demoralizing means, and the most lawless and dangerous part of our population. It is the Head of the Mob. It387 rules by, and through, and for the Mob; and unless it is struck down New York has not yet seen the worst part of its history.
It was soon struck down. The Times began the verbatim publication of O’Brien’s evidence on July 22, 1871, with a masterly analysis of it. The Evening Post’s editorial that afternoon took the view that the Times’s evidence was in all probability valid to the last figure, that the Ring could not disprove it, and that it made the refusal of the authorities to show their accounts intolerable. During the seven days that the Times required for publishing all of O’Brien’s transcripts the Post carried half a dozen editorials pressing this opinion.
However, the “secret accounts” so courageously brought out by the Times offered little more than the starting point of the exposure. They consisted of the dates and amounts of certain payments by Controller Connolly, their objects, and the names of the men who received them. The enormous sums disbursed, taken in connection with the brevity of the time, the inadequacy of the objects, and the recurrence of the same names as recipients, made the public certain that the Ring had stolen on a colossal scale. A single carpenter, for example, had been paid $360,000 for one month’s repairs on the new Courthouse. But as yet there was no legal proof against any one official. There was no evidence, sufficient to sustain a civil or criminal action, which disclosed the principals behind the bogus accounts. Moreover, redress could not be sought from the Aldermen, who were allies of the Ring, and powerless under the new Charter anyway; from the District Attorney, who was Tweed’s friend; from the grand juries, which were packed; or from the Legislature, which was not in session. Tweed might well exclaim, “What are you going to do about it?”
The Times, the Post, and other papers could do no more than continue their attacks on the Ring, call for exhibition of the city’s books, and express their faith that in the November election punishment would be made certain by the choice of a reform Legislature and a zealous388 Attorney-General. Several journals did less. The World, for example, was so far misled by Democratic partisanship as to assume an attitude of apology for the Ring. But the work of the Times and O’Brien bore its first fruit when on Sept. 4 a great city mass-meeting was held at which a Committee of Seventy was appointed; and a more important result followed ten days later when Controller Connolly, after an interview with Tilden, turned traitor to the Ring, and tried to save himself by resigning and deputing the reformer, Andrew H. Green, to take his place.
For the fight was won, as the Evening Post recognized, when the party of good government gained the Controller’s books. Tilden obtained the legal opinion of Charles O’Conor, whose name carried the greatest weight, affirming the right of Mr. Green to hold the office, and gave it to the Evening Post of Sept. 18 for exclusive publication. It caused Mayor Hall to abandon instantly his intention of trying to eject Mr. Green. With the Controllership in their hands, the reformers were able to protect the city records from destruction, to undertake their careful examination, and to find the clues to judicial proofs lying in the Broadway Bank and elsewhere—clues of which Tilden made admirable use. “New York will carry down through the memory and history of the coming years,” said the Post, “the fact that Mr. Tilden threw a flood of light into the widened breach of this fortress of fraud, and that he and Mr. Havemeyer, as the only means of saving the city from bankruptcy, thrust perforce ... Mr. Andrew H. Green, whom they knew to be of stern and honest stuff, into the charge of the depleted treasury.” It was only a few months before the leading Ring members were in jail or exile.