Boss Tweed, New York City, and the Political Machine

Does democracy always foster moral success, or can the systems in place actually help those with devious intentions? To kick off our first episode of season three, Mary, Gary, and Eryn explore these questions by examining the life of Boss Tweed and why the backdrop of Gilded Age New York City was a perfect setup for the corrupt politician to seize power. How did Tweed manipulate each sector of society--from the police to groups of immigrants--to control an entire city?

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Transcript

Intro/Outro (00:01)
From the Bill of Rights Institute, Fabric of History weaves together US history, founding principles, and what all of this means to us today. Join us as we pull back the curtains of the past to see what's inside.

Haley (00:15)
Does democracy always foster moral success? Or can the systems in place actually help those with dishonest intentions? To kick off our first episode of season three, Mary, Gary, and Eryn explore these questions by examining the life of Boss Tweed and why the backdrop of Gilded Age New York City was a perfect setup for the corrupt politician to seize power. How did Tweed manipulate each sector of society, from the police to immigrants, to control an entire city?

Mary (00:51)
Hi, everybody. Mary's here, and I'm joined once again by my illustrious colleagues, Gary and Eryn. So we thought it would be fun if you joined us in a little game because games are fun, right? If I say Boss Tweed what do you think of Eryn? You go first.

Eryn (01:14)
From the first word that would pop into my head, if that's the actual game would be corruption. Having recently read two books that had Boss Tweed in them, one was The Great Bridge by David McCullough, and of course, talking about Boss Tweed's involvement with the building of the Great Bridge and then a novel called New York, and that just expands the history of New York from the 1600s, it just goes right past 9/11 and Boss Tweed plays a huge part in the corruption and Five Points and Tammany Hall, and I think he's just a very intriguing man.

Mary (02:01)
Well, Eryn, thank you. I did not really explain the game very well, so thank you for being so sporting.

Eryn (02:08)
Gary, what would yours have been?

Gary (02:09)
So your question was when you say Boss Tweed, what do I think?

Mary (02:12)
I think that was the question. Again, I didn't really explain it very well, so I think let's go with it.

Gary (02:19)
Okay, I'm going second. So I'm trying not to incorporate it, but if your question was what comes to mind? Yeah, we're being tested here first, tops of mine. It's very dual in my brain. Like when you first say Boss Tweed, I still think of the name. I don't think of an image just yet. If you've listened to the podcast before, I may have mentioned I grew up on Long Island near New York. So Boss Tweed like the name you heard about really early as a big figure in New York history, that was sort of important, but not necessarily the best. But why? And then it gets really complicated. It got real simplified, though, when you say what do you think of it? And I'm going to use the phrase larger than life. I think about the political cartoons that draw him as this practically parade, float-sized figure in American history, specifically New York history, but really American history in general. Just those drawings that later on I knew to be Thomas Nast. Generally, drawings but he's just this symbol of a whole lot of stuff. So that's kind of what I think of I'm curious while you ask.

Mary (03:29)
So he's an actual figure. Before he was the parade float in Gary's head, he was a man that he was born in New York. He is the descendant of Scottish-Irish immigrants, and he has this sort of gradual rise through local politics in New York. And he quickly becomes the boss, the leader of Tammany Hall, and he's associated with basically running the city of New York, and he almost becomes this- he's not just a man anymore. He symbolizes all the corruption of the Gilded Age and the dirtiness of graft and all these things going on in New York City after the Civil War. So I think the words that come to my mind are terrible, awesomeness, which can you be corrupt and terrible and yet awesome at the same time? And I would say emphatically, yes, because I think the more I learn about Boss Tweed, the more intrigued I am. So how can someone like Boss Tweed, who is undoubtedly corrupt, undoubtedly breaking rules, pocketing money, and just clearly cheapening the rule of law, how can he come to power and be successful in a democracy like ours? I think that's worth exploring. So I think we should maybe take a little break and then we can sort of start with, who is this guy? Who is Boss Tweed? Before he was this symbol, he was a parade float of the Gilded Age and corruption after the Civil War.

Mary (05:11)
So before the break, we said we would address the idea of who is Boss Tweed as a person. So his real name is William Tweed, and he grows up in Manhattan and he's involved in local politics. He's a bookkeeper, he's a fireman, he's an alderman, and he actually goes to Congress in 1852. So those very interesting years right before the Civil War, and he decides local politics is really where it's at. So he heads back to New York and becomes a member of the Tammany Hall Association. And through Tammany Hall, he basically gets to a point where he is running New York City in this Civil War, post-Civil War era. That's my two-sentence summary of a Boss Tweed.

Gary (05:57)
So if I could jump in before, because I have a question here. So when you say running New York City, where you mean contracts and money and decisions and things like this have to get filtered through or become filtered kind of through him.

Mary (06:11)
He's not the Mayor of New York City, but he basically puts the Mayor in place. He puts everyone in place like everyone is connected to Boss Tweed somehow some way. So Boss is just this appropriate name for him. He really is a boss. He's this imposing. He's a large figure. He's got charisma and he's got power.

Eryn (06:32)
I think it's a little bit like Mary was talking about he had this gradual rise to power. He went to Congress, he comes back and he starts out as just a member of Tammany Hall, and then he's on the city board of supervisors, and then he becomes head of Tammy Hall's general committee and then a state Senator by 1868. I don't know why in my mind, I just literally visualize him climbing a ladder higher and higher of power and utilizing who and what he can if he goes to do that.

Mary (07:07)
Well, I think what's interesting about him is there's nothing sort of untoward in a way about him having an elected office or being appointed such and such. I mean, this Tammany Hall Association has existed in New York from the 1780s. So it really goes back to the founding as an association of people who have these social and political interests, and he becomes a part of that. So far, there's nothing corrupt or terribly awesome about that story. It sounds very much like a democracy and what is part of American history. But Boss Tweed, the corruption within that framework, he just takes it to the next level, to a point where as the cartoons of Thomas Nast, if you're a history teacher or even a history student, you've seen one of those cartoons. He almost looks like I don't know what he looks like, almost like a giant in a fairytale or something. He's just this sort of weird big guy. But he was so brazen in his corruption and in the power that he wielded that it's an interesting story. Like he just took it too far.

Gary (08:13)
So your question, Mary, earlier, was how did Boss Tweed rise in a democracy? Right. What was there? And I think it may be important to go back a little bit in time to see the structure that he's in Tammany Hall and see what were its purposes. Why was it existing in such a way that when he comes on the scene in the late 1800s, he's able to plug in? And as you said, take it too far because that sounds like he only was able to do that because structures were in place for an originally non-governmental but still key part of the community that Tammany Hall was. Right. So it's like there's this organization that had a function that was doing something for many years that was so ingrained and tied into the working specifically in New York, that when he does arrive in the scene, it's like the ground is fertile enough for what he's planting and cultivating to grow if that analogy makes any sense. So do we think it's worth kind of like setting the scene for the structure of what Tammany Hall was and how it got to the point of the 18 hundreds for him to come in?

Mary (09:38)
I think I love your analogy, by the way. I'm very big on analogies. I think that makes a lot of sense. So maybe we should take a quick break and then go back to Tammany Hall in New York City and what's going on after the Civil War that's going to enable Boss Tweed to just take it to the next level.

Mary (09:59)
I think it's important. Like we were saying before the break, we have to situate Boss Tweed in his proper context to fully appreciate who he was and what he did and his legacy, and why we're even talking about him today. And New York City after the Civil War is not the New York City that we think of today. So New York City is kind of a dump, I should say parts of New York City we're certainly dumpy there's certainly very wealthy and very nice wealthy neighborhoods and middle-class neighborhoods. But then there are slums like the five points that are just absolute horrific slums, I think is difficult for modern Americans to think about. So over half or nearly half the population of New York City at this time is German or Irish immigrants like me, my family, German and Irish immigrants.

Mary (10:54)
But the streets are unpaved. There's no sewer, like cholera, tuberculosis is just rampant. So it's really for a lot of these immigrants coming into the city, life is pretty miserable. So New York City and America at large is growing in this time period. It's the Gilded Age. We're industrializing. Our economy is expanding. There's lots of jobs. And that's pulling lots of immigrants to come to the United States in the first place. But when they get here, are they being met with the American dream, or are they getting cholera and garbage dumped on their head when they walk down the street? So this is what and then Boss Tweed being in local politics and being associated with Tammany Hall, being very charismatic, is able to tap into this and sort of pull all the strings and connect the judges and the police in the fire Department and charities and just sort of weave this web of influence and control and then benefit personally tremendously, both in terms of power and wealth for himself and his fellow cronies, his Tweed ring, as they were known.

Eryn (12:08)
Yeah, that's what it comes down to is they needed these basic services. And then Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall come and give them food and health services and all these things and then just say, great, we'll give you all of these things and thank you. If you can go vote for us now at the polls, that will be of great service. And that's how you can say thank you to us. Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed provided a lot of basic needs that are important. A lot of 50%, I think you said, Mary of the population of New York didn't have and they were able to bring that as well as naturalization and voting rights for a lot of these people. But then at the same time, they were profiting from padded contracts and leases. Boss Tweed went around wearing a giant diamond on his lapel. They have a lot of money. Like they gave some things to the poor, but they still milk that for all it was worth you could say.

Mary (13:25)
That is one of the reasons why I love him is that he walked around with a big diamond. For the record, I'm very shallow. But I think to go back to what you're saying, Eryn, he basically provides ways for these immigrants to function in a city that is basically it's a scary and it's a dangerous place. And he's not only giving them necessities like food and housing, but he's contributing money to charities that are also doing these things. And he's also, I think, crucially, he sets up courts that makes these immigrants citizens. And if you're a citizen, you can vote in a democracy. And if a democracy is working the way it's supposed to, you can vote to change. Your vote is your voice, and you can work to change this dangerous environment that you're living in. Is that a bad thing that he was doing that it was a huge need and it wasn't being met? So I think this is where the argument for Boss Tweed is not as evil as we may think comes in. But, of course, it's more complicated than that. 

Eryn (14:34)
And at the end of the day, what we're saying is when that original question we have of how did someone like Boss Tweed not only function but be successful in a democracy? And when push came to shove, I mean, those who would have benefited from that fair, upright, political Democratic system were the same people who are benefiting even more from all of Boss Tweed's swindles. And so it worked out really well for, like you said, that timing in New York and what was happening for him to not only help people but also be successful. And it's a moral dilemma, we might say. I don't know.

Gary (15:21)
I think you're exactly right that the sociology of this is very functional, right. From the perspective of the people who are new to New York, who are immigrating in that, as you said, there is a system functioning from the perspective of someone coming in. One is able to find housing, to find a job, to be backed up legally, to find a pathway to citizenship, to have some kind of protection. None of this is happening behind the scenes. This is not a scenario where it turned out years later that turns out that they're taking money or anything like this. It was very obvious and one contributed to it knowing that, all right, that's just going to happen. Right. In order to get people what they need in this time period, in this kind of way, the way the system is set up, there's opportunity for corruption. It raises the question, though, about degree. At what point does it become in our minds, so problematic? Maybe immediately, maybe the way we're describing this is not a justification for the way things are supposed to be. We're just saying the way things were at the time. But I think in your explorations of Boss Tweed, there becomes a point where it's like, all right, there's such thing as too much.

Gary (16:48)
There's such thing that means he becomes this figure in political cartoons, which is evidence that people are well aware of what he is doing and what the organization is doing and what not is there a line that is crossed, and if so, where immediately far too late. Where does it get to be a problem?

Mary (17:11)
I think that's a great question. So where do you draw the line we've described? New York is not a very welcoming place to the poor and the immigrants, and Boss Tweed and his cronies are undoubtedly helping these people. But what's so bad about that? Where's the line? What went wrong? So let's take a quick break and take up that question.

Mary (17:37)
Before the break. We had hopefully described New York City as not a very pleasant place that's growing very much in the year after the Civil War and is lacking a lot of basic services. So no sewers, poor housing. And you have all these immigrants coming in and they have all of these needs that Boss Tweed is meeting, like basic needs, like coal to heat your home or a place to actually live or a loaf of bread to eat. So what's so bad about that? And like we said, that's sort of where Gary kind of teed us up. Where do you draw the line? So he is meeting those needs, but he's also partaking in just rampant corruption from his association with Tammany Hall. And it's almost like, so he didn't invent corruption, like appointing someone, you know, to a post or anything like that.

Mary (18:30)
But he just takes it so far that he really kind of makes himself a target. It's really what we call hubris, or, not we, BRI didn't invent the term hubris, but just this idea that your greed just takes you to the point where you're going to have this tragic fall. And I think that is the Boss Tweed story in a nutshell. Basically, my favorite example of his corruption is that he sets up a law office and everyone knows he's not a lawyer, but he charges all this money in legal fees and it's basically extortion. And that's just one of many examples. He pads contracts, he gets control of the city treasury. In 1970, it becomes known as the Tweed charter. So that's basically, I think that's the tipping point where he's pocketing hanging his Tweed ring. So much money, like even to this day, it's unclear how much money he pocketed because he was so good at it and he was just so brazen. I think we put down between 75 and 200 million dollars. That's kind of a big range. But even at the low end of that range that's so much money. And as we said earlier, he wore a diamond.

Mary (19:40)
These people have racehorses. He at one point Boss Tweed personally owns, he's the third largest real estate mogul in Manhattan. I mean, they're so wealthy that it gets to the point where it's starting to catch people's attention. Who is this working for now?

Gary (20:00)
It's interesting how public it is, right? All of this is happening and everybody knows about it. And I think we started off our conversation talking about how it does appear in political cartoons. But I like the analogy of sort of a puppet master. You said earlier strings, right? You can almost imagine at the end of each string, like, in order for this to function, there has to be connections between the judges that are judging you and the police that may or may not arrest somebody. And the funding for all of this, the treasury is such a key part of this, right. Controlling the budgets and then, therefore, the policies that get approved that support your budgets and all of this. It's a very orchestrated but in front of everybody thing. And it's almost as if, again, it's not one person behind the scenes pocketing shaving money off, and then it turns off that he's got millions of dollars nobody knew about. It implicates countless people to have this thing function that everyone who benefits from this to some degree must know or at least is benefiting from this system happening. So to dismantle a system like that is massive no matter what happens to Boss Tweed.

Gary (21:18)
And we can talk about what ends up happening to Boss Tweed. The system itself kind of exists outside of him. It's such a monster, for lack of a better word. And there at the top of it, he is the puppet master of all of these things.

Eryn (21:32)
Tammany hall was they decentralized themselves, and so they had Ward leaders in different parts of the city, and those Ward leaders kind of acted as advocates when they had to, and there were difficulties with the law within that Ward. And so you could have a criminal judge who was appointed or kept in office by Tammany Hall would listen to that word leader to have some sort of suspended sentence in a particular case. Right. To your point, Gary, I just imagine it and no one can see my fingers except me. But it's like your fingers are so intertwined that how do you pull that apart? And then also it was so brazenly going on in daylight, as they say, and I just imagine everyone plugging their ears and not really paying attention. But it's like all these things end up kind of because people were benefiting more from a lack of a rule of law. It, therefore, cheapens the rule of law, further degrading a healthy civil society, and they lose faith in a Democratic institution. So it seems like a very negative cycle to me, right. Like the further we go down this path, the less likely we are to believe that a Democratic institution is beneficial to us and us, of course, maybe like the immigrants who are or whoever else is benefiting from that too at the time because of that need that they had and the lack of services.

Gary (23:22)
Rule of law is a really good thing to pause and think about, because in the case of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, at this point it's almost worth contemplating what legality means in terms of what it is intended to mean and how it differs from morality. I mentioned it because when considering law and legality at the time, there are different ways of dealing with it. The enforcers of the law, if they work with you or for you, are going to handle it differently. The judges who evaluate these laws and to the point where if there's something that's problematic or in your way and you're in a corrupt system, to have the ability to change the law itself, to make your thing legal suddenly is an immense power to wield. And just considering the meaning of rule of law as it applies to Boss Tweed is a significant consideration.

Eryn (24:20)
Yeah. I mean, even thinking about it, my head hurts a little bit. And I feel like that's its own podcast episode because of how that is. You're right. It's like almost a different definition of rule of law, a different way to see it. But I would say, like, rule of law as it applies to, BRI if you looked on our website, what would the rule of law definition be?

Gary (24:47)
The concept of rule of laws, it applies to everybody. And yet here. Yes. And if part of our question is like, when is the line being crossed? Well, when the actual principle is being violated, meaning if you don't give money to the right person or you're not connected in some way suddenly now it breaks down and it is not in a question of equality anymore. And that's where contemplating law gets really messy in this time period and starts pointing us in the direction of when too much is too much.

Mary (25:23)
As you were describing all of the connections between the police and the judges, it's not like grasped and corruption ends with Boss Tweed. It still happens. And I was thinking of the movie American Gangster. You guys were talking, which if you haven't seen it's, very good, and it's basically New York again, and the corruption of the cops and the drug scene with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington. So it's a similar idea. And I think that corruption is something that is an issue that's always going to be present in some way in popular government. Right. Because we're human beings and if we were angels, we wouldn't need laws. But yet again, to go back to the original question you posed, Gary, about crossing a line, rule of law doesn't mean anything anymore because there's no justice if the judge is in Boss Tweed's pocket and law isn't being applied equally to all people. And then we haven't even touched on the subject of voter fraud yet. He's also, Tweed is violating his brazen corruption. This idea of consent of the governed, Tammany Hall, the cronies. There would be more ballots cast than there were actual people able to vote.

Mary (26:39)
And they would hire they would use their crooked cops to browbeat people into voting for the right candidate. So elections are now being tampered with, too. And I think we can that's a dangerous thing to say. If you don't have faith in the election and the results, that can be very dangerous in our government, I'm going to stop there because I go too far. But that's true, right? I mean, can we just come out and say that that's a line being crossed? I mean, that's why we all watched what was going on in the capital and started to tear up what is happening, what's happening here? And I think it's fair to say, Boss Tweed, he went too far. The corruption was going too far. And I think it would have led to problems for him anyway because he had exposes written about him in the papers and also these political cartoons of Thomas Nast criticizing his corruption. But it was really the voter fraud and the tampering with the elections. You know, and your vote is your voice and if you're going to tamper with that, then you're going too far. And that's when we start to see the end, the beginning of the end for Boss Tweed.

Mary (27:53)
And what I love about this story is that it goes back to those political cartoons of Thomas Nast, especially in Harper's Weekly, where he's criticizing sort of relentlessly all of the things that Tweed is doing. And he attacks his corruption, but he's also attacking his Tweed's attack on equality and justice. He has the Tammany Tiger loose, which we can put in our show notes and counting their strength, where he's clearly controlling elections. So it was known that he was doing this and he's drawing the Nast. The artist was drawing attention to it and it's going to expose him for what he is. So even though he has been meeting basic needs of a lot of people, he's just gone too far. So it's time to take him down, diamonds and all.

Gary (28:41)
And isn't it true that it's the cartoons that in a very real sense led to the end of the story?

Mary (28:47)
It is. So that's another fun part of the Boss Tweed story. So he does get to go to prison, then he bribed his way out because he's Boss Tweed, and then he escapes to Spain and he's recognized in Spain because of these cartoons. And then he's brought back to the United States and he dies in prison. So if a cartoonist has your number, man, watch out. If you are a very large corrupt man wearing diamonds and violating these basic principles of justice and rule of law, look out

Gary (29:23)
And internationally famous.

Mary (29:25)
Yeah, you're done for. But I think to me, so there's a lot of interesting facets, if I may borrow the diamond terminology here to this story. So there is the terrible awesomeness of the fact that he was helping, undoubtedly helping a lot of people who needed help, but he went too far with the corruption. It's like we can accept maybe a little bit, oh, hey, I know this guy. He can get me a job that goes on all the time today. Right. But he took it too far and then he violated this idea of the voting and the elections, and you've got to draw a line in the sand. And I think another part of the story that I love is that there are people who are willing to call attention to it, even though people were undoubtedly some people were undoubtedly benefiting from Tweed in this Tweed ring calling attention to there's wrong being done here and it needs to be fixed. And for me, that's the heartening takeaway that. Even if there is wrongdoing in the system and there always will be, because again, we're human beings. We're not angels. There are those who are calling attention to it and speaking up and saying something has to be fixed here.

Mary (30:38)
So that is, I think, a good place to leave it. In our story of Boss Tweed, I think it's fair to say he's a villain. I'm going to go back to my original question, but there are a lot of heroes in the story, too, and we don't know all of them. I think Thomas Nast was, in a way, a hero for what he did, but there are a lot of other heroes in the story that we're not okay with what was going on and wanted something to change.

Gary (31:07)
Yeah, I think that's an important legacy. You started us off by asking what do we think of? And now the fact that we think a lot, that almost this figure is a warning is again, larger than life means, that long afterward we are remembering lots of different I love the word facets of the story years and years later. And I think it's an ongoing thing that, like you said, terribly awesome. It's big, but it's not necessarily positive, but important and still sticks in our minds. And that's quite a legacy.

Mary (31:43)
At the start of our conversation, I asked you what comes to mind when you think of Boss Tweed? And I'm hoping maybe that now we can think of Boss Tweed maybe as a cautionary tale for our democracy. He was successful for a time, but ultimately he was brought down. And I think it's a reminder that we need to be as the people who have a voice in our system. We need to be vigilant about those people who would try to exploit the system for their gain. So don't go to sleep. It's our watch and we need to make sure that we're keeping these important principles of justice and checks and balances and the rule of law in place. And that's the responsibility of everyone. It's not just the responsibility of any one person. So that's all we have time for on today's episode. We hope that you liked us. We hope it made you think. We hope you'll be back if you liked us, go ahead and leave us a review. Subscribe. We put out episodes every other week and we will be back with more interesting stories in the history and civics orbit. So until next time, everybody, take care.

Intro/Outro (32:58)
The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exists in a free society. Check out our educational resources and programs on our website mybri.org. Any questions or suggestions for future episodes? We'd love to hear from you. Just email us at comments@fabricofhistory.org and don't forget to visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay connected and informed about future episodes. Thank you for listening.