All the News Unfit to Print

ON WILLIAM MARCY TWEED, “WHO LOOKED LIKE SOMETHING God had hacked out with a dull axe,” the cuffs would have been a perfect fit—although not for the reasons Joseph Hooker advocated. In fact, Tweed probably did wear a set of handcuffs a time or two in his life as he was taken off to jail on this charge or that. To look at him, though, was to wonder whether there was a cell anywhere in New York that could contain him.

“A craggy hulk of a man,” writes biographer Alexander B. Callow Jr., “he was nearly six feet tall and weighed almost three hundred pounds. Everything about him was big; fists, shoulders, head (which sprouted receding reddish-brown hair, like weeds growing from a rock, carved into a mustache and closely cropped whiskers); eyes, blue and friendly; the diamond, which ‘glittered like a planet on his shirt front.’”

Between 1852 and 1867, Tweed, a Democrat, was elected to the United States House of Representatives, the New York State Senate, and the New York City Board of Advisers. He was also appointed the city’s commissioner of public works, all of which meant that he was uniquely qualified to hold that most uniquely American position: big-city political boss. He was, in fact, commonly known as Boss Tweed, and many of the people who dealt with him thought it was his given first name, so perfectly did it suit his station in life. Tweed may have been the most powerful such creature in any city in the United States in the nineteenth century, and his power came not from the ballot box but from the contacts he had made in politics, favors he had done for elected officials, which translated into favors now owed. He was Cardinal Richelieu without a Louis XIII looking over his shoulder.

Tweed kept regular office hours, although not every day and not all day long—long enough, though, for a parade of supplicants to file by his desk almost without end, hands folded in front of them, heads bowed. They pleaded for jobs on the city payroll, help with medical expenses, a better apartment to live in, or a good word to immigration officials so that a relative from abroad could stay in the United States a few extra weeks or months and maybe one day become a citizen.

The Boss usually granted their wishes. All they had to do in return was hand over some cash if they could spare it, or provide some special service for the Boss depending on their vocational skills—and, oh yes, vote for whomever he told them to. They were always happy to comply.

Tweed’s other duties included managing most of the city services and deciding how much they would cost, and bribing policeman so they wouldn’t look into those costs. Sometimes, you see, they were a bit high. For instance, when a county courthouse was constructed behind City Hall, it was Tweed who purchased many of the items needed for the interior of the building: “The cuspidors . . . were priced at $190 apiece. Thermometers totaled $7,500. There were $404,347 worth of safes. Brooms and other ‘articles,’ as they were categorized, cost $41,190. A rug expert estimated that for the amount spent on carpeting the county courthouse, all 8.25 acres of City Hall Park could have been covered three times over.” The difference between the normal prices of these goods and the amount that appeared on invoices went directly into the Boss’s pockets.

Another of Tweed’s cons involved the assistance of city officials. According to historian Oliver E. Allen, “A fictitious resolution would be introduced [before New York’s Board of Aldermen] threatening some merchant or trade, whereupon the alderman would go to the aggrieved party, commiserate with him, and say, ‘Give me $250 and I’ll make sure it’s killed in committee.’ The merchant would pay, never dreaming he’d been had.” The alderman was happy to hand over a percentage of the take to the Boss.

And, of course, there was the usual graft involved in the awarding of all city contracts. The winning bidder for a franchise to build a new streetcar line on the east side of Manhattan had to pay $18,000 to Tweed and various city officials for their compliance, without which the contract would have gone elsewhere.

The Boss and his henchmen, known as the Tweed Ring, were in a sense the forerunners of the Mafia, except more civic-minded and less violent. As such, they were a perfect target for newsmen. For the most part, though, the press ignored them—or praised them, whatever Tweed desired. In most cases, it was the former. He simply did not want attention to be called to him, especially for his various methods of operation, few of which could have withstood journalistic—or legal—scrutiny. But since most reporters who covered the workings of city government at the time were on Tweed’s payroll, he had nothing to worry about.

It was common for the Boss to invite reporters to lavish banquets and give them presents of liquor, champagne, and fine cigars. Many of the reporters at the banquets did not recognize many of the others. “I never saw so many people claiming to represent the newspaper profession,” one of them wrote in his column.

also subsidized reporters on nearly all the city papers with fees of $2000 to $2500 to exercise the proper discretion when it came to writing about politics. There was the reward of patronage for the especially deserving: Stephen Hayes, on the Herald staff during the high days of the Ring, was rewarded with a sinecure in the Marine Court ($2500 a year) and Michael Kelly, also of the Herald, received positions in both the Fire Department and the Department of Public Works. Moreover, reporters from various newspapers of the country, from a Cleveland newspaper to the Mobile [Alabama] Register, were hired to write favorable notices of the Democratic administration in New York. And if a firm went too far and tried to print a pamphlet exposing the Ring, it might find its offices broken into by the Ring’s men and the type altered to present a glowing account of the Ring’s activities—as did the printing company of Stone, Jordan and Thomson.

Adding to the unwillingness of reporters to find wrongdoing in the workings of municipal government was the fact that New Yorkers were living in relatively prosperous times, many able to afford dinner at a fancy restaurant, a night at the theater, tickets to concerts and the occasional sporting event—and the Tweed Ring had a lot to do with it. The Boss padded the city payroll with lackeys and paid them well. He saw that some of his ill-gotten gains were dispersed to local businessmen, a purchase of loyalty rather than goods. In addition, Tweed devised a new and more democratic charter for the city, although he ignored its provisions when he found them personally bothersome; brought to a close the long-delayed construction of Central Park for New Yorkers to enjoy in all manner of ways; and even worked to make the city’s water supply cleaner and healthier. It was hardly the right time for the press to dig into the Ring’s more corrupt practices and demand that something be done about them.

In fact, only two publications of note in the city opposed the Tweed Ring. One of them was the New York Times, which ran a series of anti-Tweed editorials without really having any evidence, or public groundswell, to support its charges. George Jones, one of the founders of the Times, paid dearly for his editorials, finding himself ostracized for his campaign against the Boss. According to Tweed biographer Kenneth D. Ackerman, Jones “could barely leave his home on West Thirty-Seventh Street these days without getting cross looks and cold shoulders—from his club friends at the Union League, his fellow newsmen on Park Row, or city workers he passed on Broadway or Chambers Street. Even his own New York Times staff, the clerks, writers, and typesetters, seemed to doubt him.” Jones was no longer invited to the annual New Year’s reception at the mayor’s manse. “Is it a hopeless fight?” the Times asked in an editorial shortly after one of the receptions in 1871. “Even those who are anxious to see us continue the struggle profess to be in very low spirits concerning the probable results.”

The other anti-Tweed publication was Harper’s Weekly, which employed the brilliant editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast. Nast’s drawings, it has been said, showed their subject to be “a gross, half-comic character done in quick sure black line, a figure of corruption incarnate, leering, lecherous, Falstaff with a stickpin.” Tweed hated the cartoons. He knew their impact. As he explained one day to a friend who was making light of the cartoons, “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.”

Eventually, though, it was not the pictures that brought the Tweed Ring to justice; it was a variety of factors, perhaps most important the inevitability of economic cycles. When, for a number of reasons, the good times began to fade away in New York, so did tolerance for the underhanded methods of the man who ruled the city. The press turned on Tweed because he could no longer afford such generous stipends for their obedience, and the public turned on him because he could no longer afford his previous levels of civic largesse. He was finally arrested and charged with trying to maintain his high-rolling lifestyle by stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from taxpayers and the Democratic Party tills. Sentenced to two separate jail terms, he was released from the first one after serving but a single year of a mandated fifteen.

After a brief hiatus, he was incarcerated for his second term, but he escaped and fled to Cuba, then to Spain, where he was captured by Spanish authorities, who recognized him from one of the Nast cartoons. They handed him over to the Americans, and Tweed was returned to confinement in New York in 1876. It did not agree with him. He began coughing, struggling for breath, losing weight. He would never be a free man again, much less a powerful one. Two years later he died behind bars, the largest man of his time in more ways than one.

It is remarkable that bribery has played so small a role in the history of journalism. One would think that more people profiting by nefarious activities would, as Boss Tweed did, offer money to reporters to keep quiet about them; one would think that more reporters would be receptive to the increased compensation. One would also think that members of the press who were themselves on the nefarious side would seek a quid pro quo to tailor their stories for the benefit of those who could pay. And it did happen from time to time, as the next chapter will reveal.

But there are no other tales of bribery in American journalism on the scale of the Tweed Ring. The closest came early in the twentieth century when a fellow named William d’Alton Mann began publishing Town Topics: The Journal of Society. Among Mann’s scurrilous practices was to pay butlers, maids, and other members of the staffs of New York’s social elite for gossip about the sexual and financial peccadilloes of their employers, as well as their ostentatious displays of wealth before people too poor to afford an issue of Town Topics. The elite’s horror was Mann’s delight.

But an even more profitable venture, Mann decided, would be to gather the information and not print it. “If a story was particularly damaging,” writes Greg King in A Season of Splendor, “[Mann] would have it typeset and print up a copy—which in fact he never intended to publish, then discreetly let the person known he was set to print damning information and wanted them to read it first and correct any errors.”

It was, of course, an invitation to bribery, almost always accepted. Once Mann’s victims had collected themselves, and then gone out and collected little portions of their fortunes, they would pay a call on him in his offices later in the day. Invariably, we are told, “a check changed hands, marked down as a loan or stock purchase or perhaps an advertising contract, the offending item was removed from next week’s edition, and the visitors retired, sighing the long sigh of the reprieved.”

Mann was not candid about his methods but was perfectly open about his goals. “My ambition,” he once said, “is to reform the Four Hundred [the most elite of New York’s social elite] by making them too deeply disgusted with themselves to continue their silly, empty way of life. I am also teaching the great American public not to pay attention to these silly fools.” He was publishing Town Topics, he said, “for the sake of the country.”

The last we hear of bribery to any significant extent is in the 1960s, when it was common practice for boxing promoters to offer hookers to the journalists assigned to bouts. The sexually sated journalists responded, for the most part, by ignoring the seamier side of the sport, treating an obviously fixed fight as if it were the real thing, an obviously decayed sport as if it were cricket before the queen and her court. Columnists got the girls for free, reporters at a discount. Copy boys, one assumes, had to pay full price.