William M. Tweed

American politician

• Born: April 3, 1823
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: April 12, 1878
• Place of death: New York, New York

Tweed’s name is synonymous with corruption and dishonesty in urban government. Through the power waged by his Tammany Hall political machine, New York City and its citizens were systematically bilked of millions of dollars in taxes meant for civic projects. Tweed was eventually brought down by his own greed and the combined efforts of a reform coalition of prominent citizens, ordinary people, The New York Times, and political cartoonist Thomas Nast.

Early Life

William Marcy Tweed was the son of Richard and Eliza Tweed. His great-grandfather, a blacksmith, had emigrated to America from Scotland around 1750. His father was a maker of chairs, and William left school at eleven to apprentice in that trade. At thirteen, he apprenticed with a saddler, leaving to spend a brief stint at a private school in New Jersey to learn bookkeeping. He became a junior clerk at a New York mercantile firm before advancing to a position as head bookkeeper at the small brush manufactory in which his father had invested. At nineteen, he became an officer in the company, and at twenty-one, he married Mary Jane Skaden, the daughter of the factory’s principal investor.

The young Tweed, an energetic, powerfully built, ruddy-faced, jovial man, six feet tall and a robust three hundred pounds, may have found the business of making brushes a dull undertaking, for he soon discovered an outlet much more to his liking: volunteer firefighting. By 1850, he had become foreman of a company he had helped to organize, the celebrated Americus No. 611. He was then twenty-seven years old. In the latter half of the nineteenth century in America, volunteer firefighting organizations were one of the ways for ambitious young men to get ahead in politics. Powerful “Big 611,” easily identified by the Bengal tiger symbol painted on the company’s fire engine, propelled its leader into the public eye; he was soon running for the position of alderman in his home ward under the auspices of the Democratic Party. He lost by a small margin, but he won his next race easily owing to a split in the Whig vote engendered by a third candidate—a friend of Tweed who was persuaded to do him a favor. The year was 1852, and Tweed was learning how to succeed in politics.

Life’s Work

He was learning fast and from the best—the New York City Common Council was widely and cynically known at that time as The Forty Thieves—and the brush factory was soon abandoned for more lucrative pastures. He was an urban political animal, in his element in city politics, a truth realized when he served for two unmemorable years (1853-1855) in the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., something he would not repeat again. From then on, he would stick to running for the state senate and city aldermanic positions. In 1856, however, he lost his next race for alderman. Undaunted, and now drawn into the Tammany faction with Peter B. Sweeny and Richard B. Connolly in opposition to Mayor Fernando Wood, he was picked to be head of a new, bipartisan, popularly elected board of supervisors formed to check election fraud. It became, instead, another opportunity for graft and corruption.

Other appointed and elected offices beckoned in quick succession, and Tweed became commissioner of schools, deputy street commissioner, a New York state senator (1867-1871), and chairman of the New York state finance committee. On the Tammany Hall front, he was elected sachem in 1857 and by 1859 was clearly the most influential man in the organization. (He appropriated the Bengal tiger from the volunteer fire company to stand as a symbol of the society, alongside the head of Tammany, a Native American.) He dominated the 1860 state Democratic convention and was thus able to secure several choice spots for his friends and allies. Owing to his influence, Sweeny was elected district attorney in 1857 and Connolly county clerk; George G. Barnard was elected to the office of recorder and later to the New York State Supreme Court. Another crony, A. Oakey Hall, succeeded Sweeny as district attorney in 1860. Although Tweed himself was defeated in a run for the office of sheriff in 1861, the election was not a total loss, as his enemy Fernando Wood was also defeated in the mayoral race.

Undeterred by his lack of legal expertise, Tweed had himself certified by his friend Barnard as a lawyer, and he further enriched his coffers by opening a law office in 1860. He extorted large payoffs for his services from companies desirous of doing business with New York such as the Erie Railroad. In 1864, he bought control of the New York Printing Company, which shortly thereafter became the official printer for the city; other businesses were also coerced into having to deal with the company. His next acquisition, the manufacturing Stationers’ Company, was a way for him to sell supplies to the city at graft-inflated prices. The greatest boondoggle of all, the new county courthouse (later to be known as the Tweed Courthouse), was built with stone and marble from a Massachusetts quarry owned by Tweed. The courthouse, expected to cost half a million dollars, wound up costing the city’s taxpayers approximately $13 million, most of it winding up in Tweed’s capacious pockets.

Now a millionaire as well as a sachem of Tammany Hall, Tweed began to move in much more exalted circles. In 1867, he bought a large residence uptown in Murray Hill, off Fifth Avenue. He was now hobnobbing with neighbors such as the banker J. P. Morgan. He became a partner of the notorious financier/robber barons Jay Gould and James Fisk and became a director of several important utility companies and financial institutions. Gould and Fisk paid him off handsomely, in stock and a board directorship, for enabling them to get the Erie Classification Bill through the state legislature in order to legalize fraudulent railroad stock issued by their firm.

By the time Tweed secured the post of grand sachem of Tammany Hall in 1868, his power in New York was absolute. The “Tweed Ring,” a confederation of like-minded crooks and ward heelers with whom “Boss” Tweed surrounded himself, were the rulers of all they surveyed. The ebullient Tweed shared his ill-gotten gains with his ring, increasing the proportion of their graft intake from 50 percent of all bills rendered to the city in 1869 to an astounding 85 percent shortly thereafter. Proceeds were divided by Tweed, the city comptroller, the county chairman, and the mayor. They also had a separate fund used exclusively for bribery.

Tweed moved into an even larger house on Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue and maintained a stable and carriage house on 40th Street. By the early 1870’s, he had been named to the boards of the Harlem Gas Company, the Brooklyn Bridge Company, and the Third Avenue Railway Company and was president of the Guardian Savings Bank. He also organized the Tenth National Bank to control city monies and his ever-increasing personal fortune.

Incredibly, a number of New York City’s respected leaders were duped for a long period as to Tweed’s criminal character. The city charter of 1870, which further cemented the Tweed Ring’s hold on New York, was actually supported by honest and upstanding luminaries such as philanthropist Peter Cooper and newspaper publisher Horace Greeley. Retribution, however, was on its way.

The talented political cartoonist Thomas Nast launched the first volley against the Tweed Ring in 1869 with a series of caricatures that ran in Harper’s Weekly—among them the memorable “Let Us Prey,” which depicted Tweed and his cronies as fat vultures feeding off the city. The Tammany Tiger became a familiar symbol in Nast’s drawings; he did not let up his barrage until 1872. In the fall of 1870, The New York Times ran an editorial concerning the massive cost overruns on the county courthouse. Some months later, in the spring of 1871, whistle-blowers within the Tammany organization supplied hard proofs of widespread swindling and corruption to George Jones, publisher of The New York Times.

Although the Tweed Ring attempted to bribe the newspaper so that the story would not see print, it appeared in July of that year; soon thereafter, an indignant group of citizens met at the Cooper Union to form a committee to take back their city. Democratic state chairman Samuel Jones Tilden filed an affidavit citing Tweed and his ring’s misdeeds, and the affidavit became the basis of a civil suit for recovery of the city’s money.

Despite this notoriety, the serious threat of imminent arrest, and his summary expulsion from the Tammany Society, Tweed was reelected to the state senate. By December, 1871, however, his astonishing luck had run out, and he was arrested in a criminal action. (Others in his ring, taking no chances, had already fled abroad.) It took two trials to convict Tweed; in late 1873, he was fined $12,750 and sentenced to twelve years in prison. He nevertheless managed to get his sentence reduced on appeals to one year and paid only $250 in fines.

Tweed was rearrested in early 1875 in a civil action brought by New York State to recover $6 million of what had been stolen. Unable to secure the $3 million in bail set by the state, he escaped from his prison cell later that year, fleeing first to Florida, then Cuba, and from there to Spain. A Nast cartoon printed in Harper’s Weekly on July 1, 1876, led to his arrest in Spain, and he was returned to the United States during the late fall of that year. The warrant issued in New York for his arrest described him thus at the end of his career:

[F]ifty-five years of age, about five-feet eleven inches high, will weigh about two hundred and eighty pounds, very portly, ruddy complexion, has rather large, coarse, prominent features and large prominent nose; rather small blue or grey eyes, grey hair, from originally auburn color, head nearly bald on top from forehead back to crown, and bare part of ruddy color; head projecting toward the crown. His beard may be removed or dyed, and he may wear a wig or be otherwise disguised.…

Unable to pay the judgment that had been levied against him in the civil action, in which he was convicted in absentia of 204 out of 240 counts, he was confined to jail. His subsequent lengthy and detailed testimony confessing his guilt, an attempt to be pardoned for his crimes, did not work. He died of pneumonia in the Ludlow Street prison on April 12, 1878. At his side was his manservant, who had opted to accompany him to jail; everyone else, including his family, had long since deserted him.

Significance

William Marcy Tweed has come to stand for all that is bad in American urban politics. He helped to spawn a particularly grotesque breed of individual—the bloated, powerful political boss—whose like has appeared again and again on the local and national scene; few such successors, however, have even begun to approach the phenomenal levels of graft achieved by the Tweed Ring and its leader. In the twentieth century, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago and Carmine De Sapio of New York City were old-time political bosses in the spirit—if not the intense corruption—of Boss Tweed. Modern historians estimate that the Tweed Ring stole betweeen $30 million and $200 million from the city of New York, but a final, definitive figure will probably never be known.

The tragedy of William Marcy Tweed was that he had tremendous leadership and organizational skills, which, combined with a genial personality, could have served him well and long if he had chosen to follow an honest career in government. He did have good instincts when it came to running a municipal government, and some of what he did was positive and humanitarian. He was responsible for the widening of Broadway and for the preservation of the Central Park site that became the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and he helped new immigrants to the city—at a time when they were disdained and overlooked by most New Yorkers—by seeing to it that they had food, clothing, and shelter.

Tweed also helped set up the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital; opened orphanages, almshouses, and public baths; sought funding for parochial schools; and worked to increase state aid to private charities. He also was behind the effort to obtain a greater degree of home rule for New York City. Although it has been argued that these public services were mere sops granted to the poor in an attempt to gain even more political power, some scholars do not agree with such an assessment.

The scope of the corruption, fraud, and graft of Tweed and the Tweed Ring, however, remains unparalleled in urban government, and their unrestrained feeding at the public trough is what history most vividly remembers. For his years of systematically cheating the city and manipulating public trust, Tweed has continued to be vilified as one of the nineteenth century’s most reprehensible men. On his death, New York City mayor Smith Ely refused to fly the city hall flag at half-staff; that verdict still stands.

Bibliography

Ackerman, Kenneth D. Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005. Popular, balanced chronicle of Tweed’s rise and fall, tracing his successful organization of working-class and immigrant voters, and his eventual downfall and disgrace.

Allen, Oliver E. The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993. A look at the times and political machine that spawned Boss Tweed.

Bales, William A. Tiger in the Streets. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962. A straightforward account of Tweed’s life and career.

Callow, Alexander B., Jr. The Tweed Ring. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Detailed, thoroughly documented history of Tweed and the men he handpicked to defraud the city of New York.

Hershkowitz, Leo. Tweed’s New York: Another Look. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977. A reevaluation of Tweed’s impact on New York City.

Mandelbaum, Seymour J. Boss Tweed’s New York. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965. Gives credit to Tweed for exerting strong leadership at a time of chaos and change in the growing metropolis of New York City.

Werner, Morris R. Tammany Hall. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. Sets Tweed against the background of the Democratic political machine.

Zink, Harold. City Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1930. Excellent chapter on Tweed, with good references.