America Aflame (77 page)

Reservation boundaries continued to shrink or shift as white settlement expanded. The administrative overhaul notwithstanding, problems persisted in feeding, clothing, and sheltering reservation Indians. When reservation Indians did not receive goods and annuities as promised and when their territories disappeared, they conducted raids. Then policy shifted toward extermination. While easterners acknowledged corruption and inefficiency, they also placed some of the blame upon the Indian.
Harper's
, normally a sympathetic voice for the Indian, conceded, “These Indians have farms and do a little at farming; but it is evident that they are idle and shiftless, and unable to take care of themselves.” Just as North and South would eventually concur on Reconstruction policy based upon the racial limitations of blacks, so East and West would accommodate on Indian policy.
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By the early 1870s such concurrence was relatively easy to come by. Douglas's railroad drew East and West together not only in economic terms but intellectually as well. The Age of Reason had elevated science to an exalted role once reserved for religion as a major arbiter of public policy. The new science reinforced old racial views. The competitive, Darwinian view of society also privileged individual initiative and innovation, attributes lacking in “lesser” races. While white southerners banded together to work for redemption, white northerners raced off to make money.

CHAPTER 20

POLITICAL SCIENCE

MONEY RAN EVERYTHING
and people ran after money. Sometimes too hard. Russell Conwell was a believer. A Union veteran and an attorney, he became a Baptist preacher building a struggling congregation in Philadelphia into what became Temple University. In 1878, he delivered a sermon, “Acres of Diamonds,” that he would give over six thousand times. Not quite as famous as the “Sermon on the Mount,” to which some followers compared it, the speech went through numerous print editions. The advertising blurb on the back of the 1978 centennial edition claimed, “This is the beloved, all-time bestseller that has helped more Americans find more happiness than any other book besides the Bible!”
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Some sermons do not age well. They are too reflective of their time and place. “Acres of Diamonds” struck a responsive chord in Americans of the 1870s and kept on striking it because it articulated the theme of modern America. God wanted all Americans to be wealthy, the sooner the better. Forget about “Money is the root of all evil.” That is not in the Bible. The biblical passage reads, “
Love
of money that is the root of all evil.” As long as you do not fall in love, money is wonderful. “Money is power, money is force.… I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich.” People asked Conwell, “Why don't you preach the gospel instead of preaching about man's making money?” He replied, “Because to make money honestly is to preach the gospel.… The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community.”

Money can do good things. It can make a man more masculine, for one thing. “A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home.” Ultimately, Conwell asserted, “Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it!” He proclaimed to his congregation, “I say, then, you ought to have money. If you can honestly attain unto riches in Philadelphia, it is your Christian and godly duty to do so. It is an awful mistake of these pious people to think you must be awfully poor in order to be pious.” Poverty, in fact, revealed impiety. “There is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings.… It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow.”

Mark Twain pilloried the Gospel of Money in “The Revised Catechism,” published in the
New York Tribune
. Twain wanted to get rich as much as the next man. He was a friend to Andrew Carnegie, who would send him barrels of whiskey from his cellars; and he hobnobbed with Henry H. Rogers, an official of Standard Oil. Twain despised hypocrisy, however, especially in religion. For him, the Gospel of Money was no Gospel at all, just a self-serving patina for greed. Twain wrote:

What is the chief end of man?—to get rich. In what way?—dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one only and true? Money is God. Gold and Greenbacks and Stock—father, son, and the ghost of same—three persons in one; these are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.
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Where Twain saw hypocrisy, Conwell's comfortable congregants in Philadelphia heard validation. They never tired of hearing the sermon, nor, apparently, did millions of other Americans. Religions emerge initially as challenges to the prevailing culture. It was true of the Mormons and of the evangelical Protestant denominations in early nineteenth-century America. Success in the form of converts and in the wider acceptance of its theology poses a dilemma for all religions. Inevitably that religion becomes part of or subservient to the host culture. This happened in post–Civil War America in both the North and the South, though for different reasons. In the South, evangelical Protestantism sanctified the war and its causes, the Old South civilization it defended, and the crusade for redemption. Northerners, on the other hand, recoiled from the self-righteous certitude and idealism that nearly destroyed a nation even as they abolished its greatest sin. Russell Conwell, a man who came to the pulpit from a business background, represented the new voice of northern evangelical Protestantism. Conwell believed faith could only be relevant if it reinforced rather than challenged the prevailing culture.

The Gospel of Money was totally apolitical; it represented no party or candidate, reflecting the turn away from great moral issues to the pursuit of happiness. The new gospel left little room for sentiment. If the poor are always with us, then that is their problem; if the former slaves, guarded by constitutional amendments and a ring of statutes, cannot make their way in society, then the shortcoming is theirs. If the Indians cannot compete for land and sustenance with whites, then that is due to their inferiority. These were not only matters of faith but also matters of science. For governments to intervene on behalf of such unfortunates would contravene the natural order and produce chaos. And chaos would destroy democracy.

The Gospel of Money assumed that everyone pursued success on a level playing field. Conwell's assertion that the wealthiest men were perhaps the most honest was debatable, but honesty was essential for the integrity of the pursuit. No government to put its thumb on the scale of prosperity, no entrepreneur to deceive those less well informed or endowed, and no group unduly favored or burdened to skew the competition. The war had created a unified nation and abundant opportunities for a much broader range of people than at any other previous time in American history.

The lure of lucre was irresistible. Never was there so much, and never were there as many ways to use it and to grow it. Among the most popular nonfiction titles of the era were future president James A. Garfield's
Elements of Success
(1869) and P. T. Barnum's
The Art of Money-Getting
(1882). States and cities plunged into railroad construction. Between 1866 and 1873, twenty-nine state legislatures approved over eight hundred proposals to grant local aid to railroads. New York, Illinois, and Missouri were the most generous, each authorizing over $70 million in aid. Most of the funds to purchase rail stock, sometimes at inflated value, came from municipal tax-secured bonds. Mark Twain would look back on the 1870s and conclude, “I think that the reason Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the
opportunity
to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.” The postwar nation provided a dazzling array of opportunities, and many took advantage of them, some more than others.
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William Marcy Tweed never heard Russell Conwell's sermon, but he would have been an enthusiastic disciple. Tweed believed fervently in individual initiative; yet he was generous to a fault, helping friends and relatives, as well as his city, New York. Conwell would have delighted in Tweed's background, another Horatio Alger tale. His father was a brush maker, and the younger Tweed was a carpenter and then a fireman. He joined a Democratic Party that, in New York, included a large contingent of Irish immigrants. The great entrepreneurs were ordering disparate activities into large corporations, so Tweed, always a quick study, decided to organize New York politics.

Tweed befriended two influential men, Peter B. “Brains” Sweeny, an Irish saloon keeper who maintained the Democratic organization, Tammany Hall, and Richard “Slippery Dick” Connolly, an Irish ward boss who organized the city's districts and bestowed patronage liberally to secure their loyalty. In those days, politicians, not gangsters, had the colorful nicknames. Sweeny and Connolly developed a well-oiled system, or “machine,” much in the spirit of the great entrepreneurs. They hung around the docks of lower Manhattan, greeting new arrivals from the Old World with clothes, food, and cash to tide them over during the cold winters. The grateful newcomers, in turn, provided Tammany with substantial majorities in local elections, often well beyond the number of registered voters. As Tweed explained, “The ballots made no result, the counters made the result.” Tweed rose through the ranks to become chairman of the New York City Board of Supervisors, the body responsible for the day-to-day operation of America's largest city. The city became a series of construction projects that never seemed to end: road paving, public buildings, sewer and water systems, and that iron bridge over Broadway that Mark Twain navigated on his first day in New York. Doing business with the city of New York was a privilege, and Tweed aimed to make contractors pay for it.
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By the late 1860s, Tweed was making about a million dollars a month. Like all good businessmen of the era, Tweed was a student of vertical integration. He established his own business, the New York Printing Company, which billed the city for all its printing needs. One bill, submitted in 1870, charged the city $10,000 for three inkbottles, six reams of paper, and a few boxes of rubber bands. In an era when welfare was rarely public, Tweed spent some of his profits on the poor, distributing $50,000, in food, fuel, and clothing to impoverished New Yorkers in the winter of 1870. The city's bonded indebtedness increased from zero in 1867 to $90 million by 1871, with Tweed and his coterie siphoning off about $50 million for kickbacks, payoffs, and their own pockets. He was especially proud of the new county courthouse, whose initial cost was pegged at $250,000. It wound up costing taxpayers $13 million. Andrew Garvey, known for good reason as “the Prince of Plasterers,” charged $3 million for $20,000 worth of plastering. “Lucky George” Miller, another contractor true to his name, earned over $360,000 a month for carpentry, though the building's structural materials were primarily iron and marble. What galled New Yorkers was less Tweed's $750 million profit on the project than the fact that it sat unfinished.
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Investigative journalism might have uncovered these details, except that most of the region's eighty-nine newspapers received considerable advertising revenue from Tammany Hall, and those editors who were especially friendly to Tweed earned handsome Christmas bonuses. After Tweed was exposed, twenty-seven of these newspapers folded, having existed primarily on the income from Tammany. Not only did journalists ignore Tweed's defalcations, but they also praised him as a reformer and a builder. The Republican press might have brought him down, but Tweed had worked out an arrangement with Thurlow Weed, the Republican Party boss in New York State, by which the Democrats would leave Albany to Weed, if Weed left the city to Tweed. Weed and Tweed worked together well.

The arrangement lasted until the
New York Times
, one of the Republican newspapers that had praised Tweed's acumen, “broke” the story in September 1870. The graft had become too obvious for the newspaper to ignore, and it identified Tweed and his cronies as “a gang of burglars.” The broader theme was “the Irish Catholic despotism that rules the City of New York, the Metropolis of Free America.” Thomas Nast, the Bavarian-born cartoonist for
Harper's
who had given America Santa Claus and whose drawings articulated what many northerners were feeling in their hearts during the Civil War, helped bring down Boss Tweed, perhaps more than the
Times
.
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By 1870, Nast had become an oracle for middle-class New Yorkers, many of them Republicans predisposed to despising the Irish Catholics and their sway over the city's politics. Nast depicted Tweed as a bloated bureaucrat sucking the lifeblood out of democracy, aided by his simian-like Irish allies. In one drawing, Tweed and his Tammany cohorts are vultures picking over the bones of city taxpayers, with the caption “Let Us Prey.” In another, the Tammany Tiger is in the Roman Colosseum devouring Christians with Tweed taunting, “What are you going to do about it?” Downright nasty. Tweed, recognizing the threat to his empire, offered Nast $5 million to lay down his pencil. “I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles,” Tweed told Nast. “My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures.” The attempted bribe became part of the evidence that finally convicted Tweed, sending him to prison for twelve years. The sheriff reportedly blushed and apologized when he arrived to arrest Tweed. Less than five years into his sentence, he bribed his way out, was rearrested, and died the following year in prison.
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Tweed's rule in New York was wasteful. Could anyone, though, corral the spirit of New York or other burgeoning American cities? The
New York Times
pronounced the city's government “worse than a failure.… It is corrupt, inefficient, wasteful and scandalous.” These comments appeared in 1867, four years before Tweed's deeds came to light. But when have Americans not complained about their cities? Thomas Jefferson's statement about cities as “sores on the human body” was hardly the last bad word against urban America. In the 1890s, writer Josiah Strong described the American city as “a menace to state and nation” because it was incapable of governance. The classic hand-wringing study of urban horror, Lincoln Steffens's
Shame of the Cities
, appeared soon after. In a nation that consistently elevated the farm and small town as the apotheosis of the democratic ideal, such attitudes were not unusual. What is indisputable, though, is that people with education and ambition left farms and small towns for large cities posthaste. Any place that held so many dreams was bound to be chaotic and volatile. Great energy, however, produced great things. For all the attention to Tweed and other urban bosses, the engineer, the landscape architect, and other professionals and technicians shaped American cities in the decades after the Civil War. The infrastructure and architectural styles they pioneered created the modern urban landscape.
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