BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (28 page)

Not satisfied with his handiwork, the mayor felt compelled to weigh in again a few days later. This time he wrote a “To the Public” letter flatly denying any wrongdoing on his part. He’d never received any money from the exorbitant contractor bills listed in the
Times
Secret Accounts: “I know that none of my friends will believe this… but feel amused at a falsehood too absurd to grow indignant over, especially when the malice of Mr. Jones … has been so succinct.”
¹⁹
If Jones knew otherwise, “why does he not publish an affidavit of the fact?” Hall, in fact, was not a wealthy man by Tweed standards; his law partner Augustus Brown estimated the mayor’s total assets as barely $70,000, mostly tied up in his residence on 42nd Street—not the millions of Tweed, Connolly, or Sweeny. His salary as mayor was just $7,000 and, if he did receive graft, it was invisible even to his closest friends.
²⁰

As for his approving of the exorbitant pay-outs, the mayor argued he was innocent here as well: His signatures on the warrants were mere “ministerial” acts. The issue remained personal: “the malice of Mr. Jones” hiding behind “his mask of public spirit.”
²¹

To each of his broadsides, he saw the
Times
throw the same answer back in his face:
“Are the figures we are publishing accurate or not
?”
²²

By the end of the week, as the
Times
was flooding the city with copies of its “
How New York is Governed
” pamphlets, Oakey Hall went about town with a pained look. His friends asked him questions: Was any of it true? Had he been duped? Could he explain the embarrassing payouts? His answer, his own account of city spending, would take at least two more weeks to prepare. Meanwhile, his literary blasts had embarrassed him: “The defense set up by the mayor has startled the public even more than the broad accusations of
The Times
,” Horace Greeley grumbled in the
Tribune
. “It indicated an unconsciousness of official responsibility that borders on the sublime.”
²³

That Saturday, the mayor escorted his wife, Kate, and their two eldest daughters to the city piers on South Street to see them off by steamer across the Atlantic for a summer holiday in Europe. For the ride home to 42nd Street, he invited a
New-York Times
reporter to share his carriage. Along the way, clip-clopping through lower Manhattan’s crowded alleys, he talked incessantly, trying to defend himself to his worst accuser. The charges were “unjust and false,” he insisted; he, Tweed, and Connolly all were being victimized and his report of city finances would prove it. When asked if he planned to go to Europe himself, Hall turned indignant: “I shall remain at my post, and let my enemies see that I am invulnerable to their malicious attacks.”
²⁴

But as the reporter pressed him on the political fallout of the back-to-back debacles, the Orange riots and the
Times
disclosures—his terrible month of July—Oakey Hall finally lost his patience. “My dear Sir,” he said, apparently raising his voice, “you may rest assured that neither one nor the other will exercise the slightest influence! …. We [the Democratic Party] have the state [legislature and governor’s mansion] now, and we are determined to keep it. By the time the election for Governor takes place [in November] the charges of corruption against us, even if there was anything in them, will all be forgotten.”
²⁵

Nast’s depiction of panic among The Ring following the New York Times disclosures.

Harper’s Weekly, October 7, 1871.

Back at the
New-York Times
office on Park Row, Louis Jennings would take these words and twist them, but only slightly: the mayor’s prediction that the charges “will all be forgotten” became “It will all blow over”—a phrase that Nast already had been using in his cartoons and that Nast and Jennings now planted squarely in Hall’s mouth. They soon made it common knowledge: “Being interviewed, [Hall] took the line that ‘even if there was anything in it, it would blow over before the next election,’”
The Nation
, for instance, reported the next week.
²⁶
Oakey Hall could talk all he wanted, but his message could only be what the
Times
and Nast said it was.

-------------------------

By mid-August,
Harper’s Weekly
could brag that its own star trouble-maker, Thomas Nast, had become “The most cordially hated man in New York at the present day—hated by men whose friendship would be a dishonor.”
²⁷
Nast’s anti-Tweed cartoons had become a sensation—bigger even that his Civil War drawings—and Nast himself was developing a personal fame unknown in journalism then except for Horace Greeley and a handful of other publishers.
New-York Times
articles carried no by-lines; even the most devoted reader of the Secret Accounts would never see the names Jennings or Foord identified as authors. But Nast, his neatly scribbled “
Th. Nast
” at the bottom corner of each cartoon passed around by people in local shops, factories, or saloons, posted in store windows or on bulletin boards, or argued over at corner clubs, became as widely-known as Tweed, Sweeny, or anyone else in New York.

Nast relished his celebrity, the hate mail as much as the compliments. One letter to him that summer contained a picture of him with a thread tied around its neck like a noose. Police Captain Ira Garland posted guards around Nast’s house on 124th Street; when city officials removed Garland from his post, Nast moved with Sarah and the children temporarily across the river to Morristown, New Jersey.
²⁸
His pictures had made not just the names but the
faces
of Tweed, Sweeny, Hall and Connolly as well-known to New Yorkers as their own neighbors’, more familiar even than those of President Grant or the best-known actors or actresses. “Every stroke of his pencil cut like a scimitar. His caricatures… are admirable in their grotesque fidelity,”
Harpers Weekly
wrote of its own prodigy, “so marked that if you catch only the glimpse of an eye-glass, the tip of a nose, or a straggly bit of hair, you know it stands for Hall, or Tweed, or Sweeny, or Connolly.”
²⁹

The pictures gave New Yorkers a rare chance to laugh at their stodgy city fathers knocked off their pedestals. When the
Times
blasted John Jacob Astor and his blue-blood friends for having failed to notice frauds during their examination of city books months earlier, Nast drew these well-heeled respectables—Astor, Marshall O. Roberts and Moses Taylor—as “Three Blind Mice” scurrying across a kitchen floor, their tails of “prestige” cut by a carving knife labeled “Sharp Editorials.”
³⁰
When Horace Greeley refused to attack Tweed or Oakey Hall as sharply as the
Times
had, Nast ridiculed the world-famous
Tribune
publisher by showing him in rumpled coat and puzzled face standing crying over the sick horse, “Mare” Hall as Tweed and Sweeny look on and Connolly fans himself with one marked “City Fan cost $10,000.” The caption read “Not a Bailable Case”—a poke at Greeley’s own recent bail bond for former Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
³¹

Readers began to expect a barrage of weekly Nast anti-Tammany slams just as they expected a daily blast from the
New-York Times
. In late August, Nast climaxed his assault with a full-page spread titled “The Rich Growing Richer, The Poor Growing Poorer.” Its bottom half showed a poor family in a squalid, dark basement paying exorbitant rent while, on top, Tweed, Sweeny and Hall lived like kings, sipping wine on the lawns of country estates, Connolly on a “bed of roses.” A page later, readers saw drawings of the actual country homes of Tweed in Greenwich, Connecticut; Keyser, Ingersoll and Woodward in rural Norwalk; and the Americus Club lodge on placid Indian Harbor.

Harper’s Weekly, July 22, 1871.

When his victims squirmed, they made themselves only more ridiculous. Oakey Hall labeled Nast the “Nast-y artist of Harper’s Hell Weekly—A Journal of Devilization,”
³²
and he banned sales of
Harper’s Weekly
at city-licensed newsstands. Fletcher Harper spoiled to make a fight over the issue: “I used to walk down to the office [on] mornings with my grandfather,” Harper’s grandson John Harper recalled, “and I distinctly remember how anxiously he would inquire of the newsdealers on the day of publication if the
Weekly
had been suppressed as yet; and he always seemed to be greatly disappointed when he learned that the Ring had failed to carry out its threat.”
³³

Tammany may have tried to buy Nast’s silence around this time, but they never got far. Nast claims they approached him twice, first through a lawyer friend and then through an officer of the Broadway National Bank who visited Nast at his home on a Sunday. In his own version of the story, Nast described this second encounter as a comic drama much like a scene from one of his cartoons:
^F
OOTNOTE

“I hear you have been made an offer to go abroad for art study,” the bank official says in Nast’s account.

“Yes, but I can’t go. I haven’t time.”

“But they will pay you for the time. I have reason to believe you could get a hundred thousand dollars for the trip.” Nast playing along: “Do you think I could get two hundred thousand?”

“Well possibly. I believe from what I have heard in the bank that you might get it.” Then ominously: “You have a great talent; but you need study and you need rest. Besides, this ring business will get you into trouble. They own all the judges and jurors and can get you locked up for libel. My advice is to take the money and get away.”

“Don’t you think I could get five hundred to make that trip?” Nast asks.

The bank official hesitates: “You can. You can get five hundred thousand dollars in gold to drop this Ring business and get out of the country.”

Nast, in his account, then laughs: “Well, I don’t think I’ll do it. I made up my mind not long ago to put some of those fellows behind the bars, and I’m going to put them there.”