Focus 580; Boss Tweed: the Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York

In this part of focus 580 we will review the life of one of the most famous political operatives in U.S. history. Perhaps I should modify that and say maybe one of the most infamous a man who set the standard for corruption in New York City more than a century ago the man we're talking about is Boss Tweed. During his career he among other things bribed the state legislature fixed elections and diverted public funds on a massive scale. In spite of his crimes however he was seen by a lot of people as a kind of a Robin Hood figure and remained a popular hero. At least with people of the working classes until he died this morning in this part of the show we'll be talking with Kenneth Ackerman who has written a new biography of the man. The book is entitled Boss Tweed The Rise and Fall of the corrupt pol who conceived the soul of modern New York and it's published by Carroll and Graf. Our guest is the author of some other books about the gilded age she has also served for more than 25 years in various senior posts on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch and currently he practices law in Washington D.C. He is

joining us by telephone as we talk of course as always questions or welcome from people who are listening the only thing that we ask of callers is that people just try to be brief. We ask that so that we can keep the program moving. Get in as many callers as possible. Anyone listening is welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 we do also have a toll free line. That's good. Anywhere that you can hear us that he's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 or any point here you want to give us a call. You're welcome to do that. Mr. Ackerman Hello. Hi. Thanks for talking with us. Oh my pleasure thanks for having me. So if we could take people back into time and we could meet Boss Tweed just what would be the first impression of this man. He had been like oh a Boss Tweed was a very imposing figure physically he was he was larger than life he weighed about 300 pounds. He was over six foot tall he walked with a swagger he was actually in good physical shape. He had grown up on the streets of New York he had led a street gang for a while he had been the

foreman of a volunteer fire squad he was good in a fight but he was also a very smart man he dressed very well. By the time he became the political boss of New York he was middle age and it's in his 40s. He liked to eat and so he was overweight. He would dress very sharply. He would also impress you as a very outgoing friendly man. He would probably not be shy at all about coming up to you shaking shaking your hand slapping you on the shoulder asking you some questions about your background where you come from what your parents did what you do for a living and how you vote. Certainly he's it's interesting that I guess there's maybe not a whole lot of information available about his his younger years. I mean other than than the kind of things that you talk about his being involved as a volunteer fireman and press. Prep apparently using that and his natural abilities with people and then to his ambition to get involved

in local politics and then kind of worked his way up. So is there anything that can be said about him that would help to explain just what what made him the person that he was well he was he was he was always smart in the sense that he was good with numbers. He went to school on a couple of years there's a stereotype of Boss Tweed as an illiterate drunk and that's totally false. He he grew up as his father had a chair making company. He was a chair maker on the Lower East Side of New York his unfair family wasn't wasn't wealthy but they weren't poor. He went to the local school on Christie street and his father's scrimped money to send him to a boarding school for a year. He went into business and seem to be good at it. But and addition to that he had that certain political quality that you see in people who go into public life. If he would join a group he would make a point soon to

be the head of. That he didn't just join a street gang he led when he joined the fire fire squad. Soon he knew everyone in the group P He was the one who they voted that there was an election to choose the foreman and he was the one who who won. Once he entered politics through the Tammany Hall organization he rose through the ranks. Around the time of the Civil War he was elected the chairman of the General Committee which was the operating committee of the group largely as he said there's not a lot of material about his early life he didn't. He's not someone who like to give speeches. He wasn't a theoretician he didn't write long articles for the newspapers that wasn't his style. But behind the scenes he had go away with people he had a sense of organization of how to get things done in a very pragmatic way. So well so that when real world problems came up he was the person you'd go to. Well maybe one good one great example of that. And one of the things that really helped

establish him was where the the draft riots in New York City and the fact that he unlike apparently a lot of other. People who were in leadership positions who headed the other way he dived right in. You know Tweed he had grown up in the city of New York he knew the people. The draft riots were a very ugly affair. They've been glamorized somewhat in the recent movie Gangs of New York but they were there was nothing pretty about them. They came in 1863 at a time when the Union Army was not doing well and the draft law itself. This was the first draft draft in American history was very unpopular particularly among the poor because it had a provision saying that a wealthy man could spend three hundred dollars and buy his way out. So it was a very prejudicial law for the poor. When the riots broke out they were primarily led by Irish immigrants many drunken mobs.

They were very racist the mobs went after black people in New York in particular there were several lynchings. They colored Orphan Asylum was it was burned to the ground. When it was by the time it was over most of the traditional politicians had run for cover. Either they wanted nothing to do with the draft or else they wanted President Lincoln to declare martial law on the city Boss Tweed was still brand new at the Tammany Hall leader he had just been elected head of the General Committee a few weeks before the draft riots. He was one of the few people who kept his head about him in the crisis. He spent a lot of time on the street during the riots and afterwards he was the one who negotiated a deal with Lincoln's war department to have the draft go ahead in New York City vouched for by Tammany Hall but to use the city treasury to buy substitutes for anyone who didn't want to go. So essentially Lincoln

got his soldiers but poor people in New York New York City got relief and that stablished him. Even among the wealthy elite at someone who knew how to deal with the immigrant poor how to keep the city calm in a crisis and who knew how to manage a tough situation. And there probably was would help to establish his reputation with with those people with the poor people with the immigrants as being somebody who was you know. Other people might have seen him as being corrupt. A crop. Which he was and someone who enrich himself and his friends through his connections and he was but then for these other people they were the ones who saw him as a kind of a hero who was in some sense of looking out for their interest. And those were may have may have been the only people who really mourn Boss Tweed when he died. Well he lived in an era when corruption was rampant during the civil war itself. Even the elite Republican the

elite establishment. People were profiteering like crazy from from the war selling defective meat or weapons or material to the War Department tweeds corruption early on was it was small change compared to the others as he rose through the ranks and became more powerful. He found he had a certain talent for embezzlement and money laundering and and and contract skimming and all of the accoutrements of corruption. By the time he was at his peak he had organized it to the point where he and his circle stole more money from the city government than anyone else had stolen before or sense. That's partly. Her jump jumping in on you there but I guess that's that's one of the things that I have I have seen various figures and they're all sort of stunning when you consider they would have an astounding amount of money in those days. In today's money it's even a more stunning amount. It is anybody have a good handle on just how much money.

Well the numbers are all very very vague and very political. By the time Tweed was brought down everyone had an interest in and exaggerating just how bad it was for their own selfish reasons. But the most careful count was done by a by an accountant named Henry painter who worked for Samuel Tilden on the prosecutions. And he found that over a four year three to four year period when Tweed and his group were at their power at their height of power that total amount of graft taken together was about forty five million dollars which in modern money generally you multiply by twenty one would be about a billion altogether. And that was just over a period of three four years. That's right. Our guest in this hour of focus is Kenneth Ackerman and he is the author of a newly published biography of Boss Tweed and that's the title The Rise and Fall of the corrupt pol who conceived the soul of modern New York that's the subtitle and the publisher of the book is Carolyn Graff and if you're interested in reading about Boss Tweed you can head out to. Bookstore look for the book. And here on the program also questions are welcome.

3 3 3 9 4 5 5. That's for champagne Urbana listeners. We do also have a toll free line if you are listening in around Illinois Indiana or if you're listening on the Internet. As long as you're in the United States you may use the toll free line that's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We do have a caller on the toll free and someone listening this morning in Indiana we'll go there line for oh yes two questions one is a little bit off base but I'm hoping you can get someone to like mine ever since I've been in my school and learned about it I wonder how in the hell that happened and I'm talking about the $300 that you could pay to not go into the war. I was wondering if you have been know what combinations in Congress and were Lincoln wasn't all this is something that on its face value it is seems you know senseless you know expect them to expect the pork to be in a sense rise up in some sense I wonder if you know anything about that in relationship to tweet. And the second question has to do with Thomas Nast was he ever in

under any danger at all by doing his political cartoons. Thanks a lot. Took a question let me start with the $300 because that's a curious one. It was part of the draft law enacted by Congress in 1863. There was actually very controversial in Congress. Lincoln didn't really take and take a stand on it he didn't like it but he didn't fight it. It was put in by Republican members of Congress primarily for the reasons you would think they were generally wealthier people. Now he's one of them James G Blaine of Maine later a presidential contender purchased paid the $300 to get out of going to the to the Army in order to serve in Congress. Another congressman at the time James Garfield a future president who had served in combat early in the war argued very strongly against it on the House floor. But it was passed on a divided vote in the House and

Senate became part of the law. And even after the draft riots there was a movement. A year later I believe in 1864 to repeal that $300 commutation clause and Congress refused to do it. There was so much backing among wealthier people to keep it in place. That that lasted throughout the war. As far as Thomas Nast goes now. It was of was a central player in the whole Tweed story. Nast became nationally famous during the Civil War as an illustrator the new illustrated journals were it were a new phenomenon in America they had just started in the 1850s. The whole idea of being able to get images of people and events mass produced immediately and circulated all around town was a very new thing so they were very popular. And Napster was the but the most original. Edgy artist of his time who used this for political for politics.

He took on tweet and basically turned him into a laughingstock. It turned him into a cartoon character. Fat kind of ugly looking with a big nose a silly grin always walking always looking fat with a big diamond stick pin on his chest. When when Nast got going there was harassment against Harper's Weekly journal that published them as well as harassment against the New York Times. It took mostly financial financial form the city of New York for instance refused to buy textbooks from the Harper publishing company which publish nasty cartoons as a way of getting them to drop out of to give up the fight. But they refused to do it. Whether he was under physical danger he says he was it's very unclear whether he was a one of the. The quotes that I come across that has been attributed to Tweed and I don't know if he in fact actually said it but he was obviously very

unhappy of these characters that Nast was producing he didn't like it and he is said to have said something like I don't care what the papers say about me. My constituents can't read but dammit they can see the pictures. Well it's interesting there are a couple of quotes like that that are attributed to Tweed very famous quotation that he very likely never said that quote that you mention appeared in Harper's Weekly at the height of the Tweed battle was repeated over and over and over again. There is no direct sourcing on it. It's not even in quotation marks. When when it first when it was first used in Harper's another one like that is what are you going to do about it. By the way Tweed was confronted with that with the charges of financial corruption and shouted at a reporter what are you going to do about it. That quote first appeared in a Thomas Nast cartoon. It was repeated over and over and over. It was used against Tweed constantly in the fight. But there's no

evidence that he ever said it. We should talk a little bit about Tammany Hall as is if you will there certainly have been over time political bosses in big American cities people figures like tweet but tweet is the the the one if there's any name that's going to get a flicker. Recognition from people it's him and associated with Tweed will be Tammany Hall which is something that that was in existence before he kind of came along and became the boss he didn't invent this what was Tammany Hall the Tammany Hall as it was. It started out as a social club around the time of the Revolutionary War. One of the patriotic clubs where people get together have a few drinks and and and and socialize. It became political very early on though Aaron Burr was the first person to use it as a political machine. And over time it became stronger and stronger. And in the 1840s that decided to cast its fate

with working men developed an alliance with the Irish immigrant community had worked for universal manhood suffrage which was a very new idea in the 1840s it threw in its support to Andrew Jackson and the common man. At the time there was no formal office that would say Democratic Party New York City and said you had a couple of competing political clubs each trying to gain recognition as the official voice of the Democratic Party in New York and Tammany Hall was the biggest one of these that competed against a couple of others. And Tweed became the head of it when Tweed took over. He basically eclipsed all the others. He made Tammany so strong but it's tied to the immigrant community in particular that no one else could compete with that. Let's talk about how many remain to power for 90 years after him.

Let's take another call here we have someone listening in Eureka this morning this is also on the toll free line one for. I learned morning I just like to check out a quote and its possible accuracy I believe it was Garrison Keillor and when it is writer's Allman acai quoted something like the following statement to Boss Tweed an honest politician when bought stays bought does that have the ring of truth. It's the kind of thing he would say but I've I've never seen him. I've never seen that quoted from him. I see. OK. We do it with actually very careful about his public statements because he knew he was being watched he was a public figure who was often investigated especially when the New York Times then and Harper's Weekly started campaigning against him he had to watch his words very carefully. Course of course if you're trying to set it up maybe in in private and you got publicly for it or something. Thank you very much. All right thank you again other questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5 Boss Tweed Wayne

Tweed pad a number held a number of political offices. He was an alderman. He was elected to the Congress he was in the house he was in the New York State Senate. But it seems that his he where he would rather be was more behind the scenes and felt that that being in the deposition was was everything gave him all the power he needed given the opportunity to enrich himself and his cronies. And in fact. You know someone might have suggested to him maybe he'd like to run for mayor and he would have said well why. What would be the point. Why do I need to be the mayor. I'm running to city now. He basically controlled mayors city by running Tammany Hall he controlled the electorate the election apparatus he could pick who would be nominated and his nominees always won. As a result the governor owed his job to Tweed. The mayor his job to Tweed. He controlled the state legislature both through his own role as chairman of a major committee in the state Senate plus

controlling the appointments. The one official job that did give him power was he was the Director of Public Works in New York City. And as a result he directly controlled all of the hundreds of patronage jobs for the people who did manual labor paving the streets and digging the sewers and working in the parks. And that was a very early power base for him. But mostly as you say he worked behind the scenes. You know he the way that he made his money essentially he and his associates made his money it touches on the fact that he and the people in his circle hasn't really had control over all of the the official business of the city all of the contracting and that they worked out a scheme where essentially people overpaid that the city overpaid for just about everything. And that then the people who got the contract with this was for for paving or for providing printing

services or for building a building then would kick back the extra the overhead would go then back to Tweed and his people who set up the deal in the first place and that it would that was how it is that he and his circle managed to make so much money managed to skim so much money that that kind of figure that we talked about earlier over this relatively short period of time. How exactly did that work. Well it was an old game and tweed took it and expanded it to drive it to its limit. Basically if you were a contractor doing any work for the city either providing services or providing goods in order to get your bills paid you had to submit it to the county board of supervisors at the time the New York City and New York County were basically the same New York was West Manhattan Island the boroughs weren't added until later. A little bit like Cook County and Chicago. The two are the same. The

supervisors then would insist that you inflate your bill by. I started out at 15 percent and that extra money would be kicked back to Tweed and one or two other members who would make sure that only their friends bills got paid. Or only the contractors who paid the kickback got paid over time as he as he got became more powerful. That 15 percent rose to 25 then 35 ultimately reached 65 percent. At its height over over the three or four year period when when Tweed and his group were in total control of New York the city debt rose from about 30 million to almost 100 million dollars for from a combination of graft as as well as the actual cost of servicing the city spending lavishly on city improvements. Patronage jobs paving streets and so on Tweed made a point to

keep taxes low so that the wealthy would support him even while all of this was going on. But if the cost of all of the spending was passed either to investors on Wall Street or to bondholders in Europe and so the hope was that the Piper would never have to be paid. I was released. By something that I read I think it was actually one of the reviews of the book talking about just how how big the city was how big the city of New York was how big its budget was and what it what an enormous financial entity it was that the budget for the city even. I think if I remember this right the budget for the city of New York was bigger than the budget for all of the states along the Atlantic coast including New York State all put together. That's sounds right when you think of it New York City was by by far the biggest city in America and the state functions of state government and even national government were very limited at the time

that the federal treasury was I believe under a hundred a hundred million dollars at that time it exploded during the Civil War. But once a piece returned the call. To the federal government was basically limited to a few small bureaus that the Treasury Department which ran the customs houses was the biggest the biggest department not counting the army on the frontier. So New York was a very large it had about a million people at that time mostly crowded into the lower half of Manhattan Island. What's striking is that for such a big city and such a big budget the controls were so loose and the fact that Tweed and his cronies were able to take really total control of the city treasury with very little oversight very there was no normal accounting. They went out they were supposed to issue an annual statement of the Citi debt at one point they just stopped and no one could do anything about it.

Let's talk with another listener here someone in F-ing him. Cell phone line for. Well yeah I can you hear me OK. Yes. Yeah I'm on a cell so I just had three quick question don't hang up and listen to what little I know. I think you can correct me if I'm wrong that the beginning of the watch tweeds demise came with the building of the City Hall I think which ran so far over budget that it actually cost more to build than the White House. That's what I've heard I don't know you might want to expound on that. And I just was wondering as far as his actual demise how did he die. You know what state was the UN financially and what year in fact did he did he pass away. If you guess want to comment on that thank you. OK well that's that's been sort of the second half of the story. We haven't quite gotten to yet and we will. You want to talk about the city hall project. OK. The building that that lead was associated with I

finally brought him down was it wasn't the City Hall itself it was the county courthouse Tweed. We had been during during his period. New York City was building a new county courthouse that would however that would centralize all of the court buildings and all of the the city and county offices that didn't fit in city hall. It was a very large building and it stands today on on in City Hall Park in New York it's called the Tweed courthouse. It was it's a gorgeous building and it has been a central octagonal Rotunda with Sting glass ceiling fan and beautiful geometric arches internal columns. But it went way over budget and what happened was that one of the disgruntled people within tweeds own organization the county sheriff who was very jealous of of money that other people were making managed to get his hands on some copied account books from the city controller's office and after a long

period of indecision he tried to blackmail tweed with these with these account books. Finally he decided to be a good citizen and he gave them to the New York Times which printed them. These are the so-called secret account disclosures. The first time anything like this had been exposed by any newspaper in America and what they showed were expenses on the courthouse which were so impossibly large that you knew they had to be fraudulent. For instance the amount of money supposedly spent for chairs for the courthouse was enough to purchase three hundred and fourteen thousand chairs which if you put them in a line would make a line seventeen miles long. There was enough money put aside supposedly spent on carpets for the courthouse that if you made a strip one foot wide it would go from lower Manhattan all the way to New Haven Connecticut. The New York Times laid all of this information out with that kind of detail and that was what ultimately brought about tweeds downfall.

Samuel Tilden a lawyer in New York figured out a way to trace these this overspending the obvious graft from the city treasury ultimately directly to boss tweeds account at the at the Broadway Bank. And that was what that was what caused the ultimate indictments and prosecutions that put him in jail. Tweed died in New York City in jail jail on Ludlow Street the very famous jail that was the debtors prison many well-known people served time there. It was joke that Tweed was the Tweed was the head of the board of supervisors when the Ludlow Street Jail was being built. If you knew he was going to be spending so much time there they would have made it a nicer place. But he died a broken man. He he knew he would never get out of jail. He had tried to escape at one point he had spent a lot of money on bribes and managed to slip away get as far as Cuba and then

Spain but was rearrested and brought back to New York to serve his time. He can he made a full confession of his crimes late in life as part of a deal with prosecutors. And exchange for releases. But the deal was broken they refused to release him. By the time he died in jail it was 1878 he was 55 years old. He was a broken man. He was in failing health. His family had largely deserted him because of the scandal. The harassment against his family by the media was was merciless. His wife travel was traveling in Europe under an assumed name she called herself Mrs. weed so that she wouldn't be confused with her husband. He had two sons who were kept in a boarding school in New England. Not even told of their father's death. He had one daughter who stayed in New York City and was loyal to him to the end but but she was really the only one close by. There was no Tweed fortune at that point. Most of the money had dissipated away either

in lawyer bill or in forest sales or in the money that he'd tried to get to his children but they were forced to sell off to pay bills. Given his association with political corruption in the city it's surprising that someone in the long line or maybe someone did suggest that maybe the Tweed courthouse should be renamed. Well this is part of the irony of lost weight. I'm the one hand he is. He is easily the most corrupt politician to ever serve in America and was convicted on 204 of crack counts of misdemeanor fraud and died a disgrace man in jail. But today a hundred and thirty years later he is honored by the city by having his name on the courthouse on the tweet courthouse because he was so popular and because people feel he did so many good things during his life. Very quickly let me introduce Again our guest for this part of focus 580 We're talking with Kenneth Ackerman. He's written several books about the Gilded Age and now has produced this new book. It's a biography of Boss Tweed and it's published by Carroll and Graf

It's out now. If you're interested in reading it you can go to the bookstore and look at the book. And if you like to call in here Ask Question 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Well supposing that we we could again bring Boss Tweed back and allow the man to speak in his own defense about the all of the things that he would have said that he he did good for the CID. New York and the people of New York. How would how would he make the case for himself. Well of Boss Tweed were to come back. He would probably point out the fact that he is that while recognizing the bad things he did he and his circle really did more to Bill in New York City and to bring the immigrants and the poor into the political mainstream than anyone else during that era. Tweed had his fingerprints on really every major New York institution from the late 1800s

from the Brooklyn Bridge to the New York Stock Exchange to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Museum of Natural History to Mt. Sinai Hospital. The list goes on and on. It was his group that spent the money to pay to pave the streets around midtown to broaden to widen Broadway to dig dig sewers all over town to build the infrastructure to allow the city to expand northward. He he made a point he had a very pragmatic tie with the immigrant community but the but the effect of it was to bring the Irish and the Germans and several others into politics into society at it at a time when nativism when when prejudice against immigrants was at its height. But Tweed. It's due to Tweed felt it important to take on that fight said that there is good that went with the bad and Tweed was appreciated during his life

time when even after the attacks on him for corruption had been going on for almost a full year. Most people in New York either didn't believe it or didn't want to believe it or refused to believe it. When he would throw a political rally he could draw tens tens of thousands of people of theirs. There was one where the crowd with estimated at between 40 and 100000 people who came out primarily to see Boss Tweed. They would come marching in matching red shirts which was and a homage to Tweed's background on the New York Fire Department marching in formation. Political rallies back then were a whole level beyond what we what we have today. Torchlight parade sand and fireworks and brass bands whole level of showmanship. But he was very very popular. Well I'm sure that it was a major form of entertainment. At the time the political rally was it was there for TV and movies so it was

like it was the national soap opera. Let's take another caller here or someone listening in Chicago line for you know my wife by the way I just finished I think it's a renovation of the Tweed courthouse in New York. Within the last year spent a few million dollars to do it. With respect to Tweed and corruption I don't think you could have existed without the cooperation works is working hand in glove with those of the leaders of the Republican Party this was the days in which the robber barons took control of the Republican Party locally and nationally. Early on the Republican Party was it was a mixture of these robber barons who I guess supplied the money to abolitionists who eventually were. It's remained within the party but we're relatively powerless and much of the country. And do you see these guys the rubber bands who are operating in New York.

And robbed the pastor who built many of the slums in the Lower East Side and in the Tenderloin district just to the west of the Times Square 40th Street Circuit street and so on 20th Street the Vanderbilt's been to New York Central Railroad. The guys who are the guy who controlled the area in Lackawanna rods It was a fight. There was money. Lots of money passed. During those days to gain control of the hospitals and businesses and also Ron left St.. Do you have anything to say about the Republican parties and the money that passed between them. Well the caller is absolutely right on this. We'd had several close ties with the Republican Party and with the robber barrons they did work hand in glove. He was particularly close with Jay

Gould who was the head of the Erie Railroad and his partner Jim Fisk when Jay Gould and Fisk cornered the gold market for instance in 1989 or tried to corner the gold market twee was right in right in the middle of that working with them. He also represented Cornelius Vanderbilt Commodore Vanderbilt in the New York State legislature when Vanderbilt tried to get some laws changed to on one of his stock manipulations Tweed was the one who returned to Tweed's machine always made a point to take. A limited number of well-known Republicans and put them in high profile positions to give the illusion of bipartisanship. For instance there was a Republican named Henry Smith who ran the police board while Tweed was was the boss. But Henry Smith would always do a favor for Tweed if we'd asked him for one. Chester Allen Arthur a future Republican president of the United States and and a Republican boss in his own right had a had that was was relatively young during

this period but he had a job as a counsel for a tax commission under tweeds regime so he too is a tweed Republican who at one point when Tweed was being accused of manipulating the city bucks he and his controller Richard Connelly put together a six member commission headed by John Jacob Astor the third one of the wealthiest men in New York who gave their blessing to the city bucks. So he always had those kinds of ties. And the reason was that the tweeds regime was a good deal for the wealthy during his time in power he spent a lot of money. City of improvements. And even though a lot of that money went into corruption and graft and was wasted. Still property values were up all over town. It was a period very much white the 1990s the economy was good the economy was working and. The causes were much larger than Boss Tweed. He was certainly part of the environment that made it work. As far as the courthouse and its renovation it's interesting that the renovation was a was

completed just recently it originally was going to go for a city be used as a city museum but Mayor Bloomberg decided to put the Board of Education in the Tweed courthouse which caused quite a few wry remarks in the New York Press. At one point they were going to start a day school for the children of people who worked there and called it the hall at the Tweed academy until a couple of historians complained and started joking about what what what what would you teach in the Tweed Academy. Let's go on here we have a caller in Urbana line number one we'll talk with him next. Hello good morning. I would like to know if you could give us a criticism of the film Gangs of New York I think most Americans know about as a result of scritches AC's film and it's got its good side and its bad side but. I'm really interested in your critique of it and still sort of straighten the record out. What this specific gravity of the international workingmen's Association

was in New York at this time that is to say Karl Marx's first international of which Frederick Douglass was a member and I'll have to listen thank you. Thanks for the question. Gangs of New York is a very interesting movie the probably the most ironic point is that if you pick up a copy of the book by Herbert Asbury the man the name Boss Tweed doesn't appear anywhere in the book. He's not he's not even mentioned in the book. However in making the movie Martin Scorsese he the producer had to create certain composite characters in order to tell the story. And it was really impossible to tell a story about New York during that era without including Boss Tweed. You can you can nit pick that movie to death and it's very easy to do a lot of people have done it. The bell of the but church character was based on a man named Bill Poole who was a fighter a saloon

gambler and a nativist who died actually before the Civil War that the character in the movie was based partly on him but partly also on another figure name. They are Brian Gers who was a political figure in the Seventh Ward actually a rival of tweed early on in tweeds career that the level of violence that they showed in the movie was very characteristic of New York. I'm more in the 1820s and 1830s. By the time you got to the 50s and 60s the way politics was manipulated was more by ballot box stuffing and intimidation rather than outright murder or killing. But the one thing that I guess I didn't like about the movie I saw it at the time that I was starting to have to work on this book was the was the way that Tweed was portrayed. They made him look very sleazy in a way that he was a double talker that he was someone who had placed

second fiddle to Bill the Butcher. And my feeling was that Tweed would not play second fiddle to anyone. And if you saw him walking down the street he would not look comical he would look friendly outgoing interesting interested but he was someone that you would take seriously he is someone that you could do business with. Our guest in this hour of focus is Ken Ackerman. He is the author of a new biography of Boss Tweed. It's just out now you can look for it in the bookstore. We have about 10 minutes left and certainly if there are other people listening who have questions you may call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5. Because one of the things that strikes me is the continuing popularity among writers particularly and I guess. Think of novelists of the Gilded Age New York. And I suppose the more I read about it the more engaging in the more remarkable it is that you could. You can find almost any story there or you could set almost any story

there and and then that when you look at the truth and what life was really like at the time some of it seems almost too much you think no you couldn't really make up a story like that and yet you can find real life stories. It must have been at the time that the most booming place certainly the most booming place in the America maybe the one of the most ethnically diverse one of the biggest spreads between the rich and the poor. It must've been quite a place. The fascinating city took to live in at the time it was a tough city to live in at the time we we tend to forget today just how hard life was for people hundred 30 years ago with with basics you know no bathrooms no showers no no food standards. The streets were mostly muddy and crowded traffic was was snarled to a level that we couldn't even imagine today. If you picture a major city like Broadway with no traffic lights no cars but just a

swarm of horses and carriages and and and people. In the streets with no with no order or direction and narrow narrow crooked streets it was impossible to get across but sure and in that cauldron of humanity there was a certain vitality and dynamism and energy partly because people who lived in New York had come there for a reason. The immigrants in New York were mostly first generation they were people who were either born in in Europe Ireland Germany England and a dozen other countries and had made the crossing themselves or their parents had made it within their within recent memory. Tweet estimated at one point that something like 60 percent of the vote in New York in the 1860s was foreign born as were immigrants. So that that number and at the same time you had a city that had just gone or a country that a disk on through the sieve the shock of civil war

that the changes of industrialization an enormous influx of money because the American economy was going through an enormous boom and all of the money around the country from telegraphs. Agriculture was all flowing to to New York. We were the largest port and the home of the New York Stock Exchange and with with with with so few rules then and bureaucracy and limitations. It was a very free wheeling place. These social forces were played out in very dramatic very direct ways. There was no other way no other way for things to happen except very directly. So it made for an interesting place. Yeah. Let's see we get at least one more caller here we'll go to line one in Champaign. Hello I enjoyed calling on a cell phone and I certainly enjoy your show and I wish I could have called in on yesterday

but today is very interesting. Follow up question on the caller relating to the Gangs of New York movie. But my question is one which tweets position on the civil war where where one wishes that didn't come out in the movie. It whether he was pro and not necessarily the slavery question was it was really an issue over state's rights. And but it didn't come out whether he was for the draft. And if I remember my history that draft riot actually did occur. I don't remember remember in history us in Pennsylvania history but I don't recall that we didn't we weren't taught details more or less a draft riot occurred. I say if I remember right that's all.

Well the draft riot did occur and it was an epic level riot. Well over 100 people were killed thousands of people were injured. Millions of dollars of property damage was done as far as tweeds position on the civil war. He was a war Democrat which was not a small thing to be at the time. New York City with a very disloyal city it was a it was there were there were more copperheads anti Lincoln anti war. Democrats in New York than any other northern city early in the war the mayor a man named Fernando wood had to happen seriously propose that New York should secede from the union itself and become a free city dealing with both the north and the south. There was that kind of sentiment but Tammany Hall in particular stuck with the union and was a loyal group which gave it credibility on all sides that was close to the immigrants and to the immigrant community because of the services it provided. But it was credible with the Republicans because it was loyal in the war. It actually raised a troop of soldiers for the Union

army which was headed originally by a man named William Kennedy who was the grandson of Tammany Hall. If you go to the Gettysburg National Park the Gettysburg battlefield you'll see a statue of an Indian and what it is is a monument to the Tammany Hall brigade that fought at Gettysburg. So Tweed was a ward Democrat but more than that he was a pragmatist and he recognized that a Tammany was going to be influential after the war that it had to show its loyalty during the war. And he was very helpful to Lincoln and to Edwin Stanton his Secretary of War in settling the draft issue and prayer and being the head of the recruitment committee in New York City during the war. Certainly it help. To their their pursuit of tweed helped establish should a number of people among them Samuel Tilden who went on to run for president. In fact I guess some people think he actually won but he he

wasn't the president. In what way were the people who were who were part of this group who are going after tweed in in what way were they made by by the effort to bring him down and by bringing him down. Well quite a few people say when Tweed went down with such a crash and with such a scandal the people who brought brought him down were very well rewarded. Samuel Tilden the lawyer who put together the legal case against Tweed and aided the prosecution became so famous as a result of it that he wrote that famed first to become governor of New York as governor he took. The upstate canal ring. I mean those two things he became known as the most important crime fighter of his generation. That that was the basis on which he launched his presidential bid in 1876. He did win the popular vote against Rutherford Hayes but there was a dispute about the electoral vote in three southern states very similar to the

George Bush Al Gore election of 2000 there was a disputed outcome a special commission with decided it was it was chosen to sort it out and they voted on a party line vote to give all of the disputed votes to Hayes. There is it's widely felt that fill it in with cheated out of that out of that election. The others who became very famous as a result were for Thomas Nast of HARPER'S WEEKLY and then also being the publisher of The New York Times George Jones The New York Times saying the crucial role in actually breaking the case against tweeted a number of smaller players and several prosecutors went on to two seats in the United States Congress the judge who put a tweet in jail became the chief judge of New York. But several reformers made their paint their name on that case. Well we're going to have to stop because we're at the end of the time but if you'd like to read more of the story look for the book that we have mentioned is titled Boss Tweed The Rise and Fall of the corrupt pol who conceived the soul of modern New York and the publisher on the book is Carolyn Graff

by our guest Kenneth Ackerman and Mr. Ackerman thanks very much. David thank you I enjoyed very much.