America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  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.2

  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.3

  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.4

  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.5

  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 f
or 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.6

  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.7

  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.8

  “Let Us Prey,” 1871. One of a series of merciless cartoons Thomas Nast drew satirizing William M. Tweed and his Tammany gang in New York City. In this drawing, Tweed and his crew of “vultures”—Peter B. “Brains” Sweeny, Richard B. “Slippery Dick” Connolly, and A. “Elegant” Oakey Hall are waiting for the storm of protest to “Blow Over.” It didn’t, and Tweed was convicted and imprisoned due in no small part to Nast’s caricatures. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  In the wake of the Tweed scandal, a group of citizens appointed a blue-ribbon panel, the Committee of Seventy, to study reform measures including imposing literacy and property qualifications for voting. The clamor to limit democracy was considerable. Historian Francis Parkman complained it was foolish if not criminal to leave the city’s destiny to “the dangerous classes.” Liberty, he argued, “means license and politics means plunder.” The committee managed to end public welfare (in the midst of a depression) but accomplished little else. By the late 1870s, Tammany was back in business. The city instituted civil service reform to limit the politicians’ power of appointment. In 1882, Congress would pass a federal Civil Service Act, placing the reins of government in the hands of professionals who would carry out their responsibilities in an objective, apolitical, and honest manner. Or so the theory went.9

  Southern whites opposed to the Republican governments and black suffrage learned from the media frenzy surrounding Tweed and his cohorts. They understood that corruption as a practice was not as important as corruption as an issue, especially if they could tie it to suffrage. Corruption played well to northern audiences, who need only reference their own backyards to sympathize with white southerners. The issue of corruption lent more credence to the charges that these southern governments were illegitimate.

  This is not to say that southern Republican governments were chaste. The Republican administrations in South Carolina were especially profligate. The state government expanded services and infrastructure but grew the state debt from $5.4 million to $15.8 million between 1868 and 1872. Evidence indicated that some lawmakers benefited financially from these expenditures. The South Carolina General Assembly spent $125,000 on wine and whiskey for lawmakers during one session alone. A printing firm, the Republican Printing Company, bribed legislators to award it state contracts at inflated rates. South Carolina’s printing bill soared from $21,000 in 1868 to $450,000 in 1873.

  Some of the lawmakers enjoyed well-furnished quarters. Between 1868 and 1872, South Carolina spent $200,000 on furniture for the statehouse. An inventory taken in 1877 indicated that only $17,775 worth of furnishings remained. There were also bond frauds involving state securities and discounted railroad stock sold to legislators in exchange for favorable votes. Key officials in the state government led the carnival, including Republican governor Robert K. Scott (a white northerner) and his successor, Franklin J. Moses Jr. (a white southerner). Perhaps the most notorious of the crew was John J. “Honest John” Patterson, who bought a U.S. Senate seat in 1872 for forty thousand dollars, bribing state legislators who elected him. These lapses were not unique for the Gilded Age, but they indelibly tainted regimes whose legitimacy was already suspect. The New York Times spoke for many disgusted northerners when it noted in 1874 that “ignorant negroes [in South Carolina] transplanted from the cotton fields to the halls of the Capitol, where they have been drilled by unscrupulous white adventurers, have naturally made a mockery of government and bankrupted the State.” Little wonder that support for southern regimes was eroding quickly, even among staunch northern Republicans.10

  Not all Republican governments in the South were tainted, but the few examples afforded the Democrats opportunities to attack all these regimes as the logical outcome of universal suffrage. The improvements in infrastructure, education, and the economy accomplished by southern Republicans provided, ironically, visible evidence of alleged profligate spending, higher taxes, and the opportunity, if not the reality, for graft.

  Democratic chicanery in the South did not raise a similar concern in the North. Southern Democrats stuffed ballot boxes, levied poll taxes, prevented Republicans from voting, and changed polling places without general notification. One rarely heard of corruption once the low-tax, low-service, lily-white Redeemer governments took office. In Georgia, for example, corruption charges in 1875 led to the impeachment and resignation of the Democratic state treasurer, the impeachment and conviction of the comptroller general, and the resignation of the commissioner of agriculture. James “Honest Dick” Tate, the Redeemer state treasurer of Kentucky, was so popular voters reelected him to ten consecutive terms. One day he was gone, and, officials discovered, so was $229,000. None of this condoned Republican failings, but a double standard operated in the nation.11

  Investigations into government corruption typically revealed cozy relationships between public officials and corporate leaders. Entrepreneurs, the heroes of the postwar era, began to receive closer scrutiny after the Tweed investigation uncovered ties between Tammany and railroad executives. Mark Twain enjoyed taking the moguls to task. He taunted railroad magnates “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, two of the most unlovable of the era’s entrepreneur
s. “Go and surprise the whole country by doing something right,” he baited Vanderbilt. “I didn’t remember ever reading anything about you which you oughtn’t be ashamed of.” Of Gould Twain wrote, “The people had desired money before this day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.” Gould attempted to corner the gold market; he manipulated railroad stock, and he ruthlessly bought out competitors. Small in stature, dark in complexion, he was rumored to be Jewish.12

  The scandals swept over public opinion in rapid succession. Gould, Vanderbilt, Tweed, and then the Credit Mobilier revelations splashed into the press and nearly drowned the Grant administration. Transcontinental railroad promoters had set up Credit Mobilier (named after a French bank that failed in 1867) as the independent construction company through which all funds to build the railroad were funneled. The construction company raised funds from the sale of stocks and bonds and repaid investors with government subsidies as each section of the road was completed. The men who ran the railroad and the construction company were one and the same, and they spread stocks and bonds liberally throughout the Congress to obtain friendly legislation. Credit Mobilier was the only company bidding on construction contracts. Congress set the upper limit for bids, and, miraculously, Credit Mobilier’s bids matched the ceilings, enabling the directors to sell bonds to that amount, though construction costs for each section were well below the bids. The directors of both companies pocketed the difference and provided gifts to friendly congressmen and Vice President Schuyler Colfax. The Pacific road was a moneymaking enterprise long before a single train crossed the continent.13