The Great Bridge (17 page)

Smith was a Republican, a bank president, and a dear friend of Boss Tweed’s, who had made Smith Police Commissioner. Sweeny, also known as Peter “Brains” Sweeny, was a pudgy, black-haired, sinister-looking man who had been called the sneak thief of Tweed’s entourage, but who preferred to describe himself humbly as “a sort of adviser” to the Boss. Like Tweed, Smith had been named a member of the powerful new Executive Committee and so had the pleasure of watching Tweed perform his first recorded service on behalf of the bridge.

As was frequently his way when commencing an association with a grand public endeavor, Tweed wanted an eminently respectable name also associated with it from the start. So as the Executive Committee got down to business, he urged that Horatio Allen be appointed consulting engineer at an annual salary the same as young Roebling was to get, eight thousand dollars, and that the appointment date from August 1, even though Allen had had no hand in any of the work during that time. A formal motion to that effect was presented, passed, and the genial Allen, who was present, immediately accepted. Then, after a few brief formalities were seen to, the meeting broke up and Tweed went back across the river.

There had been no fanfare of any kind and on the surface it might appear that little of importance had been accomplished. But Tweed doubtless felt he had put in quite a good morning.

The sudden death of the elder Roebling had created the single possible flaw in the venture, as Tweed saw it; so he had moved to solve that—or to appear to solve it, which was more important. Irrespective of the skills possessed by the young engineer, without the father in command, a failure of public confidence might develop and bring the bridge to a halt, something Tweed did not want. Tweed was anxious that this project continue for quite some time to come. But now young Roebling was backed up by an engineer of his father’s vintage, whose professional standing was well known, whose character was unimpeachable, who was a founding member of the Union League Club, and so forth. If anyone should one day care to check the record to see who had put him there to safeguard this vast and important undertaking, he would find the name “Wm. M. Tweed.” (Horatio Allen’s professional contribution to the work in the next few years would add up to just about nothing.)

The Tammany chieftain had also made his first entrance onto the Brooklyn scene and not a stir had resulted. He had gone to Brooklyn in good faith and in broad daylight, he had been seen on Fulton Street, he had taken a place among such upright gentlemen as General Slocum and Henry Murphy, he had fixed his name to the greatest municipal enterprise of the day, and no one had raised a hand or a voice to stop him.

For nearly two years more Tweed would play a decisive part in the business of the Bridge Company, traveling to Brooklyn to attend stockholders’ meetings or to serve on the Executive Committee when it served his purpose. He would make no secret of his interest in the bridge, nor did anyone else try to hide, or gloss over, the obvious fact that his was a very powerful voice in bridge affairs. But when it came time for Tweed to explain the earlier stages of organizing the Bridge Company—that business transacted
prior
to his open association with the project—everything he said would be angrily denounced by the two principals in his version of the story, William Kingsley and Henry Murphy.

Murphy stated there was no truth whatever in anything Tweed said. He denied absolutely playing the role Tweed credited him with, claiming he and Tweed had had no dealings concerning the bridge. And he stuck to that until his dying day. Which one of them, if either, was telling the whole truth will never be known.

But according to Tweed’s version of the story, Murphy was a very different sort of man from the one Henry Stiles depicted and perfectly capable of Tweed’s brand of politics if that was the only way to get what he was after. In late 1867 or early 1868 Murphy had been after a pledge from the City of New York to subscribe to a million and a half dollars’ worth of bridge stock. (Brooklyn’s subscription, exactly twice that amount, had been arranged quite smoothly. The three million dollars from Brooklyn was all set. The remaining shares, a half million dollars’ worth, were to be sold to private citizens.)

Tweed’s account of what went on behind the scenes is the only one available. It was presented a number of years later and is rather vague on such important details as to just when Murphy came to him for help—whether, for instance, it was before or after Murphy made his bitter fight for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1868, a fight Murphy lost to Tweed’s hand-picked candidate, John Hoffman. The timing, needless to say, would be an interesting part of the story. In any event, it was Murphy, according to Tweed, and Murphy alone, who came to him in Albany to say the Bridge Company needed money from New York, which, as Murphy said, was a matter to be decided by the Common Council.

Tweed, at that time, was newly arrived at Albany, having recently become “a brother Senator” of Murphy’s, as Tweed put it, representing New York’s Fourth District. He had hired a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Delevan House, where amid potted plants and gleaming sideboards loaded with decanters of whiskey and Holland gin, and with the steady trill of his beloved canaries filling the air, Tweed transacted the people’s business. If one wished something done at the old stone Capitol up the street, one went first to the Delevan House, to the second floor. Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Vanderbilt, they all made an appearance sooner or later, as did countless lesser “lobbyists,” one of whom later testified that the going price of a vote ranged anywhere from fifty to five hundred dollars. For Vanderbilt alone Tweed is said to have distributed $180,000.

If Tweed and Murphy did meet in private, as Tweed said they did—to reach an “understanding” about the bridge—it was doubtless there in Tweed’s chambers and it must have been a memorable confrontation. The two of them were like the opposing sides of the same political coin, the one a great, florid mountain done up in a loud suit, the other small, neat, dignified, but tough as a nut and doubtless detesting every minute of the transaction. There they must have sat, face to face, a pair of Tweed’s favorite enameled cuspidors, decorated with rosebuds, stationed conveniently close by.

According to Tweed he immediately reminded Murphy that he was no longer a member of the Common Council and therefore had nothing to do with its decisions. “But,” said Murphy, “can’t you influence them?” (Tweed, it seems, described this little exchange with a perfectly straight face.)

“I told him I hadn’t done any lobbying business there, but might if necessary,” Tweed continued.

“Shortly after he called again. In the meantime I had conversed with a gentleman occupying a position in the Board of Aldermen which entitled him to credence, and he told me the appropriation could be passed by paying for it.” Tweed had asked how much it would cost, but when he tried to recall the answer after so many years, he was unable to say whether it had been $55,000 or $65,000. (Considering the number of “understandings” Tweed took part in, his slip of memory is not surprising.) But a price was agreed on. “I informed Mr. Murphy of that fact. He told me to go ahead and make the negotiation. I did so, and the money was authorized to be appropriated or the bonds issued. I can’t tell the manner in which it was done, but that was the result.”

Tweed had no trouble recalling the gentleman of “credence” to whom the money was delivered, or who acted as the go-between.

“With whom did you have dealings?” he was asked during the subsequent investigations.

“Mr. Thomas Coman,” Tweed answered. (Alderman Coman was a Tammany hack of long standing.)

“You gave him the sum of money to be paid in bulk to the members of the Board of Aldermen?”

“Yes, sir.”

Just how the money was actually delivered to him, Tweed never said, but according to a story told later, one fine day all $55,000 or $65,000, whichever it was, came across from Brooklyn in a carpetbag, and there is reason to believe that the man carrying the bag was William C. Kingsley. For even if everything Tweed said was true, Murphy would never have involved himself directly in that part of the transaction; while Kingsley, on the other hand, was not unaccustomed to handling large sums in the line of duty; and it seems most unlikely that either of them would have entrusted such a mission to anybody else. The only thing of interest Kingsley seems to have put in writing on the subject back at the time was a comment to John A. Roebling in a letter dated April 16, 1868. There was among the New York aldermen, he told the engineer, “a strong combination made against the measure [the bridge] by a ring that want to be bought.”

But however Tweed got the money, he did not turn it over to Alderman Coman until
after
he, Murphy, and Kingsley had reached still one further “understanding.” Tweed was always very agreeable about passing money along to his political associates and generally he liked to take a little of it for himself, as he probably did in this case. But Tweed by now was no petty grafter. He too was a visionary, with his eye on the future, and bribing a few aldermen was simply not his line any longer, except as a necessary first step in a larger, grander scheme. Tweed was working up an arrangement whereby he and his Ring could get control of the entire bridge.

First of all Tweed wanted stock in the bridge and he wanted it at a bargain price, he wanted it as a gift actually. It was a courtesy he was accustomed to in such affairs. In his testimony he said Murphy told him there had been some difficulties selling bridge stock in Brooklyn, which was the case, and that additional private investors would be most welcome; whereupon Tweed had immediately suggested that he, Smith, and “Brains” Sweeny might like “to go in the direction of the bridge,” as Tweed phrased it.

“What inducement was held out to you to become a stockholder in the Brooklyn Bridge?” Tweed would be asked during his soul-baring testimony.

“As the law then read,” he answered, “five hundred thousand dollars subscribed by individual stockholders would control the entire bridge, the appropriations, expenditures of money and supplies, and everything.”

Tweed was very familiar with the legislation Murphy had drawn up. According to the law the entire corporation, though representing four and a half million dollars of the people’s money (from the two cities), was actually controlled by the private stockholders. So just as Tweed explained in his testimony, the man with ten shares of stock (a thousand dollars’ worth) had as much say as the City of New York or the City of Brooklyn, with all their millions tied up in the venture.

“Now, how did you expect to be benefited by becoming one of the subscribers to this bridge?” Tweed’s interrogator asked. Tweed answered with two sentences, the second of which is a classic sample of his gift for understatement.

“I expected,” Tweed said, “that when the bridge was built by the citizens of New York and Brooklyn, and with their money, it would be a well-paying dividend stock. Then we expected to get employment for a great many laborers and an expenditure of the money for the different articles required to build the bridge.”

It would not be until after the Tweed Ring collapsed and its incredible thievery was exposed that anyone would be able to appreciate just what Tweed might have in mind when he spoke lightly of “employment for a great many laborers” or “an expenditure of the money for the different articles required.” The truth of the matter was that no politician alive had so keen or cultivated an appreciation for a large, costly, time-consuming public work.

For example, several years prior to the time Tweed developed an interest in bridgebuilding, he had commenced a new County Courthouse on Chambers Street, just across the park from City Hall, or almost directly in line with where the New York entrance to the bridge was to be. The architect’s plans called for a three-story building, of iron and marble, in the style of a Palladian country house, and it was to cost, according to law, no more than a quarter of a million dollars. At the outset it had looked like a straightforward, relatively modest piece of business. But by 1868 it was still being built and rebuilt—and ever so slowly. The “city fathers” (Tweed’s people) had authorized some additional three million dollars to keep the job going (such an edifice certainly ought to be in keeping with the greatness of New York itself, Tweed would say), and there seemed no end to the number of people needed to work on the structure, or to keep it running smoothly. It took, for example, thirty-two full-time employees just to maintain the heating apparatus. By the time it would be finished, in 1871, Tweed’s courthouse would cost more than thirteen million dollars, or nearly twice the price paid for Alaska.

The act incorporating the New York Bridge Company had not stipulated a specific ceiling on how much could be spent on the bridge, or even a rough estimate of the ultimate cost, only what the capital stock would be. Roebling’s estimate was a matter of public record, of course, but engineers’ estimates seldom turned out to be accurate, and even so, as round numbers to work with, six to seven million must have struck Tweed as a much better start than he had had with the courthouse.

But what surely must have set Tweed and his closest associates to doing some very fancy reckoning was the prospect of such an immense, unprecedented piece of construction, where all manner of unexpected developments could call for vast outlays of public money. Three chairs and forty tables for the Chambers Street courthouse had been bought by the City of New York for $179,792. Windows had cost $8,000 apiece. One friend of the Ring, a man named Garvey who would become known as “The Prince of Plasterers,” had been paid by 1869 half a million dollars for his plastering work inside the courthouse, plus a million more to repair what he had done. (That July Garvey’s bill for plastering came to $153,755, and his total bill, for work that should have cost about $20,000, would be nearly three million.) Among the many checks made out for “articles required” for the courthouse, to cite one more example, was one for $41,190.95—for “Brooms, etc.”