Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York's Gilded Age 9780812297232

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Electoral Capitalism

AMERICAN GOVERNANCE: POLITICS, POLICY, AND PUBLIC LAW Series Editors: Richard Valelly, Pamela Brandwein, Marie Gottschalk, Christopher Howard A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

ELECTORAL CAPITALISM 





THE PARTY SYSTEM IN NEW YORK’S GILDED AGE

Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright 䉷 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Broxmeyer, Jeffrey D., author. Title: Electoral capitalism : the party system in New York’s Gilded Age / Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer. Other titles: American governance. Description: 1st edition. 兩 Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] 兩 Series: American governance : politics, policy, and public law 兩 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019046246 兩 ISBN 978-0-8122-5236-1 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Political parties—New York (State)—History—19th century. 兩 Political culture—New York (State)—History—19th century. 兩 Capitalism—Political aspects—New York (State)—History—19th century. 兩 Political corruption—New York (State)—History—19th century. 兩 New York (State)—Politics and government—19th century. Classification: LCC JK2295.N7 B76 2020 兩 DDC 324.2747009/034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046246

For Fran, Bill, Ann, and Dave, who gave us their New Yorks

contents

Introduction 1

The Tammany Bank Run of 1871 27 Chapter 1. Tammany Hall’s Lost Financial Sector 30

Dawn of the Conkling Machine 53 Chapter 2. Republican Party Business 57

Can’t You Help Me in Gettin the Vacant Place for Me 87 Chapter 3. Partisan Poor Relief 88

The Henry George Boom Fades 119 Chapter 4. Anti-Monopoly in the Age of Party Consolidation 122

Conclusion 152

Notes 165 Index 211 Acknowledgments 217

Introduction

THE BALLOON In the late 1860s, an indignant landowner named Michael H. Cashman sought an audience with William “Boss” Tweed. Cashman owned four valuable plots on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that his neighbor had encircled with fences and gates, effectively cutting off access. Petitions to local government went unheeded. Adding insult to injury, a portion of the imperial neighbor’s land was technically owned by the city, which planned—at some unknown future date—to extend Bloomingdale, a major boulevard, through the estate. The city had handsomely compensated the lucky culprit with $25,000, or $408,428 today, for public works that never materialized.1 Newspapers also reported, belatedly, that the neighbor had paid no taxes on the city land for several years running.2 With other channels blocked, the aggrieved Cashman sought redress from Boss Tweed, a major political force who had a reputation for fixing problems. The petitioner was a constituent, of sorts. M. H. & D. Cashman, his harness manufactory, was located within the state senator’s downtown district.3 Tweed’s advice was sly upon learning that Cashman’s troublesome neighbor was none other than Fernando Wood. Perhaps, the Boss suggested, you should employ aeronautical methods and “get into your land with a balloon.”4 In short, nothing could be done. The transgressor was a former three-term mayor whose brother, Benjamin, was a state senator, lottery baron, and publisher of the Daily News, one of the city’s largest circulating newspapers. Fernando himself was a longtime fixture in political circles and a chief member of the opposition to Reconstruction in the House of Representatives. He was the face of the Democratic Party for a generation of New Yorkers. The balloon tale provides a window into the unseen and public faces of electoral capitalism in the late nineteenth century as well as the cynicism it engendered among fellow citizens. Even if Tweed’s clever remark was

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apocryphal (we can’t be sure), it alludes to the very real way in which officeholders accumulated vast wealth from politics and how they rendered it exclusive. The story resonates because the official persona maintained by Fernando Wood was that of a prosperous and civic-minded merchant. In truth, he became a millionaire primarily through real estate speculation during his officeholding career, along with his brother Benjamin. The principal method was to purchase common lands cheaply, strategically increase their value with public works, and resell them. The Wood brothers’ ability to leverage officeholding for personal gain and, equally, their capacity to fend off critics, was made possible by nearly three decades as power brokers. With America undergoing industrial transformation after the Civil War, new fortunes appeared suddenly, as if from thin air. It was not always clear to the public how that wealth had been attained or at whose expense. The balloon story is rich with irony because the aggrieved landowner sought out Boss Tweed for redress. Here was a cunning political entrepreneur who adopted the Wood brothers’ accumulating practices and expanded them with far-reaching vision into other sectors of the economy. The empire that Tweed built stretched from patronage positions in government (mocked as the “Shiny Hat Brigade”) to banks, distilleries, cigar manufacturing, steamboat lines, railroads, construction, printing, and mines. Tweed and Wood were bitter factional rivals, but they shared a similar profile. Both epitomized a new breed of officeholding capitalist that was revolutionizing what it meant to win elections and hold office. Neither was our petitioner’s balloon problem confined to one party. Mary Lydig Daly, a keen observer of public affairs during the Civil War, was well aware “that there were rogues [like Fernando Wood] on both sides, on the Republican side not as yet so well known (who had their fortunes yet to make and therefore are more dangerous).”5 She was prescient. By the 1880s, the Republican organization in New York had minted its own coterie of wealthy officeholders from the ranks of middlebrow party operators. Under U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling’s supervision, the party cultivated a web of business and legal ventures that projected national influence well beyond the confines of traditional party committees. What Daly could not have anticipated was that the logic of capital accumulation would evolve from the marginal activity of “rogues” into a dominant means of organizing party government. Outsiders like Cashman, our hapless petitioner, were often left mystified about how to interpret this phenomenon and respond through traditional channels.

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Figure 1. Woodlawn: The fenced estate of Fernando Wood, 77th and Broadway. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Leaders of political parties during the nineteenth century became some of the earliest millionaires in the United States. From the American Revolution to the 1840s, property owners followed the republican tradition of gentlemen-politicians who “retired” into public life as ratification of established status.6 By the 1850s, however, the political system itself emerged as a major source of fortunes. The conspicuous appearance of political wealth thrust questions into the public debate about democratic representation and the ambitions of office seekers. Newspaper editors, political rivals, and civic reformers wondered how political entrepreneurs, many of whom hailed from modest backgrounds, became so wealthy throughout their careers. This controversy was initially muted because generating personal wealth from political property was informally acknowledged as part of coalition building and mass party competition. Drama over slavery and union also temporarily overshadowed these concerns. Nevertheless, between the 1860s and 1880s, controversies large and small erupted in the nation’s capital and across the country. Nowhere was this truer than New York, a center of trade, finance, and industry, where officeholders’ fortunes were among the largest of the Gilded Age.

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Introduction

OVERVIEW Now is the opportune moment to look with fresh eyes upon an old dilemma. How do struggles over unequal wealth shape democracy in America? Tensions between the push of equal voice and the pull of unequal property are inherent in democratic capitalism. But concentration of riches at the top of society is currently more extreme than at any other time since before the New Deal.7 Citizens are looking for meaningful points of reference to understand the main drift. Fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and Supreme Court rulings like Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) has revived the issue of money in politics for a new generation. An upsurge of protest, from the Tea Party’s attack on “crony capitalism” to Occupy Wall Street’s critique of the 1 percent, moved the issue to the center of public attention.8 Donald Trump’s co-management of business and presidential responsibilities keeps it there.9 The question of whether the United States is an oligarchy, or becoming one, is no longer confined to the radical fringes. It is hotly debated in the open.10 I approach the inequality dilemma from a historical perspective by focusing on the distinctive fusion of property and officeholding within the American state. Specifically, my study revisits the unprecedented concentration of power and wealth into the hands of a few party leaders that took place during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Political parties were at the peak of their relevance during the Gilded Age—corralling loyalists, driving agendas—precisely when the inequality crisis was at its worst. Yet, few scholars of American politics draw systematic links between the two phenomena. In this book, I present an alternative view of party development in America’s first century. During the Gilded Age, “electoral capitalism” became constitutive of the party system, a process that I explore through an investigation of New York and its role in national politics. Political commodification fueled individual ambitions, factional negotiation, and partisan combat. To be sure, a host of burning issues was paramount in the public’s eye. Generations of historians have admirably documented how everything from Reconstruction, nativism, and the tariff to labor relations and monetary policy reflected deep social divisions that cleaved parties. My own concern is less about any particular issue like the “bloody shirt” or epochal ideology like Jeffersonianism. Instead, I seek to reevaluate the systemwide elements of political behavior that made this period distinctive.

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Thus, I also seek to draw attention to the unique role of political institutions in the historical process of capital accumulation. Rising prominence of the New History of Capitalism as a coherent field has refocused attention on the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of capitalism in America, especially slavery’s vital contribution.11 Yet no studies have examined how political parties, specifically, transform into circuits of accumulation. Surprisingly little is written in American political development on how “coalition merchants” constructed the machinery of partisan conflict.12 By this I mean: what actual practices were involved? My contention is that late nineteenth-century party leaders grew powerful insofar as they managed to bring a modicum of order to chaotic party markets. Since the Cold War’s behavioral revolution, political scientists have borrowed the market concept from economics as a metaphor for political competition.13 I deploy the term literally. The Gilded Age, after all, was a period when the United States moved from a society with patchwork markets into a capitalist society, a transformation that also involved the electoral sphere.14 However, Richard Bensel has shown that the practices of nineteenth-century political actors diverged significantly from textbook expectations of methodological individualism inherent in rational choice models.15 A fuller view of political behavior requires exploring the meaning of people’s strategies and calculations as they are enmeshed within layers of social context. Instead of predicting how people should behave in various circumstances, as do game theorists, my study elaborates how they have done so in actual historical practice. Gilded Age officeholders who gained preeminence acquired valuable commodities and monopolized their allocation to peers, clients, and subordinates. The kinds of commodities in question were votes, nominations, appointments, charters, subsidies, franchises, and legal privileges— anything of value within the political arena that could be traded, bought, or sold. When Levi P. Morton, the future twenty-fourth vice president, was running for U.S. Senate in 1881, an emissary from a bloc of New York legislators approached his business partner to propose swinging a dozen votes his way in exchange for a large cash payment. Morton declined after some deliberation, or he was outbid (it remains unclear).16 His successful rival, Thomas C. Platt, went on to the U.S. Senate and later to lead both the state party and the U.S. Express Company. Most gilded election contests were not equally brazen auctions, of course, although the practice of “treating” voters with small symbolic payments was widespread.17 Still, Morton’s

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bartering points to a larger market tendency at work that subsumed political action. Struggles over political items of value shaped how individuals competed for and won office, which internal party factions guided policy, who rewarded allies, and whether the interests of constituents were served, ignored, or provoked. While the period was characterized by extreme polarization in congressional voting, party rhetoric, and sectional passions, we should not lose sight of defining characteristics that made the Gilded Age a common experience.18 The practices that historical actors employed to accrue political power and wield it were strikingly similar. The business of politics made peers of rivals, and separated professionals from amateurs. Democracy, after all, is not just casting a vote, some building where deliberation takes place, or a notion. It is what people say and do to mold the collective future. Democracy “is” as democracy “does,” which is why governing looked so different in the early republic as opposed to the Gilded Age or today. In this way, as a series of actions within the party marketplace, electoral capitalism imprinted upon citizens’ imagination about how officeholders served the public and themselves.

WHY ELECTORAL CAPITALISM Electoral capitalism is a category of entrepreneurship in which the capture of public office and the accumulation of private wealth are mutually reinforcing endeavors. We typically think of capitalism as the process by which money begets greater wealth within an economic sphere of employers, workers, commodities, and markets. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that in modern society, capital takes on many forms, including a political one. Each type of capital exists within semiautonomous “fields” organized by differing rules and histories, and populated by embodied agents who each have a capacity for structured improvisation. Within political institutions, capital moves through a “property-based electoral logic,” the realm of competition for the legitimate right to speak and act for the state.19 Professionals who master the “dull and toilsome work of election politics” use that expertise as the productive means to accumulate rewards.20 Think of this surplus as the political increment. Under consideration, then, is capitalism of a particular species. The formula for electoral capitalism is when politics begets wealth. The main actors who accumulate and invest are ambitious officeholders. Their

Introduction

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basic inputs are levers of influence within a polity, whatever those may be depending on regime type, institutional matrix, historical legacy, and popular attitudes. Compared with peers, the United States has an entrepreneurial political system. Jens Borchert and Gary Copeland note this feature is emblematic in two main ways; first, with multiple pathways in a federal system for individual careers; and second, by the creative methods necessary to secure political resources.21 Adam Sheingate has cautioned against comparisons between economic and political entrepreneurship because it may not be clear what represents the search for monopoly “profits” in the political context.22 But any such qualification itself must be historically bounded. The Gilded Age was a time, by all accounts, when moneymaking was at the forefront of officeholders’ priorities. We can empirically identify those political profits by triangulating archival materials, government and corporate records, newspapers, and other primary sources, and by placing them in proper context. The starting point is to examine governing institutions as a source of investment for an array of projects both political and personal. To capture surplus, officeholders’ most common points of entry are to access the people’s capital, or taxpayer money readily available; the alienated state, or debt financing; and crucially, the means to dictate the conditions of entry into markets. When politics create markets anew, as with transcontinental railroads or land enclosures, a feverish gold rush sweeps over legislatures, executive agencies, and lower offices. Bourdieu’s theory provides a starting point for understanding why. Officeholders are more than disinterested intermediaries who operate at the locus of governing. We see this time and again, from Fernando Wood’s land speculation and Tammany Hall’s financial sector, to Republican governor Alonzo Cornell’s “blind pool” and Thomas Murphy’s litany of uncollected debts from his tenure as collector of the port of New York. As Gilded Age officeholders formed pro-growth coalitions within parties, they sought ways to tap into and manage pools of capital. Nineteenth-century American governance predominately mobilized private actors to implement public policy “out of sight.” Authorities did not directly manage public enterprises and recoup monopoly profits back into the high modern statism of the later twentieth century. Instead, the legacy of policy voluntarism relied on local notables, civic associations, and private businesses, invariably routing economic windfalls into private pockets.23 Officeholding accumulation was not without controversy—especially

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Introduction

when government decisions visibly benefited incumbents or family members. Nevertheless, reliance on private actors with electoral connections allowed for innovations in party-run business and the expansion of patronage armies into new realms. Thus, it is no coincidence that monopoly consolidated simultaneously in economic and party organization after the Civil War. The first companies of truly national scope, in railroads, telegraphs, and express services, operated with an ambiguous public-private legality. The gilded officeholding class joined the corporate strata because competition for capital took place within political institutions. Fundamentals of coalition building required it.24 The circulation of capitalist value through political institutions will surely look and feel different from place to place and time to time. So, too, will its critics who are forced to respond. In the case of the Gilded Age, those who fell loosely under the banner of reform spanned from business competitors and trade unionists to middle-class professionals and party bolters. Each adversary cultivated unique rationales why party regulars were in violation of “good government” principles. The reaction of grassroots reformers is particularly instructive. Despite disagreements among Greenbackers, the Knights of Labor, and others, each group of dissenters attempted to sever the ties between party regulars and the accumulation of private property. We can learn a great deal about the officeholding species of capitalism by examining the failed campaigns against it.

BIRTH OF ELECTORAL CAPITALISM Expansion of the franchise in the United States precipitated the circulation of electoral capital by expanding popular control over public resources. The comparatively early advent of mass suffrage was an unprecedented experiment in representative institutions and political organization. Leading gentlemen during the revolution and early republic viewed direct popular participation in public life as impractical and dangerous to disinterested lawmaking and the protection of property rights.25 Formal expression of electoral choice was thus initially limited to wealthy merchants and planters through legal obstacles such as property and taxpayer qualifications. Nevertheless, governing elites failed to stem the expansion of the political content of “the people.”26 From the 1790s to the 1850s, as the country grew by leaps and bounds in territory and population, there was a massive democratization in the right to vote for white men regardless of wealth.27 The entrance

Introduction

9

of new publics into the electorate—yeoman farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, and eventually propertyless white men—transformed the practice and discourse of political competition. With generalized suffrage, the rigors of selfgovernment meant a vigorous quest for mass votes along with wider opportunities for public office. James Bryce noted the impact on professionalization: “people do not say ‘politicians’ but ‘the politicians,’ because the word indicates a certain class with defined characteristics.”28 In practice, democratization of elected and appointed public office in America was made possible through its commodification. Venal office was a feature of the early modern European state that signaled the transition away from feudalism, both as a mechanism of state financing and by facilitating ascent of the bourgeoisie into administrative posts.29 In the United States, democracy transformed this long-standing tradition by replacing control of kings over the allocation and sale of office with “the people” mediated by electoral institutions and party apparatuses. From the 1830s through its apogee by the turn of the century, anti-monopoly movements, party functionaries, voters, and opportunists all demanded, each for their own purposes, the redistribution of state-owned property through the spoils system. Networks of Andrew Jackson supporters organized the Democrats, the country’s first mass party, with resources acquired from preexisting executive departments.30 In his 1829 State of the Union address, President Jackson announced rotation in office as a reform to dislodge the influence of a privileged few. “Office is considered a species of property” available only to an elite, he proclaimed, and should instead be turned over to the “service of the people.”31 Government jobs were transferred en masse to the victorious party, who filled those spots with partisans that tithed a portion of their salary back into party coffers, usually anywhere from 2 to 10 percent.32 Federal, state, and local offices were bought and sold by operatives within party markets. Choosing how to appropriately distribute electoral rewards consumed a huge amount of time and energy because the fate of party unity relied upon it.33 In assigning spoils, party leaders considered factors such as personal loyalty and party service. However, those in position to appoint or nominate party and government posts were utterly besieged by entreaties for consideration. Among the “immense thrusting crowd of American political aspirants,” as Alexis de Tocqueville described office seekers, a party leader or dominant party faction was well situated to hold bidding wars.34 “The actual sum of money to be paid for an office is

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Introduction

as publicly named . . . as the price of dry goods are named between a dealer . . . and his customers,” one newspaper editor recounted while traveling through the nation’s capital in the 1850s.35 Fernando Wood was notorious for selling the same nomination to more than one prospector.36 Democratic commerce therefore emerged in relation to universal white manhood suffrage, party bureaucratization, and the quest for spoils. Whereas the revolutionary generation of gentlemen politicians possessed reputation and property before they began public careers, the Jacksonian Democrats and their Whig and later Republican rivals were often men of modest means. Many stepped into office with little or no independent fortune and frequently had no more at their disposal than a combination of their ambition and the productive value of an elected or appointed office. Office seekers routinely went into debt purchasing party nominations, which incentivized them to innovate methods of electoral wealth accumulation once in office.37 Despite frequent turnover and brief tenure, social climbers coveted elected and appointed office due to its capacity for generating wealth. By midcentury, mass party coordination effectively created capital, a political surplus, to be invested and used for the purpose of gaining political advantage—winning elections, party-building, and rewarding constituents and allies. Public opinion harbored a “measureless wealth of latent power,” observed Walt Whitman.38 Nearly the entire eligible electorate was mobilized between the 1840s and 1870s, with voter turnout as high as 70 and 80 percent. In the latter part of this period, simultaneous with the Tweed Ring, Walter Dean Burnham estimates turnout in New York City at 90 percent.39 For parties, failing to win enough support meant losing the ability to auction public offices. For political entrepreneurs, it meant missing out on profitable ventures. In this context, with material stakes high and electoral competition fierce, popularity gained value as political currency. Candidates developed populist appeals based on social class, cultural boundaries, and civic pride. Parties offered policy commitments to attract and mobilize their political bases. As social historians have long noted of political mobilization in this period, theatricality and performativity during campaign season were central components of popular entertainment. The basis of political management by “exciting the people,” in the words of Martin Van Buren, was the touchstone for trading and exchanging a wide range of things of political worth: suffrages, elected or appointed office, favors, contracts, and government approval or public subvention.40

Introduction

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New York in the Gilded Age was fertile ground for entrepreneurs to press the boundaries of democratic officeholding. Experiments were possible because the very nature of property ownership was in legal and cultural flux. During this period, human slavery was abolished, but corporations gained constitutional rights as people.41 Risk takers thrived by working the nether regions of the Yankee Leviathan’s embrace of capacious public action to preserve the Union. Political geography also mattered. New York was highly contested in elections and supplied a disproportionate number of national party leaders due to its weight in the Electoral College.42 Most crucially, the Empire State emerged as a center of the postbellum financial and the corporate order. Social trends like the gilded passion for speculation, for example, found expression within political careers. The desperate search for alternatives to low-wage employment, driven by industrialization, led to the growth of poor relief within the spoils system. Extended party networks become a de facto employer of last resort for the needy among the electoral crowd. If party leaders centralized wealth at the top, it is also important to see how some of that property was redistributed downward to meet popular demands. The explosion of the market for patronage, one of the Gilded Age’s defining features, is often treated as an oddity. Petty spoils took place within a larger context of party accumulation. Gilded political practices, in turn, found their way into now-classic studies of modern democracy. The quizzical forms of popular democracy that manifested in New York captivated turn-of-the-century European social scientists. Many were writing comparative studies as implicit critiques of home countries and often—wrongly—extended local histories into generalizations about the nature of mass politics. By relying so heavily on elite reformers for personal advice and source material, early scholars downplayed or missed the business side of gilded party organizations. Instead, the reform legacy bequeathed social science with a disdain for the spoils system, which had benefited the politically connected poor. Fault lines of reform battles have thus continued to reverberate into subsequent generations. Social scientists like James Bryce and Max Weber adopted elite analyses without much circumspection about the biases that traveled with them. By contrast, grassroots critics of party regularity saw no lasting remedy without addressing the centralization of property into the hands of a few party leaders.

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Introduction

THE PARTY NOIR Many scholars conflate the vibrancy of political parties with the health of democracy. This would be a mistake. Parties greatly exacerbated the Gilded Age’s crisis of inequality between the rich and poor by fusing party competition to the accumulation of wealth. Parties, of course, are vital for electoral representation, which is why political scientists tend to celebrate them.43 By nominating individuals for office, parties sort voter preferences, structure participation, and provide a vehicle for coordinating on behalf of common goals. Theorists hold up “responsible” parties as the implicit standard, like those from the Gilded Age, which boasted society-encompassing participation and coherent agendas capable of censure at the ballot box.44 The presence of a party system, in which at least two parties compete, allows for a curated style of popular accountability. Yet, the party form casts a long shadow. Under certain historical circumstances, political parties have served the cause of disenfranchisement and rank violence; at other times, they showed the pathway to participatory inclusion and peacemaking.45 Although the political party has potential to serve as a leveling force in society, it rarely does. The default mode blesses those already favored with time, skills, education, self-confidence, and of course, money.46 Truly, any problem in democracy that party helps to create will require party to resolve. But even this reality is distorted by how party action requires a “conspiracy of silence” over central issues of the day to secure consensus.47 Why, then, do we hear little about the dark side of strong party government in American history? We need to confront the Party Noir, my term for the pathological aspects of political parties in American political development. The task is urgent as we approach historic levels of inequality in our own time. For all the purported ability to act responsibly, in political science terms, gilded officeholders had impressive discretion at the top of party hierarchies to flout democratic constraints. Here, we are talking about party leaders, the representatives of representatives. Capital-acquiring leaders were able to engage in politics on their own terms by concentrating authority into party machines. The Wood brothers and William Tweed on the Democratic side, or Roscoe Conkling, Levi Morton, and Thomas Platt among Republicans, were hardly divorced from electoral pressures. Quite the contrary: fierce competition and the imperative to coordinate was what drove organizational innovations. Parties typically centralize

Introduction

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decision-making when internal party consensus is high, as it was in the postbellum years.48 Mastery over the electoral circulation of capital gave leaders the ability to build personal followings, craft policy, and shape favored outcomes, thereby enhancing their autonomy. When it comes to the Gilded Age, at least, whoever says party, says oligarchy. The wealth gap enlarged into a full-blown crisis of inequality, not because the representational capacity of parties was weak, but precisely because they were effective instruments. Oligarchy’s most dramatic expression is found in how New York officeholders joined the nouveau riche—mansions, conspicuous consumption, and all—as constituents were increasingly impoverished. The Gilded Age was a period of rising strikes when wages for laborers fluctuated wildly. Employment was precarious. For many people, the standard of living declined, as Richard White has demonstrated by proxy measures of height and mortality.49 Artisanship and its republican traditions were degraded by industrial rationalization. After the Panic of 1873, misery was widely felt across the bottom of society.50 These conditions radicalized a generation of grassroots reformers. The journalist and editor John Swinton witnessed political leaders call out police to beat starving laborers assembled in Tompkins Square demanding work relief. During the 1880s, John Swinton’s Paper would become a fulcrum of activity in favor of property redistribution and for overturning the stranglehold of party regulars. The paper’s namesake played a key role in organizing Henry George’s 1886 campaign for mayor of New York, the only serious challenge to the gilded party system. The stories we tell ourselves in political science fall short in explaining this manner of democratic crisis. There is simply too little attention given to patterns of mercenary behavior in party development. The prevailing institutionalist view does not engage with the problem directly. However, the scholarship does imply that strong parties should limit behavior like baldfaced greed and self-dealing. If party were placed above any one individual, then the private gain of top leaders would be subservient to the collective good of election victory.51 Scandals alienate voters—or, at the very least, generate uncertainty. By serving as self-defeating arguments for party alternation, they offer easy grist for opponents to exploit arguments about breaches of public trust. We might then reasonably expect centralized parties to curtail members’ behavior to prevent the avoidable fallout of election reversals. Yet, instead of mitigating greed, gilded party organizations moved aggressively to systematize the quest for profits. Why?

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To answer, let us reappraise the oligarchical party, a theoretical tradition otherwise relegated to the “dustbin of history” in political science circles. Bureaucratization places leaders in a position to develop considerable autonomy vis-a`-vis rank-and-file party members or the voting electorate, who enjoy no equivalent special knowledge of rules and procedures or incumbent resources.52 Midcentury mass parties were in constant need of funds to mobilize the electoral crowd. As private entities, they had to pay for ballots, plan the speaker circuit, publish and disseminate campaign tracts, and “treat” loyal voters on election day with cash, cigars, and shots of whiskey.53 Beyond expenses, political parties also had to meet the demand of entrepreneurs for upward social mobility. For much of the nineteenth century, bankers, merchants, landlords, and planters—elites who were already propertied—financed electioneering directly from their pocket. They were among the few in society with resources necessary to underwrite the heavy costs of sustained mobilization.54 So, their priorities set the terms of public debate. The age of mass politics ushered a demographic revolution in officeholding in which lower-middle-class and working-class aspirants began to displace the “gentlemen class” in positions of authority. Officeholders with a popular base wanted something different from their public service than predecessors—direct access to capital. And yet, sophisticated histories characterize gilded officeholders as the instruments of rising industrial elites. Gilded Age political battles are portrayed as the mirror of business conflicts or as following in their wake.55 This is because officeholders who were not independently wealthy would need to go hat-in-hand to find a patron who might champion their career. A notorious example would be in the 1860s, when Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt hired opposing teams of politicos in the fight over control of the Erie Railroad. Boss Tweed worked for them both, at different times. Or, on the Republican side, how Roscoe Conkling transformed himself into the preferred retainer of Collis P. Huntington’s Central Pacific Railroad in the U.S. Senate. Later working as a private lawyer, Conkling helped to sway the court’s ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that the Fourteenth Amendment originally intended to protect the property of corporate “persons.” What carried the argument was his reputation as a party titan and his testimonial as a former member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction.56 And yet, the “hireling” explanation of political behavior is thin.

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Gilded party leaders did more than service or manage the preexisting interests of business elites. They made themselves into significant investors in party activity. New control over property was the ambitious officeholder’s source of relative autonomy from traditional democratic constraints like interest group demands or voter preferences. In the New York party system, this distinction separated leaders from the officeholding crowd. Those who led parties found ingenious ways to tap the public treasury, directly and indirectly, and ride a wave of public debt associated with quasipublic infrastructure projects and corporations. Leaders speculated in markets, established party-run ventures, and expanded tax collection (“assessments”) from low-level appointees in the spoils system. Those who rose high in parties rendered themselves materially “interested” by creating market opportunities anew or by shifting established businesses in new directions. Max Weber famously drew a link between the routinization of income and the consolidation of politics as a vocation.57 His attention was narrowly focused on the growth of officeholders’ salaries, which Weber noted allowed them the time to monopolize political expertise. Public salaries did increase during the Gilded Age, with periodic voter complaints about “salary grabs.”58 But profits from electoral capitalism coordinated by party leaders far outpaced the relatively modest streams of official income. The party leader’s accumulation of capital was the visible hand guiding the period’s “triumph of organizational politics.”59 The dynamism of gilded parties lay in how they tapped directly into core functions of the American state to produce a surplus that could be widely shared. Electoral capitalism thrived by becoming indispensable, through electoral conquest, to the pursuit of public purposes. Becoming co-investors, officeholders helped to build railroads, conduct foreign policy, pay for wars, and shape national markets by facilitating commerce and communication across regions. When the Republican Party implemented agendas like westward expansion or sound money, or when Democrats promoted urban development or mass transit, they did so in ways that favored allies by generating organizational funds and personal windfalls. This fusion of private property with state functions through mass party organization is what made gilded experiments analytically distinct. There have always been a select few individuals who profited from holding office. Only during the Gilded Age, however, did accumulation and dispossession became the common experience of everyone from the party boss and the disgruntled reformer, to bewildered citizens like Michael H. Cashman.

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Introduction

PROPERTY AND ALLIANCES Scholars disagree about party formation and what makes coalitions “sticky” over the long term. The reigning perspective, pioneered by John Aldrich, holds that parties are best understood as the creation of ambitious office seekers in their strategic quest for higher office, more power, and greater prestige.60 Parties exist or adapt insofar as officeholders have use of them. By contrast, an alternative approach by the coauthors of The Party Decides contends that “policy demanders” are the primary force aggregating party coalitions.61 According to the party-centric view, competition between organized groups is what structures the options available to officeholders. Both sides agree that party formation is a game of coordination. The divide falls where these theories stand on the age-old question of human agency versus social structure. The officeholder or the interest group: which is the chicken, and which is the egg? The debate is frustratingly circular.62 Historically, the two perspectives were not mutually exclusive. Gilded party leaders constructed governing coalitions by uniting over electoral victory and the mutual accumulation of wealth. Property was the very glue reconciling the rough edges of individuals and organized interests together into effective collective action. Coalition building is risky because political actors operate with limited information amid uncertainty. Party organization, at the individual level, involves personal alliances forged among jealous rivals. Problems of deceit or genuine misunderstanding are frequently layered atop legitimate personal and policy differences, part of myriad contingencies arising from human behavior.63 Meanwhile, organized groups vie for influence within big-tent party structures as they pursue diverse and even contradictory agendas. In nineteenth-century parties, disagreements over the makeup of party tickets and control over committees and caucuses unfolded amid open-ended factional conflict.64 It was relatively easy for dissidents to bolt and promote competing tickets before Progressive Era state laws restricted ballot access.65 The pressure of ceaseless election cycles threatened to recalibrate the balance of power to reflect shifting real-world circumstances. Faced with these organizational dilemmas, entrepreneurs discovered that electoral capitalism had practical partisan advantages. Going into business with each other and striving to make party allies not only powerful, but also rich, sought to enjoin political and economic fates over the long term. Pro-growth coalitions of diverse interests form precisely because

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17

positive-sum benefits may be widely distributed when the economic pie is expanding.66 On the other hand, winner-take-all elections create fixed tensions between victors and the losers who must by definition be excluded. In post–Civil War New York, groundswells from below pressed party leaders to address poverty. Parties did respond, not through universalistic social policy, but rather in ways that enhanced their own power. The patronage system expanded rapidly in New York to include those politically connected poor who found themselves at the bottom of the labor market with few alternatives.67 Political property, high and low, was a tool of party leaders to unite fates, reward friends, and convert enemies.

GILDED NEW YORK New York’s party system during the late nineteenth century offers an opportunity for rich empirical description of electoral capitalism. The purpose of a demonstrative case is to identify and explain how a sociopolitical process unfolds within a given context when those relations have not been analyzed systematically.68 Together with original archival work, historical narrative has the potential to challenge staid presumptions. Behavior like political wealth accumulation is obscured by power relations. The method is especially crucial when the goal is to look behind the curtain.69 Daniel Galvin puts it best when he maintains that “research can be theoretical without being causal” by incubating concepts with the potential for deployment in other terrain.70 My claims are born from a nuanced case study that is at once historically and geographically limited. Yet, the theoretical payout lies exactly in that promise of political development to identify patterns, sharpen explanations, and refine concepts. Democracy and capitalism have expanded around the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, suggesting a wider scope of applicability. During the nineteenth-century “Golden Age of Capital,” Democrats and Republicans in New York produced a bumper crop of officeholders who wielded economic capital by merit of their position within party government.71 The state’s antebellum legacy of deploying public resources to spur the banking sector, canal building, and railroads meant that officeholding entrepreneurs already knew how to secure capital through political institutions.72 At midcentury, mass politics required bulkier coalitions with more internal contradictions to balance questions about political incorporation, along with struggles over collective consumption of transportation

18

Introduction

and housing. New York’s imperial relationship with the American West and the country’s rise to economic dominance in the world system magnified the scope and scale of the stakes. Disunion also inadvertently accelerated the development of electoral capitalism. The Republican Party, victorious in the Civil War, was the wizard that conjured the modern administrative state.73 To win the bloody conflict and consolidate postwar gains, Republicans first interpellated and then aligned themselves with nationally backed investors dependent upon “sound money” principles.74 A similar tendency was at work locally, where Democrats inflated debt with municipal paper to buttress a financial sector run directly by Tammany Hall. New York’s party system became an early locus of nationalization in party activity, along with Wall Street’s position as the “central nervous system” of markets “licking up the cream of commerce and finance.”75 Party bankers like August Belmont, a Democrat, and Levi P. Morton, a Republican, raised huge sums on behalf of their respective parties to spend on battleground states in presidential cycles and midterm elections.76 Only within this context can we understand how party regulars transformed officeholding from an electoral end in itself into a mode of capital accumulation. Late nineteenth-century party leaders experimented with a wide array of practices such as real estate speculation, establishing media properties, chartering railroads, forming legal partnerships, and selling lottery tickets. Above all, political allies and the coalitions they formed were starved for credit. Officeholding entrepreneurs found ways to meet this demand by coordinating collective action in ways that innovated party organization. The methods that party leaders employed to discreetly secure access to credit foreground how they pursued independence within the political system. Roscoe Conkling did not publicly campaign for the U.S. Senate on propelling Morton, Bliss and Company to the heights of international finance so that it would double as the bank for himself and the country’s Republican elite. Instead, Conkling defended the marketing of government bonds—performed by close allies—and “sound money” policies supported by Wall Street. Similarly, poor immigrant backers of Tammany Hall could hardly have anticipated that the Tweed Ring would create a string of savings banks from its election triumphs after 1867. Before collapse in 1871, those banks supplied Boss Tweed with a source of working capital for his governing agenda.

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Not all officeholders doubled as real estate developers, like Fernando Wood. Not every U.S. senator held corporate office, like Thomas Platt, who used a perch at the U.S. Express Company to award himself and his sons, Frank and Edward, no-interest loans. However, the political figures who developed these practices were the ones who gravitated to the heights of the party system. We can hardly trace any clear “will of the people” propelling this phenomenon. Did the voters of New York send Alonzo Cornell, son of the university founder, to Albany as governor in 1880 so that he could expand his personal fortune? There is no evidence to suggest they did. Electoral capitalism, as a process, nevertheless became so integral to gaining and keeping power that it was a normal part of turning the wheels of party government.

THE CORRUPTION IMBROGLIO Let me be clear: this book is not an examination of corruption, strictly speaking. To this day, historians characterize the Gilded Age by the rapacity of officeholders and the degraded nature of public virtue. The “jobbery, pelf, and thievery” of Grantism, Tweedism, or the Great Barbecue are never far from descriptions of the period.77 The focus is highly problematic. Corruption is a populist category, not an analytical one, and is defined by a historical moment’s prevailing politics of legality and morality. Everyone has a sense that politics is “corrupt.” Few agree on what that means in practice. That includes scholars, too. The dilemma becomes clear as the vocabulary of corruption leaves us flailing to understand developments today. The forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, owns a luxury hotel operating on a government lease down the street from the White House. Along with the Trump International Hotel, a hotspot for lobbyists both foreign and domestic, the president and his family own and manage a diversified global business portfolio that intersects with public policy at every turn. Today’s Republican Party now spends heavily at Trump properties around the country, as do affinity groups and donors.78 Is this corrupt? Critics of the president must prove these profits fit into a legal definition of bribery where an official act is demonstrably traded in exchange for something of value. The Roberts Supreme Court has so narrowed the legal interpretation of corruption that it overturned the conviction of former Virginia governor

20

Introduction

Robert McDonnell, a Republican, and led to the mistrial of Robert Menendez, a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey. Under the current standard it would be easier for Trump International Hotel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the president to be convicted. Thus, most challenges to President Trump’s business practices have retreated to a focus on “conflicts of interest,” largely upheld by self-regulation, disclosure rules, and minor sanctions like fines. Trump’s political behavior is better understood as a contemporary expression of electoral capitalism. Patrimonial wealth accumulation is his how he looks to solve classic problems of collective action.79 By contrast, most lay people and even scholars deploy an overly capacious view of corruption. The World Bank definition is “the abuse of public office for private gain.”80 Historically minded legal thinkers have located similar intentions during the early American national period. Zephyr Teachout, for instance, documents extensively how anticorruption measures written into the constitution sought to prevent abuse. The target was not simply individual acts of venality but also “dependence corruption,” according to Lawrence Lessig, which meant systematic reliance of officeholders upon one person or group.81 Yet, the civic republican notion of undermining the public interest is vague in the extreme. It could arguably envelop not only a traffic cop taking bribes but a congressperson walking through the revolving door to work for a company whose policy interests he or she oversaw in committee. Another weakness is how the World Bank’s definition of corruption is rooted within ideological notions of market purity. Public officeholders are inherently suspected of “rent seeking,” or preying on business assumed to otherwise have flourished without state intervention. To be sure, there are well-documented cases when officeholders acted like the “roving bandits” of Charles Tilly’s famous essay on state building.82 Corporate titans referred to venal legislators as “strikers.” Whereas common laborers were increasingly prone to stop work for higher wages, legislators were known to hold up legislation for payola. Central Pacific Railroad president Collis P. Huntington once complained that strikers were “very thick and hungry in Washington” and “seemed to be holding high carnival everywhere.”83 But neoclassical theory is flawed because neither electoral politics nor political institutions are alien to markets. Quite the opposite: markets are socially embedded and politically constructed. Rent seeking’s one-dimensionality fails to explain the full complexity of electoral wealth accumulation during

Introduction

21

the Gilded Age or today. Theories of rent seeking cannot tell us how Boss Tweed made himself into a banker in the 1870s or how Paul Manafort, a superlobbyist, founded a private equity firm through party connections in the early 2000s.84 Instead, we need to come to terms with how officeholders become market makers in their own right.85 Those who engaged in electoral capitalism did not perceive themselves as thieves, parasites, or rent seekers but rather as clear-eyed businessmen raising capital for worthy endeavors. One hagiographic biographer said, without irony, of Fernando Wood: “Instead of waiting, like [Charles Dickens’s] Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up, he himself turned something up; no matter what, he thought, so it were work, were industry, were resolute self-maintenance.”86 Benjamin Wood, his brother, ran a lottery business with the same methods and capital that he used to manage Mozart Hall, the family’s political faction. The so-called easy boss of the Republican Party, Thomas C. Platt, would not even consider an office unless he saw a way to extract more profit from it than his original investment.87 Platt’s approach was common from midcentury until the 1880s. Officeholding entrepreneurs considered themselves squarely within mainstream norms of individual pluck and self-help, even if the public at large was more ambivalent. Relying on the corruption approach is also deeply problematic because it normalizes behavior or condemns the abnormal before critical analysis has taken place. Today, Xi Jinping of China and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines purge rivals under guise of “anticorruption” campaigns. In American political development, the charge appears to mean little more than accusations of improper behavior. Eric Foner and Alexander Keyssar convincingly argue that postbellum charges of corruption were thinly veiled criticisms that the “wrong” kinds of people—former slaves in the Reconstructed South or immigrants in the North—were suddenly in charge of government priorities.88 Horace Greeley was blunt in his testimony to a Senate committee investigating corruption at the port of New York: “individuals who have no right to make money are making large sums.” With Greeley, there was little subtlety. These unworthies happened to be political rivals who had rejected his own bid for the port’s lucrative general-order business, valued by one old-line merchant as “cheap at $200,000 in gold.”89 Neither can we rely on legal standards. What constitutes the line of propriety is arbitrary (sometimes comically so) and ever shifting. James Terwilliger was a Whig and then Republican clerk in both chambers of the

22

Introduction

state legislature for nearly twenty years. In early 1872, scandal erupted over the 20 percent commission he received on official Senate printing jobs distributed to political friends, with the price of contracts greatly inflated. Terwilliger was genuinely surprised by the uproar over a “gratuity,” based upon “a custom of many years” that was standard practice in the printing business. He denied wrongdoing at his resignation, declaring, “I perceive that a public feeling, now unusually sensitive, takes a view of my action different from what I have taken. I propose to recognize and obey that public sentiment . . . with the expression of sincere regret that I have in any way offended it.”90 What changed? For months, the Democratic Party’s Tweed Ring had come under assault for how it governed New York City. Tammany Hall’s own practice of taking large percentages from government contracts was widely vilified as corruption incarnate, setting a new standard of public virtue. Over the course of a career, officeholders routinely gather multiple sources of income and wealth: legal, illegal, or ambiguously in between. During the Cre´dit Mobilier scandal, Roscoe Conkling avoided investigation and expulsion from the U.S. Senate by accepting legal fees from railroads rather than stock.91 Who is tried and convicted is inherently a political process. There is no better example than Boss Tweed. None of the dozens of his Republican collaborators found themselves in comparable legal jeopardy; Tweed essentially received a de facto death sentence by miserable prison conditions while peers continued to govern. The labor reformer John Swinton was utterly convinced that charlatans ran Tammany Hall. He nevertheless doubted whether polities without mass suffrage—in Europe, for instance—were governed more wisely.92 Ultimately, charges of corruption tell us more about the historical balance of power and the outcomes of political struggles than about whether a political actor has engaged in self-aggrandizement, why he or she did so, and how the feat was accomplished.93 Gilded contemporaries nevertheless viewed the gilded party as an instrument of upward social mobility. Plainly, it was. Virtually destitute until the 1850s—failing as a potato farmer, and at one point, pawning his watch to buy a Christmas present—Ulysses S. Grant was welcomed into a life of property by the war.94 A political career kept him there for a time, finally realizing his long ambition “to be entirely above the frowns of the world, pecuniarily.”95 After his presidency, Grant worked party networks in an aspiration to become a railroad baron and financier. Plying allies for

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loans and business opportunities, he promoted grandiose plans, including Mexican railroads and a Nicaraguan canal that failed spectacularly, along with his son’s investment firm.96 Grant’s remarkable transformation from pauper to statesman (and back to pauper) was emblematic of an entire generation of Stalwart officeholders in New York, men whom he treated with and elevated through appointments. The ex-president was swindled out of his fortune by a con man, Ferdinand Ward, who built a pyramid scheme based on imaginary investments in fictitious government contracts—clandestinely secured, it was rumored—by Stalwarts and HalfBreeds.97 Neither was the yearning for social mobility limited to party leaders. Internal party markets for spoils were transformed by basic needs. Lowlevel appointment to a patronage position with a modest salary often signaled a meaningful social promotion or the rescue of family finances. Political property from top to bottom was possible because the gilded party was an organizational locus for the circulation of capital.

PLAN OF THE BOOK Each chapter opens with a vignette. These narratives are structured around particular historical moments to prime the reader for the empirical evidence and analysis that will be systematically unpacked. Chapters that follow explore how electoral capitalism organized the party system in Gilded Age New York. With fresh interpretations, I drive well-trodden subjects like party-business relations, factionalism, the spoils system, and political reform onto new ground. Chapter 1 describes how the Tweed Ring spawned a vibrant financial sector that was integral to its brief success. William “Boss” Tweed and his allies employed banks controlled or co-managed by Tammany politicians to embezzle funds, build political alliances, and invest in a wide array of business ventures. The capital of these savings and commercial banks—city money, deposits from Catholic charities, and the savings of immigrant laborers—was accumulated through political channels. During their operation between 1867 and 1871, politician-bankers engaged in a mix of patronage deals and profit-driven financial speculation. In effect, Tammany banks were ground zero for the Ring’s conversion of political hegemony into a windfall of economic capital that fueled party activities and buoyed personal fortunes. Importantly, the anti-Ring mobilization by upper-class reformers was more than a revolt of wealthy taxpayers concerned with abstract goals of good government or rescuing city credit; it

24

Introduction

was also a reaction by old-line bankers in direct competition with Tammany upstarts. A dramatic bank run catalyzed by elite reformers in November 1871 drove them into bankruptcy, bringing this novel experiment in electoral capitalism to an end. Chapter 2 details how Stalwart Republicans operated their party organization as a business. Led first by Roscoe Conkling and then by Thomas Platt, the Stalwarts were hegemonic in statewide public office for a decade after the fall of the Tweed Ring. Historians have long noted that Conkling’s control of the state Republican Party was heavily reliant on control over federal patronage at the customhouse in the port of New York. Just as important was the faction’s deep links to Morton, Bliss and Company, a financial brokerage firm, and the U.S. Express Company. The Stalwarts who ran these businesses used them for salaries, to extend credit to themselves and allies, and to make available new sources of sinecures. Corporate officeholding, especially, became a valuable institutional tool for navigating disputes between jealous rivals. As the firms extended the scope of their business, factional influence also grew in national party circles and presidential administrations. Chapter 3 presents a bottom-up perspective on electoral capitalism with a social history of the spoils system. Part of the allure of party machines was how they democratized petty officeholding, spreading prestige and political property among the electoral crowd. Patronage networks, of course, had guided appointments since the 1830s. By the Gilded Age, spoils evolved into a de facto system of partisan social insurance. Laborers, immigrants, widows, the aged, Union veterans, and the poor all pressured the political system to make jobs readily available. In keeping with the Jacksonian tradition, partisan loyalty was the defining criteria for placement. However, party leaders seized upon their powers of appointment to help constituents escape low wages and downturns in the business cycle. The imperatives of coalition building drove both parties to shield a politically connected minority of supporters from the vicissitudes of industrialization. Electoral capitalism had the effect of centralizing power in the hands of party leaders. Chapter 4 considers the sharp public reaction to that consolidation of power and wealth by drawing special attention to critics of regular party organization. Scholars of gilded political reform almost exclusively cover elites and tend to overemphasize the importance of civil service measures. Yet, poor people were reformers, too. Reform from below presented a host of alternatives to elite proposals that have largely gone unnoticed.

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This chapter focuses on the distinctive ideas and methods of grassroots actors. Social movements during the “Great Upheaval” of the 1880s had the effect of crystalizing long-standing popular grievances about the party system. Ranging from the fanciful to the practical, grassroots alternatives shared common features. They all flew under the banner of anti-monopoly. Proposals were foremost concerned with improving living conditions. And grassroots actors sought to fundamentally decommodify politics by restructuring the link between public office and property accumulation. Most of these efforts failed to gain support or be implemented. Nevertheless, critics from the margins help us to better understand the fusion of capital and public power that characterized the gilded party system. The book concludes with a discussion of why we should pay closer attention to the diverse experiences of officeholding in American political development. During the Gilded Age, individuals high and low brought their own ideas about what it meant to serve the public and themselves. Public office, a species of property, was mobilized through the party system as an organizing feature of electoral competition. Consequently, political wealth became highly concentrated in the hands of a few party leaders, a trend that elicited protests from outsiders. Today we face similar questions about extreme inequality, popular accountability, and the role of money in democracy. A new wave of fortunes is sweeping the political class, raising cackles and shaking the bonds of trust between citizens and representatives. Our contemporary debates take place within a different historical context. Still, a clear-eyed understanding of the electoral species of capitalism, including its patterns and legacy, is crucial to appreciating the recurring challenges that confront democracy in America.



The Tammany Bank Run of 1871

A mob of hostile depositors gathered in the rain outside of the Guardian Bank in the Five Points, and the Bowling Green Bank, near Wall Street. Crowds of Irish and German immigrants were clamoring at the shuttered iron gates to withdraw their meager savings. According to the New York Herald, when it became clear the banks would not open for daily business, a commotion erupted in the streets.1 Wet and angry, the locked-out depositors cursed the names of prominent bank officials, including the Guardian’s president, William M. Tweed, who was concurrently the local state senator, New York City’s commissioner of public works, chairman of the county Democratic Party, and Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall. Despite the hopelessness of the situation, many people lingered outside the gates for news. Reporters described a weeping elderly man, peddlers anxious about paying debts, and parents worried about their children’s savings accounts.2 More ominous was a bulwark of police on standby to combat public disorder.3 After all, Henry “Hank” Smith, chairman of the Police Commission, was also vice president of the Guardian and president at the Bowling Green. It was Monday, November 20, 1871. The bank run was sparked by a slow-moving change in municipal government. Richard Connolly, the Tammany-backed comptroller and Tweed ally, had abruptly resigned in disgrace one month earlier and named a reformer, Andrew Green, acting deputy with full powers over the Department of Finance. Mayor Oakey Hall, another Tweed confidant, initially refused to accept Green’s legitimacy and to ratify the appointment of a political opponent. Yet, faced with an escalating crisis over allegations of pervasive official misconduct, on Saturday, November 18, Mayor Hall at last conceded to the reform movement.4

28

The Tammany Bank Run of 1871

Figure 2. A picturesque view of Bowling Green Bank. Jordan L. Bailey, Savings Account Book. Author’s collection.

In one of his first official acts, deputy comptroller Green ordered the transfer of $56,000 of public money away from the Guardian Bank.5 When the Guardian was unable to honor the bank draft, “rumors spread like wildfire” about the solvency of financial institutions affiliated with Tammany Hall, the dominant faction of New York City’s Democratic Party.6 In the panic, even old-line savings banks faced questions. To calm depositors and avert a run, on Sunday, November 19, officials at the National Savings Institution placed a sign on its door reassuring clients that all claims would be faithfully met when open for business the following day. The bold gesture failed to delay a swift downfall; the bank could not meet the draft of $847 by a depositor named Charles Hoff.7 When a Herald reporter sought comment from Guardian Bank officials, several of whom sat on both boards, he found its “doors bespattered with Five Points filth, and with the appearance of not having been opened in a century.”8

The Tammany Bank Run of 1871

No fewer than four savings banks with Tammany political connections failed: the Guardian, Bowling Green, National Savings, and Yorkville. For weeks, rumors of insolvency shook a series of commercial banks, the Tenth National, Ocean, Broadway, Central National, Eighth National, and Union-Square.9 Members of the “Tweed Ring” were already under investigation for their role overseeing city finances. These very same officials, along with many of their contractors and business associates, now faced multiplying lawsuits from depositors targeting banks placed in receivership by the courts.10

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chapter 1

Tammany Hall’s Lost Financial Sector

THE TAMMANY BANKS Electoral capitalism flourished during the Gilded Age as party entrepreneurs experimented with techniques to both win office and accumulate capital. In this vein, the rapid growth and sudden disappearance of Tammany Hall’s financial sector is one of the most intriguing yet unexplored facets of the “Tweed Ring.” The Ring was a small circle of officeholders who governed New York City between 1866 and 1871; they were caught embezzling millions of dollars from state and local government through the Tammany political machine.1 Control over a network of banks, savings and commercial, was integral to William Tweed’s sweeping ambition to reshape the postbellum political landscape by bringing to power a coalition that included laborers, immigrants, and Catholics. Wearing many hats that crosscut elected and appointed positions, party factions, and social clubs, a number of influential Tammany figures transformed themselves into bank officers. Crucially, these banks opened access to new sources of capital— lines of credit conjured from electoral conquest—that went into financing ventures large and small, local and countrywide. These banking institutions were the linchpin of Ring members’ vast but fleeting personal fortunes.2 Although Tammany banks existed only a few years, officeholders from both parties used them to route cash and checks through “special” accounts, finance personal loans and mortgages, purchase municipal debt, and speculate in real estate, stocks, and bonds. Banks were not afterthoughts of the Tweed Ring’s program, as previous scholars have treated them. Nor were they designed as swindles; at least, they were not intended to be. Working-class immigrants were invited to embrace bourgeois values of thrift by opening savings accounts. Tammany bankers marketed their services to credit-hungry neighborhoods, changed small bills for the poor,

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31

and provided an ostensibly safe place to store hard-earned wages while reaping interest. Most strikingly, Tammany leaders and their families held significant personal accounts in these institutions, including the entire Ring—William “Boss” Tweed himself, Oakey Hall, Richard Connolly, and Peter Sweeny—as well as the wider clique of building contractors, business associates, and patronage appointees.3 “The petty politicians of the Sixth, Seventh, Fourteenth, and Fourth Wards are howling with indignation,” remarked the New York World, as the November 20 bank run left them high and dry along with common depositors.4 To say Tammany political figures were flush with cash during their heyday under Tweed would be an understatement—between $6 million and $30 million was pilfered from taxpayers. Popular mythology offers a number of tantalizing hypotheses about where New York’s money disappeared, from Spanish banks after Tweed’s failed 1875 escape to tales of buried treasure.5 Frank Bellew immortalized the latter theory in his caricature of Tweed as “The Tammany Kidd concealing his treasures” (Figure 3). The more plausible albeit less sensational explanation is that the money circulated through New York’s own banks, including those controlled by Tammany Hall.6 Established banking houses doing business with the city did not ask embarrassing questions about the origin of deposits, something that rapacious aldermen and county board officials discovered in the 1850s. Yet, the Ring needed more than the tacit support of venerable bankers with impeccable credentials. William Tweed, Oakey Hall, Richard Connolly, and Peter Sweeny needed allies they could trust completely with active knowledge about the political sources of their newfound wealth. To fill this niche arose a stratum of politician-bankers who oversaw the Ring’s schemes and also participated in them. The Tammany bank run of 1871 dramatizes our lacuna about the transformation of political power into economic capital in American political development. Aside from early struggles over the national bank and the federal government’s role in paying for wars, there are few nineteenthcentury studies in which political authority so starkly deployed public coffers to deliberately interpellate a professional class of partisan financiers. Certainly little scholarship exists outside of national political institutions, where Congress and the Treasury Department set monetary policy or financed armed conflicts such as the Civil War.7 Tammany banks, by contrast, took root locally within a specific historical conjuncture made possible by two main factors: the development of mass parties and New York’s

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Figure 3. The myth of Boss Tweed’s buried treasure. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

privileged place within the national and world economy. Universal white manhood suffrage prompted a bureaucratization of party organization that fueled electoral competition and the quest for spoils. Concurrently at midcentury, merchant capital in New York migrated into the financial sector. Debt-financed Union victory further consolidated Wall Street’s position as the “capital of capital” and fostered a Republican-leaning group of financiers.8 The Tweed Ring’s brief foray into financial services demonstrated that a parallel process was under way on a smaller scale: Tammany officeholders

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33

transformed into bankers by leveraging their position as intermediaries between working-class voters and public treasuries in New York. Close examination of the Tammany banks, including those who ran them and how they worked, reveals that members of the Tweed Ring were ascendant electoral capitalists who appropriated democratic capital—that is to say, capital mobilized through the political system—and put it to work in diverse investments.9 Whereas capitalism is the process by which money begets money, the formula of political capitalism is when politics begets money. In this particular case study, the institutional medium for private wealth accumulation was a network of partisan banks. To foreclose this burgeoning trajectory, anti-Tweed forces led by the Committee of Seventy, composed entirely of established merchants and bankers, vigorously attacked the Ring with every tool at its disposal: taxpayer strikes, capital flight, social pressure, party fusion, and civil and criminal suits. The origins of Tammany banks in the mass party system and their ultimate extinction are thus exemplary of tensions that erupted over sources of wealth and power in postwar American society. Why have the Tammany banks escaped scrutiny, despite all the attention the Tweed Ring has received over the years? Historiography has focused on how bribery, fraud, and embezzlement allowed the Ring to coordinate political authority across New York City’s fragmented Gilded Age social divisions and political institutions. Thus, analysis of the Ring has always begun and ended with the same explanation: corruption.10 The corruption charge was originally advanced by the middle-class press, which celebrated wealth while condemning the chaos of industrial society in terms of moral failure.11 This framing of events also served the aims of anti-Tweed vigilance committees formed by the upper classes that longed to reverse the gains made by the poor under universal white manhood suffrage.12 And while Samuel Tilden’s grand jury and subsequent investigations aggressively pursued the beneficiaries of stolen money, they were careful to avoid shining unwanted attention upon the complicity of powerful financial institutions. To this day, no muckraker, historian, or social scientist has scrutinized the central role of banks in making Tweed’s activities possible. Tammany’s nascent financial sector, chartered in the state legislature and buffeted with politically acquired deposits, allowed Tweed to finance party and business activities on a grand scale. The nineteenth-century spoils system had fueled mass parties in the United States since the Jacksonian era. By the Gilded Age, spoils evolved beyond control over patronage in

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Chapter 1

parks departments and customhouses—the traditional focus of historians and political scientists. Midcentury party brokers had been content to collect assessments on appointees, acting essentially as tax farmers on behalf of the mass party system.13 More risky operators might risk scandal to extract a share from public contracts. In the heady days of economic expansion between 1865 and the depression of 1873, activist pro-growth government agendas catalyzed a breed of conspicuously political businesses. “The golden years of the age of capital,” as Sven Beckert has called them, were a period when enterprising officeholders innovated new techniques to acquire greater resources.14 They did so by offering businessmen access to pools of publicly backed capital by chartering corporations with special rights and privileges.15 The price of influence peddling was no longer just the one-time lobbying fee, but partnership in management and profits. In New York, Tammany Hall was at the forefront of this chartering mania as corporations shed their status from long-term investments in the public interest into objects of private speculation.16 Between 1867 and 1871, banks with new or amended charters became the nerve center of the Tweed Ring, converting popular support, electoral victory, and public office into finance capital. Tammany banks are also an opportunity to explore the colorful cast of secondary characters who participated in the Tweed Ring: Hank Smith, Walter Roche, Reeves Selmes, and Henry Genet. These figures have remained virtually anonymous to historians who have focused attention upon peak political actors. Although he was the central organizer, Tweed depended upon banking allies to perform vital services. Ring leaders were hardly dictators who commanded unthinking allegiances, despite being vilified as such by the popular press. They were instead party operators, entrepreneurs voluntarily cooperating across multiple institutions—including financial ones—for mutual benefit at the polls and on balance sheets. The handful of political allies who ran Tammany banks became newly minted property owners by extending credit, pooling resources, and coordinating investments in real estate, railroads, and newspapers. Banks and the ventures they financed placed propertied elites on corporate boards alongside Ring members, bringing Tweed together with scions like the Astors, newer robber barons such as the Vanderbilts, and staunch Republicans like Levi P. Morton and George Opdyke.17 Tammany politicians from lower wards and the uptown elite rarely caucused within the same party factions.18 But they were tied together as corporate managers on business deals that cemented mutual interest over the accumulation of wealth.

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35

The Tammany bank run of November 1871 shattered this precarious network weaving together political allegiances with debt, credit, and speculation. The panic generated by Andrew Green’s “checkmate moves” against Tweed’s financial infrastructure exposed that its solvency was not based upon the typical cash reserves, deposits, or securities. Tammany banks were bolstered by the flimsiest of political confidence won in the rough-andtumble of mass politics but lost just as easily when turned out of office. Bankruptcy deprived the Tweed Ring of crucial resources at the very moment when its members faced unprecedented attacks. Without access to banks, the circulation of the Ring’s political capital came crashing to a halt.19

THE BOSS’S BANKERS Investigations into the Tweed Ring continued for years after their removal from office. Court battles persisted long after the city’s credit was restored because of the great difficulty proving allegations of fraud and embezzlement. The main reason was the sheer magnitude and complexity of the Ring’s banking practices. The principal point where public funds were diverted was clear enough: “Tweed’s Charter” of 1870 and a new tax levy bill created a Board of Audit that empowered Tweed, Hall, Sweeny, and Connolly to co-authorize new spending. Yet, it was virtually impossible to fully reconstruct where money went and exactly who pocketed it along the way. One of Samuel Tilden’s investigators, Henry Fox Taintor, devoted four and half years of his life to this project. Tellingly, in 1877 he conceded to the city council in testimony that it would be “impossible for me to recite the various tedious, complicated, and laborious operations which have been conducted.” In fact, he explained, “the necessity of the minuteness of the inquiry” demanded that he sometimes visit between thirty and fifty separate banks on a single day to review accounts.20 Amid confusion tracking money, a fundamental reality was lost. New York banks had widely varying relationships to the Ring. On a conceptual level, Tammany’s financial sector had three mutually dependent layers. What distinguished each layer were the level of Tammany influence and the way it functioned within larger Ring operations. The inner layer consisted of savings banks the Ring founded and controlled, the Guardian, Bowling Green, National Savings, and Yorkville. The second layer was composed of the Tenth National, a commercial bank where

36

Chapter 1

Tammany placed large city deposits and co-managed affairs. Finally, there were more established commercial banks that serviced individual Tammany leaders by allowing them to circulate checks and notes drawn from less reputable Tammany-backed institutions. Individual members of the Tweed Ring might sit as directors on banks within this tertiary layer, but as outsiders with the status of glorified clients. Tweed and his allies in the state legislature chartered four savings banks between 1867 and 1869 and propped them up with money from city deposits, Catholic charities, and the earnings of common laborers. The number of savings banks in New York had been strictly limited for most of the nineteenth century. This was due in part to the high degree of faith required of trustees to handle client savings. In theory, state charters were supposed to mandate conservative banking principles and enforce countermeasures between bank officers and trustees to prevent theft, collusion, and selfdealing. This was particularly important for an institution’s solvency because, unlike commercial banks, the only capital reserves lay in people’s deposits. Of course, this feature was the central attraction for capital-poor Tammanyites. However, if deposits were mismanaged—or worse, stolen— then solvency fell upon whatever securities or collateral the bank officers might be able to produce at a moment’s notice. Integrity in bank officers was therefore paramount. The Bowling Green Savings Bank explicitly touted safeguards on advertisements with assurances that no bank officers would have access to funds.21 In the aftermath of bankruptcy, committees of depositors suing Tammany banks found trustworthiness in short supply.22 Another reason for the paucity of savings banks was that the legislature acted as a legal bulwark defending the privilege of a handful of wealthy individuals to speculate on deposits. It was not until the decade after the Civil War that the exclusive hold over savings banks was blown wide open: 133 were newly incorporated, the vast majority at the peak of Tweed’s influence, whereas only eighteen were previously in operation.23 A major factor in the savings bank expansion was the political exigencies of Tammany’s governing coalition, hungry for lucrative sources of patronage. Beyond politics, however, demand for services was riding high. Manhattan’s population grew by leaps and bounds, while wage labor was proliferating, generating new potential clients. The lower classes benefited from a tight postwar labor market, fostered by Tweed’s debt-financed public works. The four years that Tammany savings banks were in operation, the number of depositors rose by

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37

108,988 in New York City—impressive considering the population was roughly one million.24 A manifesto on saving was promoted in all of the Bowling Green Savings Bank’s materials: The moneys deposited in saving banks are the fruits of toil, the evidence of power, of industry, of thrift, of independence. The depositors are not objects of charity, but sturdy contributors to the accumulations to which we so proudly point as evidence of our national growth and prosperity. They are the producers of wealth through labor effectively applied; they consume so much as they require, and the surplus they put aside as an accumulating fund for future investment,—in more extended business, in a home secure from landlord’s caprice or rapacity, or for the day when sickness or misfortune shall compel resource to the surplus earnings of more prosperous years.25 The bank advertisement reads like Tammany’s gospel of wealth. It was a laborist vision of empowerment that, in turns, celebrated individualistic prosperity and condemned landlorism. Clearly, the ability to harness the savings of the laborers offered a tantalizing source of “working” capital for whoever could get their hands on it. Savings bank officials were all Tammany officeholders in the National Savings Institution (chartered 1867), the Guardian Savings Bank (1868), the Bowling Green Savings Bank (1868), and the Yorkville Savings Bank (1869). William Tweed was titular head at the Guardian, and Hank Smith, at the Bowling Green. Several officers overlapped across multiple banks, in particular, Hank Smith and Walter Roche. In practice, the two co-managed the Guardian, the Bowling Green, and National Savings Institution, which were all mutually dependent upon resources acquired by the Tweed Ring. Tweed’s favored building contractor, James Ingersoll, was director at the Guardian and the National Savings. John McBride Davidson, the city’s supplier of safes, was president at the latter, where Tweed’s brother Richard was also director.26 Five Pointers held a majority at the Bowling Green. Along with Roche sat Owen and Timothy Brennan, whose brother Matthew was sheriff. The Yorkville Savings Bank, located uptown in East Harlem, a working-class immigrant neighborhood, was essentially a private bank for Henry Genet, the local state senator. He ran the bank with political allies John McQuade, police justice, and Frank Twomey, city clerk. On the Yorkville’s board of

38

Chapter 1

directors sat John McKeon, a popular Irish attorney, wartime Copperhead, and leader of the McKeon Democrats.27 Hank Smith and Walter Roche ran daily affairs at the Tammany savings banks, with the exception of the Yorkville.28 Smith was a prominent “Tammany Republican,” a faction explored more in Chapter 2, which exchanged patronage with local Democrats. He first met Tweed and Roche on the New York County Board of Supervisors, where they served on the Committee on Banks and Insurance Companies. Together, they evaluated claims for fees and directed public money for deposit.29 Born into a Mohawk Valley farm family in 1821, Smith worked his way through Erie Canal boats, becoming a driver, captain, and then company agent in New York City for the Swift-sure Steamboat and Albany day-lines. A staunch Whig, he was elected alderman in the First Ward from 1854 until it was reorganized into the County Board of Supervisors, when he was elected as a Republican. His organization, the Henry Smith Club, made him a powerful Republican district leader.30 The New York Tribune once noted that he was “extremely popular with the working classes in the lower part of the city.”31 On Tweed’s recommendation, Hank Smith was appointed by the state legislature in 1868 to the Metropolitan Police Commission and was subsequently elected treasurer. In 1870 he became president, despite the fact that Democrats controlled a majority. Control over police authority was the third rail of municipal politics. Native-born propertied elites fiercely resisted local control over the coercive apparatus; invariably that would mean Tammany police, which reverberated into issues of temperance, gambling, crime, and patronage. Most notably, the Republican-designed commission system from the Charter of 1857 stripped Mayor Fernando Wood of power in this arena and precipitated the bloody Police Riots.32 Tweed’s solution was to appoint a Republican with whom he could do business, quite literally. Smith was never a Democrat or member of Tammany Hall. However, he was vice president of Tweed’s Americus Club, located in Greenwich, Connecticut, and also a member of his Blossom Club on Fifth Avenue.33 The very same year Smith was appointed police commissioner, he became president of the Bowling Green Savings Bank and vice president of the Guardian. He was also director at the National Savings Institution and two commercial banks, the Tenth National and Eight National. Hank Smith’s business partner was Walter Roche, an Irish famine refugee from County Carlow. On election day, his “low rum shop” at 19 Mulberry Street served as a Five Points polling place. Much like Tweed and

Tammany Hall’s Lost Financial Sector

39

Figure 4. Hank Smith: Tammany Republican. Harper’s Weekly, March 17, 1872.

others of his generation, Roche cut his teeth as foreman of volunteer firemen. The Roche Guards emerged in the 1850s as a force of shoulder-hitters, or street fighters, allied with the Brennan brothers in neighborhood politics.34 Matthew Brennan was one of the first Irish Catholics to secure a place of influence within the Tammany hierarchy and, in a major achievement, the first Five Pointer elected citywide. Roche himself was elected county supervisor for its inaugural session, from which the Tweed Ring crystalized. Politics served Roche well, although he began to describe himself as a “strict

40

Chapter 1

business man.”35 The same year that Roche became vice president of two banks and director of a third, he was also commissioner of street openings and a noted “speculator ‘on the make’ generally.”36 It was through Roche and the Brennans that Catholic charities were recruited to place large deposits with Tammany savings banks.37 The second layer of Tammany’s financial sector was organized around the Tenth National, a commercial bank. Its connection to Tammany Hall dated from October 1868. Wall Street speculators Jay Gould and Jim Fisk brought William Tweed and Peter Sweeny, his lieutenant, onto the Erie Railroad board of directors to build a political firewall against the legal advances of rival industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt. Gould and Fisk also recruited the Tweed Ring’s support for an audacious plan to corner the market in gold. The adventurers collectively purchased a majority stake in the Tenth National Bank, with the Ring’s share of the investment at $500,000.38 As part of Gould and Fisk’s financial speculation, Sweeny, the city chamberlain, moved millions of dollars of taxpayer money away from the Broadway Bank.39 To make the gold corner possible, by the culmination of Black Friday, September 24, 1869, the Tenth National had certified $25 million in checks with mostly nonexistent collateral.40 The bank survived the Friday crash that it helped trigger, and an investigation by the Treasury Department. When the Tenth National’s officer elections were held in January 1870, all members of the Tweed Ring were elevated to directors—Tweed, Sweeny, Connolly, and Hall. Tweed’s father-in-law, Joseph Skaden, joined them, as did Peter Sweeny’s brother-in-law, John Bradley, a Tammany state senator from the Seventh District. Hank Smith, Tweed’s connection with the police and Tammany savings banks, was also placed on the board, thereby forging a key management link between the Ring’s commercial and savings banks.41 Tellingly, the bank became the repository of over $1.2 million of city money.42 The Tenth National, through Gould and Fisk, offered something of great value to Tammany that was otherwise beyond its reach: a bank with a national charter. With the United States off the gold standard to finance war debt, Congress empowered the Treasury Department to grant national banks exclusive rights to hold reserves in the form of U.S. banknotes. The national banks issued these notes, deemed legal tender, based upon federal government bonds purchased as security. Along with greenbacks, they represented a new uniform currency backed not by promise of payment in

Tammany Hall’s Lost Financial Sector

41

specie but rather, as Stephen Mihm explains, an abstract belief in “the credit of the nation.”43 With a capitalization of $1 million, the Tenth National partnership with Gould and Fisk thus greatly magnified the Tweed Ring’s reach.44 The politicos could now use the “broker’s bank” as a reliable intermediary between public money and Wall Street. Finally, the outermost layer of the Tammany network was composed of a patchwork of personal accounts in established commercial banks. To the extent possible, Ring members from Tweed on down preferred to work with cash. However, under the Tweed Ring’s regime of profligate spending, government departments paid contractors in vouchers and warrants.45 What this meant in practice was that New York issued promises to pay bills with its own form of scrip. Payment in city paper facilitated embezzlement, but also made the grossly inflated cost of goods and services traceable for later investigators. This paper was circulated through dozens of banks and funded by a trebling of bonded debt purchased by New York banks, including Tammany institutions, and European investors (see also the discussion of Lenox Library’s endowment in Chapter 2). A veritable army of plasterers, plumbers, carpenters, furnishers, and printers was overflowing with vouchers and thus required banking services. Once a bank accepted the local government paper, essentially converting it, Tammany contractors would transfer the Ring’s cut—which ranged from 16 to 66 percent—into the personal accounts of their patrons through payment in checks, banknotes, and greenbacks.46 In this way, Tammany officeholders brought long-standing financial institutions a large volume of business. Members of the Tweed Ring had their preferred banks through which they circulated money dispossessed from taxpayers. In return, the banks gave them special treatment. Frequently this meant loans without security or collateral. But their checks would often be mislabeled as cash deposits in accounting books while they were allowed to withdraw cash, essentially trading questionable paper from Tammany banks for greenbacks. Tweed himself patronized the Ocean Bank, among others, where his New York Printing Company secured loans and he later became director.47 Comptroller Richard Connolly kept his largest account at the Central National Bank. Andrew Garvey, whose firm plastered the walls of the New York county courthouse, sent his money through the Broadway Bank.48 Not surprisingly, the Ocean, Central National, and Broadway banks were all custodians of city deposits.49 Peter Sweeny and his brother James frequented the Nassau, Broadway, and Fourth National

42

Chapter 1

banks.50 The principal contractor for the construction of the Harlem District Courthouse, John Scallon, made deposits at several different banks, including directly into the Yorkville Savings Bank. As Yorkville’s president and also counsel to the courthouse commission awarding contracts, Henry Genet was less discreet than most.51 More typical was the strategy of James Ingersoll. He later testified that several million dollars’ worth of warrants passed through his hands into a half dozen New York banks, of which he only retained $100,000 for personal use.52 When extrapolated to the Ring’s main contractors John Keyser, John McBride Davidson, Andrew Garvey, J. O. Seymour, and others, the sheer breadth of circulation is staggering. Investigators for Samuel Tilden’s grand jury found that peripheral accounts in commercial banks invariably routed checks to and from the Tenth National, which acted as Tammany’s clearinghouse. Essentially, the Tweed Ring laundered public funds through well-regarded institutions into one whose reputation was tainted by association with Jay Gould’s corporate empire. With its position at the Tenth National, the Tweed Ring then supplied its savings banks and political projects with an ample flow of credit. The Ring therefore had its own savings banks, a co-managed commercial bank, and a web of accounts scattered across the city. “Nearly every bank in the city is implicated in frauds upon the public treasury,” argued Henry Genet as the state senate debated his expulsion from the chamber.53 Genet meant to rally this fact in defense of his actions. Whether or not the entire banking community shared culpability, in the end, only members of the Tweed Ring were punished.

POLITICAL FINANCE How exactly did the Tammany banks function? Official investigations and court records show they mixed spoils-style patronage with profit-minded business calculations. They provided access to a pot of money devoted to lobbying activities in Albany. At the same time, bank officers financed a diverse array of personal and corporate loans and investments; a surprising number were spread across the country. Bolstered by public deposits and securities of real estate acquired cheaply through political channels, Tammany banks participated in some of the period’s most notorious financial practices—sweetheart loans, risky speculation, loose bookkeeping, and straight-up theft. Voracious demand for credit ultimately outstripped Tammany’s ability to provide sufficient collateral. This gap left its banking

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43

network vulnerable to the panic catalyzed by Andrew Green’s transfer away of a small amount of city money on November 18, 1871. Some loans hewed conspicuously to the political side of the equation. A major obstacle of Tammany Democrats in the state legislature was cultivating alliances with upstate Republicans. Yet, the 1870 and 1871 state legislative sessions experienced a burst of productivity that included two of Tweed’s top priorities: a revised state charter and decentralization of tax revenue. To advance his Albany agenda, William Tweed used his banks to make personal loans to legislators. A prime example of how this worked were the loans that he oversaw to General James Wood, a Republican state senator from the Thirtieth District in Livingston County. Senator James Wood was elected in 1869 by defeating an incumbent Democrat closely allied with Jay Gould’s Erie Railroad. Once in office, Wood seized an opportunity to raise capital for a new business venture. His local reputation was damaged by a failed law partnership and insolvency; thus, Wood turned to political avenues to finance his investment in a whiskey distillery. He approached Jay Gould, president of Erie Railroad, who offered him $10,000 in cash, and then Tweed, who wrote the senator a check for $15,000 from the Tenth National Bank. Both were ostensibly loans, and they were based on Wood’s paper—a promissory note to repay the sum three months later with interest. Neither lender sought collateral or securities, or undertook the normal inquiries about Wood’s creditworthiness. The loans were granted based on their new relationship as “friends” and Wood’s reception to pending legislation. With these funds, Senator Wood was in need of banking services. He did not deposit the money locally, at least not at first. Instead, he turned to Tammany banks, where he sought to push his new credit further. Hugh Hastings, a Republican assemblyman, newspaper editor, and Tweed lobbyist, later explained in testimony how the rural senator came to open accounts in downtown Manhattan with the Bowling Green Savings Bank. Wood informed Hastings in conversation that he was traveling from Albany to New York City for business, and requested advice where to place his money. According to Hastings, “Mr. Smith was standing close by us at the time, and I said, ‘there is the President of the Bowling Green Savings Bank.’ ” In fact, Hank Smith and James Wood were already acquainted from the Republican state convention in Syracuse that nominated him for senate, and from Smith’s frequent lobbying trips to Albany on Tweed’s behalf. When the senator opened an account with the Bowling Green,

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Chapter 1

Figure 5. Bowling Green Savings bank check, signed by Reeves Selmes. Author’s collection.

Smith was present at the meeting, along with Walter Roche, the bank’s vice president, and its secretary, Reeves Selmes, who was also deputy county clerk. Wood’s new account was granted “special” status, meaning he received interest daily, as opposed to the monthly interest accrued by common depositors.54 That same meeting, Wood withdrew $1,000 for later deposit at the Livingston County Savings Bank located within his electoral district. The Tammany leader also made another loan to Senator Wood’s business partner, Henry Chamberlain. Tweed discounted a note from the Tenth National Bank for $15,000 at 3.4 percent interest due in three months. To accompany the note, Tweed wrote an introductory letter for Chamberlain to William Bliss, president of the Tenth National. Chamberlain subsequently opened a corporate account for the New York Whiskey Company at the bank. The Tenth National accepted Tweed’s note, and on his word, the whiskey company’s credit. By the time of Tweed’s first arrest in the fall of 1871, the whiskey company had yet to generate one dollar of profit. Wood never repaid Tweed the principal on loans totaling $30,000, the maturity of which was extended six times in two years.55 During investigations, Tweed acknowledged making substantial loans to state senators, and noted in 1872, “I have many [outstanding] claims against the lower House.” It is doubtful that he expected to make any money from them or that he even expected to be paid back. Rather, Tweed cultivated the image within legislative chambers that he was a banker with

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45

capital at his disposal and could be approached for favors. Extension of credit to upstate politicians was meant to foster cycles of dependency; loans could be perennially renewed as long as help on votes and committee work continued. Importantly, such benevolence was in contrast to money loaned to Tammany subordinates, who were required to repay in full.56 But Tweed’s Albany loans also reveal another facet of banking operations. By working through the Bowling Green and Tenth National banks, Tweed sought to keep the circulation of capital firmly within the orbit of Tammany-controlled institutions.57 Tweed’s political debtors patronized his banks. In contrast to explicitly political loans, a separate category of Tammany investments was meant to generate profit. Bank officers used their privileged positions to finance personal mortgages on choice real estate.58 Most strikingly, the savings banks had an overwhelming amount of their capital invested in risky “call loans.” Savings institutions typically invested in lowyielding government or corporate bonds that were unlikely to place depositors’ savings in peril. On the other hand, call loans were speculative investments. In theory, they could be recalled upon demand should the need arise, as opposed to a fixed date in the future. Commercial banks did a brisk business in these types of loans. The Ocean Bank, where Tweed was director, had $500,000 worth of outstanding call loans in 1871, but it was ostensibly capitalized at $1 million.59 Savings banks had no such working capital beyond deposits. Worse, there was virtually no oversight of investments. The boards of directors of Tammany banks were figureheads who rarely met, and treasurer Reeves Selmes happily cosigned checks without question. At the time of its bankruptcy, the Bowling Green Savings Bank had nearly 40 percent of its total deposits invested in call loans, with interest running as high as 15 to 20 percent on principal. Most of these loans were extended to political associates without security or consultation beyond one or two individuals with clear conflicts of interest. As might be expected, this practice had a destabilizing effect. Smith and Roche used the Guardian Bank, where they were also officers, to pump tens of thousands of dollars into the Bowling Green to temporarily cover up heavy losses.60 Following the November 20 run, Smith, Roche, and Selmes utterly failed to collect at a pace fast enough to keep the Bowling Green solvent.61 For example, the bank loaned $65,000 to the Avenue C Railroad. Alfred Darling, a Republican and founder of the prestigious Union League Club,

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Chapter 1

was lead incorporator. Upon the loan’s negotiation, Smith and Roche were elevated onto the railroad’s board of directors to oversee their investment. The company had been organized in December 1868 with the mandate to place track across a circuitous route through the Lower East Side. The legislature later amended the charter to further expand the scope of its terrain uptown.62 However, most of the Avenue C line remained unbuilt when the Bowling Green called in its loan in late November 1871. The railroad balked and filed suit on the grounds that Roche had illegally appropriated bonds for personal use. Even in receivership, the bank never recouped the money.63 The Avenue C was a classic example of how Tammany politicians leveraged political institutions for private accumulation. They supported the passage of a railroad charter whose mandate fell within the confines of their electoral constituency, even going so far as to partially finance it through private banks with money appropriated from taxpayers. Another class of investments was geographically far from Tammany’s parochial domain. During an impromptu April 1870 meeting in Hank Smith’s office at police headquarters, the Bowling Green decided to purchase shares of the Hannibal and St. Joseph, a Missouri railroad. Unfortunately, the railroad’s stock prices fell precipitously. The bank eventually lost $123,000 on the gamble, despite Smith’s initial assurances to Roche and Selmes that “plenty of money was to be made in it.”64 Counted among the losses were police funds: pensions, disability, and compensation for family of officers killed in the line of duty. In addition, the bank had invested illegally and subsequently lost $18,000 raised by police for victims of the Great Chicago Fire.65 The Bowling Green was not the only Tammany bank to look across the country for speculative opportunities. The Yorkville Savings Bank held $10,000 worth of Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad bonds.66 When the Ocean Bank failed in December 1871, the court-appointed receiver found that, along with uptown lots on Seventh Avenue, the bank owned 2,357 acres of land in Cherokee County, Iowa, and 14,000 acres in Illinois. The Ocean also owed $40,000 to an unnamed “western” bank.67 Tammany’s own newspaper confessed, “the failure of the Ocean Bank has involved many persons in a sea of troubles.”68 In their hurry to get rich quick, the Tweed Ring also patronized Wall Street brokerage firms. It may be of little surprise that Tweed had a “speculative” account in Smith, Gould, Martin and Company, where Jay Gould was a named partner.69 More startling was the healthy amount of business

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47

given to the brokerage firm of George Opdyke, the wartime mayor of New York and a leading figure in Radical Republican circles. After the Ring scandals broke, Opdyke wrote an embarrassed letter to Tilden’s investigators. Apparently, Tweed and other Tammany officeholders had purchased $76,000 worth of convertible bonds through his firm for the New York & Oswego Midland Railroad; Opdyke claimed to have no prior knowledge about these sales before the grand jury’s inquiry.70 Still, it was widely known that investigators were seeking to claw back public money. Opdyke, the sitting vice president of the New York Chamber of Commerce, did not volunteer to return his commission. There is no record he ever did.

REVENGE OF THE BANKERS Historiography has largely cast the elite reaction against the Tweed Ring as a revolt of wealthy taxpayers led by an old guard of gentlemen-politicians. Yet, many of the individuals who actively led the reform effort had material stakes involved beyond abstract goals of restoring the city’s credit and public confidence in government. Reformers’ heavy interests in banking and finance meant that many of them were in direct competition with the Ring’s upstart banks. Anti-Tweed forces used their skills as ruthless business operators to bring swift closure to Tammany’s experiment in electoral capitalism. Rival savings institutions led the revolt against the Boss’s banks. For a coterie of the immigrant bourgeoisie who made their fortunes prior to the Tweed Ring, or independently of it, becoming a bank officer at the Emigrant Savings Bank (founded in 1850) and German Savings Bank (1859) was already a recognized path to elite status. Furthermore, these savings banks sought the same immigrant working-class constituency as Tammany voters and would-be depositors. When credible accusations of peculation arose in the press, Charles O’Conor from Emigrant Savings and Philip Bissinger of German Savings placed their resources behind reformers. The sixty-sevenyear-old O’Conor took the lead in early suits against Tweed.71 The law firm of John Develin, who was counsel for the Emigrant Bank and vice president of the anti-Tweed Committee of Seventy, represented depositor suits against the Guardian that precipitated its involuntary bankruptcy. Develin in particular was hardly coy in making business competition a motivating factor. He once closed legal arguments by reading from the “glowing prospectus issued by the [Guardian] bank and circulated among citizens and

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Table 1. Comparison of Savings Banks (January 1871) Tammany Banks Bank & Charter Year

Competitors

Deposits ($) Depositors Bank & Charter Year Deposits ($) Depositors

Bowling Green Savings (1868)

643,911

1,549

Greenwich Savings (1833)

7,202,669

22,695

Guardian Savings (1868)

255,596

725

Bowery Savings (1834)

21,874,855

53,854

Yorkville Savings (1869)

50,040

222

Harlem Savings (1863)

591,793

3,049

National Savings (1867)

2,230

19

8,176,840

21,022

Emigrant Savings (1850)

Source: The Bankers’ Magazine and Statistical Register, July 1871, 124.

smaller dealers” to highlight Tammany’s lack of credibility in banking affairs.72 The activism of wealthier and more established financial institutions was thus felt in court actions. To oversee the Bowling Green’s cannibalization, Shepherd Knapp was appointed receiver. At the time, Knapp was trustee at Greenwich Savings, an old-line rival, president of Mechanics’ National Bank, and former president of the Clearing House.73 Richard Schell posted bond for his brother Edward’s receivership of the National Savings Institution; Edward was treasurer at the rival Manhattan Savings Institution, located one block north on Broadway. When the bank run had occurred, Richard also happened to be vice president of the Union Trust Company.74 This was the same bank where the newly empowered deputy comptroller, Andrew Green, was moving public deposits away from the Guardian Bank at the explicit request of mayor-in-waiting William Havemeyer and Samuel Tilden.75 The redirection of public deposits to the Union Trust was a deliberate allocation of patronage by reformers to their own banking allies. One nineteenth-century chronicler, Emerson Keyes, attributed the failure of Tammany savings banks to “struggling for existence in the effort to compete with old established organizations.”76 Table 1 confirms the established banks had both the greater number of depositors and the larger quantity of deposits. The threat of economic competition, however, was

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quite real. Established rivals found the congruence between voters and depositors at the Tammany banks alarming. Also worrying: the terms of Tammany banks were generous to the poor, forcing more established banks to raise interest dividends on savings accounts to compete.77 Indeed, through political connections, Tammany enjoyed a major competitive advantage. With ready access to public funds, Tammany banks enjoyed a plentiful source of capital for future growth.78 Keyes was correct to cite competition among savings banks as one cause of Tammany bank failures. But the struggle was just as political as economic. Did the Tammany banks have a future? In one respect, they were expanding along with Tweed’s political reach. In the summer of 1871, Tweed amended the charter of the National Savings Institution to cover a wider geographic area that included all territory south of Fourteenth Street.79 These ambitions for growth met with fierce resistance. One measure is the invective that erupted from redoubts of established banking. The Tammany banks were “fraudulent all through,” charged the Financier. “Their rapacity which had such an adaptability that, like the elephant’s trunk, it could pick up with equal ease small things and great, created savings banks because it wanted even small hoards.”80 The New York Times chided the banks for accumulating “capital thus wrongly acquired.”81 Another Republican paper mocked Tammany politicians for “playing bank.”82 Public attention generated by the bankruptcies in November 1871 provided a fresh wave of embarrassment for Tammany Hall, already weakened by the New York Times’ revelation of embezzlement over the summer. Henry Genet of the Yorkville Savings Bank failed to satisfy fraud investigators, claiming, strangely for a banker, “he was not in the habit of keeping accounts.” Senator Genet subsequently fled to Canada with $17,000 in bank deposits.83 Acrimonious legal battles between the Guardian and the Bowling Green, formerly allied banks placed in receivership, elicited court testimony that exposed off-the-books activity. In several cases, Tweed apparently withdrew tens of thousands of dollars without leaving any record.84 Roche, for his part, was found guilty of improperly lifting $77,408 of bank money.85 As the hammer fell, former associates turned against each other in quixotic attempts to escape liability, fraying a once powerful alliance. By the run of November 1871, Tammany banks were effectively ostracized from the business community. This was symbolized by ostracism from the New York Clearing House and the refusal of other banks to honor

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Figure 6. State senator Henry Genet of Yorkville Savings Bank. Author’s collection.

checks, notes, and other forms of paper.86 Reeves Selmes of the Guardian and Bowling Green banks frankly acknowledged to the press that “the odium heaped upon us” crippled long-term viability.87 Soiled reputations left the banks with only local government available as the lender of last resort; yet, political conditions made rescue impossible. The power of reformers over the flow of credit was made clear when deputy comptroller Green secured a half-million-dollar loan without security from the New York Clearing House to meet the bankrupt city’s payroll obligations.88 Established banks put in question by the November Tammany run had no trouble finding rescuers to stabilize them. In triumph, reformers crowed that no bank chartered before 1850 was swept away in the fallout.89

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CONCLUSION Tammany Hall’s banks were an innovative development in the Gilded Age’s spoils system, but their central role in the Tweed Ring elicited a fierce reaction from capital-owning New Yorkers. In the following decades, Tammany became synonymous with Democratic regulars in the city. However, the composition of leadership and political practices were transformed by the Ring’s defeat, including the end of a foray into finance.90 It is impossible, of course, to speculate about historical trajectories in which the banks might have survived Tweed intact. Would Tammany-grown capitalists have developed distinctive policy interests in tension with its immigrant and working-class electoral base? After all, an important contingent of Republican financiers weaned on selling U.S. government debt bolted their party in 1872, demonstrating independence from machine politics. Or would the development of Tammany’s banking sector have made the faction even more influential in state and national politics by providing access to greater resources? Hosting the Democratic national convention of 1868 at Tammany Hall is certainly one indication of national ambitions. Instead, we only know the actual historical outcome. In a loss that Walter Roche told the press he felt “very deeply,” the bank run of November 18–20, 1871, aborted the emergence of Tammany’s politician-bankers.91 Reformers imposed a division of labor between political professionalism, the domain of ward heelers, and control over the private allocation of capital investment, the sphere of capitalists. The age of Tammany’s heady financial speculation was over.



Dawn of the Conkling Machine

Thomas Murphy was smoking a Henry Clay cigar and lounging with friends when he learned of his confirmation to be the next collector of the port of New York. On July 11, 1870, his luxury suite in Manhattan was Republican headquarters. Alonzo Cornell, a future naval officer at the port, and later governor, had stationed himself beside the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s telegraph operator. Wall Street speculators often convened in the hotel’s spacious gilt-wood rooms to catch the final stock quotes of the day. Cornell waited for a different kind of news. The U.S. Senate was meeting in executive session deep into the night. For weeks, Reuben Fenton, New York’s senior senator, had delayed consideration of President Ulysses S. Grant’s nominee. Now, debate was finally under way. Fenton armed himself with newspaper clippings and proceeded to hold the Senate hostage to a wearisome four-hour assault on Murphy’s fitness for office. The man, Fenton maintained, was nothing more than a “political speculator,” beginning with the nominee’s record as a shoddy war contractor. One inspector from the War Department alleged that hats manufactured by Murphy’s firm were “so rotten that they could have no strength.”1 Murphy overcharged, and even once misrepresented a box of fur shavings as finished goods.2 More recently, the nominee had gained an unsavory reputation for his on-again, off-again alliances with Tammany Hall, and its leader, Boss Tweed. Finally, at 7:00 p.m., Fenton relinquished the floor, confident of his arguments. The chamber voted for a brief recess. Despite the late hour, there was little worry about the Senate reconvening without a quorum. The collectorship stood at the apex of the nineteenth-century spoils system. Two-thirds of the nation’s imports circulated through the New York Custom House.

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An astounding five-sixths of all tariffs were collected there. Customs was the single largest source of federal revenue, funding an expansion of the administrative state that enacted the Republican Party’s sweeping agenda.3 With 1,500 workers operating under byzantine regulations, New York’s waterfront was the patronage redoubt of the Yankee Leviathan.4 Senators from across the country expected to press applicants for jobs there. During campaign season, customhouse workers returned home to work the polls, with some traveling hundreds of miles across several states. And election committees from around the country would look to the next collector for the party capital raised by “assessments,” or taxes, on rank-and-file appointees. The collector also distributed lucrative patronage in the form of warehousing contracts, and was in the enviable position to do favors for wealthy and connected merchants. There were electorally strategic calculations, too. Grant swept the presidential election of 1868 but lost the biggest prize, New York’s thirty-three electoral votes. Republicans needed the labor and capital that could only be provided by partisan administration of the waterfront. Reflecting these stakes, Capitol Hill was teeming with pro- and anti-Murphy men ready for battle over his confirmation. A horde of New York politicos had traveled in by rail a week prior. They stalked the lobbies and parlors with “claims” and “records,” placing barroom wagers about who would come out on top. On the day of the vote, lobbyists roamed the corridors of the Senate. Their pockets were stuffed full of affidavits and private messages, ready to press them into the right hands. A pair of Methodist ministers hovered about, ominously warning the dangers of placing Murphy, an Irish Catholic, into a vital public trust.5 (The religious question was omnipresent throughout his career.)6 Former members of Congress and local reporters also crowded the halls, along with petty office seekers. Fenton’s delay tactics had caused a backlog for other nominees, and “strikers of all ages, colors, and conditions” were impatient for their turn.7 “It was worth the life of a Senator to show his head outside of the guarded doors,” quipped an observer.8 Back on New York’s waterfront, the Custom House carried the somber air of a wake. The long-suffering incumbent, Moses Grinnell, ordered a stream of telegrams delivered to the collector’s

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Figure 7. Thomas Murphy, port collector and speculator. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

office to keep abreast of Senate developments. Meanwhile, rumors had spread quickly from gossiping clerks who read the morning papers. Another bad omen: there was usually a crush of petitioners at the door seeking to “wear the badge of the Customs and do their country some service for adequate compensation.”9 Naval Officer Edwin A. Merritt once described Collector Grinnell, in his heyday, as “badgered, unable to listen to this immense crowd that was pressing him.”10 But as the confirmation debates wore on, the chaos of jobbers melted away. Even Grinnell loyalists murmured aloud of impending removals. “They would be obliged,” wrote the New York Times, “to give way to the hungry ones who had been clamoring for a chance at the public crib.”11 One last telegram arrived at the end of the business day. Fenton was still going at it on the Senate floor, giving Grinnell a glimmer of hope. Yet, petty officeholders have their own wisdom. As the port cleared out, one night watchman brazenly solicited Murphy’s home address. He planned to appeal in person for his $3 per day.

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Night had come, but the day was not over. Rather than make the commute home, the customhouse gang flocked to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It seemed as if “every post and pillar in the hotel was firmly supported by weighers, inspectors, and gaugers, who freely discussed Mr. Murphy’s prospects.”12 And so by 8:00 p.m., fatigued senators predictably streamed back into their seats. The upper chamber prepared to hear a rebuttal from Roscoe Conkling, New York’s junior senator. Conkling was an insufferable snob who began his daily regimen with a boxing workout; on the eve of the Civil War, he once physically blocked the way of a mob of southern House members threatening Thaddeus Stevens.13 Conkling was also one of the age’s great performers. A few months before the confirmation vote, he won a small fortune from a jury for an engineer maimed by the New York Central Railway.14 Now the Utica trial lawyer began with a vigorous defense of Murphy’s “business character” and personal integrity. Over the course of an hour Conkling pivoted to the repudiation of Reuben Fenton, and by proxy, his political leadership in New York. Coming at the end of a long day, Conkling nevertheless brought the audience to their feet several times. William Stewart of Nevada later recalled the oration dripped with “logic, sarcasm, reason, and invective.”15 For the finale, Conkling stood directly over the desk of his home-state rival, and read from criminal proceedings that implied Fenton pilfered money as a youth but was never charged. Fenton was too stunned to dispute the claim; instead, his head bowed in shame. At 10:00 p.m., the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s wire finally picked up news of the Senate vote. Alonzo Cornell raced to deliver the message through a scrum of ward heelers, office seekers, and “floppers” who had been with Grinnell just the day before. Murphy was confirmed 48 to 3.16 Fenton men loitering around the Senate halls were apparently in disbelief when the vote tally was first announced. They took it as a hoax. For the Murphy lobby on scene, there was no mistaking triumph. Revelers moved celebrations from the Senate to The Willard, just down the street from the White House, where they filled two parlors and held “high carnival” for the rest of the evening. The New York Tribune reported, “many times have they drunk, amid cheers, to what they denominate the political death of Reuben E. Fenton.”17

chapter 2

Republican Party Business

Party business was a major source of wealth for political professionals in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Enterprises established, owned, or co-managed by party leaders grew into hybrid institutions that made money and won elections. The spoils system was already a distinctive feature of the country’s representative democracy. With mass political parties entering the second generation, and the economy growing, innovative modes of organization continued to transform political practices. By the Civil War, the most consequential spoils had evolved far beyond “Jacksonian” patronage, that is to say, public office in places like custom houses, parks departments, and the postal service. Moisei Ostrogorski’s observation, long forgotten by today’s social scientists, was that the parties had “broken through the shell of the spoils’ system” and into commercial enterprise.1 Senator Roscoe Conkling’s capture of the Port of New York in 1870, and his political machine’s control over it until 1878, was precisely such a shell. From that point of departure, corporate offices and speculative ventures evolved into desirable sources of political patronage because they could return a surplus. As with traditional forms of antebellum patronage, the economic windfall from party business helped to finance electoral competition and reward loyalists. The vibrancy of party business illustrates how the nature of spoils was transformed. Democracy requires party government to coordinate common goals between people and groups across fragmented political institutions. During the Gilded Age, that fundamental electoral relationship was expressed in new ways that unified property and officeholding within the mass party. In New York, Republicans experimented with organizational forms such as party business to cement factional control and to enforce

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party regularity. The Stalwart Republicans crafted policy congruence between the party, adjunct businesses, and the American state. As a faction, their strategy was to build and maintain coalitions by making their allies, and the party, rich. We have much to learn about how gilded parties worked by paying attention to the way that officeholders understood themselves. The Stalwart contribution to party theory and practice was to advance the corporate party, with its commodification of politics, as a coherent mode of organization. The idea was first articulated by William Seward before the Civil War and later implemented by party leaders such as Roscoe Conkling and Thomas Platt in the 1870s and 1880s. Stalwart political entrepreneurs fused business institutions like the U.S. Express Company and Morton, Bliss and Company together with traditional operations like raising funds, allocating patronage, and negotiating between rivals. Rendered viable enterprises by federal and state patronage, party business provided useful tools— corporate offices, access to capital, and elite status—that helped to solve classic problems of collective action. In a departure from “Jacksonian spoils,” these offices and their emoluments could be shielded from the vagaries of the electoral cycle, which gave them an element of stability. Importantly, material resources made available by party business supplied factions with positive-sum resources to invest in campaigns and also to navigate factional disputes. Business activity also furthered policy agendas when party and company goals aligned. This chapter examines how one party faction leveraged the spoils system to engage in party business. My focus is on Stalwart Republicans in New York and the relationship of party regularity to the process of capital accumulation. In the first section, I explore the distinctive features of gilded party organization—the self-understanding of political leaders and their political behavior. In the following section, I trace a map of cross-party alliances organized through particular moments of business cooperation. Finally, I scrutinize the party’s most vital enterprise. At its peak, Morton, Bliss and Company was the country’s premier financial brokerage house. Republican partisans ran the firm in a way that was instrumental to electoral conquest. Links between these institutions—the Republican Party, on the one hand, and adjunct businesses, on the other—tells us much about the historical fusion of property and officeholding within American political development.

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GILDED SPOILS Electoral capitalism during the Gilded Age generated a particular kind of common sense among practitioners of party regularity. The view of Republicans in New York was that the party was a corporation and victory should produce a surplus. William Seward, a towering midcentury figure, invoked mass parties as joint-stock companies “in which those who contribute most direct the action of the concern” and also reap the greatest reward.2 In the nineteenth-century context, Seward referred to the victor’s right to direct public policy, but importantly, also the ability to dispense spoils. The conflation of political party and business enterprise should not surprise us. Bureaucratization of the corporation and the mass party occurred broadly within the same historical moment of the century’s organizational revolution. The two forms sprouted within a similarly ambiguous public-private legality and cross-pollinated via demonstration effect.3 Postwar monopoly consolidated simultaneously in economic and party organization. The former occurred with the advent of the corporate form and the latter in the rise of political machines. Railroad, telegraph, and express companies were the first corporations of truly national scope and complexity.4 As “children” of the Civil War Yankee Leviathan, Richard White explains, growth and profits relied upon government subsidies, legal privileges, military protection, and rate guarantees.5 Managing the government side of company operations presented a host of new opportunities. During the war, for instance, Chester Arthur received a loan from Cornelius Vanderbilt that was twice the size of his annual salary as New York’s quartermaster general. Charged with overseeing the commodore’s transportation contracts shuttling New York volunteers to the front, the young Arthur made ready use of a political line of credit.6 In many cases transportation and communication companies preexisted demand for services and, frequently, settlement in the west. Directed from Wall Street and Capitol Hill, companies on the country’s periphery took on classic state functions like mail delivery, the maintenance of order, and the organization of social life more generally.7 A great deal of market competition between corporate giants thus took place within political institutions. Corporate battles in legislatures and federal agencies over public investment and exclusive legal rights revolutionized the policy process, creating the permanent business lobby.8 In the rush

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to establish its westernmost station on Goat Island in San Francisco Bay, Collis P. Huntington of the Central Pacific Railroad outmaneuvered Union Pacific rivals, not in boardrooms but in congressional committees. The secret to his success was Roscoe Conkling, Central Pacific’s “strongest man in the Senate.”9 Conkling used his contacts in the Interior Department to ensure a vital land survey and oversee transfer of a military base.10 Companies also set their own prices through public authority. Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, served in the War Department during the Civil War and ensured large profits for transporting men and material to the front.11 John A. Dix embodied the overlap between party, company, and state. Throughout his long career, he served as Union general, Republican officeholder (as governor of New York from 1873 to 1874), and president of the Union Pacific Railroad. Dix explained in his memoirs: “the [Union Pacific] enterprise was in some sort a public one: the Charter was granted by an Act of Congress, a large subsidy in bonds was given in aid of the undertaking, and the Government was willing to give importance to it by allowing an officer of high rank to hold the presidency.”12 Another expression of the corporate party was how politicos grew into the managerial strata along with economies of scale. Party leaders came to populate boards of directors and trusteeships. Historian Colleen Dunlavy explains the transformation in corporate governance from the antebellum “democratic” rule of one person, one vote to the “plutocratic” standard of one vote per share after the Civil War. This profound change, she argues, ratified the transition of corporations from public to private entities, and set the stage for consolidation of influence into the hands of a few large investors working indirectly through salaried managers.13 In notable cases, like Thomas Platt of the U.S. Express Company, party leaders moved into positions of direct authority as the “zealous friend of our company.”14 Many of the politicos holding corporate office had otherwise tangential prior connection to the industry and very little personal investment to contribute. In this respect, they were much like the organizers of the transcontinental railroads. What they brought to the table was access to other people’s money—public capital secured through alliances within the halls of power.15 For Platt, Cornell, and others, most conspicuously William Tweed of the Erie Railroad on the Democratic side, profits were not so much in the owning of stock, per se, as in the management of the corporation itself and the various ways to siphon off money via financial maneuvers.16

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The career trajectory of Thomas Platt, an Owego druggist and later Stalwart boss, is instructive. He rose up the ranks of the U.S. Express Company from secretary to director and finally president in 1879. This rapid ascension took place in between his tenure in the House of Representatives from New York’s Twenty-Eighth District, as chairman of the Republican State Committee in 1877, and shortly prior to his election to the U.S. Senate in 1881. In his memoirs, Platt refers to the U.S. Express Company as “private business.”17 Reality was to the contrary. The bedrock of its revenue was a federal contract, stripped from the hands of the rival Adams Express Company, to transfer U.S. currency over telegraph lines at the cost of 20 cents per $1,000. The rest of the value of the company lay in its monopolistic right of way negotiated for telegraph routes alongside railways like the Baltimore and Ohio, Lakeshore and Michigan Southern, Lake Erie and Western, and the Chicago and Alton. Management of the U.S. Express Company yielded a bonanza. Thomas Platt and his two sons, Frank and Edward, were paid hefty salaries and held positions as directors, treasurer, and company counsel. Over the course of his tenure at the company, Thomas’s salary went from $9,000 to $25,000 annually ($223,000 to $650,000 today). Of course, he continued to collect salaries from numerous public offices, such as $2,500 to serve as quarantine commissioner (or $62,000 today).18 As president, he loaned himself money directly from the company treasury at low interest rates and without the conventional securities. Although the Platts owned very few shares in total, they made a small fortune in shorting U.S. Express Company stocks by using insider information. By the late 1880s, there had not been a shareholders meeting in twenty years. Shareholders sued, complaining about low dividends compared with rival companies. Platt justified his management practices in court by arguing the federal contract served “the public interest” and therefore the company had less responsibility to elevate profits.19 Party and business so thoroughly overlapped for “Boss” Platt that when he inherited Roscoe Conkling’s political machine, he managed it out of the U.S. Express Company’s office at 49 Broadway. He met statewide leaders there and coordinated patronage appointments. “You will not decline to serve” as chair of a party committee, Platt once wrote in a directive to Levi P. Morton on company stationery.20 With faith in a centralized developmental state, Republican power brokers in New York championed the theory of party-as-corporation. Midcentury, political “wizards” like Thurlow Weed were already practiced hands

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Figure 8. Thomas C. Platt, president of the U.S. Express Co. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

at raising party funds and directing campaign labor with the purpose of achieving predictable returns (election results) in the face of strident competition (at the polls). Roscoe Conkling, leader of the Stalwart Republicans, the dominant New York faction in the decade after the war, was the greatest proponent of Seward’s corporate party perspective.21 In his own speeches, Conkling echoed the comparison of party leaders to stockholders and electoral spoils to dividends.22 More to the point, Conkling ran his machine in that practice from the late 1860s until his fall from power in the early 1880s. As they reached the pinnacle of the state party system, each of the Conkling machine’s main lieutenants—Chester Arthur, Alonzo Cornell, George Bliss, and Thomas Platt—became members of the propertied elite. Even after Conkling left the U.S. Senate, he continued to revolutionize the fusion of property and politics. Conkling’s own post-Senate law practice was

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dependent upon work from railroads (primarily the Central and Southern Pacific) and the financier Jay Gould. A journalist who anonymously wrote The Sayings of Uncle Rufus expressed the new relationship through parody. The satirical novel imagined a law firm consisting of Conkling and “Uncle Rufus” Hatch, a Wall Street broker with a reputation for affecting a folksy style. The fictional “A1” partnership of Conkling and Hatch, the satire intimated, would offer a “combination of law and commerce.” The Hatch character explained that profits would be shared widely with cooperating legislators, judges, and corporate stockholders.23 Therefore, it apparently did not escape observers that in real life, Conkling’s business—his law firm—monetized influence among Republican networks of party officials and officeholders. One opponent of “Conklingism” noted the enterprising disposition of Republican Party regulars. “Looking upon the public service as a profitable mine, their lease of which is brief,” opined the critic, “they work it so as to yield the utmost profit or advantage to themselves.”24 The charge was more than figurative. Among a host of ventures, Stalwart officeholders ran mining companies together.25

PARTY ACCUMULATION Accumulation of capital was an organizing logic of political action for Stalwarts. Early in his political career, Thomas Platt candidly explained the link between political service and anticipated rewards in a patronage negotiation. Writing to Gilbert Scribner, New York’s secretary of state, he laid out his criteria for officeholding. Platt would accept nomination to public office “only if I should be satisfied that there is money in it and that no such original outlay of capital is needed.”26 His logic of investment and return was more than passing fancy; like other middle-class professionals who administered the Conkling machine, the discussion of whether to pursue nominations and appointments invariably involved the question of whether the position might be “profitable.”27 One Brooklyn district leader named William H. Beard lobbied for membership on a commission to choose the location of a federal building. “If I should obtain the appointment,” he promised, “the party would get back all I should get out of it.” Among his qualifications for the post, the prospector touted “large dealings in real estate” locally. Beard & Kimplaud—his firm—might aid in the construction, he implied heavily.28 The notion was implausible that an office seeker

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eager to profit from land speculation and contracts would organize a venture only to return the entirety of his gains. Still, Beard knew how to sound the right note. Alonzo Cornell explicitly outlined these broad parameters of partybased accumulation under Conkling’s reign. The son of Cornell University’s founder, Alonzo became an early ally of Conkling, who appointed him naval officer at the port of New York, made him state party chair, and elevated him into the governor’s office in 1880. “While I should not, from a sense of propriety, use my official position in the party to promote my personal interest,” Cornell wrote to Francis Silvester, a Kinderhook lawyer, on stationery from Western Union (where he was vice president): “I confess, that if the party shall carry out the views which you express, it will be exceedingly gratifying to me and I shall endeavor to fully appreciate the kindness of those who contributed to such a result.”29 Cornell implies the officeholder’s pursuit of wealth was warranted when in concert with party goals. Indeed, this was the doctrine of Stalwart leader Roscoe Conkling himself: personal wealth accumulation was appropriate when it simultaneously advanced the interests of the Republican Party and the American state.30 By contrast, any individual who promoted self-interest above and beyond the party risked weakening unity. Chester Arthur, the quintessential gilded party bureaucrat, typified this balance. Arthur became personally wealthy through land deals, railroad speculation, and salaried appointments. He also proved willing to defer to Conkling’s lead about tempered accumulation in the party’s interest. In this way, party accumulation worked to widely dispense spoils, not simply with appointments, but through whatever profits could be mined from them. As described in the vignette opening this chapter, Conkling’s Stalwarts controlled the port of New York, a crux of national tariff policy and local patronage. In 1872, the officials fined an importerexporter, Phelps, Dodge, and Company, the huge sum of $271,017— equivalent to $5 million today. Of the money collected under the “moiety” system, the federal government received its share of $137,436; port officials (all Conkling appointees) and Senator Conkling himself collectively distributed the remaining balance.31 The party also received its tithe, gathered in the form of assessments. As port collector from 1871 to 1878, Chester Arthur’s main function was to enforce duties and to collect revenue for the federal government. He served precisely the same role within the state party.32

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Figure 9. Roscoe Conkling’s patronage: capital of The Machine. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Here we see the logic of party-based accumulation in pure form. Control over the nation’s busiest port was important because high tariffs on imports were central to the Republican Party’s alliance with northern manufacturers and the native-born working class. After the 1872 election, the state party needed to replenish funds and to prepare for Conkling’s own forthcoming bid for the presidential nomination. And, of course, those who worked the party levers believed they deserved compensation. Chester Arthur’s biographer put it this way: “New York Stalwarts operated by the

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politics of self-interest: what enhanced their power, prestige, and bank accounts was good for Republicans and the public.”33 Railroads are a prime example of overlap among the vested interests of party, company, and policy making. Here, actual practices veered far afield from the Stalwart ideal of frictionless party accumulation. Following the collapse of the Tweed-backed New-York Viaduct Railway, Stalwarts took responsibility for the highly contested process of chartering, financing, constructing, defending in court, and rendering profitable New York City’s elevated railroads. The state legislature chartered the Gilbert Elevated Railroad Company in June 1872, shortly after Tweed’s arrest.34 Importantly, the act did not specify any particular route. Instead, the company charter empowered a five-member Rapid Transit Commission to recommend a path for the road and to secure financing from hesitant investors.35 Among those commissioners was Chester Arthur, recently appointed port collector. John Dix, a former Union general and railroad president, was also named; he would shortly be elected governor of New York.36 The commission’s plan would not only determine which New Yorkers might enjoy the convenience of rapid transit. It would also shape the geography of urban development, and which lucky real estate speculators and property owners would benefit. A later Gilbert Commission, which Arthur chaired in 1877, was further empowered to organize new railway companies altogether.37 From that commission, the Manhattan Elevated was born, controlled by the financier Jay Gould. Personal financial records indicate that Chester Arthur was amply compensated for his railroad commission work. Early in the process he collected bonds from promoters that grew in value when the Gilbert Elevated merged with the New-York Elevated to become the Metropolitan Railroad.38 The Metropolitan bonds, worth $7,290 (approximately $180,000 today), became part of the estate inherited by Arthur’s children after he died in 1887.39 Among the earliest institutional investors in the Gilbert and Metropolitan railroads was Morton, Bliss and Company. That financial brokerage house, which also handled the company’s bond sales, was affiliated with the Stalwarts and will be explored in the following sections.40 Despite the personal fortunes minted—or perhaps because of them— controversy over the railroad policy resulted in an acrimonious split within the state Republican Party. In the 1880s, the press ridiculed Alonzo Cornell as the “Blind Pool” governor when it was made public that Jay Gould managed an investment portfolio on his behalf.41 At the time, Gould was lobbying New York State for tax breaks benefiting his consolidated elevated

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railroad properties, where he had designs to create a monopoly from the Gilbert, New York, and Manhattan companies.42 Cornell opposed the tax breaks at the very moment he was trying to win command of the party apparatus from Roscoe Conkling. By 1882, Conkling was no longer a U.S. senator but employed as Jay Gould’s corporate lobbyist. Marshaling all of his remaining influence, the aging Stalwart boss launched a jeremiad against Governor Cornell as “that lizard on the hill,” and stripped him of renomination at the state convention in Saratoga, New York.43 One result of the schism, ironically, was to deeply embarrass the newly installed presidential administration of Chester Arthur. The Stalwart president had run the New York State party machinery for years and, although few knew, owned bonds in the very elevated railroads stirring up party disunion. Another consequence was in the electoral arena. Even the campaign manager of Charles J. Folder, Conkling’s nominee for governor, believed that Conkling and Gould had made an “inescapable political blunder” in removing Cornell.44 The Stalwart rupture resulted in the election of a Democratic governor of unusual strength. That man, Grover Cleveland, later became the sole non-Republican president between the Civil War and the turn of the century. The gilded party sought to temper its members’ appetites in the collective electoral interest. In practice, constraining personal greed proved challenging because of the overlap with policy stakes.

CROSS-PARTY ALLIANCES The construction of cross-party political alliances via wealth accumulation was also an integral factor in facilitating governance. One of the few constants in American politics is that political institutions fragmented by the separation of powers and federalism requires proactive coordination. In the struggle to govern, factional elements often discover common ground across the partisan divide. So it was during the Gilded Age. The fractious Democratic Party commanded large voting majorities in New York City. However, Democrats were typically shut out of statewide control in the governor’s office and over the legislature.45 Conversely, Republicans could only compete in New York City, which held the richest spoils, through fusion tickets of independents or with the help of Democratic bolters. Power sharing was always tenuous. Yet, practical politics called for appreciating realities. Cross-party deals made structural sense. Party regulars also

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shared professional norms and, frequently, social backgrounds as former shopkeepers and lawyers on the make. The so-called Tammany Republicans were born from this primordial soup of interparty mass politics.46 Noted in the previous chapter, the group allied with the Tweed Ring to support the charter of 1870 that devolved fiscal authority, placing taxpayer dollars within Tammany’s reach. In return, roughly eighty Republicans landed cushy patronage jobs in municipal government.47 One of these Republican figures was Chester Arthur, who received an appointment as legal counsel to the city Tax Commission worth $10,000 per year ($196,851 adjusted for inflation)—a salary greater than that of the president of the United States.48 Later in the decade, Stalwarts were the ones in a position of bargaining strength. None other than Arthur himself negotiated a nine-point agreement with anti-Tammany Democrats to support the election of Edward Cooper to mayor in 1878.49 As will be discussed in Chapter 4, the grassroots critics of party regularity saw the crossparty collaboration for what it was: a common investment in the spoils of electoral capitalism.50 Electoral incentives were the backdrop to Stalwart participation in the speculative frenzy created by rising urban property values. A coterie of Republican customhouse officials and leading members of the Tweed Ring jointly invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into purchasing and flipping plots of land in uptown Manhattan.51 By the 1870s, this was long a proven method of coalition building. Local Democrats had governed since the 1850s “upon the top of a bubble” in real estate.52 Fernando Wood put together the first citywide pro-growth coalition by combining uptown property owners with a growing electorate of Irish laborers. The winning formula was to manage the city’s rapid expansion through enclosures of public land and expulsion of squatters. Control over the city’s Sinking Fund and land auctions meant that Mayor Wood and later Democrats enjoyed their choice of the best plots coming on the market.53 Land values were supercharged with labor-intensive public improvements paid for by a revolution in municipal debt financing, as the democratization of voting rights propelled demands for public goods in sanitation, housing, and transportation. Control over construction work and building contracts became a major source of municipal patronage. The politics of placemaking through the development of parks and streets further supercharged speculative profits. Meanwhile, the appointment of friendly assessors—for example, Tweed’s brother, Richard—lessened the tax burden

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for the lucky few while activism in neighborhood associations defended local prerogatives.54 Republicans treated with Tammany Hall when that organization was just as much of a real estate brokerage firm as a party faction. Land speculation was part of any political coalition’s appeal. Leading Stalwarts also coowned plots of land across Manhattan with fellow customhouse officials, judges, and middle-ranking politicos, although in lesser amplitudes than among Democrats. From 1869 until his death in 1886, Chester Arthur was involved in $147,211 worth of land transactions (over $3 million today) with over a dozen fellow officeholders. During the same period, he was collector of the port of New York, state party chair, vice president, and then president.55 The breadth of Arthur’s investments covered the political landscape. Partners included Republicans active in the Tweed Ring, such as Thomas Murphy, the central figure of this chapter’s opening vignette, and those who led the Ring’s dogged legal prosecution, like the lawyer William Fullerton. Officeholders did their business working through the same party leaders, whether directly or indirectly. Importantly, the origin of those investments was opaque. In the fall of 1869, Thomas Murphy purchased a 20 percent stake in half a million dollars’ worth of property on the east side of Central Park co-owned by William Tweed, Peter Sweeny, Hugh Smith, and Richard Connolly.56 The real estate deal was publicly noted and discussed. The following summer, Senator Reuben Fenton had even tried to use the fact to sink Murphy’s nomination for collector of the port of New York. What voters could not know, and what contemporaneous investigators and later generations of scholars have missed, is that particular land speculation grew out of the founding of Lenox Library. James Lenox had inherited his father’s thirty-acre farm, profiting fabulously from the long nineteenth-century boom in Manhattan real estate. Turning to philanthropy, in 1870, Lenox sought to bolster his legacy by endowing a library on Fifth Avenue between Seventieth and Seventy-First Streets. The library would become one of the city’s leading cultural institutions. Decades later, it merged into the New York Public Library, along with the Astor and Tilden Libraries. Lenox Library required incorporation from the New York state legislature and accommodation by local authorities. To ensure the project’s success, Lenox employed William Tweed and Thomas Murphy. Senator Tweed himself introduced the Senate bill on January 12, 1870. Murphy helped shepherd it through the legislative gauntlet on the Republican side.57 Both party

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leaders were rewarded handsomely. From his estate, Lenox sold these political allies the entire East Side block on Madison Avenue from SixtyNinth to Seventieth Streets, which Murphy and the Tweed Ring jointly purchased. In fact, both men had known each other since the 1850s. They came of age as petty bourgeois tradesmen-cum-political hustlers in the milieu of the Seventh Ward, sandwiched by the Five Points slum and the waterfront.58 Only from land conveyed by James Lenox, the land baron, did the two politicos become business partners. Murphy later testified to a Senate committee that none other than Andrew H. Green—the celebrated urban reformer who publicly derided Ring “improvements”—had brokered the transaction.59 In 1872, Samuel Tilden’s investigators uncovered $7,766.50 worth of checks paid out to Thomas Murphy through the Ring-controlled Tenth National Bank (roughly $16,000 today). Apparently, the dots were never connected to form a complete picture; for want of either political motivation or prosecutorial vision, we may never know.60 The Lenox-Murphy-Tweed land deal, however, was merely one slice of the total windfall. Handwritten ledgers from James Lenox and the library’s own annual reports indicate that party leaders also received significant interest-bearing bonds for their work. Murphy was granted two separate bonds totaling $59,000 ($1.1 million today), due in three years, yielding 7 percent interest twice a year, every April and October. In addition, Murphy and members of the Tweed Ring—Tweed, Peter Sweeny, Richard Connolly, and Hugh Smith—were collectively granted another three bonds worth $77,000 ($1.5 million), with a similar schedule of maturity and interest payouts.61 What manner of property secured these bonds? The same city block near Central Park that Lenox conveyed them all. Lenox thus financed Tweed with funds and collateral to expand his own business empire, already extensive but growing, in banks, real estate, mines, steamboats, hotels, whiskey distilleries, publishing, and railroads.62 Thomas Murphy proved just as enterprising, if at a smaller scale. With his Lenox surplus, Murphy became a major force behind the urban development of Long Branch, New Jersey. After the war the scenic coastline became a fashionable summer destination for the nouveau riche, “a brave and showy effort in the direction of Newport that never quite managed to lose sight of Coney Island.”63 In 1866, a Tammany police judge saved Murphy from drowning by pulling him from the water.64 Undeterred by the incident, Murphy took on the mantle of early booster and land speculator.

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He organized the Long Branch Association to establish a local library and other civic amenities. In the early 1870s, he also flipped choice plots of land on Ocean Avenue, the leisure destination’s main thoroughfare, and purchased a nearby racing track in Monmouth. Inaugural races drew a crowd of six thousand people, including one hundred members of Tammany Hall’s social wing, the Americus Club. The “Tweed Compliment” was a mile-and-a-half run, with the top prize of $1,000. None other than Boss Tweed himself bestowed the consolation prize.65 Murphy’s Long Branch investments paid dividends. On Ocean Avenue, he was living three doors down from President Grant. Here, the two men bonded over fast horses, which led to Murphy’s surprise nomination as collector of the port of New York, and a lifelong friendship. “If the President goes out for a walk, Tom accidently meets him,” commented one reporter, ungenerously. “If Grant wants to take a peep at Monmouth Park Stables to look at race-horses, Tom decides to look for them also.”66 The political increment garnered by the likes of Tweed and Murphy was always part of a wider circulation of capital throughout politics and society. Beyond the personal gains to individual party leaders, Lenox bestowed his library with a $300,000 endowment (or $60 million today) invested almost entirely in local government debt. The fund was split between a Permanent Fund and a Building Fund, two-thirds the value of which was placed in New York County, City Revenue, and City Park Improvement Bonds.67 Tweed, notably, was the man who co-signed local government spending, along with other Ring members on the Board of Audit (and also listed on the Lenox bonds). Recall that Tweed was also president of the Parks Department, the single most important source of municipal jobs— which he ran as a personal fiefdom. Lenox served as the library’s treasurer, so there can be no mistake. The philanthropist’s long-term investments took place when Tammany Hall controlled local authorities that were issuing unprecedented levels of new public debt to finance an expansive public works program, expand the size of the public workforce, and supply a ready stream of capital for Ring-owned banks and companies. In sum, Lenox’s portfolio of investments represents a staggering vote of confidence in the city’s fiscal health and its governance by Tammany’s urban growth machine. After the collapse of the Tweed Ring in 1871, these business deals transformed into a political liability. James Lenox publicly signed his name and gave support to the anti-Tweed vigilance Committee of Seventy.68 By 1872,

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the library bonds issued as political rewards were identified in official accounts as owned by “Murphy and others” to erase Tweed’s footprint. After it became abundantly clear Tweed would never recover from the scandal, the library’s trustees moved the Ring’s share of the bonds from the Building Fund, their original home, to the Permanent Fund. From the Permanent Fund, trustees finally transferred a $30,000 bond to Murphy alone, with the library reabsorbing the balance. As the sole political survivor, he received $89,000 ($1.7 million) in total principal, not including the 7 percent biannual interest payments. When Murphy collected the principal on the last bond in 1880, however, his own reputation was noxious due to an ongoing insurance scam.69 The library’s accounts now masked his name, too, referring obliquely to liquidation of bond “No. 15.”70 Lenox had once assured his business agent about the political process of building the library: “If there be anything of the Samson about me, I think it is only this—that I pull down the edifice on others and yet escape myself.”71 The rise of nineteenth-century bookkeeping, according to Michael Zakim, was a market-making activity that served to make business more legible, or when necessary, to mask liabilities.72 Lenox Library opened in 1877 to public acclaim, with the role of party leaders all but erased from the endeavor. Political alliances received more public scrutiny when business ventures flopped. Republican financier Levi P. Morton was listed prominently on the board of directors for the proposed Viaduct Railway, along with the entire leadership of Tammany Hall. After revelations of widespread embezzlement in the summer of 1871, that business connection became highly suspect. It helped when the cross-party accumulation was mediated through an adjunct party-run business, which rendered a veneer of respectability and separation. Recall that Henry Smith, the Republican police commissioner, managed most of the Tammany banks, discussed in Chapter 1. After the bank run, Smith became an object of derision in political and business circles. Still, cross-party ventures typically flew under the radar. Chester Arthur’s law firm, Arthur, Phelps, Knevals, and Ransom, included a partner who was a local Tammany judge. The year Arthur was elected vice president, he chaired a metropolitan commission to “open” the Spuyten Duyvil parkway.73 The job involved a legal and fiscal process of negotiating real estate, railroad, construction, and political interests. Urban development could move forward only if the benefits were successfully mediated through the dominant party.

Figure 10. Lenox Library: an interior view. The New York Public Library Archives, The New York Public Library.

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MORTON, BLISS AND COMPANY Morton, Bliss and Company was a leading Gilded Age financial brokerage house and, after the New York Custom House, the single most important patronage source for the Stalwarts. Levi P. Morton, the firm’s founder, exemplifies how ambitious entrepreneurs advanced business interests along with political careers. At the Civil War’s outbreak, Morton was a middling New York merchant bankrupted by the rupture of antebellum cotton markets.74 His turnaround from this setback was nothing less than remarkable, as he became a millionaire several times over.75 The immense debt burden undertaken during the Civil War had a double effect, according to Richard Bensel. For one, the unparalleled scale of public debt centralized the country’s financial sector in Wall Street and reduced the reliance of domestic capital markets on Europe. Union victory also had the effect of fostering a cadre of Republican-leaning capitalists to help service and pay off that enormous national debt.76 Two years into the war to save the Union, Levi Morton began his personal ascendance by founding a financial brokerage house. The firm’s roots began as L. P. Morton and Company, and it entered the crowded market for general financial services: buying and selling government securities, taking orders for stocks and bonds, trading in gold, and paying interest on deposits. The government had suspended specie payment on January 1, 1862, creating a fevered pitch for speculation in gold.77 In this context, the firm struggled to establish itself as a way station for foreign exchange transactions as businesses sought to navigate inflationist pressures from wartime monetary policy. By war’s end, Morton was successful enough to repay creditors from his prior bankruptcy. But the firm’s success was hardly impressive or first tier. Morton’s fortunes changed in 1869 when he brought in a new business partner, George Bliss. Together, the two men would make their mark by selling U.S. government debt and railroad stocks and bonds to foreign and domestic investors. The two men, along with former Canadian finance minister John Rose, who ran the London branch named Morton, Rose and Company, maintained control of the firm until Morton’s twilight years.78 When they sold the firm at the turn of the century, it was incorporated into J. P. Morgan’s financial empire.79 Given its modest origins, how did Morton, Bliss and Company become one of the country’s most successful brokerage firms? Neither biographers

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nor historians have been able to fully explain, pointing to personal characteristics such as thrift and “fair dealing” or larger structural changes in economy and society.80 A better answer lies in the firm’s close alliance with the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party run by the political boss Roscoe Conkling. In the 1870s, the brokerage firm moved into a close alliance with Conkling by supporting his capture of the New York state party. To be sure, there was policy congruence: Roscoe Conkling represented powerful constituencies in the U.S. Senate that were in favor of speedy resumption of the gold standard—Wall Street investors, banks, and gold traders. Conkling also used his influence with the Grant administration to back “sound money” policies against the demands of greenbackers, silverites, and other so-called debt repudiationists.81 The New York senator was so symbolically affiliated with gold that the “Roscoe Conkling lode” was named after him in Hinsdale County, Colorado.82 Policy making, however, was about more than philosophizing about the economy in speeches. There were also substantial capitalist spoils involved in the “sound money” alliance between the Stalwarts and Morton, Bliss and Company. The firm’s first patronage coup was to secure the right to transfer federal money abroad. This privilege involved State Department transfers in diplomatic affairs and payment of salaries to members of the U.S. Navy.83 By depositing federal funds with Morton, Bliss and Company, the government allowed the firm temporary use of the money as capital before its withdrawal. The firm effectively became a de facto government-backed bank managing investments for private clients. Remember that pre–New Deal banking operated without federal guarantees. Banking houses in this period lived and died on the reputation of named partners. Even storied firms were known to fold practically overnight during severe downturns and take the fortunes of unlucky investors with them into oblivion. Party-secured government backing was a comparative advantage that proved crucial to cementing the business reputation of Morton, Bliss and Company. The partisan alliance reached a peak when Roscoe Conkling successfully lobbied the Grant administration for Morton, Bliss and Company to become the lead licensed fiscal agent with authority to market U.S. government bonds.84 This privilege included the popular 5–20s that helped win the war, so called because they were twenty-year bonds at 6 percent interest that could be called in after five years. The established competition—a “syndicate” composed of Drexel, Morgan and Company; McCulloch and Company; and the venerable Jay Cooke and Company—was shocked at the

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upstart firm’s unexpected seat at the table. Then, in 1873, Morton, Bliss and Company won another coup by securing the largest share of the business of floating government bonds. With this privilege came the right to government-sanctioned commission on sales.85 At one-half of 1 percent of bond sales, the commission meant potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit, depending on the size of the bond offering.86 Jay Cooke and his firm were fully supplanted, despite the banking house’s celebrated role in financing Union victory. Looking back to interpret this pivotal development, even James McElroy, Levi Morton’s most comprehensive biographer, was baffled. “By what arguments or methods Morton overcame him [Cooke] we have no record,” wrote McElroy. “But we know the result of the contest.”87 Considered within proper political context, there is little doubt that Stalwart party connections were the firm’s competitive market advantage. Roscoe Conkling’s faction played a central role in Grant’s triumphant reelection in 1872 by defeating Liberal Republican bolters led by Horace Greeley. In return, Conkling’s political machine won Grant’s support in matters of federal spoils.88 This patronage secured by the Conkling machine established Morton, Bliss and Company as a financial brokerage house with singular political influence. President Grant himself was fully aware of the fact.89 Government recognition made the firm “known in all of the financial centres of the world.”90 American investors in Europe and Europeans banking in America looked to the firm because of its elevated status—and for the financial stability that connection ensured by guarantee of large and stable government-backed cash reserves. Perhaps the greatest example of this fusion of high finance and statecraft was the manner in which Morton, Bliss and Company took on an unofficial diplomatic capacity. Levi Morton and John Rose negotiated on behalf of their mutual governments, the United States and Great Britain, over damages related to the Alabama claims. After the war, U.S. senators like Charles Sumner (Republican of Massachusetts) demanded compensation for shipping lost to this British-built vessel operated by the Confederacy. Diplomatic crisis was averted through payments won in a settlement during international arbitration. “I do not know anyone who deserves more success than you in this [Alabama] treaty,” wrote Horace Porter, President Grant’s personal secretary, to Morton. “And now you have it.”91 The spoils were significant. Fifteen million dollars was transferred to the United States government from Great Britain—through Morton’s brokerage house (the equivalent of $300 million today).92 Members of the firm served not only as

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mediators in diplomacy but also as beneficiaries of the capital flow between nation-states. To say that Levi Morton and John Rose had a direct material stake in resolving diplomatic crises over the lingering tensions of the Civil War would be an understatement. Even the Alabama contracts to record firsthand testimony related to cataloguing wartime naval losses were an opportunity for the Conkling machine to dispense patronage.93 Company records throughout the 1870s and 1880s vividly demonstrate the day-to-day operations of party capitalism. Of course, Levi Morton and George Bliss were adept in negotiations over the sale of iron or stocks and bonds with industrialists like Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, and Collis P. Huntington. More striking is how the partners discussed business and politics as if they were the same enterprise. In the firm’s correspondence, Morton and Bliss would debate national convention struggles and election results with the same attention and focus as the merits of promising companies.94 And the partners were deeply involved with advancing political appointments, the central task of the spoils system. Morton routinely recommended positions on behalf of friends to state officials and cabinet members for deserving rank-and-file party workers; he even appealed to President James A. Garfield for his own son-in-law to be paymaster in the army.95 As with any party broker, Morton pressed for notification “at an early day” for his clients’ appointments. Unlike many of his party peers, he leveraged patronage claims along with supporting character references from allies in railroads and banks rather than only with testimonials from local ward heelers.96 In one particular case, Morton recommended a “careful and prudent” local banker for the position of pension agent in Macon City, Missouri, to replace a “low and un-principled politician” affiliated with Liberal Republican bolters.97 Promoting appointments also dovetailed with direct business interests. The firm sought to place allies on courts that presided over states under Reconstruction whose bonds they sold to investors.98 Friendly federal courts would ensure that “Redeemed” states in the South would have to honor the spending commitments for public works and social provision made under prior Reconstruction-led allies. Even before the collapse of southern Republicanism in the mid-1870s, the firm took regional party allies to court when legislatures sought to “scale,” or reduce, the burdens of state-bonded debt.99 Morton, Bliss and Company furiously worked the back channels of public debate as national attention shifted from Reconstruction to monetary policy. The brokerage firm lobbied members of Congress and the

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cabinet to oppose payment of interest in anything but gold on government debt. “I want you to give me your views in regard to the course Congress is likely to take on ‘Resumption’ and ‘Silver,’ ” George Bliss wrote to Simeon Chittenden, a congressman from Brooklyn who held a personal account at Morton, Bliss and Company. “How far can a bill go on Remonetizing silver, and how far out to repeal the Resumption Act—in your judgment? Give one your views as fully as you can. I want to steal something from your brain for [Morton, Rose and Company of] London.”100 In the 1870s, Morton traveled to Capitol Hill to testify before Congress on behalf of resumption of the gold standard. He corresponded frequently with members of Congress, U.S. Treasury officials, and presidents Grant, Hayes, and Garfield.

“I HOPE YOU MAKE A MILLION” Levi Morton began his own career in public officeholding as a gold bug firmly associated with the Stalwart machine. When he ran for his own seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s wealthy Eleventh District—Democrats called it the “Windsor Hotel District”—he did so with Roscoe Conkling’s express blessing.101 Morton addressed the district convention in 1876, explaining “the danger to the public credit and to the welfare of the business community” is “so serious that no citizen has the right to refuse a call to political duty.”102 Including support for the national ticket and southern state parties, he raised $278,500 during that election cycle, or $6.6 million today.103 The Irish Democrat condemned him as the “English Candidate” for ties to London finance. Despite “spending money like water,” the campaign ended in personal disappointment.104 Morton lost in a close three-way race with a Greenback candidate, although he polled ahead of the national Republican ticket in a difficult cycle.105 That same year, Morton canvassed Wall Street for contributions on behalf of Conkling’s presidential ambitions. Then in 1878, Levi Morton again ran for Congress with the full backing of the machine at the height of its power.106 He was finally elected in a contest that he personally characterized as a referendum on “sound currency” and “honest payment [of national debt] in gold.”107 Opponents put it more directly: “he wants to go to Congress to represent his firm.”108 That kind of charge, however, obscured the reality that Morton’s firm was the party, or at least part of its most prominent faction.

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Morton remained a Stalwart in good standing to the end. He paid the highest rate of assessment ($5,000 or $124,000 today) and deferred to Conkling’s leadership even after established with his own political base.109 In 1880, Morton was appointed chair of the national party’s finance committee with the task of leveraging the Republican advantage on Wall Street to the greatest extent possible. During that election, he declined prestige-laden nominations because they would have placed Stalwarts at a disadvantage in intraparty disputes; for example, Morton reluctantly passed on a vice presidential nomination. James Garfield, the presidential nominee, would not guarantee patronage concessions to Conkling, who preferred his prote´ge´ become Treasury secretary. Unfortunately, the coveted Treasury appointment was vetoed by western silver Republicans, Midwestern inflationists, and manufacturing interests. Morton was instead offered the naval portfolio. Conkling again forced him to withdraw, this time even after he had formally accepted.110 Despite personal setbacks, Morton’s commitment to Conkling and Stalwarts was unshaken until a decisive turning point in the balance of power within the national party. In 1881, Roscoe Conkling abruptly resigned from the U.S. Senate after losing a power struggle with the Garfield administration over control of patronage at the New York Custom House. This conflict at the onset of the Garfield administration between Conkling’s Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds, led by James Blaine, ended the careers of many party regulars in New York. Among the few who politically survived this collapse was Levi Morton.111 He did more than survive. He thrived, later becoming a U.S. senator, vice president, and governor. How did Morton manage to navigate party tensions so deftly? For one, he was shrewd. He recognized that factional acrimony had become a zero-sum game that might imperil his career. Thus, he distanced himself from the fight, literally, by accepting a diplomatic post as minister to France. “The position,” counseled George Bliss, “has been filled by men of standing as high in estimation of the country.” His partner also adroitly noted that, by accepting the place, “in many ways you could promote the interests of the firm. . . . It would improve our standing abroad far beyond the new position you name.”112 Back home in New York, Stalwarts, Half-Breeds, and civil service reformers battled over party committees, conventions, and “scratcher” campaigns.113 Levi Morton’s career thrived while other Stalwarts faltered because he enjoyed a vital institutional advantage in factional politics. By the 1880s,

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Figure 11. Roscoe Conkling and Thomas Platt: A Fragile Alliance. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Morton, Bliss and Company had become the principal source of financial services for Republican operatives, officeholders, military officials, and statesmen. The circulation of capital through the party, from personal finance to party fundraising, relied increasingly upon the firm. “Do you know any safe place where I can invest one thousand dollars?” Edward Sanborn, nephew to a Union general and himself a prominent Republican lawyer, was blunt in his appeal.114 Others, like Congressman Simeon Chittenden (Republican of New York), were subtler. In frequent correspondence with the banking partners, Chittenden wove queries about which railroad investments might receive the highest returns along with his own updates about the progress of silver bills in the House of Representatives.115

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Information is a valuable commodity in financial markets. Morton’s firm deftly managed its location at the intersection of party, government, and financial markets to maximum effect, recommending stocks and bonds to allies while counseling against unwise investments. With the firm’s institutional role properly understood, it should come as little surprise that Morton was a personal financial adviser to both Roscoe Conkling and James Blaine. In this capacity, Morton was among the few regularly communicating with both factional heads who refused to speak with each other.116 Despite long-standing association with Stalwarts, Morton had engaged Blaine of the Half-Breeds in a charm offensive by extending him personal loans and offering stock tips and investment advice.117 “You are quite at liberty to draw upon M.B.&Co.,” Morton’s partner informed Blaine shortly before he became the party’s presidential nominee in 1884. “We shall take care of your draft with pleasure.”118 Furthermore, with his unique position at the crossroads of finance and politics, Morton raised funds for national party committees. Notably, he did so in defiance of Conkling’s appeal for New York financiers to withhold campaign funds from Half-Breeds until they agreed to patronage concessions.119 Loss of control over factional capital was a crucial part of the Stalwart unraveling. “Our National Committee cannot raise money—you can—I want you to take hold and do it—not simply for the cause but for me.”120 So James Blaine pleaded with Levi Morton in the heat of the presidential election of 1884. On a personal level, Levi Morton loaned money to Blaine’s daughter, Margaret, while she was traveling through Paris on vacation (two months’ rent and “a little surplus”). Blaine and his Half-Breed faction rightly interpreted the magnanimous gesture as a personal olive branch from the Stalwart financier.121 To place the loan in context: Blaine and Conkling had long ceased to be on speaking terms, and their factions were furiously battling in a death match over party nominations for U.S. Senate and control over customhouse patronage at the port of New York. Working through intermediaries, Morton learned that Blaine was fully behind him and that he “was of too great service to the party” to suffer from longtime association with Stalwarts. At a time when Stalwart allies were losing their livelihoods, Morton was assured that “not a hair on his head will be touched.”122 After 1881, Conkling formally ended his officeholding career and abruptly cut off relations with several former lieutenants. This included spurning one-time confidants such as Alonzo Cornell, incumbent governor, and

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Chester Arthur, president. Despite severing those longtime ties, Conkling remained close with Morton, even as the financier-politician overtly gravitated toward the Half-Breeds faction. “Many sided as are you,” Conkling wrote to him in Paris, “you are not two faced.”123 It is possible the Stalwart chief was unaware of Morton’s increasing support of Blaine. However, while Morton had committed lesser public sins of factional disloyalty than either Cornell or Arthur, he had nonetheless accepted a diplomatic appointment from the hated Garfield administration against Conkling’s explicit “advice.” The Stalwart leader was notorious for ending relationships on lesser slights. The relationship between Conkling and Morton endured because it was still useful for both, the ailing boss and the rising star. Conkling went out of his way to maintain friendship with Morton, who was actively cultivating new allies to win a coveted prize: the U.S. Senate seat that Conkling himself had vacated. For his own reasons, Conkling sought to preserve his relationship with Morton. With the presidency out of reach and the old boss’s control of the party slipping, Conkling was keen on “retiring” from public life to build a personal fortune. “My heart is as much turned to money making as yours on country making,” he confided to Morton.124 Such a goal would require continued access to the financial expertise of Morton, Bliss and Company. As Morton’s political career took off, Conkling became a wealthy corporate lawyer; the former senator’s friends at the firm continued to manage his investment portfolio with careful attention. Morton, Bliss and Company also served as the platform for personal wealth accumulation coordinated by intrepid officeholders on their own initiative. Upon his death in 1886, Chester Arthur left behind an estate worth $124,160, or $3.3 million today, predominantly composed of railroad stocks and bonds purchased through the firm.125 The most striking case, again, is Roscoe Conkling. “I shall have a little money now, & if you know any good thing to do with it, I shall be glad to know it too,” wrote Conkling to Thomas Platt, his fellow U.S. senator.126 Platt’s meteoric rise in the state party during late 1870s, and his sudden entre´e into Conkling’s inner circle, has always puzzled historians.127 Correspondence makes plain that Thomas Platt’s arrival as Conkling’s intimate in 1877, and Platt’s controversial election to the U.S. Senate in 1881, was clearly intertwined with an arrangement in which he also served as Conkling’s personal money manager.128 “My Dear Mr. Platt,” wrote Conkling, “I have reasons for suggesting that you go (in your own way & right)

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to Mr. C.P.H. [Collis P. Huntington] and find out whether there is soon & certainly to be anything in C.P. [Central Pacific Railroad] which makes it a desirable purchase at the present market. If so, I would like to act, if you will still write and telegraph to me.” At certain moments, Conkling was practically giddy: “I hope you make a million.”129 In the Stalwart machine’s division of labor, Platt stayed abreast of speculative railroad stocks and purchased them on behalf of Conkling, his Senate colleague. Platt accomplished this with the aid of accounts, checks, and credit made available by Morton, Bliss and Company.130 The confluence of political alliance and investment reliance also made for an awkward disjuncture. In one letter, Conkling berates Platt as “touchingly childlike, bland, and witchingly guileless” for his dalliance with home state rivals. A mere several lines later, in a complete about-face, he thanks Platt for making complex investments on his behalf that he does not fully understand.131 In fact, Platt held Conkling in something like contempt due to his lack of respect for others.132 But Platt also served the same role as wealth manager for other important figures as well. Whitelaw Reid, owner of the New York Tribune, once demanded a refund from Platt because he was “guaranteed” quick profits on Aurora Railroad stock that never materialized.133 Indeed, use of the banking house by Republicans was so banal that party members used the firm’s foreign offices to withdraw money and secure valuables in safety deposit boxes when traveling across Europe. If travel funds ran low, officeholders could appeal to the firm to make up the difference as a courtesy to them and their family.134 The firm’s role as intermediary between personal wealth accumulation and policy making was made embarrassingly clear during the Cre´dit Mobilier scandal. At the height of outcry in 1873, led by expose´s in the New York Sun, the public learned that the Union Pacific Railroad and its construction subsidiary, the Cre´dit Mobilier, made stockholders of numerous congressmen in return for legislative support for subsidies and land grants. Congressional hearings revealed that Morton, Bliss and Company held Union Pacific shares on behalf of Republican officials, including $3,000 for James Patterson ($16,000 today), who was ultimately expelled from the U.S. Senate for corruption.135 The firm weathered the scandal by presenting itself as a neutral arbiter of business that simply connected buyers and sellers as they would any other clients. But it was clear from testimony that the brothers Oakes Ames and Oliver Ames, Jr., of the Union Pacific and also other railroad barons relied on the firm to distribute shares discreetly to

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members of Congress in both houses.136 Morton himself sat on the board of directors for the Union Pacific Railroad, acting as “virtual trustee for many investors, at home and abroad.”137 He once declined the company’s presidency. The firm also operated as official financial and transfer agents for the railroad company. Morton’s partner, George Bliss, had even generously gifted tens of thousands of dollars in Union Pacific stock to his own extended family in 1872.138 The Union Pacific Railroad was a political creation in its national charter and funding. Morton and his firm helped make that company and its political finance possible by operating as intermediary between party, government, and financial markets.

CONCLUSION Beyond control over the New York Custom House, economic windfalls from management of party capital or access to speculative investments were positive-sum benefits that could be widely distributed to allies. Coordinating the personal financial portfolios of prominent Republicans through Morton, Bliss and Company was one way for competitors such as James Blaine, Roscoe Conkling, and Levi Morton to engage with one another over the long term, even when their factional and policy interests diverged. Mutual profits were a compelling reason to come together, and to stay together. Not surprisingly, the quest for individual wealth and the party’s accumulation of capital was also a source of discord. The collapse and disintegration of the Stalwart faction, after all, was fundamentally about which personalities, and the factions behind them, would control patronage. Conkling’s political career thus ended in the early 1880s with an abruptness and acrimony comparable to a hostile takeover. Stalwart forces lost control over party markets. Rivals absorbed their remaining assets and purged the vanquished from party committees. In this crucial way, gilded spoils differed from their origins in the early period of mass politics. Party business involved a renovation in political and social relations. The scramble for antebellum patronage had largely meant competition for appointments to public office. Salaries were relatively modest. Appointees rotated out, or where thrown out, at the mercy of the election cycle or the collapse of a dominant faction. While rooted in control over public authority, party business was nevertheless buffered from many immediate electoral pressures. In some cases, the collapse of a faction might mean the dissolution of party business; however, the U.S.

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Express Company and Morton, Bliss and Company proved resilient. Recall that the Tammany banks explored in Chapter 1 disappeared so thoroughly they barely left a trace. By contrast, Stalwart business organizations survived political setbacks and grew in value. Persistence in control over gilded spoils proved a major advantage. From the wealth acquired through the political process, officeholders could make claims over private property rights. Of course, critics of the party system fiercely contested the legitimacy of gilded political fortunes, a topic covered in greater detail in Chapter 4. Both elite and grassroots reformers were deeply troubled by the simultaneous consolidation of monopoly in electoral politics and the corporate economy. The fact remains, however, that most party intrigue and wealth accumulation took place far from public view and without the knowledge of anyone but the participants. As this chapter’s opening vignette demonstrates, Roscoe Conkling once destroyed a rival, Reuben Fenton, by publicly reading unfavorable documents on the floor of the U.S. Senate.139 In its day, the tactic was widely regarded as a brutal move that could destroy reputations. But his own private correspondence, which survives in the archival collections of Morton and Platt, is evidence of business ties that he surely would have preferred were kept private. Not surprisingly, Conkling and Arthur both oversaw the destruction of personal papers.140 Would it have made a difference if details of financial alliances had been made public? Voters already had trouble following the confused causes and outcomes of factional disputes. It is hard to imagine they grasped the political implications of the corporate struggles those factions produced among investors and company managers. A deeper look at historical political behavior from the Gilded Age complicates our scholarly understanding of party formation. The root of politician-centered party theory in political science is the ambitious officeholder. But the scholarship treats office seekers’ desire to win higher office and their desire to build personal wealth as motives that stand awkwardly apart. For Stalwarts, the accumulation of wealth and power were one and the same. Meanwhile, we should not lose track of how the demands of policy seekers often require the construction of new institutions—by ambitious individuals—to foster alliances over policy and to cultivate meaningful relationships over time. Morton, Bliss and Company originated as a Stalwart firm. However, Levi Morton himself was able to transcend factional fault lines. His firm’s financial services became indispensable to the circulation of capital through the entire Republican Party rather than only a single faction.

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Without a financial brokerage house to mitigate factional warfare between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds, Levi Morton would not have been able to satisfy the appetites of Roscoe Conkling, Thomas Platt, James Blaine, and many others. Without the capitalist spoils won by the Conkling machine, which secured his firm’s competitive advantage, Morton would have had neither higher office nor great personal wealth. Morton, Bliss and Company was a patronage mill, a lobbying operation on monetary policy, and a bank for Republican officeholders, all rolled into one. And it was also a springboard for Morton to the second-highest office in the land. In the example of party business, the accumulation of property has a transcendental quality that links the fates of individuals and groups.



Can’t You Help Me in Gettin the Vacant Place for Me

Joseph B. Stillwaggon, Sep 4, 1875, Flushing Hon L. B. Prince1 Sir I was up to see denis burns.2 he can’t live over to day He sent for me an told me he should not live. as his time had come I have been in the habit of going to see him every weak. some times oftner, he has got nothing. as he has used all for medesson and he has got a large family help him to get this month pay if it is in your power this will mak his place vacant I am in need of something to as my papers will not give me a living,3 can’t you help me in gettin the vacant place for me, as you have a pull on them and as I have spent all that I had in politicks. and am left without anything to work on pleas answer and oblig. yours truly Joseph B. Stillwaggon.

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Partisan Poor Relief

PETTY OFFICEHOLDING: ANOTHER LOOK Scholars portray the spoils system as little more than a partisan bacchanalia fueled by electoral imperatives. Even the moniker is laden with knowing cynicism.1 The word “spoils” conjures up a vision of marauding pirates, much like those who star in Charles Tilly’s famous essay on the origins of state building.2 In our master narrative, James Garfield’s tragic assassination over a patronage dispute only sets the capstone to an embarrassing tradition. By the moral tone of nomenclature alone, historiography’s judgment is clear: spoilsmen were a “burlesque” upon republican government.3 Given the centrality of spoils to the birth of mass democracy in America, our understanding is oddly flat and uncomplicated. We know, for instance, that spoils connected party with government bureaucracy. Party leaders began placing loyalists in post offices, customhouses, and parks departments after the 1830s.4 Appointees were expected to perform vital election work and to finance campaign expenses through their labor and salaries. With the advent of universal white manhood suffrage, the resources of public administration were circulated through party organization to subsidize the costs of mass collective action. Under spoils, from the 1830s to the turn of the century, political parties were at their most “responsible.” In the political science sense of the term, parties commanded loyalty around a coherent set of issues and delivered on those commitments. And yet, there are problems with the received wisdom. Do we accept the assumption that spoils, in the form of appointments, remained virtually unchanged over the course of a half-century?5 The invented tradition outlasted careers, innumerable scandals, the Whig Party, and even secession. Historians do allow that the number of offices available for plunder grew

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after the Civil War by leaps and bounds, and so the excesses also grew in scale.6 Missing from this rather simplistic view, however, is any sense of how spoils may have transformed over time and adapted to particular contexts and shifting popular demands. Thus, scholars only mark two defining moments: the arrival of “rotation in office” in the 1830s, a beginning, and the triumph of civil service reform at the turn of the century, the end. But it should not be any grand revelation that petty officeholding under Chester Arthur was not the same as during the time of Andrew Jackson. What, then, can we learn about nineteenth-century democracy in America? The aim of this chapter is to foreground one unanticipated development that took hold within the late spoils system. By the Gilded Age, spoils had evolved the ancillary goal, alongside electoral victory, of protecting the vulnerable in society. Regular party organization embraced petty officeholding as a form of poor relief by offering what contemporaries called a “situation.” Party brokers directed a significant resource at their disposal— the power to appoint lower offices—toward mitigating the economic uncertainty and immiseration that arose from rapid growth of capitalist markets. Karl Polanyi observed in his classic, The Great Transformation, that rapid wealth accumulation also unleashes the kind of economic dislocation that sparks popular demand for social protection. Partisan poor relief was a distinctly American type of nineteenth-century Polanyian reaction to the Industrial Revolution’s unmooring of society. Political loyalty remained the defining criteria for nominations and appointments, as it was since the Age of Jackson. Beyond this basic threshold, an expectation became widespread that the needy partisan ought to be “taken care of.”7 The welfare of the politically connected poor, and their immediate circle of friends and family, was strongly taken into consideration as part of the party’s right to distribute office. Partisan poor relief also gives us an alternative vantage to ambition theory, which political scientists use to understand party formation. The theory’s basic premise is that political behavior is best explained by how individuals pursue progressively higher and more powerful offices. A mayor wants to be a member of Congress. Senators want to be president.8 However, there is a wrinkle. The theory assumes an equivalence of higher and lower offices. Clearly, the abject poverty common to nineteenth-century petty office seeking is not what scholars like Joseph Schlesinger or John Aldrich had in mind when formulating axioms about party formation. Well-propertied party leaders could bide their time, carefully strategize

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which offices to pursue, and turn down offices. Roscoe Conkling, for instance, passed up two nominations to the Supreme Court, including one as chief justice, because he was more interested in being secretary of state or president. The vantage point from the bottom of the party system, by contrast, suggests that political actors were more concerned about survival or uplift than maximizing power or social honors. New York’s party system is instructive because regular organization was hegemonic across the period. In the decade after the Civil War, the spoils system in New York City alone expanded to include one in eight voters.9 Although I draw from the experience of Democrats, especially Tammany Hall, I predominantly focus on the Stalwart wing of the Republican Party, which has far less of a reputation for engaging in proto-welfare politics. Upon close examination, the Stalwart faction was in fact a model of partisan poor relief. New York was highly competitive in national elections after the war and boasted the largest bloc of electoral votes. Structured around federal patronage controlled by U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling, the Stalwarts dominated state politics between the collapse of the Tweed Ring in 1871 and Conkling’s resignation from the U.S. Senate in 1881.10 As Martin Shefter has noted, Conkling led a middle-class machine populated in its upper ranks by white-collar professionals, the rural petite bourgeoisie, particularly centered in canal and mill towns, corporate managers, and finance capitalists. Leveraging patronage as a discipling force, the Stalwart faction cultivated a popular base among native-born workers, farmers, and Union veterans who brought Republicans victory in a Democratic-leaning state.11 From the beginning, Republican critics like George William Curtis forcefully argued that Stalwarts had devolved the party into a “mere conspiracy of officeholders” that bred corruption and administrative bloat.12 Despite vocal opposition, the Stalwart faction exercised significant influence over appointments in every presidential administration from Ulysses Grant to Chester Arthur. The bulk of evidence in this chapter is drawn from the archival materials of James B. Butler, chief of appointments under Charles J. Folger, the U.S. Treasury secretary from 1881 to 1884. The president’s second choice for that cabinet position, Folger was a longtime ally of Conkling and Arthur who ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York in 1882. During that bitter episode recounted in Chapter 2, Folger stripped the party nomination away from incumbent governor Alonzo Cornell, who was also a Stalwart. Cornell had defied Conkling’s attempt to return to the U.S. Senate after his resignation

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over a patronage dispute with President Garfield. Conkling expected to be easily returned to office as a symbolic rebuke to Garfield. Instead, the Stalwart boss found himself unseated by the state legislature as Governor Cornell openly contested leadership of the machine.13 James Butler found himself at the center of the factional maelstrom. He managed Secretary Folger’s doomed gubernatorial campaign, the last gasp of the Stalwarts, while fulfilling official government duties in staffing the Treasury Department. The archival collection—previously untapped, to my knowledge—has the virtue of illustrating the complex links between state and federal politics during the Gilded Age. The Butler Papers offer a truly intriguing window into a critical juncture in time when federal civil service rules were slowly being introduced but were actively fought and poorly institutionalized. By examining correspondence and party records, I demonstrate that office seekers made systematic and explicit needs-based claims for relief, citing bankruptcy, business slump, old age, disability, health crisis, family dependents, personal expenses, and extreme hardship. Nearly all manner of misfortune was cited, even alcoholism. Poor relief was hardly the sole or even main purpose of spoils, to be sure. In fact, the vast postwar growth of public authority produced a whole spectrum of powerful tools to build coalitions and reward loyalty. Legislatures passed a bonanza of charters, franchises, and subsidies for allies amid a flurry of “gifts” of company shares or one-time “legal fees.” Politically well-connected lawyers gained control of significant commercial property through appointment to court receiverships. Placement on corporate boards gave individual party leaders favorable terms to speculate in railroad, telegraph, and express companies; in turn, they guaranteed rates or secured contracts. For urban politicos, real estate development became the favored means of earning quick windfalls. Fernando Wood, Boss Tweed, Chester Arthur, and Thomas Murphy were just as much realtors and developers as politicians at certain moments in their careers. Partisan poor relief took root amid a flowering of spoils. Capitalist spoils like directing city deposits to friendly banks, discussed in Chapter 1, or control over Treasury bond sales, explored in Chapter 2, allowed political entrepreneurs to wield economic capital. By contrast, the spoils-as-welfare variant I explore here was more conventional, relying almost exclusively on appointments within public administration. Banality should not suggest inconsequence. Rather, the phenomenon deserves our special attention because partisan relief became a common means-tested form of wealth

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redistribution for the politically connected poor. Offices were a type of “credit,” in leaders’ own words, upon which they could draw at will.14 The practice ensured that public property—a democratic commons—patterned the fabric of social life during a time of great social and economic turmoil. In this way, the spoils system was one part of the multiple welfare states that served distinct populations before the New Deal, whose lineages scholars have uncovered in land policy, veteran pensions, and decentralized public assistance.15 Partisan poor relief was not philanthropy, although it was periodically dressed up in charitable terms. The practice arose because the midcentury revolution in mass politics made parties susceptible to pressure from below. A major factor was not just that the poor were electorally enfranchised, but when. The sequencing of mass suffrage occurred before widespread proletarianization.16 When the industrial age arrived in haste, entrenched political parties were the only encompassing organizations present on the scene that were at least semiresponsive to popular needs. By carving up the democratic commons and redistributing public offices widely through state capture, party leaders took action in a way that accommodated existing property relations instead of upending them. Armed with the ballot, and little else, lower-class voters found a way to negotiate with party leaders who were seeking an electoral edge. The practice thrived because it was an electoral asset that was malleable to the benefit of enterprising party leaders. Spoils helped to win elections by drafting an army of laborers into the public sphere to arouse support for preferred candidates and party tickets. Importantly, the material relief acquired through the spoils system provided only temporary and exclusionary assistance. Part of the very reason why spoils proved to be an effective means of political mobilization was that parties offered a coveted but inherently limited benefit. In this way, the pressing demand for social protection cemented party regularity into formidable political monopolies that, by the 1880s, even the staunchest of partisans had come to resent.

SPOILS HIGH AND LOW The spoils system was among the most important extra-constitutional institutions of nineteenth-century government. It is indeed hard to imagine democratization in America without spoils. At least, there could very well have been an alternative trajectory—but there was not. Despite this central

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role, scholarship tends to view spoils as a mere sideshow that best serves to illuminate other questions. The allure of patronage played a key a role in political professionalization, serving as the material basis for the decline of “gentlemen” who dominated the First Party System.17 The historian Mark Summers suggests that maturation of spoils contributed indirectly to midcentury disunion by fostering cynicism and expediency within the growing sectional rift.18 Scholars of Reconstruction show how federal patronage came under attack because of its use to establish a fledgling multiracial coalition in the new south.19 Political scientists frame the struggle over spoils as a proxy battle over the separation of powers; for example, the Hayes and Garfield administrations battled Congress for control over executive appointments. In hindsight, the conflict prefigured the presidency-centered system and polarization that would later develop during the twentieth century.20 Above all, we think not so much about spoils, per se, as about how they came to an end. The movement for civil service reform is widely explained as a formative stop on the path to the modern administrative state. Professionalization of the civil service and the development of expertise endowed the state with capacity to address a host of new social problems, from rotten food and land conservation to workplace relations and regulating the business cycle.21 Stripping appointment and promotion powers away from congressional party barons fostered the bureaucratic autonomy that we associate with contemporary governance. And yet, while these perspectives are important, a fuller portrait must place spoils at the center of inquiry rather than the periphery. One obvious way to start is by foregrounding the lived experience of petty officeholders. Surely these experiences have something to tell us about popular government in the nineteenth century. If the approach sounds obvious, apparently it is not. Very few studies in American political development look at grassroots officeholders.22 We do know, for instance, the Second Party System placed public office within the reach of commoners. Federalists and Jeffersonians alike had merely transplanted old ideals of elite public service, substituting the well-propertied “aristocracy of talent” for that of birthright.23 By the 1830s, however, rotation in office served as vanguard for a revolution in political culture. When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled Jacksonian America, he observed that part of what distinguished the United States from Europe was “the vast number of ordinary men who occupy public stations.”24 Glen Altschuler and Stuart Blumin refer to this

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structure of feeling as the Rude Republic, which spun egalitarian vernacular together with a culture of “blatant office-seeking.”25 Put another way, public honors and trusts were democratized, although this occurred unevenly according to place, race, and gender. The spoils system is a fertile place to look for new insights into nineteenth-century democratization. Here I do not mean the doings of presidents, cabinet members, senators, governors, or mayors who worked the “high” spoils system. Peak actors already figure prominently in studies of the genre. Too often, Ulysses S. Grant’s deference to senatorial courtesy, Roscoe Conkling’s 1877 Rochester speech denouncing reform, or George Washington Plunkitt’s soliloquy on “patriotism” is taken as proxy for the spoils system writ large. The one-sided conflation is easy to make. Statesmen leave behind a trail of documentation; even leaders who deliberately destroyed their papers to avoid scrutiny remain central characters in historiography.26 Under the best of circumstances, it is difficult to locate records about ordinary people and to reconstruct their lives. And thus, with few exceptions, the history of the spoils system is overwhelmingly a history of high spoils.27 By contrast, I am more interested in the concerns of those who populated the low spoils system: the rodmen, street sweepers, messengers, clerks, weighers, inspectors, assessors, washroom attendants, and doormen. These are the obscure officeholders who sustained party regularity when it was at its most disciplined in American political development.28 Nineteenthcentury parties were decentralized and parochial. Yet, we rarely attempt to listen to the voices of rank-and-file ward heelers and other hangers-on who were active on the local scene. This is an unfortunate oversight because lowly political actors made up the party bedrock. “Can you not get me some position in Washington,” inquired an office seeker named John H. Hansen to his party broker, “in which I can render some service to my country for a small living remuneration?”29 Unfortunately, we fail to see Hansen and other petty officeholders in the way they saw themselves: as small “r” republicans looking for a way to get by doing the people’s work. If our approach to the study of democratic officeholding begins from below, rather than on high, we must admit to knowing remarkably less than first appears. This is a shame because it was the party bedrock that undertook the “dull and toilsome” labor that sustained electoral democracy in the mass period.30 These were the individuals who went on leaves of absence to participate in the election canvass, in some cases traveling

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hundreds of miles to return home to mobilize old friends and neighbors. While the party typically paid for wagons to carry voters to the polls, it was petty officeholders who hired and drove them through the rain and muck, sometimes fronting their own money.31 Lowly party workers organized the speaker circuit, carrying a nominee’s message to isolated corners of the state. These uncelebrated figures, largely ignored by scholars, met face to face with voters and pressed party tickets into their hands (Roscoe Conkling, by contrast, infamously refused to be touched by voters). When necessary, many of these same petty officeholders performed the unsavory task of recruiting “floaters”—voters marketing their ballot for price—with small bills, cheap cigars, or a shot of whiskey. Respected leaders publicly disavowed such vulgar activities even as they depended upon them for success. Notably, it was the officeholding crowd that often first identified and recommended “worthy” candidates for positions. Referrals might pass through two or three hands of progressively more powerful leaders until a case was ultimately decided; or, if unlucky, a person might land in purgatory “on file.” Political leaders, in turn, relied upon the grassroots for ongoing support, including for party taxes (“assessments”) to finance campaigns and for local intelligence about the electorate’s mood. The bedrock of partisan officeholders was also useful to whip up excitement when needed, for example, to pass local resolutions in support of an incumbent administration or to sustain a controversial party line. One way to appreciate the significance of petty officeholders is how they suffered the blunt of scorn heaped upon the day’s strong party system. To the press, spoilsmen were the “political army,” the “shiny hat brigade,” “paint eaters,” the “customhouse gang,” “hirelings,” “politicians of the lower order,” and “plunderers.”32 Or without poetry, they were simply “placemen,” the mirror opposite of statesmen. Press descriptions shared a generic view of the officeholding crowd as anonymous and interchangeable, with no fixed moral compass. Meanwhile, each party or faction insinuated its opponent’s followers were incompetent, or worse, venal. The reputation of “vulgar politicians” was so bad that clever entrepreneurs embraced the black mark as a vehicle of distinction to rally voters against well-propertied rivals. George William Curtis of the Civil Service Reform Association found little redeeming in “the poor old women who scrub the floors of public buildings, and the pages who run errands, and the messengers who sit at office-doors, and the coal-heavers who feed fires.” He found their dependence on political favors rather

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Figure 12. The party bedrock: Tammany street sweepers, circa 1871. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

than individual merit to be pathetic.33 The merit system, per the Social Darwinism that was all the rage in reform circles, would finally expunge the public administration of inferior people.34 Cartoonists found a ready target in the chorus of spoilsmen they depicted surrounding the party boss. Rank-and-file officeholders were drawn in rags, often portrayed in overtly racialized stereotypes meant to induce revulsion and mobilize discriminatory attitudes. The transactional nature of politics was never far away. For instance, a spoilsman would be drawn with ballots stuffed in his pockets and a hand extended outward, as if to suggest the anticipation of rewards.35 Cold War historians like Richard Hofstadter cemented this cartoonish outlook in a seminal essay, “The Spoilsmen: An Age of Cynicism.” Hofstadter raised a litany of objections to the “villainous practices of orthodox politics,” relying upon tropes from the period’s self-nominated “best men” about the corruption of public life.36

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When elite reformers complained about the “excesses” of universal manhood suffrage, spoilsmen were the living, breathing proof of the supposed moral decline in government. Scholars today fundamentally reject this view, which was laden thick with upper-class bias and racist animus. Attacks by the day’s reformers and, later, the Dunning School, were transparent proxy battles over the political empowerment of the so-called wrong groups: newly freed slaves, Catholics, immigrants, and the poor.37 Progressive Era caricatures of “bossism” also paid little attention to the mass of followers, implying voters and lesser politicos had no independent will of their own.38 Only in the 1960s did a wave of revisionists produce a few notable works that attempted to understand popular support for machine politics as anything beyond seductive manipulation.39 Most notable in the genre was Alexander Callow, who offered the first social history of Tammany Hall. For Callow, supporters of the machines were not dupes. Popular forces rallied to party leaders for reasons of collective ethnic or religious protection.40 The classic, negative view of the party bedrock persists even today, despite the mainstreaming of critical perspectives in the academy. That is unfortunate because the master narrative of the spoils system—that of endemic corruption, waste, and decadence—is still the one created by the victorious civil service reformers with their flurry of publications, expose´s, and anti-machine vigilance committees. One dissatisfied reformer writing in 1877 put it bluntly: we “do not believe the party exists for the purpose of giving a few workers fat offices.”41 In an obscure essay, John W. Pratt, one of the 1960s revisionist historians, offered an alternative framing. He contended that gilded party machines like Tammany Hall were Keynesianism avant la lettre, with expansionary spending regimes and active labor market policies.42 However, Pratt and others never further explored the tantalizing idea. The prospect of Keynesian precursors in the organization of machine politics is worth revisiting. Unlike Tammany, Stalwart Republicans advocated laissezfaire prescriptions like a sharp contraction of the money supply and the quick resumption of gold specie. However, even if Stalwart Republicans and Swallowtail Democrats did not support pro-labor public policy, party leaders may have still advanced social protection through the development of their internal party structures. This external and internal disjuncture is important. Within their organizational form, the Stalwarts were a party built upon liberal notions of spending for relief, a carryover from Whiggish

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antecedents that celebrated an imagined community’s organic social order.43 Relatedly, many civil service reformers who advocated for “the abolition of unnecessary elective and appointive offices” did so precisely because they opposed how the spoils system decommodified labor. The signature feature of social welfare policy, per Gøsta Esping-Anderson, is “when a service is rendered by matter of right, and when a person can maintain a livelihood without reliance on the [private] market.”44 During the Gilded Age, government became the employer of last resort. It was precisely this partisan right to office that elite reformers sought to uproot. President Rutherford B. Hayes broke with previous tradition when he insisted that public administration be “free from partisan control, and organized strictly on a business basis.”45 An 1877 Evening Post editorial clarifies the issue as reformers understood it at the time. “Placing the public service on a sound business basis” meant eliminating “the assumption that the government owes certain persons a living, and should furnish it to them.”46 Those “certain persons” were petty officeholders promoted through party networks. That same year, the reform-inspired Hayes administration fired a number of “useless and costly deputy collectors” at the port of New York, including Corporal James Tanner, who lost both his legs at the Second Battle of Bull Run.47 By targeting a politically networked disabled veteran, the Hayes firings struck directly at the prevailing logic of partisan poor relief, one that Grant had not only supported but personally advocated.48 Public backlash overtook the reformers—this was over a decade before veterans’ pensions were widely available—and Tanner was promptly reinstated.49 Still, battle lines were drawn for the next decade.50 Was there in fact a party right to office? If so, were party leaders justified in framing that officeholding right in terms of relief? The Tanner affair illustrates how Social Darwinism and laissez-faire were the rhetorical pedestals upon which elite reformers worked to fundamentally reorganize the party system.51 The reformer’s goal was to impose austerity measures upon the politically connected poor, which was equated with a return to the principles of budgetary “economy” and “good government.” The movement for civil service reform did enjoy support from some working-class quarters, as will be explained in Chapter 4. Radicals like Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty, and the United Labor Party candidate for New York mayor in 1886, saw regular party organization as a cause of high rents and low wages. But voices like that of George were

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relatively marginal to a cause driven by professionals and businessmen. Indeed, from the perspective of spoils as poor relief, civil service reform looks a lot like a pattern well established in scholarship on the American welfare state. After a period of expansion, property owners mobilize to contract public rolls. Relief is withdrawn, pushing individuals into the private labor market to either sink or swim.52

PETTY OFFICE SEEKING Despite open derision, the competition for petty office was fierce. Office seekers angling for consideration placed exceptional demands upon party leaders. Looking back on the first year and a half of his presidency, Benjamin Harrison estimated that he spent nearly a quarter of his time each day managing petitions.53 The cartoonist Kin Hubbard captured the anarchic spirit of internal party labor markets. In the “Frenzied Plum Hunters,” he portrayed a stampede of men with bowler hats moving toward a door labeled “Plunder Committee.” In another vivid depiction of the officeseeking crowd, men and women huddle anxiously around the door of the New York Custom House. A sign reads: “no applicants for office received this day. This rule is imperative. Thos Murphy, Col[lector].”54 One man sacked by Murphy in 1870 explained, “all New York humanity gravitated toward the Custom-House.” It was not just merchants there on business but “everyone who was fit for nothing elsewhere, and so thought he deserved a job in the Custom-House.”55 The geographic pool of applicants was not just city or statewide. On New York Harbor, the entire country was present through congressional influence. With a reserve army of candidates knocking at the door, nearly all of the serious applicants for office already fulfilled basic imperatives of party service. “The woods are full of worthy cases of a similar character,” explained Thomas C. Platt, the so-called easy boss of the Republican machine, when spurning the advances of one petitioner.56 Anyone and everyone promoted candidates. Even Henry Ward Beecher, Brooklyn’s famous Congregationalist minister, advocated political employment on behalf of clergy who needed a reliable source of income.57 In this landscape of competition, additional criteria like material need emerged as one way to distinguish worthy office seekers from the crowd. The air of desperation was in part because there was no set path to success for any particular application. Office seekers had to be vigilant and

Figure 13. The officeseeking crowd assembles to petition Thomas Murphy. There was good reason to inquire about vacancies. As collector, Murphy made 338 removals within a year. His predecessor, Moses Grinnell, had removed another 510 workers during roughly the same tenure in office. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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even crass about self-promotion. It was not always clear where to apply or whom to address with credentials. The question was not minor. The sole mission of the Jay Commission, appointed by President Hayes in 1877, was to investigate corruption at the New York Custom House. Yet, the commission received a flood of would-be applicants promoting themselves for any vacancies that might arise. A few cases were even referred to the Treasury secretary for consideration.58 It was far less expensive to send a letter—or more likely, several—than to appeal for an audience in person at the nation’s capital or wherever a party broker held court. However, the challenge was to locate a figure well ensconced enough in party networks to actually help. “Allow me to say that without influence a man remains in status quo here,” explained Frederick G. Kissam, a worker in the New York Custom House. “With influence & friendship he goes up.”59 Influence was the intangible coin of the party realm whose importance was assumed by all. But its value was ever fluctuating and liable to be placed in question by shifting events at the polls or by the uncertain outcomes of factional disputes. A person of “influence” was generally someone who could deliver on promises of employment. By the 1880s, party brokers looking for a ready excuse to avoid making a commitment could blame new reform policies for the obstacle, even when they turned around and offered that same position to another loyalist.60 This was the golden age of Herman Melville’s “confidence man,” when face-to-face relationships were replaced by abstract impersonal constructions of “reputation.”61 Many aspiring politicians rallied supporters to their cause based upon little more than hot air. As one middling broker warned leaders up the party hierarchy, some local politicos “are of a class, generally, that you cannot afford to listen to.”62 Promises cost nothing. On the other hand, job prospects might induce party service. Even seemingly respectable public figures dispensed promises far more liberally across their constituencies than could possibly be fulfilled. When a patron overplayed his hand, he would undertake a letter-writing campaign to allies far and wide looking for open places, calling in favors and bartering with this or that advantage. Please help “relieve me of this embarrassment with Ashman,” wrote one party middleman. “I told him that he would be appointed, and he at once paid his assessment and spent all his months salery [sic] and now is out of employment.”63 This, of course, was the broader context for the assassination of James Garfield by Charles Guiteau. Betrayal on promises or even misunderstandings could very well

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precipitate acts of revenge. It was not unheard of for disappointed office seekers to physically accost would-be party brokers with a pistol or knife.64 One of the reasons why party newspapers thrived covering byzantine factional strife was that countless readers scanned the articles for any hint of how the political winds might shift employment prospects. When an editor or journalist speculated about a forthcoming appointment to a post rich with patronage to dispense, the nominee-in-waiting could expect a deluge of mail and requests for personal audiences. Appeals were of a genre: the missives were full of congratulations that a would-be nominee’s talents were finally being recognized. The writer might then transition into wistful reminiscence of shared youth, inquire about the health of a family member, or touch upon any shared point of reference. At last, the applicant would finally get to the point, asking to not be forgotten when the time came to hire staff. When James B. Butler was named chief of appointments under Treasury Secretary Charles J. Folger, the upwardly mobile country lawyer was swamped with entreaties from Peekskill, New York. Hometown friends and acquaintances learned from word of mouth or the paper that a local boy had made good, earning appointments out west before landing in Washington. Old “friends” were not about to let the chance pass to ride on Butler’s coattails.65 Despite rampant nepotism and the need for ingratiation, petty office seekers also sought places from those with whom they lacked any deep personal connection. As the electorate grew, weak social ties stretched through increasingly impersonal layers of party bureaucracy. Apologias for taking advantage of “slight acquaintance” were counterweighted with the most dramatic tales of woe or herculean dedication to party service.66 All the same, it was likely to blunt the effectiveness of an appeal if not accompanied by an endorsement from an association or referral from recognized leaders. Among New York Republicans, for example, local chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic had a direct conduit into the Stalwart machine, which made “The Bloody Shirt” an effective means of electoral mobilization.67 Brokers also paid attention to the resolutions of political clubs and party committees adopted in favor of patronage, many of which were highly detailed in their requests of particular positions for members.68 Chester Arthur reportedly said that he did not care if an applicant was the devil incarnate so long as he came endorsed by the party’s Central Committee.69 Some evidence suggests that rural nominees to federal office required a member of the congressional delegation “to his back,” whereas

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local political clubs were sufficient for those from New York City.70 Given the need for strong political ties, recommendations were also routinely cosigned by numerous politicians and dignitaries so as to increase the applicant’s claim to be representing an important constituency. It is easy to forget that patronage appointments were once an important expression of local representation in government. Editors of party newspapers would also flex their muscles by making demands on behalf of referrals, including themselves. Michael Scanlon, editor of the Irish Republic, urged appointment of his wife to a clerkship in the Treasury Department. His paper was one of the few among the Fenians in America to throw support behind the Republican Party. Now, he pleaded, “I am in Washington with a very large family not earning enough to keep them in bread.” He later landed a clerkship.71 Hugh Hastings of the Albany Commercial Advertiser wrote James Butler at the Treasury no less than seven times pressing the case of Hannah M. Whitney for a clerical position. Hastings was a longtime newspaperman and lobbyist who intervened routinely in patronage decisions. With his reputation as a transactional Republican, he had few qualms about working with anyone in power, including William M. Tweed in his heyday, when the Boss had helped secure his paper subsidies. In this particular case, according to Hastings, Whitney was trying to support a large widowed family. In letter after letter, he implored in increasingly assertive terms, “Poor Ms Whitney she worries me once or twice a week with a letter. Take pity on the poor girl and find something for her to do.” Only after Butler finally relented and agreed to hire the woman did Hastings confess he had never personally met Whitney, but had known her parents years ago.72 Unlike Hugh Hastings, few people were in a place to dictate terms. Only rarely was an appointment deemed a “political necessity.”73 On the other hand, the less secure a claim, the more an applicant felt obligated to promise something of value in return. One woman offered a bribe of $200 for any appointment worth $50 a month or more (the offer was ignored).74 More typically, the usual transaction was based upon an ability to deliver a quantifiable bloc of votes. At least one applicant appears to have leveraged sex, or was coerced.75 The best time to secure a promise was during the canvass before the election, when representatives of a nominee traveled the state or district to solicit support from local party committees.76 In some cases it was difficult to evaluate how genuine the turnout operation truly was, for instance, when unknown farm hands claimed the ability to turn

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out hundreds of rural votes, or if urban ward heelers would be true to their word. If necessary, boasts were investigated by the closest known contacts of an inquiring party agent. One extreme example demonstrates the format of how these appeals worked. Mrs. A. W. Doty, desperate to have her son, Jacob, appointed to a clerkship, claimed that her out-of-state letter-writing campaign to family in New York had “influenced some two or three hundred votes.”77 Experienced hands would have easily recognized the extravagant claim was driven by desperation.

THE SITUATION During the Gilded Age, people who could not find a better life elsewhere looked to the party for aid. That material reality was reflected in popular vocabulary. Individuals who sought lower office did not make an appeal for plunder or booty in the fashion implied by critics of the day or even historians.78 Instead, office seekers pursued what they called a situation. The particular “situation” desired by rank-and-file partisans was rather modest. Candidates wanted a better life, maintenance of the status quo, or some manner of cushion to deal with difficult personal circumstances that would enable them to establish a “competency.” In the self-understanding of ordinary Americans, competence meant an ability to sustain a viable household, and therefore required a basic measure of material independence.79 Such patronage cases were called “objects of sympathy” by New York leaders like Folger and were distinct from appointments based on individual merit, political necessity, or nepotism alone.80 The practice was so ingrained that party brokers who contested certain choices for office would sometimes do so on the grounds that needy cases were in fact fraudulently portraying their problems.81 Partisan poor relief had the effect of transforming entire government offices into places of refuge, or in the words of one critic, “an asylum of nonentities.” If the beating heart of the country’s spoils system was the New York Custom House, one clerk who worked there described his own office in the Debenture Department as filled with “incapable fogies of all ages, the mentally lame, halt, and blind.”82 However, the clerk’s tenor obscures how the middle class very much also relied on patronage generally, and the Custom House, specifically, for succor. William Speiden was a veteran of Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan. He traveled the globe, but later

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in life fell on hard times, declaring bankruptcy in 1868. If he had not received an appointment to a clerkship in 1870, through the intervention of Levi P. Morton, his wife Marion explained, there would have been a “change in our living that would have been one of many privations.”83 It was a common refrain among clerks that “a gentleman by birth and education, at one time in affluent circumstances, but like so many others, in these times, is now depended upon a [political] salary for our support.”84 At salaries of two thousand to five thousand dollars per year, depending on pay class, clerks employed by the federal government could make credible claims to membership in the middle class. As shown in Table 2, the vast majority of the positions at the center of the spoils system in New York at the Custom House offered considerable material stability. Nearly all positions were far above the average annual earnings of $439 for non-farm workers in 1874, and $1.32 per day. Watchmen on the docks earned $3 per day, which was 60 cents more than the national average for skilled engineers.85 These were jobs worth getting and keeping, if you could. The same was true even for manual laborers. Push factors were the major difference for applicants at the bottom of the spoils system. The typical appeal for poor relief was frankly expressed in “extreme need,” and was followed by a detailed account of hardship: the lumber industry was slackening; the liquor business had collapsed after a panic; workplace injury or wartime disfigurement left a worker unable to perform manual labor; an illness led to job loss or a lifelong handicap, like deafness; an estate was inherited in “reduced condition”; an individual was heavily indebted; or a brother was recovering from alcoholism.86 The common theme was that temporary or uncertain employment prospects made it impossible to raise a family, or to get through a season without help.87 Opportunity for personal uplift was also a factor in appointments. “Sir, I am a poor boy,” wrote Willie Tandy to his U.S. senator, “but I am ambitious. I desire to obtain some position where I shall be profited not only pecuniarily but also where I shall meet with advantages which shall qualify me for future duties.”88 Tandy and many other petty office seekers pursued a political “situation” largely out of lack of opportunity elsewhere in the community. Leonidas C. Houk, a congressman from east Tennessee, explained one sympathy case to Butler in terms that neatly sum up the logic of partisan poor relief:

Table 2. Middle-Class Spoils: Compensation at the New York Custom House, 1874

Official Position Assistant Collector Deputy Storekeeper Deputies Deputy Castle Garden Cashier Assistant Cashier Clerks Clerks Clerks Clerks Clerks Clerks Clerks Segar Inspector Segar Clerk Segar Clerk Segar Clerk Segar Clerk Segar Clerk Segar Clerk Segar Clerk Segar Clerk Segar Clerk Messengers Opener & Packer Messengers Messengers Messengers Messengers Messengers Messengers Supervisor Custom House Asst. Supervisor Custom House Ushers Engineer Watchmen Carpenter Porters Porters Firemen

Number of Employees

Annual Salary and Pay Rate (1874 Dollars)

Salary and Pay (2016 Dollars)

1 1 13 1 1 1 2 1 3 1 13 12 39 1 1 43 1 40 52 49 43 2 23 4 1 8 1 2 41 1 1 1 1 4 1 8 1 2 16 5

5,000 5,000 3,000 2,000 2,000 3,500 4,000 3,500 3,000 2,800 2,500 2,400 2,000 2,000 1,900 1,800 1,700 1,600 1,500 1,400 1,200 1,100 1,000 1,000 1,000 900 850 840 800 600 300 2,400 1,600 1,200 1,500 1,000 3.50 (per day) 900 720 720

107,729 107,729 64,637 43,091 43,091 75,410 86,183 75,410 64,637 60,328 53,864 51,710 51,710 51,710 40,937 38,782 36,628 34,473 32,318 30,164 28,855 23,700 23,700 23,700 23,700 19,391 18,314 18,098 17,236 12,927 6,463 51,710 34,473 28,855 32,318 23,700 75.41 19,391 15,513 15,513

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Table 2. (Continued)

Official Position Messengers Watchmen Scrubber Storekeeper Castle Garden Asst. Storekeeper Castle Garden Inspectors Captain Nightwatch Lieutenant Nightwatch Night Inspectors Inspector Long Island Measurer of Marble Weighers Weighers’ Clerks Weighers’ Foreman Assistant Weighers Temporary Assistant Weighers Gaugers

Number of Employees

Annual Salary and Pay Rate (1874 Dollars)

Salary and Pay (2016 Dollars)

3 20 1 1 1 292 1 2 144 4 1 19 19 19 77 49 9

1.50 (per day) 3.00 (per day) 45.00 (per month) 4 (per day) 1,000 4.00 (per day) 1,600 1,200 3.00 (per day) 730 2,000 2,500 1,500 1,500 1,400 0.40 (per hour) 2,000

32.32 64.64 1,316 86 23,700 86.81 34,473 28,855 64.64 15,728 43,091 53,864 32,318 32,318 30,164 8.62 51,710

Source: List of Salaries of Custom House Workers, December 24, 1874, Folder 8: Report on Treasury on Custom House, Arthur Papers, N-YHS.

I have a friend who narrowly escaped being a great man, but on the principle that “a miss is as good as a mile,” he is consequently a “poor devil,” and while a perfect gentleman of good habits both to morals and industry, he is “hard up,” and only asks for a “place” as a “watchman,” or “messenger.” Now, can’t you give it to him? He has been a valuable friend to me personally, and without him the Republicans of our Ward in this city would be without a manager. If you can take care of him till the fall or winter he will prove himself worthy in every particular.89 Specific details aside, Houk’s style of appeal for patronage jobs was the norm. The congressman advanced a needs-based argument and stressed urgency on behalf of an office seeker’s entitlement to a situation. Even if the position was fuel for Houk’s political machine, the appeal suggests that self-promotion by many lowly spoilsmen was out of sheer necessity.

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In this vein, by far the most common kind of plea for partisan poor relief was made on behalf of women left by their husbands or widows who were the sole breadwinner for a large family.90 One letter demonstrates how this pattern sounded: “It is a case, I say in confidence to you, truly a case of destitution.” Here, Catherine Bliss promoted the case of Kate Maguire, who she claimed as a friend. This was no random appeal. Catherine happened to be the wife of George Bliss, one of the most politically well-connected lawyers in New York, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and James Butler’s social acquaintance.91 Catherine lobbied Butler with the news that Maguire was alone responsible for housing and feeding her aged father and sick mother. “Can you help[?]” Bliss pleaded. “All that is desired is any position you can find for her.” She was hired to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at $1.25 per day.92 Another example is found in the pleas of Daniel Webster Flagler, a former brigadier general who fought at Gettysburg. Flagler petitioned on behalf of his late West Point comrade’s widow, an “invalid” with daughters. “Hers is the hardest case I have ever known,” he wrote.93 Officeholding spoils presented women with novel opportunities while also reinforcing gendered notions of family and caregiving. Women first entered the federal workforce during labor shortages created by the Civil War, fostering what historian Jessica Ziparo has called a “grand experiment.”94 However, the Stalwart machine demanded narrow criteria for women’s employment. Even women candidates without children of their own found it imperative to cite poverty-stricken siblings who needed care.95 Under some circumstances, relief was even transferable within a family. If an officeholder was dying or too infirm to actually perform the work required, it was common practice to request the position be given instead directly to a son or daughter acting as substitute. This was one way to maintain a much-needed source of income within the family.96 Of course, any additional action on someone’s behalf like this would require yet more “influence” within party networks. “Make no appointments of females unless I approve them,” stressed Treasury Secretary Folger to Butler.97 Partisan poor relief was tightly micromanaged. Social protection became fused so tightly with the spoils system that in some instances the direct line from public relief to the spoils system was institutional. “You remember you kindly offered me a position for some competent man in the Treasury Department,” wrote Jacob Hess, president of the Department of Public Charities for the City of New York. “Will you

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kindly inform me when you would like for me to send the man for examination and confer a very great favor.”98 Hess wrote to James Butler frequently. He was responsible for needy cases in a city teeming with deprivation. But as a former state assemblyman and the party’s current district leader, Hess was in a position to gain a hearing. “I dislike to annoy you very much about patronage,” he noted self-consciously in one letter promoting a woman named Sarah Wadleigh for “any position.”99 In a later telegram, Hess sounded the familiar theme of popular reciprocity: “Do not forget Jimmy Davis . . . it will please all New York.”100 One recurring dilemma that confronted party brokers was what to do about aging men in the workforce. Before Social Security was established to mitigate elder poverty in the 1930s, it was financially disastrous for many older men to leave the workforce, especially with a large family of dependents. Manual labor of the kind in demand for artisans or unskilled workers was brutally hard on the body. What the spoils system allowed for was an avenue to easier tasks, such as the “light work” that Alonzo Cornell requested Thomas Platt find for a thirty-two-year-old victim of lung disease.101 William L. Findlay, an attorney for the New York City Fire Department, shows how this was done in detail. He queried the U.S. Treasury Department about whether it would be possible to find employment for Charles Kinkel, a German American war veteran. A man of “gentlemanly appearance” and “good education,” Kinkel was now, at fifty years, too old for the rigors of the job. Findlay requested a new position for the man in Washington in the Treasury Department or at the New York Custom House, perhaps as a messenger. If it was otherwise unclear, Findlay made sure to note that Kinkel’s “good will is worth many votes on Election Day.” He was eventually hired on as a draftsman in the Treasury’s Office of Supervising Architect at the rate of $5 per day.102 The New York City Fire Department was no stranger to placing its former members in party sinecures as a form of pension. In an age of loose building codes and wooden slums, the work was dangerous and required a kind of bravery that brought fame to men of low backgrounds. The professional Fire Department of the postwar years grew out of volunteer-based antebellum street gangs that patrolled the polls on Election Day and enforced political loyalty. Their political pull meant that firemen were some of the best politically networked departments in the city.103 Another example of this kind of workplace negotiation is found in a flurry of letters concerning the printing office of the Treasury Department.

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Figure 14. Treasury Secretary Charles J. Folger: advocate of partisan poor relief. From left to right, the apparitions haunting Folger are Jay Gould as monopoly, Chester Arthur as the administration machine, and Stephen B. French, a Conkling loyalist who forged convention credentials to strip Alonzo Cornell, the incumbent governor, of the party nomination. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

After twenty years of hard labor, in 1883, Lewis H. Lanman was promoted to the “prover” position—less physically demanding—but thereafter demoted again. His brother-in-law, Maurice F. Holahan, a Tammany legislator from the Twelfth Assembly District, began a campaign to petition for his restoration. “Lanman has worked hard at the press,” Holahan argued, noting “after twenty years of hard labor, the strongest men are at a serious disadvantage.”104 Writing on official state letterhead, Holahan was blunt and direct: “[Lanman] is not strong enough at present to compete with younger

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men.” The foreman overseeing Lanman defended the demotion on grounds there was simply not enough work to justify the position. Many others had been let go, too. Furthermore, previous inquiries by James Butler to foremen in the printer’s bureau were met with the line that “whatever it is must depend upon his ability.”105 State Representative Holahan’s rebuttal was enlightening about the uneven fate of placemen under the spoils system. In fact, “some provers who had influential friends were retained when Lanman was discharged,” despite the slacking work. It turns out that Lanman, too, had influential friends. He was restored to a promotion that took him out of hard labor and raised his compensation from piece-rates to a salary of $1,565 per year, worth about $40,873 today.106 The case offers a fascinating view into low-level cross-party negotiation between a Tammany Democrat and a Stalwart Republican. As evident from the Lanman case, the spoils system has a well-earned reputation for surplus usage. One port collector explained that many offices were put into existence “simply because MCs [members of Congress] are bound to keep their friends in office whether the public service requires them or not.”107 Proliferation of redundant offices was one of the major administrative sins catalogued by civil service reformers of all stripes, as explained in Chapter 4. Positions were filled with political hacks who campaigned on official time, barely showed up, or held multiple offices simultaneously. But the make-work and waste that we associate with spoils must also be understood within proper historical context. We must, at the very least, endeavor to appreciate the popularity of these practices from the standpoint of petty officeholders. Shuffling men and women into unnecessary, more comfortable, or even phantom positions was a common type of public pension. Petty office was awarded for public service and very often based upon financial distress.

THE “TWO PENNY” OFFICE: SALARIES, ASSESSMENTS, REMOVALS There is no doubt that a clever person could make a fortune working at the peak of the spoils system.108 For everyone else, compensation was modest or worse.109 One party broker explained that his friend, W. P. Raymond, “had quite a little property and income” that was “lost in one way or another, while accumulating a large family.” Now, “he is in the condition of the maiden who cried . . . ‘Anything, with a good salary.’ ”110 In stark

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contrast with the celebrity one might attain through popular election, the actual work performed in lower appointed office was unlovely. Early in his four-decade political career, Fernando Wood mocked his own post as dispatch agent for the State Department, calling it a “two penny office.” Wood’s simple charge was to load and retrieve diplomatic messages in New York harbor. At the same time, he confessed the job “would put some 6 or 800 dollars per annum in my pocket, which God knows I need very much.”111 Newly married and looking for a break, like many others, Wood both depended upon and loathed the help. One consequence of the resoundingly modest compensation was a constant drumbeat for raises or promotion. “Let us by all means have honest and capable men,” wrote one anonymous officeholder to the Journal of Commerce, amid a flurry of reform proposals in the late 1870s to reduce the public payroll. “But let us pay them something more than a mere living compensation for services rendered—a compensation that will not only place them above temptation but enable them to lay something up for their declining years and for those dependent upon them for support.”112 If there was an informal party right to office, as party regulars believed, an obvious question followed. Was there not also the right to earn a livable wage? In practice, there was not. Still, many petty officeholders supported the idea. Securing a raise meant another round of influence peddling above and beyond what it took to gain appointment. Letters flowed through party brokers on behalf of those who believed they, and not workplace rivals, deserved higher rank and pay. These appeals predictably highlighted that rivals lacked party endorsements, failed to pay assessments, did not vote in critical elections, or hailed from a competing faction.113 Here, again, material need was a regular feature of claims. “His misfortunes appealed to sympathy,” went one request on behalf of a man named Colonel Sprague, “that I accepted him as one of the small flock that I feel bound to help.” Sprague landed a position at $10 a week, noted the patron, but the plan was to “use the place as a stepping stone or work for a Washington place.”114 One appeal written on behalf of a young messenger at the New York Custom House was punctuated with the plea, “the poor devil wants to get married.” The raise in question was an additional $100 per year for a total of $840, or the salary equivalent of $21,455 today. The request was rejected without explanation. Perhaps the petitioner’s advocate was insufficiently powerful, or maybe the raise was denied because the man in question, one of the rare African American officeholders, was subject to discrimination.115 We do not

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know the rationale, except that money problems were a universal issue for petty officeholders. Under the spoils regime, appeals through party networks could smooth over some of the rougher edges of the workplace, or completely upend it. When one federal inspector came by a Manhattan branch of the New York Post Office to impose budget austerity, the response up party lines was swift and furious. Salaries should not be reduced, lectured the supervisor, because “the amount now paid, $2.00 per day, is scarcely enough to support one person, instead of a family, as it is required to do, most men being married.”116 Already, custodians and clerks were forced to double as night watchmen, he noted, which employees resented. By the 1880s, postal superintendents were under pressure from trade unions to address pay disparities and hostile work conditions, as the following chapter describes. At the same time, rank-and-file workers with deep political connections felt little compulsion to heed formal workplace hierarchies and rules. Temporary employees might lobby far above their direct supervisor’s head, for example, to plead for prompt reappointment so as to avoid any gap in wages or to petition for unpaid wages.117 Disputes replayed frequently when the heads of local party machines found themselves at the bottom of the federal civil service. Supervisors, managers, and foremen complained these men were “subversive,” threatening to wield “influence” against the formal workplace hierarchy. Why follow the orders of supervisors with little influence when local leaders had direct personal ties with powerful members of Congress?118 Thus, the flip side of the equation meant that if you had a good situation in political employment, part of the job was to constantly fend off rivals looking to usurp your place. During one attempted rebellion, chief appointments officer James Butler wrote to Secretary Folger, “the whole department is rotten and reeking with the foulest disloyalty.”119 Underlings in search of promotion might conspire with other party brokers or petty officeholders to seize control of a department and its patronage. Rumors of conspiracies filled the pages of correspondence read by party leaders, with fallout that could injure bystanders down the ladder.120 One case highlights the shifting fortunes of petty officeholders and the great lengths it took, first to obtain a place and then to lobby for a raise. In the winter of 1882, the postmaster general of Buffalo, New York, John M. Bedford, wrote directly to James Butler to lobby for an appointment for Isaac M. Schermerhorn. Bedford’s friend was a local lawyer and twice Buffalo’s postmaster, first from 1867 to 1877 and then again from 1871 to 1878,

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when he made the princely sum of $4,000 per year, or $88,757.121 During the halcyon days of the Stalwarts, Schermerhorn was Roscoe Conkling’s point man in Erie County.122 When in office, he had in fact helped secure Bedford’s own position there. Now that Schermerhorn himself had fallen on hard times, working as lowly freight agent for the Northern Central Railroad, Bedford wanted to return the favor.123 To sharpen the appeal, Bedford noted that Schermerhorn was an old college associate of Butler’s boss, the Treasury secretary, Charles J. Folger. Within a month’s time—a rapid turnaround—Schermerhorn was appointed special agent at Tucson in the Arizona territory. The case gives some indication of the diaspora across the continent and western territories among those individuals who sought a desirable situation. Seven months later, however, Bedford followed up with an additional request: Schermerhorn sought a raise above his measly compensation of $6 per day.124 The problem, Bedford explained, was that costs were expensive out west, “with a high tariff on every article purchased.” Schermerhorn had first applied for a raise through formal channels in public administration. When that failed, he again contacted Bedford, who sought an audience with Richard Crowley, a major Stalwart figure in New York. This point of access would have been ideal. Crowley had originally recommended James Butler for his current position from which he now managed appointments and promotions at the Treasury Department.125 Unable to gain an audience, perhaps because the Stalwart faction was unraveling, Bedford again wrote directly to Butler in Washington with the hopes of making a second direct appeal on Schermerhorn’s behalf. (Unfortunately, the record is incomplete whether Bedford’s client was successful in receiving a raise.)126 In light of meager salaries, it should come as no surprise that petty officeholders found party “assessments” to be a burden. Opponents of the Tweed Ring claimed they “very often take a month’s pay” from new workers upon hire.127 Party regulars compared the money to church contributions.128 Yet, the process was far closer to taxes in terms of the coercion deployed. The 1870s was a decade when party tax collection aspired to the aura of scientific-like precision. Leaders like Chester Arthur, who simultaneously chaired the state party while collector of the port of New York, brought a military discipline to party fundraising from his wartime experience as quartermaster general. Still, efforts to make the government workforce legible to party agents were highly uneven. During the campaign of 1882, the Republican State Committee contacted Butler for an updated copy

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of the United States Official Register. Apparently, the committee had been soliciting political assessments from a list that was over a decade old; thus, only some of the federal departments previously contacted were responsive.129 Due to the contested nature of assessments and the turbulence of factional strife, it was not always easy to find political allies willing to furnish crucial information about public employees, including names and addresses. Predictably, complaints bubbled up from the grassroots as party financing became more systematic. A common refrain was that an officeholder had been a staunch partisan since the founding of the Republican Party. Credentials established, recalcitrant petty officeholders then pled poverty.130 One employee at the port of New York’s Office of Inquiry for Missing and Dead Letters framed his refusal in terms of basic needs: “being a father of five children,” his earnings were “barely sufficient to keep the wolf from the door.” Thus, a mandatory contribution of $20 (about $406 today) would “result in privations as would render him guilty of heartlessness & stupidity in eyes of every right thinking man.”131 Another disabled Union veteran, with six children under working age and a salary of $1,400 per year, also protested the partisan pressures on his family budget. His view: he had already given enough for his country on the battlefield.132 The overarching theme of complaints held that assessments were an undue imposition: “My wife who is a sensible woman and always has her say in money matters, advises me not to spend any money unnecessarily until the mortgage on our place is paid.”133 Appeals for reprieve from assessments fell on deaf ears. Resistance to payment or delay would result in repeated personalized circulars, some of which sounded vaguely threatening, or even reprimands by party operatives at the workplace. One fundraising follow-up letter from the Republican State Committee in 1880 was explicit: “Another circular reminding you” to contribute was recently sent. “As this matter seems to have been in part neglected, and in order that there may be no misunderstanding, please let me know, by return mail, if we shall hear from you further and when.”134 Keep in mind, the name of the state committee chairman, Chester A. Arthur, was emblazoned at the top of the letter. Arthur was also the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee that year; in a real way, fundraising discipline flowed directly from the top of the national ticket. Two years later, one Republican State Committee fundraising circular went further than reminders, expressly instructing “contributions be paid in person” at

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campaign headquarters.135 There was little way to avoid the consequences of party tax evasion. The ever-present threat of removal was a real possibility, even when assessments were paid in full. One customhouse worker, Daniel Sheehan, sued port collector Thomas Murphy to avoid paying his assessment but lost in court before a Tammany judge.136 Grassroots complaints thus landed in the mailboxes of newspapers and magazines. Editors were more than happy to air internal grievances as part of their leverage in party squabbles. Aside from middling pay and onerous party taxes, the spoils system was also by definition capricious. When a party or faction was turned out of power, a patron was usurped, or an appointee fell out of favor, dependents were likely to be “put through a course of sprouts.”137 That is, petty officials were often unceremoniously booted with no warning and little recourse. T. Browne Dix was an eight-year veteran when abruptly removed as a warehouse manager by the collector of the Boston Custom House. His brother, John A. Dix, began a vigorous campaign for reinstatement and was outraged to learn the only recourse was an informal job trade. He was urged to barter an equal place at the New York Custom House for a person to be selected by the Boston collector. Dix refused or was unable to produce a “situation” on New York Harbor. Only after three years of direct petitioning to the Treasury secretary himself did John A. Dix, a former cabinet member, Union general, and future governor, finally earn a polite blowoff.138 The Dix case is a sobering example of the limits of influence. Without powerful family or friends, it was common to be left in the lurch. But even those who enjoyed the backing of eminent public figures with formidable national reputations were not immune to removal. Civil service reformers maligned the discretionary nature of the spoils system because it privileged political connections above all else. It was precisely discretion that produced a lively officeholding culture. New York’s first professional baseball team, the New York Mutuals, was founded by Boss Tweed along with the county coroner. The New York Times protested loudly. The entire roster of “Base-Ball Sinecurists” was employed in no-show jobs by the city’s street cleaning department. Tweed’s angle? He wanted to cultivate a political base among working-class immigrant fans of the new sport. (At the price of ten cents’ admission, Tweed also sought a return on his investment in the club.)139 True, certain officials at the New York Custom House were more likely to be found in bucket shops or saloons than at their posts. One man afflicted with “a mania for speculation” was “constantly

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running away from his desk to check the ‘ticket’ and see how the market was.”140 But patronage practices also sustained a veritable literary salon on the Manhattan waterfront. Richard Henry Stoddard, the romantic poet, received his initial referral for a clerkship from Nathaniel Hawthorne and worked alongside Herman Melville, men who enjoyed widespread acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Stoddard’s account of the social life of spoilsmen is fascinating: I had not been long installed in the Debenture Room before it began to be frequented by men of letters, who found it convenient to remember I was one of their number. I was glad to see them, when the unsteady pressure of business gave me a little leisure, and I chatted with them about their own writings, past, present, and prospective. Well known at the time, most of these gentlemen are now forgotten; they dropped in upon me at luncheon time, and were occasionally more thirsty than I could have wished.141 The mass party was a patron of the arts, in part, because politics crossfertilized with a thriving bohemian scene. Jack Savage, a refugee from the failed Young Ireland uprising of 1848—a man who could “sing a good song”—was among a coterie of minor celebrities who enjoyed long careers on the waterfront. Savage’s party service had included drafting a campaign biography for Andrew Johnson during the election of 1864, after which he somehow managed to avoid factional purges. In Stoddard’s telling, at least, the group of artists was fairly tight-knit, suggesting that he intervened several times on Melville’s behalf to prevent transfer away from a preferred post on Gansevoort Street.142 Stoddard came in with the old Democratic regime and was thrown out in 1870 when collector Thomas Murphy undertook a pro-Stalwart purge of the Custom House. Many leading literary figures of the day rallied in vain for reinstatement, including a “who’s who” of elite reformers: George William Curtis, the Harper brothers, Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune, and the famous essayist Charles Nordhoff.143 Collector Murphy was unmoved. Tellingly, Stoddard landed on his feet, once again thanks to spoils. The poet was appointed clerk to George B. McClellan, then serving in a sinecure as chief engineer for the New York City Department of Docks under the Tweed Ring.

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CONCLUSION The nineteenth-century spoils system is far too easily reduced to cunning political leaders who thrived off the venality of political supporters. We must also take into account how spoils transformed over the course of a half-century within particular social and economic contexts. If we step back from the broadsides of civil service reformers, and we are willing to reevaluate the phenomenon from the bottom up, a more complicated picture comes into focus. After all, there was a historical moment when spoils were popular. By this I mean the term twofold; first, in terms of public ratification via the mass party, and second, by how men and women of lower class benefited. The spoils system was a property relation that was conspicuously subject to electoral fortunes. Importantly, partisan poor relief developed precisely because of the very thing reformers sought to eliminate—the discretion of leaders to pick and choose among an internal party labor market of desperate office seekers. Organized around the concept of a party right to public office, political “situations” were viewed as viable, and in many cases, preferable alternatives to the private labor market or impending destitution. Thus, petty officeholding operated as a de facto form of welfare in New York under the Stalwart Republicans during the 1870s and 1880s. For a fraction of the politically connected poor, especially those suffering financial distress, it was possible to work the channels of party influence to secure relief in the form of lowly appointments.



The Henry George Boom Fades

Henry George’s voice was hoarse from a nasty cold. Ready for another turn, nonetheless, he was preaching from the back of a wooden truck to a crowd assembled at the corner of Varick and Franklin Streets. “Here is the true democracy” standing before us, spoke the celebrated author of Progress and Poverty. As best he could, George continued: “But who governs us to-day in this metropolis?” “The bosses!” shot back a voice from the crowd. “Aye,” George nodded in agreement. “The workingmen know the kind of men who go into politics, not to advance ideas, but to get boodle!”1 The United Labor Party (ULP) candidate was speechifying this night of September 2, 1887, within a short walking distance from City Hall. One year earlier, Henry George’s independent campaign for mayor, backed by the rising labor movement, polled over 68,000 votes—a remarkable result. It was not enough for victory. But it placed George ahead of Theodore Roosevelt, the young Republican candidate. That campaign witnessed a whirlwind of activity. Trade unionists and reformers of all stripes had mobilized around the Clarendon Hall program of radical social reform. In little more than a month, supporters collected 34,000 petitions on behalf of George’s mayoral campaign; he spoke before tens of thousands of New Yorkers to denounce “the monopolist, the capitalist, and the millionaire”; and a formidable network of local organizers sprung to life, working the streets and neighborhoods on his behalf.2 One year later, Henry George, the homespun champion of the “Single Tax,” was again running, but this time for secretary of state. Why? He cared little for the position—a fact he made sure to note frequently and publicly. Secretary of state just happened to be

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the highest statewide office on the ballot in 1887. Supporters of the Henry George “boom” were eager to consolidate their movement into a concrete organization, the United Labor Party. And so, George, the immensely popular figure, and an indefatigable campaigner, was again nominated to be the movement’s standardbearer. Over the summer, the United Labor Party was inaugurated with fanfare in Syracuse at Alhambra Hall, amid banners of white silk declaring, “They Suffer, They Die, Because We Permit Them to Be Robbed of Their Birthright.” Delegates convened to adopt the original Clarendon Hall platform on housing and government reform, to pass new resolutions, and to nominate the new party’s first statewide ticket.3 Everything about this turn was harder, dirtier. On the night of September 2, suffering from a head cold, Henry George covered six campaign stops. He crisscrossed from the West Side to the East to speak or receive labor processions. The night culminated with a mass meeting at Paradise Park in the Five Points slum, deep inside Tammany Hall’s political bastion. The ULP nominee was greeted to a raucous band and hearty cheers. But this night’s impressive number of stops was half the pace of heavy campaigning from the year before. Back in 1886, he whisked around the city in a twohorse coupe´, moving in and out of union meetings, music halls, and street gatherings. Workers turned out to events like their lives depended on it—there were 1,200 strikes in New York City that year.4 Back then, George talked over hecklers with ease; this time, he apologized to crowds for ending early. His throat was giving out. The crest of protest was already subsiding by the summer of 1887. Unlike before, the labor leaders Samuel Gompers and Terence Powderly declined to enter the field on George’s behalf. Neither joined the new party or lent it organizational support. Debates whether to fall behind the ULP also divided the Central Labor Union. The Catholic Church denounced George’s closest ally, Father Edward McGlynn, who was excommunicated on July 3 for political activities, and removed from St. Stephen’s parish. Reaction spread among fashionable parts of the city. George and his lieutenants extended an olive branch to middle-class reformers by purging the ULP of its socialist wing. Still, there were fewer

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invitations to address civic associations and churches, and thus fewer funds from the collection basket that was circulated at events on behalf of the cause. All this was just in the Great Metropolis. It was a tough row around the rest of the state. For starters, labor’s great awakening had lifted the Henry George “boom” of 1886. There were simply fewer trade unions outside of large industrial communities. Attracting a crowd in rural parts of the state was not quite the problem. As a veteran of the lecture circuit, George was well traveled up and down the Northeast. He carried a strong reputation. In Canandaigua, situated on the Finger Lakes, no fewer than five hundred people traveled from miles around to cram into the town’s opera house. Here, too, the moment appeared to have passed. The local chapter of the Knights of Labor was recently defunct, part of a nationwide trend in the decline of the workmen’s association. Farmers and local Democratic officeholders were in attendance, and “a good many rich people,” too. They listened, applauding politely. Some cheered. Many were skeptical. Farmers peppered the evangelist of social reform with questions. The audience proved especially curious about how George’s tax on landed property might affect their own holdings.5 The election of 1887 ended with disappointment. Henry George received a mere 7.1 percent of the total statewide votes for secretary of state. It was harder this time to blame the outcome on partisan election inspectors or lack of a fair balloting process. The pace of organizing had visibly slowed. Internal divisions consumed more attention, as did the reactionary climate. Within the year, the ULP was functionally dead. The Standard, George’s reform newspaper, carried on for some years, but without a movement at its back, or even the founder. In 1888, George set sail for Europe, abandoning the electoral field once again to party regulars.6

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Anti-Monopoly in the Age of Party Consolidation

The party system came under assault during the Gilded Age for exacerbating the country’s pressing ills. By the Civil War, powerful leaders had established preeminence by maximizing their autonomy within strong party organizations. “Ring” rule was the term used by the press to describe the narrowing of decision-making into the hands of a few political professionals.1 The vernacular reflected a popular view that small circles commandeered parties by control over committees, conventions, caucuses, newspapers, and clubs. Ring leaders were hardly invincible. But years of freewheeling contests for party nominations and appointments gave way to the gilded “triumph of organizational politics.”2 The trend meant a narrower struggle for monopoly rights to speak and act for the party. Pioneers of gilded party consolidation reaped an unanticipated crop of revolt. By the 1880s, a vocal minority of critics adopted a lively pole of opposition to the hardening discipline of party regularity. How did malcontents press their revolt against party monopoly? What do their experiences tell us about the gilded fusion of capital and public power? Reexamining the ideas and practices of those on the margins of the party system offers a crucial vantage point from which to think about the limits of nineteenthcentury democratization. This chapter also aims to be a corrective. Scholars of gilded political reform focus almost exclusively on social and political elites. Remarkably little is written about those at the bottom of society who grew increasingly vocal in the final decades of the century.3 Struggles from below are an important, yet forgotten, part of the reform legacy. Ironically, grassroots party critics were often more prominent in the public eye at the time than individuals like E. L. Godkin, who wrote for the Nation, or those who dined

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at the Union League. Opposition from below was spectacular in a theatrical sense of the term.4 Strike actions, boycotts, parades, and meetings that drew overflow crowds were the forums of grassroots ideas. Yet, when wage earners and the poor do appear in scholarship, they are portrayed as the pliable, anonymous constituency of party regulars. Mass suffrage made the poor a cause of political rot, in this view, rather than part of any solution. But anger at the party system also boiled at the bottom of society. Poor people were reformers, too. In fairness, there are legitimate reasons for historical amnesia. Social movements are ephemeral.5 Grassroots actors can be contradictory when it comes to articulating popular grievances and alternatives. Few reformers from below gained any widespread fame, with the exception of Henry George and his close ally on land reform, Father Edward McGlynn. Organs of publicity like John Swinton’s Paper and Henry George’s Standard went bust after movement energy subsided. Some reform-minded trade unions did persist. After the reaction to the Great Upheaval, however, trade unions and the Knights of Labor turned away from electoral politics to survive. By contrast, elite reformers and organizations like the Civil Service Reform Association continued to produce voluminous printed materials, including self-conscious histories of their own activity.6 Early social scientists like James Bryce corresponded with these “best men” and incorporated class bias directly into study of the modern political party.7 The absence of grassroots actors in the struggle against bossism continues to be a glaring omission. Labor revolt during the 1880s and quixotic independent or third-party tickets had the effect of crystalizing long-standing popular grievances about the gilded party system. Unlike their elite counterparts, grassroots reformers held no major party posts or public office, even as dissenters. They inherited no fortunes. Instead, insurgency against party regulars was part of a nationwide convergence of worker militancy, transatlantic Irish nationalism, and agitation for women’s suffrage.8 Those involved were heterodox intellectuals, trade unionists, greenbackers, and purveyors of social gospel. The grassroots bloc included a range of socialists, from ideologues like Daniel De Leon to the nonaligned John Swinton, Irish Land Leaguers like Marguerite Moore, and Frank J. Ferrell, an African American member of the ULP who had worked to integrate the Knights of Labor.9 What held dissenters together was more than collective action against the party system. As Gretchen Ritter argues in her work on rural Populists of the 1890s, demise

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of the antimonopoly tradition represented nothing less than foreclosure of an alternative trajectory in American political development.10 Grassroots reformers sought to fundamentally restructure the link between public office and capitalism by decommodifying politics. What follows, first, is a brief discussion of this “other” reform tradition from below and how it fits with what we know about elite reformers of the Gilded Age. Then I discuss the spectrum of ideas that grassroots actors advanced to sharply curtail electoral capitalism. This includes an imaginative but failed campaign against Republican Party regulars. During the election of 1884, the Typographical Union No. 6 waged a vigorous electoral boycott of the Blaine presidential ticket. The case demonstrates how a small group of workers attempted to combat inequalities perpetuated by the spoils system. What originated in minor workplace struggles later generalized into an electoral strike against the “old parties” in the Henry George boom of 1886 and 1887, when George’s independent candidacy for mayor led to the formation of the United Labor Party. Finally, I offer some closing thoughts about these mostly failed attempts to democratize the gilded party system from below.

THE OTHER REFORM TRADITION Political reform during the Gilded Age is all too often conflated with elitism. Critics of the party system, however, fall into two camps: elite and grassroots. The self-described “best men” spearheaded the former. An amalgam around the labor movement and fellow travelers composed the latter. These two camps coexisted in the same historical moment and, despite a wide social gap, they were in dialogue. Even more, reformers high and low shared common ground. Both camps insisted they had been unjustly dispossessed of the right to govern. To this end, reformers tapped into anti-party discourse that had lineages dating back to the early Republic’s distrust of factional strife. By midcentury’s rise of mass political culture, anti-partyism was more likely to be expressed via third parties or bolters than by total rejection of the party form.11 “Anti-party parties” like the Liberal Republican, Greenback-Labor, Prohibition, United Labor, and Populist parties each sought mass followings while publicizing a crisis of representation. Far less appreciated is how gilded political reformers also shared roots in the anti-monopoly tradition. Scholars associate anti-monopoly in American political development with popular challenges to high finance, primarily during the Age of Jackson, or with agrarian Populism at the turn of the

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century. The postwar era was indeed awash with sectional battles between goldbugs, greenbackers, silverites, and bimetallists.12 Yet, during the 1880s the very same tradition energized critics of the electoral system. The connection reformers made between party and monopoly was made possible by the period’s coevolution of centralized wealth and deepening political inequality. Alongside industrialists, party leaders made themselves conspicuously wealthy. William Tweed of Tammany Hall had been a chairmaker. Navigating party channels, he became a major landowner and financier. Thomas Platt had been a druggist in the small canal town of Owego. By climbing the ladder of New York Republicans, he became president of the U.S. Express Company, taking command of a corporate giant in communications and finance. In the popular imaginary, there was little distinction between the corruption of polity or economy. The anti-monopoly framework was fundamentally about dispossession of “the people” by social parasites. Trade unionists found themselves excluded from party tickets and local juries as they were also driven from the workplace by managerial prerogative. Monopoly thus became a dominant way for critics to understand the yawning gap between ordinary voters and the parties that supposedly represented them. In monopoly’s political expression, it was politicians who subverted republican institutions. Elite political reformers saw party regulars as conspirators of “rings” centralizing power into the hands of a few unworthy figures. In place of the monied aristocracy conjured up by Jacksonians or the Populists stood “Bossism” and its entourage of party hacks. George William Curtis, leader of the Civil Service Reform Association, pointed to nothing less than a “conspiracy of officeholders and m.c.’s.”13 He believed that public corruption took hold through the spoils system, allowing a few individuals to selfishly accrue ill-gotten personal wealth and dangerous power. While the power of party leaders increased, individualism was squashed. Or so Curtis claimed when he walked out in protest of the Republican convention that nominated James Blaine for president in 1884.14 Editorial cartoonists popularized this interpretation among the emerging professional strata of the middle class. The satirical magazine Puck drew Tammany Hall, the quintessential party machine, as an equivalent form of subversive monopoly quite naturally standing alongside railroad and telegraph giants.15 Grassroots reformers shared affinities with this view but embraced a fully producerist critique of the “old” parties. “We pin our faith to universal

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suffrage,” Henry George lectured to audiences around the country, “yet with all power in the hands of the people, the control of public affairs is passing into the hands of a class of professional politicians, and our governments are in many cases but a means for the robbery of the people.”16 Here, anti-monopoly principles attacked the illegitimate fusion of party and capital as the “bogus aristocracy.” While elite reformers saw corruption as waste of taxpayer money, workers experienced it as expropriation of their hard labor, the historian David Scobey argues.17 One poem circulated among trade unionists called “God Bless the Politician” had the refrain, I am a loafer, and I live By doing nothing all the time It is but once a year I work And that is on election day But then I go in like a Turk And thus I earn my yearly pay.18 For anti-monopolists, party regulars were rentiers driven by a logic of profits rather than commitment to the public good. Henry George expressed the labor movement’s analysis most clearly. He maintained that “party managers” practiced politics “as the ability to shrewdly estimate values, to foretell the changes of the market, to buy things at the lowest price and sell them at the highest, to unite interests and make combinations, and to place capital when it will secure the largest return.” Electoral “combinations” were made not in public but rather behind closed doors and to the advantage of party insiders; upon conclusion of business, they “go off to take a drink together.”19 The description was nearly identical to how George and other anti-monopolists described the bureaucratization of capital in railroads, telegraphs, oil, steel, and the news media. Party monopoly was only possible, Henry George believed, because electoral representation was bought and sold like any other commodity. Were officeholders who passed anti-worker laws or called on police to break strikes simple hatchet men of financiers and employers? It was too simple to decry them so. Police commissioner Stephen B. French broke a Manhattan streetcar strike in 1886 with violence and by employing the police force as scab labor. A failed whaler and gold prospector from Sag Harbor, French’s third career as a Stalwart spoilsman minted a personal fortune and, according to the New York Herald, “a record so rank it smells to high heaven.”

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Party service accomplished what California prospecting could not. (A decade later, French committed suicide after embarrassing losses in a failed speculation.)20 With experience, radicals like George came to see a more complex dilemma than political surrogacy on behalf of industrialists. Whether Tammany Hall or Stalwart Republican, party leaders stood atop electoral institutions that were organized around the accumulation of wealth. Challenging the maldistribution of property necessarily meant confronting the party system because officeholders were more than gatekeepers. They represented a breed of capitalists molding the social order to their benefit. Despite elements of common ground, reformers were too riven by the “social question,” or how contemporaries referred to social inequality, to cooperate. Working-class thinkers like Henry George and John Swinton periodically addressed and socialized with the reform elite.21 But there was no agreement on the source of threats to republican government. Nor could reformers agree on which remedies were necessary or urgent. Was corruption simply the actions of bad men of low status?22 Or was there something inherently problematic about the unequal nature of property? The goal of elite party critics was to explicitly narrow the path of “legitimate” wealth accumulation. Control over capital would ideally be restricted to an exclusive private sphere and placed beyond the reach of grasping politicians who would force themselves onto corporate boards, establish banks, and run party businesses. The preferred method was civil service reform. In seeking to delimit the boundaries of officeholding, elite reformers were engaged in a program of cultural distinction similar to Catherine Astor’s quest to stratify society life with sumptuous balls.23 While elites prioritized civil service reform, grassroots actors looked forward to another horizon. When Henry George ran for public office, first for mayor of New York as a labor-backed independent, and then for secretary of state, he proposed nothing less than an alternative pathway. “Instead of the question whether this ring or that ring shall divide the spoils,” he told an assembly at Heiter’s Hall in Manhattan, “we are going to discuss social questions which come home to every man in his family—the rest from labor, the rate of wages and the way people are housed.”24 In 1886, George campaigned to end private land speculation that drove up urban rents, and to establish public ownership of mass transportation. He pressed to make local courts responsive to wage earners and to end police intervention in labor disputes. George spoke in favor of the eight-hour day, and he

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Figure 15. Henry George attacks corruption, monopoly, rings, deals, spoils. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

was a voice to abolish convict labor. The New York Times encapsulated the dismissive attitude of elite reform: “Georgism” was impractical and even dangerous. Instead, it would render “essential aid” to reform “if Mr. George should see his way clear to impress upon his followers the importance of maintaining and extending the system of civil service reform in municipal affairs.”25 In truth, grassroots actors were of mixed opinion about civil service reform. On the one hand, trade unions could not succeed while party regulars dominated public employment through the spoils system. The union shop failed to take root when individuals were dismissed on a political whim. The International Typographical Union (ITU) called for an end to spoils in public printing work as early as 1872 and maintained the position into the 1890s.26 Labor unions reacted with outrage at the partisan appointment of state factory and public health inspectors; instead of investigating

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employer abuses, “political agents” traveled the state campaigning for the reelection of the Democratic governor, David Hill.27 During the Henry George campaign, Samuel Gompers decried the unrepublican dependency of “tramps and paupers” on poor relief from party chieftains.28 Some workers genuinely hoped the “merit system” would promote fairness—for example, in hiring of teachers. Finally, “the poor man’s daughter backed only by her ability” would be placed on equal footing with “political magnates” and the rich.29 Or so the hope went. On the other hand, many workers experienced new examination and classification requirements under workplace conditions they viewed as unjust. It was not simply that exams favored the literate and those of middle-class privilege. Years of uneven adoption dating back to the Grant administration meant low-level workers were required to submit to exams; meanwhile, the heads of departments made twice as much or more and remained appointed “irrespective of their qualifications for that position.”30 It seemed patently unfair that “young fellows fresh from school draw as salary as high as $100 [per month]” because they scored a few measly points higher on a test. Meanwhile, “men who have done faithful service for years draw but $60.”31 A common attitude was that civil service laws were yet another tool to discipline workers. New rules stripped away worker control on the job, making it difficult for laborers to organize collectively and bargain. The International Typographical Union endorsed civil service reforms early and repeatedly. However, after they were implemented, one group of printers complained the “union has lost all real control” in its shop in “the matter of admissions to the workforce, the privilege of subbing and the enforcement of its scale price and trade regulations.”32 Partisanship may have been lessened. Yet, work and wage considerations fundamental to negotiating union contracts were superseded. Civil service rules that were ostensibly to remove bias and caprice were in practice often justification for workplace retaliation. During a mass meeting at Cooper Union on June 24, 1886, speakers like Terence Powderly and Father Edward McGlynn hailed postal workers as “conscientious and faithful public servants.” Citing long routes and heavy loads, the meeting resolutions called for shorter hours, greater pay, and recognition of postal workers as “Government employe´s” in trade unions. True reform was not about “standing at a rum-hole door asking for votes,” argued the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, but pressing for “good government, by good men,

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irrespective of party.” But how superintendents implemented administrative reforms was a real obstacle to organizing. Writing to the Standard, one letter carrier reported that his superior wielded civil service rules as a cudgel to force two dozen men working in his office to withdraw from a growing trade union. Postal clerks, too, denounced this kind behavior as petty autocracy. They especially complained about a system of exacting obedience through fines, some of which workers learned of only when drawing their pay that had been diminished without prior notice.33 Despite concerns about public-sector organizing, Henry George jumped to his feet during the founding United Labor Party convention at Syracuse in 1887 to block a resolution that would have placed the party on record opposing civil service reform.34 Today, George is best known for his tireless promotion of the “Single Tax”; less appreciated is the fact that he also contributed to George William Curtis’s elite journal dedicated to civil service reform.35 So when William Potts of the New-York Civil Service Reform Association wrote to George’s newspaper, the Standard, to sound out the ULP’s official stance during the campaign of 1887, George took the opportunity to explain: Whether subordinate public officials shall be appointed for political services, or whether they shall be appointed according to the ability with which they pass an examination, is a matter of little moment as compared with the question whether we shall or shall not have a host of totally unnecessary offices to fill. The best civil service reform would consist in abolishing the thousands of offices for which there is really no use, and in removing the temptations to moneyed interests to corrupt politics and bribe officials.36 True “purification of government,” according to George, required the abolition of unnecessary offices. Mugwumps appeared to promote something of a parallel view. Upon closer examination, however, George’s position went beyond anything most elite counterparts were willing to entertain. Middle-class professionals who made up the reform constituency relied on appointment to public commissions for social prestige and to establish reputations. Many reformers also depended upon officeholding to advance business interests and to press authorities for rate guarantees and subsidies. Take one example in the multi-partisan reformer William Ivins. He drafted the first Australian ballot law for Massachusetts and was consigliere in the

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reform administration of a business partner, William R. Grace, New York mayor. Grace lobbied Benjamin Harrison’s administration to secure Ivins an appointment as commissioner to the International American Congress, from which he oversaw the firm’s interests in Peruvian mines.37 Or, take the case of Silas W. Burt, a leading figure of civil service reform during the Garfield and Cleveland administrations. Burt was tasked with eliminating redundant offices at the New York Custom House and prohibiting party assessments. His portfolio of personal investments was notably composed entirely of railroad stocks and bonds.38 To emancipate railroads from public officeholding in the way Henry George advocated would have made these companies more than unprofitable—many never would have been built in the first place. So, were railroad profits considered “spoils”? Only if “rings” of party bosses and financial speculators won control, as with the Erie Railroad wars, or when legislators accepted outright bribes, like during the Cre´dit Mobilier scandal. Elite reformers simply did not view public commissions or prestigious offices as part of the old spoils system. Men like George W. Curtis and E. L. Godkin campaigned against patronage in public life but sought positions for friends in private like everyone else.39 Proper officeholding was part of the new world of modern business and scientific expertise. What mugwumps and the Civil Service Reform Association wanted were fewer street sweepers and lowly clerks. Above all, they wanted to expunge the Yankee Leviathan’s growing administrative proletariat from the ranks of government. Barring that solution, the next best thing would be workers’ expulsion from the public sphere by insulating officeholding from the pressures of mass suffrage. By contrast, Henry George came to an abolitionist perspective on civil service from his own bitter experience in the electoral field. After battling both Democrats and Republicans in a difficult 1886 mayoral campaign, George knew well that spoils underwrote regular party organization. At the same time, he was attuned to the class bias of elite reforms. Rather than advocate for “any particular system of appointment,” George did not equivocate: abolish the vast majority of public offices entirely.40 Years after the failure of the “Henry George boom,” the labor reformer John W. Sullivan took the idea even further in an influential pamphlet, Direct Legislation. The proper remedy was to abolish not just most public offices but the “lawmaking monopoly” altogether. Governing power would be placed directly into the hands of citizens, who would cast ballots on

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matters of public importance without interference from any party apparatus run by self-interested officeholding professionals. The idea was not altogether new. When Victoria Woodhull ran for president back in 1872, the iconoclasts at Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly called for the referendum as part of a broader program of women’s suffrage and “equality for the laboring classes.”41 John Sullivan’s own radical proposal was formulated in the 1890s with the hindsight of political disappointments, including his support for the United Labor Party and a stint as editor for George’s Standard. Sullivan believed third-party efforts had shown “seeds of decay” by falling prey to the very machine methods they once decried. The referendum would solve the problem of flawed leaders, such as Henry George, and party bureaucracy, like the United Labor Party, which collapsed after expelling its socialist wing. Sullivan imagined that a class-conscious electoral majority of wage earners would redistribute the fortunes of monopolists into small, self-governing urban homesteads. Only the referendum process would end “class rule, ring rule, extravagance, jobbery, nepotism, the spoils system, every jot of the professional trading politician’s influence.” At least on this last point of eradicating the “quasi-oligarchy” of party rule, he believed, “all schools of political reformers might unite.”42 On this, he was prescient. Within a decade, middle-class progressives like Ralph Easley—men who otherwise condemned socialism—argued for the indispensability of Sullivan’s direct democracy as a means to circumvent party.43 Beyond abolishing offices and the lawmaking monopoly, there were even more unorthodox ideas percolating at the grassroots. Long before the campaign of 1886, the machinist and radical Matthew Maguire wrote to Henry George on behalf of the Spread the Light Club of Brooklyn: “Honesty in public affairs is greater than in private ‘business’ at the present time, when every merchant, manufacturer, landlord, is of necessity, a liar, a fraud, a swindler, and a thief.” Given the stealings of industrial and financial monopolists, “we would therefore rather submit to the petty larceny perpetrated by a band of bum-politicians.” Elite reformers routinely opined about the need for honesty in government in the headlines of newspapers and in speeches. However, posed with the undesirable choice of rapacious politicians or rapacious businessmen, this club of anti-monopolists found party regulars to be the lesser evil. Why not, then, let local government officials “superintend our factories, grocery; bake- and meat-shops”? The result could not be worse than the

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present situation, Lighters reasoned, and might be better. If this logic appears to be an apology for the spoils system, it was not. The Spread the Light Club of Brooklyn resolved that “land, light, air and water are the free gifts of nature and every child born into this world has a right to share in the same.”44 The club was in fact the cultural front for fifty or so radicals hailing from the Irish Land League, the local Greenback-Labor Party, Henry Kimball’s Church of Humanity, and the Knights of Labor Local Assembly 1562, when the Knights were still underground. According to historian Rob Allen, the club operated an intellectual forum from November 1880 to March 1882. They debated rent and usury in the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and drew crowds of workers to their lectures. Meeting at 365 Fulton, club members like Theodore Cuno would heckle spoilsmen from the building’s roof as they were entering City Hall across the street.45 The Spread the Light Club’s principles were on “the side of Collectivism,” and by their standards, even Henry George was found wanting. Maguire’s group advocated the general abolition of private property—a position they considered to be on the cutting edge of science, and one that George endorsed only in the case of land ownership.46 Lighters, it should be noted, were far from the mainstream.47 But the club members helped to establish the Central Labor Union (CLU). Several members, including Maguire, served in early CLU offices, where they strongly advocated formation of a “workman’s ticket” that later materialized in the Henry George “boom” of 1886. The club’s unorthodox views reveal a fundamental tension among thinkers in the grassroots reform camp. Doing away with “hordes of officials,” as Henry George and John W. Sullivan wished, was a widely popular position that displayed frustration with the spoils system. But abolition stood at odds with the radical call for the public ownership of land, transportation, and as many socialists desired, all of industry. Who would administer such an enlarged public domain? On this conundrum, George and Sullivan were largely silent, trusting in the self-governing traditions of Jeffersonian democracy and the New England town hall. For all their quirks, the Spread the Light Club at least addressed the antimony. In the immediate term, there was unlikely to be relief from officeholding rentiers. Maguire and the Lighters found temporary usage for “bum-politicians” who would hopefully take a smaller share of the “boodle” from laborers than industrialists. In the long term, professional politicians might be turned away from rapacious speculation toward addressing social needs.

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There were also practical attacks on the spoils system. The GreenbackLabor Party of Queens proposed a reform inspired by Reconstruction. Greenbackers called for disenfranchising and barring from future office any citizen or organization “convicted in trafficking in votes.”48 By 1880, the counterrevolution of Redemption was under way across the south. But memory was still fresh of ex-Confederates who were disenfranchised by the federal government for treason. The idea to block party leaders from office stood prominently in the platform alongside boilerplate anti-monopoly positions denouncing the gold standard, railroads, and usury. Another plank targeted the circulation of party capital by demanding a steep reduction of salaries among officials earning over $1,000.49 Greenbackers assumed that salaries were inflated to finance regular party assessments. If implemented with zeal comparable to the Radical phase of Reconstruction, these two proposals would have struck a blow against the commodification of officeholding. Incredibly, a few years later Greenbackers endorsed none other than Benjamin Butler for president—one of the great spoilsmen of the age.50 The local platform nevertheless is testament to the seriousness with which grassroots reformers treated the problem of spoils.

BIG SIX AND THE REPUBLICAN BOYCOTT This section details a case study of one trade union’s epic struggle with the spoils system. In 1883, the Typographical Union No. 6’s long conflict with the New York Tribune evolved into a boycott of the Republican Party. The campaign originated out of a bitter showdown with Whitelaw Reid, the paper’s owner and editor, for unilaterally breaking a union contract. Beginning with the Tribune, the labor movement’s targets grew to include the state Republican party and the Blaine presidential ticket, both of which supported the paper financially. By mobilizing allies from across the state and around the country, trade unionists attempted to secure the union shop by disrupting the interdependent relationship between newspapers and political parties.51 The effort demonstrates the creativity with which grassroots actors were willing to confront the spoils system as part of efforts to improve working conditions.

The Tribune: From Partisan to Party Regular The New York Tribune was a singular institution in its heyday. Founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley, the newspaper punched far above its weight in

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mere circulation. A broad intellectual footprint allowed Greeley to play a central role in the formation of the Republican Party.52 Nineteenth-century newspaper editors were multipurpose propagandists, lobbyists, and office seekers.53 Much of the Tribune’s public value lay in an agenda-setting “soft power” that reached far beyond Manhattan politics. The paper was widely read across upstate New York and free labor strongholds in the “west”— Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.54 Among party circles, Greeley operated a clearinghouse for hustlers of information about policy making and nominations. But the Tribune’s politics leaned more toward intellectual quackery than political hackery. Greeley’s eccentric voice gave the paper its moral claim to be “New York’s most honest newspaper.” The capstone of Horace Greeley’s career, however, brought the paper into the Gilded Age by driving it to near ruin. In 1872, the perennial gadfly broke with Republicans by challenging Ulysses S. Grant for reelection.55 A relative newcomer to the Tribune named Whitelaw Reid managed the presidential campaign. Reid was an Ohioan who first made his name as a reporter covering the Battle of Shiloh. He joined the paper late, only in 1868, but came to manage it during the founder’s prolonged absences traveling. After the debacle of Greeley’s 1872 campaign, the Tribune’s reputation was in tatters. Greeley had alienated longtime supporters by allying with exConfederates and by repudiating signature policies on the tariff and African American civil rights. Circulation declined heavily, and the paper lost a third of its valuation.56 Whitelaw Reid seized control of the Tribune in the aftermath of the crisis and transformed the paper’s identity. Under Greeley, the prospective audience had been the Republican Party’s original free labor coalition, formed in the mid-1850s. The aspiration was for maximum circulation among small farmers, artisans, and manufacturers. By contrast, beginning in the mid-1870s, Reid molded the Tribune into a voice of confidence in the emerging corporate order. The Tribune’s new readership ideal would revolve around the owners and managers of big business. This included the professional class of architects, planners, accountants, and lawyers who serviced large corporations. The marker of success was no longer the absolute number of copies sold but whether the paper was widely read at Saratoga resorts, where the financial elite vacationed.57 An updated business model accompanied the philosophical evolution. Greeley’s paper had worked much like him: exhibiting freewheeling grandiosity with little attention to management details. The enterprise operated under a regime of benign neglect. Under Reid’s control,

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Figure 16. Jay Gould: Whitelaw Reid’s new direction for the Tribune. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

the business end of the paper changed drastically. His ethos was maximizing profit through rationalized efficiency, personal relationships be damned. The company’s ownership structure shifted, too. Until the 1870s, the Tribune had been held under the personal control of Greeley and a small circle of stockholding friends. Whitelaw Reid himself was far from wealthy at the time of his rise. He managed to secure the Tribune company only on credit through the largesse of others. Reid’s majority control was ultimately

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obtained through private loans of undisclosed size from Jay Gould, the socalled Mephistopheles of Wall Street, and Collis P. Huntington of the Central Pacific Railroad. We do not know the parameters of these agreements, except that Reid thanked Huntington, explaining “when you want help, draw upon me for might.”58 There is a useful point of reference. During the war, Reid had turned to the Cooke brothers’ banking house to finance an ownership stake in the Cincinnati Gazette. The deal with Jay Cooke included marketing war bonds to the public and acting as the bank’s personal agent in business matters.59 Now it was Jay Gould, the notorious financier, and C. P. Huntington, the railroad tycoon, who became Reid’s patrons.60 A new relationship was formed with Republicans to counterweight declining circulation. Immediately after the crushing Liberal Republican party defeat of 1872, Reid had angrily denounced party politics as a “vulgar struggle of vulgar men through vulgar means for petty offices and plethoric but questionable gains.”61 Yet Reid demonstrated little revulsion when he was the one expanding into the lucrative political market. Both factions of Republican Party regulars, Stalwarts and Half-Breeds, became crucial allies in the late 1870s and 1880s. The partisan alliance peaked when James G. Blaine laid the groundwork for his 1884 presidential nomination in the pages of the Tribune.62 Financial aid made the Tribune a party organ. Thomas C. Platt of the Stalwart faction organized county committees around the state to subsidize the newspaper out of party coffers. Local committees were encouraged to make subscriptions available to partisans at steeply discounted “club” rates. Platt crisscrossed Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and upstate New York as a salesman marketing bulk subscriptions. James G. Blaine of the Half-Breeds used national contacts to press for subscribers on terms that were even more steeply discounted.63 When Blaine became the Republican nominee in 1884, he directed the campaign’s lucrative printing orders for circulars and pamphlets to his good friend Whitelaw Reid. Campaign patronage alone was worth tens of thousands of dollars. The alliance reflected the reality that Reid was not just a confidant of the “Plumed Knight” but one of his most prominent surrogates.64

The Contract Fight In this context, Whitelaw Reid became New York’s foremost anti-labor newspaper owner and editor. The break with tradition was stark. The Tribune historically enjoyed peaceful labor relations. Horace Greeley himself

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was the founding president of the Typographical Union No. 6, nicknamed Big Six, and even served a year as chair of the New York Printers Union.65 The midcentury reform movement he came out of was a big tent of labor republicanism open to ideas of a “cooperative commonwealth.”66 Famously, Greeley opened up the paper in its early years as a forum to utopian socialists. He hired labor-friendly editors like Charles A. Dana and John Russell Young. And Greeley introduced Americans to reports from Karl Marx, one of Europe’s foremost revolutionaries. At the time of Greeley’s death, Henry George was on contract as a correspondent. “Mr. Greeley’s management was always found to be on the side of popular rights,” recalled Big Six members in later years, when lamenting the new order of things.67 By contrast, Whitelaw Reid argued loudly for the supremacy of capital in the operation of the industrial economy and within his own company. The paper’s new mantra was the owner’s fundamental right to pay whatever rates the market would bear. Invariably, that meant the open shop.68 During the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Reid’s newspaper called for protesting workers to be shot and hanged.69 More to the point, he practiced what he preached in labor relations “from roof to cellar,” as one union put it. In 1874, Reid crushed a bricklayers strike during construction of the company’s massive new tower. The Tribune itself estimated at the time that half of the city was unemployed.70 Later, Reid invested in some of the industry’s first linotype machines and became an early adopter of the technology. New printing methods meant increased output but also the opportunity to replace old hands at lower rates with less skilled workers. Not satisfied with these changes, Reid hired William P. Thompson, an ex-Confederate anti-union expert, as the foreman tasked with expelling the long-standing printer’s union.71 Conflict erupted in late June 1877. Ironically, the dispute came shortly after the Typographical Union unveiled a $6,000 bronze memorial of Horace Greeley at Greenwood Cemetery, where they eulogized him as a believer in shared prosperity. Reid, in attendance, was quietly recruiting replacement workers.72 Shortly thereafter, Reid demanded a unilateral 25 percent wage cut for skilled printers and gave no assurances about whether they would be paid by contract or by hour. Many of the workers were old Greeley friends or war veterans. Some had twenty years of experience and considered themselves “gentlemen.”73 Big Six predictably refused Reid’s “Four Points,” a list of management demands, one of which would have abrogated the union shop. The printers were ordered out of the building amid a heavy police presence. Six months later, Reid

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jubilantly reported to stockholders a “net profit of forty odd thousand dollars” from labor savings.74 What followed was a seven-year interregnum at the Tribune without a union presence. Workplace unrest exploded again in 1883 after simmering for years. On Friday, November 16, Tribune workers abruptly struck again for union recognition. The action was part of an effort by new leadership in Big Six to enforce a uniform wage scale across the industry.75 No doubt the compositors were emboldened by support from the rapidly growing Knights of Labor and a general climate of labor militancy. By the 1880s, the Tribune company was profitable, minting Whitelaw Reid a substantial fortune. Remarkably, wages were about half in the 1880s what they were before 1876 when the paper was union. The suddenness of the strike caught management off guard because Thompson was ever vigilant. Many younger workers had never been union members. Conveniently for the strikers, Reid was traveling in Ohio, adding to management’s confusion about how to respond. To end the strike, foreman Thompson signed a contract making the Tribune a union shop for one year. The agreement was signed on Reid’s behalf and included official recognition, a union wage scale, and provision for thirty days’ advance notice if either party sought to withdraw from the contract. Work resumed as normal for two weeks under the union contract. Then, on Wednesday night, December 12, management retaliated in force. Thompson arrived on the shop floor with what Big Six members described as a “platoon of police.” Accompanying the police were replacement workers hired from newspaper ads placed in Utica, Schenectady, Troy, Albany, Philadelphia, Lancaster, Reading, and as far as Baltimore. Thompson gave workers two options: accept a unilateral wage cut or leave the premises immediately. Nearly all the workers present—fifty-nine out of sixty-four compositors and journeymen—walked out. Whitelaw Reid thereafter dismissed them in the rival press as “seventy foolish printers.” The foreman quickly had the print shop running again with “rat” labor and, according to union reports, the help of police.76 The next day, hundreds of people protested outside the Tribune building in solidarity with the locked-out workers.77

Boycott the Tribune! Big Six took the struggle public by immediately voting for a boycott and selecting a committee to see it implemented. “When we boycott a thing, we

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simply leave it alone,” explained Typographical Union No. 6’s promotional materials. The union adopted an official prohibition on subscriptions or the paper’s purchase from street vendors. Most crucially, “we simply buy nothing from the man who advertises in it.”78 Boycotting is a form of community sanction meant to pressure an employer at the point of consumption. As Michael Gordon has shown, labor supporters of the Irish antilandlord movement adapted the practice to New York’s industrial landscape in the late 1870s.79 Yet, to shape an outcome like restoring a union shop would require the ability to exert a preponderance of market power. The Typographical Union boasted about 3,500 members in New York State. Those numbers were hardly enough to win a successful boycott. To augment their forces, Big Six called upon allies in the labor movement to join the boycott. Samuel Gompers’s Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions passed one such resolution of endorsement: We see the growing power of wealth and monopoly, and we observe that its tendency is to crush all individuality out of the workingman, and to render him as one of the grains of sand washed out by the caprices of the ocean of capital. Self-sacrifice and union among ourselves is the only manner in which we can resist domination. We will, therefore, to the extent of our power, aid No. 6 in this fight for our common principle. We agree that we will not purchase from any man who advertises in the Tribune, or who purchases the Tribune, or who sells the Tribune. Or from any news-stand which does not contain a notice that it does not sell the Tribune. Our money shall not go into those channels through which a part of it will return to the Tribune, neither will we contribute to the business prosperity of those who support the Tribune in this battle against the principle of organized labor.80 The struggle to end the lockout continued into the spring. By May, the Typographical Union was publishing extended lists of boycott endorsements from trade unions, labor assemblies, and Knights of Labor locals from around the country. Most resolutions from places in Ohio, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania were tailored to express particular aspects of outrage that harkened to their own struggles with local employers.81 The Typographical Union No. 6 established a weekly newspaper as part of the campaign. Appropriately named the Boycotter, it had the appearance

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of a generalist labor paper.82 In actuality, all of the paper’s attention was directed at shaping public opinion about the Tribune lockout.83 Editorials denounced the company’s labor practices, lampooned Whitelaw Reid’s elitist pretensions as “snobocracy,” and referred to him derisively throughout the paper’s columns as “Whitelow.” Anti-Tribune stories were repetitive from week to week and even within issues. The reporting flirted with salacious rumors, for example, that foreman William Thompson was a wife beater. Above all, the paper’s main purposes were education and mobilization. It sought to combat negative stories published in the Tribune about the printers union.84 Again, the audience was not so much the general public as the labor movement. The Boycotter’s circulation was primarily at labor meetings and parades. Financing came from subvention by the Typographical Union, voluntary donations, and subscriptions from labor allies.85 By one account, Big Six was spending $900 per week ($2,500 today) during the boycott’s most active phase.86 Even with growing labor solidarity and its own newspaper, Big Six struggled to bring the Tribune back to the bargaining table. Gilded Age boycotts were most successful as a labor weapon when workers themselves made up an important share of consumers. The union admitted frankly that the paper’s circulation “was not general among workingmen.” That was by design. Mass circulation was much less central to Whitelaw Reid’s business model. The Tribune company had diversified, becoming a landlord. Revenues were also bolstered from membership in the Associated Press syndicate.87 Thus, closing ranks around class solidarity was impressive but simply not enough. There was another obvious potential point of marketplace leverage in striking at Republican Party patronage.88 The Typographical Union reasoned the threat of electoral punishment would pressure the Republican party, and therefore its client, Whitelaw Reid, to negotiate. It was not just the party subsidies, already noted. The Republican Party was so central to Reid’s personal fortune that courtship of his wife, Lizzie Ogden, was secured during a White House dinner in the Hayes administration.89 Marriage into one of the wealthiest families in the country carried him into rarified circles beyond anything he could have achieved as a nouveau riche newspaperman. There was also the matter of Reid’s conspicuous ambition for high office. The Tribune owner’s name was floated for numerous party offices, from nominations to the U.S. Senate to prestigious diplomatic posts in Europe. In this context, the union’s mobilization against the Tribune was not a matter of targeting circulation but challenging party regularity.90

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Table 3. Tribune Boycott Labor Endorsements, New York City and Environs, August 1884 Adelphia Labor Club Aldine Labor Club Amalgamated Society of Carpenters & Joiners Amalgamated Society of Carpenters & Joinersa Amalgamated Society of Engineers Amalgamated Trade and Labor Union Amalgamated Trade and Labor Uniona Ariel Association Arion Association Bakers’ Progressive Labor Club Central Labor Union Central Labor Uniona D.A. No. 64 Knights of Labora Executive Council Building Trades Hat Finishers’ Union Hickory Labor Club Hod-Hoisting Engineers Union Housesmiths’ Union Hudson Labor Association Independent Labor Associationb Iron Moulders’ Union No. 25 Jefferson Association Journeymen Tailors’ Benevolent Protective Association Knickerbocker Labor Association Laborers’ Union

Longshoremen’s Union Manufacturing Team Shoemakers’ Society Onward Labor Club Operative Shoemakers’ Union Packing-Box Sawyers a Patternmakers’ Union Pianomakers’ Union Plasters’ Union a Plumbers’ Union Pressmen and Feeders’ Union Progressive Labor Club Progressive Painters Ship Caulkers’ Union Shoemakers’ Union Stairbuilders’ Union State Trades Assembly Stereotype Finishers’ Union Tin Roofers’ Union Typefounders’ Union Typographical Union No. 7 (German) Typographical Union No. 98a Union Associationa United Custom Upholsterers’ Union United Order of Carpenters United Packing Boxmakers Unity Labor Club Varnishers’ Union No. 18

Source: Boycotter, May 31 and August 2, 1884. a Brooklyn b East New York

Boycott Blaine! Boycott the Republican Party! The Tribune calculated it would survive a consumer boycott. The Republican Party was less confident of whether it could afford to antagonize the labor movement. New York was a perennial swing state. Without the state, any pathway to victory for the presidency was perilously narrow through Ohio and Indiana. Whereas the Tribune did not rely on wage earners for its readership, the Republican Party did rely on them for votes. Democrats

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and Republicans during the Gilded Age were cross-class parties that channeled social conflict through racial (and racist) appeals or by claiming that protectionism benefited the working class by raising wages domestically. In New York, native-born Protestant skilled workers were a natural-leaning Republican constituency, especially in large urban areas, upstate mill towns, and settlements that ran along the state’s canal network. Furthermore, the image of dignified free labor was bound up with the party’s Lincolnian tradition.91 At the beginning of 1884, an election year, Big Six began to deliver public warnings addressed to “party managers” about an electoral boycott if Republicans continued to support Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune. The notion that workers everywhere would cast a ballot solely on a workplace issue involving eighty members in a single craft union might seem farfetched. But just as major newspapers greatly enhanced the views of their owners and benefactors, printers unions also magnified their own distinctive voice and influence far beyond small numbers. Big Six made its lockout into a cause ce´le`bre that resonated far beyond Newspaper Row in Lower Manhattan. Seymour Martin Lipset explains in his classic study that printers were at the vanguard of labor activism in the nineteenth century. They were literate, which was rare for the time, and facilitated collective action. As highly skilled workers, they were capable of pressing for self-protection by withdrawing their expertise from the labor process at the point of production. Urban printer locals, called “chapels” in New York, were among some of the first unions organized in the United States. The ITU is the oldest national union. At the time of the boycott, it already employed a full-time organizer. New York chapels offered a range of member benefits, including strike relief, which Tribune’s Big Six members received in 1877 and again after the 1883 lockout.92 Printers also exerted outsized influence in the labor movement because they were what scholars call “early risers” in social movements. Big Six routinely lent its support to solidarity strikes and promoted the eight-hour movement. Members also took up leadership roles in the most significant class-based organizations that led protests, demonstrations, and strikes during the Great Upheaval of the 1880s. Printer William McCabe served as grand marshal of the first Labor Day parade in 1882. The youthful president of Big Six who launched the Tribune boycott, John R. O’Donnell, helped co-found the CLU, an umbrella of two hundred labor organizations in New York and New Jersey.93 Troubadours like Henry George, John Swinton, and

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Figure 17. Big Six fights off anti-union Republican newspapers. Boycotter, October 4, 1884.

John W. Sullivan were all printers who traveled widely lecturing on radical ideas to improve social conditions. Denunciations of the Tribune and its Republican patrons became staples of protest just as the labor movement was going through a renaissance in membership size and strike activity. Together with the newly created CLU, Big Six’s Union Boycott Committee organized a parade up Broadway to Fourteenth Street. On Tuesday, April 22, thousands of protesters walked past the Tribune building, which was protected by a line of police, and ended with a mass rally at Cooper Union. During the speeches, the Typographical Union No. 6 announced new support from ITU locals in Albany and Utica. Edward King of the CLU took the stage to condemn the Tribune, proclaiming that it “has always been in favor of the cause of capital where there was a fight.” The public meeting culminated with the passage of a

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resolution: “we hereby pledge ourselves to boycott to the fullest extent Whitelaw Reid, the New York Tribune, and all people, firms or political parties who give him recognition, aid or comfort.”94 The next day in Buffalo, Thomas Gawley of the state’s western ITU branch addressed another demonstration of 13,000 labor protesters. Banners with the slogan “Boycott the N.Y. Tribune” were prominent together with other demands to end the convict labor system in New York State and to win the eight-hour day.95 The Tribune boycott’s first real success was at the 1884 Republican New York State convention in Utica. Prior to the annual meeting, the Boycotter outlined its threat of an electoral boycott in plain terms: “If the Republican party of this State or country aids or abets the Tribune in any way, we will see to it that the Trades Unionists of the country will vote against the candidates of that party.” The union warned of the ability to swing thousands of its membership’s votes in New York, a number large enough to be decisive in a close election. “A Trades Unionist may be a Republican or a Democrat,” the paper lectured the Republicans. But “he is a Trades Unionist first, last, and all the time.” The Typographical Union cautioned: “we have sounded this friendly note of warning so that the Republican managers can proceed with their eyes open.”96 Big Six came in force to the Utica Republican state convention, demanding an audience with power brokers. They passed out notecards to Republicans converging on Bagg’s Hotel. The message read, “Delegates to the Utica Convention: Boycott Whitelaw Reid and the New York Tribune. 100,000 Men Demand It.” Presumably, these “100,000 Men” were the imagined voting strength of the united labor movement across the state. That would have represented a formidable voting bloc—8.5 percent of the total ballots eventually cast in 1884.97 Whatever backroom discussions took place, we do not know. Theodore Roosevelt reportedly advised state senator Warner Miller, who was running the convention, against including Reid on the grounds it would “antagonize the influential people in the party.”98 Reid was notified in advance of trouble brewing. To avoid embarrassment, he forwarded a midnight dispatch from Manhattan withdrawing from his position as “delegate at large.” The Typographical Union took full credit for the victory. The state convention was a direct blow, given New York’s importance to James G. Blaine’s candidacy, and Reid’s association with the candidatein-waiting. “Bye-Bye, Whitelow, see you again in 1885,” the union crowed. “Does Whitty want a foreign mission?” they wrote in reference to Reid’s

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ambition for appointment to the Court of St. James. “How would you like to go to the North Pole?” Lest any nuance be missed, Big Six made the connection between Reid’s stunted officeholding career and the Tribune workplace dispute crystal clear: “Five months ago you locked us out. Last Wednesday, we knocked you out.”99 With victory at the state convention, the Tribune boycotters pressed their advantage. Now, Big Six set their sights on the national party’s June convention in Chicago. Invoking the power of the labor movement and its ally, the Knights of Labor, the Typographical Union wrote: We wish to, politely but firmly, impress upon the minds of the managers of the Republican party that the “seventy foolish printers” have magnified in number and degree in the ratio of a ten-horse power microscope. They have the active sympathy and support of every trade union organization from Maine to Oregon; and for once, at least, the “plain people” have determined to stand together . . . what we peculiarly desire to say to the Republican managers—and we say it more in sorrow than in anger—is that if they shall in any manner recognize Whitelaw Reid, or give him the official patronage of the party, or undertake to send his paper out as a campaign document, unless he should conclude to repair, so far as he can, the injustice he has wrought, we will certainly defeat the party in the State of New York!100 The Typographical Union printed a convention-only edition of the Boycotter for distribution to Republican delegates at the Chicago national convention. In the special issue, the union turned the ideals of elite reform against Reid by questioning his personal honesty and commitment to the sanctity of private business contracts. They noted the Tribune unilaterally broke a mutually agreed-upon contract with his own workers. The Typographical Union proclaimed: “A party which is the means of bringing into power dishonest men has no right to expect the support of honest voters.”101 When it came to spoils, Reid was a “Republican for revenue only,” transforming the Democratic slogan on tariffs into allegations of personal enrichment. Elite reformers like Whitelaw Reid himself had been using such high-flung rhetoric against party regulars as far back as Boss Tweed in 1871 and Grant in 1872. Finally, the Typographical Union once again threatened

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to swing the balance of voters against the Republicans, this time nationally. The Knights of Labor, with its membership in “every town or hamlet” from the Atlantic to the Pacific, were “working to destroy the paper and its editor.” The union claimed an implausible influence over no fewer than 200,000 labor voters—twice the size of claims at the Utica state convention. However, Big Six’s efforts in Chicago were rebuffed.102 James Blaine was nominated on the fourth ballot. Whitelaw Reid, his closest adviser, was probably the person who most benefited after Blaine himself.103 After the national convention setback, Big Six called for a boycott of the Blaine ticket.104 During a mass meeting in Clarendon Hall, the union rolled out a full-throated critique. “Is the Republican Party Degenerating?” ran one Boycotter headline. The union newspaper lamented that the party “arrays itself against the laborers, sneers at the plain people who Abraham Lincoln delighted to honor, and denounces and insults the trade unionists of this country.” Republicans had once ended slavery as a labor reform, the union noted. Now, the party had disgraced itself “in open alliance with the brokers, railroad magnates, and other well-known representatives of monopoly and the money power.”105 There were no ad hominem attacks on James Blaine similar to Reid. “In his private life he may be, and doubtless is, a very estimable gentleman,” explained the boycotters. “With this the union has nothing to do.” On the contrary, “in his position as the chief supporter of a newspaper which is arrayed against Organized Labor, it has everything to do.” A vote for Blaine was a vote for the career and riches of Whitelaw Reid and the Tribune.106 However, the Typographical Union brutally attacked the Republican Party’s central plank, the tariff. The policy was nothing more than a “device to catch voters,” according to the union, because official party organs like the Tribune rhapsodized about protection but failed to pay their own workers more than “pauper wages.”107 Big Six’s call to boycott Republican newspapers spread. By the fall of 1884, the country’s leading Republican papers were actively under boycott by the labor movement. Charges of exploitation arose at the Indianapolis Journal, the Troy Times, the Utica Herald, the Buffalo Commercial, the Albany Commercial Advertiser, and the Philadelphia Press. In each of these cases, local workers or labor committees wrote letters to Big Six arguing that lucrative patronage had not benefited printers, only the owners.108 The Boycotter magnified these concerns: “Ithaca workingmen remember the fact

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that the Ithaca organ of the Republican party pays the lowest wages . . . less than all its local Greenback, Democratic or Independent contemporaries.”109 There was no escaping the issue. The Republican National Committee chair, Murat Halstead, owned the Cincinnati Commercial, which had its own history of labor trouble. In one episode, a factory owner in Oneida County distributed copies of the New York Tribune to all of his employees on behalf of the Blaine campaign. A group of seventeen workers made a show of returning them to the foreman in respect of the Typographical Union boycott.110

The Boycott Wins and Losses Without a doubt, the Tribune boycott was a contributing factor to James Blaine’s narrow defeat. How much impact the campaign had on the outcome is impossible to say. But it speaks volumes that Blaine personally met with a union delegation at his home in Augusta, Maine, about the boycott and then privately pressed Whitelaw Reid to negotiate. The Knights of Labor and the Central Labor Union also lobbied the Republican National Committee, to no avail.111 The Republican ticket lost in New York by a mere 1,143 votes—less than the total membership of the ITU in the state. Of course, not all members of the printers union were originally Republican partisans. Big Six ultimately claimed to have swung a bloc of eight hundred votes, which would account for 70 percent of the vote margin; this smaller number was a far more realistic estimate than the union’s earlier inflated boasts of controlling hundreds of thousands of votes.112 What impact did the wider boycott have on workingclass voters beyond the printers union? The labor vote may very well have been a factor in Indiana, New Jersey, and Connecticut, where Blaine lost by 1 percent of the popular vote. In the election’s wake, the Second Assembly District Republican Club unanimously passed a resolution inviting Whitelaw Reid to “take up his abode in Hades.”113 At least by one measure, the boycott did suppress the power of the Tribune. The paper’s lack of popularity during the electoral campaign was an albatross for Republican messaging. In the heat of the campaign, Whitelaw Reid found it necessary to clandestinely publish a temporary pro-Blaine penny sheet called the Extra. The paper’s entire purpose was to appeal to the common voter by avoiding public affiliation with the Tribune.114 Would propagandizing have been a far easier task without an active boycott? Yes. Would it have been easier if Whitelaw Reid had not made the ideological

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Figure 18. The defeat of James Blaine: Big Six revels in triumph. Boycotter, November 15, 1884.

decision to abandon the paper’s mass appeal? Yes, again. We should not forget that the boycott campaign took place alongside many other significant forces that also opposed Blaine—his defeat was overdetermined.115 The greatest effect of the boycott may simply have been to magnify the Democratic party’s own rhetoric during the election, which sought to coopt rising anti-monopoly sentiment. In the end, Big Six claimed victory. To the question of “who did it,” it was “the Boycotters and their friends who did it, and all who are interested must not forget to remember it.”116 That included Blaine himself, “retired salesman.”117 In politics, credit claiming matters. On the other hand, the boycott summarily failed to resolve the original workplace conflict. The Tribune was actually in stronger financial condition after the election, thanks to Blaine’s unwavering patronage. What the boycott did accomplish was shutting the door to a presidential administration in which Whitelaw Reid would have enjoyed unparalleled influence. After

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the election, the Typographical Union renewed the boycott on Reid as “the arch enemy of labor.”118 The Republican State Committee attempted to broker a truce in 1885. That deal fell apart when it became clear that Tribune management was still actively discouraging employees with anti-union threats.119 By comparison, two other “rat” papers subsidized by the Republican party, the Indianapolis Sentinel and the New York Mail and Express, both reached union agreements shortly before the presidential election of 1888. Whitelaw Reid simply refused. The labor struggle at the New York Tribune dragged on. It was not until 1894 that the paper once again became a union shop.120 In a testament to the boycott’s symbolic power, an official delegation from Big Six headed by John Kenney, then president, traveled to the 1892 Republican national convention in Minneapolis to discuss terms.121 In exchange for help clinching Whitelaw Reid the vice presidential nomination, an agreement was reached where he would accede to union recognition. Big Six publicly endorsed Reid and then whipped support for his nomination on the convention floor. Longtime allies in the labor movement were utterly shocked at the brazen Machiavellianism. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen reprinted the entire history of the Tribune dispute in their magazine and howled, “Whitelaw Reid is one of the most disgusting representatives of the codfish aristocracy in the continent. . . . Do [the Typographical Union members] want an unrelenting, rancorous enemy of labor for their Vice-President?”122 In an ugly turn, the Tribune remained a “rat” office long after the deal, provoking uproar within union ranks about the perils of backroom dealing. Members were enraged to learn two members of the delegation to the Minneapolis convention were personally rewarded with plum new jobs as foremen at the paper. Here was a fitting climax to the boycott ordeal. Big Six had tried to leverage the spoils system against Whitelaw Reid. The Republican newspaperman turned around and used patronage employment against the union, promising top union officials jobs in a party-run establishment if they would only support his personal ambitions.123 It took another two years of direct action to finally win actual union recognition at the Tribune. In all, the boycott showed the possibility and limits of an electoral strategy that attacked spoils as the means to improve working conditions. The argument was never that spoils were unjust or improper—merely that the benefits should be widely shared by everyday workers through high wages and enforced through collective self-organization. Big Six was quite right in

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understanding that Reid’s wealth depended upon the popularity and electoral success of the Republican Party. The problem remained that Whitelaw Reid was more than willing to trade modest political sanctions in the realm of officeholding to keep his newspaper union free.

CONCLUSION Grassroots reformers during the 1880s brought distinctive views to the forefront of public attention. Henry George, third parties, referendum advocates like John W. Sullivan, the Spread the Light Club, and trade unions—each advanced remedies for the twin dilemmas of growing social inequality and party consolidation. These figures held no major party offices and owned little property, unlike well-known elite reformers of the day. What united reform from below, as I call it, was the shared belief that political parties were responsible for worsening inequality through fusion of electoralism with private property. Grassroots objections to the gilded party system crystalized during the Great Upheaval of labor revolt. Embracing the anti-monopoly tradition, these views were expressed through mass demonstrations, protests, strikes, and boycotts rather than elite venues like literary journals. Reformers from below also advanced a host of creative proposals to curb the growing power of party regulars. Ideas ranged from the radical (wealth redistribution via the referendum process), to the possible (disenfranchisement of misbehaving politicians), to the pragmatic (electoral boycotts for union recognition). By deconcentrating party rule, anti-monopolists and fellow travelers hoped to regain their “lost share,” which had been seized by party capitalists. Administrative fixes desired by elites were taken seriously. But civil service reform never became a first-order priority. It simply failed to address a major dilemma for workers, which was the growing dominion of capital over labor in Gilded Age life. By contrast, political reform from below meant a radical transformation of living conditions.

Conclusion

THE BALLOON PROBLEM REVISITED Cashman’s balloon is a fitting tale of Gilded Age democracy. As recounted in the introduction, Michael H. Cashman, like so many others, found himself on the wrong side of party government. With the only route to his Manhattan property blocked, Boss Tweed counseled him in jest to float a balloon above and around former mayor, then-Congressman Fernando Wood’s sprawling, illegally fenced-off Woodlawn estate. The wry advice was to suffer quietly and accept the primacy of party leaders. If we entertain Tweed’s logic seriously, unhappy citizens might all launch balloons into the air in response to political malfeasance. Picture the skyline crowded with a flotilla of hot air balloons, the sole purpose of their travels being to avoid the cluttered landscape of party obstructions. The imagery captures something uniquely absurd about frustrations the public once faced. Yet, the balloon problem hides a more intractable dilemma than symbolic lack of access or representational failure. The irony of Tweed’s advice was that he traveled to his own estate in grand luxury. In 1866, the Boss purchased a casino steamboat, the John Romer, as part of his growing business empire. The company’s purpose was to shuttle New York politicos, with dispatch and liquor, to a sumptuous new Tammany clubhouse erected in Greenwich, Connecticut, and to carry the Boss directly to Linwood, his eighty-acre mansion.1 The comparison of travel accommodations between Cashman’s inconvenience and Tweed’s luxury, both of whom began their careers as artisans, would surely have provided a glaring disjuncture. That is, if the public had been aware. The sources of party leaders’ power and wealth, frankly, were mysterious to contemporaries. Whether historical or apocryphal, Cashman’s tale directs our attention to workings of the gilded party system that were hidden from plain sight. Fernando Wood and Boss Tweed owed their very statesmanship within the

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Democratic Party to mastery of property accumulation through interlocking webs of party organization and public office. So did their Republican homologues, Roscoe Conkling, Levi Morton, and Thomas Platt. Each of these ambitious entrepreneurs experimented with methods to leverage officeholding for personal wealth and factional strength. By expanding the lens of scholarly attention beyond well-known figures to the second and third tiers of party leadership, the richness of business and political ties come into sharper focus. Under Tweed’s reign, Tammany Hall established a financial sector. Henry Smith and Reeves Selmes, two otherwise obscure figures, managed those banks. Not one but two Stalwart Republicans rose to the nation’s highest executive offices during this historical period. Chester Arthur, who became president, served as an informal political banker in his capacity as collector of the port of New York, levying and investing party assessments. Through his firm Morton, Bliss and Company, Levi P. Morton serviced the personal financial needs of the Republican political class. The delicate task, which required navigating cross-factional conflict, helped elevate him to the vice presidency. Only by illuminating the doings of lesser leaders like Thomas Murphy, Stephen B. French, and James B. Butler, as well as Morton’s business partner, George Bliss, do we gain valuable insight into how the Stalwarts ran the New York Republican Party for a decade. From an expanded view it becomes clear. What made governing possible during the Gilded Age was the circulation of capital through political institutions. Of course, parties are made up of more than just leaders. Flows of capitalist value connected personal fortunes attained at the top with spoilsmen who composed the party bedrock. Thus, any understanding of Gilded Age electoral capitalism is incomplete without appreciation for the role of petty officeholding. Along with a litany of ventures in party-run business, gilded party organization included the development of internal party markets for poor relief. Nineteenth-century mass politics required broad support and the reconciling of divergent needs. Guarantee of a party right to office, and the willingness of leaders to distribute lower offices to those in dire need, bolstered the popularity of party regulars at the bottom of society. As a quasi-public benefit, employment within the spoils system meant that a narrow stratum of the politically connected poor were beneficiaries of electoral capitalism. Party work was tenuous. Nevertheless, partisan poor relief held out the possibility of personal or family rescue and even selfimprovement. The reputation of spoilsmen for rapacity was more a projection of accumulating practices at the top of parties, where the Tweeds and

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the Conklings roamed, than a fair portrayal of the life and times of the lowly party hack. Rarely did they expect or achieve anything beyond a modest “situation” that might establish, in the language of the day, a competency. Leaders built considerable autonomy for themselves by accumulating capital and managing lower officeholders. Only party regulars boasted the tools of mass mobilization, and through election, the means of public administration. They mastered the game by monopolizing the right to speak and act on behalf of the party. When this influence decayed, so did factional organization. The collapse of the Stalwarts was due in part to the willingness of allies like Chester Arthur and Levi Morton to accept nominations and appointments against Roscoe Conkling’s express consent. The relative autonomy of party leaders could also be frustrating for coordinating collective action. The owner of the New York Tribune, Whitelaw Reid, promoted his own interests above those of the party on which he heavily relied. During the 1884 presidential election, Reid defied calls to unionize printers at risk of sanction by working-class voters, contributing to the defeat of his close ally, James Blaine. Reid’s wealth increased; Blaine’s career was eclipsed. The Tribune boycott and its failure was but one example of how the actions of party leaders, ripe with contingency, drove electoral capitalism to new ground. At the turn of the century, the poor were poorer and the rich were richer. What role did the political party play in this outcome? The trend was not inevitable. We ought as scholars to consider the Party Noir, the unseemly set of power relations fundamental to electoral success. The gilded fruits of political property—and its centralization and maldistribution through party organization—reshaped New York and the country into a starkly unequal society in new ways. A political version of the haves and have nots found expression within the party system by the creation of great political fortunes, on the one hand, and political dispossession, on the other. The dual trend was immanent within the gilded party system. There was no more apt legacy than Roscoe Conkling’s arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). As Jim Crow set in nationally, provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to guarantee the civil rights of African Americans were emptied and replaced with new content to benefit corporate profitability. Conkling’s legal interpretation only makes sense in the context of the fusion of party and capital that was hegemonic in New York during his career—a party system he championed for decades.

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Grassroots reformers understood the problem of dispossession and sought to confront it when and where they could muster the strength. An eclectic band of malcontents came together in the 1880s during a brief moment of social movement upsurge. Their efforts resulted in seemingly disconnected fights. Labor boycotts of partisan newspapers, for example, transformed into strikes against party tickets at the ballot box. What disparate reformers from below shared was the anti-monopoly desire to democratize governing by enlarging access to property. To do so, they presented a raft of proposals to break the grip of electoral capitalism, from disenfranchisement of party leaders to the adoption of the referendum. The most sweeping proposals would have replaced wealth accumulation for its own sake with a politics based on social needs, articulated most clearly in the vision of the Brooklyn-based Spread the Light Club. At the very least, the hope of trade unions like Big Six was to spread the electoral windfall to a broader constituency. Struggles from below floundered in this period. It helps to make sense of why. Greenbackers, the Knights of Labor, or trade unionists were doing more than challenging powerful individuals or factions. Anti-monopolists adopted a radical posture by taking aim at officeholding property, the very glue holding the party system together. The status quo they contested was built around the expectation that representation was something to be bought and sold, and that an officeholding career was the path to make one’s fortune. Grassroots reformers who championed alternatives to party regularity discovered their ideas and methods, much like Michael H. Cashman, fenced in on all sides, and without a balloon.

SOCIAL SCIENCE LINEAGES The mausoleum commemorating New York’s gilded party system, of all places, can be found in the academy. Successive generations of social scientists continue to draw upon this case study indirectly through the legacies of James Bryce and Max Weber. Both scholars visited New York at the tail end of the period covered in this book and folded insights from the experience into broader conclusions. One result was the state’s politics were stretched far beyond its own boundaries in terms of significance, whether rightly or not. Why was gilded New York productive for studying and theorizing about modern politics? With outsized personalities and audacious scandals, the scene would have been hard to ignore. More fundamentally, the oddities of the New York experience were due to the confluence of mass

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politics and industrial capitalism, two factors that leading scholars believed would define the century to come. The party system represented an early field experiment in democratic capitalism when that was still relatively alien to Europeans. As emblems of the modern age, the state’s party regulars cast a long shadow over the origins of political science and sociology. The foremost carrier of New York’s legacy was James Bryce, an early president of the American Political Science Association (APSA). He earned the honored post, and near universal acclaim in the nascent profession, by writing The American Commonwealth. Published first in 1888, the American literati welcomed the compendium as a definitive survey of the country’s public affairs. A touchstone for generations of political science students, the book sold more than a quarter million copies, thanks in part to promotion via the network of notables who aided his research collection.2 In a contemporaneous review, no less an authority than Woodrow Wilson hailed Bryce’s contribution as “a turning point in our constitutional and political studies.” The section on the party system, noted the future president, “is the crowning achievement of the author’s method.” Wilson found it to be a “scientific digest” of the conditions that produce “certain distinctly American types of politicians,” namely, the party boss.3 Later critics like Charles Merriman, who faulted the work’s lack of analysis, took for granted the accuracy of Bryce’s descriptions.4 More recently, the historian Morton Keller has called the work a “portrait” of American government during the Gilded Age.5 From beginning to end, The American Commonwealth was profoundly shaped by the Tweed Ring. James Bryce worked on the book project from 1883 to 1888 while undersecretary of foreign affairs in the second government of William Gladstone.6 His first exposure to American politics, however, came earlier in 1870. Upon landing in America, Bryce called upon E. L. Godkin, a scion of elite reform.7 The Nation’s editor already boasted a reputation as Tammany’s irascible opponent. Notably, the two men shared a heritage of Irish Protestantism and commitment to liberal principles.8 Godkin became so instrumental to Bryce’s project that, counterintuitively, he was cut from the original acknowledgments to avoid the perception that he was laundering that mugwump’s worldview.9 During the same 1870 trip, Bryce traveled to Rochester, New York, to observe the Democratic state convention. It was a fortuitous moment. The Tweed Ring’s hold over state government was in full bloom. Bryce had the opportunity to observe the Tammany leader working the convention floor in real

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Figure 19. Former New York Mayor A. Oakey Hall, shortly after the Bryce suit. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

time. During the Rochester stay, Bryce was also the guest of a bishop named Bernard McQuaid, who knew the Tammany political milieu as a native from growing up poor and Irish Catholic in Lower Manhattan.10 James Bryce’s American Commonwealth was also bookended by the Tweed Ring. It so happened that Oakey Hall, mayor during the scandal of the 1870s, was living in London exile when Bryce’s first edition was published. Hall was a regular of the artistic scene and eked out a modest existence as a barrister and London correspondent for the New York press. A problem arose when Bryce published a chapter on the Tweed Ring written by Frank Goodnow, a Columbia University professor. Hall was enraged at the book’s portrayal of his role as a leading figure “of quite phenomenal dishonesty.”11 Or, perhaps he sensed an opportunity. Either way, there is little question that Hall craved an audience, whether it was the readership of literary journals, on the theatrical stage, or among voters. The former New York mayor sued Goodnow and Bryce for libel, and he litigated the

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dispute in the press to defend his reputation. The episode caused a minor sensation. Hall knew how to garner publicity, and he peppered everyone with media probes from his old nemesis Thomas Nast to the New York World.12 The American Commonwealth lawsuit proved to be an expensive and embarrassing burden for James Bryce. The controversy lingered for a decade. Lawyers urged a settlement, but he refused. Goodnow’s Tweed Ring chapter was accurate, in Bryce’s view, and thus should not be amended. Here, the cultural context is vital. As Sven Beckert has shown, reaction to the Tweed Ring and its subsequent overthrow was the moment that crystallized an elite consensus about “good government.” The narrative that emerged was that evil men of lowly status had corrupted public affairs by exploiting support among the unthinking masses.13 Bryce suspected that Hall was looking for a payout—exactly the kind of corrupt behavior that his book had documented extensively and condemned. Surrender would not befit “the best men of culture,” who Bryce argued in his book should rule in place of debased politicians, the likes of which Hall was exemplar.14 It was not until 1898 that British courts threw out the libel suit “for want of prosecution.” Hall left London and returned home to New York. By then, Bryce had collected another round of evidence and published a new edition. He rewrote the Tweed Ring chapter personally in detached empirical language stripped of potential libels. The new chapter stood first among only three case studies the author felt merited in-depth treatment. For Bryce, the Tweed Ring and the kind of politics it represented was the embodiment of the twin evils of party regularity and public corruption, “the ugliest feature in the politics of the country.”15 The post-suit book revision became the heavily cited definitive edition that sits on dusty university library shelves today.16 Tammany Hall had litigated itself into the pantheon of political science. Max Weber is another thinker who entombed the Gilded Age New York party system within his work. Widely acknowledged as a founder of political science and sociology, Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” was delivered as a university lecture in Munich in 1919. In the influential classic, Weber introduces a definition of the modern state (a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory), a typology of authority (traditional, charismatic, and legal), and a truncated history of the professional politician dating from late medieval princes. Delivered amid war and revolutionary turmoil, then, it is surprising that Weber’s analysis crackles with

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references to American politics. To be sure, there are many lineages to the famous essay, including Weber’s own flirtations with a stunted political career.17 But any genealogy of this influential lecture is incomplete without appreciating the imprint of Gilded Age New York. The historical sociologist Lawrence Scaff demonstrates that Weber’s 1904 visit to the United States greatly impressed the German scholar. The trip coincided with Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential reelection campaign, providing the backdrop of mass politics in full spectacle. Weber spent two weeks in New York City alone, not to mention travels upstate, and carried with him Bryce’s American Commonwealth as a primer. Weber also consulted with Edwin Seligman, a Columbia University professor who was a prominent anti-Tammany figure in reform circles. From this visit, America became a point of reference, per Scaff, a “yardstick of measurement” for comparison with historical developments in Germany, France, Great Britain, and Europe.18 A close reading of “Politics as a Vocation” makes these comparative empirical foundations clear. Gilded Age New York looms large when Weber outlines his now-famous analysis of political professionalism. The references are both explicit and subtle. Few individuals, organizations, or places are specifically named, despite a tendency to speak in sweeping terms about America. National icons like George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln earn a single comment each. By contrast, Weber cites Tammany Hall twice by name.19 Moreover, he generalizes from Tammany to make a point that the electorate’s expansion to non-elites, rather than broadening decisionmaking, resulted in “plutocratic recruitment” of leadership. Weber argues that Tammany Hall exemplified the rise of “pure patronage” parties managed by “booty politicians” who operated a sort of primitive accumulation through electoral conquest. Intriguingly, he cuts through the noise—issues, personalities, major events—and locates the animating center of the party system that captivated him during his American travels. When Weber makes the distinction between professionals who live “off” politics, as opposed to amateurs who live “for” it, he advances a barebones materialist definition. Embourgeoisement, or the opening of independent sources of property, was what made political professionalism possible.20 For example, the officeholding entrepreneur was the modern case of professionalism that Weber offers in greatest detail. Here is an oblique reference to the Tammany-style “New York” politician. Weber suggests that party leaders separated voters from the means of administration much like

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the capitalist who built combinations by “expropriating” independent producers. Weber could not be more explicit in the parallel with political economy. He introduced the modern political professional to be “like the American boss who considers his costs a capital investment which he brings to fruition through exploitation of his influence.”21 Recall that Thomas Platt intimated the exact same understanding in personal correspondence, discussed in Chapter 2, when declaring he would not consider an office unless assured the returns would be greater than the investment. Weber’s analysis also squares with the anti-monopoly critique articulated by Henry George that party leaders accumulated an “unearned increment” off the back of the citizenry, explained in Chapter 4. The first person to truly popularize that notion in print, however, was probably the reformer William Ivins in Machine Politics and Money in New York City Elections. Weber likely would have been exposed to Ivins’s analysis through the work of Moisei Ostrogorski, another European scholar, and Weber’s own Columbia University–led introduction to reform circles, where the idea circulated. Max Weber’s goal was to show that the American boss and the party machine were the “children of democracy, of mass franchise,” rather than a bizarre accident of history. Popular rule in its actually existing form, he explained, was managed not by “the people” in the abstract but rather “the boss . . . a political capitalist entrepreneur who on his own account and his own risk provides votes.” The competitive struggle for mass electoral support had bureaucratized popular representation, placing control into the hands of a leader type “who seeks power alone, power as a source of money, but also power for power’s sake.” In the American context, and especially with Tammany leaders, the historical record suggested that power was convertible to wealth through public office. What made the boss successful, per Weber, was whether he could “accumulate the necessary capital for political enterprises.” The job of the mass leader was to gather and manage the surplus necessary to mobilize the electoral crowd. This was “a state of affairs that could not exist without enormous evils,” he lamented. Along with Bryce, Weber channeled the lessons of elite reform. The system was “a corruption and wastefulness second to none.”22 In this way, Weber’s Tammany Hall stood as a metonym for the American political party. The analytic sleight of hand was an implausible stretching of historical evidence beyond recognition.23 New York was not, in fact, representative of America. Neither was the country emblematic of the full spectrum of democracy or its future potential. The conflation was also

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wrong in more immediate ways. Theodore Roosevelt’s own critique of Bryce was how American Commonwealth overlooked party regularity among the upper class. With long-winded toasts at sumptuous dinners and flush bank accounts, monied officeholders—including Republicans—might appear to have little in common with Tammany Hall. In reality, the Stalwarts were homologues to Tammany operators in many respects. Levi P. Morton’s dual role as leading financier and party hack, however, would have proved inconvenient for Weber’s generalizations about vulgarized mass politics. There was little the German scholar deemed uncouth, demagogic, or plebian about people like Morton or his highbrow constituents, the “goldbugs.” By generalizing from the American case as he saw it, Weber cautioned student radicals and socialists in his own time that welcomed “plebiscitary democracy” to postwar Germany. Be careful what you wish for, he implied, with heavy innuendo. Speaking about supporters of the rising German Social Democratic Party, he warned that mass democracy may not empower quite who you expect. By working Tammany’s legacy through “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber has bequeathed us with a German-inflected first-cut analysis of electoral capitalism. Refracted through the self-styled objectivity of early twentieth-century social science, his materialist definition of political professionalism is still common today. Every time we make note in our introduction to political science courses that professionals “live off” politics, we pay indirect homage to a reductionist interpretation of Gilded Age New York.

DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT Electoral capitalism is a historical and contingent phenomenon. This book is bounded within the Gilded Age, a discrete period, and limited to one state’s experience. To superimpose these findings directly onto issues and events of today might be tempting; after all, scholars and laypeople increasingly trumpet a “Second Gilded Age.” Allow me to sound a note of caution. The valuable service performed by the demonstrative method is to illuminate behavior that, while unseen, is constitutive of politics. We need to know what historical actors do when hidden from view if we aspire to comprehensive analysis. Unfortunately, political scientists do not wield the power of subpoena. In the inevitable absence of access to crucial materials, we are left with historical approaches that must piece together patterns

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through the hard work of archival research. But patterns are not equivalent to predictions. And even if patterns recur, it is never in exactly the same manner as before. One unavoidable downside of the intensive case study model is limited generalizability. I do, however, claim broader significance for this book in one crucial respect. Neither the story of democracy in America, nor its history of capitalism, can be fully told without appreciation for the fusion of both within electoral politics. This convergence deserves further appraisal as a distinctive theme of political development. A logical place to begin would be to locate where the political class, here or abroad, now or across time, is engaged in a project of self-aggrandizement that subsumes the entire political system. Do the means of public officeholding overlap with personal and party wealth accumulation? If so, what are the mechanisms of coordination? When is electoral capitalism triumphant in history, and why at times does it recede in importance as a logic of political organization? There are many pathways forward to thinking about electoral capitalism as a concept that takes place within particular settings. For example, let us consider a shift from the long-standing focus on money in politics to a debate over capital. Our current understanding about how money works in politics is an embarrassing muddle. One survey of contemporary American politics found it “nearly impossible” to locate any clear link between money and political outcomes.24 Another scholar describing the explosion of corporate lobbying in the United States since the 1980s concludes, “politics is not a vending machine.”25 We currently obsess over strangely decontextualized moments in time. Take the rents collected by a politician. Does it matter the form in which rents materialize or if beneficiaries are friends or family? Or consider the moment of policy implementation. Is a policy outcome the product of undue influence by organized interests? Such corruption-based framing is too slippery to be of any use. Narrow attention to the quantity of money in transactions tells us little that is definitive. By contrast, the electoral capitalism perspective entails a critical look at socially embedded relationships over time. The new framework would require scrutinizing the meaning of political behavior. Analysis would be tethered to practices of wealth accumulation like speculation, patronage, organizational innovation, and the ever-changing modes of political professionalism. Any such research agenda, in the American setting at least, will require a fresh look at how capitalist collective action is coordinated

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through the political party. As purveyor of nominations for public office, party is the premier vehicle through which politicians become capitalists and capitalists become politicians. That much is as true today, in the era of strong party identification amid weak organization, as it was during the gilded heyday of party regularity.26 Another point of entre´e into the same research is through the lost vocabulary of anti-monopoly. Losers are too often summarily dismissed as inconsequential. If we take a step back, we see that despite their marginality, critics of electoral capitalism once pushed fundamental concerns to the forefront of public debate. What is the legitimate role of political property in our system of government? When is it acceptable to leverage public office to accumulate wealth for an individual or party? Who should enjoy the windfalls of democratic capitalism? And how should profits be distributed? We must also be careful to guard against the facile notion that electoral capitalism is simply about exclusion or the distortion of representation, as anti-monopolists alleged. Life is never so simple. Throughout this book, we saw out-groups incorporated into rising coalitions. Party banks were part of coalitions that aided underserved publics. Needy individuals embraced partisan poor relief as a line of flight in trying circumstances. New reputations were built from modest origins. Real gains cannot be summarily dismissed as the vapid artifice of baroque power relations. Otherwise, we risk becoming deaf to those voices that are often muffled in society. Any paradigm shift in our thinking, such as recommended here, will surely pose more questions than answers. Historical experience does offer clarity in one respect. The foremost beneficiaries of electoral capitalism were those who managed it on a daily basis, the party leaders.

notes

introduction 1. Money adjusted for inflation in throughout this book is calculated via http://www .westegg.com/inflation/ and based on Consumer Price Index statistics from Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1975). 2. New York Evening Post, July 14, 1869; New York Times, October 31, 1878; New York Times, December 12, 1878; New York Times, June 10, 1879; New York Times, May 17, 1896; New York Herald, February 15, 1881. 3. Edward Hooker, Descendants of Rev. James Hooker, 1586–1908 (Rochester, NY: E. R. Andrews Printing Co., 1909), 211. 4. Quoted in New York Times, October 31, 1878. 5. Harold Earl Hammon, ed., Diary of a Union Lady, 1861–1865 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1962), 198–199. 6. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 287–305; Richard Hofstadter, “The Spoilsmen: An Age of Cynicism,” in The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965), 162–182. For examples of the “influence” gentlemen wielded, see Ronald Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 128–140. On New York specifically, see Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 71. 7. Richard Fry and Rakesh Kochhar, “America’s Wealth Gap Between Middle-Income and Upper Income Families Is Widest on Record,” Pew Research, December 17, 2014; Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013), 24. 8. Pew Research, “Most Americans Say U.S. Economic System Is Unfair,” February 10, 2016. 9. In a press conference at the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump announced that he was not divesting from his business. Instead, his sons would run the company. Josh Dawsey and Darren Samuelsohn, “Trump Drops ‘No New Deals’ Pledge,” Politico, January 11, 2017. See also Remarks of Walter M. Shaub, Jr., Director, U.S. Office of Government Ethics, as prepared for delivery at 4:00 pm on January 11, 2017, at the Brookings Institution. 10. “Do the Rich Call the Shots?” Room For Debate column, New York Times, April 21, 2014; Ira Katznelson et al., “Forum: Anxieties of Democracy,” Boston Review, August 27– September 9, 2015, https://bostonreview.net/forum/ira-katznelson-anxieties-democracy; Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page, “Oligarchy in the United States?” Perspectives on Politics 7,

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no. 4 (December 2009): 731–751; Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 1 (March 2013): 51–73. 11. Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, American History Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 314–335; Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Special Issue: The History of Capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 3 (July 2016); Brian Luskey and Wendy Woloson, eds., Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). For popular coverage of the field, see Jennifer Schuessler, “In History Departments, It’s Up with Capitalism,” New York Times, April 6, 2013. 12. Hans Noel’s term to describe the work of political entrepreneurs who construct ideological coalitions between factions within parties. Hans Noel, Political Ideologies and Parties in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 13. For a critical survey of the literature, see Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). On the cultural history of rational choice scholarship, see Steven Belletto, “The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State,” American Quarterly 6, no. 2 (June 2009): 333–357. 14. Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith, “Introduction to an American Revolutionary Tradition,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4; James Parisot, How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 2. 15. Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box at Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), x–xiii. 16. George Bliss to Levi P. Morton, January 4, 6, 7, and 15, 1881, Morton, Bliss and Co., Letterbook of George Bliss, March 1876–December 1877, Records 1876–1899, Vol. 4, March 3, 1880 to January 27, 1881, New-York Historical Society. 17. Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 72–73, 79. 18. Keith Poole, “The Polarization of Congressional Parties,” 1879–2014, Voteview.com, http://voteview.com/political_polarization_2014.html. On ideology, see John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Chapters 3, 5. 19. The theory further argues that capitals are convertible between fields (social, cultural, political), a process mediated by the state. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in The Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 46–58; Pierre Bourdieu, “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field” and “Delegation and Political Fetishism,” in Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Mathew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 171–202; Pierre Bourdieu, “Delegation and Political Fetishism,” in Language and Symbolic Power, 203–219; Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the

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State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” trans. Loı¨c Wacquant and Samar Farage, in State/Culture: State-Formation After the Cultural Turn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 53–75. 20. This poetic characterization of political professionalism hails from James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 56. 21. Jens Borchert and Gary Copeland, “The United States: A Political Class of Entrepreneurs,” in The Political Class in Advanced Democracies: A Comparative Handbook, ed. Jens Borchert and Ju¨rgen Zeiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 393–411. 22. Adam Sheingate, “Political Entrepreneurship, Institutional Change, and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 17 (Fall 2003): 185–203, 190. 23. Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Nicholas Parillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). This mode of governance has returned as the preferred mode of policymaking in the neoliberal period. Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 24. For instance, the New York–based lobbyist for European investors in the Erie Railroad warned one Republican state legislator from Queens that a bill before his committee to “legislate certain Directors into office” was a “device” to “create a gigantic machine as under Tweed & Sweeny, for working the destruction of the Republican party.” John Livingston to Le Baron Bradford Prince, February 21, 1874, Box 3, Folder 1874, Le Baron Bradford Prince Papers, New-York Historical Society. 25. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 287–305. 26. Gary Kornblith and John Murrin, “The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class,” in Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred Young (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 28–79. 27. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 41. Democratization of the right to vote for white men was simultaneous with, and predicated upon, the disenfranchisement of free African American men during this period. David Bateman, Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 28. Bryce, American Commonwealth, 56. 29. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 2–24, 69–71; Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 80–81, 166–167. 30. Richard R. John, “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 50–84. 31. Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message, December 8, 1829, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-3.

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32. C. K. Yearly, The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, 1860–1920 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1970), 97–120. 33. Benjamin Harrison recalled spending four to six hours per day on patronage matters during his early presidency. Charles W. Calhoun, “The Political Culture: Public Life and the Conduct of Politics,” 185–213, in The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 196. 34. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969), 258. 35. Quoted in Mark Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 59. 36. In 1863, the lawyer and former actor John K. Hackett believed he had secured the Mozart Hall nomination for corporation counsel for the price of $7,500, or $150,000 adjusted for inflation. However, Fernando Wood resold the nomination to a rival at a higher price. Irate at the double-cross, Hackett pulled a pistol on Wood in his own parlor. The two apparently reconciled. Three years later Hackett finally made it on Wood’s ticket. New York Times, January 25, 1863. 37. Nineteenth-century federal administration frequently depended upon officeholders paid by fees and bounties. Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive, 9–48. 38. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, ed. Ed Folson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 19. 39. Walter Dean Burnham, “Those High Nineteenth Century American Voting Turnouts: Fact or Fiction?,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16, no. 4 (1986), 613–644, 635. 40. Joel Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of Party Politics (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 397. 41. Corporations received protections under the Fourteenth Amendment in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), a case argued before the Supreme Court by Roscoe Conkling, the New York Stalwart leader. 42. Between 1868 and 1888, the parties traded statewide victory back and forth in presidential elections. Democrats won the state’s electoral votes in 1868 (with native son Horatio Seymour), lost them to Republicans in 1872 (on a fusion ticket led by Horace Greeley), won them back in 1876 (with native son Samuel Tilden), lost them to Republicans in 1880 (to native son vice presidential nominee Chester Arthur), won them again in 1884 (with native son Grover Cleveland), and lost them in 1888 (to native son vice presidential nominee Levi P. Morton). Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots: 1836 to 1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 888–889. 43. E. E. Schattschneider’s contention that electoral democracy would be “unthinkable” without parties is still normal science. E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Rinehart, 1942), 1. For a more recent exposition on this point, see Seth Masket, The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How They Weaken Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 44. For an overview of the responsible party thesis and its origins in Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government, see John Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 11–14. The principal modern statement is APSA Committee on Parties,

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“A Report of the Committee on Political Parties,” American Political Science Review 44 (September 1950): i–xii, 1–99. On the recent call for greater party responsibility to combat inequality, see Task Force on Democracy and Inequality, “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” American Political Science Association (2004), 18–19. 45. The paradigmatic case in American political development is the role of party in both enfranchising and disenfranchising African Americans. Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 46. Steven Rosenstone and Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993), Chapter 2. 47. I borrow this notion from Eric Foner’s description how the second party system was founded upon avoiding the slavery issue. Jeffrey Selinger notes that parties in American political development were not founded upon the “great issues of the day.” Instead, they subordinated the most divisive issues to advance ones less likely to disturb unwieldy cross-sectional alliances necessary to maintain national majorities. Many of society’s most important questions “lack an empirical trace.” Jeffrey S. Selinger, Embracing Dissent: Political Violence and Party Development in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 4, 11–13, 175. 48. Gary Cox and Matthew McCubbins, Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the House of Representatives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 49. Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 477–481. 50. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 987–996, 1020–1032. 51. On the capacity of institutions to shape individuals’ norms, see Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). In the American party system, see Aldrich, Why Parties, 16–26. 52. An earlier scholarly tradition in sociology made the autonomy of party officers from the electoral base a central feature of inquiry. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968). For a survey of this work and how it became orthogonal to political science, see Cedric de Leon, Party and Society (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), 100–101. 53. Mark Summers, “ ‘To Make the Wheels Revolve We Must Have Grease’: Barrel Politics in the Gilded Age,” Journal of Policy History 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–72. 54. Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Parties “subsidize” the costs of collective action on behalf of individuals to engage them in the electoral process. Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America, 27. 55. James Bryce’s American Commonwealth argued that industrialists (and the educated elite) were the “true rulers” and that party leaders were “subordinate to them.” The idea remains widely accepted. Of upper-class New Yorkers, Sven Beckert writes, “Their expertise, as well as their financial capacity for rewarding politicians, facilitated a fine-spun network of personal relationships to people in elective office.” Their influence on political decisions, both

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“subtle and powerful,” was “probably most effective in the struggle over specific issues.” Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 81–82; David C. Hammack, “Elite Perceptions of the Power in the Cities of the United States, 1880–1900: The Evidence of James Bryce, Moisei Ostrogorski, and Their American Informants,” Journal of Urban History 4, no. 4 (August 1978): 363–396, 377. The instrumentalist perspective holding that politicians were the tools of robber barons is most stark in the once-influential book by Matthew Josephson, The Politicos, 1865–1896 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938). 56. In fact, at the time of the amendment’s drafting, Conkling had advocated for a language change from “citizens” to “persons” so it would cover the sizable immigrant population that gave states like New York more representation. David Jordan, Roscoe Conkling: Voice in the Senate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 65–66. 57. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 77–128. 58. For example, in 1873 Congress voted itself a raise of $2,000 per year, $38,000 today, retroactive for two years, plus travel allowances. The public reaction during an economic depression helped throw Republicans out of power in the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War. Borchert and Copeland, “Political Class of Entrepreneurs,” 396–397. 59. Morton Keller’s term from Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), Chapter 7. 60. Joseph Schlesinger, Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966); Aldrich, Why Parties, Chapter 2. 61. Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, The Party Decides (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 62. Addressing this conundrum, Sewell argues that dynamic structures are mutually constituted by social contexts and human agency. William Sewell, Jr., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (July 1992): 1–29. 63. Why, for example, did Republicans Roscoe Conkling and James Blaine become implacable foes? Certainly their opposing factions, Stalwarts and Half-Breeds, were rooted in competing regional and economic constituencies; they also squabbled over patronage. But the level of their mutual hatred was so intense that it defies simplistic reduction to political imperatives. The feud had significant repercussions, including Blaine’s narrow loss of New York State in the presidential race of 1884, which cost his party the presidency. 64. Mark Summers, Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 65. Alan Ware, “Anti-Partyism and Party Control of Political Reform in the United States: The Case of the Australian Ballot,” British Journal of Political Science 30, no. 1 (January 2000): 1–29. 66. My thinking here owes a debt to research on pro-growth coalitions in urban politics. John Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 4–6; Clarence Stone, “Looking Back to Look Forward: Reflections on Urban Regime Analysis,” Urban Affairs Review 40, no. 3 (January 2005): 309–341. 67. Keller, Affairs of State, 239.

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68. John Gerring, “Mere Description,” British Journal of Political Science 42, no. 4 (October 2012): 721–746; Ivan Ermakoff, “Exceptional Cases: Epistemic Contributions and Normative Expectations,” European Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (August 2014): 223–243, 235. On the undervalued role of empirical description in social scientific advances, see Max Besbris and Shamus Khan, “Less Theory. More Description,” Sociological Theory 35, no. 2 (June 2017): 147–153. 69. Scott A. Frisch, Douglass B. Harris, Sean Q. Kelly, and David C. W. Parker, “Taking the Road Less Traveled,” in Doing Archival Research in Political Science, ed. Scott A. Frisch, Douglass B. Harris, Sean Q. Kelly, and David C. W. Parker (New York: Cambria Press, 2012), 10–15. 70. Original emphasis. Daniel J. Galvin, “Qualitative Methods and American Political Development,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert C. Lieberman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 207–227, quote on 212. 71. Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase from his Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (London: Abacus Books, 2008), 46. 72. Brian Murphy, Building the Empire State: Political Economy in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 12. 73. Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 74. “Sound money” meant the full payment of war debt in gold, early resumption of the gold standard, swift contraction of greenbacks, and measures that would reduce inflation. Nicholas Barreyre, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). 75. Quoted from Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), xvi. 76. Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 79, 88–89; Robert McElroy, Levi Parsons Morton: Banker, Diplomat and Statesman (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), 107. 77. Quote form C. Vann Woodward, “The Lowest Ebb,” American Heritage Magazine 8, no. 3 (April 1957): 52–57, 106–109. 78. Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), “Profiting from the Presidency,” June 19, 2018, https://www.citizensforethics.org/profitingfromthepresidency; CREW, “Trump’s 2000 Conflicts of Interest (And Counting),” accessed September 13, 2019, https://www.citizensforethics.org/2000-trump-conflicts-of-interest-counting/; Center for Responsible Politics, “All the President’s Profiting: Properties,” Opensecrets.org, based on Federal Election Commission data released on June 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/2KlZwRl. 79. Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, “The Patrimonial Turn In The American State,” Clio: Newsletter of Politics and History, An Organized Section of the American Political Science Association 28, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 6, 20–24; Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, “Political Machine of the 21st Century: The Trump Organization as Platform Capitalism,” Public Seminar, August 22, 2019, http://www.publicseminar.org/2019/08/political-machine-of-the-21st-century/. 80. World Bank Group, “Corruption and Economic Development,” in Helping Countries Combat Corruption: The Role of the World Bank, https://bit.ly/1G8kxVo. 81. Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Lawrence Lessig, Republic Lost: The Corruption of Equality and the Steps to End It (New York: Hachette, 2016), 15–20.

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82. For instance, the notorious Gilded Age “Black Horse Cavalry” was sometimes referred to by journalists as the “Third House” of the New York State legislature. New York Times, June 25, 1910; Charles Tilly, “Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 160–187. 83. Collis P. Huntington to Charles Crocker, December 21, 1870, and Collis P. Huntington to Leland Stanford, March 18, 1872, Letters from Collis P. Huntington to Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, E. B. Crocker, and D. D. Cotton from August 20, 1867 to August 5, 1869 (New York, 1892), 225, 316. 84. On Paul Manafort’s transformation from political consultant to founder of Pericles, a private equity firm, see Franklin Foer, “The Plot Against America,” Atlantic, March 2018, https://theatln.tc/2BymJdp. For a comparative historical examination of the 1870s and today, see Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, “Bringing the ‘Ring’ Back In: The Politics of Booty Capitalism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Forthcoming, July 2020). 85. Most prominently in gilded political economy, the transcontinental railroads that drove financial markets and spurred westward expansion actually preceded demand. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), xxvi. 86. Xavier Donald MacLeod, Biography of Honorable Fernando Wood, Mayor of the City of New York (New York: O. F. Parsons, 1856), 47. 87. In the Chapter 2 section on party accumulation, I further describe and contextualize Platt’s logic. Thomas Platt to G. Hilton Scribner, January 3, 1873, Folder 1: Letters to Scribner, 1871–1884, Gilbert Hilton Scribner Papers, 1831–1918, Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York State Library. 88. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), xix–xxvii; Keyssar, The Right to Vote,141–162. 89. Those contracts would be worth $4.2 million today. Report and Testimony of the Committee on Investigation and Retrenchment on the Alleged Frauds in the New York CustomHouse, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1872), xiii, lxvi. 90. Quoted in New York Tribune, February 16, 1872. James Terwilliger had a long history of service in the Republican Party. He was acting secretary of the Republican National Committee during Lincoln’s reelection campaign in 1864. After the Senate printing scandal, Terwilliger landed on his feet. He became private secretary to Thomas Murphy, then collector of the port of New York, and later won a patronage spot as clerk in the New York City Police Department at a salary of $1,800 per year (approximately $47,000 today). Syracuse Journal: January 16 and 17, 1872; February 2, 7, 9, 10, 13, and 19, 1872; February 18, 1878; Syracuse Courier, January 16, 1872; New York Tribune, February 13 and 16, 1872, News Clippings, James Terwilliger, Terwilliger Family Papers, 1865–1972, Richard and Carolyn Wright Research Center, Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse, New York. 91. James Patterson, a Republican from New Hampshire, was expelled from the U.S. Senate in 1873 for accepting $3,000 in stock from Union Pacific president Oakes Ames. Patterson complained to the New York Tribune: “If I should accept money from a railroad the people would call it bribery; but other Senators, who are lawyers, may receive large fees from the same company even though they never appear for it in court, or so far as I can learn, do any business for it except in Congress, and nobody seems to think there is anything wrong

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about it.” Five years earlier Conkling had accepted $10,000 in “legal fees” from the Central Pacific Railroad when the company was trying to secure its westernmost transcontinental station on Goat Island in San Francisco Bay. Yet, in contrast to Patterson, Conkling suffered no equivalent outrage or sanction. “Senate Report Recommending Expulsion of Senator James Patterson, February 27, 1873,” in Congress Investigates: A Documentary History, 1792– 1974, vol. 3, ed. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Roger Burns (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1975), 1960; New York Tribune, November 25, 1875; Richard Price Morgan, Jr., Exhibit W. Statement No. 61, October 15, 1887, in Report on the Central Pacific Railway and Its Branches, United States Pacific Railway Commission (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1887), 4555. 92. Robert Waters, Career and Conversation of John Swinton (Charles H. Kerr, 1902), 17. 93. Peter Bratsis, Everyday Life and the State (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), Chapter 3. 94. Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Random House, 2016), 116, 128. 95. Quoted in White, American Ulysses, 137. 96. On Grant’s post-presidency business dealings, see William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 487–493. On his role as political fixer in the Maritime Canal Company of Nicaraguan, see Robert McElroy, Levi Parsons Morton: Banker, Diplomat and Statesman (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), 89–95. To impress upon the public the “incalculable” advantages of the plan, Grant made frequent reference to his experiences as wartime commander and later presidential administration. Ulysses S. Grant, “The Nicaragua Canal,” North American Review (February 1881): 107–116. 97. Grant and Ward’s reliance on the “imaginary business” of government contracts began after the end of the bull market in September 1880. Geoffrey C. Ward, A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 159, 162, 166–168, 178–179, 180, 184, 185, 193, 197, 201, 205, 206, 219.

the tammany bank run of 1871 1. New York Herald, November 18, 1871; Commercial Advertiser, November 20, 1871. 2. Commercial Advertiser, November 20, 1871; New York Herald, November 21, 1871. 3. New York Herald, November 19, 20, 1871. 4. John Foord, The Life and Public Services of Andrew Haswell Green (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913), 97–101. 5. New York Evening Post, November 18, 1871; New York Tribune, November 20, 27, 1873; Albany Argus, November 21, 1871. 6. New York Herald, November 18, 1871. 7. New York Tribune, November 20, 1871; New York Herald, November 20, 1871; New York World, November 21, 1871. 8. New York Herald, November 19, 1871. 9. Pomeroy’s Democrat, November 25, 1871; New York Times: December 14, 15, 16, 19, 1871; New York Leader, December 12, 1871; New York World, October 24, 1873. 10. New York Evening Post, November 29, 1871. Legal action against Tammany banks continued for years. New York Times: March 11, 1876 and February 4, 1880.

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1. For Tammany’s pre-Tweed history, see Jerome Mushkat, Tammany Hall: The Evolution of a Political Machine, 1789–1865 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971). On the Tweed Ring, see Seymour Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed’s New York (Chicago: Elephant, 1990); Morton Keller, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), chapter 8; Alexander Callow Jr., The Tweed Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); John W. Pratt, “Boss Tweed’s Public Welfare Program,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 45 (1961): 396–411; Leo Hershkowitz, Tweed’s New York: Another Look (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1977); Kenneth Ackerman, Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of New York (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005). 2. Leaders of the Tweed Ring were all millionaires at the peak of their influence. Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Aldermen to Investigate the “Ring” Frauds with Testimony Elicited During the Investigation, Document no. 8 (New York: Martin B. Brown, 1878) (hereafter Ring Frauds), 372. For my estimate of the size of the fortunes of the inner members of the Ring, see Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, “The Boss’s ‘Brains’: Political Capital, Democratic Commerce, and the New York Tweed Ring, 1868–1871,” Journal of Historical Sociology 28, no. 3 (September 2015): 384–387. 3. James Gill v. Guardian Savings Institution of the City of New York, New York Court of Appeals (New York: S. Hamilton’s Son, 1879). 4. New York World, November 21, 1871. 5. For a survey of these theories, see: Interview with Mrs. Holly Tweed by David Murrah, Borger, Texas, November 28, 1977, Richard M. Tweed Papers, 1836–1932, Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas (hereafter Richard Tweed Papers, Texas Tech). 6. William Tweed made this point about wide circulation expressly during one of his final prison interviews. He told his old friend Thurlow Weed: “I am utterly powerless to make any restitution. . . . Everybody had a claim on me, and right and left I have disbursed the funds to others . . . the property is beyond my control and I cannot return it.” In particular, Tweed made note of millions lost in real estate and stock speculations. “Boss Tweed’s Penitence,” Press Clipping, n.d., Richard Tweed Papers, Texas Tech. 7. The major exception is Aaron Burr’s founding of Manhattan Company, which became a cornerstone of the rising Democratic-Republican Party. Brian Murphy, Building the Empire State: Political Economy in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), chapter 3. 8. Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 117–125, 135–144; Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 32–43; Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17, 236, 238–239, 241, 251–253, 312, 364–365. 9. Broxmeyer, “The Boss’s ‘Brains,’ ” 387–395. 10. This analysis was most coherently stated by Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed’s New York, 55, 58, 67, and Callow, Tweed Ring, 10, 47, 51. For the exception, see Hershkowitz, Tweed’s New York, xiv–xvi; however, in disputing “myths,” Hershkowitz’s story also revolves around corruption, albeit disputing it.

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11. Judy Hilkey, Character as Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 88. 12. Alexander Keyssar, Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), chapter 5; Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 181–192. 13. Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), 4, 7–8. 14. Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 146, chapter 5. 15. Christopher Tomlins, Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21–30. 16. Kessner, Capital City, 22–32. 17. These figures sat on the boards of directors of the Viaduct Railway, the Real Estate Trust Company, and the New York Mutual Gaslight Company. 18. See, for instance, David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage, 1982), 131–134. 19. By 1877, William Tweed was an imprisoned former bank president who failed to secure even the smallest personal loan. William Tweed to Margaret Tweed, November 3, 1877, Box 1, File 8, Richard Tweed Papers, Texas Tech. 20. Testimony to the Board of Aldermen, Folder: Account of His Services, Henry Fox Taintor Collection: Correspondence and Papers, 1858–1913, New-York Historical Society (hereafter HFT, N-YHS). 21. “No President, Vice-President, Trustee, officer or servant of said Corporation shall, directly or indirectly, borrow the funds of said Corporation or its deposits, or in any manner use the same or any part thereof, except to pay necessary current expenses, under the direction of said Board of Trustees.” Bowling Green Savings Bank Promotional Pamphlet, n.d., 4 pages, author’s personal collection. 22. Under receivership, only 34 percent of deposits were returned by the Bowling Green Savings Bank. The Guardian paid out all accounts under $200, while larger accounts received only between 45 and 50 percent of their original value. Willis Seaver Paine, A Summary of Savings Banks That Have Failed in the State of New York (New York: The Financier, 1906), 28–31, 35–41. 23. The Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register 13, no. 11 (May 1879): 890–891. 24. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Corporation of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York for the Year 1871–72, in two parts, compiled by George Wilson (New York: Press of the Chamber of Commerce, 1872), 185, in New York Chamber of Commerce Records MS噛1440, Box 92, Folder 2, Series II, Vol. 14, 1871–1872, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 25. The manifesto was also published as a message “To Depositors” in the bank’s personal account books, where individuals were invited to careful keep track of deposits and withdrawals. Bowling Green Savings Bank Promotional Pamphlet, n.d., 4 pages, author’s personal collection. 26. McBride’s safes, paid for by taxpayers, ended up in Tammany bank vaults. They became a focus of litigation after bankruptcy that received a large amount of attention by the press. New York Herald, December 5, 1877. 27. Mushkat, Tammany Hall, 186, 353–355, 361–362. 28. Genet ran the Yorkville Bank. His uptown political base in the Eighth Senate District was independent of Tweed but allied with him.

176

Notes to Pages 38–40

29. Proceedings of the Board of Supervisors of the County of New York, from January 1 to June 30, 1867 (New York: New York Printing Company, 1867), 91–147. See also John I. Davenport, The Election and Naturalization Frauds in New York City, 1860–1870 (New York, 1894), 250–251, 279. 30. New York Times, February 24, 1874; New York Herald, February 26, 1874; Amsterdam Daily Graphic, February 27, 1874. 31. New York Tribune, February 24, 1874. 32. James Richardson, “Fernando Wood and the New York Police Force, 1855–1857,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 50 (January 1966): 5–40; Leonard Chalmers, “Tammany Hall, Fernando Wood, and the Struggle to Control New York City, 1857–1859,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 53 (January 1969): 17–33; Tyler Anbinder, “Fernando Wood and New York City’s Secession from the Union: A Reappraisal,” New York History 68 (January 1987): 67–92. 33. Frederick Hubbard, Other Days in Greenwich: Or Tales and Reminiscences of an Old New England Town (New York: J. F. Tapley & Co., 1913), 199; New York Herald, January 30, 1870. 34. Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Plume, 2002), 168, 284–287, 292–293. 35. “Report of the Select Committee in Relation to the Charges Against Hon. James Wood, Senator from 30th District,” Document no. 54, Documents of the Senate of the State of New York, 95th Session, 1872, Vol. 3, No. 34–55 (Albany: Argus Company, 1872) (hereafter Wood Charges), 58. 36. Street openings were a legal and fiscal process subject to intensive real estate speculation. New York Herald, September 16, 1869. Quoted from New York Times, February 14, 1872. 37. Roche convinced the Sisters of Charity to deposit $92,000 in the Bowling Green Bank. He was a major fundraiser for the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, and his wife was active with Convent of the Sacred Heart. Owen Brennan was city commissioner of charities and corrections. In the state senate, Tweed’s Committee on Charitable and Religious Societies appropriated $2.5 million for charities—more in three years than the previous seventeen combined. See New York Times, March 11, 1872; New York Herald, January 3, 1871; Pratt, “Boss Tweed’s Public Welfare,” 403–405, 409. 38. Ackerman, The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1988), 77. 39. Ackerman, Gold Ring, 14–30. 40. Ackerman, Gold Ring, 113, 150–151, 164; J. T. W. Hubbard, For Each, for the Strength of All: A History of Banking in the State of New York (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 127; Kessner, Capital City, 119–120. 41. New York Herald, January 12, 1870; Edward Renehan, Jr., Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 168. 42. A post-Tweed bank audit showed $825,000 from the Police Department, $262,000 from the Fire Department, $80,000 from the Public Works Department, and $50,000 from the Seventh Avenue Improvement Fund. Documents of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York For the Year 1872, Document no. 6 (New York: M. B. Brown & Co., 1873).

Notes to Pages 41–46

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43. Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 305–318, 330–340; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 248, 268–274, quoted 318. 44. New York Times, April 21, 1864. The Bankers’ Magazine and Statistical Register, August 1871, 95. 45. See, for example, Callow, Tweed Ring, 182–183, 198–206. 46. The Ring’s percentage of contracts grew over time. Table of Percentages from Warrants, Testimony to the Board of Aldermen, Folder: Account of His Services, HFT, N-YHS. 47. Other politicians affiliated with the Ocean Bank were Cornelius Corson, clerk for Tweed’s state senate committee on municipal affairs; Charles Cornell, city water register; and George Caulfield, a Tammany leader from the Seventeenth Ward. 48. Richard Connolly, Deposit Receipts, Folder: Correspondence 1858–1870, and Andrew Garvey Checks, Folder: Business Papers, 1871–1873, HFT, N-YHS. 49. New York Leader, December 23, 1871; New York Times, January 4, 1872. 50. A. E. Smith to Samuel Tilden, December 19, 1871; A. E. Smith to Lucius Comstock, December 25, 1871; and Cashier of Bank of New York to Lucius Comstock, December 29, 1871, Tweed Ring Correspondence, 1870–1872, November to December 1871, and Undated, Series 1 Correspondence: 1810–1919, Samuel J. Tilden Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (hereafter Tilden Papers, NYPL). 51. Tweed was chair of this commission. “Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate into the Matter of the Alleged Frauds in the Building of the Ninth District Court House, in the City of New York,” Document no. 25, Documents of the State of New York Senate, Ninety-Sixth Session, Vol. 2 (Albany: Argus, 1873). 52. Ring Frauds, 593–594. 53. Communication from Henry W. Genet to the Senate of the State of New York in Relation to the Report of the Committee to Investigate the Alleged Frauds in the Building of the Ninth District Court House in the City of New York (Albany: Argus, 1873), 7. 54. The New York Tribune on January 4, 1872, accused the Bowling Green Savings Bank of allowing state legislators such as Wood to draw unlimited sums from their accounts. There is no extant evidence to corroborate the allegation. 55. Wood Charges, 48–58, 62, 67–68, 73–76, 81–89, 103, 108–109. See also New York Herald, March 16, 1872. 56. The building contractor James Ingersoll at one point owed $300,000 to the Tenth National Bank, who noted, “I had to pay it all.” Ring Frauds, 598. 57. A similar phenomenon was true of police funds and building contractors. 58. Gill v. Guardian, 198. 59. Bankers’ Magazine and Statistical Register, January 1872, 491–493. 60. Transfers were made through Reeves Selmes’s “secretary account” in both banks. New York Times, February 26, 1874. 61. New York Times, January 25 and March 11, 1872. 62. Harry James Carman, The Street Surface Railway Franchises of New York City (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1919), 132–133. 63. New York Times, June 16, 1874. 64. Shepherd F. Knapp, as Receiver of the Bowling Green Savings Bank, of the City of New York, against Walter Roche, New York State Court of Appeals: Records and Briefs (New York: E. Wells Sackett & Bro. Law Book and Job Printers, 1874), 51–76.

178

Notes to Pages 46–51

65. New York Times, February 22, 1872. 66. New York Herald, December 5, 1877. 67. New York Times, December 16, 19, 1871. 68. New York Leader, December 16, 30, 1871. 69. The “Smith” in the firm was Henry N. Smith, the Wall Street broker and gold trader—not to be confused with “Hank” Smith of the Police Commission and the Guardian and Bowling Green banks. Henry Martin to Lucius Comstock, December 27, 1871, Tweed Ring Correspondence: November–December 1871, Tilden Papers, NYPL. 70. George Opdyke to Lucius Comstock, January 9, 1871, Tweed Ring Correspondence: November–December 1871, Tilden Papers, NYPL. 71. Hershkowitz, Tweed’s New York, 193. 72. New York Times, February 26, 1874. 73. Kessner, Capital City, 20–22. 74. The Schells were old Tweed rivals dating back to the 1850s and 1860s. Mushkat, Tammany Hall, 303, 306, 370; Hammack, Power and Society, 132–133, 161. 75. John Foord, The Life and Public Services of Andrew Haswell Green (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913), 94–98. 76. Emerson Willard Keyes, A History of Savings Banks in the United States from their inception in 1816 down to 1877, Vol. 2 (New York: Bradford Rhodes, 1878), 544. 77. The National Savings Institution and the Bowling Green Savings Bank offered 6 percent interest on all sums of $5 and upward, which accrued monthly. The Greenwich Savings Bank responded by offering 7 percent. Many banks had minimums of $1 for deposits, the average daily wage of a laborer, but the Bowling Green accepted “deposits of any sum, from ten cents to ten thousand dollars.” Quoted from New York Tribune, October 28, 1869; June 30, 1871; July 13, 1871; History of the Greenwich Savings Bank of New York (New York, 1896), 24. 78. Rivals derisively called this electoral capital the “municipal pap.” New York Herald, November 19, 1871. 79. Albany Evening Herald, April 12, 1871; Commercial Advertiser, August 18, 1871. 80. The Financier, January 27, 1872. 81. New York Times, November 25, 1871. 82. New York Truth, December 29, 1880. 83. Communication from Genet, 25. 84. Gill v. Guardian, 231, 403–404. 85. New York Times, February 26, 1874. 86. The Clearing House was a cooperative, self-policing market where banks met and exchanged checks and other notes with each other. Institutions had to leave with a positive balance daily. Defaulting on an obligation would result in becoming an outcast in the financial community. For a description of how the system worked, see J. S. Gibbons, The Banks of New-York, Their Dealers, the Clearing House, and the Panic of 1857 (New York: Appleton & Co., 1870), chapter 18. 87. New York Herald, November 19, 1871. 88. Foord, Life of Green, 102–104. 89. Bankers’ Magazine and Statistical Register, May 1879, 890–891. 90. Martin Shefter, “The Emergence of the Political Machine: An Alternative View,” in Theoretical Perspectives on Urban Politics, ed. Willis D. Hawley et al. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 14–44. 91. New York Herald, November 22, 1871.

Notes to Pages 53–54

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dawn of the conkling machine 1. New York Tribune, September 22, 1871. By contrast, Murphy’s nomination received wide support. New York Times, July 3, 1870; New York Herald: July 3, 8, 11, 1870; Ogdensburg Journal, July 6, 1870. 2. Fraud allegations related to Thomas Murphy’s wartime contracting record were published during Horace Greeley’s campaign, eventually successful, to remove Murphy. Any allegations of shoddy contracting should be contextualized by the day’s cutthroat political competition between the conservative and Radical factions of the Republican Party. However, a separate client also sued the manufacturing firm Murphy and Griswold during the war over a similar issue: the poor quality of an order of buffalo robes. In the wartime contracting case, Murphy’s legal representation was none other than Chester Arthur, then only an ambitious young lawyer. Murphy paid Arthur $1,000 ($16,580 today) for defense against the fraud charges, which were dismissed by a commission presided over by Arthur’s political mentor, Senator Edwin Morgan. After winning the case, Murphy and Arthur became close friends, allies, and business partners. When Murphy was forced out of the collectorship on November 18, 1871, over another contracting scandal, he recommended Arthur for the post. Arthur went on to hold the collectorship for seven years as a central figure in the Conkling machine. New York Herald, July 3 and 8, 1870; New York Tribune, September 22 and 25, 1871; Murphy v. Boker (1864) in Practice Reports in the Supreme Court of Appeals of the State of New York (Albany: William Gould, 1865), 251–265; Arthur & Gardiner Account Book, 1864–1866, Envelope 4: Account Books, Chester Alan Arthur Papers, 1847–1886, New-York Historical Society. See also Thomas Reeves, Gentleman Boss: The Life and Times of Chester Arthur (Newtown, CT: American Political Biography Press, 1975). 3. Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 99–104, 109–110. 4. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial ed., pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 1106, series Y 352; Andrew Wender Cohen, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), Chapter 8, 134; Reeves, Gentleman Boss, 62–68. 5. Earlier in the same year, Thomas Murphy led a Republican Party welcome delegation for O’Donovan Rossa, a Fenian prisoner released by British authorities, and recruited him to run against Boss Tweed for the state senate. Upon his nomination for port collector, local papers speculated wildly about how Murphy would navigate foreign policy issues as “an Irishman, a red-headed Irishman, a republican Irishman.” Quoted from New York Herald, July 22, 1870; David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling: Voice in the Senate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 136; Florence E. Gibson, The Attitudes of the New York Irish Toward State and National Affairs, 1848–1892 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 241–244, 254–261. 6. Opponents attacked Murphy’s Catholicism with “tricky” circulars as far back as his first for run for public office in 1865. Murphy was the most powerful Irish American federal officeholder in New York during the Orange and Green Riots of 1870 and 1871. Among the casualties resulting from the civil unrest was an unrelated thirty-nine-year-old Irish man named Thomas Murphy. New York Times, November 4, 1865; New York Tribune, July 13, 1870. 7. Strikers are “a bold class of marauder, who ‘come down’ upon a candidate for a place . . . with threats that if he does not give it, they will be down upon him in Primary Elections.”

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Notes to Pages 54–59

Hans Sperber and Travis Tritschuh, American Political Terms: An Historical Dictionary (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1962), 439–440. 8. New York Tribune, July 12, 1870. 9. New York Times, July 3, 1870. 10. William J. Hartman, Politics and Patronage: The New York Custom House, 1852–1902, PhD diss., Columbia University, 1952, 159. 11. New York Times, July 12, 1870. 12. New York Sun, July 12, 1870. 13. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, 22. 14. The sum was $18,000, among the largest personal injury awards to that date ($354,000 adjusted for inflation). Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, 126. 15. Reminiscences of Senator William M. Stewart, of Nevada, ed. George Rothwell Brown (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1908), 254–257, quoted 257. 16. Congressional Globe, 41st Congress, 2nd Session, July 11, 1870, 524. 17. New York Tribune, July 12, 1870.

chapter 2 1. Moisei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, Vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 196. 2. William Seward, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” speech delivered at Rochester, New York, October 25, 1858. 3. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), chapters 3, 4. 4. Joshua Wolf, Western Union and the Creation of the American Corporate Order, 1845– 1893 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7; James Ely, Railroads and American Law (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 16–30. 5. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), xxvii, 4, 7–8. 6. The loan has not been previously explained in biographies of Arthur or Vanderbilt. In a series of letters dated October 18 and 25, 1861, Chester Arthur thanked Cornelius Vanderbilt for sending him a $3,000 check, the equivalent of $77,000 adjusted for inflation. The check was made out to Arthur, who claimed in the correspondence that the money would be put toward paying a family mortgage. The newly married Arthur had assumed some of the financial liabilities of Elizabeth Hansborough Herndon, his widowed, southern-born mother-inlaw. But documents from Arthur’s own personal bank account show a $3,000 deposit on October 11. At the time, his salary was barely $100 per month, and so the size of the Vanderbilt loan greatly exceeded what he expected to earn that year in his current position. The money exceeded all other previous individual deposits documented in his account book until he went into private practice with the expiration of his tenure in office. The year 1861 was financially difficult for Arthur, as evidenced by his testy response to an overdrawn bank account only a few months earlier. There is no evidence the Vanderbilt “loan” was used for the mortgage or ever repaid. Chester Arthur to Cornelius Vanderbilt, October 18, 1861, Cornelius Vanderbilt to Chester Arthur, October 25, 1861, and Papers Relating to Loan of C.V. to E.H.H., Series 4

Notes to Pages 59–61

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Reel 1, Additional papers—1846–1960, Chester A. Arthur Papers, 1829–1886, Library of Congress, Microform (hereafter Arthur Papers, LOC). For Arthur’s management of his motherin-law’s pension and personal finances, see C. A. Arthur Account with E. H. Herndon, October 1847 to May 1861, Envelope 3, Chester Alan Arthur Papers, 1857–1886, New-York Historical Society; C. A. Arthur Nassau Bank Account Book, August 28, 1858, to February 20, 1865, Envelope 3, Chester Alan Arthur Papers, 1857–1886, New-York Historical Society (hereafter Arthur Papers, N-YHS). Arthur overdrew his account by $90.46 in May 1861. The letter is hidden in the back pocket of E. H. Herndon’s Account Book. Nassau Bank Overdraft Letter to C. A. Arthur, May 21, 1861, Envelope 4, Arthur Papers, N-YHS. 7. Philip Fradkin, Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and American West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 24, 146. 8. White, Railroaded, xxv. 9. C. P. Huntington to Mark Hopkins, November 25, 1868, Letters from Huntington, 351. 10. According to expense reports, Central Pacific compensated Roscoe Conkling $10,000 for “legal services.” Richard Price Morgan, Jr., Exhibit W. Statement No. 61, Report on the Union Pacific Railway and Its Branches; The Central Pacific Railway and Its Branches, The Central Branch of the Union Pacific Railroad; the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad; Also on Auxiliary and Lease Lines, October 15, 1887, 4555. Stuart D. Brandes, Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 74–75. 12. Morgan Dix, The Memoirs of John A. Dix (New York: Harper Brothers, 1883), 149. 13. Colleen A. Dunlavy, “From Citizens to Plutocrats: Nineteenth-Century Shareholder Voting Rights and Theories of the Corporation,” in Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 66–93. 14. This quote refers to Thomas Platt and is taken from a letter written by Alonzo Cornell to Norvin Green, President of Western Union. Alonzo Cornell to Norvin Green, January 20, 1880, Alonzo B. Cornell (Governor of New York) 1880, 1881, 1883, Box 4, Series I: Correspondence, Thomas C. Platt Papers, Manuscript and Archives, Yale University Library (hereafter Platt Papers, Yale); Alonzo Cornell to William Orton, October 16, 1876, Folder 6, Box 1, Alonzo B. Cornell Papers, 1830–1904, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library (hereafter Cornell Papers, Cornell Library). 15. White, Railroaded, 26–36. 16. The most dramatic example was the 750 percent profit of Cre´dit Mobilier. It was owned by heads of the Union Pacific Railroad and built most of the railroad lines by hugely inflating costs. White, Railroaded, 35. 17. Thomas Collier Platt, The Autobiography of Thomas Platt (New York: B. W. Dodge & Co., 1910), 97. 18. As a point of comparison, the annual salary of $25,000 was double the entire wealth that Thomas Platt reported in the 1870 census. In the mid-1880s, his son Edward also made $15,000 and Frank earned $7,500. Federal Census of 1870, Owego, Tioga, New York, 284, National Archives and Records Administration via Ancestry.com; Wheeling Register, August 4, 1881. 19. Albert W. Atwood, “The Great Express Monopoly. Part III: ‘Might Makes Right’— The Story of the U.S. Express Company and of Its Government Contract,” The American Magazine, 71 (1911), 758–770. See also David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage, 1982), 215.

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Notes to Pages 61–66

20. The tone of the appointment letter sounds like conscription rather than voluntary participation. Thomas C. Platt to Levi P. Morton, June 8, 1886, Correspondence: 1886, Box 2, Levi Parsons Morton Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (hereafter Morton Papers, NYPL). 21. Conkling began his career as a “Seward Whig.” David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling: Voice in the Senate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 8–9. 22. Roscoe Conkling, “Rochester Speech,” in The Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling: Orator, Statesman, Advocate, ed. Alfred Conkling (New York: Charles Webster, 1889), 538–549. 23. The Sayings of Uncle Rufus (New York: Jesse Haney & Co., 1881), 28–32. 24. “A Promising Reform,” Scribner’s Monthly 6, no. 1 (May 1873): 97–104, quotes on pages 97–99. 25. Alonzo Cornell and Thomas Platt were vice president and treasurer of the MoroComo Golding Mining Company located in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. Statement of the Moro-Como Gold Mining Company (New York: Office of the Company, 1883), Folder 1883, Box 5, Platt Papers, Yale. 26. Thomas Platt to G. Hilton Scribner, January 3, 1873, Gilbert Scribner Papers, 1871– 1911, Folder 1, Box 1, from the collections of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, New York. 27. When congratulating Levi Morton, already a millionaire, on his election to Congress in 1878, Treasury Secretary John Sherman wrote: “I have no doubt your service as a member will be of very great advantage to the country, though, as you are aware, the post will not be a very profitable one for you.” John Sherman to Levi P. Morton, November 12, 1878, Correspondence: 1878, Morton Papers, NYPL. The remark was surely meant to salute Morton’s disinterested public service. At the same time, the comment suggests that accumulating profit was an omnipresent consideration. See also Harold F. Gosnell, Boss Platt and His New York Machine: A Study of the Political Leadership of Thomas C. Platt, Theodore Roosevelt, and Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 17–24. 28. William H. Beard to John J. O’Brien, August 28, 1882, Folder: Ba–Bla, Box 1, James B. Butler Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (hereafter Butler Papers, NYPL). 29. Alonzo B. Cornell to Francis Silvester, May 5, 1876, Alonzo Cornell, 1832–1904, from the collections of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, New York. 30. Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, “Roscoe Conkling’s Wartime Cotton Speculation,” New York History 96, no. 2 (February 2016): 167–181. 31. While not a port official himself, Conkling justified his cut as payment for “legal services.” Thomas Reeves, Gentleman Boss: The Life and Times of Chester Alan Arthur (Newtown, CT: American Political Biography Press, 1975), 82–83; Richard Lowitt, William E. Dodge: A Merchant Prince of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 275–284; Robert Cleland, A History of Phelps Dodge, 1834–1950 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1952), 58–64; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, 43rd Congress, 1st Session, Miscellaneous Documents, No. 264, May 2, 1874, 247–248. 32. Thomas Reeves, “Silas Burt and Chester Arthur,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 54, no. 4 (October 1970): 319–337. 33. Reeves, Gentleman Boss, 139.

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34. An Act to Incorporate the Gilbert Elevated Railway Company, Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, 103rd Session, Vol. 10 (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Co., 1880), 1967–1971. 35. William D. Middleton, Metropolitan Railways: Rapid Transit in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 20–21. 36. Dix had served as president of the Union Pacific Railway during the 1860s and briefly as president of the Erie Railroad in 1872, when he was elected to push out the Tweed faction. Dix, Memoirs, 406–408. 37. The Gilbert Commission recommended much of the route that today encompasses the IRT Number 3 line from Harlem to Bowling Green. James Blaine Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 1864–1917 (New York: Arno Press, 1970), 105–122; Railroad World, March 10, 1877, 224. 38. The Gilbert’s main promoter was Jose´ F. Navarro, a former member of the board of directors from Tweed’s previous failed railroad. Navarro later testified that early Gilbert stocks and bonds were sold at varied prices, with some as low as the cost of a round trip commute on the train—less than a dollar. Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 113. 39. “C.A.A. Estate Memorandum of Division,” Series 2, Reel 1, August 6, 1862–February 7, 1887, Arthur Papers, LOC. Here a contrast in fortunes is warranted. In the merger process, Rufus H. Gilbert, the inventor of the railroad technology, was swindled out of his ownership stake. Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit, 116–117. Middleton, Metropolitan Railways, 17, 21; New York Times, December 18, 1879; July 15, 1880. 40. George Bliss to Levi P. Morton, January 34, 1878, Morton, Bliss & Co., Letterbooks of George Bliss, Vol. 2, December 29, 1877–May 17, 1879, New-York Historical Society; List of Stockholders, October 11 and December 7, 1877, Folder: Manhattan El, NY; Metropolitan El, NY, Contracts, Etc., 1877–1883, and List of Subscribers, May 13, 1884, Folder: Manhattan El, NY; Metropolitan El, NY, Contracts, Etc., 1884, Box 4, Cyrus Field Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (hereafter Cyrus Field Papers, NYPL). 41. Jay Gould claimed that he managed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” out of a fund for officeholders, from which Cornell benefited. New York Herald, August 20, 1882. There is some evidence to confirm Gould’s use of investment to build political alliances. George B. V. Bliss (unrelated to the George Bliss of Morton, Bliss and Company) was the Stalwart district attorney for the Southern District of New York during the Grant administration, and prosecutor of the Star Route frauds under President Garfield. Bliss wrote in his unpublished reminiscences that State Supreme Court Judge Noah Davis, a former member of Congress from Rochester, was speculating in stocks “largely on points given to him by Jay Gould.” Davis was routinely distracted by “little notes brought to him about the stock exchange” when the court was in session. Bliss recalls that fellow lawyers found the habit annoying. Autobiography of George Bliss, Vol. 1, Unpublished, George BV Bliss Papers, 1846–1897, New-York Historical Society. On Noah Davis, see J. Q. Bittington, History of Haverhill, N.H. 1831–1895 (Haverhill, NH: Cohos Steam Press, 1888), 323. 42. For a direct appeal from Gould to Cornell on behalf of his “large personal interest in all three of the Elevated Companies,” see Jay Gould to Alonzo B. Cornell, July 21, 1882, Folder 8, Box 1, Cornell Papers, Cornell Library. Cyrus Field of the New York Elevated Railroad considered the city and state tax burden, along with the size of damages paid to owners of

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abutting property, among the most serious obstacles to the success of urban rapid transit. “In Considering the Problems of Rapid Transit in New York the Following Facts Should Be Borne in Mind,” Folder: Manhattan El, NY El, Metropolitan RR Corr., 1877–1882, Box 3, Cyrus Field Papers, NYPL. 43. Quoted in New York Times, April 3, 1882. Cornell had opposed Conkling’s return to the U.S. Senate after his resignation in 1881 in an ambitious bid for leadership of the Stalwart organization. Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, August 23, 1882; New York Truth, March 30, 1883; Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), chapters 24 and 25. 44. James B. Butler to Charles J. Folger, September 13, 1882, Folger-Butler Correspondence, November 11, 1882–July 26,1884, Butler Papers, NYPL. 45. After the Charter of 1857 placed much of everyday governance into Republicanappointed metropolitan boards, Tammany Hall required the consent of at least some Republican state legislators to run New York City. 46. Even the sympathetic referred to the faction as the “Tammany Republicans.” George W. Curtis, for instance, defended Horace Greeley’s association. See George W. Curtis to Alonzo B. Cornell, September 12, 1871, Folder 6, Box 1, Cornell Papers, Cornell Library. For a firsthand account of the purging of Tammany Republicans from the state Republican Party, see the unpublished Biography of Alonzo B. Cornell, 12–13, Folder 8, Box 2, Cornell Papers, Cornell Library. 47. George Bliss, the Stalwart attorney and officeholder, compiled a list of Tammany appointees from city payroll records who served on Republican Party committees. See Report and Testimony of the Committee on Investigation and Retrenchment on the Alleged Frauds in the New-York Custom House (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), Vol. 3, 139–141. Some of the most prominent Tammany Republicans are not included on the list, such as Bliss’s friends Thomas Murphy and Chester Arthur. Both men flipped to Conkling’s faction and participated in a purge that took place at the Republican State Convention at Syracuse in 1871. Tammany Republicans are best characterized as hailing from the wartime conservative faction of the Republican Party that was on the outs during the heyday of the Radicals. Tammany Republicans also drew most of their strength from New York City— especially downtown working-class districts that had historically supported the Whigs in the 1850s. Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, “Boss Tweed and the Tammany Republicans,” Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History, September 19, 2015, https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/ boss-tweed-and-the-tammany-republicans. 48. George Frederick Howe, Chester A. Arthur: A Quarter-Century of Machine Politics (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957 [1935]), 41–42. On the 1871 Syracuse convention in which Conkling expelled the Tammany Republicans, see Conkling, Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, 341–343, 345–346; Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, 154–158. 49. The agreement of 1878 included guarantees for Republican election inspectors, appointments for top Stalwart lieutenants, the right to veto future mayoral nominees, and a provision ensuring “fair” apportionment for future city districts. Undated List of 1878 Election Demands, Reel 3, Series 2: Arthur-Dun Manuscripts, 1862–1887, Arthur Papers, LOC. On the deal’s context, see Reeves, Gentleman Boss, 137. 50. Republican “machine managers have systematically bartered with Tammany Hall, or any available Democratic faction, for patronage, by methods as reprehensible as Tammany

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itself.” Junius, The Independent Movement in New York: As an Element in the Next Election and a Problem in Party Government (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880), 170–171. 51. Thomas Murphy invested over $100,000 (or $1.7 million today) in land near Central Park with members of the Tweed Ring, whose total pooled investment was $542,500 (or $9.4 million). Real Estate and Builders’ Guide, April 22, 1871, 192; Alleged Frauds, Vol. 1, 129–130. Murphy and Arthur also jointly invested in the Globe Mutual Life Insurance Company. See Thomas Murphy Mortgage, Globe Mutual Life Insurance, December 10, 1868, Series 4 Reel 1, Additional papers—1846–1960, Arthur Papers, LOC. 52. Phrase taken from Junius Henry Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869), 36. 53. The Sinking Fund controlled $20 million worth of city land, administered contracts and leases, issued stocks for the Croton Water Aqueduct and Central Park, monitored special assessments, and paid the city’s debts. As the fund’s leading commissioner, in the 1850s Fernando Wood oversaw an inventory of all city-owned lands, the first since 1838. Under his mayoral administrations, the commission executed public auction of this land to private buyers in three successive waves. Thus, Wood knew exactly what land would be sold and when because he managed and approved those sales. Communication from the Comptroller to the Commissioners of the Sinking Funds, Transmitting Maps and Lists of Real Estate Belonging to the Corporation of the City of New York, January 1, 1860 (New York, 1860). See for instance, meetings from February 24, 1857; October 24, 1857; September 3, 1860; and March 22, 1861, in Proceedings of the Commissioners of the Sinking Fund of the City of New York, 1844–1865 (New York: Martin & Brown Co., 1903). 54. In 1870, Boss Tweed was the third largest landowner in the city. New York Herald, July 16, 1869. Collusion with politically appointed local tax assessors was how Fernando Wood avoided paying any property taxes from 1866 to 1878 on his ten-acre Woodlawn estate. His property stretched from Seventy-Sixth to Seventy-Eighth Streets between Broadway and Riverside Drive. New York Times, October 31, 1878. Wood was a founding member of the West Side Association, formed by local property owners to lobby the city and state for improvements. Peter Salwen, Upper West Side Story: A History and Guide (New York: Abbeville, 1989). Another land speculator involved in his neighborhood association to “guard the interests of property owners” was Chester Arthur in Gramercy Park. New York Times, March 11, 1873. On role of Tweed in founding the Real Estate Trust Company, see David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 112. 55. In this decade or so of activity, Arthur appears to have speculated in land primarily on the west side of Manhattan between 96th and 147th Streets. Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, March 20, 1869, 11; April 22, 1871, 192; October 7, 1871, 152; November 2, 1872, 166; June 28, 1873, 303; July 18, 1874, 42; October 20, 1880, 925; November 19, 1881, 1081; March 11, 1882, 220; March 3, 1883, supplement, 136; December 1, 1883, 964. On land sold from the estate after his death, see June 4, 1887, 783; March 19, 1887, 383; April 9, 1887, 487; June 4, 1887, 776; March 4, 1905, 466. 56. Thomas Murphy’s self-serving, partial explanation of this lucrative business deal with the Tweed Ring has not been published since his own Senate testimony in 1872. Murphy told senators: “I made a purchase, through Andrew H. Green, of two blocks of ground owned by James Lennox [sic], situated between Sixty-eighth and Seventieth streets and Madison and

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Fourth avenues, in the city of New York. After having purchased that property I went immediately to Governor Morgan to have him join me in it. I state the whole purchase to him, with the terms and conditions, and my opinion of the purchase. He said he was going to Newport that night; that he would be back next week and go up with me to see it. Next morning I met Mr. Hugh Smith in the stage, on the corner of Thirty-ninth street, close by where I live. There is a line of stages, owned by him, starting one block from my house. I state to him my purchase, which he pronounced as an excellent one, and he said that he would like to have an interest in it. I told him I had seen Governor Morgan the day before and offered him a half interest, but that, on account of his wanting to wait until next week, that if he (Smith) wanted an interest I did not know of any man I would prefer giving it to, and he could have any interest he wanted up to half. We rode in the stage together as far as Chambers street and Broadway, where we go out; and we went into Delmonico’s and took a seat in the lunchroom, where he suggested to me my letting Messrs. Tweed, Connolly, and Sweeny have an interest in the purchase. I reflected for a moment, laughed, and said to him, ‘Mr. Smith, when I was in the legislature, in Albany, I did everything I could to destroy your party and build up mine.’ ” Alleged Frauds, Vol. 3, 392–393; Real Estate and Builders’ Guide, October 23, 1869, 6. 57. Henry Stevens, Recollections of Mr. James Lenox of New York and the Formation of His Library (London: Henry Stevens and Sons, 1886), 198–199. 58. Both Tweed and Murphy were also Whigs; however, Tweed changed parties by the mid-1850s. Alleged Frauds, Vol. 3, 432. On Tweed’s Whiggish antecedents, see Leo Hershkowitz, Tweed’s New York (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1977), 10. 59. See note 54 for Murphy’s testimony about Green’s involvement. On Green’s public attitude toward Tammany, see Anita Klutsch, Andrew Haswell Green: The Father of Greater New York and His Dual Vision of a Cultivated and Consolidated Metropolis, Ph.D. dissertation, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universita¨t, Munich, 2012. 60. Murphy deposited or cashed the Ring checks at Grocer’s Bank. Samuel B. White to L. S. Comstock, January 5, 1872, Tweed Ring: Jan.–Feb. 1872, Tweed Ring, 1870–1872 March, Series 1: Correspondence, 1810–1919, Tilden Papers, NYPL. 61. 1870 Ledger-List of Securities in Which the Funds of the Library Are Now Invested and 1870 Ledger-Paid Out of the Building Fund, James Lenox Treasurer, 1870–1876, Statement of Accounts, 1870–5, Box 13, Series V: Board of Trustees, 1870–1896, and Annual Report of the Trustees of Lenox Library of the City of New York (Albany: The Argus Company, 1871), 6–8, 14–16, in Lenox Library Annual Reports, 1871–1890, Box 2: Annual Reports, 1871–1895, Series I: Board of Trustees-General Administration, 1870–1890, Lenox Library Records, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (hereafter Lenox Library, NYPL). 62. For a detailed profile of Tweed’s vast business empire, see Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, “The Boss’s ‘Brains’: Political Capital, Democratic Commerce, and the New York Tweed Ring, 1868–1871,” Journal of Historical Sociology 28, no. 3 (September 2015): 384–387. 63. Entertaining A Nation: The Career of Long Branch (Bayonne: New Jersey Printing Company, 1940), 45. 64. The judge was Joseph Dowling, an Irish immigrant who made his way through the old volunteer firefighting gangs to become a trusted ally of Matthew T. Brennan in the Sixth Ward. Troy (NY) Weekly Times, May 18, 1876. 65. Thomas Murphy is the very first person named in the “Act to Incorporate the Long Branch Association,” followed by Horace Porter, Ulysses S. Grant’s private secretary, the

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financiers Joseph Seligman and Anthony Drexel, and George W. Childs, the Philadelphiabased publisher. John Hoey, another incorporator, was Murphy’s partner at Monmouth Park, the racetrack located three miles west of Long Branch. All men were significant property owners in Long Branch. Acts of the Ninety-Seventh Legislature of the State of New Jersey and the Twenty-Ninth under the New Constitution (Morristown, NJ: Vance & Stiles, 1873), chapter 186, 1051–1052. At one point in 1873, Murphy owned no fewer than four choice plots off Ocean Avenue, including two with a view of the water. Harper’s Weekly reports these purchases cost Murphy $44,000 in total (or $932,000 today). On Murphy’s property development and land dealings in Long Branch, see Thomas Murphy Property, 1873, Monmouth County, G&M 15, Roll no. 15, U.S. Indexed County Land Ownership Maps, 1860–1918, Microfilm via Ancestry .com; Harper’s Weekly, August 23, 1873, 728; Writers Project, Works Progress Association, Entertaining a Nation, 42–60, 44–47. On Murphy’s role in Monmouth Park, see Franklin Ellis, History of Monmouth County, New Jersey (Philadelphia, R. T. Peck & Co., 1885), 779, 892. On Murphy’s ownership of Deal Park, see New York Tribune, April 5, 1900. 66. New York World, June 6, 1871. 67. Lenox Library Annual Report, 1871, 6–8, and Fourth Annual Report of the Trustees of Lenox Library, Draft, January 2, 1874, Annual Reports—Drafts, Box 2: Annual Reports, 1871– 1895, Series I: Board of Trustees-General Administration, 1870–1890, Lenox Library, NYPL. 68. James Lenox’s name is listed fifth from the top of the meeting’s “Vice Presidents” in Appeal to the People of the State of New York Adopted by the Executive Committee of Citizens and Taxpayers for the Financial Reform of the City and County of New York (New York: Free Press Association, 1871), 4. 69. Thomas Murphy and his partner, William Laimbeer, another ex–state senator, were appointed public “assessors” of real estate securities owned by insurance corporations. In 1877, the two overbilled the Manhattan Life Insurance Company for work. The company declined to pay the $9,800 ($233,000 today), although state insurance superintendent John F. Smyth, Murphy’s longtime political friend, had certified the bill as valid. The state comptroller balked, and would agree only to a bill of $720 ($1,700 today), arguing: “If you could find steady employment at this rate for a year of 300 working days, you would have received $81,600 which is an amount that would pay the salary of the Superintendent of the Insurance Department, to whom you are subordinate, for twelve years.” Quoted in the Insurance Times, January 1881, 878. Murphy took the case to court, but the conflict dragged out for years. He finally received the money in 1882 when, remarkably, the state legislature passed a bill to render him payment. Murphy’s controversy drew unwanted scrutiny to this long-standing Stalwart source of corporate patronage. The Insurance Journal: A Review of Fire and Life Insurance, April 1879, 61; Report of the Committee on Insurance, May 5, 1880, Document no. 134, Documents of the State of New York, Vol. 8; Weekly Underwriter, February 11, May 7, June 3, and June 10, 1882. 70. James Lenox Handwritten Ledger, May 2 and June 7, 1875, James Lenox Treasurer, 1870–1876, Box 13, Statement of Accounts, 1870–1875, Series IV: Board of Trustees—Treasurer, 1870–1896, Lenox Library, NYPL. 71. In a letter dated February 11, 1870, in Stevens, Recollections of James Lenox, 199. 72. Michael Zakim, Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 73. C. A. Arthur to Samuel Lewis, February 9, 1880, Swann Auction Galleries, Sale 2276, Lot 306; Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, June 4, 1881, 574; New York Times, August 30, 1882; City Record, September 26, 1883, Supplement, 46.

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Notes to Pages 74–77

74. Robert McElroy, Levi Parsons Morton: Banker, Diplomat and Statesman (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), 39. 75. In the Census of 1860, Morton reported an estate worth $50,000. By the 1870s, he was a multimillionaire; Levi P. Morton, New York, Ward 18, District 2, U.S. Census of 1860, M653, National Archives and Records Administration via Ancestry.com. 76. Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 239–252. 77. At its peak in 1864, the gold dollar was trading at well over twice the value of greenbacks. See Figure 1 in Barreyre, Gold and Freedom, 47 See also 64. 78. On the postwar growth of transatlantic investment houses, see Dolores Greenberg, Financiers and Railroads, 1869–1889: A Study of Morton, Bliss & Company (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1980), 26. 79. Morton consolidated the firm into a trust in 1899 and sold it to J. P. Morgan in 1904. At that time, the company had $40 million in deposits, $2 million in working capital, and a $6 million surplus. McElroy, Morton, 319. 80. McElroy, Morton, 45–46. Greenberg, Financiers and Railroads, 28–32. 81. Conkling viewed those in favor of silver “a nearly equal mixture of idiots and knaves.” He was even less kind in his assessment of greenbackers. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, 290–291. On the significance of this monetary debate, see Gretchen Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chapter 1; Samuel DeCanio, “Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver,” Studies in American Political Development 25, no. 1 (April 2011): 1–26. 82. The mine owner was named Osmer C. Stewart. He also named another mine after James Blaine. Engineering and Mining Journal, April 1, 1882, 174. 83. McElroy, Morton, 67. Hamilton Fish narrates the story of how the Conkling machine won the contract in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 32 vols., ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–2012), 24:218. 84. Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 24:218. 85. McElroy, Morton, 55–67, 81–89. 86. The commission allowed on bond sales began as low as 1/25 of 1 percent during the war and rose to 1/8, 1/4, and finally 1/2 of 1 percent in the 1870s. Vincent Carosso, The Morgans: Private International Bankers, 1854–1913 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 192. See also Ellis Oberholtzer, History of United States Since the Civil War, 1868–1872, 278; Ellis Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke: Financier of the Civil War, Vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 194; M. John Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 9. 87. McElroy, Morton, 54. 88. Grant had lost New York in 1868 despite his electoral sweep. Jordan, Conkling, chapter 10. 89. William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 333. 90. McElroy, Morton, 67. 91. Horace Porter to Levi Morton, May 16, 1872, Correspondence: 1872, Box 1, Morton Papers, NYPL. 92. McFeely, Grant, 333, 336, 352–353. 93. Charles J. Berry to James B. Butler, January 17, 1883, Folder: Ba–Bla, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL.

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94. George Bliss to Levi Morton, June 14, 1876, Morton, Bliss and Company, Letterbooks of George Bliss, Vol. 1: March 1876 to December 1877, Records 1876–1899, Manuscript Collections, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society. 95. See, for instance, M. M. K. Speiden to Levi Morton, May 8, 1870, Box 1, Correspondence: 1870–1, Morton Papers, NYPL; Levi Morton to Ulysses S. Grant, February 14, 1877, in Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 28:510; Levi Morton to James Garfield, March 13, 1881, Correspondence: January–June 1881, Morton Papers, NYPL. 96. See, for instance, Morton’s letter on behalf of applicant Isaac Tyson to a New York City park commissioner. Levi Morton to C. D. Borden, March 23, 1886, Levi P. Morton Papers, 1824–1920, from the collections of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, New York. 97. In patronage correspondence with Morton, J. H. Easton argues that he “can take office without its interfering with my business.” However, the office stood to benefit his banking interests by encouraging pension recipients to make local deposits. Morton, Bliss and Company with letter from J. H. Easton to Orville E. Babcock, March 17, 20, 1873, Folder 290, Box 5: Correspondence L–O, Correspondence 1849–1947, Orville E. Babcock Papers, Newberry Library Archives, Newberry Library, Chicago. 98. George Bliss to M. J. Day, May 24, 1876, in March 1876–Dec. 1877, Vol. 1, and George Bliss to Levi P. Morton, December 31, 1880, in March 3, 1880, to January 27, 1881, Vol. 4, and George Bliss to Chester Arthur, November 2, 1883, in March 19, 1883, to May 12, 1884, Vol. 5, Morton, Bliss and Co. Letterbooks, New-York Historical Society (N-YHS). 99. Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 284. 100. George Bliss to S. B. Chittenden, November 2, 1877, in March 1876 to December 1877, Vol. 1, Morton, Bliss and Co. Letterbooks, N-YHS. 101. This district included Murray Hill, a fast-growing elite neighborhood. The Windsor Hotel was a luxury hotel that opened on Fifth Avenue in 1873. 102. L. P. Morton Scrap Book 1A, 1859–1878, 46–47, Morton Papers, NYPL. 103. This remarkable sum is Morton’s own estimate and includes money that he bundled from Wall Street and personally contributed to party efforts. Levi P. Morton to William Evarts, September 5, 1877, Box 1, William Maxwell Evarts Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, Fremont, Ohio . 104. New York World, November 5, 1876. 105. Samuel Tilden, a popular business Democrat and former governor, was running for president. 106. New York World, October 15, 1878. 107. McElroy, Morton, 79. 108. L. P. Morton Scrapbook, 1b, 1878–1880, 7, Morton Papers, NYPL. 109. Party Assessment Rolls, n.d., Roll 3, Series 2: August 6, 1862, to February 7, 1887, Arthur Papers, LOC. 110. Jordan, Conkling, 342. 111. Some, like Thomas Platt, were only able to return to prominence within the party after an extended period out of power. 112. George Bliss to Levi P. Morton, March 3, 1881, Correspondence: January to July 1881, Morton Papers, NYPL.

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113. “Scratcher” campaigns urged followers to scratch off the names of offending candidates from a party ballot and to write in an alternative. 114. E. D. Sanborn to Levi P. Morton, May 27, 1879, Correspondence: 1879, Morton Papers, NYPL. 115. On Cre´dit Mobilier, see Levi P. Morton Scrapbook 1A, 1859–1879, 25–26, Morton Papers, NYPL; see letters from George Bliss to S. B. Chittenden (April 16, 1878; May 14, 15, 1878; June 10, 14, 15, 1878; December 10, 1878; and January 31, 1879), in Morton, Bliss and Co., Letterbook of George Bliss, Vol. 2, December 29, 1877, to May 17, 1879, Morton, Bliss and Co. Letterbooks, N-YHS; J. W. Bailey to Levi Morton, April 16, 1884, Correspondence: May 1884, Morton Papers, NYPL. 116. Roscoe Conkling to Levi P. Morton, August 1, 1880, Correspondence: 1880, Morton Papers, NYPL. 117. See Blaine’s letter settling his account and thanking Morton for “liberality” of lending terms. James Blaine to Levi Morton, March 27, 1886, Correspondence: 1886, Morton Papers, NYPL. 118. George Bliss to James Blaine, January 15, 1884, Vol. 5: March 18, 1883, to May 12, 1884, Morton, Bliss and Co. Letterbooks, N-YHS. 119. McElroy, Morton, 110. 120. Original emphasis. James Blaine to Levi Morton, October 19, 1884, in McElroy, Morton, 159. 121. Margaret Blaine to Levi Morton, March 2, 1882, Correspondence: March–April 1882, and James G. Blaine to Levi Morton, April 4, 1883, Correspondence: April 1883, Morton Papers, NYPL. Morton extended the same courtesy to Thomas Platt’s son, Harry. Thomas Platt to Levi Morton, July 3, 1882, Correspondence: July 1882, Morton Papers, NYPL. 122. R. W. Cameron to Levi P. Morton, April 12, 1882, Correspondence: March to April 1882, Morton Papers, NYPL. 123. Roscoe Conkling to Levi P. Morton, November 7, 1883, Correspondence: November 1883, Morton Papers, NYPL. 124. Roscoe Conkling to Levi P. Morton, October 14, 1880, Correspondence: 1880, Morton Papers, NYPL. 125. Chester Arthur Estate: Memorandum of Division, Series 2: August 6, 1882, to February 7, 1887. See also Arthur’s receipt for gold trades from the firm. S. B. French to Morton, Bliss and Company, November 21, 1873, and June 9, 1874, Series 4, Reel 1, Arthur Papers, LOC. 126. Roscoe Conkling to Thomas Platt, January 22, 1881 Series 1: Correspondence, Box 4, Platt Papers, Yale. 127. There were a dozen Conkling lieutenants who sought his vacant U.S. Senate seat and believed they deserved it more than Platt. 128. See, for instance, Gosnell, Boss Platt, 21–30. 129. Roscoe Conkling to Thomas Platt, January 20, 1881, Series 1: Correspondence, Box 4, Platt Papers, Yale. 130. Roscoe Conkling to Thomas Platt, August 21, 1880; December 31, 1880; January 4, 18, 20, 22; and February 6, 1881, Series 1: Correspondence, Box 4, Platt Papers, Yale. 131. Roscoe Conkling to Thomas Platt, February 9, 1881, Roscoe Conkling (Senator), 1880–1883, Series 1: Correspondence, Box 4, Platt Papers, Yale. 132. Speaking of Conkling, Platt once said: “While bowing to his transcendent talents & favors I do not think he possess all the practical common sense that the State has ever produced & I believe the opinions of pigmies, like myself, are entitled to respect. I have my own

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views & when I am satisfied I am right I am quite as tenacious as he.” Thomas C. Platt to Alonzo B. Cornell, March 3, 1880, Folder 7, Box 1, Cornell Papers, Cornell Library. 133. Whitelaw Reid to Thomas C. Platt, April 7, 1881, Folder: Whitelaw Reid, Series I: Correspondence, Box 4, Platt Papers, Yale. 134. November 17, 1877, in Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 28:314–315. 135. “Senate Report Recommending Expulsion of Senator James Patterson, February 27, 1873,” in Congress Investigates: A Documentary History, 1792–1974, Vol. 3, ed. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Roger Burns (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1975). 136. L. P. Morton Scrap Book 1A, 1859–1878, 25–26, 30, Morton Papers, NYPL. 137. New York World, March 12, 1873. 138. Henry Roberts to George Bliss, February 19, 1872; John C. Kingsley to George Bliss, February 19, 1872; and Theodore P. Kingsley to George Bliss, February 19, 1872, Correspondence: 1870s–1880s, Box 1: Correspondence, Bliss Family 1842–1883, n.d., Bliss Family Papers, 1842–1961, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New-York Historical Society. 139. Conkling read private letters from Treasury Secretary John Sherman on the Senate floor when his machine was under pressure from the Hayes administration. When Arthur was under attack by civil service reformers in the 1870s, he leaked correspondence to the press from prominent Republicans who were condemning his actions in public but continued to plead in private for the patronage needs of friends and family. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, 390; Reeves, Gentleman Boss, 137, 147. 140. Arthur family lore is that one day before he died, the president ordered his son to fill “three large garbage cans at least four feet high” to burn his papers. Index to the Chester A. Arthur Papers (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1961), v. See also Conkling’s successful efforts to keep his affairs private in Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, xi–xiii.

can’t you help me in gettin the vacant place for me 1. Prince held a seat in the New York Assembly at the time from Flushing, Queens. Joseph B. Stillwaggon to Le Baron Bradford Prince, Box 3, Folder: 1875, Le Baron Bradford Prince Papers, New-York Historical Society. 2. Dennis Burns was an Irish American man then employed as messenger at the New York Custom House. Register of Officers and Agents Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1874), 162. 3. Originally a carpenter by trade, during the war Stillwaggon served in the Fifteenth New York Volunteers. Thereafter he held office as postmaster in Flushing from 1864 to 1874, in later years earning a salary of as much as $2,400 ($55,500 today). After this letter, he landed a position as messenger in the New York Custom House—the same job as Dennis Burns—at $840 per year ($20,000), and finally, as a policeman in New York City, where he earned a pension. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971, Ontario-Schoharie Counties, Vol. 46, 1874–1889, NARA Microfilm M841, Records of Post Office Department, Record Group 28, National Archives, online database via Ancestry.com; George Van Skal, Illustrated History of the Borough of Queens (New York: F. T. Smiley, 1908), 157; Official Register of the United States, Containing a List of Officers and Employe´s, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875, 1881), 994, 184; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 1, 1908.

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1. Here I take a cue from Richard R. John, who makes a similar point about the Gilded Age periodization as a form of historiographical judgment in “Who Were the Gilders?” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8, no. 4 (October 2009): 474–480, 476. 2. Charles Tilly, “Warmaking and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169–187. 3. This declaration originates from Horace Greeley, that oracle of nineteenth-century reform, in reference to Chester Arthur’s nomination as New York port collector. Greeley had his own tortured relationship with spoils. David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling: Voice in the Senate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 172. 4. Richard R. John, “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 50–84. 5. For a typical periodization, see Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 43. 6. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), 239. 7. Victor Henry George to Chester Arthur, December 28, 1878, Folder 7: Letters Relating to Appointments, Chester Alan Arthur Papers, 1857–1886, New-York Historical Society. 8. Joseph Schlesinger, Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966); John Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 9. Keller, Affairs of State, 239. 10. Allan Peskin, “Who Were the Stalwarts? Who Were Their Rivals? Republican Factions in the Gilded Age,” Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 4 (Winter 1984–85): 703–716. 11. Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 12. George W. Curtis to Anonymous, November 19, 1871, Correspondence: 1824–1876, George William Curtis Collection, GA-2, Hayes Library. 13. New York Times, April 3, 1882. 14. The view of public office as form of political credit is found in Roscoe Conkling to Ms. A. M. Coleman, September 25, 1869, Folder: 1869–1870, Roscoe Conkling Papers, Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. See also the reformer William Ivins’s analysis that power to appoint office was the “capital of the Machine.” William Ivins, Machine Politics and Money in New York Elections (New York: Harper Brothers, 1887), 10–11. 15. Laura Jensen, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of Social Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), chapter 1; Stephen Pimpare, “Toward a New History of the Welfare State,” Journal of Policy History 19, no. 2 (2007): 234–252. 16. Shefter, Political Parties, chapter 3.

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17. Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), chapter 4. Richard Hofstadter, “The Decline of the Gentlemen,” in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979), chapter 6. 18. Mark Summers, Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849– 1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 19. Boris Heersink and Jeffery Jenkins, “Southern Delegates and Republican National Convention Politics, 1880–1928,” Studies in American Political Development 29, no. 1 (April 2015): 68–88. 20. Frances Lee, “Patronage, Logrolls, and ‘Polarization’: Congressional Parties of the Gilded Age, 1876–1896,” Studies in American Political Development 30, no. 2 (October 2016): 116–127. 21. Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, chapter 2. 22. A notable exception is Richard Bensel, The Ballot Box at Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 23. Below the upper crust of officeholders, reality was somewhat different than the Jeffersonian ideal. Gordon Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 287–304. 24. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1, ed. Henry Reeve, revised by Francis Bowen (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 216. George Combe also paid the spoils system special attention in his Notes on the United States of America: During a Phrenological Visit 1838–9–40, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart & Company, 1841), 177–179. 25. Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. 26. As previously noted, both Roscoe Conkling and Chester Arthur oversaw the destruction of their personal papers. Index to the Chester A. Arthur Papers (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1961), v; Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, xi–xiii. 27. With a few exceptions: the work of Alexander Callow, Mark Summers, and Altschuler and Blumin each touch upon “low” spoils, although not expressly so or in a sustained manner. Bensel’s Ballot Box explores the ground level of party politics from the standpoint of election campaigns. 28. E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1942); Michael McGurr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, “The Polarization of Congressional Parties,” Voteview.com, March 21, 2015. 29. John H. Hansen to James Butler, March 8, 1882, Folder: Letter G, Box 2, James B. Butler Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (hereafter Butler Papers, NYPL). 30. James Bryce’s poetic description of those anonymous workers who made the gears of the mass party move. See The American Commonwealth, Vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 56.

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31. See, for example, Malley to James Butler, October 25, 1882, Folger-Butler Correspondence: November 11, 1882, to July 26, 1884, Box 5, Butler Papers, NYPL. 32. “Shiny hats” were overpaid “new” men who could afford the outward trappings of gentlemen thanks to cushy offices. “Paint eaters” were so hungry for plunder they would supposedly devour paint off the walls. The latter term was reference to the corruption endemic to the construction of public buildings like the New York Court House. Alexander Callow, Jr., The Tweed Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), chapter 8. 33. George W. Curtis, “The Machine and the Remedy,” in Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis, Vol. 2: Addresses and Reports on the Reform of the Civil Service of the United States, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 161. 34. For Curtis’s unabashed praise of Herbert Spencer and his ideas on Social Darwinism, see George William Curtis, “Herbert Spencer on the Yankee,” From the Easy Chair, Third Series (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894), 56–64. 35. See, for example, William James Linton, The House That Tweed Built: Dedicated to Every True Reformer, Republican or Democrat (Cambridge, MA, 1871), 18. 36. Richard Hofstadter, “The Spoilsmen: An Age of Cynicism,” in The American Political Tradition (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1962), 162–182, quote on 171–172. 37. On this point, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863– 1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), Preface; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 159–162. 38. The best example is Mathew Josephson, The Politicos, 1865–1896 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938). 39. On 1960s revisionism, see Charles Calhoun, “The Political Culture: Public Life and the Conduct of Politics,” in The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles Calhoun (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 239–264, 185–186. 40. Callow, Tweed Ring. 41. W.H.C. to George William Curtis, September 29, 1877, Correspondence 1877–1882, George William Curtis Papers, Hayes Library. 42. John W. Pratt, “Boss Tweed’s Public Welfare Program,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 45 (1961): 396–411. Martin Shefter picks up this point in Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis: The Collapse and Revival of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), chapter 2. 43. John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapter 3. 44. Gøsta Esping Anderson, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 22. 45. Ari Hoogenboom, “Rutherford B. Hayes and Reform of the Spoils System,” Hayes Historical Journal 4, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 17–28, 19, 23. 46. New York Evening Post, June 12, 1877, Scrapbooks Vol. 1, 47–9, Records of the Jay Commission investigating the Operation of the New York Customhouse, 1877–1879, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland. 47. James Marten, America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), chapter 3, quote on 49. 48. Grant promoted needs-based partisan poor relief. For example, he solicited a position at the port of New York for Willie Hillyer, “a most excellent young man of twenty-one years,

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who I have known from his infancy, and who is now left with a widowed mother and five younger children than himself dependent upon.” Grant’s perspective on appointments was likely influenced by his own brush with poverty. Ulysses S. Grant to Benjamin Bristow, September 5, 1874, and Bristow to Grant, September 8, 1874, Folder: September–October, Box 3, Benjamin H. Bristow Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter Bristow Papers, LOC); Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Random House, 2016), 136. 49. New York Evening Post, June 12, 1877, and New York Sun, June 12, 1877, Scrapbooks Vol. 1, 47, Jay Commission, NARA, College Park, Maryland. The emergence of veterans’ pensions as a major federal welfare policy did not occur until the 1890 Dependent Pension Act. The 1879 Arrears Act allowed for one-time payments based on disability, but few eligible individuals even applied. The 1890 law, however, finally transformed veterans’ pensions into an old-age and survivors benefit. The number of pensioners covered doubled to one million people. By 1893, the federal government was expending 41.5 percent of its income on benefits. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 109–110, 128–129. 50. On this issue, see The Republican Campaign Text-Book for 1882 (Republican Congressional Committee, 1882), 167–172. 51. The connection between Social Darwinism and civil service reform was most complete in E. L. Godkin, editor of The Nation. On the philosophy as “apologia” for capital accumulation, see David Nasaw, “Gilded Age Gospels,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 128–133. 52. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 53. Calhoun, “Political Culture,” 196. 54. Murphy enacted a high-profile wave of political firings during his brief tenure as port collector under Grant, so the interest of these prospectors in vacant posts was not unwarranted. Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, “Office-seekers at the door of the collector’s office,” New York Public Library Digital Collections, Accessed September 26, 2019. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-ccc6-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. 55. Richard H. Stoddard, Recollections: Personal and Literary (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1903), quote on 139, 137–142. 56. Thomas C. Platt to Ashley W. Cole, July 21, 1899, Folder: Thomas Collier Platt, Box 1, Ashley W. Cole Papers, 1882–1916, Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. 57. Henry Ward Beecher to William M. Evarts, January 7, 1879, Box 1, William Maxwell Evarts Papers, Hayes Library. 58. Wife of D. G. Bishop to John Jay, April 29, 1877, Box 1, Records of the Jay Commission Investigating the Operation of the New York Customhouse, 1877–1879, NARA. 59. Frederick G. Kissam to William M. Evarts, August 20, 1879, William M. Evarts Papers, GA-3, Hayes Library. 60. For an example of civil service reforms leveraged as an excuse, see James B. Butler to J. S. Freer, September 15, 1883, Letterbook no. 3, October 16 to March 8, 1884, Box 4, Butler Papers, NYPL. 61. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), chapter 1.

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Notes to Pages 101–103

62. George W. Atkinson to James B. Butler, July 7, 1882, Folder A, Butler Papers, NYPL. 63. Martin Holmes to Butler, November 16 and December 4, 1882, Folder H, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 64. See, for instance, the article on the Hackett affair in the New York Times, January 25, 1863. 65. “Your rising from a poor boy to this important position is very pleasing to many of your former friends. . . . I fell in with John J. Pullen . . . he is of excellent character. . . . I take pleasure in recommending him to you for a situation in the Treasury.” Original emphasis. E. D. Bates to Butler, February 21, 1882, Folder: Ba–Bla, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 66. A. R. Hart to James Butler, June 19, 1883, Folder: Letter G, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 67. See Henry A. Barnum to James B. Butler, July 12, 22, 1882, Folder: Ba–Bla, Box 1, and Lehman Israels to Butler, July 18, 20; September 2, 1882; Folder: I, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 68. For example, see Resolution of the 19th Ward of the Johnson Club at Their Headquarters in Favor of Mr. Sciler for a Position as Nightwatchman at the New York Customhouse, November 20, 1866, Folder: Collector of Customs at the Port of New York, 1826–1893, Box 1, Alexander Hamilton United States Custom House Records, 1794–1893, New-York Historical Society (hereafter Custom House Papers, N-YHS). 69. Anonymous to L. Turnure, April 27, 1877, Box 1, Records of the Jay Commission Investigating the Operations of the New York Customhouse, 1877–1879, NARA. 70. “Republican Reformer” to Editor of the New York Tribune, May 3, 1877, Box 1, Records of the Jay Commission Investigating the Operation of the New York Custom House, 1877–1879, NARA. 71. Michael Scanlon to Benjamin Bristow, July 20, 1874, Folder: July 1874, Box 3, Bristow Papers, LOC. For another recommendation via the Irish Republic, see Moses Grinnell to J. N. Palmer, January 7, 1870, Folder: Collector of Customs at New York, n.d., 1824–1893, Box 1, Custom House Papers, N-YHS. 72. Quoted in a letter dated June 27. Hugh Hastings to Butler, April 26, 30, 1883; May 17, 30, 1883; June 19, 27, 1883, Folder: H, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 73. General J. Hooker to James B. Butler, note written on letter of L. Briral to Hooker, January 6, 1883, Folder: H, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 74. Fannie G. Crowther to James Butler, February 1, 1883, Folder: Letter C, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 75. This judgment is based on an inference that Butler was carrying on an affair with an applicant who sounded very desperate for an appointment. Sarah Haywood is the only case I have seen where an audience was scheduled in any applicant’s home, let alone a woman’s. The tone of the correspondence is flirtatious. The woman assured Butler, “you need have no fears for anything, my reputation as a lady is established and I am known as such.” Sarah E. Hayward to James B. Butler, January 8, 17, 1882; November 29, 1882; Folder: Letters G, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 76. During Charles Folger’s gubernatorial campaign in 1882, his campaign manager Butler wrote: “You can safely give a dozen first class clerkships half a dozen laboring places, $660 a year, and three female places at $900. . . . New York shall get every one of them.” James B. Butler to Charles Folger, October 7, 1882, Folder: Butler-Folger Correspondence November 11, 1882 to July 26, 1884, Box 5, Butler Papers, NYPL.

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77. Mrs. A. W. Doty to James B. Butler, November 22, 1882, Folder: Letters D, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 78. Take, for example, Mark W. Summers, The Gilded Age: Or, The Hazard of New Functions (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 179. 79. Richard White, Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 136–137. 80. This distinction is made clear when discussing civil service reform in Letter of Acceptance of Hon. Charles J. Folger, October 2, 1882, 9, Folder 4, Charles J. Folger Papers, Geneva Historical Society. 81. One party broker wrote to Butler about an officeholder, “she claims her husband has softening of the brain induced by the war. . . . All bosh! The old fellow is a lazy, good natured, harmless old curmudgeon, fond of ‘ease at the inn’ and whisky. The neighbors never discovered any softening of the brain.” Original emphasis. W. P. Robinson to James Butler, October 13, 1882, Folder: Reports by Republican Leaders (Not Favorable to Folger’s Winning of the Governorship of New York), Box 5, Butler Papers, NYPL. 82. Stoddard, Recollections, 137. 83. Marion K. Speiden to Levi P. Morton, May 8, 1870, Correspondence: 1870–1871, Morton Papers, NYPL; New York Times, Bankrupt Notices, April 14, 1868. Biographical Directory of the State of New York, 1900 (New York City: Park Row Building, 1900), 459. 84. Wife of D. G. Bishop to John Jay, April 28, 1877, Box 1, Records of the Jay Commission Investigating the Operation of the New York Custom House, 1877–1879, NARA. 85. United States, U.S. Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), Part 1, 165, Series D 728–734, 735–738. 86. Walter W. Braman to James B. Butler, November 18, 1882, Folder: Ble–Blu, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. C. W. Johnston to Benjamin H. Bristow, January 3, 1874, Box 3, Folder: Jan–May, Bristow Papers, LOC. Benjamin Bassett to James Butler, April 4, 1883; December 7, 1882, Folder: Ba–Bla; William E. Chandler to Butler, February 9, 1883, Folder: Ca–Cor; R. A. Elmer to Butler, April 18, 1883, Folder: E; Cecie M. Gouter to Butler, July 11, 1883, Folder: G, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. B. H. Brewster to Butler, March 31, 1883, Ble–Blu, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. J. Lyman Buckley to Le Baron Bradford Prince, January 4, Folder: No Dates, Box 3, Le Baron Bradford Prince Papers, New-York Historical Society (hereafter Prince Papers, N-YHS). 87. Owen Torrington to Le Baron Bradford Prince, December 17, 1872, Folder: 1872, Box 3, Prince Papers, N-YHS. 88. Willie Tandy to Benjamin Bristow, October 19, 1874, Folder: September to October 1874, Box 3, Benjamin Bristow Papers, LOC. 89. Leonidas Houk, April 21, 1883, Folder: H, Butler Papers, NYPL. 90. B. H. Brewster to James B. Butler, March 31, 1883, Folder: Ble–Bu; Henrietta Anderson to Butler, September 7, 1882; Mrs. G. L. Andrews to Butler, July 10, 1883; W. P. Brownlow to Butler, January 23, 1882; Mrs. S. W. Dorsey to Butler, December 4, 1882, Folder: D. Angela Eastman to Butler, November 15, 29, 1882, Folder: E; H. R. French to Butler, Folder: F, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 91. On George B. V. Bliss’s role as a Stalwart in the Conkling machine, see Thomas Reeves, Gentleman Boss: The Life and Times of Chester Alan Arthur (Newtown, CT: American

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Political Biography Press, 1975), 28, 41, 60, 73. Bliss broke with Conkling after he was promised renomination for the post but was passed over without being consulted. Autobiography of George Bliss, Vol. 1 (Unpublished Manuscript), 247, George B. V. Bliss Papers, 1847–1897, Manuscript Collections, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society. 92. Original emphasis. Catherine Bliss to James B. Butler, January 22, 1883, Ble–Bu, Box 1, and James B. Butler to Catherine Bliss, February 1, 1883, Box 4, Butler Papers, NYPL; Official Register of the Officers and Employe´s of the United States in 1883, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 52. 93. D. W. Flagler to Butler, August 14, 1882, Folder: F, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 94. Ziparo argues that despite the vital work performed, there was a “failure to see women as employees rather than objects of paternal pity or sexual desire.” My own reading of the Stalwart record of appointing women officeholders confirms this analysis. Jessica Ziparo, This Grand Experiment: When Women Entered the Federal Workforce in Civil War–Era Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 3. 95. Sarah E. Hayward, January 8, 17, 1882, and November 29, 1882, Folder: H, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 96. W. Baldwin to Charles J. Folger, October 11, 1882, Letters: G, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 97. Original emphasis. Charles J. Folger to Butler, September 23, 1882, Folder: FolgerButler Correspondence, November 11, 1882 to July 26, 1884, Box 5, Butler Papers, NYPL. 98. Jacob Hess to Butler, November 25, 1882, Folder: G, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 99. Jacob Hess to Butler, January 10, 1882, Folder: G, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 100. Jacob Hess to Butler, March 13, 1883; Folder: G, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 101. Alonzo B. Cornell to Thomas C. Platt, September 28, 1883, Folder: Alonzo B. Cornell (Governor of New York), 1880, 1881, 1883, Series I Correspondence, Box 4, Platt Papers, Yale. 102. William L. Findlay to Butler, May 31, 1883, and June 6, 1883, Folder: F, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL; Official Register of the United States in 1887, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 57. 103. The best example is Harry Howard, an orphan who joined the “Bowery Boys” gang in his youth. After he was elected foreman of the Atlantic Hose Company No. 14, Howard held office as city alderman, state assemblyman, and city receiver of taxes, and was finally appointed Chief Engineer to the Fire Department. His personal bravery in saving people from burning buildings made him a citywide celebrity. At the age of thirty-six, he suffered a heart attack on his way to a fire, and his right arm was paralyzed. Howard retired to a sinecure in the Department of Public Works as Inspector of Vaults and Areas. The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), 255; New York Times, February 7, 1896; Mathew Patrick Breen, Thirty Years of New York Politics Up-To-Date (New York, 1899), 77–81. 104. Quoted in M. F. Holahan to Butler, June 4, 1883, Folder: H, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 105. A. H. Irish to Butler, October 14, 1882, Folder: I, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL. 106. M. F. Holahan to Butler, June 4, 12, 18, 23, 1883, Folder: H, Box 2, Butler Papers, NYPL; Official Register 1883, 48; Official Register 1887, 46. 107. W. A. Simmons to Orville E. Babcock, June 13, 1874, Folder: June, Box 3, Benjamin Bristow Papers, LOC.

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108. Some peak offices were notably local, such as sheriff, which collected fees, or other municipal offices like public works, from which officeholders engaged in lucrative real estate speculation. A number of these local positions are explained in Chapter 2 in the section on the Tammany Republicans. 109. As Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, salaries that seems small to the rich appear “enormous” to those of modest means. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1, ed. Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 225. 110. A. D. Dunbar to James Butler, January 29, 1883, Folder: Letter D, Box 1, James B. Butler Papers, NYPL. 111. Original emphasis. Jerome Mushkat, Fernando Wood: A Political Biography (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990), 20–21. 112. Scrapbooks of Newspaper Clippings Concerning the Investigation of the New York Customhouse, 1877–1879, 49, Vol. 1, General Records of the Treasury, RG 56, Records of the Division of Appointments, NARA. 113. See, for instance, Stephen B. French to James B. Butler on behalf of Harry Clay McClean, May 6, 1882, Folder: F, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 114. J. M. Bundy to James Butler, February 9, 1883, Folder: Ble–Blu, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 115. S. M. Blanchford to James Butler, December 18, 27, 1883, Folders: Ba–Bla, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 116. R. B. Gatens to F. J. Phillip, May 8, 1883, Folder: G, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 117. Joseph H. Barrett to Butler, July 16, 1883, Folder: A, and E. L. Fowler to Butler, Folder: F, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 118. Some colorful examples of insubordination are Charles A. Brackett to Butler, June 27, 30, 1883, Folder: Ble–Blu, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 119. Butler claims to have uncovered a conspiracy between a clerk named Walter S. Eaton and William E. Chandler, Arthur’s secretary of the Navy, to gain control over patronage in the Treasury Department while his boss was traveling. In response, Secretary Folger writes, “the Sec’y will be back. He will gather the reins. The balking faithless jades will feel the scourge on their feeble flaubes. The men with inky eyes will fawn like spaniels and be spurned as spaniels are spurned.” Charles Folger to James Butler, October 1, 5, and Butler to Folger, October 6, 1882, Folder: Butler-Folger Correspondence, November 11, 1882, to July 26, 1884, Box 5, Butler Papers, NYPL. 120. For example, in 1882 a messenger named Lewis Valentine was swept up in a workplace dispute. One of his many supervisors asked him to deliver the contents of a rival’s waste bucket. Valentine was unaware it included confidential letters. He was abruptly fired despite eight years of service, good reputation, advanced age (he was sixty years old), and the fact he had “a wife and crippled son to support.” He lost a job worth $840 per year. Quoted in the April 19 letter of C. C. Adams to James Butler, April 17, 19, 1882, Folder: A, Butler Papers, NYPL. 121. Register of Officers and Agents in the Service of the United States for 1875, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1876), 986. 122. Roscoe Conkling to Isaac M. Schermerhorn, March 7, 1871; September 11, 1871; March 4, August 11, 1872, Folder: 1871, and February 27, 1877; October 18, 1877, Folder: 1876–1877, Roscoe Conkling Papers, Special Collections, Syracuse University Library.

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123. Railway World, April 12, 1879, 354. 124. Official Register in 1883, 37. 125. Richard Crowley to Charles J. Folger, November 11, 1881, Folder: Folger-Butler Correspondence, November 11 to July 26, 1884, Box 5, Butler Papers, NYPL. 126. John M. Bedford to Butler, December 27, 1882, January 1, July 14, 1883, Butler Papers, Folder Ba–Bla, Butler Papers, NYPL. 127. Report and Testimony of the Committee on Investigation and Retrenchment on the Alleged Frauds in the New York Custom-House, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1872), Vol. 3, 359 (hereafter Alleged Frauds). 128. Alleged Frauds, 1:xxxvi. 129. William F. Barker and Republican State Committee to Butler, September 28, 1882, Folder: Ba–Bla, Box 1, Butler Papers, NYPL. 130. John L. Hensel to George William Curtis, August 14, 1882, Correspondence: 1877– 1882, Curtis Papers, Hayes Library. 131. William Granert to George William Curtis, September 29, 1872, Correspondence: 1877–1882, Curtis Papers, Hayes Library. 132. John L. Heupel on behalf of Cunningham to George William Curtis, August 14, 1882, Correspondence: 1877–1882, Curtis Papers, Hayes Library. 133. Anonymous, forwarded from Congressman Samuel S. Cox to George William Curtis, May 1882, Correspondence: 1877–1882, Curtis Papers, Hayes Library. 134. New York Republican State Committee Campaign Circular, October 23, 1880, Republican Committees, Curtis Papers, Hayes Library. 135. Republican State Committee Fundraising Circular, October 27, 1882. See also Republican Congressional Committee Follow-Up Circular, September 8, 1882, Folder: Republican Committees, Curtis Papers, Hayes Library. 136. Alleged Frauds, 3:359. 137. The phrase comes from Stoddard, Recollections, 137–138. 138. John A. Dix to Salmon P. Chase, September 9, 1861, and Salmon P. Chase to John A. Dix, May 13, 1864, Series of letters and documents relating to the removal of Timothy Browne Dix from Warehouse Department of Boston Customs, 1861–1864, Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. 139. Some of the Mutuals’ games drew crowds as large as ten thousand people, including most of the downtown Manhattan political class. Tweed had invested $7,500 in the team ($159,000 today), and, remarked one contemporary, “he probably got it all back again” before losing everything later in scandal. On this story, see Ted Vincent, Rise and Fall of American Sport: Mudville’s Revenge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 101–106; Daniel E. Ginsburg, The Fix Is In: A History of Baseball Gambling and Game Fixing Scandals (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995), 7, 54; Robert P. Gelzheiser, Labor and Capital in Nineteenth-Century Baseball (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 16, 29; James C. Nicholson, The Notorious John Morrissey: How a Bare-Knuckle Brawler Became a Congressman and Founded Saratoga Race Course (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2016), 109–110. 140. Blatchford to Butler, July 7, 1880, Folder: B, Butler Papers, NYPL. 141. Stoddard, Recollections, 137. 142. Melville’s extant office-seeking letters are Herman Melville to Woodly, March 20, 1860, and Melville to Rockewell, March 28, 1861, Folder 1081, Herman Melville Letters: 1852– 1861, Manuscripts Collections, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society.

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143. George W. Curtis to Thomas Murphy, August 2, 1870, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

the henry george boom fades 1. New York Herald, September 3, 1887. 2. Louis F. Post and Fred C. Leubuscher, Henry George’s 1886 Campaign: An Account of the George-Hewitt Campaign in the New York Municipal Election of 1886 (New York: Henry George School, 1886 [reprinted 1961]). 3. New York Herald, August 17, 1887. 4. As reported by the state’s Bureau of the Statistics of Labor. David Scobey, “Boycotting the Politics Factory: Labor Radicalism and the New York City Mayoral Election of 1886,” Radical History Review 28–30 (1984), 280–325, 295. 5. New York Herald, October 5, 1887; New York Tribune, October 5, 1887. 6. Martin Shefter, “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg, eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Pattern in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 197–276, 270–271.

chapter 4 1. Hans Sperber and Travis Trittschuh, American Political Terms: An Historical Dictionary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 374–376. See also Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, “Bringing the ‘Ring’ Back In: The Politics of Booty Capitalism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Forthcoming, July 2020). 2. The phrase comes from Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), chapter 7. 3. For a recent survey, see Richard White, Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chapter 5. For older historiography, see Richard Tucker, Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998); Hayes Historical Journal, Special Issue on Civil Service Reform, 4, no. 3 (Spring 1984); Richard Hofstadter, “The Fate of the Reformer,” in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1979), 172–196; Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865– 1883 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968); John G. Sproat, “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 4. Because working-class reformers sought to mobilize mass support, their language was far more colorful than elites’. Take one example from a letter published in John Swinton’s Paper: “Up and cleanse your city offices of the filthy slugs, roaches, and bloated spiders that fatten on the stealings from city treasury and banks. Pitch from their snuggeries the adulterous issues of the debauched ballot-box. The hour of order is closing in upon you. . . . The period of wholesale peculation is fast passing.” John Swinton’s Paper, December 18, 1886.

202

Notes to Pages 123–126

5. The boom-and-bust cycle is typical of the labor movement in American political development. Dan Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 6. Representative of the genre is Dorman B. Eaton, The “Spoils” System and the Civil Service Reform in the Custom-House and Post-Office at New York (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881). 7. E. L. Godkin to James Bryce, February 16, 1886; November 8, 1889; December 27, 1891; November 19, 1897; in The Gilded Letters of E. L. Godkin, ed. William M. Armstrong (Albany: SUNY Press, 1974), 338–339, 407, 430, 499–500. 8. Edward T. O’Donnell paints a vivid portrait of this reform coalition in Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 9. Daniel DeLeon joined a united front behind Henry George’s campaign at Chickering Hall in 1886. John Swinton’s Paper lost its radical namesake a small fortune. Swinton’s goal was “Striving for the Organization and Interests of Working men and giving the news of the Trades and Unions.” David Scobey, “Boycotting the Politics Factory: Labor Radicalism and the New York City Mayoral Election of 1886,” Radical History Review 28–30 (1984): 280–325; Robert Waters, Career and Conversation of John Swinton (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1902); Sender Garlin, John Swinton: American Radical, 1829–1901 (New York: AIMS, 1976); Marguerite Moore, “My Experience in a New York Campaign,” Women’s Journal, November 19, 1887. On Frank J. Ferrell and the ULP, see New York Herald, August 17, 1887. 10. Gretchen Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 11. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Joel Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), chapter 11. 12. Richard Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Nicolas Barreyre, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). 13. The abbreviation stands for members of Congress. George W. Curtis to Anonymous, November 19, 1871, Correspondence: 1824–1876, Curtis Papers, Hayes Library. 14. Curtis reportedly declared, “A Republican and free man I came to this Convention; by the grace of God a Republican and free man will I go out of this convention.” Gordon Milne, George William Curtis and the Genteel Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), 180. 15. “Puck’s Perplexing Position—Between Two Evils,” Puck Magazine, October 12, 1881. 16. “Moses” Lecture, Delivered in Brooklyn, New York, at Fourth Street Methodist Protestant Church, Sunday on May 25, 1884, Lecture Notes, Reel 9. Series III Diaries and Memoranda, 1855–1896, Henry George Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (hereafter Henry George Papers, NYPL). 17. Scobey, “Politics Factory,” 307. 18. “Turk” refers to the Irish torc, or wild boar, and not someone from the Ottoman Empire. Boycotter, August 2, 1884.

Notes to Pages 126–130

203

19. Henry George added in the dry humor of social gospel: “This business has its ethics too, but they are not quite those that are laid down in the Good Book.” Henry George, “On the American Republic,” n.d., Series III, Diaries and Memoranda 1855–1896, Reel 10 ZL-342, Henry George Papers, NYPL. 20. French was a key leader of the Stalwart machine and ally of Chester Arthur. He spent ten years as treasurer of Suffolk County and then landed at the New York Custom House before his appointment to the New York Board of Police. At the Republican state convention of 1882, he secured the nomination of Charles J. Folger for governor by audaciously presenting fraudulent delegate credentials, causing great scandal. Stephen B. French Will, March 4, 1896, Record of Wills, 1665–1916, New York Surrogates Court, via Ancestry.com. New York Herald, September 23, 1889. See also “The Popular Revolt! Saratoga-Syracuse: Two Candidates and Two Conventions, Stalwartism vs. Republicanism, The Friends of Garfield on the Candidate of Conkling!,” in The Campaign Book of the Democratic Party: The Republican Party Reviewed. Its Sins of Omission and Commission (Washington, DC: R. O. Polkinhorn, 1882), 9; New York Times, February 4, 1896. 21. Swinton was a member of a debate group called the Twilight Club, whose membership included elite reformers like Charles F. Wingate. Waters, Swinton, 81. For an example of Henry George’s cross-class socializing, see Robert Morris Ogden, ed., The Diaries of Andrew D. White (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 313. 22. “If our political men were only gentlemen,” went one elite lament, “we should find our political affairs in a good condition, and the great questions that stand before us in a fair way of being properly adjusted.” This would be true, argued the author, “even if they were no more than ordinarily intelligent.” “The Gentleman in Politics,” Scribner’s, no. 6 (October 1873): 746–747. 23. The link between elite reformers in politics and society life was a direct one. Ward McAllister’s “Patriarchs” formed as a reaction to the Tweed Ring and their fabulous but ephemeral wealth. Eric Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 152, 185–186. 24. New York Herald, October 30, 1886. 25. New York Times, September 30, 1886. 26. Examination of the Civil Service: Report and Testimony (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 377. Thomas Jenckes introduced his civil service reform bill in December 1865. However, it gained little traction among elite reformers until the end of Grant’s first administration. Ari Hoogenboom, “Thomas A. Jenckes and the Civil Service Reform,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 74, no. 4 (March 1961): 636–658. 27. New York Tribune, August 20, 1887. 28. On this point, see Samuel Gompers’s 1886 Cooper Union endorsement of Henry George’s candidacy. Stuart B. Kaufman, ed., Samuel Gompers Papers, Vol. 1: The Making of a Union Leader, 1850–1886 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 431–434. 29. Henry A. Richmond, “The Merit System Among the Teachers of the Public Schools,” Civil-Service Reformer 4, no. 9 (September 1888): 108–110. 30. New York Tribune, August 20, 1887. 31. Boycotter, February 20, 1886. 32. Typographical Journal 9, no. 10 (November 16, 1897): 77. 33. Original emphasis, quoted in Boycotter, June 26, 1886. Standard, March 5, 1887.

204

Notes to Pages 130–133

34. New York Herald, August 20, 1887. 35. The Civil-Service Reformer 4, no. 7 (July 1888): 83. 36. Standard, February 12, 1887. 37. W. R. Grace to John Grace, August 9, 1889; W. R. Grace to James Blaine, August 9, 1889; and W. R. Grace and M. P. Grace, September 16, 1889, Folder: Grace & Company Liquidation/Legal Papers, Box 8, William Ivins Papers, Ivins Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (hereafter Ivins Papers, NYPL). 38. In 1882, Silas Burt owned $24,000 in railroad bonds. List of Securities on Deposit, July 14, 1882, Box 1: Silas W. Burt Correspondence, 1870–1910, New-York Historical Society. For the dependence of railroads on public authority, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 16–36. 39. In response to a recommendation from George W. Curtis for postmaster at West New Brighton, Roscoe Conkling scoffed, replying that he should “drop a line to the P.M. General—it will go on file and prevent mistake.” George W. Curtis to Roscoe Conkling, November 3, 1874, Correspondence 1824–1876, George W. Curtis Papers, Hayes Library. E. L. Godkin is particularly audacious in beginning his patronage correspondence with the assertion: “Far be it from my thoughts to approach you as an ‘office seeker’ but . . . ,” E. L. Godkin to William Evarts, April 2, 1877, Box 1, GA-3, William Maxwell Evarts Papers, Hayes Library. 40. Advocacy of the wholesale abolition of entire administrative departments was consistent with George’s laissez-faire views about income taxation and free trade. See O’Donnell, Henry George, 30, 277–278, for a genealogy of these ideas. 41. Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, February 3, 1872. 42. The idea was basically a Georgeist program of urban land reform carried out via the referendum process. James W. Sullivan, Direct Legislation by Citizenship Through the Initiative and Referendum (New York: True Nationalist Publishing Company, 1893), 7–8, 66. 43. Ralph M. Easley, “Socialism: What It Is and What It Is Not,” Proof, Box 1, Folder: Free Speech Clippings, Ivins Papers, NYPL. 44. George gave the club’s first public talk in December 1880. Quoted from Spread the Light Club to Henry George, April 17, 1881, Letters: July to December, Reel 2 ZL-342, Henry George Papers, NYPL. On the club, see New York Herald, February 14, 1881, and April 10, 1882. Irish American Weekly, August 27, 1887; Rob Allen, “We Do Hold That Land, Light, Air and Water Are the Free Gifts of Nature’: The Spread the Light Club of Brooklyn, 1880–1882,” Academic Association of Historians in Australian and New Zealand Business Schools, Fourth Annual Conference, 2012. 45. The term “Spread the Light” was common, but the club picked it up when the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator’s Patrick Ford was fundraising for the Land League. These insights about the club’s origins come from Rob Allen, personal correspondence, Auckland University of Technology, March 17, 2018. 46. In fact, Henry George later broke with socialists on this question when he ran for secretary of state in 1887 and purged them from the United Labor Party. O’Donnell, Henry George, chapter 8. 47. As noted in this chapter’s opening vignette, even George’s “Single Tax” found a skeptical audience among farmers when campaigning around the Finger Lakes in 1887. New York Herald, October 5, 1887.

Notes to Pages 134–138

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48. The National Greenback-Labor Party of Queens County, NY: Platform, Constitution, & By-Laws 1880, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 49. Equivalent to $26,000 today, adjusted for inflation. 50. Henry B. Raymond, “Ben Butler’s Last Hurrah: The Presidential Campaign of 1884,” Colby Quarterly, 10, no. 1 (March 1973): 26–38. 51. On the sociological basis of interdependent power, see Frances Piven, “Can Power from Below Change the World?” American Sociological Review 73, no. 1 (February 2008): 1–14. 52. Hendrik Booraem, The Formation of the Republican Party in New York: Politics and Conscience in the Antebellum North (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 10. On this program and its popularity, see Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014), chapter 2. 53. Newspaper owners and editors were “coalition merchants” during the nineteenth century much in the same way described today by Hans Noel, Political Ideologies and Parties in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 7. 54. Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1863–1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 19–21. 55. The break was ostensibly over issues of corruption and civil service reform. However, Greeley was bitter over a lack of diplomatic appointment. 56. Bingham Duncan, Whitelaw Reid: Journalist, Politician, Diplomat (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 46–48. 57. The Tribune’s new direction under Reid and the national Republican Party’s swing to big business occurred in tandem. See Richardson, To Make Men Free, chapter 5. 58. Whitelaw Reid to Collis P. Huntington, November 15, 1871, author’s collection. 59. Duncan, Whitelaw Reid, 20. 60. During the 1870s and 1880s, Gould moved from buccaneering speculation of the Gold Corner variety into consolidating control over elevated railroads and Western Union. Railroads and wire services depended heavily upon political authority. Hence, Gould had an interest in shaping public opinion. 61. Whitelaw Reid, “The Scholar in Politics,” Scribner’s, no. 6 (September 1873): quoted from 607, 605–616. 62. Mark W. Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of a President, 1884 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 70. 63. James G. Smart, “Whitelaw Reid: A Biographical Study,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1964), 203–211. 64. Duncan, Whitelaw Reid, 59, 101, 104. 65. George A. Stevens, New York Typographical Union No. 6: Study of a Modern Trade Union (Albany: J. B. Lyon Co., 1912), 616–618. 66. Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), chapter 1. See also Morton Borden, “Some Notes on Horace Greeley, Charles Dana and Karl Marx,” Journalism Quarterly 34 (Fall 1957): 457–465; Adam Tuchinsky, “ ‘The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever’: The New York Tribune, the 1848 French Revolution, and American Social Democratic Discourse,” Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (September 2005): 470–497; Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

206

Notes to Pages 138–143

67. Boycotter, June 5, 1884. 68. Duncan, Whitelaw Reid, 98–99. 69. Smart, Whitelaw Reid, 255. 70. Smart, “Whitelaw Reid,” 245–247. 71. Thompson promised to save Reid $450 per week in wages alone. Smart, “Whitelaw Reid,” 249. 72. The ITU’s statue fund was considerable for the time and would amount to $143,273 today. The Greeley Monument Unveiled at Greenwood, December 4, 1876 (New York: Francis Hart & Co., 1877), 11–14. 73. Harry Baehr, Jr., The New York Tribune Since the Civil War (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1936), 183. 74. June 29, 1877, Executive Committee Minutes, Reel I, Vol. 1: 1870–1884, Typographical Union No. 6, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library (hereafter Big Six Papers, NYPL); Smart, “Whitelaw Reid,” 254. 75. The union’s membership nearly doubled in 1883. Stevens, Typographical Union, 656. 76. Police were also ordered to run the streetcars during mass strikes in 1886, which makes this claim plausible. Scobey, “Boycotting the Politics Factory,” 295. 77. New York World, December 13, 1883. 78. Boycotter, April 26, 1884. 79. Michael A. Gordon, “The Labor Boycott in New York City, 1880–1886,” Labor History 16 (Spring 1975): 184–229. 80. Boycotter, January 5, 1884. 81. Boycotter, May 5, 1884. 82. Big Six had in fact considered, and declined to support, a “bona fide workingmen’s paper” as early as 1870. Plan for a workingmen’s daily paper, August 2, 1870, Volume 3, Reel 2, February 1870 to November 1880, New York City Typographical Union No. 6 Regular Meetings Minutes, Big Six Papers, NYPL. 83. Explained in Boycotter, July 5, 1884. 84. See, for instance, New York Tribune, April 4, 1884, in which the paper writes that the Typographical Union No. 6 is “making a fool of itself” by making contract demands. 85. The union voted to cease publication on May 1, 1887, the first anniversary of the Haymarket bombing, by a lopsided vote of 1,162 to 530. Stevens, Typographical Union, 388. 86. The estimate comes from a delegate on the union’s boycott committee, presented during an address to the Amalgamated Trade Unions of New York. The Irish World and Industrial Liberator, February 9, 1884. 87. The Tribune began to charge substantial rents from tenants who took up prime office space on Newspaper Row. Duncan, Whitelaw Reid, 60. 88. Stevens, Typographical Union, 389–390. John R. Commons et al., History of Labour in the United States, Vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 317. 89. Smart, “Whitelaw Reid,” 239. 90. Big Six did claim the boycott dropped Tribune circulation by 40,000 in the five months of the campaign. That number was pure bluster. Boycotter, May 17, 1884. 91. Republican Party Platform of 1884, Political Party Platforms, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, American Presidency Project, University of California–Santa Barbara. 92. Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow, and James Coleman, Union Democracy: The Inside Politics of the International Typographical Union (New York: Free Press, 1956), 19, 21, 29,

Notes to Pages 143–150

207

30. Locked-out workers received $9 per week from late December 1883 until early February 1884. That was about $245 per week adjusted for inflation in 2018 dollars. Tribune Relief, February 5, 1884, Typographical Union No. 6, Executive Committee Minutes, 1870–1884, Big Six Papers, NYPL. 93. Stevens, Typographical Union, 656–659. 94. Quoted in Boycotter, April 26, 1884. 95. The fight against convict labor was long associated with Typographical Union No. 6. Big Six ran petition and lobbying campaigns against prisoners fulfilling printing contracts at below market rates in 1868, 1871, and 1883. Stevens, Typographical Union, 516–519. Boycotter, April 26, 1884. 96. Quoted in Boycotter, May 17, 1884. 97. Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 633. 98. Roosevelt likely had ulterior motives in that he opposed James Blaine’s presidential nomination, and Reid was Blaine’s close ally. Whatever the reason, the boycott was a part of the rationale for excluding Reid, if a convenient one. 99. Quoted in Boycotter, April 26, 1884. 100. Original emphasis. Boycotter, May 17, 1884. 101. Boycotter, August 2, 1884. 102. Boycotter, May 31, 1884. 103. David Muzzey, James G. Blaine: A Political Idol of Other Days (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1934), 286. 104. Stevens, Typographical Union, 391. 105. Quoted in Boycotter, May 31, 1884. See also Boycotter, June 28, 1884. 106. Boycotter, August 16, 1884. 107. Boycotter June 28 and July 5, 1884. 108. Boycotter, August 2, 1884. 109. Boycotter, August 23, 1884. 110. Boycotter, August 16, 1884. 111. Robert McKechnie and Charles B. Smith, two former union presidents, traveled to Blaine’s home in Augusta, Maine, for the audience. For the full story from the union’s point of view, see Boycotter, September 27, November 22, 1884. See also Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, 175; Duncan, Whitelaw Reid, 105. 112. Smart, “Whitelaw Reid,” 307. 113. Boycotter, November 22, 1884. 114. Boycotter, August 23, 1884; Smart, Whitelaw Reid, 300. 115. Other factors included a bolt by Mugwumps, Roscoe Conkling’s vindictive scratcher campaign in western New York, and the “millionaire’s dinner” gaffe where the Reverend Samuel Burchard belittled Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Republicans even blamed the weather for suppressing turnout. 116. Boycotter, November 22, 1884. 117. Boycotter, November 15, 1884. 118. Report of Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Session of the International Typographical Union, June 1885 (Philadelphia: McCalla & Stavely, 1885), 101. 119. Stevens, Typographical Union, 391–392.

208

Notes to Pages 150–158

120. Stevens, Typographical Union, 390–396. 121. Opposition by the Typographical Union did not prevent Benjamin Harrison from appointing Whitelaw Reid as minister to France in 1888. But unlike with a vice presidential nomination, that office was not subject to sanction directly by voters at the ballot box. For a cross-section of national reactions to the union’s baffling turnaround, see The Literary Digest, June 25, 1892, 20–22. 122. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Engineer’s Magazine 16, no. 11 (November 1892): 969–971. 123. The Journalist 15, no. 13 (June 11, 1892); 15, no. 14 (June 18, 1892); 16, no. 8 (November 5, 1892).

conclusion 1. The Greenwich and Rye Steamboat Company was capitalized at $75,000. Tweed and other members of the Tammany Americus club owned the controlling shares, along with local Greenwich notables. Frank Hubbard, Other Days in Greenwich (New York: J. F. Tapley Company, 1913), 202–217; Rachel Carley, Building Greenwich: Architecture and Design, 1640 to the Present (Greenwich, CT: Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich, 2005), 68; Elizabeth Clarke, ed., Before and After 1776: A Comprehensive Chronology of the Town of Greenwich, 1640–1976 (Greenwich, CT: Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich, 1976), 51–54. 2. The book’s most recent printing was in 1995. Morton Keller, “James Bryce and America,” Wilson Quarterly 12, no. 4 (Autumn 1988): 86–95, 93; James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995). 3. Woodrow Wilson, “Bryce’s American Commonwealth,” Political Science Quarterly 4, no. 1 (March 1889): 153–169, 158–9. See also “James Bryce and the Academy of Political Science,” Political Science Quarterly 53, no. 3 (September 1938): 321–327. 4. All three men—Bryce, Wilson, and Merriman—were early APSA presidents. Morton Keller, “James Bryce and America,” Wilson Quarterly 12, no. 4 (Autumn 1988): 86–95, 95; APSA Presidents and Presidential Addresses, 1903–Present, http://www.apsanet.org/ABOUT/ Leadership-Governance/APSA-Presidents-1903–to-Present. 5. Keller, “James Bryce and America,” 95. 6. Keith Robbins, “History and Politics: The Career of James Bryce,” Journal of Contemporary History 7, no. 3/4 (July–October): 37–52. 7. Edmund Ions, James Bryce and American Democracy (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 68–71. 8. William Armstrong, E. L. Godkin: A Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978), chapter 1. 9. This was Bryce’s own confession. See Keller, “James Bryce and America,” 89. 10. Ions, Bryce, 40, 141. 11. Frank J. Goodnow, The Tweed Ring in New York City (London: Macmillan, 1888), 10. 12. Croswell Bowen, The Elegant Oakey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), chapter 14. 13. Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 7.

Notes to Pages 158–163

209

14. David C. Hammack, “Elite Perceptions of the Power in the Cities of the United States, 1880–1900: The Evidence of James Bryce, Moisei Ostrogorski, and Their American Informants,” Journal of Urban History 4, no. 4 (August 1978): 363–396. 15. Bryce, American Commonwealth, 589. 16. Bowen, Elegant Oakey, 292. 17. Kieran Allen, Max Weber: A Critical Introduction (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Books, 2004), 16–19, 26–31. 18. At the end of his life, Weber even suggested that Germany borrow the “club pattern” as a means of right-wing political organizing. Lawrence Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 17, 123–124, 164–165, 168–169, 191–193; Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, “A Biographical View,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 3–31, 18. 19. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 77–129, 103, 110. 20. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 84–88. 21. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 86. 22. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 109. 23. In “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber committed a similar flattening of complexity and historical comparison. He attributes to Leon Trotsky the quote “Every state is founded on force,” spoken during the peace negotiations of Brest Litovsk. However, Weber empties this quote of context and meaning by ripping it from Trotsky’s larger argument, showing Weber’s predilection for “performing a creative misreading” of historical events. For this argument, see Stefan Eich and Adam Tooze, “The Allure of Dark Times: Max Weber, Politics, and the Crisis of Historicism,” History and Theory 56, no. 2 (June 2017): 197–215, 200. 24. Heath Brown, Pay-to-Play Politics: How Money Defines the American Democracy (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 5. 25. Lee Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Become Politicized and Politics Become More Corporate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 23. 26. Julia Azari, “Weak Parties and Strong Partisanship Are a Bad Combination,” Vox, November 3, 2016, https://bit.ly/2IGMIHV.

index

Alabama claims, 76–77 ambition theory, 4, 10, 16, 89. See also party organization The American Commonwealth. See James Bryce American Political Science Association (APSA), 156, 168n44, 208n4 Ames, Oakes, 83, 172n91 Ames, Oliver Jr., 83 anti-monopoly, 9, 25, 123, 155; critique of ring rule, 122, 131; election of 1884 and, 149; radical branch of, 126, 132–134, 160; tradition of, 124–125, 151, 163; union contract and, 137–139. See also Spread the Light Club Arthur, Chester, 64, 66, 68, 89; destroys personal papers, 85, 191n140; election of 1880, 168n42; land speculation by, 69, 91, 185n55; law practice of, 72, 179n2; party leadership, 114–115, 154; personal wealth of, 62, 68, 82; petty offices and, 102, 191n139, 192n3; as port collector, 153; presidential administration of, 66, 90, 110 (fig.), 153; Tweed Ring and, 184n47; Vanderbilt loan to, 59, 180n6 assessments: party, 15, 34, 54, 95, 101; burden of, 114–116; custom house and, 64, 153; petty office and, 112; reform critique of, 131, 134 Avenue C Railroad, 45–46 Beard, William H., 63–64 Beecher, Henry Ward, 99 Bellew, Frank, 31, 32 (fig.) Big Six. See Typographical Union No. 6 Bissinger, Philip, 47 Black Horse Cavalry, 172n82 Blaine, James, 79, 86, 125; election of 1884, 148, 149 (fig.), 154, 170n63; labor boycott of,

124, 134, 142, 207n111; Morton and, 82; personal wealth of, 81, 84, 190n117; Reid and, 137, 145; tariff policy of, 147; Bliss, George (lawyer), 62, 108, 183n41; split with Conkling, 197n91; Tammany Republicans and, 184n47 Bliss, George (banker), 74, 77–79, 84, 153 Bliss, William, 44 Board of Audit, 35, 71. See also Tweed Ring “bogus aristocracy,” 126. See also antimonopoly Boston Custom House, 116 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6–7, 166n19 Bowling Green Savings Bank, 27, 28 (fig.), 35–36, 38, 45, 175n21; check from, 44 (fig.); deposits of, 48 (table), 176n37, 178n77; gospel of wealth and, 37, 175n25; legal woes of, 49; lobbying and, 43, 177n54; railroad speculation and, 46; reputation of, 50. See also Tammany banks boycott, 123, 124, 154–155, 206n86, 206n90, 207n98; elections and, 134, 139–145, 147–150. See also Typographical Union No. 6 Boycotter, 140–141, 144 (fig.), 145–147, 149 (fig.), 202n18. See also New York Tribune; Typographical Union No. 6 Bradley, John, 40 Brennan, Matthew T., 39–40, 186n64 Brennan, Owen, 37, 176n37 Broadway National Bank, 40–41 Bryce, James, 9, 11, 123, 155; The American Commonwealth and, 156–157 (fig.), 158–161, 167n20, 169n55 Burr, Aaron, 174n7 Burt, Silas W., 131, 204n38 Butler, James B., 90, 111, 153; affair of, 196n75; appointments by, 102–103, 105, 114, 196n76; Department of Public Charities (New

212

Index

Butler, James B. (continued ) York) and, 108–109, 196n76; Folger campaign and, 91; Treasury revolt and, 113, 199n119 Cashman, Michael H., 1–2, 15, 152, 155 Central Labor Union, 120, 133, 142 (table), 143–144, 148 Central Pacific Railroad, 14, 20, 60, 83, 137, 173n91, 181n10 Charter of 1870, 35, 68. See also Tweed Ring Chittenden, Simeon, 78, 80 Cincinnati Gazette, 137 civil rights, 135, 154 civil service reform, 79, 91, 93, 95–98, 101, 111, 188; Arthur’s defense from, 191n139; election of 1872, 205n55; historiography of, 24, 89; local party leaders and, 113; party markets and, 116; poor relief and, 99; Social Darwinism and, 195n51; workingclass critique of, 118, 127–131, 151. See also reform Civil Service Reform Association (national), 95, 123, 125, 131 Conkling, Roscoe, 22, 24, 60, 65 (fig.), 80 (fig.), 85; alliance with Morton, 75, 78–79; corporate party theory and, 58, 62, 64, 153; custom house, 57; defense of patronage, 191n139; election of 1872, 76; election of 1884, 207n115; as Gould’s lobbyist, 67, 110 (fig.); legal fees and awards, 18, 63, 173n91, 180n14, 181n10, 182n31; as party boss, 2, 14, 61, 95, 114, 154, 184n43; Platt’s view of, 190n132; personal wealth of, 81–84, 86; resigns from senate, 79, 91; Rochester speech, 94; speech for Murphy’s confirmation, 56; Supreme Court nominations and, 90; views on silver and greenbacks, 188n81. See also Stalwarts Connolly, Richard, 27, 31, 35, 40–41, 69–70, 186n56 Cooke, Jay, 75–76, 137 Cooper, Edward, 68, 184n49 Cornell, Alonzo, 7, 19, 60, 62, 110 (fig.), 181n14; conflict with Gould, 66–67, 183n42; Murphy’s senate confirmation and, 53, 56; party accumulation, 64, 66, 182n25, 183n41; political appointments, 109; split with Conkling, 81, 90–91, 184n43

corruption: allegations of, 90, 96–97, 101, 125–127, 174n10; Henry George fights, 128 (fig.); Bryce’s view of, 158, 160 corruption: theory, 19–23, 33, 162 Cre´dit Mobilier (scandal), 22, 83, 131, 181n16. See also Morton, Bliss and Company Crowley, Richard, 114 Cuno, Theodore, 133 Curtis, George William, 90, 95, 117, 125, 130, 202n14; critique of party regularity by, 202n14; defends Horace Greeley, 184n46; Social Darwinism of, 194n34; solicits patronage, 131, 204n39. See also reform custom house. See New York Custom House “customhouse gang,” 56, 95, 99. See also party bedrock Davidson, John Mcbride, 37, 42, 175n26 democratic commerce, 10. See also electoral capitalism Democratic Party, 22, 27–28, 51, 117, 121, 149, 156; cross-party alliances and, 67–68, 184n50; electoral capitalism and, 153; McKeon and, 38. See also Tammany Hall; Tweed Ring demonstrative method, 17, 161–162, 171n68 Develin, John, 47 Dix, John A., 60, 66, 116, 183n36 electoral capitalism, 1, 4, 16, 18, 23, 30, 33; birth of, 8–11; definition of, 6–8; entrepreneurs and, 21; overview of, 153–155, 162–163; as paradigm of analysis, 162; Platt’s logic of, 63, 160, 172n87; Trump and, 20; Weber and, 161. See also spoils system Erie Railroad, 14, 40, 43, 60, 131, 167n24, 183n36 Fenians, 103, 179n5 Fenton, Reuben, 53–56, 69, 85 Ferrell, Frank J., 123 “floaters,” 95 Folger, Charles J., 67, 90, 102; governor’s race, 108, 110 (fig.), 196n76, 203n20; poor relief and, 104; Treasury Secretary, 113–114, 199n119 Fourteenth Amendment, 14, 31, 49, 154, 168n41, 170n56 French, Stephen B., 110 (fig.), 126–127, 153, 203n20

Index Garfield, James A., 77–79, 91, 93, 101, 183n41; assassination of, 88; presidential administration of, 82, 131. See also Half-Breeds Garvey, Andrew, 41–42 Genet, Henry, 34, 37, 42, 49, 50 (fig.), 175n28. See also Yorkville Savings Bank George, Henry, 119–121, 123–124, 128 (fig.), 151; campaign of 1886, 13, 98, 129, 202n9; campaign of 1887, 130, 204n46; critique of party regularity by, 126–127, 131, 160, 203n19; debates Spread the Light Club, 132–133, 204n44; as printer, 143; reform legacy of, 204n42, Tribune correspondent, 138. See also The Standard Godkin, E.L., 122, 131, 156, 195n51; solicits patronage, 204n39 Gompers, Samuel, 120, 129, 140 Goodnow, Frank, 157–158 Gould, Jay, 14, 46, 77, 110 (fig.); Cornell and, 183n41–42; elevated railroads of, 66, 183n42; Erie Railroad and, 43; political investments by, 183n41; Conkling lobbies for, 63, 67; Tweed Ring support by, 40–42; Reid and, 136 (fig.), 137, 205n60 Grace, William R., 131 Grand Army of the Republic, 102 Grant, Ulysses, 22–23, 53–54, 71, 76; business of, 173n96; campaign of 1872, 135, 146; political appointments and, 90, 94, 98, 194n48; presidential administration of, 75, 78, 129. See also Stalwarts Great Railroad Strike of 1877, 138 Great Upheaval, 25, 123, 143, 151, 155, 202n9. See also reform Greeley, Horace, 21, 76, 137–138, 168n42, 179n2; breaks with Grant, 205n55; denounces Arthur, 192n3; pro-labor views of, 137–138; statue of, 206n72; Tribune and, 134–136 Green, Andrew H., 27–28, 35, 43, 48; broker for Tweed and Murphy, 70, 185n56 Greenback Party, 8, 78, 123, 148, 155 Greenback-Labor Party of Queens, 133–134 greenbacks, 40–41 Grinnell, Moses, 54–56, 100 (fig.) Guardian Savings Bank, 27–29, 35, 47, 50; deposits of, 48 (table); legal battles and, 49, 175n22; sketchy loans by, 45; Tammany officers of, 37–38, 178n69. See also Tammany banks

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Half-Breeds, 23, 79, 81–82, 85–86, 137 Hall, Oakey, 27, 31, 157 (fig.), 158 Hastings, Hugh, 43, 103 Hatch, “Uncle Rufus,” 63 Havemeyer, William, 48 Hayes, Rutherford B., 78, 93, 98, 101, 141 Hill, David, 129 Huntington, Collis P., 14, 20, 60, 77, 83, 137. See also Central Pacific Railroad influence (spoils), 34, 63, 90, 99, 101, 108, 113; compensation and, 112; limits of, 116; by Morton, Bliss and Company, 76; poor relief and, 104, 108. See also spoils system Ingersoll, James, 37, 42, 177n56 International Typographical Union (ITU), 128–129, 143–145, 148. See also Typographical Union No. 6 Ivins, William, 130–131, 160. See also reform Jackson, Andrew, 9, 89, 159 Jacksonian era, 10, 24, 33, 89, 93, 124 Jay Commission, 101 John Swinton’s Paper, 13, 123, 201n4, 202n9. See also John Swinton Knights of Labor, 8, 121, 123, 129, 155; Local Assembly 1562, 133; Tribune boycott, 140, 142 (table), 146–148 Land League (Irish), 123, 133, 204n45 Lenox Library, 41, 69–71, 73 (fig.), 185n56. See also Thomas Murphy; William Tweed Liberal Republican Party, 76–77, 124, 135, 137 Long Branch, New Jersey, 70–71, 186n65. See also Thomas Murphy Maguire, Matthew, 132–133. See also Spread the Light Club Manafort, Paul, 21, 172n84 McGlynn, Edward, 120, 123, 129 McKeon, John, 38 McQuade, John, 37 Merriman, Charles, 156 Merritt, Edwin A., 55 monetary policy, 75, 78, 80, 123, 125, 161, 171n74 Morton, Bliss and Company, 18, 24, 58, 183n41; bond sales, 188n86; elevated railroads and, 66; origins of, 74; Stalwarts and, 75–78, 80, 82–83, 85–86, 153, 188n83

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Morton, Levi P., 5, 12, 18, 153, 161; banking house of, 74; Blaine and, 190n117, n121; diplomacy, 76–77; political appointments, 61, 105, 182n27, 189n96; political career, 78–79, 81–82, 85, 154, 168n42; financial adviser to Conkling and Blaine, 81; Tweed link, 34, 72; Union Pacific Railroad and, 84; wealth of, 188n75, n79 Mozart Hall, 21, 168n36 mugwumps, 130–131, 156, 207n115 Murphy, Thomas, 7, 55 (fig.), 91, 99, 116, 153; business with Tweed, 69–72, 184n47, 185n51; Catholicism and, 179n6; fraud allegations, 179n2; insurance scam by, 187n69; Irish republican sympathies, 179n5; James Lenox and, 185n56; Long Branch and, 70–71, 186n65; as port collector, 100 (fig.), 117, 172n90, 179n2, 195n54; senate confirmation of, 53–56. See also Lenox Library National Savings Bank, 28–29, 35, 37–38, 49; deposits of, 48 (table). See also Tammany banks neoliberal, 167n23 New Deal, 4, 75, 92 New-York Civil Service Reform Association, 130 New York Clearing House, 48–50, 178n86 New York Custom House, 53–54, 99, 106–107 (table), 115; Jay Commission and, 101; patronage and, 54, 57, 74, 79, 81, 84, 109, 203n20; Phelps, Dodge, and Company scandal, 64; poor relief and, 104–105, 109, 191n2; reform of, 131; social life of, 112, 116–117. See also spoils system New York Public Library. See Lenox Library New York Tribune, 38, 56, 83, 134–136, 154; anti-labor turn of, 137–139; boycott and, 139–150. See also Whitelaw Reid; Typographical Union No. 6 Nordhoff, Charles, 117 Ocean Bank, 41, 45–46, 177n47. See also Tammany banks O’Conor, Charles, 47 O’Donnell, John R., 143 oligarchy, 4, 13, 132, 169n52 Opdyke, George, 34, 47 Ostrogorski, Moisei, 57, 160

“paint eaters,” 95, 194n32. See also party bedrock party bedrock, 94–95, 96 (fig.), 97, 101, 105, 153. See also spoils system The Party Decides, 16 party noir, 12–14, 154 party organization (theory), 14–16, 85, 92, ambition theory, 89; bossism and, 97; relative autonomy and, 154; Second Gilded Age, 161–163 party system (Gilded Age), 4, 6, 7, 11–13, 68, 72; grassroots critique of, 123; New York and, 17–19, 90, 98, 168n42; social science and, 155–161, 169n55 patrimonial, 20 patronage. See poor relief; spoils system Patterson, James, 83, 172n91 “placemen,” 91, 95, 111. See also party bedrock Platt, Thomas C., 5, 12, 19, 21, 24, 62 (fig.), 80 (fig.), 153; anti-monopoly critique of, 125; early career of, 125; as financial adviser to Conkling, 82–83; party accumulation and, 58, 60, 63, 160; personal wealth of, 61, 85, 181n18; political appointments, 99, 109, 182n20; Tribune alliance, 137; view of Conkling, 190n132 poor relief (officeholding), 91–92, 97–99, 153, 198n103; contesting, 197n81; Department of Public Charities (New York City) and, 108; “situation” and, 104–105, 113–114, 154, 196n65. See also spoils system Porter, Horace, 76, 186n65 Powderly, Terence, 120, 129 Prince, Le Baron Bradford, 87, 191n1 Progress and Poverty, 98, 119. See also Henry George Progressive Era, 16, 97 Reconstruction, 1, 4, 14, 77, 93, 134 reform, 24, 51, 122, 127; control of capital and, 50; elites and, 97, 125, 128, 187n68, 203n33; grassroots and, 123–124, 151, 155, 201n4; Henry George campaign of 1887, 119–120; labor rhetoric, 146–147; reducing officeholders’ salaries, 112; radical proposals of, 134; referendum and, 132, 204n42; social science and, 156, 159–160 Reid, Whitelaw, 83, 117, 134–135, 136 (fig.), 143; anti-labor views of, 138–139; Blaine loss in 1884 and, 148–149; campaign of 1872, 137;

Index denunciation by Typographical Union, 147, 150; diplomatic career of, 146, 208n121; early career of, 135; personal wealth of, 141, 151, 154; withdraws from Republican state convention, 145. See also boycott Republican Party, 15, 18–19, 24, 54, 57, 59, 83, 125; Conklingism and, 63–64, 75; disunity, 66, 90, 170n63; electorate, 65; Horace Greeley and, 135; Irish support for, 103; labor boycott of, 134, 142–148; newspaper patronage, 137, 141, 147–148; party capital, 85; Platt and, 21; sectional tensions within, 79; southern Republicans, 77; state committee (New York), 114–115, 150, 153. See also Half-Breeds; Stalwarts ring. See Tweed Ring Roche, Walter, 34, 37, 46, 176n37; bank positions of, 40, 44; biography of, 37–38; Roche Guards and, 39; stolen banks funds and, 49; reaction to bank run, 45, 51 Roosevelt, Theodore, 119, 145, 159, 207n98; critique of Bryce and, 161 Rose, John, 74, 76–77 “salary grab,” 15, 170n58 Scribner, Gilbert, 63 Selmes, Reeves, 34, 44–46, 50, 153, 177n60 Seward, William, 58–59, 62, 182n21 “shiny hat brigade,” 2, 95, 194n32. See also party bedrock Sinking Fund, 68, 185n53 Smith, Henry “Hank,” 27, 34, 37, 39 (fig.), 40, 153; biography and, 38; cross-partisan alliances, 46, 72; lobbying and, 43–44; risky lending practices of, 45 Smith, Hugh, 69–70, 186n56 spoils (gilded), 59, 62, 71, 91, 187n69, 189n97; corporate offices and, 61, 131; distinctive features of, 84–86; Morton, Bliss and Company, 75–77; speculation and, 68. See also spoils system spoils system, 9–11, 15, 17, 23, 32–34; business reaction to, 47–48; capital and, 36, 42–43, 64, 192n14; compensation in, 106 (table), 111–113; custom house and, 53–54, 100 (fig.), 105; growth of, 90; historiography of, 88–89, 92–93, 97, 118, 159; Jacksonian type of, 57–58, 84; labor’s reaction to, 124–125, 127–129, 132–134; make-work, redundant offices and, 109, 111; as party right to office,

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98, 112; perils of, 199n120; petty office and, 24, 94–96 (fig.), 99, 101–104, 153; political development of, 57; removals, 116; social life of, 116–117; upward mobility, 107–108. See also assessments; poor relief; spoils (gilded) sound money. See monetary policy Spread the Light Club of Brooklyn, 132–133, 151, 155, 204n45 Stalwarts, 23–24, 63–65, 85, 153; business alliances, 58, 61, 66, 74–76, 78, 81; collapse of, 84, 91, 154; disunity and, 67, 114, 184n43, 203n20; Edward Cooper and, 68, 184n49; elevated railroads and, 66, 183n38; insurance scam by, 187n69; personal investments by, 69, 82–83, 182n25; petty officeholding and, 90, 97, 102, 108, 118; police violence and, 126; reputation of, 126; rivalry with Half-Breeds, 79, 86, 137, 170n63; Tammany Hall and, 110–111, 127, 161, 184n50. See also Republican Party The Standard, 121, 123, 130, 132. See also Henry George Stoddard, Richard Henry, 117 “strikers,” 20, 54, 179n7 Sullivan, John W., 131–133, 144, 151, 204n42 Supreme Court, 4, 19, 90, 154 Swallowtail Democrats, 97 Sweeny, Peter, 31, 35, 40–41, 60–70, 167n24 Swinton, John, 13, 22, 123, 127, 143, 203n21 Taintor, Henry Fox, 35 Tammany banks, 23, 27–31, 33–35, 72; bankruptcy of, 175n22; confidence in, 36; generous terms of, 41, 49, 178n77; lawsuits against, 47; legacy of, 51, 85, 153, 163; operations of, 42–43, 45, 48 Tammany Hall, 7, 18, 22, 49, 90, 96 (fig.), 116, 174n1; cross-party alliances, 38, 43, 53, 110–111, 116; electoral coalitions and, 34, 38, 72; Henry George campaign of 1887 and, 120; luxury and, 152; monopoly and, 125, 127; party accumulation by, 46–47; protoKeynesianism of, 97; social science and, 156–161. See also Tweed Ring Tammany Republicans, 39 (fig.), 53, 68–69, 103, 184n46–47 Tanner, James, 98 tariffs, 54, 65, 146

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Tenth National Bank, 29, 35, 38, 42–45, 70; directors of, 40; deposits of, 177n56. See also Tammany banks Terwilliger, James, 21–22, 172n90 Tilden, Samuel, 33, 35, 42, 47–48, 70, 168n42 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 9, 93, 199n109 Trump, Donald, 4, 19–20 Tweed Ring, 10, 18, 22, 29–31, 90, 114; bank run of 1871 and, 35; Bryce and, 156–158; Committee of Seventy and, 33, 47, 71; corporate boards and, 34, 175n17; electoral capitalism of, 34, 37; George B. McClellan and, 117; gold corner and, 40; James Lenox and, 71, 186n56; McAllister’s Patriarchs and, 203n23; origins of, 38–39; personal fortunes of, 32 (fig.), 33, 46, 174n2, 174n6, 175n19, 177n46, 185n54; kickbacks and, 41–42, 178n78; land speculation by, 68–70; Tammany banks and, 36. See also Tammany Hall; Tammany Republicans Tweed, William “Boss,” 18–19, 21, 23, 30–31, 91; Americus club and, 38, 71; antimonopoly critique of, 125; balloon anecdote, 1–2, 152; baseball (New York Mutuals), 116, 200n139; brother Richard, 37, 68; elite support for, 34; financing Tammany banks and, 36; Guardian Bank and, 27; Hugh Hastings and, 103; James Lenox and, 70, 72; National Savings Bank, 49; Ocean Bank and, 41, 45; railroads and, 14, 60, 66, 167n24; state legislature and, 35, 43, 176n37; steamboat company, 208n1; Tenth National Bank and, 44; Thomas Murphy and, 53, 69, 71. See also Tammany Hall Twomey, Frank, 37 Typographical Union No. 6 (“Big Six”), 124, 134, 138–139, 155; anti-union newspapers and, 144 (fig.); appeal to Blaine, 207n111; backroom deals, 150; boycott endorsements and, 142; founds Boycotter, 140–141;

solidarity with, 148; strike and lockout benefits of, 141, 143, 207n30; threatens Republicans, 145–147. See also Boycotter; International Typographical Union; New York Tribune Union League Club, 45, 123 Union Pacific Railroad, 60, 83–84, 172n91, 183n36 Union Trust Company, 48 United Labor Party, 98, 119–121, 123–124, 130; Henry George campaign of 1887, 204n46; John W. Sullivan’s critique of, 132 U.S. Express Company, 5, 24, 84–85; Platt and, 19, 60–61, 62 (fig.), 125; Stalwarts and, 58 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 14, 40, 59, 180n6 Ward, Ferdinand, 23, 173n97 Weber, Max, 11, 15, 155, 158–161, 209n18, 23 Weed, Thurlow, 61, 174n6 Western Union, 64, 181n14, 205n60 Whig Party, 10, 21, 38, 88, 97, 182n21, 184n47, 186n58 White, Richard, 13, 59, 185n85 Wilson, Woodrow, 156, 168n44 Wood, Benjamin, 2, 12, 21 Wood, Fernando, 1–2, 12, 19, 21, 38, 152; land speculation by, 7, 19, 91, 185n53–54; petty office and, 112; urban growth coalition and, 68, 213; selling nominations, 10, 168n36 Wood, James, 43–44, 177n54 Woodhull, Victoria, 132 Yankee Leviathan, 11, 54, 59, 131 Yorkville Savings Bank, 29, 35, 37–38, 42, 46, 49; deposits of, 48; Henry Genet of, 50 (fig.), 175n28; Tweed and, 177n51. See also Tammany banks

acknowledgments

This book examines politics as a system of capitalist markets. In my quest to discover how things work, the project has many origins. I won’t bore you with them. Yet I do feel that clarification is in order given the historical and empirical material. I’m not a New Yorker. I didn’t grow up there, and I don’t live there now. Well, I discovered you can fall in love with a place. New York is poetry. I was lucky to toil there for nearly a decade among the weirdness: teeming crowds, experimental subcultures, unsanctioned food carts, and grime. Of that romance, I leave behind this book. If it sings— maybe, here or there—you know why. I owe a debt of gratitude to many people and institutions. My colleagues at the University of Toledo welcomed me back to the Midwest. Sam Nelson, the chair of my department, shared time and resources so that I might complete this project. Both the Department of Political Science and Public Administration and the University of Toledo provided funds to conduct archival research, including a summer research fellowship. Very happily, I chose to take parental leave—twice, thanks to my union contract—to care for my newborn children. Both times this project came to a complete halt, and my brain felt as if it devolved into a gelatinous paste. But, I think everyone should be in a position to raise their kids! I was only able to do so because members of the UT-AAUP enshrined this basic right into the faculty collective bargaining contract before I even arrived on campus. Multiple factors converged to bring forth Electoral Capitalism in current form. Between a deficit of external funding and becoming a new dad, three lost chapters are out there floating in the ether. I began work that examines, via Fernando Wood’s urban growth machine, why political wealth accumulation sits adjacent to the “spatial fix” characteristic of capital mobility. I also hoped to read the spoils system against the grain by addressing the centrality of public officeholding to vibrant postbellum African American communities. The final missing chapter would have explored the interrelationship between spoils and empire, both in western continental territories

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and overseas. Going further back, I originally planned to compare the late nineteenth century with our current period, beginning after New York’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s. (Friends advised that it would be better to finish.) My fever dreams envisioned a sprawling comparative study of electoral capitalism that included late Victorian London and Third Republic Paris. (Venture capital funding never materialized.) The world is no worse off, I am confident, and perhaps even better. But the project’s full scope does place this finished product in perspective. My experience at the CUNY Graduate Center was formative. You can’t deny its flaws, so I won’t. But the caliber of scholars there, and the students drawn into orbit, makes for a climate of raw, hustling energy that stands apart from the comfortable institutions of higher learning. First and foremost, I want to thank Frances Piven, whose scholarly rigor and generosity have shaped not only my scholarship, but also the kind of person that I strive to be. My sincerest thanks are due to Joe Rollins, for his humor and insights. Two CUNY historians, Joshua Freeman and Thomas Kessner, helped to mold the project and push it forward at crucial moments. Ruth O’Brien and Alyson Cole provided so many of us with support when it mattered most. Hunter’s Department of Political Science gave me the opportunity to learn about teaching from extraordinary pedagogues. Where would I be without them all? Several people rescued me time and again. I leaned heavily on the kindness and wit of Alex Zamalin, Jonathan Keller, Ben Epstein, Patricia Stapleton, Nicholas Robbins, Dan Skinner, Steve Pludwin, Rachel Faulkner-Gurstein, Flannery Amdahl, William Adler, Fanny Lauby, Tom Waters, Douglas Medina, Mike Miller, Aaron Shapiro, and Utku Sezgin. Megan Francis must have seen something worthwhile in my project, when even I didn’t. She supported my work for an award from the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association. That meant the world to me, and still does. Joel Feingold is a comrade going back to our Student Labor Action Coalition days in Madison, Wisconsin. Joel collected archival materials in New York when I was no longer on location, and he was always game to talk about whichever social and political crisis was current. Everyone should read his essay, “Remembering Peekskill” (Jacobin, June 22, 2017). Going back many years now, my brilliant friend Charlie Hoyt, the labor leader, has shaped so much of my thinking in our conversations. There are also many friends, like David Kreisman, that I met through my other political

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education jobbing as a ward heeler, and then as a trade union organizer. We made little to no progress pushing boulders up the mountain. Others helped carry me over the line, too. I’m grateful to Jeffrey Selinger for his extensive comments. Many conference discussants were generous with feedback over the years: Laura Jensen, Daniel Carpenter, Ruth Bloch Rubin, David Bateman, Boris Heersink, and Joe Peschek. Rob Allen shared with me his wonderful work on Spread the Light Club, giving me a new transatlantic appreciation for late nineteenth-century Irish social movements. When I was cold-emailing senior scholars, Richard Bensel responded to my work on the Tammany banks with multiple pages of rich critique, even though he didn’t know me. When I was preoccupied with caring for my newborn children, several people were kind enough to aid with the remote retrieval of archival collections: Aaron Lattanzi in Syracuse University, Timothy Vasko at Cornell, Larry Svabeck for the Newberry Library, and Karen Osburn of the Geneva Historical Society. I am deeply humbled by the opportunity to be a part of the American Governance series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Richard Valelly, Pamela Brandwein, Marie Gottschalk, and Christopher Howard, the book series editors, have contributed so much to our field with their scholarship and professional service. Thanks are due for permission to reprint “Political Capitalism in the Gilded Age: The Tammany Bank Run of 1871,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 16, no. 1 (January 2017): 44–64, which makes up the bulk of Chapter 1. Some of my introductory chapter relies upon work first elaborated in “The Boss’s ‘Brains’: Political Capital, Democratic Commerce, and the New York Tweed Ring, 1868–1871,” Journal of Historical Sociology 28, no. 3 (September 2015): 374–403. Peter-Christian Aigner at the Gotham Center for New York City History graciously extended the blog as a venue for “Ben Wood and New York’s Southern Lotteries” (September 1, 2015) and “Boss Tweed and the Tammany Republicans” (September 15, 2016). I thank Peter Agree and Noreen O’Connor-Abel, my editors at Penn Press, for their patience and skill. Everyone from peer reviewers to the American Governance series editors have my sincerest gratitude, along with Zoe Kovacs, Joyce Ippolito, and anyone behind the scenes who moved this manuscript in ways large or small. My family deserve special acknowledgment for their unwavering support throughout this long ordeal. Their patience and guidance have sustained me during the highs and the lows. To Mom, Dad, and Eric; to the

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memory of my grandparents Fran, Bill, Ann, and Dave; and also to Pam, Allan, and Orlee: please know that acknowledgment pages do not run long enough to fully express my thanks for your love and support. Most important, I want to thank Shira, who has endured with matchless grace a partner in academic purgatory for so long. You are the best. And finally, to Noni and Izzy, for everything about you, I am thankful.