As a result Governor Hoffman, probably acting with Tweed’s consent, if not at his direction, came rushing down from Albany to issue a proclamation saying that anyone who wished to “assemble and march in peaceable procession” was at liberty to do so and would get full protection from the police and the military. It was an immensely popular move. Some 160 Orangemen decided to go ahead with their parade. Four regiments of National Guard were ordered to stand by, including the Ninth, in which Tweed’s bosom friend Fisk was a colonel. Catholic priests called for peace and understanding, while it was rumored that in Brooklyn trained gangs of Irish thugs were getting ready for action.
The line of march was from the Gideon Lodge of Orangemen in Lamartine’s Hall, at Eighth Avenue and 29th Street, downtown to Cooper Union, at Eighth Street and the Bowery. Nothing much happened until the Orangemen reached 26th Street, where the police, marching on either side, had to force a path through a crowd blocking the way. At 25th Street the police were ordered to charge. By then stones and bricks were coming down from housetops. Near the corner of 24th Street a shot was fired. The police said later it came from an upstairs window, but others claimed a rifle went off accidentally among the Ninth Regiment, which had been drawn up at 25th Street, with the comic-looking Fisk prancing about on horseback.
Whichever the case, the bullet took off part of the head of a private in Company K, of the Ninth. Instantly, without orders, the soldiers opened fire into the crowds. The fusillade was very brief. When it was over, two soldiers, one policeman, and a total of forty-six bystanders, including a number of women and children, were dead.
(Fisk had dismounted in the midst of all this and disappeared into a saloon, where, it was later learned, he escaped out a back door, scaled several fences, got rid of his uniform in a house on 23rd Street, then fled as swiftly as possible to Long Branch, New Jersey, the fashionable seashore resort.)
Everyone was furious at the Ring, including most of the Irish Catholics who had long been the very lifeblood of Tammany. Among the Protestants there was angry talk of Irish despotism. “Write on the tombstone of Wednesday’s victims: ‘Murdered by the criminal management of Mayor A. Oakey Hall’” one man commented. Others felt the riot was symptomatic of a larger tragedy. “Behind the folly and wickedness of the Irish,” said The Nation, “there lie American shortcoming, corruption, and indifference.”
The problem was, however, that most of the people who could have organized any sort of movement against Tweed were out of town for the summer. The Times continued its assault day after day, but nothing happened. When Tweed was pressed to comment on what the Times was printing about him, he exclaimed defiantly, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
As it was, nothing would be done about it until the end of the summer, when a mass meeting was called at Cooper Union on the night of Monday, September 4. Former Mayor William Havemeyer presided, thousands attended. In no time the rather refined and reserved-looking crowd was in a fine frenzy. “There is no power like the power of the people armed, aroused, and kindled with the enthusiasm of a righteous wrath!” said Judge James Emott from the speaker’s platform. No more could there be any denying the frauds of the Ring, he said, and in obvious answer to Tweed’s now famous retort, he asked, “Now, what are you going to do about these men?” “Hang them!” shouted voices from the audience.
A so-called Committee of Seventy was organized that night, and included among its membership some of the most distinguished names in New York—Judge Emott, Robert Roosevelt, Andrew Green, who had been a pallbearer at John A. Roebling’s funeral, and Abram Hewitt. Also among them was Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy friend and New York neighbor of Hewitt’s. Tilden was a rather cold, calculating corporation lawyer and a Tammany Democrat of great ambition, who had had little derogatory to say about Tweed prior to this, but who now took charge of the committee and shortly became known as the leader of the entire reform movement.
The campaign to destroy the Ring was on in earnest. On September 12 someone broke into Comptroller Connolly’s offices and stole all the vouchers for the year 1870. The theft was a great mystery according to city officials. But in Harper’s Weekly Nast pictured Connolly, Sweeny, Tweed, and Hall looking highly ridiculous as they proclaimed their innocence and a few weeks later Nast had the same group cowering in the shadow of a gallows.
Secretly, Tweed began transferring all his real estate holdings to his son. Hall tried to get Connolly to resign, while Connolly, terrified the others were about to throw him to the lions, consulted with Tilden, who told him to take a leave of absence and appoint the upright Andrew Green as Acting Comptroller. This was done. Armed guards were stationed in the Comptroller’s office to watch over what remained of the records. The reformers had achieved a beachhead.
Tweed, however, was anything but placid through all this. He had power aplenty still and he had no intention of giving up without a fight. The real test, he knew, the only one that mattered, would be in November, at the polls. His own term as State Senator would expire on December 31.
First he had himself unanimously re-elected chairman of the General Committee of Tammany Hall. Then he went off to the Democratic state convention at Rochester, taking along a gang of New York thugs to remind any wavering delegates where their sympathies lay. Bribes were handed out liberally. Tilden and some other reform delegates put up a fight of sorts, but Tweed was in control the whole time and everyone knew it. He got the nominations he wanted, including his own.
Back on the Lower East Side of New York the day after the convention ended, Tweed stood before some twenty thousand cheering followers, in Tweed Plaza, doffed a little Scotch cap, bowed low, and said the following:
At home again amidst the haunts of my childhood and scenes where I had been always surrounded by friends, I feel I can safely place myself and my record, all I have performed as a public official plainly before your gaze. The manner in which I have been received tonight has sent a throb to my heart, but I would be unjust to myself and unjust to those who have seen fit to entrust me with office if at times like these, when to be a Democrat, when to hold a public office is to be aspersed and condemned without trial, traduced without stint, there was not felt to be engraven on my heart the proud satisfaction that as a public officer, I can go to the friends of my childhood, take them by the hand, take them in a friendly manner, and saying to them, “There is my record,” and finding that it meets with their approval.
For most Americans the evils of the Tweed Ring were the natural outgrowth of the essential evil of big cities. New York being the biggest of big cities, it would quite naturally produce a Tweed. New York simply got what New York deserved was the feeling. The city was mostly foreign-born after all, better than half Roman Catholic. The golden age of representative government had lasted less than a hundred years learned men were saying gloomily. Jefferson had been right about what cities would do to American life. The future now belonged to the alien rabble and the likes of Tweed. “Perhaps the title ‘Boss of New York’ will grow into permanence and figure in history like that of the doge of Venice,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary. Even Walt Whitman of Brooklyn, who celebrated the “power, fullness, and motion” of New York in his Democratic Vistas published that year, wrote savagely of the “deep disease” of America, which he diagnosed as “hollowness at heart.
But if in New York—even in New York—men of principle, men of integrity, education, and property, could rise up and triumph over a Tweed, then perhaps there was hope for the Republic. The idea was a tonic. Numerous other cities had their “mute, inglorious Tweeds,” as E. L. Godkin wrote in The Nation, and other cities would have their own spirited crusades for the restoration of political virtue. Reform groups became the fashion. Committees were formed. Silent indifference to political immorality was no longer acceptable in polite society and Brooklyn was no exception.
As might be expected the impact of things happening so close by in New York was especially pronounced in Brooklyn. The
talk that October was nearly all politics. The editors of the Union, in their offices directly below the Bridge Company, wrote that Brooklyn could well use the services of New York’s Committee of Seventy and that there had been “fear and trembling” among certain Brooklyn officials ever since the assault on Tweed began.
That election frauds had made the Honorable Martin Kalbfleisch mayor of Brooklyn two years before was common knowledge. That there would be more of the same this time seemed inevitable. But even Kalbfleisch appeared to be caught up with reform spirit. He had denounced the Democrats and was running for re-election as an independent. So it was a three-way race. The Republicans had a candidate and Boss McLaughlin had put up a former mayor named Powell, a decent enough man, as were most McLaughlin mayors, with the notable exception of Kalbfleisch.
The Democrats appeared to be in trouble for the first time in years. The opposition was calling for the downfall of the Brooklyn Ring along with the Tweed Ring. Kalbfleisch would assuredly take away more Democratic votes than Republican. For McLaughlin, for Murphy, Kingsley, and Thomas Kinsella, these were exceedingly busy times, with much at stake, not the least of which was the total say on how the Bridge Company ought to be run. Nobody who understood the realities of Brooklyn politics seriously thought the Democrats might lose, but at the same time the Democrats were taking no chances.
Then on the 23rd of October there was a horrible accident at the bridge. Two men had been killed, both married men with families. A third was so dreadfully mangled that little hope was held out for him, and five others were badly injured. Until now the bridge had had a perfect safety record. In the two years since construction began there had not been a single serious accident, no injuries to speak of, no loss of life. This was extraordinary, in view of the known hazards, and it was generally taken as a sign of conscientious management.
The Brooklyn tower by then had reached a height of about seventy feet. The day of the accident an eight-ton block of granite was being hauled to the top of the tower by one of the three huge boom derricks mounted there, which were all held in position by wire rigging, like the masts of a ship. Suddenly a socket in one of the guy wires broke and two derricks fell from the tower.
One man, a rigger on the derricks, was struck by a great wooden boom that sheared off half his skull. He was thrown down on the top of the tower, stone dead. “If he had stood still he would not have been injured,” C. C. Martin said later; “but when he heard everything crackling and crashing, he lost his presence of mind and ran out where the derrick was coming down just in time to be struck.”
Another man had been standing on an elevated railroad track that ran along the side of the tower facing the river, about fifty feet above the dock where the stone scows tied up. His job was to shove a little flatcar under the stones as they were hoisted by an engine on the dock, then move them into position to be picked up by one of the derricks on the tower. When the derricks fell, the stone suspended from one of them crashed through the track about twenty feet from the spot where he was standing. It would have missed him, in other words. But seeing it coming, he had fled to the end of the track and leaped off. The fall broke both of his legs and no one knew how much else internally. He died later.
The other man killed instantly was also on top of the tower. He too saw the derricks falling and tried to get out of the way by jumping over a granite block sitting on the masonry. Just as he jumped, the mast of one derrick fell on him, crushing him, face downward, into a crevice in the masonry no more than eight inches deep.
Roebling, Paine, and Collingwood were over on the New York side at the time, but C. C. Martin, who was in his office in the yard below, heard the crash and rushed up the narrow flight of stairs built at one corner of the tower. Martin found several men trying frantically and futilely to move the fallen derrick. The man caught beneath was unconscious but still alive. Martin sent for jacks and levers and in another fifteen minutes had the derrick up and off. The man was pulled out from under; he breathed a few times, as though his awful agony had been eased, then died.
The man’s name was Daugherty and he had been working near Thomas Douglas, the stonemason, who was foreman on the tower. Douglas had started off running in the same direction as Daugherty, but instead of trying to jump the stone block in the way, he had crouched down beside it. As a result the stone saved him. But when Daugherty was struck, his knees came down on Douglas’ back, pinning Douglas so he could not move. In his agony Daugherty kicked Douglas in the kidneys so severely that Douglas would never recover. He lived on for nearly two years after that, working part of the time, but troubled terribly by the injury and gradually growing worse. The story goes that he wanted to live only long enough to know that the Brooklyn tower was finished. When he was told that it had been, he died almost immediately afterward. “He was a splendid man,” Martin told reporters.
But the accident also left a lot of people wondering how well things were being managed by the Bridge Company and at a time when what the Bridge Company needed most was public confidence. The guy wire on the derrick broke because of a defective weld in one socket, as would be learned. The accident had not been caused by mismanagement or the use of shoddy equipment, but a great many people did not know that, or believe it if they did.
An investigation was called for and was conducted by the coroner, with the result that the Bridge Company was entirely exonerated and credited publicly with using the best-quality material and taking every precaution to guard against accidents. “This has been the case from the first and will continue to be,” William Kingsley stated; “no labor or expense will be spared to insure the safety of the employees.” The day before elections the Executive Committee would grant to each of the families of the deceased payments of $250, or a little better than three months’s wages.
But a few days after the accident and two weeks before the elections several hundred reform-minded Brooklynites met inside the Brooklyn Skating Rink to organize their own Committee of Fifty, as they called it, or the Rink Committee, as it would become popularly known—“to investigate charges of fraud, extravagance, and corruption in several departments of the city government.” Also included for investigation was the New York Bridge Company.
As expected, the Democrats won in Brooklyn, but by only a slim margin. They were immediately charged with bringing hired goons over from New York, with buying votes, with using repeaters, fictitious names, all the customary devices. Most of the charges were probably true. That there was fraud at the polls there is no doubt whatever. Later examinations would show that a minimum of six thousand illegal votes were cast. But only five men would be convicted in subsequent trials, all of them quite unknown and unimportant, largely because the Democrats had in their possession some damaging information concerning the prosecuting district attorney.
Powell was mayor now. McLaughlin, Kingsley, and the rest were all still in power. But across the river the election had destroyed the Tweed Ring.
The reformers had gone to work in New York as never before, and they had worked together, Republicans and Democrats. It was their one best and last chance, they believed. Young Men’s Reform Associations were organized. Clergymen called upon their congregations to do their duty. Newspapers and picture magazines described it as probably the most important election ever. On Election Day A. T. Stewart closed his store so every clerk could vote. Four regiments of militia backed up the police to see that everything was conducted properly at the polls and for the most part it was. Among many older, wealthier citizens, however, it was thought that very little would come of all this.
The reform ticket won by an overwhelming majority. Only two Tammany aldermen managed to survive. Tilden was elected to the State Assembly. Of the five Senatorial districts in the city, candidates put up by the Committee of Seventy were victorious in all but one—Tweed’s. But Tweed’s majority was less than half what it had been two years earlier and it had cost quite a sum of cash distributed about the ward. A few days after the votes we
re counted it was announced that the annual Americus Club Ball would be postponed.
Almost immediately the New York World sent a reporter across the river to interview the man thought to be the brains of the Kings County machine, William C. Kingsley. The World had been notably patient with Tweed all these years and now seemed eager to demonstrate that New York had no franchise on corruption. Kingsley stated categorically that there was no such thing as a Brooklyn Ring. Hugh McLaughlin, he said, lived in the plainest fashion. Why McLaughlin did not even keep a horse, Kingsley said with emphasis, and was probably not worth $100,000. The contrast with Tweed went without saying.
Kingsley conceded that the Kings County Democrats had taken something of a beating at the polls largely because of Tweed’s troubles. “That great tidal wave of corruption in sweeping over the land has damaged us here to a certain extent,” he remarked. But just so nobody misjudged his own motives, he concluded the interview by saying that he would be richer by $250,000 had he never had anything to do with politics.
Sometime soon after that the Committee of Fifty began looking into the management of the Bridge Company. The committee had already searched first for foul play in the management of Prospect Park and failed to turn up much. One or two other investigations were proving equally inconsequential, and among Brooklyn Democrats, the very conscientious chairman of the committee, a man named Backhouse, became the butt of innumerable bad jokes. But with the bridge the investigators believed they were on to something, and chiefly as a result of their curiosity a number of matters that had only been talked about privately before got into print a good deal sooner than they would have otherwise.