"Boss" Tweed : the story of a grim generation / by Denis Tilden Lynch.

An Old Game

25

Wood began his first term as Mayor in 1855. His second
overlapped the beginning of the great civil strife. Wood was
an arch-hypocrite as well as corrupt. He obtained his start in
life by purchasing three ships with money he had stolen in the
course of one year from "longshoremen made drunk in his
waterfront groggery." This his hired biographers, at his
instigation, euphemistically called a grocery. This is permissible. For politicians, like poets, enjoy the same license.
Wood ran lotteries, and was covertly leagued with the underworld. He professed sympathy with the zealous efforts of
churchmen to effect reforms in public office. Wood schemed to
end his career in the White House. A greater schemer opposed
him. This was Tweed, who abjured hypocrisy, loathed Wood
for his cant, and drove him from public office. An act which
would cover a multitude of Tweed's sins were it not that his
motive was chiefly his predilection for plunder.
A decade or more prior to this, while the Swartwout scandal
was still the talk of the country, the notorious Police Justices
Ring, which levied blackmail on offenders brought before them,
was uncovered. One of the impeached jurists was a good man
in the public esteem. He was noted for his charity.
Public thieving did not begin with Tweed. Nor did it die
with him. It exists because of the apathy of the mass. Sometimes the mass is roused to a sense of the wrongs inflicted upon
it. Invariably, it is immediately blinded by passions of racial,
religious, or partisan strife, kindled by politicians. On rare
occasions the mass struggles until it has effected a reform.
But eventually the politician triumphs and the mass is divided
and one side wars upon the other and then succumbs to inertia..
The looting is resumed. I
Almost every one of Tweed's associates from the beginning
of his public life, played this age-old game of the politician.
Tweed was an exception. He humored the prejudices of the
mob when forced to recognize them. There was agreat influx
of European immigration beginning in thiee orties. It Was
largely Irish and German. A large part of it settled in New
York. It was here before Tweed became of age. But not
until he was a power in Tammany was a German-born nom