Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [658]
In the end, however, patronage was the lubricant that kept the still-rickety political machines in running order. The mayor appointed all policemen but had to choose them from a nominating list submitted by ward aldermen; the need for annual reappointment kept cops attentive to councilmen’s wishes. Supporters could also be rewarded with carting licenses, saloon licenses, and appointments as health wardens, street sweepers, and a myriad of other minor city positions. Councilmen handed out municipal contracts for school, dock, sewer, and street construction to builders, utilities contractors, stonemasons, and carpenters (a good many of them Irish), who returned the favor by mobilizing their grateful employees at election time.
Aldermen, imbued with the era’s entrepreneurial spirit, also asked what government could do for them, and found many answers. They could require contractors to present padded bills and then split the excess among themselves. They could award contracts to firms run by relatives, or in which they were partners, or owned entirely by themselves. The really big money, however, came from the ability of a newly autonomous political elite to force the city’s economic elite to pay for things it had once commandeered more directly. Market-oriented politicians set about selling off public assets to the highest bidder.
There was plenty to sell. The Common Council merrily leased out city piers, sold off profitable riverfront properties, and granted ferry franchises to a favored and responsive few. Corruption was hardly new, of course—“There never was a time when you couldn’t buy the Board of Aldermen,” Tweed once remarked—but it was the arrival of the street railroads, with their attendant scramble for franchises, that brought civic chicanery to new heights (or depths).
Since the Harlem Line had been initiated back in the 1830s, aldermen had generally rejected requests to run horsecars through the city’s streets, usually at the behest of politically influential omnibus operators determined to avoid competition. As the potential profits in accommodating the railroad interests became clear, they changed their minds. First, however, they had to beat back proposals that the city itself lay out a unified rail system, to keep fares low and earn profits for the city. Laissez-faire aldermen indignantly denounced public ownership—it would never be able to impose “a system of responsibility that private enterprise alone can arrange and insist upon”—and then got down to the lucrative business of handing out franchises to clamorous (and rivalrous) entrepreneurs.
The turnaround on railroads largely coincided with the accession to power—in the November 1851 elections—of brushman-chairmaker William Tweed and a host of other petty entrepreneurs including a tobacconist, saloonkeeper, stonecutter, butcher, saddler, timber dealer, fishmonger, fruit vendor, and proprietor of a livery stable: men who had watched their “betters” get rich and were determined to get their cut. Working amid the cloud of lobbyists that swarmed each day about City Hall, the Common Council set about earning its nickname of the “Forty Thieves.”
Among other initiatives during their two-year run for the money (1852-53), the magistrates spurned an offer to pay the city fifty thousand dollars for the exclusive right to collect dead animals from the streets and gave the contract instead to one W. B. Reynolds, paying kirn sixty-three thousand a year (out of which, a grand jury later found, he made disbursements to aldermen