“We place at the head of the list of evils under which our municipal administration labors, the fact that so large a number of important offices have come to be filled by men possessing little, if any, fitness for the important duties they are called upon to discharge.... There is a general failure, especially in the larger cities, to secure the election or appointment of fit and competent officials.... Animated by the expectation of unlawful emoluments they expend large sums to secure their places and make promises beforehand to supporters and retainers to furnish patronage or place.”
Also:
“It would be clearly within bounds to say that more than one-half of all the present city debts are the direct results of the species of intentional and corrupt misrule above described.”
Further:
“We do not believe that, had the cities of this State during the last twenty-five years had the benefit of the presence in the various departments of local administration of the services of competent and faithful officers, the aggregate of municipal debts would have amounted to one-third of the present sum, nor the annual taxation one-half of its present amount; while the condition of those cities in respect to existing provisions for the public needs would have been far superior to what is now exhibited.”
The New York City tax levy for 1877, the year of the report, was $28,400,000, one-half of which was caused by official robbery. Therefore, according to the report of these able and experienced citizens made after an examination of the city’s finances, the city had been robbed of a sum which represented fourteen millions a year, and which capitalized at five per cent amounts to $280,000,000, a fair estimate of the amount of politicians’ loot up to that time. In other words, every family in New York had on an average, been plundered to the tune of $1400 by state and city politicians. If this $280,000,000 was not loot what was it? And if not chargeable to manhood suffrage to what is it chargeable?
The committee showed its opinion of the cause by its choice of the remedy. It recommended the creation of a Board of Finance to control municipal expenditures, and to be elected by tax and rent payers only. This expedient, so objectionable to greedy and grafting politicians, was never adopted or even offered to the people for adoption. The report fell flat in a legislature elected by the controllable vote, and of course thoroughly corrupt and unpatriotic.
Looking back still further and for the benefit of those who would like additional evidence upon the political degeneracy of New York City, a few facts will be given taken from Myers’ History of Tammany Hall and by him taken mostly from public documents, commencing about 1826 shortly after “the great advance” which the twaddling sentimentalist writers tell us was made by the introduction of manhood suffrage.
In the November election of 1827 was the greatest exhibition of fraud and violence ever seen in the city. “Now,” (says Myers) “were observable the effects brought forth by the suffrage changes of 1822 and 1826.” Repeating flourished and honest voters were beaten and arrested for trying to vote. Next year, in 1828, hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal votes were counted, including those of boys of nineteen and twenty years of age. This practice was continued in the ensuing decade. It was then just one year after the complete triumph of manhood suffrage in New York State that money was first used to influence voting in New York City elections. The city was carried in 1828 by Tammany Hall for Andrew Jackson. Four years later in 1832, and subsequent years, the price of votes in New York City was stated at $5.00 each. Paupers from the almshouse and convicts were voted at the polls. In 1838 Swartwout, a Jackson collector of the port, and an unsavory politician, became a defaulter for $1,200,000, an enormous sum for that time, and Price, the United States district attorney, defaulted for $75,000. Civic frauds were frequent and increasing. An aldermanic committee in 1842 reported that dishonest office holders had recently robbed the city of near $100,000, equivalent to a theft of $2,000,000 from New York City in our time. The wholesale naturalization mill was put in operation, turning out several thousand new voters a year. From 1841 to 1844 the total vote of the city was thus increased about twenty-five per cent in newly naturalized foreigners alone; most of them probably without interest in the country or real understanding of its institutions and history. At the election of 1844 it was estimated that twenty per cent of the votes were fraudulent. The primaries were organized by violence and reeked with fraud. The character of many of the noted city politicians was notoriously bad, including professional gamblers, pugilists and even thieves. About this time the city political gangs began to appear. The ward heelers with a following of repeaters were a new power in politics. In one period of ten months, 1839-1840, there were nineteen riots and twenty murders in a city of only 300,000 population. Mike Walsh’s was the principal gang. The gangs increased in number till in 1856 the Bowery Boys and Dead Rabbits had a pitched street battle in Jackson Street, where ten were killed and eighty wounded.
The sale of nominations to office first became notorious in 1846. Prices ranged from $1,000 to $20,000. This circumstance alone is almost convincing proof of universal corruption in public affairs since no one buys an office unless with the knowledge that money is to be made corruptly in its administration; and this is usually impossible or too dangerous to be undertaken unless the general administration is so corrupt as to be tolerant of fraud, bribery and extortion. The common council was notoriously for sale; it was believed that every city department was corrupt. In 1851 the Williamsburg Ferry scandal broke out and it was shown that $20,000 in bribes had been paid to New York City aldermen. The “Forty Thieves” was the name given to the New York City aldermen of 1852, to whom one Jacob Sharp first applied for a franchise to build a street railway on Broadway, New York. An injunction was obtained; but they passed the franchise in defiance of the injunction. Of the aldermen who thus voted, one was imprisoned for a fortnight and the others fined. A similar affair was the sale of the New York Third Avenue Street Railroad Franchise by the same board of aldermen; over $30,000 was said to have been paid in bribes for this franchise, a great sum for those days.