Ten days later the Sun carried on the editorial page a long news story headed “Our Statue of Boss Tweed—the Readers of the Sun Going to Work in Dead Earnest—The Sun’s Advice Followed, Ha! Ha!—Organisation of the Tweed Testimonial Association of the City of New York—A Bronze Statue Worth Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars to Be Erected.”
Sure enough, the ward politicians had taken the joke seriously. Police Justice Edward J. Shandley, Tim Campbell, Coroner Patrick Keenan, Police Commissioner Smith, and a dozen other faithful Tammany men were on the list of trustees. They decided upon the space then known as Tweed Plaza, at the junction of East Broadway and New Canal and Rutgers Streets as the site for the monument.
The Sun added to the joke by printing more letters from contributors. One, from Patrick Maloy, “champion eel-bobber,” brought ten cents and the suggestion that the statue should be inscribed with the amount of money that Tweed had made out of the city. This sort of thing went on into the new year, the Sun aggravating the movement with grave editorial advice.
At last the jest became more than Tweed could bear, and from his desk in the Senate Chamber at Albany, on March 13, 1871, he sent the following letter to Judge Shandley, the chairman of the statue committee:
My dear Sir:
I learn that a movement to erect a statue to me in the city of New York is being seriously pushed by a committee of citizens of which you are chairman.
I was aware that a newspaper of our city had brought forward the proposition, but I considered it one of the jocose sensations for which that journal is so famous. Since I left the city to engage in legislation the proposition appears to have been taken up by my friends, no doubt in resentment at the supposed unfriendly motive of the original proposition and the manner in which it had been urged.
The only effect of the proposed statue is to present me to the public as assenting to the parade of a public and permanent testimonial to vanity and self-glorification which do not exist. You will thus perceive that the movement, which originated in a joke, but which you have made serious, is doing me an injustice and an injury; and I beg of you to see to it that it is at once stopped.
I hardly know which is the more absurd—the original proposition or the grave comments of others, based upon the idea that I have given the movement countenance. I have been about as much abused as any man in public life; I can stand abuse and bear even more than my share; but I have never yet been charged with being deficient in common sense.
Yours very truly,
Wm. M. Tweed.