In the 1860s, New York City began building a new county courthouse in lower Manhattan. By the time work stalled, the building had cost roughly 12 million dollars, more than the United States had paid Russia for all of Alaska in 1867. Much of the money had gone to padded bills from friendly contractors, who passed a share back to the men who ran the city. The courthouse still stands, and New Yorkers still call it the Tweed Courthouse.

Tammany Hall

Those men belonged to Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party organization that dominated New York politics for most of a century. Its most notorious leader, William M. Tweed, and his allies controlled the city's finances in the late 1860s. Estimates of what the Tweed Ring stole vary enormously, from about 25 million to 200 million dollars, partly because so many records were destroyed.

Tammany was more than a theft operation, and that explains its staying power. It was a political machine: an organization that won elections by delivering concrete help. Precinct captains found jobs for new immigrants, especially the Irish, helped families through winter with coal and food, and sorted out trouble with the police. In return they expected votes. Political scientists call this pattern clientelism: trading goods or favors for political support. For poor newcomers in a city with no welfare state, the machine was often the only institution that treated them as worth helping.

The fall of Tweed

Two forces brought Tweed down. The cartoonist Thomas Nast attacked the Ring week after week in Harper's Weekly, drawing Tweed as a bloated thief in images that even readers with little English could follow. Then in July 1871, The New York Times printed leaked city accounts, copied by insiders, that showed the fraud in detail. Tweed was convicted in 1873. He later escaped and fled to Spain, was caught and returned, and died in a New York jail in 1878. Tammany itself outlived him by decades.

Honest graft

The machine's own philosophy was recorded in 1905 by the journalist William Riordon, who published the talks of a Tammany district leader, George Washington Plunkitt. Plunkitt drew a line between "dishonest graft," such as taking money from gamblers and saloon keepers, and "honest graft," which he proudly practiced. Honest graft meant profiting from inside knowledge of public plans: learning that the city would build a park, buying the land first, and selling it to the city at a profit. As he put it, "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em." Plunkitt's candor is funny, but his distinction survives in modern debates about insider dealing, conflicts of interest and what counts as corruption when no law is broken.

Ending the spoils system

At the national level, American government jobs were long handed out as rewards for party loyalty, a practice called the spoils system after a senator's remark in 1832 that "to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy." Every new administration faced crowds of office seekers. In 1881 one of them, Charles Guiteau, shot President James Garfield, angry that he had not received a diplomatic post. Garfield's killing by a disappointed office seeker pushed Congress to pass the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. It introduced merit hiring through exams for some federal jobs and banned forcing federal employees to contribute to campaigns. At first it covered only about a tenth of federal positions, but presidents steadily extended it.

Britain had moved in the same direction earlier. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 recommended competitive exams for civil service entry in place of patronage, and its ideas were put into practice over the following decades. In the same year as the Pendleton Act, Britain passed a law capping election spending by candidates.

The secret ballot

Another reform struck at vote buying directly. Under open voting, often with ballots printed by the parties themselves, a machine could see whether a paid voter delivered. The secret ballot, pioneered in the Australian colonies in the 1850s and adopted by most American states from the late 1880s, ended that, because buyers could no longer check how people voted. A bribe that cannot be verified is a poor investment.

Worked example

Historians still argue about how to judge the machines. Their defenders point out that Tammany drew hundreds of thousands of immigrants into American public life and supplied help that no government then offered. Some reformers, meanwhile, mixed genuine concern about fraud with contempt for Irish Catholics and the poor. Critics answer that the machine's help came at a price: taxpayers covered the theft, and help went mainly to those who voted the right way, which turned a citizen's need into a debt to the party. Apply that test to a modern case. A city council member's office helps residents fix housing problems quickly, but residents notice that known supporters get faster service. Constituent service is a legitimate part of representation. It becomes clientelism when help depends on loyalty. The lasting lesson of Tammany's era is that rules applied to everyone alike, through merit hiring and secret voting, can replace personal favors with rights.