Tweed Day 2024 is on Wednesday, April 3, 2024: Do you think Jack Tweed enjoyed his wedding day?
Wednesday, April 3, 2024 is Tweed Day 2024. tweed day by puppetofgod on deviantART tweed day by puppetofgod
There's some confusion in regards to what exactly Tweed Day is commemorating – could it be the corrupt American Democratic boss renowned for running the Tammany Hall political machine, William M “Boss” Tweed, who also went the “Tweed Ring” which stole between $30 to $200 million through political corruption in New You are able to, or perhaps is it the initial Scottish fabric, usually fashioned into suits, jackets and pants in designs for example hounds tooth and herringbone?The apparent answer will be the Scottish material, although there's no record of April 3rd getting any relevance towards the roots of Tweed, the error which had it named Tweed, or any founders’ birth or dying dates out of the box the typical situation with days similar to this.April 3rd comes with a unique relevance to Boss Tweed though – he was created April 3rd, 1823.
I hate how these days people will happily assume that he's only in it for the money. If he was really in it for the money - would he be with Jade?! Probably not...he'd be trying his luck with another girl who has more money. But no...he genuinely loves her and wants to be with her - is that such a crime?! Take away the fact Jade has been in the public eye for the last seven or so years and made a career out of it...they're just two young people who will soon be seperated and they're trying to make Jade's last moments alive as happy as they're ever gonna be.
I think he probably did enjoy it, I mean...there are pics of him smiling away. But if you were marrying the woman you love, knowing that someday soon she'll be gone - wouldn't you be trying to fight back the tears and stay strong? That must've been pretty hard for him to do, but it's no wonder he maybe looked - as you said - miles away.
And if he is just after the money - so what? How is it going to affect any of you lot? They both love and make each other happy so I say all the best to them - it's their life, not yours!
who was boss Tweed?
"Boss Tweed" and the Tammany Hall Machine
David Wiles, Eaps 760
From the Wilson readings, it is natural to think of big city "political machines" and negative connotation like "sewers." The ward based, patronage driven form of local government is commonly thought of in criminal terms and, in that sense, so are Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York City.
There is little question that the Tweed Ring were outright thieves and that Tammany Hall did have a series of reoccurring scandals. An estimated 75 to 200 million dollars were swindled from the City between 1865 and 1871. Yet, there is more to the story than a confrontation of the machine form of city government and the ideology of reformer exhortations. Tammany represented a form of organization that wedded the Democratic Party and the Society of St. Tammany ( started in 1789 for patriotic and fraternal purposes) into an interchangeable exchange. The weave of city politics was the triangulation of the Mayor's office, the Democratic Party and the social club organization. During the Civil War era, the Society of St. Tammany became the Democratic Party equivalent to the Union League Club and the Republicans. The difference is that the Democrats won control of New York City and "The Big Apple" was, perhaps, the most important government structure in the United States for more than seventy years.
In 1854 Fernando Wood became the first Tammany Democrat mayor of the City. 1860 William March Tweed became chairman of the New York county Democratic Party and the leader (called the Grand Sachem) of the Tammany club. For the next seventy years ( until the 1934 mayoral victory of Fiorello La Guardia) the anti machine reformers only held the mayor's office and control of the City for a total of ten years. Given the present day infamy of the "Tweed" identity to disgrace it is curious that the "rascals took so long to be thrown out."
The success of Tammany Hall to control City politics and persist in power until the years of the Great Depression is better appreciated by understanding Samuel Tilden George Washington Plunkett.
Samuel Tilden was the Chairperson of the New York State Democratic Party during the Tweed era and ran for President against Rutherford Hayes in 1876. He, more than any other politician, is given credit for bringing down the Tweed Ring in New York City. The problem was that he worked on the task of identifying and bring down the Tweed ring for more than a decade. Republicans charged that length of time amounted to a cover-up; Democratic argued that length of time was necessary for state power to isolate and weaken local government control. In short, Samuel Tilden was a reformer who found himself (in the early l870's) caught between the reformer desires to clean up the criminal excess of the political machine and the practical implications of gauging probable success. As he gathered information to prove Tweed criminality beyond a shadow of a doubt Tilden also wanted the state Democratic Party to not be accused of corruption or covering up. He knew the general movement for municipal reform was growing but he also knew the underlying strength of the political machine form of local government would remain regardless of the reformer success with the Tweed phenomenon.
George Plunkett was made famous by writer William Riordan who described Tammany Hall as "a series of very plain talk on very practical politics delivered by Tammany philosopher from his rostrum-the New York County Courthouse bootblack stand."
The book, Plunkett of Tammany Hall was first published in 1963 and contains chapters like, "honest and dishonest graft," "the curse of civil service reform," "reciprocity in patronage," " Tammany leaders not bookworms," "dangers of the dress suit in politics," "on the uses of money in politics," " bosses preserve the nation," and "Tammany the only lasting democracy." Plunkett's formula for staying on top for seven decades of New York City rule was; " Tammany is the ocean, reform the waves, and there is a lot of unofficial patronage to ride out the storms if you know the ropes. Why don't reformers last in politics? Because they are amateurs and you must be a pro. Politicians do not have to steal to make a living because a crook is a fool and a politician can become a millionaire through 'honest graft."
When we remember Ellis Island was in New York harbor (with the Statue of Liberty) and it is estimated that two fifths of the American population have relatives that were processed through that in migration site, the Plunkett "plain talk" starts to make sense. "Think what the people of New York are. On half, more than one half, are of foreign birth. They do not speak our language, they do not know our laws, they are the raw material with which we have to build up the state....there is no denying the service that Tammany has rendered the Republic. There is no other organization for taking hold of untrained, friendless men and converting them into citizens. Who else in the city would do it? There is not a mugwump who would shake their hand."
For that city context Plunkett advises those concerned with local governing; " Don't go to college and stuff your head with rubbish; get out with your neighbors and relatives and round up a few votes you can call your own. Study human nature and make government warm and personal." For the way the political machine routinely operates, Plunkett states, "What reformers call 'machine' we call organization. In New York City the smallest unit is the election district committee, headed by a captain. The election districts overlap with the assembly districts headed by leaders who, in turn, constitute the county executive committee. Assembly leaders are elected in primaries and elect their own party chairmen." Author Riordan points out that the New York City Democratic organization in the l920's numbered 32,000 committee men spread over five counties. The amount of patronage in l888 (when Woodrow Wilson was publishing his famous piece) for just the city county containing Manhattan and a slice of the Bronx was 12,000 municipal jobs and a payroll of twelve million dollars. At the time this was a bigger resource distribution than the Andrew Carnegie iron and steel works.
When George Plunkett dies in 1924 he was eulogized this way;" He understood that in politics honesty doesn't matter, efficiency doesn't matter, progressive vision doesn't matter. What does matter is the chance for a better job, a better price of wheat, better business conditions. Plunkett's legacy is to that practicality."
Why was boss tweed corrupted?
After the election of 1869, Tweed took control of the New York City government. His protégé, John T. Hoffman, the former mayor of the city, won election as governor, and Tweed garnered the support of good government reformers like Peter Cooper and the Union League Club, by proposing a new city charter which returned power to City Hall at the expense of the Republican-inspired state commissions. The new charter passed, thanks in part to $600,000 in bribes Tweed paid to Republicans, and was signed into law by Hoffman in 1870. Mandated new elections allowed Tammany to take over the city's Common Council when they won all fifteen aldermanic contests.
The new charter put control of the city's finances in the hands of a Board of Audit, which consisted of Tweed, who was Commissioner of Public Works, Mayor A. Oakey Hall and Comptroller Richard "Slippery Dick" Connolly, both Tammany men. Hall also appointed other Tweed associates to high offices — such as Peter B. Sweeny, who took over the Department of Public Parks — providing the Tweed Ring with even firmer control of the New York City government and enabling them to defraud the taxpayers of many more millions of dollars. In the words of Albert Bigelow Paine, "their methods were curiously simple and primitive. There were no skilful manipulations of figures, making detection difficult ... Connolly, as Controller, had charge of the books, and declined to show them. With his fellows, he also 'controlled' the courts and most of the bar." Contractors working for the city – "Ring favorites, most of them – were told to multiply the amount of each bill by five, or ten, or a hundred, after which, with Mayor Hall's 'O. K.' and Connolly's indorsement, it was paid ... through a go-between, who cashed the check, settled the original bill and divided the remainder ... between Tweed, Sweeny, Connolly and Hall".
For example, the construction cost of the New York County Courthouse, begun in 1861, grew to nearly $13 million – about $178 million in today's dollars, and nearly twice the cost of the Alaska Purchase in 1867. "A carpenter was paid $360,751 (roughly $4.9 million today) for one month's labor in a building with very little woodwork ... a plasterer got $133,187 ($1.82 million) for two days' work".
Tweed and his friends also garnered huge profits from the development of the Upper East Side, especially Yorkville and Harlem. They would buy up undeveloped property, then use the resources of the city to improve the area – for instance by installing pipes to bring in water from the Croton Aqueduct – thus increasing the value of the land, after which they sold and took their profits. The focus on the east side also slowed down the development of the west side, the topography of which made it more expensive to improve. The ring also took their usual percentage of padded contracts, as well as raking off money from property taxes. Despite the corruption of Tweed and Tammany Hall, they did accomplish the development of upper Manhattan, though at the cost of tripling the city's bond debt to almost $90 million.
During the Tweed era, the proposal to build a suspension bridge between New York and Brooklyn, then an independent city, was floated by Brooklyn-boosters, who saw the ferry connections as a bottleneck to Brooklyn's further development. In order to ensure that the Brooklyn Bridge project would go forward, State Senator Henry Cruse Murphy approached Tweed to find out whether New York's aldermen would approve the proposal. Tweed's response was that $60,000 for the aldermen would close the deal, and contractor William C. Kingsley put up the cash, which was delivered in a carpet bag. Tweed and two others from Tammany also received over half the private stock of the Bridge Company, the charter of which specified that only private stockholders had voting rights, so that even though the cities of Brooklyn and Manhattan put up most of the money, they essentially had no control over the project.
Tweed bought a mansion on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, and stabled his horses, carriages and sleighs on 40th Street. By 1871, he was a member of the board of directors of not only the Erie Railroad and the Brooklyn Bridge Company, but also the Third Avenue Railway Company and the Harlem Gas Light Company. He was president of the Guardian Savings Banks and he and his confederates set up the Tenth National Bank to better control their fortunes.
