Stop Them Damned Pictures

Boss Tweed, leader of the Democratic Tammany Hall political machine in New York City (c. 1863-1871), was born William Marcy Tweed on this day in 1823 in New York City.

A rough-housing dropout who became leader of the local volunteer fire company, Tweed entered politics as a defender of the immigrant poor, but was nipping at the till almost from the beginning, first as a grafting alderman of Manhattan, and then as a listless U.S. congressman (1853-55). Later as a member of the New York board of supervisors and state senator, he climbed to the top of the Tammany Hall machine and lined his pockets with millions of dollars (estimated at $30-200 million!) of city money from public works kickbacks and bribes, while controlling all Democratic Party nominations in New York. While Tweed got rich, New York got the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the early 1870s, in the wake of city budget shortages, the New York Times began to run exposés on Tweed and his "Ring" of cronies, but even more damaging were Thomas Nast's stinging caricatures of Tweed as a gluttonous vulture in Harper's Weekly; as Tweed himself said, "Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!" In 1873, he was prosecuted by Samuel Tilden on corruption charges and sentenced to 12 years, but his sentence was reduced to one year. After he was released, the reform movement was in full swing, and he was arrested again on other charges.

In December 1875, Tweed escaped from prison and fled to Cuba on a Spanish ship, then to Europe. There he was recognized, purportedly from one of Nast's cartoons, extradited to the U.S. and brought back to prison, where he died at age 55, on April 12, 1878.

Plain Bill

William Sulzer, the Democratic governor of New York from January to October of 1913, was born on this day in 1863 in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Known as "Plain Bill," Sulzer served as a member of Congress from 1895 to 1912, and was elected governor of New York in 1912 with the support of the New York City Tammany Hall political machine. Soon after he took office, however, he fell out of favor with Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy when he failed to appoint certain handpicked Tammany allies to key positions and advocated the use of primary elections rather than nominating conventions for the selection of candidates for office, thus taking the party banner out of the hands of the backroom pols; by the year's end, Sulzer was impeached for allegedly diverting campaign funds for personal use.

At the time, anti-Tammany forces cried foul, and almost immediately afterward, Sulzer was elected to a seat in the New York State Assembly. He ran for governor in 1914 as a candidate of the American Party, but did not receive the vindication he had hoped for, running third behind the Republican victor, Charles S. Whitman; Sulzer's Tammany-backed successor, Martin H. Glynn came in second in his losing bid for re-election. In 1916, Sulzer turned down the presidential nomination of the American Party, and practiced law in New York City for much of the rest of his life. He died there on November 6, 1941.

Sulzer also starred in a film about his impeachment (The Governor's Boss, 1915) in which, on celluloid if not in real life, he successfully fights Tammany Hall and keeps his office. Despite all the populist sentiment in his favor, Sulzer's name has never been officially rehabilitated, and he remains the one New York governor whose portrait does not hang in the Hall of Governors in the State Capitol in Albany.

So Long As I Can Sing and Dance

"I belong to a race that sings and dances as it breathes. I don't care where I am so long as I can sing and dance." -- Florence Mills.

Florence Mills was born Florence Winfrey on this day in 1895, in either Washington, D.C. or Virginia.

The first African-American singer/dancer to headline at the New York Palace Theatre, Mills conquered Broadway before it was acceptable for African-Americans to appear in big time venues. Possessed of a high, quavery voice, she enchanted audiences with her brightness and elegant bearing as the star of Sissle and Blake's groundbreaking revue Shuffle Along in 1921. In 1926, Mills starred in Blackbirds, first in New York and subsequently in Paris (where it was Paris' first-ever all-black revue) -- a show that the Prince of Wales, for one, is said to have seen over 20 times.

She died on November 1, 1927 at the age of 32 while hospitalized for an appendectomy. As her funeral cortege marched down Seventh Avenue, a plane flew overhead, dipped its wings, and released a flock of bluebirds in tribute to her.

Judge Crater, Please Call Your Office

Years after his unexplained disappearance, Judge Joseph F. Crater's wife Stella mused: "I have wondered often whether Joe simply walked out of the life we had together. What woman wouldn't? Yet, always, I tell myself that he would not have run away. He was too much of a fighter. No matter what anyone says, he was a decent, fine, wonderful man."

New York Supreme Court judge Joseph F. Crater was born on this day in 1889 in Easton, Pennsylvania. A graduate of Lafayette College and Columbia Law, he was a Manhattan lawyer, a law professor at Fordham and NYU, and a footsoldier in New York City's Tammany Hall political machine when Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to fill the unexpired term of a resigning trial judge in April 1930.

On August 6, 1930, Crater hailed a cab on West 45th Street, waved goodbye to the couple with whom he had dinner that evening, and was never seen again. Earlier in the day he had withdrawn $5,100 in large bills from two of his bank accounts and carefully collected a bulky file of legal papers from the files in his office.

Did he go into hiding on his own? Was he murdered by political enemies? Theories about his disappearance abounded: some said he went off on a toot with a showgirl (he was fond of the theater and popular with show people); a punch-drunk fighter claimed he found Crater operating a bingo joint in Africa; a man going to the electric chair in New York told the story that Crater was murdered by gangsters as revenge for Crater sending one of their associates to jail after he accepted a bribe to let him go free; and some earnest prospectors out West said they met him out in the desert, presumably looking for Jacob Waltz's Lost Dutchman mine.

All efforts to find him failed, and he was declared legally dead in 1939. There was evidence that he may have been involved in a shady real estate deal involving the City of New York, and he disappeared during a highly visible investigation of Tammany Hall. Stella always maintained that politics had been the reason for his disappearance.

In 2005, Mrs. Stella Ferrucci-Good, a 91-year old Queens housewife, died leaving behind a letter claiming that Judge Crater was murdered by her husband, a New York cop, and a cab driver, and that he was buried under the boardwalk at Coney Island, at the present site of the New York Aquarium. Although police confirmed that human skeletal remains were found at the Aquarium excavation site in the 1950s, they were immediately buried in a Potter's Field on Hart's Island, making any possibility of an identification just about hopeless.

For many years, Crater's disappearance was a popular parlor room puzzle, and the object of many jokes. "Judge Crater -- please call your office!," became a favorite graffiti slogan, found around the world for a number of years.

Incidentally, Crater wasn't the first New York Supreme Court judge to disappear. 101 years before Crater's disappearance, Judge John Lansing also disappeared under mysterious circumstances -- without any showgirls, Tammany Hall intrigue or Queens widows to provide pat explanations.

Moses Said So

Robert Moses was born on this day in 1888 in New York City.

A Phi Beta Kappa political scientist from Yale, Oxford and Columbia, Moses was hired as a technical expert by the New York City Civil Service Commission in 1915 to implement the meritocratic (anti-patronage) reform ideas he had articulated in his doctoral thesis, but before he could make much headway, reform mayor John Purroy Mitchel was defeated for reelection. Governor Al Smith then hired Moses, eventually appointing him the president of the Long Island State Park Commission, marking the beginning of Moses' extraordinarily long career as a public builder.

Supervising the construction of parkways, bridges and highways around New York, Moses was publicly admired as an expert manager who conducted his business above the political fray, but behind the scenes he was a Machiavellian who wielded more political power over public works than any elected politician. One of his favorite strategies for doing so was extending the maturities of existing public bond issues, thereby restricting the legislature's ability to second-guess him without jeopardizing the state's role as fiduciary to the public bondholders. Even his detractors had to admire his energy, intellect and technical talents: as governor of New York and later as president, Franklin Roosevelt resented Moses' authority, but felt moved to pour millions of dollars into his projects, such as the remarkable Triborough Bridge (1940) and numerous zoos, parks and monuments which kept Depression-era construction laborers in full employment.

His skills as an organizer were not always matched with socially visionary judgment: his housing projects and expressways often fractured neighborhoods and displaced the underprivileged, resulting at times in increased racial and ethnic tensions in neighborhoods which had enjoyed relative peace and leading to the reorganization of large portions of New York from pastoral pedestrian niches to an often alienating car culture. When his projects succeeded, as they often did despite his estrangement from their social consequences, his autocratic management style was tolerated, but by the 1960s, as community involvement in planning decisions became a political flashpoint, Moses found himself being marginalized politically, particularly by the policies of New York City mayor John V. Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Rockefeller finally drove Moses out of all his political posts when Moses was 75. Although he had taken his own paternalistic reform ideals to their logical limits, he ultimately fell victim to another reform movement, with ideals which focused on democracy and not exclusively on efficiency. He died on July 29, 1981 in West Islip, New York.