William M. Tweed is the most infamous American politician of the 1800’s. His excessive frauds and eventual downfall propelled him into infamousy. Despite having the charm to acquire many associates, Tweed chose to use his skills to gain wealth and power for himself and others. Through his rise to power to his fall and enemies, Boss Tweed remained one of the most important figures in New York City history.
Born in New York City, at a time of civil unrest, Tweed had a passion for acquiring knowledge. He studied many different trades quickly, but soon found a liking to volunteer firefighting (Manning, 2007). At age twenty-seven, Tweed became the overseer of the company he helped begin, Americus No. 611, which was easily recognized by the Bengal
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With this power came leniency for the men and Tweed began to use this power to gain personal wealth. Tweed accomplished this when he made business for the city. For example, “Tweed allowed the contractors to overcharge the city for their work as long as the suppliers ‘kicked back’ a portion of their illicit profits to him” (Anbinder, 2010), as well as Hall, Sweeny, and Connolly. Tweed and these men were nicknamed the Tweed ring, known for their illicit acts against the city (Hirsch, 1945, p. …show more content…
341). In 1868, Nast began to attack the Tweed Ring in his cartoons. One famous cartoon depicts Tweed and his men as “fat vultures feeding off the city” (Manning, 2007). The next few years, Nast drew Tweed as an “obese, scowling, heavy-bearded thug, sometimes with a moneybag in place of his head, sometimes wearing a striped prisoner’s uniform” (Leepson, 2009, p. 54). Tweed’s infamous comment on the pictures was “Let’s stop them damned pictures. I don’t care what the papers write about me - my constituents can’t read; but damn it, they can see pictures!” (Lamb, 2007, p. 717). Nast proved to be the most effective person to lead Tweed to his demise; however, many other media outlets soon joined the
Egan begins this story about the Big Burn of 1910 with the story of how the United States Forest Service came into existence. He says it came from a very odd partnership of two people: Teddy Roosevelt, and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. While they were very different they also shared many things in common. Both of them were born and raised by rich families in Manhattan. Much like Roos...
Robert Fulton, Edward K. Collins and Samuel Cunard are a few political entrepreneurs, that Folsom tells about. All three of these men worked in the steamboat industry and received federal aid to run their businesses. Also, they all had high prices for passenger fair and mail postage. Unfortunately, Cornelius Vanderbilt, a market entrepreneur, defeated Fulton, Collins and Cunard.
During this era, businesses supplied large amounts of employment for citizens which created power for these businesses. They had the power to provide bad working conditions, lower wages, and fire their employees without any justification (Doc 1). George E. McNeill, a labor leader, states how “whim is law” and one can not object to it. The government took a laissez-faire approach and refused to regulate economic factors. This allowed robber barons and business tycoons to gain more authority of each industry through the means of horizontal and vertical integration. It wasn’t until later in the time period that the government passed a few acts to regulate these companies, such as the ICC and the Sherman Antitrust Act. One of the main successful industries was
George Washington Plunkitt was a complicated politician from New York in the 1900’s. He had his own questionable way of seeing what’s right and what’s wrong. Plunkitt’s Ideas of right a wrong sometimes seemed to be off. However, some of his ideas about things that needed to be reformed were as true then as they are now. Plunkitt seemed to be a man that knew how to get what he wanted out of people with very little effort. From the perspective of an outsider this could make him hard to trust, but to people then this wasn’t a problem.
The book Plunkitt of Tammany Hall is not only a monument to George W. Plunkitt's 40 plus years as a senator, it is also a monument to his enormous ego. G. W. Plunkitt was a well-liked man among his supporters and Tammany men alike. He had opposition from reformers who accused Tammany Hall of illegal activities involving graft. But, according to Plunkitt he never engaged in, "blackmailin', gamblin' or disorderly people." He said that "the politician that steals is worse than a thief. He is a fool." Plunkitt made a fortune in politics, and he did it all through honest graft. He says that even if his worst enemy wrote his epitaph that he could not do more than write: "George W. Plunkitt. He Seen His Opportunities and He Took 'Em."
During the Gilded Age, several Americans emerged as leaders in many fields such as, railroads, oil drilling, manufacturing and banking. The characterization of these leaders as “robber barons” is, unfortunately, nearly always correct in every instance of business management at this time. Most, if not all, of these leaders had little regard for the public or laborers at all and advocated for the concentration of wealth within tight-knit groups of wealthy business owners.
The growth of large corporations had impacted American politics by causing governmental corruption because of the power some industries had in society. Since the government had used laissez faire in the late 1800s for the big businesses to...
Capone was known by lots of names: Scarface, The Big Fella, Public Enemy Number One, Big Al. He was known as a kind man that was generously giving. He was known as a business man. He had a $62,000,000 in businesses averaging an income of $100,000 a week (Ocean View Publishing). He was also known as a murderer, killing many and ordering even more deaths. Capone was arrested many times but lack of evidence let him off the hook. Capone was a sneaky, intelligent business man that ruled the streets of Chicago.
Gerald Benjamin and Stephen P. Rappaport, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science Vol. 31, No. 3, Governing New York State: The Rockefeller Years (May, 1974), pp. 200-213
As Darrow gained more self-confidence and looked at his prospects in Ashtabula, he began to see that there were limits on what he could achieve by staying where he was at. Somewhat impulsively, he decided that he and his family should move to Chicago, which they did in 1887. He believed that although the competition among lawyers was going to be fiercer in Chicago, so too were the opportunities. And, so, too, was the corruption in politics. What he saw was far different from he experienced in a small city in northern Ohio. But, he also recognized that this was a way of life in Chicago, and he came to accept that graft and corruption was an aspect of doing political business, although it was morally indistinguishable from the kind of ordinary
He, in league with a select few others with the same depraved interests, puppeted the city’s entire leadership with their well-fed hands, not without the use of bribery and threats. In addition to this distortion of leaders, the Ring, as it was called, had the support of most of the city’s lower-class immigrant population. As the city rapidly became more industrial, it seized the opportunity to use the influx of working immigrants for their own gain. In exchange for jobs and services, Tweed asked only for votes; in this simple manner the group’s control of the city was secured. Defendants claimed that the Ring brought “energy,” “system,” “order” to the city; they were not wholly wrong, as the services it provided benefited the city’s poorest. However, these benefits came at a steep cost: $200 million - nearly $6 billion in today's money - defrauded in taxes. Few outlets were available to protest this gross abuse, as most of the city's people had been inculcated into support of the Ring, and most newspapers had been bought out by it. However, Nast’s paper Harper’s Weekly remained
This paper will discuss Ralph Steadman as an illustrator, but more specifically as a political cartoonist in post World War II Britain. His deeply set animosity for certain political figures and his caricaturization of them is a purely geographic feature. Steadman’s involvement in England’s top satirical publications boosted his credibility enough locally to garnish him better paying illustration jobs in the United States. These jobs not only brought better pay, but a new cast of politicians and elite society members for Steadman to poke his jokes at, thus further solidifying his reputation as the next great satirist from a long line of English caricature artists. In particular I am going to discuss other British cartoonists that share Steadman’s feelings towards the socially “elite”. This will help illuminate similarities between the artists and their common contempt for high society as well as prove that Steadman’s location of upbringing molded his satirically based career. Among these additional British illustrators are Gerald Scarfe and John Tenniel; both had also illustrated the pages of the weekly satire Punch (Fig.1)(Fig. 2). Scarfe’s style was extremely similar to Steadman’s and both Steadman and Tenniel are well known for their illustrations of Alice in Wonderland (Fig. 3)(Fig. 4). Thomas Nast is yet another illustrator who focussed on political cartoons in the British satirical publications of Punch and Private Eye (Fig. 5). Nast’s wit was not only responsible for the iconography that has become known as the modern day idea of Santa Claus, but one of his more famous illustrations was responsible for aiding in the capture of Boss Tweed (Fig. 5). Punch and the satirical ora that surrounde...
In exchange for political or financial support, the Tweed Ring extracted millions of city contracts in New York City. “The Tweed Ring reached its peak of fraudulence in 1871 when The New York Times exposed embezzlement of city funds by the Tweed Rings corruption” (“November 23, 1876: “Boss”). In 1871, the Tweed Rings and Boss Tweed were both tried and sentenced to prison. The downfall of Tammany Hall began in the early 1900s when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal came into play. Political Machines were beneficial to society's income but they resulted in negative consequences and long lasting economic problems. With new modernized technology, the effectiveness of Tammany Hall became ineffective. The urban political boss of America will forever be known as ”Boss Tweed.” Though corruption arose from the effects of Tammany Hall, it defined a point in history as the basic democratic system regardless of the world’s restored government system. (O’Toole
Frances Perkins attended the male high school of Worcester, went on in nineteen hundred-two to receive her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College, and a Masters at Columbia where she studied sociology and economics (Severn 11). After finishing her education, Perkins moves to the state of New York to work for the government as a factory inspector (Mohr 32). In Albany she began to lobby for a bill that would limit a woman's workweek to fifty-four hours. Though met with great opposition, this cry for action got her noticed by Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner who she would work with closely later down the road (Severn 40). In defeat, she went to Manhattan and was an eyewitness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire on March 25, 1911. This inspired her to forerun on fire and working conditions regulations in New York, and was the “torch that lightened up the political scene,” in her favor. Having prev...