Tammany refined stealing from corruption into ‘honest graft.‘
Evidence
By precept, if not by preachment (for Silent Charlie had not received his nickname for nothing), for example, by having his Board of Aldermen hold up street-closing permits for the construction of Pennsylvania Station until the railroad awarded the excavation contract to a firm in which he had a hidden financial interest, he showed Tammany that there were safer ways of making money from public works. By 1905, Sachem George Washington Plunkitt, who, as a state senator, had ridden at the head of the “Black Horse Cavalry,” was sitting, resplendent in handle-bar mustache and gleaming stovepipe hat, on Graziano’s bootblack stand in the old courthouse off Foley Square at noon hours expansively explaining how cavalry were obsolete and how he was coining millions out of the “coincidences” surrounding “big improvements,” coincidences which he called, in a phrase he may also have coined, “honest graft.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3025
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Moses’ machine-free power proved worse for democracy than machine corruption. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3197; Tammany government was driven by greed, not will to help — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 1448; Large-scale corruption builds incrementally from small moral compromises (+1 more)