Assignment task:
''It's hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed's system, though. The Tweed ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box. Its frauds had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing and organization... His aid took many forms, state money for schools and hospitals, lumps of coal at Christmas, and city patronage jobs to put bread on family dinner tables.... The ring had only one fatal flaw: its humanity. Human beings composed it, governed by greed, vanity and fear. Greed ultimately took control; they stole too much and lost their nerve. Treachery broke the ring more than any outside force.''
-Kenneth Ackerman, Tweed biographer, 2005
''The fact is New York politics were always dishonest - long before my time. There never was a time you couldn't buy the Board of Aldermen.... A politician coming forward takes things as they are.'
-William M. "Boss" Tweed, from a jailhouse interview, 1877
Using the excerpts, answer a, b, and c.
Q1. Briefly describe the perspective of the biographer Kenneth Ackerman on Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall.
Q2. Briefly describe the perspective of William M. "Boss" Tweed on his actions and conviction.
Q3. Briefly explain an event or idea from the period 1865-1898 that could be used to support or refute Ackerman's perspective.