The Boss in American Government: A Conversation with Mark Thompson

In this conversation, QUery On Inc. founder Mark Thompson sits down with Nicolas Jofre to discuss his forthcoming book from McFarland Publishers: The Boss in American Government: William Tweed and His Successors in Corruption from the 1860s to Today. The conversation offers a historical lens on the influence of money in American politics and government.

William "Boss" Tweed ran New York City from 1863 to 1871 as the head of Tammany Hall, amassing what would be roughly half a billion dollars in today's money while serving as a public employee. Tweed’s operation was a sophisticated political machine that understood how to win loyalty from voters, and used its power to amass astounding wealth for Tweed and others.

Thompson and Jofre explore how the conditions that enabled Tweed mirror challenges we face today. From questions about cryptocurrency in the White House to the fundamental role of money in campaign financing, the conversation traces a through-line from the Gilded Age to the present moment.

The discussion also tackles potential solutions, including public financing of media for political campaigns, an idea proposed by Senator Paul Douglas in the 1960s, championed by Jimmy Carter, and endorsed by President Bill Clinton in his 1998 State of the Union address, only to be killed by a coalition of incumbents and media networks.

Transcript

Nicolas: My name is Nicolas Jofre and I am here with the founder of Query On Inc., Mark Thompson. Over the course of the next hour or so, we're going to be having a conversation about Mark's upcoming book and also about our organization, Query On Inc.

Mark, thank you for making the time, for being here with me in this new experience of podcasting. I'll start by talking a little bit about you, if you don't mind. You have lived many lives: you served in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, earned the first PhD in public policy ever conferred at Harvard, and then worked as a real estate investor. Your academic work has focused on decision science and game theory. In your two most recent books, you applied those methods to military decisions during World War II. Through all of this, you've also been interested in the question of corruption in American government. And you co-founded our nonprofit organization, which is dedicated to researching the influence of money in politics and government.

We'll talk about the organization later, but can you tell us where the idea for this book came from and why it felt important for you to write this story?

Mark: Sure. Let me first just mildly correct one of the things that you said. I am not the sole founder of the tiny charitable corporation that you and I are both members of, but I am a founder along with my business partners.

Where did the idea of this book come from? I would give primary credit to Charles Lewis, known as Chuck Lewis to his friends. Chuck wrote a number of terrific books suggestive of corruptive possibilities in American government. He wrote, for instance, a series of “Buying of the President” books, 1996 through 2004. He was the lead author on a similar book, The Buying of the Congress. Each of these books detailed the lists of campaign contributions made to various candidates for these offices.

In addition, I was fortunate to have had a number of personal conversations with Chuck Lewis. He and I both thought it might be a useful complement to his several books if I were to write a book that gave a bit of a historical perspective on corruptive possibilities in American government. And we both agreed one of the most notorious episodes of governmental corruption in the history of our country is what has been known as the Tweed Ring, a cabal of Manhattan politicians who reigned supreme in New York City from 1863 to 1871.

Nicolas: Is it fair to say that this book is different from the traditional scholarship that you have done?

Mark: I would say it's quite different. My two previous books were applications of decision science and game theory to a specific set of battle decisions in the Second World War. And this is fairly different, although I do apply decision science in one of the sections of this book. Decision scientists, as a rule, are dismayed at the denial of uncertainty by most human beings. Historians fall into that. Many historians, including historians of William Tweed, have been in uncertainty denial.

Nicolas: Let's turn to this story that I was not familiar with prior to reading the book. I did not know about this period in history. What is most fascinating about the content are the very obvious parallels between Tweed's operation, the operation of many other bosses who came after, and what we're seeing with the federal government currently. I wonder if you could describe who this man is and why this matters.

Mark: Well, I have many friends who are very smart, and I find that about half of them know who William Tweed was and what the Tweed Ring was. William Tweed was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1823. He was a gregarious fellow, a natural politician. By the age of 23, he had been elected to the United States Congress. He served one term, and the reason he only served one term is he afterwards said that he was frankly bored, sitting around and listening to a bunch of snoozers discuss possible contracts. So in 1855, he returned to Manhattan. And over the next 16 years, in the opinion of a majority of historians, he amassed more political power than any previous urban politician in New York City—or any other city on Earth—ever had.

And it wasn't just political power. He was said to have boasted that in his prime he was worth $20 million. If we translate that to the money of 2025, we're talking about roughly half a billion dollars that Tweed was able to pull into himself—all while a public employee. Needless to say, eyebrows were raised as to how a public employee could make $20 million.

Nicolas: You make the case that, at least in Tweed's case, there seems to be a tradition of this form of government in American politics.

Let's start by describing the setting that gives rise to a character like Tweed and to the machine that he built. I'll start by highlighting a Portuguese phrase from Brazil that translates to: “I steal, but I get things done.” The point of the phrase is the notion that there are times in a society where conditions are so challenging for segments of folks that they are willing to put up with a substantial amount of corruption as long as they see some benefit to themselves—which in many cases is just meeting basic needs.

And so, let's talk a little bit about the conditions in New York.

Mark: There were more Germans in New York City in 1865 than in any other city on earth other than Vienna and Berlin. When Tweed began to be attacked by the press of New York City, The New York Times was coming out with special editions in German because the German faction was so large.

Tweed came to power. His political power arose from and through Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall had been huge in New York City even before Tweed became a member. Tammany Hall was especially good at winning the allegiance and the votes of immigrants. Tammany Hall was largely within the Democratic Party, but also had token membership from the opposition.

The main opposition party in the early years, say the 1840s, were the Whigs. And the Whigs in New York City were not particularly interested in making immigrants happy or even securing the votes of the immigrants. So Tammany had a free hand, and by the time Tweed became paramount in Tammany Hall, Tammany already had overwhelmingly the allegiance and the votes of the immigrants—the Irish and the Germans in Manhattan.

Nicolas: Can you talk a little bit about why that was? What services did Tammany Hall provide in exchange for that allegiance?

Mark: There's a terrific movie—Martin Scorsese was the director—Gangs of New York. Scorsese has a scene in that movie that answers your question better than I can, Nicolas. Basically it shows William Tweed greeting immigrant arrivals in New York City and telling them that he will help them to settle. He will find them jobs. And: don’t forget to vote Tammany. That's basically how Tweed and Tammany Hall amassed power—terrific retail political operations doing important favors, especially for immigrants. Those immigrants, as a result, voted overwhelmingly for the candidates of Tammany Hall.

Nicolas: It does remind us of Trump's ascendance over the past 10 years, where the angle has really been about helping the working person and the resonance that he has had. Like Tweed, it’s built on “I recognize your struggles, and I'm here to help you.”

Tweed’s operation is focused on helping individuals, but his primary goal is amassing power. I wonder if you can describe his ascendancy through politics and how he built an incredibly sophisticated operation where, at his height, he had a very formalized system for securing votes and then securing positions for his friends in power.

Mark: Tweed had his ups and downs. As I said, at the age of 29 he was elected to the U.S. Congress, which shows he was a pretty successful politician. But then he returned to Manhattan and found he’d lost many of his political contacts. He ran again for his previous post as an alderman and was resoundingly defeated. So in 1855, he was basically a chair maker. He had to start all over again.

By 1860, he decided that he was doing well enough as a politician. He had a number of minor posts—he was a county supervisor (one of 12 for the County of New York), he had been a school commissioner. He had a number of minor offices like that, which made him enough money that in 1860 he decided he could leave chair making behind. So he and his brother declared bankruptcy. There are ethical questions about that bankruptcy—some of his biographers believed that he had enough assets to fully repay his creditors. But anyhow, in 1860 he declared bankruptcy, and 11 years later he was worth, as he said, $20 million. How did that happen?

A main step is that in 1863, with the help of his number one political ally, Peter Sweeny—they were often considered a paired set of shot-callers within Tammany Hall—Tweed was elected the chairman of the Tammany Hall General Committee. This meant that he and Sweeny controlled the choices of candidates not just for legislative offices within New York City, but also for judicial positions. So they had a number of judges who owed their judgeships to the support of Tweed and Sweeny. As a result, those judges tended to make their rulings in ways that Sweeny and Tweed wanted.

Tweed's power grew through the 1860s until, in the late 1860s, he was elected to the Senate of New York State. He had gone 15 years between significant electoral victories—from his election to Congress in 1853 until the late 1860s he didn't have a single noteworthy electoral victory. He wasn't a charismatic speaker; people didn't rush to the polls to vote for him. But as his power became more paramount, he did have a number of people who would vote for him.

In early 1870, there was significant resentment within the Democratic Party about how powerful and rich both Tweed and Sweeny had become. There was a significant revolt against the two of them within the Democratic Party of Manhattan, and Tweed was able to beat off this challenge to his supremacy. The contest boiled down to competing charters for the City of New York. A major theme was that almost all New Yorkers resented the fact that they didn't control their own city.

There had been notorious scandals in the city in the 1850s, and as a result the upstate Republicans decided New Yorkers could not be trusted. What the upstate Republicans basically did in the 1850s was to make the City of New York essentially a protected—and dictated-to—ward of the upstate Republicans. Basically all citizens of Manhattan resented that.

Tweed decided that he would kill two birds with one stone. He would pass a charter that would restore home rule to Manhattan and, at the same time, demolish the opposition to himself and Sweeny within the Democratic Party. How did he do this? He paid for it.

Do you have any guess what the price might have been? 

Nicolas: Cheaper than we might expect? Depends on expectations. 

Mark: The later estimate—testified under oath by Tweed himself—was that he laid out $1 million in Albany to bribe the various legislators to pass his city charter instead of the competing charter of his opponents within the Democratic Party.

Nicolas: And yes, this included several instances when he bribed his opposition. It wasn't just bribing his allies but actually going to the opposing party and saying: what's the price tag? 

Mark: Under oath he testified that he had an advisor on how to win over fellow Democrats, but relied on others for advice on how to win over Republicans. The best advice he got on the latter was: there are five key Republicans; give a total of $200,000 to these five—$40,000 apiece. Tweed was clever. He decided he wouldn't give $40,000 to each of the five; he would give $20,000 to one of the five who would then distribute to the other four. That way four of the five could truthfully say that they never took a penny from William Tweed. The total price was estimated to be $1 million—at least $200,000 to the Republicans.

Tweed was able to pass his charter, and The New York Times—which later would be a major journalistic opponent of the Tweed Ring—was ecstatic in the spring of 1870 that Tweed had passed his charter. They wrote editorials saying that Senator Tweed had now distinguished himself as a genuine reformer.

Nicolas: That was because the charter granted authority overwhelmingly to the local county. Do you think they understood the level of corruption happening, or did they not have a sense of the mechanism used to achieve that?

Mark: They should have understood. Very smart, capable people had written many pieces indicating that New York City, as run by Tweed and Sweeny, was one huge corrupt enterprise. The Times earlier had been critical of the Tweed Ring. But in the spring of 1870, with the passage of the Tweed Charter, it seems the Times was substantially “in the bag” for the Ring.

One of the directors of the New York Times had actually joined Tweed in a number of business ventures. That man died in August of 1870, and within two months the editorial position of the Times turned around 180 degrees—from singing the Ring’s praises to, in the fall of 1870, coming out very strongly against all of Tammany's candidates for office in the elections of 1870.

However, in those elections, the Times and its allies were singularly unsuccessful. The Republican government under Ulysses Grant had taken a number of measures to clamp down on corruption in the Manhattan elections that year. The Republicans thought they were in a terrific position to sweep those elections. Well, they got the “sweep” part right—they were the ones who were swept. The Tweed Ring candidate for mayor, Oakey Hall, won reelection. The Tweed Ring candidate for governor of New York State, John Hoffman, was also handily elected.

This led to the six months that have been considered the apogee of the power of the Ring of William Tweed—the first six months of 1871.

Nicolas: Can you describe a little bit the extent of his power at that point? Give people a sense of what that might look like applied to current New York City government—what it might look like if somebody had that amount of power.

Mark: I think it would take a week to describe everything he controlled. But let me take an instance or two.

In the late 1860s, what is now the Borough of Brooklyn wanted a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan. They badly wanted a bridge. Manhattan didn't want the bridge nearly as badly as the Brooklynites did. The question for Brooklyn was what to do to get Manhattan to commit to paying $1.5 million for the construction of the bridge. What should the Brooklynites do?

Nicolas: Well, I would call up Tweed.

Mark:  Exactly. You’re totally in sync with the Brooklynites of the late 1860s. They saw the problem and the solution. The solution was William Tweed. Tweed went across the East River to Brooklyn, explained the problem, and explained the solution. He basically said: give me $60,000 to distribute strategically within the government—among the councilmen, assemblymen, and aldermen of Manhattan—and I will get them to vote for the construction of this bridge, which when constructed would be the largest suspension bridge on earth.

Tweed also said, in addition to the money to bribe the other guys, “I want special considerations for myself and other members of the Ring. I want you to sell me, at deeply discounted prices, shares in the entity constructing the Brooklyn Bridge. I want substantial say in the hiring of thousands of laborers in the construction of the bridge.” And that's how it happened. The members of the government of Manhattan were bribed; Tweed and his fellow Ring members made a lot of money; they gained control over many jobs; and the bridge got built.

Nicolas: This goes back to the notion: the guy gets stuff done. A great example is he successfully secures the land for the construction of the Met, among many other similar examples. It turns out he really shapes New York positively in many ways—or at least makes significant contributions to the city. Which goes to the point that there is a certain amount of forgiveness people have, or willingness to ignore obvious corruption, as long as they see the works actually happening.

The problem, of course, is that in addition to the many illegal things he does, there seems to be a significant profit motive. One of the common tactics he uses is that for every political favor he provides, he earns himself. So he becomes a director in many different companies. This is part of the approach he uses to amass wealth.

I want to turn to the psychology of a character like him. You provide in the book examples of bosses who have followed a similar trajectory. I think we’re all pretty familiar with the template for this kind of person. What drives this person? He seems to have some respect for the city and public works, but at the same time, he's a deeply egotistical man who is very materialistic. He wears a diamond on his shirtfront. The funniest detail is that he has a picture of himself on his desk. I wonder if you could describe the psychology of such a person, because I do think there is something about that psychology that enabled this model.

Mark: My short answer is that it was very much about power. But yes, he also cared. There were a number of instances—cited in the book—where he was laying out a lot of himself and his own money to help disadvantaged citizens of Manhattan.

Nicolas: And he keeps a pretty good pulse on what they need, which is evolving, not static.

Mark: Yes. One of the primary characteristics of successful bosses is that they are terrific at understanding what motivates voting behavior. Tweed—and virtually every other successful political boss in this country and elsewhere—had to be good at figuring out how to get votes. He was great at that.

Nicolas: The paradox is that somebody who has some amount of empathy for the voting class also probably wouldn't want to be wearing a massive diamond all the time. There’s a fractured psychology here.

Mark: He definitely made a mistake in not just wearing that diamond but in purchasing for himself and his family a huge, luxurious mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City. He had 10 children. Time and again, when the reform community mobilized itself to kick Tweed out of power, you hear New York’s upper class protesting these new arrivals who were living in luxurious mansions. I think he was terrific at understanding many of the needs of the lower classes. He seems not to have understood how dangerous to him personally the alienation of the elite would be, through such conspicuous consumption.

Nicolas: This is where hopefully the book provides some hope—that justice eventually comes, perhaps not to the extent he deserved, and certainly not yielding the kinds of reforms that would be necessary. The end of his life is not happy. Can you describe a little bit about the collapse that happened?

Mark: One of the things that happened then was that Tweed's oldest daughter was married, and it was probably the grandest wedding that had ever been held in the United States. The wedding gifts were estimated to be worth $700,000—1870 dollars. They got something like 70 sets of silver. They compared the wedding of Tweed's oldest daughter to the most recent wedding of a daughter of Queen Victoria and decided that Tweed's daughter got much more.

Tweed had made two mistakes. One, he had lived too grandly, which antagonized a lot of people. Two, he and his fellow Ring members hadn't been sufficiently careful about who had control of the evidence of their thefts from New York City’s monies.

There were a couple of deaths that contributed to the downfall of the Tweed Ring. I mentioned the death of a director of the New York Times in 1870. In January 1871, one of the primary bagmen of the Ring—the Clerk of New York, a man by the name of James Watson—loved to race his sleighs at high speed through Central Park. He had an accident; he got kicked in the head by one of his horses, and he soon died.

The Ring made the mistake of bringing in somebody to the accountancy departments of the city who would have documentary evidence of the thefts. The accounting of the City of New York in the prime time of Tweed was statutorily mandated to be periodically reported to all citizens—statutorily required, maybe, but in practice it didn’t happen. The controller of the finances of the City of New York was a prominent member of the Tweed Ring, Richard Connolly, and he basically didn't disclose much at all. When he finally was forced to come up with some sort of accounting in August of 1871, nobody could figure out the total debts of New York City. Some thought it was $75 million; some thought it was $125 million. In any case, it was a huge number.

The accountants who came in after the death of James Watson brought detailed notes from the financial records of the City of New York to The New York Times. The Times in July of 1871 began publishing these. New York voters who had been blasé about the suspected crimes of the Ring—the attitude of “yes, he robs, but he gets things done”—were outraged at the details the Times published day after day. There were specifics like the designated plasterer for the Tweed Courthouse, then under construction and way over budget—Andrew Garvey—being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a couple of days’ work. The general sense of corruption hadn’t kept people from voting for the Ring in November 1870. But these specifics in July 1871 enraged the citizens of Manhattan, and in November the Tweed Ring was voted out of power.

Nicolas: That feels different from the current moment, because I believe that trust in institutions like The New York Times is very different now. It seems the population really saw these reports as an authority on what was actually happening and believed them and was outraged. I don't believe it would operate similarly today. Another thing that happened is the riling up of people that Harper's Weekly was doing as well, with cartoons that communicated to populations who might not have been reading. The cartoonist is poking fun at him, irritating Tweed quite a bit. As you say, deaths had a big part in it—allowing crucial information to get out. Suddenly people thought it important to do something about this.

So then he ends up in jail—initially yes, then he leaves, then back again. It seems like the judicial system did work to a certain extent. Was that empowered by public outcry, or would those judicial results have happened anyway?

Mark: If you read many of the histories, the eventual guilty verdict was somewhat surprising. Tweed and Sweeny controlled probably every single judicial appointment in Manhattan. They had judges backing them, and they also stacked juries. One of his primary opponents said that for years there was not a single jury in Manhattan that had not been packed by Tweed and his allies. It was widely assumed that even after the indictment there was no possible way he could be convicted.

A man by the name of Samuel Tilden—a Democrat—reaped more political advantage from bringing down the Ring and the eventual jailing of Tweed than any other human being. Tilden was elected president of the United States in 1876—now, you might wonder at that, since his name does not appear among the lists of presidents. According to Franklin Roosevelt, with a majority of historians in agreement, the election of 1876 was stolen away from Tilden by a cabal of Republicans.

Back to the judicial proceedings: Tilden was a terrific lawyer and organizer. He organized teams to vet potential jurors. They had a judge in both of Tweed's trials who was extremely anti-Tweed—Noah Davis. Finally, in November of 1873 Tweed was never convicted of theft. His crime was a “failure to adequately audit.” The 1870 charter had put him and his Ring buddies in charge of auditing many city expenditures. Obviously they didn't do a very good job of auditing because millions were stolen. Tilden prevailed on banks to link, for instance, every time the complicit plasterer was paid a couple hundred thousand dollars, 24% of the contract ended up in Tweed's bank account. This was stressed by the lawyers and the judge: that Tweed had received more than a million dollars of such payments. The judge basically told the jury that they should convict. They did, and Tweed went to jail.

But there are dangers in seeing this as a morality tale: if you do bad things like Tweed, bad things happen to you. Tweed claimed to have amassed a fortune of $20 million. What happened to that money? Did any of it get recovered by the city? No. He started spreading it to his family prior to going to jail. He had 10 kids, and those 10 kids did very well.

The City of New York recovered a lot of money from one of the bagmen. As for Tweed's closest political ally, Peter Sweeny—if Tweed stole $20 million, it appears Sweeny must have stolen $8 million. What happened to Sweeny? He worked out a deal with the city: he would pay $400,000. Sweeny fled to Canada and then to Europe. But after working out this deal, he returned to New York City and lived there—probably quite well off—until 1911.

If you look at political machines in the United States, it is safe to say that perhaps the majority never were soundly spanked by the governments.

Nicolas: Not an entirely hopeful end to the story, I guess—hopefully in the sense that the crimes were brought to light. And I think hopefully that gives people a reason to reform the institutions themselves.

Let's switch to talking about reform and about Query On Inc. So, it is a very pessimistic story, and I think the point of the Tweed book is largely that many of the same dynamics that were at play with Tweed and many of the things that he did are things that have persisted. Things we can continue to see. You could see that as a pessimistic story, and yet you decide to spend some of your time thinking about reform through Query On Inc.

Query On Inc. was founded in 2008 by you and your business partners. The idea is to try to quantify the total impact that money in politics has had on our nation and make that as tangible as possible to the individual citizen. How much has it cost the average person that there has been such an overwhelming capture of our institutions by the private sector?

In the current moment, I would categorize the potentials for hope and reform in a couple of different buckets: academics, reform-oriented nonprofits, the press, and the public. Where do you see hope?

Mark: All of the sectors you named I was—and would continue to be—hopeful about. Unfortunately, to a significant extent, those hopes have been disappointed. You and another member of our little corporation, Alan Cohen—editor of The Milbank Quarterly—did, in my opinion, outstanding outreach to the political science community. It resulted in Query On Inc. supporting an excellent chapter on fundraising by congressional candidates by a professor at UC Irvine named Danielle Thomsen.

But it had been our hope that either economists or political scientists could be motivated to come up with at least a ballpark estimate of how much harm is being done to the U.S. Treasury and to individual citizens as a result of policy favors done by elected politicians to make their contributors happy.

Maybe the most notorious instance of this occurred back in the 1980s. You ever hear of the Keating Five?

Nicolas: No.

Mark: In the late 1980s, savings and loans were tremendously over-audacious in their lending. In particular, Lincoln Savings and Loan, located in Irvine, California, was overextended. The federal government—the Federal Home Loan Bank Board—said: wait a minute, you guys don't have sufficient financial soundness. The federal board wanted to look into the financial status of Lincoln and a number of other S&Ls.

What do you do if you're Charles Keating and you don't want to be looked at too hard? You make political campaign donations totaling $1.3 million to five men who became U.S. Senators. In the spring of 1987, when the government is questioning the financial soundness of these institutions, you call a meeting: you call in the head of the federal board and all five senators to whom you've made substantial contributions. The board is basically scared off further investigations. They cease investigating Lincoln. Two years later, in 1989, Lincoln goes belly up.

What was the cost to the government? $3.5 billion. So basically for $1.3 million, Keating bullied the federal government into a situation where the price tag was more than $3 billion. The total price tag for the collapse of many S&Ls nationwide in the 1980s has been estimated at something like $160 billion. Keating was sent to jail (served five years). The number one recipient of his political campaign donations, Senator Alan Cranston, was reprimanded by the Senate.

The $160 billion the federal government had to write checks for is some indicator of how much harm might be caused by campaign donations. For $1.3 million, Keating was able to cause $3.5 billion of harm to the U.S. government; his bondholders were wiped out; 20,000 bondholders also sued. The total harm to the Treasury and individuals would seem enormous.

An extremely sad aspect is that nobody has been willing to make even a ballpark estimate of the total price tag of that harm. How can reform organizations know how hard to work to reform various aspects of potential corruption—particularly campaign financing—when no one has even a ballpark estimate?

Nicolas: My response is that I think the real leverage point is with the donors themselves. My hope is that sufficient numbers of people who hold wealth—and sufficient numbers of powerful elected folks—are tired of the system. That's where I think there's optimism. If I were a nonprofit, I would be thinking really hard about the mega donors. It doesn't seem like they think about it in those terms.

What's your sense—and what optimism do you have for the press? Various publications and individual journalists have done a good job. But there's still a big gap in what we know. How would you grade the press?

Mark: I don't know how I'd grade them, Nicolas, but I have high hopes for all three segments you indicated. Chuck Lewis wrote a number of terrific books that should have motivated all three segments to much greater activity. Larry Kinson wrote another series in line with Lewis. Both, and others, indicated tremendous corruptive potential through campaign contributions. Unfortunately, none of the three segments has been sufficiently motivated to either effect important reforms or come up with ballpark estimates of harm.

One thing that's somewhat a basis of hope: if you read The New York Times, over the past two weeks they’ve run a number of articles on the mayoralty race in New York City. They’ve focused on the most significant campaign donations to the leading candidate—Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo has gotten big-bucks contributions from DoorDash and from the realtors of New York City. In both cases, the Times raises its eyebrows and asks why these donations are being made—should there not be significant ethical questions? So the press is doing many good things, but the desired goal line still seems dishearteningly distant.

Nicolas: I hope that's a place where Query On can make a difference. Part of my fear is: if we come up with this estimate—once the figure is established and we give people a sense of how big that number is—the public wouldn't care that much. That's the puzzle I'm interested in: how do you get people to care? I think they do care. It's a combination of hopelessness and maybe not presenting the information in the right ways. If I had to focus on an area, it would be thinking about how we get this information to the public in such a way that they actually care about it.

Another segment we haven't talked as much about are individual politicians. There are examples of politicians who make more of an issue of this and raise the questions; they can be motivating to the public. I have hope there.

I also think we're entering an era where the corruption has become much more public. I'm thinking about things like seeing industry in the White House and current questions around the White House relationships to crypto—and large sums of money individuals are going to benefit from. We don't fully understand where it's coming from. Hopefully we’re entering an era where, even if the public hasn't been thinking about these issues because it's felt hopeless, suddenly the top headlines are about motivations of elected individuals. Should it really be okay that because it's happening out in the open, somehow it makes it fine? The answer is obviously no. Hopefully it will make a difference.

So to wrap up: the final question is on potential solutions. Because a lot of this has to do with the way campaigns are financed. If you want to run and be elected, the number one priority is to figure out how you're going to run your race. It's really expensive to run an effective race. There are a number of proposals people float. One is financing campaigns using public money—many reformers have tried municipal proofs of concept. Another idea is around the compensation of elected officials—should they make much more money such that they have fewer incentives to seek payments from bad actors?

Which of these ideas is most interesting to you? Where do your reform preferences lie?

Mark: One idea—credit to others before me—is that there be public financing of media: social media, television, radio, and so on. I had a friend (now deceased) who said that there is no corruption in Great Britain as a result of campaign contributions—because every major party candidate, by British law, has automatic funding: free access to television, radio, and social media.

This idea has been put forward in the United States. In Illinois, Senator Paul Douglas proposed it in the 1960s. Jimmy Carter was in favor somewhat later. In the 1998 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton proposed this idea. Unfortunately, after Clinton's proposal, the idea of free airtime for political candidates had a half-life of maybe seven days. Incumbent politicians and the media combined to kibosh it—networks make so much money off political advertising, and incumbents don't want anything that might give a leg up to challengers. Those two factors killed it. I have almost not heard it mentioned in the 27 years since. It seemed immensely appealing, but it’s as dead as the proverbial doornail.

Nicolas: How hopeful are you that we'll see some change?

Mark: I have huge hopes, but so far they've been largely disappointed. Still, I will keep trying.

Nicolas: To close: the conversation was initially focused on Tweed, and you've spent a lot of time in his world. You don't have a time machine, so you don't get to talk to him. If there were one question you could ask him, what would it be?

Mark: I'll answer on one condition, Nicolas: that you answer your own question after I answer.

Tweed was, in many ways, very smart. He had a terrific memory and terrific ways of interacting with a wide range of persons. He did a good job of recruiting figureheads for his Ring—for mayor and governor. He had sufficient voter understanding to know that voters would want somebody at least superficially honest. So he had at least superficially honest men serve as mayor of New York and as governor of New York State.

Given his astuteness, I’d ask him: among the many successor machines after him, which political machine and boss would he admire most? I would speculate Thomas Pendergast in Missouri and maybe the first Mayor Daley—Richard J. Daley—in Chicago.

Nicolas: And you think that based on? 

Mark: Because he was so interested in creating a tremendously effective machine.

Nicolas: I would want to ask him his genuine thoughts on the concept and model of democracy: whether he thinks it's a fool's errand and that authoritarianism makes more practical sense, or whether he believes democracy is worthwhile but sometimes requires centralization of power to get things done. Do you think there’s a way to do this without the corruption? Can democracy work?

Mark: I think he would say corruption is inevitable. He was overwhelmingly proud of what he did. He joined the Manhattan government as an alderman in the 1850s, he entered a government with an ethos of members lining their own pockets. He had a lot of kids—he wanted money for his family—and he happily entered into the stealing.

Nicolas: So if the default system is everyone amassing wealth, we might as well have somebody effective who also has some civic inclinations.

Mark: Yes.

Nicolas: So, the book will be coming out soon. When can we expect it?

Mark: My publisher, McFarland, is not telling me.

Nicolas: All right—so they'll hold us in suspense until it comes out. Is that the cover?

Mark: This is the cover.

Nicolas: Coming to an Amazon near you will be The Boss in American Government: William Tweed and His Successors in Corruption from the 1860s to Today. Well, thank you, Mark Thompson. Hopefully this was an enjoyable first podcast experience.

Mark: Nicolas, I thank you for making the experience as exciting as it has been. I never knew which question was coming next.

Nicolas: I hope that was okay.

Mark: That was fine. That's the way it should be.

Nicolas: Thank you.