Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms Mike Schur and Tammany Hall About this episode Mike Schur knows how to run a show or two - but could he handle Tammany Hall?? Ed takes Mike on a journey to visit with old Boss Tweed, one of the most divisive - and dare we say cartoonish? - political figures of 19th century New York City.
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 It's great to know that even back then, when the criminal needs to flee somewhere, where do you go? Florida.
0:08 Speaker 01 Florida, you're so incorrigible. It has this kind of like, like mischievous pirate thing going that I kind of like.
0:16 Speaker 00 Oh, Florida, you've gone and done it again.
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1:06 Speaker 03 The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.
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2:07 Speaker 01 Welcome to Snafu, the podcast about history's greatest screw ups. I am your host, Ed Helms, and each episode I drag a brilliant guest through one of these disasters and we ask ourselves, what the hell does this tell us about us as human beings? Today, my guest is one of my oldest and dearest comedy pals. He's a writing legend, SNL, The Office, co-created Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place, Rutherford Falls, and by the way, he directed tons of all those episodes as well. And, oh, don't let me forget, out of all of us who worked on The Office, he was also the best actor. Yeah, he's the one who brought the legendary
2:52 Speaker 01 Moe's Schrute into all of our hearts and nightmares, of course. He just got a very well-deserved star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and at this point, I'm pretty sure NASA might be trying to name a planet after him. Please welcome Mike Schur. Hello, Mike.
3:10 Speaker 00 What a wonderful introduction. Thank you. I mean, thank you, first of all, for highlighting my acting, because I think, you know, that's the legacy that I hope to leave this earth with more than anything else.
3:22 Speaker 01 I don't think you get enough credit for your acting, and I don't think you act enough. I think you need to be in more stuff.
3:27 Speaker 00 I will take any acting job that requires me to A, remain mute, and B, run along the side of a car like a dog.
3:38 Speaker 01 Let's talk about Moe's for a second, because what went into your choices, the choices that you made as an actor? Was that something that like the writer's room really kind of broke down and was like, it'd be really funny if he was just sort of spooky and almost like a horror movie character just sort of popping up? Or was it, was that just your own brain sort of chewing on it and then showing up to set and being like, I'm gonna get weird?
4:07 Speaker 00 Certainly, the way that Greg Daniels and the writers wrote, and I'm putting that in quotes, wrote the character of Moe's was-
4:17 Speaker 00 Spooky and weird and just kind of off. My choices as an actor, I would describe as coming from a white hot panic. Just pure panic, just no one had told me what to do. I didn't know what to do. I'm not an actor and I just did anything. I just did anything that I could think of in the moment and people kept finding it amusing. And so I just kept panicking and doing whatever came to mind.
4:46 Speaker 01 I love it.
4:46 Speaker 00 Glad you enjoyed it.
4:48 Speaker 01 It was a gift to all of America. So thank you, the world, really, truly. I'm really eager to dig into this snafu with you today, but before I do, I just wanted to tell you something. Cause I, I was thinking about, you know, we've, we've known each other for 20 ish years and we've collaborated very closely in many different ways over the years. And I've, I've talked about you in publicly in interviews a lot over the years. And I realized there's something that, that I've kind of say when, when your name comes up in interviews frequently. But I don't know that I've ever said it directly to you. And I, and I was like, I gotta tell Mike this.
5:29 Speaker 01 I gotta get on the record with Mike Schur and let you know that the character Andy Bernard on The Office never would have clicked for me without you. You were such an instrumental part of like helping me find his voice and shaping who he became. And that whole process, all of our fun little huddle ups and, and just hard laughs and brainstorming sessions about who Andy Bernard could be and why Andy was funny or what made him funny. And it's just like one of my favorite memories of show business.
6:11 Speaker 00 That's so kind of you to say. I mean, I will say that, you know, you joined the show in season three and the plot was that, you know, Jim had moved to a different office and the office that would happen to be chosen was in Stanford, Connecticut. And I grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, which is maybe an hour and change north of Stanford. And I just instantly knew Andy. I grew up with Andy, a lot of Andys. And it was a very familiar character to me, the sort of preppy, like good time Charlie guy who went to an Ivy League school and just wanted to be liked and was was just desperate for for like,
6:51 Speaker 00 you know, was maybe a little clumsy in the way that he went about it, but had a good soul and a good heart. And I just remember thinking the combination of that character description and you as an actor. I was like, oh, I know. I get this. I get this. I know exactly who this guy is. And I, and I do have a lot of, as I'm sure you do, specific memories of like little moments of like figuring out the exact right little mannerism or sort of prepster.
7:19 Speaker 01 Right.
7:20 Speaker 00 Little, little turn of phrase or something that he would give. There was the, the episode where you all get drunk in the office, having to work late at night.
7:30 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
7:31 Speaker 00 And, and you start singing an Indigo Girls song.
7:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, Closer to Find, great song.
7:37 Speaker 00 And then Jim chimes in and you pop up and go tuna, like so excited that he also knows all the lyrics to Closer to Find. I mean, that's, that was my childhood. That was exactly my childhood. It was like sitting around with my friends and listening to that album in particular.
7:51 Speaker 01 That's really where I think our friendship forged. Like that's when I met you was coming on to the office set. And just immediately, like you were one of, one of that handful of people that put me at ease immediately.
8:05 Speaker 00 Oh, I'm so glad.
8:06 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's awesome.
8:09 Speaker 00 It was a good time. It was a very fun, fun time. And I think all of our lives, it felt like we were just in a very creative world with a bunch of creative, fun people. And our only job was to figure out what was the funniest thing that could have happened at any given moment.
8:24 Speaker 01 That's exactly, our only job was to make each other laugh as hard as possible.
8:27 Speaker 00 Yeah. And I mean, there's no better job.
8:30 Speaker 01 No better job. Well, Mike, I am thrilled you're here because today's story is basically a political sitcom.
8:38 Speaker 00 Excellent.
8:39 Speaker 01 Only with a lot more graft, more fistfights and way more dark money changing hands under the table today.
8:48 Speaker 01 We're talking about Tammany Hall and the legendary Boss Tweed.
8:53 Speaker 00 Fantastic.
8:54 Speaker 01 Yes. How familiar are you with this story?
8:57 Speaker 00 Fairly familiar, I would say, in the broad strokes. The Power Broker by Robert Moses is one of my favorite books ever written. And Tammany Hall is a huge part of Robert Morris's origin story. And, you know, Robert Moses's story is legendary and covers many chunks. But his, like, understanding of politics was forged in Tammany Hall.
9:27 Speaker 01 All right, well, let's start with some baseline info here because I think a lot of people have heard of Tammany Hall, but might be wondering, like, what is it exactly? Was it a building? Was it some sort of club? Or was it a symbol of something opaque and powerful, maybe even a little bit sinister? Well, the answer is actually yes, all of the above. Tammany Hall was indeed a series of buildings in New York City, the most famous of which stood at 14th Street and Park Avenue South. But it is, in fact, so much more than that. When historians say Tammany Hall, they're actually referring to the democratic political machine that controlled New York City politics for well over a century. From the early 19th century to the mid 20th century,
10:11 Speaker 01 Tammany Hall was part fraternity, part mafia, part city council. Think The Sopranos, only the front business instead of being a strip club. It was City Hall.
10:23 Speaker 00 Right. Yeah, it was the, it was the machine that ran New York.
10:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, and a political machine, by the way, is, was actually the term for this type of, it was not just a kind of random metaphor that I'm using. It was actually what these operations were called. For over 100 years, Tammany Hall decided who got jobs, who got contracts, and often who won elections in the biggest city in America. So, Mike Schur, how did it all begin? Well, let's rewind a little bit, shall we?
11:00 Speaker 01 Back all the way to 1789, the same year George Washington became president, coincidentally, back then, there were a number of prominent fraternal organizations like the Freemasons or the Society of the Cincinnati, and these groups tended to be a bit crusty and aristocratic, a little snooty like country clubs. The Cincinnatians were even accused of trying to set up a kind of American hereditary nobility, which is pretty rich considering we had just fought a massive war with England to get rid of all that crap.
11:34 Speaker 00 The most, the most American thing, right, is you, you're like, no more sovereigns, and then as soon as the king is gone, you're like, what if we had a king?
11:43 Speaker 01 Nobility's nice, isn't it?
11:45 Speaker 00 Good points.
11:47 Speaker 01 So, the modern version of these clubs, I think, is like, we see around as like, Masonic temples or the, the Shriners. The Odd Fellows, which actually started in England around this time, or even earlier, was also happening at this time. And I think that largely, or the Rotary Club, the Lions.
12:10 Speaker 00 Well, it's not just those, it's also, you know, when you're talking about, like, societies that aim to pull levers of power, you're also talking about, like, in the modern day, there's Bohemian Grove, and there's the Davos Conference, and there's, as long as there have been societies, there have been people seeking to form organizations that secretly control things. And so, you know, that, some of those clubs are more civic-minded, some of them are more, you know, charity-minded, but-
12:41 Speaker 01 Or social, just fraternal, yeah.
12:44 Speaker 00 But there's, it is always the case that there have been people in every society, even ones that purport to be purely democratic, or republic, or whatever you want to call them, that are like, wait, we're rich, and maybe if we quietly meet in a room somewhere, we can divvy up the society and, and capital in a way that will benefit us and not other people. So, it's, it's a tale as old as time.
13:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, indeed. What's funny is that- Is that they're just as dumb as everybody else. But all kinds of conspiracy theories get ascribed to them. And I, I just think if you could probably get into those rooms, you'd be like, what the, oh, these idiots?
13:22 Speaker 00 This is the group of people that.
13:26 Speaker 00 My favorite thing in the world is when a billionaire does something stupid and the reaction is like, well, that he's probably not doing that. He's a billionaire and it's like, no, he died. Promise. He's just as dumb as everybody else.
13:37 Speaker 01 Of course. All right. So enter into this landscape of sort of crusty aristocratic societies.
13:45 Speaker 01 The Society of St. Tammany founded in New York, basically as a deliberate fuck you to all of these aristocratic clubs. So this was to be a patriotic club for the common man. It was named after Tammanend, a Leni Lanape chief mythologized as a patron saint of America and liberty. Of course, the Society of St. Tammany also massively appropriated Native American attire, rituals.
14:18 Speaker 00 You're kidding.
14:19 Speaker 01 And you're kidding. Yes.
14:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, they not, not a real progressive woke crew at this time, but they threw large events, parties and parades. They were rowdy, populist and kind of a bit campy or silly. They had a big sense of humor and, and also probably quite a bit cringe as well.
14:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, I would imagine. Yeah.
14:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. So guess who shows up real early in this, in this zone?
14:52 Speaker 00 Who's that?
14:52 Speaker 01 Aaron Burr. Yeah. Yeah. That guy. Revolutionary War vet, the third vice president. And yes, the guy who murdered Lin-Manuel Miranda.
15:04 Speaker 01 He's a national treasure, Miranda.
15:06 Speaker 00 Does someone fact check these podcasts? Or should we do it in real time? Cause I, I think.
15:11 Speaker 01 No, I, I asked the internet and they said that Aaron Burr shot Lin-Manuel.
15:15 Speaker 00 Oh, you got.
15:15 Speaker 01 There's video of it. I swear to you.
15:19 Speaker 00 You got the AI overview and it.
15:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:21 Speaker 00 Told you that Aaron Burr murdered Lin-Manuel Miranda.
15:24 Speaker 01 A hundred percent. This is all AI generated, including me. I am fast asleep in my house right now.
15:33 Speaker 01 Okay, so no, he didn't murder Miranda. He murdered Alexander Hamilton. And Burr is the one who really saw early on
15:46 Speaker 01 the sort of political potential of Tammany Hall. He saw it not as just a bunch of rowdy fun dudes, but as a ready-made voter base. And he's the one who really steered Tammany Hall straight into politics. Okay, so now jump ahead to the early 1800s. New York is being flooded with immigrants, especially from Ireland. Between 1820 and 1860, more than 1.6 million Irish arrived in America. And most of them funneled right through New York City. Of course, the famous Ellis Island, right by the Statue of Liberty there in New York Harbor. Tammany, as an organization, not happy about this.
16:30 Speaker 01 They were deeply xenophobic, as were a lot of Americans at that time. And they really resisted this massive influx of immigrants and sometimes violently. Not, not a real welcoming.
16:47 Speaker 00 Not rolling out the red carpet.
16:49 Speaker 01 Not exactly, but this will change, Mike Schur. This will, this will completely flip because somebody at Tammany Hall did the math.
17:01 Speaker 01 All right. Irish immigrants meant Irish votes and votes meant power. And so Tammany did a 180 and they did, in fact, roll out the welcome mat. And by welcome mat, I mean jobs, food, social services, and even protection from the angry nativist movement. In return, the Irish delivered loyalty at the ballot box. By the mid 1800s, they weren't just part of Tammany's political machine. They were basically the engine inside of it. Real talk, Mike Schur. Do you see this as smart politics or just ugly exploitation? Or just maybe exactly the kind of two-faced move that defines American politics in every era?
17:48 Speaker 00 It's a familiar story. They were smart enough to understand the way the wind was blowing. It's also a classic American thing to have a bunch of immigrants come over to this country and then within a generation be like, I don't like immigrants. And it's like, what, what, what, what are you doing? But they were, and this was the source of all of their power, was they were smart enough to understand that there were waves crashing on the shores of America and they could either try to fight them or surf them and they decided to surf them. And so that is the-
18:22 Speaker 01 Great metaphor, by the way.
18:23 Speaker 00 Thank you very much. That's the, the, the key to all of these movements, as I understand them and whether they survive or disappear, is do you get on board with what is inevitable? Or do you try to fight it? And getting on board is a much smarter move politically. You mentioned the Sopranos. There's scenes in the Sopranos where it's Thanksgiving and the guys in the, in Tony's crew are like handing out turkeys on Thanksgiving.
18:50 Speaker 01 Yeah. By the way, Tammany Hall, same thing.
18:52 Speaker 00 Invented it, yeah.
18:53 Speaker 01 Fully handing out turkeys.
18:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, like that one, like having a giant free turkey Thanksgiving meal is like, that's a year's worth of votes that they just bought for, for, you know, at the time, what, like 75 cents worth of, of fowl.
19:07 Speaker 01 Yeah. Fabulous insight, Mike Schur. I love the way your brain works. We're going to cut all that out, though.
19:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I assume you're cutting all of this out, right? This isn't going to air.
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21:36 Speaker 01 So we have now set the stage and here comes our headliner. Are you ready? Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the man who, well, not, well, he's not going to join us. He's dead, but welcome to our narrative. The man who would come to embody Tammany Hall's power, greed and epic corruption. William Boss Tweed. Have you heard of Boss Tweed? You know, you're familiar with Boss Tweed. What does his name, what does his name conjure for you?
22:08 Speaker 00 It conjures an enormous barrel-chested gentleman who strolls through the streets of New York and everyone knows his name and he is legendary and people whisper and point and wave and he waves back.
22:22 Speaker 01 Oh my gosh, you're just, it sounds like an episode of Cheers.
22:25 Speaker 00 It basically is. He's basically Norm, but on the streets of 19th century New York.
22:29 Speaker 01 And also not afraid to just hit you with an axe.
22:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
22:33 Speaker 01 He's a very complicated guy because he was enormous, both in stature and in girth. And, uh, and of, by all accounts, a very gregarious and jovial guy.
22:46 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:47 Speaker 01 Really like the kind of like, you know, backslapping good time Charlie. But also like capable of like horrific violence.
22:56 Speaker 00 Yeah. Combination of people like breaking into huge smiles and waving and him waving back. And also moms grabbing their kids and hustling them inside when he walked down the street. That's what I picture.
23:09 Speaker 01 All right. So, uh, let's get into, uh, old, uh, old Boss Tweed here. Born in 1823 on Manhattan's Lower East Side, son of a chairmaker. He actually apprenticed at the family trade, but, uh, he had much more lofty ambitions. His first step in chasing those ambitions was the rough and tumble, politically connected world of New York's volunteer fire companies. Isn't that kind of, uh, interesting?
23:38 Speaker 00 Kind of interesting. Yeah.
23:39 Speaker 01 Because back then, fire companies weren't the noble, dalmatian-loving institutions. That we think of today, they were basically street gangs with hoses. Right. They or buckets like crews would literally fistfight over who got to put out a blaze because whoever controlled the fire. Fires were so common and whoever could control the fires had significant control over the neighborhood. And then of course, all of the political clout that came with that. So think of, think of politics by way of pro wrestling, but with a lot more water damage. Yeah, sure. Thank God we don't have to rely on for profit emergency services anymore.
24:19 Speaker 01 For now. Yeah. Doing. Not sure where things are going. When is this airing? Yeah, exactly. So as we were, as we mentioned before, Tweed was a very gregarious guy. He first joined engine company number 12 before helping found America's fire company number six in 1848. This company was nicknamed the big six and their symbol, a flashy tiger. Tweed rose to foreman of this fire company, a position he parlayed into membership in the society of Saint Tammany. Again, if the fire, these fire companies were, were very politically connected because they had, it was just all power brokering.
25:02 Speaker 01 But between these sort of rough and tumble figures and politicians and the leaders of the various wards throughout New York city. So from there he bounced around a few different roles. He was an alderman, congressman for a spell, found that very boring. Came right back to New York city from Albany. He was even a lawyer for a minute, but he finally found real power on the New York county board of supervisors. As deputy street commissioner. What is a street commissioner? That just sounds mobbed up. It really does. The street commish.
25:43 Speaker 00 Well, it conjures an image of like, this is the guy who knows all the other people in the neighborhood, right? Like, it's a guy who's like, we need 60 people to do some task. And he's like, I got it. And he just goes out and knocks on all the doors and rounds up the crew. And yeah, yeah, that's a very mobbed, very mobbed up sounding job.
26:04 Speaker 01 Well, as Deputy Street Commish, old Tweed controlled city contracts, jobs, and construction. And this is where Tweed's genius for corruption truly flourished. If you wanted your cousin on the city payroll, you slipped Tweed some cash. If you wanted your construction company to build a new school, you cut Tweed a slice. Or maybe you would just get the contract and never even have to build the fucking school. It's like, they were just cranking out all the, all the cash.
26:38 Speaker 00 So you've been in New York for 20 years, and three of your cousins come over from, from Dundalk, Ireland, and they don't know what to do. And you go to see boss Tweed, or one of his minions, and you say, we need construction jobs. And they go, here's three construction jobs. You give us 20% of your salary, or whatever. And you take that deal, because the alternative is-
27:03 Speaker 01 And, by the way, you vote for us.
27:05 Speaker 00 And you vote for us.
27:06 Speaker 01 You show up and you vote for us. And if we tell you to, you go to the ballot box five, six, seven, eight, 10 times.
27:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, you change your name 10 times.
27:13 Speaker 01 Which was common, like, they were just stacking ballots. I want to be clear. So, this wasn't something that Tweed brought to New York City government. This was the culture of New York City government at the time. It was just a profoundly corrupt apparatus across the board. The group of 20 aldermen, and then there were 20 assistant aldermen, who were, who were a sort of like, governing body in the city. And they were known as the Forty Thieves. Like, that was, that's how people referred to them. And this was well before Tweed even entered the picture. So, he just kind of came in and was-
27:52 Speaker 01 Like, oh, I, I, I get how this works and just kicked it up a huge notch. He basically industrialized political corruption in New York City. And, oh, don't forget, New York City, you know, it, it's nothing like it was today in scale, but it was massive for the time. And the economy of New York City was on par with entire other countries.
28:19 Speaker 00 Nations, yeah.
28:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:21 Speaker 00 When we were researching Parks and Rec, we learned about a group of people in a city in California that shall remain nameless, that they incorporated this, the town. And then this group of people who'd been living there for a long time, basically were like, we want to control this forever. And so they, the way they formed the government was it was like, you know, there was a planning committee and a sewer committee and a, and a construction committee and everything. And they had, it had three members and the way it worked was, you know, you served like a six year term. But at the end of the term, you, it was some mechanism by which like you named your own successor to the committee. And so then they just all, they would like just all switch committees. So they just.
29:06 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh, that's brilliant.
29:08 Speaker 00 Yeah. So they, and they, they, their name was the Dirty Thirty. It was thirty, thirty people controlled the entirety of this town for, for decades. Because there were rules about how you could only serve on these such committees. State laws, you could only serve in the committees for a certain amount of time. So they just were like, all right, we'll only serve on the committee for six years. And then we'll just switch and hand it to someone else. And we just, they kept rotating. And as a result, they just controlled every single aspect of the planning of the community.
29:34 Speaker 01 I'm very curious, how do you think, uh, how do you think Leslie Knope would do in Tammany Hall?
29:41 Speaker 00 Not well. She is a person who believed in fairness and equality and a meritocratic system of achievement.
29:50 Speaker 01 Sure. And also I think she's someone who assumes the best intentions in others.
29:56 Speaker 00 Yes. Yeah. I mean, she, she was no fool. She certainly in, over the course of the show, had to deal with a lot of corrupt people and understood that people's motivations were not always pure. But, um, yeah, it would, Tammany Hall would not have been a, a good environment in which she could flourish to the best of her abilities.
30:14 Speaker 01 I'll be honest. I also would not flourish.
30:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:17 Speaker 01 I feel like my brain just doesn't work the right way for that. And then I don't mean that in like, oh, because I'm a good person. I just mean, like, I don't, I can't track those complex webs of manipulation. And it's like, it's so overwhelming to me. It's, but, but someone like Tweed, like, he's really like an evil genius. He also was, he had that sort of like Bill Clinton level memory. So he did, he had like an uncanny knack for people's names. That gives you power. And that's something I've always never had.
30:51 Speaker 00 No. I've forgotten your name like three times during the course of this podcast.
30:56 Speaker 01 During this podcast. Yes.
30:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:57 Speaker 01 Likewise.
30:58 Speaker 00 No, those people who have like an internal ledger where they know everyone's face and name, and also where they live and what they owe you and what you did for them and can recall that with instant clarity. That's a, that's a real classic power grab skill that people have.
31:16 Speaker 01 All right. Well, as well as things were going for Mr. Tweed, he would become truly unstoppable during the Civil War. So in 1863, the federal government has imposed a military draft and New York City exploded into riots. This was an incredibly tragic episode. Poor Irish immigrants were furious at the idea of fighting a war that they didn't feel was theirs, while rich people could buy their way out by paying for, for substitutes. Also, black people were being unfairly scapegoated as the cause of the war. And so they were being targeted for horrific violence. Mobs burned buildings and attacked the homes of
31:59 Speaker 01 Republican elites. It was violent racist chaos. But of course, Tweed.
32:07 Speaker 01 Saw opportunity.
32:08 Speaker 00 Of course. This obviously, you might remember, was dramatized in Gangs of New York.
32:13 Speaker 01 Of course.
32:14 Speaker 00 That famous sequence toward the end of the movie there.
32:16 Speaker 01 Yes, of course. The violence of that movie is so hard for me. It's so visceral.
32:21 Speaker 00 Very intense.
32:22 Speaker 01 Of course, as he's like a genius of like, just making it that feel visceral. A lot of historical inaccuracies in that movie, but that is, this chapter is exactly how that movie culminates. Tammany started offering loans to working class men so that they too could pay for substitutes in the draft. It was on paper compassionate, but it also meant those families now owed Tweed money, gratitude, and loyalty. The riots quieted down and Tammany's grip tightened even further. This is feeling like House of Cards on steroids.
33:00 Speaker 00 Yeah.
33:00 Speaker 01 Do you see brilliant crisis management or just sociopathic opportunism?
33:05 Speaker 00 Sociopathic opportunism, yeah.
33:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:07 Speaker 00 How do we make everyone more indebted to us than they were before?
33:11 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, from here, things like Tweed just consolidated everything even more. Courts, legislature, city treasury, voting booths, everything bent to his will. And this is also when he earned the name boss. He became, boss was a term at the time for like the leader of a political machine, and he was definitely the boss. And here's where the corruption, it just, it scaled up so epically. Probably the most famous example is the New York County Courthouse. Do you know this, this story?
33:49 Speaker 00 I don't think so, no.
33:50 Speaker 01 Okay, the New York County Courthouse, which is down on Chamber Street in Manhattan, it was built at this time, and it was originally budgeted at $250,000, which is a ton of money for the time. By the time Tweed and his cronies were finished, the bill had ballooned to $12 million, which is roughly 200 million in today's money.
34:17 Speaker 00 Wow. So what is that 40x the original cost or something?
34:22 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
34:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, 48x the original bid price. Great.
34:26 Speaker 01 How does this happen? How does someone pull this off? Well, it's actually pretty simple. Tweed's friends padded every single contract. Carpentry, plastering, furniture, even the brooms for janitors all billed at cartoonishly astronomical rates. One carpenter supposedly got paid $360,000 for a month's work.
34:51 Speaker 01 By the way, that's, that's in 1860 money.
34:55 Speaker 00 Right.
34:55 Speaker 01 It's millions and millions of dollars.
34:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
34:58 Speaker 01 A plasterer pulled down half a million. The courthouse became less a civic building and more of a pinata stuffed with taxpayer cash just repeatedly whacked by Tweed's gang and just grabbing all that cash. And that's just one project. And by the way, they didn't even finish. They just, this courthouse went unfinished for like decades.
35:25 Speaker 01 Later Tweed would actually be tried in this very courthouse, which is ironic, but we'll get to that. By 1871, Tweed and his, all of his buddies had skimmed off an estimated $200 million total, which was more than 4 billion in today's money.
35:43 Speaker 00 Man, oh, man. They really knew what they were doing, didn't they?
35:47 Speaker 01 They did. He, yeah. So he became the third largest landowner in Manhattan. He owned two yachts. I guess yachting was a thing then too. At what point, Mike Schur, does corruption stop being shocking and just become like slapstick comedy? I mean, this is like when your carpenter is making more in a month than Apple makes in a quarter. Are we still talking about corruption or is this just like Marx Brothers?
36:14 Speaker 00 Well, it gets to, it gets to the cartoonish level where eventually collapse is inevitable because no one ever, ever, ever says, I have enough now. I'm going to.
36:26 Speaker 00 Stop, I'm gonna like, take what I have and just enjoy my life. It's never enough for, for folks in this position. So they just push and push and push and push until they're finally caught or brought down somehow. This is the story of all of these folks, especially the New York folks, who were, you know, who, who had this massive pool of human labor and the ability to kind of consolidate power at a time when, when the country was still young and cities were still young. Every movie is about this too, right? It's like the person who's like amassing, amassing, amassing. And then at some point, if they just said, alright, I'm good, I'm gonna retire. They could live their life and their, and generations of their families could live their lives in, in wealth and security forever.
37:11 Speaker 00 They just never do because it's a, it's a psychosis that just pushes them to the point where inevitably they push too far and someone comes along and takes them down. And that's what happened to him.
37:21 Speaker 01 But the other thing to keep in mind is that this isn't just something that's kind of like making a fool out of the city of New York. It's also, there are financial repercussions to this. The money is coming from somewhere. It's coming from the city's coffers. And a lot of the city's money is also, you know, been purchased by, by international investors who are, who are starting to sniff around like, what is going on? Like the, it's starting to have real, raise a lot of like real financial issues for the city.
38:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, they're all, it's all essentially Ponzi scheme, right? It all depends on this endless influx of new people and new stuff coming in so that there's more jobs and then there's more construction and there's more schools and more buildings. And at some point, it's not fundamentally different from something like Enron or whatever. Where like the people at the top are, they're gonna get away with it as long as the like confidence in the system sustains itself. And then something comes along, in Enron's case, it was the dot com bubble bursting, that suddenly like when the flow of new investors is cut off, suddenly someone goes like, well, wait a second. Now where is all this money gone? And then they, when people start looking into it, finally,
38:43 Speaker 00 that's when the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.
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41:16 Speaker 01 Tweed was really good at kind of shoring up his, his support for exactly these reasons. Sure. Um, he knew how to play the game. So a lot of the money that he was getting, uh, through corruption, he was also giving to charity. So he would, so Tammany Hall would sponsor public services like hospitals and schools. And that of course won him a lot of fans. He would remain incredibly popular within his, his ward in New York City well after, um, he toppled, which we're about to get to. He just had a ton of fans, particularly in the working immigrant communities who finally felt like someone in power had their backs. Right.
41:57 Speaker 01 So for a while, Boss Tweed looked untouchable. He had the votes, the jobs, the contracts, the courts, even the legislature. But if history teaches us anything, Mike Schur, it's that when karma and hubris square up for a fight, the smart money's on karma.
42:16 Speaker 01 Am I right? Yeah, absolutely. Proud of that one. I'm proud of that. Good, yeah. You can have a nice little, little line there. You can use it. Okay.
42:26 Speaker 01 All right. So Tweed's operation finally began to crumble thanks to a very surprising thing. And that is the power of satire? Hmm. Yeah. Wait for it. Okay. This is, this is really interesting. So the New York Times had begun publishing, uh, a huge expose on the city's finances and all of this corruption. We're talking reams of evidence that showed the courthouse scandal and dozens of other padded contracts and what ultimately brought the, the details of Tweed's abuses of power to light. It would take this extra push to really spread the news of Tweed's corruption throughout the city.
43:12 Speaker 01 Inter-political cartoonist, Thomas Nast. So you probably have an actual image of Boss Tweed in your mind, and almost certainly, it is rooted in the cartoons of Thomas Nast. Nast worked for Harper's Weekly, a magazine with a huge circulation for the time. He drew Tweed as a grotesque vulture, feasting on the city of New York. He drew him as a giant bag of money with legs. He drew the Tammany Tiger devouring actual democracy. And these doodles, as it would turn out, were devastating.
43:46 Speaker 00 There we go.
43:47 Speaker 01 There we go.
43:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
43:50 Speaker 01 That's...
43:50 Speaker 00 That's what I think of as the bulging stomach, like, the vest with the buttons about to pop off because of the bulging moneybag stomach. Yeah.
44:00 Speaker 01 And ironically, a Tweed suit.
44:03 Speaker 00 Hmm.
44:04 Speaker 01 Now, here's what's fascinating about these cartoons. Tweed's reaction was, like, he was furious about the cartoons. And he said, this is a quote, "Stop the damn pictures. I don't care much what the papers write about me. My constituents can't read, but they have eyes." And he was exactly right. You know, so many of the working population of New York City were just... Didn't have access to education, and so... But these pictures, they were devastating. They were on the covers of things. They were all... It just was, they were everywhere. And everyone could sort of immediately understand, oh, this is Boss Tweed, and he is corrupt.
44:48 Speaker 00 Right.
44:49 Speaker 01 This is not, this ain't good.
44:51 Speaker 00 Would you say that a picture was worth a thousand words in this case?
44:56 Speaker 01 Like, like, 900.
44:58 Speaker 00 Okay.
44:59 Speaker 01 Maybe?
44:59 Speaker 00 Something north of 900.
45:01 Speaker 01 Like, a lot of words. Yeah. Now, it's worth noting, Nass himself, complicated figure. He was virulently anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. Many of his cartoons dripped with prejudice. But when it came to Tweed, he was relentless and it worked. He's Boss Tweed, so what does he do? He tries to bribe the New York Times. Sure. To stop with all of this. One founder of the New York Times was allegedly offered $5 million to spike the stories. Adjusted for inflation, that's well over $100 million. Just to keep quiet. That's wild. I mean, this is an insane amount of money.
45:43 Speaker 01 Like, how, who, I can't, I just can't even imagine bribes at that level in this. I'm sure it's happening, but it's just wild. I mean, a Qatari jet is worth what? That's worth, that's like around a hundred million. Around a hundred million, yeah. Kind of a bribe? I don't know. But here's the amazing thing, that New York Times publisher refused the money, saying, quote, "I don't think the devil will ever bid higher for me than that." Wow, that's a good line, too. So the pressure, all of this pressure, kind of like coming down on Tammany Hall and right onto Boss Tweed himself, it just became untenable. And the machine finally cracked.
46:26 Speaker 01 The city comptroller, himself caught up in the scandal, turned state's witness. He flipped and he testified against Tweed, who was ultimately indicted on 204 counts of fraud and corruption. And I'm sure that was like, just the stuff they could actually. The iceberg, yeah. That was just the stuff they could document. He was convicted, sentenced and jailed. But, old Boss Tweed, he wasn't done scheming. In 1875, he escaped custody. Now, this is kind of an interesting thing, like. Custody was kind of a loose thing like they were let they were still letting him like go out to dinner with go home for dinner with his family and stuff. It's just like
47:09 Speaker 00 They didn't want to be rude.
47:10 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, I mean, he had been he had given so many Christmas turkeys to everyone.
47:14 Speaker 00 That's right.
47:14 Speaker 01 So like, they were just like, yeah, go have dinner with your family. At one point.
47:18 Speaker 00 Just come back. You gotta come back, though.
47:20 Speaker 01 You gotta come back. Well, one night he didn't come back and he he disappeared from New York City. He made his way down to Florida and under an assumed name and then to Cuba. And then he got on a ship to Spain.
47:36 Speaker 00 It's great to know that even back then, when the criminal needs to flee somewhere, where do you go? Florida. You just go to Florida. It's just been the haven for criminals and and misfits for since at least the mid 19th century. I like I like knowing Florida is nothing if not consistent.
47:57 Speaker 01 There's something, I don't know, there's something like I have this like, like, like, Florida, you're so incorrigible.
48:05 Speaker 00 Oh, you scoundrel.
48:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, you scoundrel. It has this kind of like, like, mischievous pirate thing going that I kind of like.
48:12 Speaker 00 Oh, Florida, you've gone and done it again, haven't you?
48:15 Speaker 01 It's like people running giant bags of cocaine and shooting each other, but then the then the afternoon, they just like have their mojitos and turn on the Jimmy Buffett and.
48:26 Speaker 00 Just get on a fan boat and down some tequila and hang out in Florida.
48:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, man, come on. Listen, we're incorrigible. What do you want? Florida. The weather's so good. Come on now. All right. So he made it to Spain and this is really wild because the cartoons still haunted him. According to some accounts, Spanish police recognized him because of Nass's caricatures. And which is also a testament to the scale of this news that was breaking. It was really was international news and it was setting off alarm bells in financial markets around the world. But yeah, Spanish police likely recognized him and they called their the American guys and were like, yeah, we're
49:15 Speaker 01 sending him back. So he got sent back to the United States, imprisoned again, ultimately died behind bars in 1878, age 55.
49:27 Speaker 00 I mean, for a guy of his girth in that time period, it's not, you know, it's not terrible.
49:33 Speaker 01 The Tammany Tiger had roared its last roar.
49:38 Speaker 01 So even with Tweed gone, Tammany Hall did not vanish overnight. The machine limped along for decades, churning out mayors and dealmakers well into the 20th century. But when FDR was on his road to the presidency in the early 1930s, he campaigned as an anti-Tammany New Yorker, and his win was basically the final wrecking ball for Tammany Hall. The clubhouse doors finally shut for good in the mid 20th century. Mike Schur, that is the story of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed, the biggest, baddest, most corrupt machine New York City ever built. Do you have any sort of like larger, big picture takeaways? For me, I was really struck
50:18 Speaker 01 by the role that media played in this story, and particularly the role of comedy cartoons, right? It wasn't the cops, or Congress, or even rival politicians who brought down Boss Tweed. It was journalists and cartoonists.
50:32 Speaker 00 I will, I'll say a couple of things. Number one is, one of the best things about this country, this screwed up, messed up, messy, complex country that we live in, is that in the First Amendment, it says very clearly, the government cannot put you in jail for, or prosecute you in any way for speaking up and saying what you believe. And it also says that the media is free. And because of that, we have a system by which newspapers in history, and television shows, and radio programs, and other media outlets are allowed to point out and make fun of and highlight corruption in government. That has always been true. It is, in theory, I would say, still true today. When I worked
51:16 Speaker 00 at Saturday Night Live, which was my first job, Jim Downey, who's probably the greatest political satirist, he's the Thomas Nast of his day, really, wrote the famous debate speeches, sketches between Bush and Gore in 2000. And, you know, the famous, the first debate sketch involved
51:39 Speaker 00 You know, summarize your campaign in one word and Al Gore, Daryl Hammond as Al Gore said lockbox and Will Ferrell, as George Bush said, strategery. And that line stuck to George Bush so thoroughly, he did have a lot of malapropes in his day, but there's a large number of people who believe that he really said that, that he really said strategery at one point. There's a lot of people who believe that Sarah Palin said, I can see Russia from my house. She did it. Tina Fey said that as Sarah Palin on SNL. And that, that tradition, that is very much in the Thomas Nast tradition, right? Is the, there's a difference between the way people understand the world we live in
52:22 Speaker 00 and the country we live in from dry media reports about fraud and corruption and everything else, and the way that we see it through comedy. And comedy is often a more powerful weapon and a more direct way to make people understand something about government and corruption and fraud and whatever else is going on than actual news. And I, that, that's all I was thinking of as you were telling the story is, is thank goodness that this country allows us to do that, because I believe that is the most effective way, often, for people to come to understand what their political leaders are doing. And that's what Thomas Nast did to Boss Tweed, and that's what Jim Downey and other folks have done to politicians through SNL cold opens over the years.
53:07 Speaker 01 Do you think that culturally, we actually kind of underestimate the, the power of, of jokes? Like, can humor still land a knockout punch? I'm thinking about, um, South Park right now.
53:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
53:22 Speaker 01 Is, is really, appears to be puncturing the armor of this administration in a, in a, in a Very startling way.
53:32 Speaker 00 I mean, the media landscape in which we currently live is so much more fractured. You know, at the time, Harper's Weekly was probably the most powerful and important institution in media. And obviously, there's, you know, there's barely newspapers anymore. And now there's barely kind of TV. There's no monoculture in TV anymore. We're now in this TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat world where things are very, very fractured. Everybody has their own algorithm. So the question to me isn't whether humor can be as potent a tool anymore. It's whether the, the delivery mechanisms that we are employing now can actually deliver a piece of satire to the world that way, or whether people are so siloed off that they'll,
54:14 Speaker 00 that, you know, people, the, the, a large majority of the public won't ever see the same thing. That's my fear.
54:21 Speaker 01 I know exactly what you mean, and I feel that sense of sort of fractured culture that you're speaking to, but I still have this feeling, and it may start, be transitioning into more of a hope at this point, but a, a feeling that, that truly exceptional work, whether it's a South Park episode, or, you know, a particularly keen clip of stand-up, like, the cream still rises to the top, and it does, it can still, like, sort of permeate those silos.
54:55 Speaker 00 I would hope so, because I think if, if the story of Boston Street teaches us anything, it's that, you know, that is what is needed in these moments. What's needed is a voice of satire and clarity and perspective that can cut through and present in a single picture, or a single comedy sketch, or a single joke, what it would take a scholar, you know, hours to properly relay. A picture of, of a greedy person as a vulture devouring democracy is a lot more effective in a single blow, in a single coup than, than, you know, a lengthy article, or a six-part series in the New York Times, or something like that. That feels like a perfect place to wrap this up.
55:38 Speaker 01 Can you share what you're working on?
55:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:41 Speaker 01 I'm dying to know what the, what the latest Mike Schur project is.
55:45 Speaker 00 So Amy Poehler and I are back together again. We're making a new show called Dig that will be on Peacock sometime next year. We don't know when, very exciting. Amy and I wrote the pilot together and we're working in the writers room now. And the extra fun thing is that my wife, JJ Philbin, is co-show running the show with me. So it's the first time we're ever working together, which is very exciting. And then in a couple of weeks, we start work on Man on the Inside, season three in the writers room. Season two will drop in November. We're getting a head start on season three, the show with Ted Danson on Netflix. So, uh, so I've got a full, a full dance card, as they say, but I would not for a second
56:28 Speaker 00 even think about missing the chance to talk to my old pal at Helms on this podcast, which I really love, by the way. It's truly, truly entertaining and delightful.
56:37 Speaker 01 Well, thank you very much. Wait, can you give us any, uh, like a log line or a teaser about this show Dig with Amy, which sounds just utterly delightful already?
56:47 Speaker 00 It's based on a book called Excavations that Amy read and really liked. It's about a group of women who work on an archaeological dig site in Greece. And it's four women, uh, ages 19, 29, 39, and 49. So four women from four slightly different generations and they work on this dig site in Greece and they slowly, over the course of the show, uncover a sort of like little conspiracy and they all have to-
57:13 Speaker 01 Did some dinosaurs murder each other?
57:16 Speaker 00 Oh, you've seen it. You've read the book.
57:18 Speaker 01 I mean, what else are you gonna find at a dig?
57:23 Speaker 00 It's a dinosaur homicide.
57:25 Speaker 01 It just sounds like so much fun and all the people that I love.
57:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, it should be very fun. I'm very excited about it.
57:31 Speaker 01 Great. Congrats on that. Mike Schur, I'm so grateful for your time and just for the, the, the great hang today.
57:39 Speaker 00 Always a great hang, buddy. Thank you for having me and, and, and I truly do love this podcast. Thank you for inviting me on.
57:46 Speaker 01 Right on. I love you, buddy.
57:47 Speaker 00 Love you too.
57:48 Speaker 01 Bye.
57:50 Speaker 01 Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Our post-production studio is Gilded Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino, Tori Smith, and Carl Nellis. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works. Legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson. Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam
58:34 Speaker 01 Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Etor. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
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59:38 Speaker 04 Halloween's almost here, and I've got plans. My first stop is Total Wine & More for cold beer, ready-to-drink cocktails, and a bottle of wine to share. And I know I'm getting the lowest prices. Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Be 21. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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