Month: October 2020

Boss Tweed claps his hands.

“Gentlemen!” he says to the things circling in the air above. “I need a moment alone with Miss Jessalyn, please.”

Then the things are just men in suits, filing out the door.  Some of them are leering at me as they go, while others are just blank-faced.  That’s one way to tell which of them used to be human and which never were: the ones who used to be human can feel things other than greed.

Tweed sits down behind his desk, sets his axe down on the floor, and leans it up against the desk within easy reach. 

Corruption always carries the threat of violence. 

Continue reading “The Economancer Chapter 8 – Back Room Deals”

I step through the door into a Tammany Hall that never existed. 

The real Tammany Hall was a place where rich and influential men met to discuss political and economic strategy.  Those men might not have actually been very respectable or refined, but they tried to look it. 

This Tammany Hall is a parody of hoopty-do politics out of political cartoons and old movies.  It looks more like the inside of a barn than the marble building outside.  Straw and sawdust is spread on the wooden floor.  There are brass spittoons here and there (okay, the real Tammany Hall probably had those), but nobody bothers to use them.  A man in a cheap suit stands on a rickety wooden stage, hoarsely haranguing the crowd, but I can’t hear him over the shouting and laughing and cheering.  The crowd includes men from every social class, high society to roustabout, but they are all men, and they’re all white.  By the standards of the 1870’s, not today.  Not an Italian among them, and very few Irishmen. 

Unlike outside, they’re all in-period.  I’m getting close to the center of Boss Tweed’s power, his literal comfort zone, so of course it looks like the time and place when he was most comfortable.

Continue reading “The Economancer Chapter 7 – Tammany Hall”