This Week in People’s History, Jul 22–28, 2026
Enriching Oneself in High Office Does Not Ensure a Comfortable Death (1871)
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, ON JULY 22, 1871, the government of New York City was firmly in the grip of a brazenly corrupt administration led by William (“Boss”) Tweed, who was robbing the city blind, but no one could prove it.
It was generally known that Tweed and his associates had become enormously rich in a short time because Tweed had acquired autocratic, unreviewable, control of the city’s expenditures.
Anyone who wanted to work for, or do business with the city, needed Tweed’s approval, and if the amount of money was not trivial, Tweed demanded a substantial cut. The Boss was so powerful that he could order the city to pay a vendor three times (or more) what something was worth and then require the vendor to give half the total to Tweed or one of his henchmen. The vendor pocketed much more than what he was entitled to, at the same time Tweed took a 50 percent commission.
The only losers in the deal were the taxpayers. But of course, many taxpayers were also grossly overpaid vendors, so they, too, came out ahead. The real victims of the official corruption were the taxpayers who had nothing to sell the city, or those who Tweed did not trust to keep mum about the enormous kickbacks.
What seemed to be a perfect scheme started to leave the rails when New York County Auditor James Watson, a Tweed confederate who alone had access to all of the city’s financial accounts, was killed in a traffic accident on a snowy street just north of Central Park.
The new county auditor was not a crook, and try as Tweed might, The Boss could not prevent the one-time deputy from coming to understand the city’s books contained a clear record of tens of millions of dollars of inexplicable overpayments.
The new auditor needed months to make sense of what he found. But then he took the evidence to the New York Times (which had been fulminating against the Tweed Ring’s conspicuous consumption for years without being able to uncover how the money was being stolen).
Finally, on this July day the Times revealed the truth with the unusually massive headline, “THE SECRET ACCOUNTS: Proofs of Undoubted Frauds Brought to Light”, sounded the Tweed Ring’s death-knell.
Tweed was arrested 13 weeks later on the basis of the evidence that appeared daily thereafter in the Times and which was soon confirmed by a blue-ribbon commission. Convicting him of 202 counts of fraud took a major effort, but he died in prison less than six years after his crimes had first been exposed. https://history.nycourts.gov/case/tweed-liscomb/
Conquest of Florida Starts with a Massacre (1816)
TWO HUNDRED AND TEN YEARS AGO, ON JULY 27TH, 1816, the U.S. conquest of Florida began when Army General Andrew Jackson’s troops destroyed what was known as Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River, 55 miles southest of Tallahassee, Florida, and killed more than 300 formerly enslaved people who had emancipated themselves in order to live free. For the history of those events and their significance, visit https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/negro-fort-massacre
Delbert Tibbs, Whose Time on Death Row Led Him to His Calling (1976)
FIFTY YEARS AGO, ON JULY 28, 1976, the Florida Supreme Court threw heavy shade of the rape and murder conviction of Delbert Tibbs, ruling there was a “very real possibility that Tibbs had nothing to do with these crimes.”
But the reversal of the verdict was not a dismissal of the charges, and there was nothing to prevent the Florida prosecutor from re-trying Tibbs.
Tibbs remained in jail, but after six months awaiting retrial, he was released on bail. Five years later a Lee County court granted the prosecutor’s request and dismissed all charges against Tibbs.
He then moved to Chicago, where he joined the staff of Witness to Innocence and became a strong advocate of ending capital punishment. You can watch a 4-minute reflection by Delbert Tibbs here: https://youtu.be/aBdt4lz1_UU?si=Xu-QBhJEs6zo5gEh
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