The degraded state of politics, sinking yearly still lower, caused unspeakable disgust, but the honest element of the citizenship seemed powerless. The occasional election of a reform Mayor made little difference in the situation, for either through the impotence of his position or his personal incompetency, the spoilsmen managed to prevail. The Common Council was the supreme power, and this body Tammany, or Tammany and Mozart together, generally controlled. The public money was spent as the Aldermen pleased. The Mayor’s veto became a legal fiction, for a bare majority[14] sufficed to overcome it, and this could generally be secured through deals and the trading of votes on one another’s “jobs.” The veto, in the words of a later Mayor, amounted “to nothing more than the publication of his remonstrance in corporation newspapers, to cause a few hours’ delay and excite the contempt of the members [of the Common Council] who have determined to carry their measure in spite of his remonstrance.”[15] Public indignation resulted in another anti-Tammany demonstration of strength in 1863. The Wigwam nominated for Mayor, Francis I. A. Boole, generally considered as nauseating a type of the politician as Tammany could bring forth. Independent Democrats and some Republicans thereupon rallied to the support of C. Godfrey Gunther, nominee of a new “reform” organization--the “McKeon Democracy.” The Republican organization, however, stood apart, nominating Orison Blunt. Gunther was elected, receiving 29,121 votes, to 22,579 for Boole, and 19,383 for Blunt. At this, as in previous elections, there were unmistakable Wigwam frauds, such as repeating and altering election returns. Hitherto, in Presidential conventions since Van Buren’s time, the Democratic candidates had been nominated against Tammany’s resistance, the organization having had each time a candidate of its own whom it sought to force on the convention. In 1864, however, the Wigwam shrewdly anticipated the action of the Chicago convention by recommending McClellan as the Democratic nominee. On the night of McClellan’s nomination, Tammany held a ratification meeting in the City Hall Park, denounced “the imbecility of the administration of Abraham Lincoln” in the conduct of the war and “its ruinous financial policy,” and declared that it had “forfeited the confidence of the loyal States; usurped powers not granted by the Constitution; endeavored to render the executive, aided by the military, superior to the judicial and legislative branches of the Government, and assumed to destroy life and confiscate property by its unconstitutional proclamations.” Again, on November 16, at a meeting of the general committee, George H. Purser, a lobbyist and organization leader, offered a resolution, which was unanimously approved, practically declaring the war a failure.