After a corrupt Congressional electoral committee declared Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the winner of the 1876 presidential election, Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate and the actual winner of the election, left politics and, as Gore Vidal delicately put it, "retired to private life and to the pleasures of what old-time New Yorkers used to recall, wistfully, as one of the greatest collections of pornography in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan." One hundred and twenty-four years later,
