Col. William D’Alton Mann (1839-1920) was elected to The Lambs in 1895 as a Professional member and there was never another member like him in The Fold. One of the most unusual members to ever join The Lambs was this Ohio-born polymath who was constantly in the press from the Civil War to the Prohibition era. When W. D. Mann was elected to The Lambs, it was thirty years after battlefield glory in the Civil War and during a time when he was one of the most controversial men in New York.
He was born William D’Alton Mann September 27, 1839, in Sandusky County, Ohio. Mann was a civil engineer before he entered the U.S. Army. At the time, if a man recruited enough men to form a regiment, he would be commissioned and lead them. In Detroit in 1861 he was commissioned a captain in the 1st Calvary. A year later, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel to lead the Seventh Michigan Cavalry, which was incorporated into General George Armstrong Custer’s brigade. Mann fought at Gettysburg, surviving unscathed.
During the war he got his first taste of milking government contracts to line his pockets. Mann invented and patented various improvements to soldiers’ equipment–including a haversack–and made a small fortune on sales to the U.S. Army. He was honorably discharged in March 1864. After his discharge, he moved to Baton Rouge and ran for Congress in September 1864 from the Third District. He lost. Charges of being a carpetbagger dogged him during his era of living in the South.
Following the war, he maintained the “colonel” sobriquet for life, and settled in Mobile, Alabama. He acquired and edited the local newspaper the Mobile Register and took a greater interest in politics in the late 1860s. He ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from Mobile’s 1st District in 1869 on the Democratic ticket. He was unsuccessful and entered the fertilizer business in Mobile.
Mann was also an inventor with numerous patents. In the age of railroad travel and luxury, he created the Mann Boudoir Car Company, a forerunner of railroad sleeper cars, later dominated by the Pullman Car Co. In 1872 Mann received patents on a sleeping car divided by transverse partitions into compartments. He went to Europe and sold railcars there for ten years. In 1878 he invented corridor cars and car vestibules used on trains built in England for use in Russia. Passengers in the U.S. and Europe loved the cars Mann sold, but the railroads were not fans because of the limited passenger capacity. While Mann pioneered train compartments, his company and business was swallowed by the much larger Pullman brand.
He arrived in New York in 1883. In 1884 his brother, Eugene De Wolf Mann, purchased the society journal The American Queen and changed the name to Town Topics. Seven years later he sold it to his brother, who turned it into a society gossip sheet. Mann left railroads to focus on running a publishing empire, using shady tactics. He was the editor-in-chief of Town Topics for thirty years.
Mann is sometimes credited with pioneering the “blind item” that gossip and scandal publications use today. Details of the matter are reported while the identities of the people involved are not revealed. Mann then blackmailed wealthy men and women to keep their names out of Town Topics.
In 1900 he founded The Smart Set, a magazine that would go onto great success in publishing short fiction during the Gilded Age. He also ran Town Topics, a publication read by the elite in New York City and Newport. It told of the comings and goings of the rich, and was a popular gossip publisher of the era.
Mann found the time to be the manager of the Herald Square Theatre in 1896, owned by fellow Lamb Charles R. Evans. Mann also invested in building the Circle Music Hall at the turn of the century, which newspapers gleefully reported the police department would not license to open.
Mann was caught up in numerous lawsuits over the years. The New York Tribune wrote, “from then on, his life was one libel suit after another.”
In the mayoral election in 1901–only three years after New York City consolidated into five boroughs–Mann was caught up in a case of making an illegal $200 campaign contribution to Mayor Edward M. Shepard. This was connected to Shepard and Tammany Hall.
During Christmas Week 1905, the 66-year-old Mann was in court against rival Collier’s magazine. He was cooped up in a courtroom for weeks. It was front page news, and even Mark Twain attended the trial. In early 1906 Mann took the witness stand in state court to defend himself from charges that certain millionaires–including J. P. Morgan and William K. Vanderbilt–were on a list of men who could not be touched in Town Topics. It was alleged that Mann used his publication to attack rivals in his scandal sheet. Mann’s business was to sell “subscriptions” to wealthy men for $1,500, including John Jacob Astor and Clarence Mackay, in exchange for favorable articles and photos in the magazine. Mann was in the hot seat when his business practices were revealed that scores of wealthy families paid him to keep their names out of Town Topics. The names of Charles Schwab and the Rockefellers were dragged into the case. Mann was labeled a blackmailer and Town Topics called a conspiracy to shake down the wealthy. He lost the case. He then was sued for libel. He won.
In 1911 he was sued by his former business partner John Adams Thayer for $50,000 in profits from the Smart Set. In 1912 his son-in-law, Senator Albert A. Wray, sued him for $200,000 for for the alleged alienation of the affections of his wife, who was Mann’s daughter, Emma. The 73-year-old publisher lost the case, and was forced in 1916 to sell his estate on Lake George and turn over the proceeds to the state.
Mann was married at least three times. He belonged to numerous veterans organizations connected to the Grand Army of the Republic. In addition to The Lambs, he was a member of the Lotos Club, the Manhattan Club, the Transportation Club, and the Press Club.
Mann owned a mansion on ten acres in Montclair, New Jersey. He died there May 17, 1920, of influenza. W. D. Mann was eighty years old. He was interred in the same place as many of his Gilded Age associates and Civil War veterans, Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx.
–Researched & written by Shepherd Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, 2025.