In 1900, American Civil War veteran and financier Colonel William d'Alton Mann sought to offer a cultural counterpart to his gossip magazine "Town Topics", an infamous publication which he used for political and social gain among New York City's elite. Mann purportedly used his "Town Topics" investigators to gather embarrassing information about wealthy individuals in New York Society and would allow these individuals to suppress the articles in exchange for monetary remuneration. This questionable practice led many historians to suggest the latter magazine functioned more or less as a means for Mann to collect blackmail: