Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [1199]
2. Such vigorous assertions unsettled even Nature’s chief apostle, Ralph Waldo Emerson. When in 1842 Emerson made a lecture swing down to the city, he inveighed against “this world of material & ephemeral interest” but confessed that maybe it was only his own “poorness of spirit” that kept him from the city. Perhaps in his next “transmigration,” Emerson speculated, he would “choose New York.”
3. This hyperinstability was compounded, Joel Ross noted, by the hypermobility so dramatically evident each May Day. “It is so customary to ’move’ on this day, that it would seem that many change their residences just to be in the fashion” but whatever their motives, the result was that New Yorkers “are more like travellers who stop on their journey for the night, and start on the next morning, with little attachment to their lodging-place, and well nigh forget it by the next sun.”
4. The interracial heart of darkness was Almack’s, “the assembly-room of the Five-point fashionables,” wittily named after an exclusive London club. Despite Dickens’s mordant rhetoric, the smartly dressed and cordial African-American proprietor, Pete Williams, arranged a “regular break-down” for Dickens’s delectation, featuring the brilliant dancing of Master Juba. Not one to miss an opportunity, after American Notes came out, Williams renamed his now notorious venue “Dickens’ Place.”
1. New York workingmen’s egalitarian imperialism was surpassed by editors, politicians, and businessmen who smelled profits from speculation, trade, and investments. Moses Beach, editor of the Sun, howled for annexation of Mexico in order to provide access to silver mines, banking rights in Mexico Gty, new commercial markets, and a fresh field for canal and railroad construction. Indeed New York Gty boasted the greatest concentration of those who insisted it was America’s Manifest Destiny to seize the rest of the continent. “The extension of the republic to the uttermost extremities of this vast division of the earth,” Bennett argued in the Herald, “must now be seen as natural, justifiable and safe as the extension of New York to the Harlem River.”
1. The anti-Catholic animus hampered even Brace’s more radical efforts. Having explored the Italian section of the Five Points and discovered that poor Italian parents were indenturing their children to “Padrones” who exploited them as organ grinders, bootblacks, and flower-sellers, the CAS tried to break the traffic and started a night school for Italian children in 1855. But parents kept their children away in fear they would be converted to Protestantism.
1. Working-class spokespeople also protested corruption. Mike Walsh excoriated the “wirepullers” who rigged nominating meetings to choose corrupt hacks who would hand out city or state contracts to their buddies. He denounced Captain Rynders as an unprincipled hireling. He decried the rising costs of campaign spending, which meant, in effect, that no one could get elected who wasn’t either already rich or who “basely sells himself to corrupt and wealthy men.” This fury stemmed from the larger conviction that the supposed Democrats were betraying the larger interests of working people under the guise of pseudo-populist rhetoric. The fact was, he insisted, that “no man can be a good political democrat without he’s a good social democrat.” But Walsh himself was incorporated into the machine and sent off to Congress, and he was snared by the party’s coalition with southern interests (and his scorn for northern hypocrisy about wage-labor)