Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [411]
As a result, in 1826 two-thirds of the Common Council were well-off or extremely wealthy men. (Across the river, 75 percent of Brooklyn’s identifiable trustees and aldermen hailed from rich families through most of the 1830s.) The mayors, when the council appointed—among them Cadwallader Golden, Walter Bowne, Philip Hone, and Gideon Lee—tended to be affluent as well.
The strong presence of elite gentlemen in the party’s leadership was one reason that, for all the Democrats’ rhetorical populism, when a nascent labor movement emerged in New York during the late 1820s, it insisted quite forcefully that Tammany did not speak for or address the issues about which its membership was concerned. Within a year of the Jacksonian Democrats’ victory, therefore, the city’s workingmen launched an independent political party that advanced a very different vision of New York’s future.
WORKERS AND “BOSSES”
During the 1820s the transformation of the trades had accelerated. Craft work had grown more subdivided, less respected. In printing, entrepreneurs bought presses and hired “halfway journeymen” who had not completed full apprenticeship. In marine construction, nearly all shipwrights now worked as wage-earners for boatyard owners. In the building trades, speculative developers let out competitive bids to contractor-entrepreneurs who agreed to erect structures for a package price; they in turn subcontracted the actual work to builders, who subdivided the labor among crews of semiskilled carpenters and masons, thus circumventing experienced journeymen, whose status and pay eroded further.
Journeymen, recognizing that their employers were more often antagonists than craft-partners, began to draw sharper lines of demarcation within the trades. In 1816 journeyman printers banned employers from their meetings. Masons followed suit in 1819. Cabinetmakers, chair makers, ship carpenters, caulkers, cordwainers, coopers, house carpenters, and tailors—all established journeymen’s societies. Like the groups formed at the turn of the century, these remained primarily fraternal associations, which provided benefits to sick and elderly members, arranged recreational outings, and marched together in civic parades. Increasingly, however, they also operated as labor unions and began appealing to the public for support against capitalizing masters, whom they branded as self-seekers whose “only object is to accumulate money.”
Before 1825 journeymen’s associations rarely engaged in strikes. One reason for such caution was that the press uniformly and vehemently condemned such actions as unrepublican and cast participants as criminals consorting against the public interest, rather than as aggrieved members of the larger community. In addition, the state refused to grant such organizations charters unless they explicitly included provisions disavowing any intention of regulating work or wages.
Nor was it always clear who the enemy was. Many small masters were as badly squeezed as their journeymen. Many upheld the leather-aproned camaraderie of the Trades, refused to sweat more out of their workers, balked at hiring cheaper unskilled labor, and marched with their employees on civic occasions. But they faced sharp competition and grim choices. Either they struggled on as principled but ever poorer independents; or they became subcontractors to merchants and/or large manufacturers and thus accomplices in the degradation of