Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [413]
In 1826 Langton Byllesby, a thirty-seven-year-old printer of English ancestry who had failed as an independent master, was doing wage-work as a proofreader at Harper Brothers, New York’s largest shop. In that same year he brought out Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth, a book in which he predicted that New York City would soon match London’s levels of crime, pauperism, and spending on prisons and welfare. Where Byllesby’s analysis differed from the equally gloomy reports of the gentry-run Society for the Prevention of Pauperism was in refusing to put the blame on working-class slatterns and slackards.
Instead Byllesby faulted the rich. It was they, he said, who were plunging the producing majority into “resourceless distress, and intense misery.” Merchant capitalists fostered rampant speculation. Auctioneers like Philip Hone got rich by drowning local industry in a flood of cheap British imports. The wealthy deployed new labor-saving machinery but harvested its benefits for themselves. Bankers monopolized credit and manipulated money for private gain. Landlords, having seized far more than their fair share of the soil in the old days, were now able to wax fat on levied rent-tribute.
Hard work, thrift, and the other practices recommended in the gentry’s book of virtues would never offset such class advantages, Byllesby said. Instead, city tradesmen should supplant the competitive production system with a cooperative one, by pooling their shops and tools, then offering equal pay for equal labor. Producers, moreover, should use their newly expanded political power to tackle the privileged position of parasitic merchants, bankers, lawyers, and bureaucrats. In particular, speculative uses of land should be forbidden, and land ownership restricted by need and use.
Thomas Skidmore had an even more incendiary analysis. The Connecticut-born Skidmore had been a peripatetic teacher up and down the eastern seaboard, then a tinkerer-inventor seeking ways to improve the manufacture of gunpowder and paper. When he moved to New York City in 1819, he labored as a machinist, worked on an improved telescope, and read widely in radical political philosophy and political economy, including Byllesby and Robert Owen.
In 1829 Skidmore issued The Rights of Man to Property! This tract not only lengthened Paine’s title but also deepened his argument. Skidmore attacked existing property relations as the ill-gotten fruits of a corrupt, colonial-era disposition of vast grants to a few landed proprietors and the ensuing failure to recycle this property over time to the wider community. As long as property remained “so enormously unequal” in its distribution, Skidmore argued, “those who possess it will live on the labor of others.” In addition to private property, Skidmore said, private banks, privately owned factories, and private educational institutions also worked to replenish the wealthy while depleting the workers. The solution was not education, pace Wright and Owen. Maldistribution of wealth was not the effect of knowledge inequality but its cause. Instead, journeymen and small masters—the backbone of the producing class—should use their political power to force an equal division of property, achieving redistribution by changing inheritance practices. Banks and manufactories should be publicly run. Land, the basis of republican independence, should no longer be treated as a commodity. “Why not sell the winds of heaven,” Skidmore asked, “that man might not breathe without price?”
Skidmore’s goal was a patriarchal utopia of free and independent producers in which there would be “no lenders, no borrowers; no landlords, no tenants; no masters, no journeymen; no Wealth, no Want.” To achieve this, men of modest fortunes had to combine with the propertyless poor and take electoral control of the government.
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