Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [415]
A brief but frenzied campaign followed. Bosses and the established mercantile press branded the Workies a “Fanny Wright ticket,” with editor Stone in the Commer-cial Advertiser calling them “poor and deluded followers of a crazy atheistical woman.” Tammany’s General Society disavowed any connection with the ticket, belittled its program, and called on “all sober, respectable mechanics of New York” to shun it.
The Workingmen lost, but they lost well. In an impressive debut they elected one candidate to the Assembly, placed a narrow second in six other races (including Skidmore’s), and won nearly one-third the total vote. The Democrats prevailed, but there was consternation in the Tammany camp.
As the Workingmen’s Party girded for the following year’s contest, however, it experienced tremendous internal upheavals. New recruits poured in, including many whose politics were quite different from those of the progenitors. One was Noah Cook. A commission agent for an Erie Canal boat line, Cook sold items ranging from cordwood to country real estate. He had also been an active Adams supporter in 1828 and was an editor of the Evening Journal. Cook’s faction, which included employers, evangelicals, large-scale manufacturers, and residents of the “aristocratic” First Ward, hoped to transform the Workingmen into an anti-Jackson vehicle. Cook allied with Owen and Evans to drive Skidmore out of the party he had started, then turned on the Owen faction and ejected it too, denouncing its education plan as a plot to break up families and undermine religion. Some journeymen, too, including the New York Typographical Society, attacked the state guardianship plan as dangerously visionary, though the Workingmen still demanded education for all and wondered aloud “if many of the monopolists and aristocrats in our city would not consider it disgraceful to their noble children to have them placed in our public schools by the side of poor yet industrious mechanics.”
Even as the party quarreled and split, one demand remained constant: more democracy in New York City. In particular, the Workingmen pressed for direct election of the mayor. They also asked that aldermen and assistants be paid, because “poor men cannot afford to spend their time without receiving an equivalent for their labor,” and under the current system “none but large property holders can be elected.” Workies wanted an end to compulsory militia service, an obnoxious obligation for men who couldn’t afford to take time off from work, or to pay for substitutes as merchants did. They wanted smaller electoral districts, which would allow “all interests to be represented” and thus offset “the misrule of the dominant party in this state, and especially in this city”—a reference to Tammany, which they believed was under the corrupt control of “idlers, office holders, and office seekers.”
The Workies were of mixed mind as to what to do with city government should they get hold of it. Some advocated an activist policy of mechanic’s liens, aid to internal improvements, government funding of education, and an ongoing regulation of the municipal economy in the public interest. But a greater number denounced government intervention in the economy—both the grant of special corporate privileges and the maintenance of municipal regulations—as an unwarranted colonial holdover, a violation of democracy on a par with the now eliminated suffrage restrictions.
In 1828 the Common Council still appointed or licensed nearly seven thousand people, including butchers, grocers, tavern keepers, cartmen, hackney coachmen, pawnbrokers, and market clerks, together with platoons of inspectors, weighers, measurers, and gaugers of lumber, lime,