Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [417]
Workingmen pressed their positions through a new paper, the Daily Sentinel, launched in February 1830 by Workie printer Benjamin Day and five other directors. But by the time of the fall elections, the party’s internal conflicts had torn it apart. Drubbed at the polls, finished as an electoral force, by 1831 the Workingmen’s Party had disintegrated.
The Workies’ collapse had many causes, including factional division, political ineptness, simple inexperience, a lack of funds, infiltration by the opposition, press hostility, the pull of regular party loyalty, and the arrival (with the 1830s) of a fevered prosperity that turned attention from politics to trade unionism. Perhaps superb leadership could have offset these handicaps, and if Frances Wright had in fact been at the party’s helm she might have made a difference. But in June 1830 Wright had announced her return to Europe to a packed (and half-female) Bowery Theater crowd, and she departed on July i, to Philip Hone’s great delight, and that of his opposite political number, Tammanyite Mordecai Noah. Further sighs of relief attended Robert Dale Owen’s closure in 1831 of the Hall of Science and its sale to a Methodist congregation.
If the independent workingmen’s voice was stilled for the moment, their words had entered irreversibly into civic discourse. Fanny Wright’s “doctrines and opinions and philosophy,” Noah noted, “appear to have made much greater progress in the city, than we ever dreamt of.” And labor’s political awakening would have both immediate and long-term consequences for New York City. The short-term impact was registered in the Democrats’ decision to woo disaffected Workies by assuming their language and their issues. Rhetorically, they denounced banks and condemned monopolies. Symbolically, they took the lead in organizing the 1830 parade celebrating the overthrow of the French monarchy. Practically, they helped enact such Workingmen planks as were compatible with entrepreneurial agendas. In 1830 legislators passed a mechanic’s lien law. In 1831 the state abolished imprisonment for debt in all cases except where fraud was alleged. The same year brought support for direct mayoral elections, a reform effected two years later with an amendment to the city charter. Such concessions brought many artisans back to the Tammany fold, and the following year Workie wards voted Democratic.
THE SUN SHINES FOR ALL
A more long-term—and more indirect—legacy of the Workingmen’s Party was the creation of a popularly oriented commercial journalism. In the Free Enquirer, Workingmen’s Advocate, and Daily Sentinel, Workies and freethinkers had passionately protested the gentry’s monopolization of knowledge, insisting that equal access to education, culture, and information was vital to a democracy. Most of their fire had been directed at New York’s stratified school system, but they also blasted the city’s press as being of, by, and for the mercantile and political elite.
Only the affluent could afford the dailies, which sold for six cents each (annual subscriptions cost a hefty ten dollars), and only the affluent cared to read them. The papers featured ship arrivals and departures, market and financial conditions, importers’ offerings, legal notices, verbatim congressional speeches, and vitriolic editorials denouncing freethinkers and trade unions or proclaiming the current party line. Editors, paid to merchandise wares and politicians, paid attention to little else, certainly not to the daily life of most New Yorkers. The lack of interest was reciprocated, and as a result the average circulation of all seven daily papers in 1835 was a mere seventeen hundred, with Colonel Webb’s Courier and Enquirer, the largest, boasting only four thousand.
Working-class New Yorkers were not lacking in literacy or interest. For all the schools’ limitations, they had helped nurture a plebeian reading audience, which publishers readily reached with religious papers, tracts, Bibles, broadsides, pamphlets,