Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [481]
This touched off an inflationary firestorm. The cost of living rose rapidly through 1834 and 1835, then shot up 66 percent in the first two months of 1836. Philip Hone noted in his diary: “Living in New York is exorbitantly dear, and it falls pretty hard upon persons like me, who live upon their income, and harder still upon that large and respectable class consisting of the officers and clerks of public institutions, whose support is derived from fixed salaries.” Beneath the range of his troubled gaze lay the great mass of the population, upon whom the great upward leap in the cost of living wreaked far greater havoc than it did on any of the victims he’d mentioned.
Indeed the disparate ways New Yorkers experienced the inflationary spiral was characteristic of their differential experience of the boom years as a whole. For some it meant fabulous profits and pursuit of pleasure; for others, degraded work, higher prices and rents, poorer living conditions, a rigidifying class structure, and a new determination to organize in defense of a crumpling way of life.
36
The Panic of 1837
On Sunday, June 5, 1836, handbills went up around the town. Headlined THE RICH AGAINST THE POOR! they denounced Judge Ogden Edwards, who had just acquitted Richard Robinson of the murder of Helen Jewitt, as “the tool of the Aristocracy, against the People!” A week later, a gigantic evening rally drew nearly thirty thousand workingmen—roughly one-fifth of New York’s adult male population—to City Hall Park, where they berated the judge again, hanging and burning his effigy for good measure. This time, however, the huge throng was not protesting Edwards’s role in acquitting Helen’s killer but rather his sentencing of twenty journeyman tailors who had been found guilty of going on strike.
The tailors’ trial capped an employers’ effort to crush New York’s fledgling labor union movement, which had been launched three years earlier by workingmen caught in the boom era’s downdraft. In 1833 inflation had sent the cost of food, fuel, and rent climbing. To restore their real wages and reverse their declining control over the workplace, skilled journeymen set out to make Manhattan a union town.
In the spring of 1833 the Journeymen House Carpenters struck for higher wages. Other sweated carpenters joined them, multiplying the union’s ranks fivefold. The Typographical Association of journeyman printers rallied behind the carpenters’ walkout. Journeyman tailors offered support. So did stonecutters and painters.
With fraternal backing, the carpenters won. Almost immediately the allies formalized their ad hoc mutual assistance compact. Representatives of nine crafts formed the General Trades Union of the City of New York (GTU), an organization, the carpenters declared, that would stand as “one great phalanx against the common enemy of workingmen, which is overgrown capital supported by AVARICE.”
The GTU made clear, in the preamble to its constitution, that an irreparable breach had opened up between masters and journeymen—former partners in the Trades—to the latter’s detriment. “We the JOURNEYMAN ARTISANS and MECHANICS of the City of New York,” the document proclaimed, believe that “as the line of distinction between the employer and employed is widened, the condition of the latter inevitably verges toward a state of vassalage while that of the former as certainly approximates towards supremacy.”
Unionists denied their labor was a mere commodity,