Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [485]
Leggett’s fiery editorials against banks and monopolists won him enthusiastic supporters. So did his reputation as a duelist and his street-trouncing in 1833 of editor James Watson Webb. In the summer of 1834 Bryant departed for a lengthy European sojourn, and Leggett, left in charge, escalated his war on “monopoly.”
Leggett argued that growing municipal inequality and declining working-class fortunes were alike the result of special privileges that the rich and well-connected extracted from government through cronyism and corruption. These privileges gave their holders an edge over smaller competitors, while injuring consumers by boosting prices artificially. To bring down this state-supported “order of American Barons,” Leggett demanded government cease all regulation of the economy and replace case-by-case chartering of companies with a general incorporation law. This would allow “the humblest citizens” to combine their small savings into “a vast aggregate of capital,” which could compete “with the capitals of the purse-proud men who now almost monopolize certain branches of business.”
For all his blistering denunciations of “monopolists,” Leggett was no anticapitalist. His principles were, in fact, widely accepted by many “purse-proud” businessmen: Whig organs like the Journal of Commerce cheered when the Post attacked usury laws (restraining interest rates banks could charge) as “arbitrary and unjust.” Yet Leggett pushed his antimonopolism with such ruthless consistency that it transmuted into an almost revolutionary challenge to New York’s traditional political economy, which had long fostered mutually profitable links between magistrates and merchants.
Leggett attacked the monopoly on ferry service to Brooklyn as a prime example of “exclusive privileges.” City authorities, by refusing to license new ferry operators, enabled existing ones to jack up the price of crossing the East River, generating fat profits, which they then shared with the city. Not surprisingly, affluent ferry operators and their supporters on the Common Council were as one in branding Leggett a dangerous radical. But his rationale was essentially the same as that which the Supreme Court used to dismantle the Fulton-Livingston combine, and the limits of Leggett’s radicalism quickly became apparent when the Sun advocated public ownership of, and free access to, all ferries. Leggett indignantly denounced the idea. “Why not free omnibuses, markets, and houses?” he sputtered. The city, he insisted, should simply allow “unrestricted competition with no other restraint but the laws of supply and demand and we will have enough boats.”
Leggett and his followers tackled such powerful corporations as the New York and Harlem Rail Road, the New York Gas-Light Company, and the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company. They went after the fire insurance industry and denounced the auction system that had made Philip Hone’s fortune. They lit into banks, particularly those that secured their charters by bribing politicians. And to forestall further corruption of legislators by would-be monopolists, they demanded incorporation be thrown open to all.
Equal Righters also tore into the ancient network of municipal regulations, dismissing the notion that government had any moral obligation to intervene in the economy on the public’s behalf. Society was “too much governed,” they thought, and they demanded root-and-branch deregulation. They sought to abolish inspectorships and end Common Council interference with trade. They wanted to scrap the licensing system, which fattened the purses of butchers and grocers and cartmen