Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [487]
Certainly the newly reelected Mayor Lawrence was not prepared for the enthusiasm of his followers when, on New Year’s Day 1837, he opened his house to the public in the traditional manner. To the delight of Philip Hone, who recorded the proceedings in his diary, the Democratic masses treated Lawrence’s house like a Five Points tavern. “Every scamp who has bawled out ‘Huzza for Lawrence’ and ‘Down with the Whigs’ considered himself authorized to use him and his house and furniture at his pleasure; to wear his hat in his presence, to smoke and spit upon his carpet, to devour his beef and turkey, and wipe his greasy fingers upon the curtains.” Served Lawrence right, Hone thought. Having pandered to the lower orders, he’d have to put up with them, lest they throw him out of City Hall in favor of one of their own class, who would be even “less troubled than him with aristocratical notions of decency, order, and sobriety.”
“TO HART’S FLOUR STORE!”
Over the next several months, as the speculative binge continued at a frenzied pace, inflation ravaged the populace. By February 1837 the price of flour had shot up to nearly $12.00 a bushel—from $4.87 back in December 1834—and pork went from $13.00 to $24.50 per barrel over the same period.
Rumors circulated that the city’s flour merchants—firms like Eli Hart and Company and S. B. Herrick and Son—were hoarding great quantities of flour and grain, hoping to drive prices even higher. New York’s commission merchants had traditionally bought farmers’ crops, stored the grain in huge warehouses, and waited for the most profitable moment to sell. Such behavior, perfectly in tune with the new market universe, was utterly at variance with the old but not forgotten moral economy, and it touched off a spate of angry editorials. “An atrocious and wicked conspiracy by rich speculators” was underway, the Herald claimed, and the New Era, a new penny press, castigated “monopolists” as “veritable vermin who prey upon the community.”
More than food was surging in cost. Coal prices were going up, and the New Era suggested forming cooperatives for the purchase and sale of fuel. Rents too were climbing rapidly, and the same paper called on the city to build small one-family dwellings, a pioneering proposal for what would come to be called public housing. Bennett counseled (in the Herald on February 3) that tenants who could not meet the exorbitant demands of the “real estate monopoly” should refuse to leave their apartments after leases expired May i, thus forcing landlords into court. He proposed a mass meeting in the Park to consider such propositions.
A week later, with the city enveloped in snow and icy winds, placards went up around town, over the signature of several Loco Foco leaders, calling for a four P.M. rally at City Hall on Monday, February 13, to air grievances. “BREAD, MEAT, RENT, FUEL! THEIRPRICES MUST COME DOWN!” it blared. “The People will meet in the PARK,” it explained, to “inquire into the Cause of the present unexampled Distress, and to devise a suitable Remedy. All Friends of Humanity, determined to resist Monopolists and Extortioners, are invited to attend.” The Post and Herald urged participation.
Monday the thirteenth was winter’s bitterest day to date, with wind whipping through the Park, but roughly five thousand people showed up. Loco Foco speakers, among them Alexander Ming, argued the connections between the flood of paper currency and the inflationary spiral. They read off and won assent to resolutions demanding hard money and an end to ferry and market monopolies and to municipal interference in trade. But what really got the crowd’s blood up were those speakers who bluntly blamed landlords and flour merchants for the outrageous price of shelter and provisions.
The last speaker, a man whose identity was never ascertained, tore