Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [494]
Most men were not so fortunate. Some camped out in Chatham Square, hungrily eyeing the corn that African-American girls were selling at a prohibitive three cents an ear, waiting until ten P.M.—clearance sale time—when the chants switched to “Hot corn! Two cents!” Others camped out at the grogshop, downing homemade liquor at three cents a glass. By the end of 1837 many were panhandling outside oyster-cellar doors. Others had joined the throngs of women—many of them mothers with children—who begged in the streets or went door to door seeking alms.
For a time, the working-class movement of the 1820s and 1830s retained some collective energy. Laborers packed into a series of Loco Foco-orchestrated demonstrations. To cries of “Our families are famishing around us,” they backed calls for hard money, economy in city government, jobs on public works, and removal of destitute immigrants to the country. One protest meeting in Greenwich Village threatened to march on the banks unless given work. Respectable observers shivered, with one witness reminded of the “Jacobins, and the Guillotine.” No heads or tumbrels rolled, however, and the agitation came to little. Loco Foco Democrats soon effected a rapprochement with their Tammany Hall counterparts, winning concessions on the monetary issues that most agitated them. Their departure left workers leaderless, because by then their unions had been destroyed.
In May 1837 the Journal of Commerce had bugled an antilabor offensive. “Now is the time to deliver mechanics and their families from the cruel oppression of the unions,” the paper urged. “The rules of the unions as to hours, pay, and everything else ought to be thoroughly broken up.” Employers should lengthen the working day. “The ten-hour system is one of the worst deformities of their deformed code,” the Journal ranted.
Given the availability of thousands of desperate unemployed, the employers’ offensive to increase hours, reduce wages, and rid themselves of union troublemakers proved highly successful. By the end of June, as one journeymen’s association noted, bosses had effectively leagued together “to take advantage of the present depressed state of our trade and business in general, in order to reduce our present prices, and to render us, if possible, obedient vassals to the nod of the oppressor.” By midsummer the union movement in New York City was dead, the National Trades Union interred alongside it.
37
Hard Times
As the city’s shattered labor force headed into its first depression winter, Horace Greeley—publisher and editor of the New-Yorker, a weekly paper—warned that at least ten thousand of the jobless were “in utter and hopeless distress” and not likely to survive the frigid season. Greeley had urged the poor to “fly, scatter through the country, go to the Great West, anything rather than remain here,” but few had heeded him. Now he believed that only massive charity stood between the poor and utter calamity.
Many New Yorkers agreed. As in prior downturns, civic relief groups sprang up in each ward. In December 1837 a Central Committee for the Relief of the Suffering Poor was organized to coordinate these volunteer efforts, the mayor serving as chair. The committee raised money by sponsoring lectures and concerts, solicited donations in kind or cash, and established depots for receiving and dispensing aid. Greeley himself was active in the Sixth Ward’s Citizens Relief Committee, and it was there that he discovered both the terrible suffering of the poor and the hopeless inadequacy of eighteenth-century