Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [498]
Amid the clash and uproar of electoral combat, it was easy to miss the fact that while these realigned and oscillating parties in general presented New York voters with real alternatives on the issue of governmental responsibilities, when it came to depression-era relief they had worked their way, from opposite directions, toward a convergent position.
In 1838, when a group of citizens petitioned the Whig Common Council to restore the assize on bread—to put the city back in the business of regulating its price and quality—the supposed governmental activists refused. Indeed they continued to chip away at any regulations that hampered freedom of action in the marketplace.
Democrats, having long equated government intervention with special privilege, also adopted laissez-faire policies when they were in power. Democratic administrations cut expenses, sold off city-owned lands (at bargain prices) to reduce the debt, and in 1841 and 1843 repealed centuries-old privileges of cartmen and butchers, declaring that such market laws “no longer are observed and do not serve the people’s interests.” Some zealots proposed shuttering the city’s markets altogether and selling off the municipal docks, but neither side was prepared to go to such extremes.
A similar convergence marked their attitude toward aiding the unemployed. On the surface, the municipality’s response seemed munificent. The number receiving relief in New York City leapt from under thirty thousand in 1837 to over eighty thousand in 1838. Most of this aid took the form of outdoor relief: provision of food, fuel, and money to the impoverished in their own homes. In addition, the population of the almshouse jumped by a third, to over twenty-five hundred, with immigrants outnumbering native-born for the first time. The amount of money appropriated, however, as distinct from the numbers of people assisted, increased only marginally—though enough to hit a record level of $281,000 by 1839. Conditions in public institutions worsened accordingly; almshouse commissioners found “neglect, and filth and putrefaction, and vermin.” The Bridewell, city hospital, and penitentiary were also crammed way beyond their physical capacities.
Mayor Clark nevertheless claimed in 1838 that Manhattan was being too generous. Clark worried that New York would get a reputation for liberality that would attract desperate out-of-towners. Even at present aid levels, he fretted, “New York is likely to become the general rendez-voux of beggars, paupers, vagrants and mischievous persons.” Tammany men pointedly busied themselves in private relief efforts, dispensing baskets of cakes, pies, and meat to the needy, but when they assumed power, their position was much the same.
Both parties, to be sure, confronted declining municipal revenues, a function of the falling assessed real estate values, and when the rate of taxation was compensatorily increased by 38 percent in 1842, bellows of protest arose from propertied Whigs and Democrats alike. Indeed large landowners demanded municipal retrenchment and threatened to move to Brooklyn, which publicized itself as a refuge from onerous impositions.
City fathers of both parties justified limits on relief by insisting, in tandem with the directors of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, that healthy and able-bodied men and women seeking public assistance were not depression victims. The 1838 Whig Common Council committee harrumphed that charity would only “increase pauperism” and “promote a lamentable dependency.” In 1840 Democrat William Cullen Bryant’s Evening Post said the managers of public charity “were so grossly