Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [611]
The solution was to use labor’s political power to break the grip of land monopolists as President Jackson had broken the reign of bank monopolists. In 1844 Evans organized the National Reform Association, whose slogan was “Vote Yourself a Farm.” The idea was to give publicly owned land to actual settlers, free of charge, while barring speculators and absentee landlords. The government—crucially—would also subsidize construction of republican villages and build government-owned railroads to get settlers to them.
Immigrant radicals also liked land reform. In 1840 Thomas Ainge Devyr, who had been a leader of the Chartist movement in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, escaped to Brooklyn, where he began agitating for free public land grants, government-owned railroads, and laws restricting wealth and landownership, and in 1844 linked up with Evans’s National Reformers.
Evans and Devyr were soon joined by Hermann Kriege, a Westphalian journalist and member of the outlawed Communist Bund der Gerechten (which later would publish the Communist Manifesto). Kriege arrived in New York in 1845 and formed the Sozialreformassoziatin (Social Reform Association), which drew nearly a thousand members, making it the city’s leading verein. The SRA soon had its own newspaper, the Volks-Tribun, and a Social Reform Halle on Grand Street that would remain one of Kleindeutschland’s most important public meeting places for decades to come. Kriege backed Evans’s free-land-for-settlers campaign, and soon land reform societies had germinated in New York and cities across the country. This popular demand for access to western lands partly accounts for the enthusiasm with which many New York workers greeted imperial expansion into Mexico and Oregon.1
For most city workers, however, garnering western lands at gunpoint, while perhaps symbolically satisfying, remained basically irrelevant. Without government support—as yet nowhere in sight—escape to the West was utterly impractical. Indeed some critics, who believed emigration schemes sidestepped rather than confronted New York’s housing problems, proposed tackling the land issue in the city itself. Mike Walsh, the Irish Protestant editor of the Subterranean (and Evans’s sometimes ally), believed that urban crowding was “the cause of more vice and misery, more suffering in every way, sickness, debauchery, seduction, assaults, and even murder, than all other causes put together.” But rather than blasting western monopolists, Walsh took aim at the most powerful landlords in New York City: Trinity Church and John Jacob Astor. Walsh declared Astor a “worthless wealthy drone” whose rent extortions amounted to a “legalized system of plunder,” and Trinity’s property, Walsh wrote in 1845, should be confiscated for public use, beginning with St. John’s Park. To encourage the Common Council to action, he blazed a direct action trail by climbing over the park’s fence and tramping on forbidden ground.
Astor’s death in 1848 at the age of eighty-five provoked others to pointed commentary. Bennett reprinted Astor’s will on the Herald’s front page and charged that at least half the estate’s enormous value was unearned. It was, rather, a by-product of the general rise in the value of New York City real estate, which in turn was due primarily to improvements effected by the city’s working people. Yet the millionaire’s legacy—apart from a bequest of four hundred thousand dollars for an Astor Library—passed not to New Yorkers in general but to Astor’s family, creating in the process a most unrepublican dynasty. Greeley took the occasion to propose limiting individual ownership of city land to a thousand acres. He also urged passage