Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [612]
Such demands, which already transgressed the bounds of the politically possible, paled next to those promulgated by the Tenant League. In February 1848, with landlords cashing in on economic recovery and immigrant desperation, Irish radicals and native land reformers established what they hoped would become a citywide organization of wage-earning tenants. Its goal, they declared, was to attack the “system of landlordism” as “one of the most blighting curses that ever was inflicted on the human race.” Specifically, the Tenant League called on the legislature to limit landlord profit from rents to 7 percent of the property’s assessed valuation, guarantee security of possession to tenants who paid their “legal rents,” impose a city tax of 3 percent on all unimproved lots (to discourage owners from keeping them off the market for speculative purposes), and halt the incorporation of building companies, which allowed combinations of capitalists to oppress the poor.
Picking up on Evans’s ideas but applying them locally, the Tenant League urged New York City to sell its public “common lands” only to those who did not already own other lots; this would allow urban “homesteaders” to build their own houses on city soil. The league also asked the legislature to forbid the renting of cellar apartments and the building of rear houses that left no part of the lot uncovered. It called for repeal of the northward extension of the fire limits, calling it a “scheme of speculators” to push Irish shanty dwellers off leased land. It denounced Moving Day—still going strong—as a landlord trick to raise rents each May. It formed lodgers’ leagues and kept track of landlords who evicted tenants and charged high rents, creating a counterpart to the landlords’ blacklist of delinquent tenants. Finally, it demanded the city establish a housing code and oversee landlord compliance.
The Tenant League proposals, which flew in the face of laissez-faire ideology and the interests of the wealthy, proved beyond the ability of the radicals to organize. There would be no direct collective confrontation by tenants of landlord power in this era. Poor people unable to keep up with burgeoning rents settled for individual but achievable tactics—fleeing without paying, or searching out ever more squalid quarters. But ideas like rent control and taxation of speculative profits had been placed on the metropolitan agenda. They’d be back.
TOWARD A COOPERATIVE METROPOLIS
In the meantime, the working-class quarters were afire with even more startling challenges to the metropolitan status quo. For decades Europe had been buzzing with a variety of “socialist” notions, nowhere more so than in Paris, where Charles Fourier’s sweeping indictment of capitalist civilization as one based on fraud, waste, and exploitation resonated widely. So did his proposal that dissenters should withdraw into cooperative communities—“phalanxes,” he called them—that would be the seeds of an alternative society.
Fourierism had reached New York during the panic years, courtesy of Albert Brisbane. The idealistic son of a wealthy upstate merchant and landowner, Brisbane was no intellectual; he always looked, said Whitman, “as if he were attempting to think out some problem a little too hard for him.” But if his versions of Fourier’s teachings were glib, he promulgated them with tremendous energy and swiftly won a crucial convert in Horace Greeley. During 1842 and 1843, the editor gave Brisbane regular access to the Tribune’s front page and added his own explanations and plaudits for Fourierism.
Horace Greeley was no socialist. A staunch Whig, he was convinced that capitalist growth would eventually benefit the working-class, that the interests of employers and employees were ultimately hi harmony, and that strikes raised the specter of class conflict and should be vigorously opposed.