Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [613]
It was, however, primarily from the middling classes that Greeley and Brisbane won most support—from people who concurred with their analysis of the negative impact of the “system of Free Competition” on life in the city. Charles Dana, Greeley’s assistant, deplored its economic fallout (“periodical crises and bankruptcies”), its psychological repercussions (“killing cares, harassing anxieties, hopes blasted, and unforeseen reverses and ruin”), and its ethical iniquity (fostering selfishness and duplicity). Most alarming was its tendency to concentrate economic and political power in fewer and fewer hands. Fourier had predicted that capitalism would lead to “Commercial and Industrial Feudalism,” with producers in bondage to large corporations and banking houses. His American disciples pointed to New York City, with its “ascendancy of a monied oligarchy and a commercial feudality” and attendant “degradation of the laboring classes,” as clear vindication of the master’s theories.
Greeley didn’t buy Fourier’s solutions, but he did believe that a moderate version, dubbed Associationalism, would sort out the problems of capitalist society without impinging on property rights or fueling class resentments. If artisans simply pooled their talents and money and established cooperative workshops, they could control their working conditions, retain the profits of their labor, preserve republican traditions of mutuality, and still survive in the larger free market economy.
As promulgated by middle-class activists, Associationalism drew some modest support from urban mechanics—a band of Brooklyn artisans organized the first American phalanx—and the city’s most effective cooperative was established by professional musicians. In 1842 the men who played in local theaters created the New York Philharmonic, a self-governing and profit-sharing orchestra. The Philharmonic, significantly, was 42 percent German at its inception, a percentage that leapt to nearly three-quarters with the arrival of revolutionary exiles, who brought with them not only a proclivity for cooperatives but considerable experience in their formation.
When Louis Philippe abdicated in February of 1848, the Parisian working class, so instrumental in his overthrow, won establishment of a Second Republic with adult male suffrage. But socialist (or “red”) republicans like Louis Blanc had pressed for more profound changes, including a guaranteed “right to work” in government-backed “cooperative” workshops. Blanc’s message had wide appeal in 1848. The provisional government emptied Clichy prison of debtors and converted it to a cooperative association in which some two thousand tailors made uniforms for the new national guard. Soon saddlers, spinners, cabinetmakers, masons—eventually more than 120 Parisian trades—had formed nearly three hundred production cooperatives, which collectively enrolled some fifty thousand members. Some were brilliantly successful, others failed miserably, but all alarmed the moderate republican leadership and horrified the bourgeoisie. Few co-ops long survived the terrible “June Days” when barricades went up and workers battled the army until being crushed in fighting that killed or injured over ten thousand.
When the refugees from this and other upheavals poured into New York City, among then- ranks was Wilhelm Weitling, a German tailor. Like thousands of his mobile countrymen, Weitling had spent time in Paris learning the skills of his trade and the language of socialism and had fought on the barricades in forty-eight. Now, in Manhattan, he proposed that New York workers create producer cooperatives, which would in turn