Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [614]
Weitling’s initiatives resonated in New York’s German community, where most people, whatever their politics, were culturally predisposed toward organizations. British radicals, too, were familiar with producers’ cooperatives, which had been established in the north of England, and natives had already been inspired by the associationist and Fourierist movement of the mid-1840s.
Among the most powerful and militant groups to get behind the idea was the Turnverein—the gymnastics society—which combined a passion for physical culture with socialist activism. Thousands of Turners had fought in the 1848 uprisings. Now, as refugees, they formed the New Yorker Socialistischen Turnverein, whose newspaper, the Turn-Zeitung, promoted a wide range of radical programs, including Weitling’s. Together with English Chartists, Irish nationalists, and American Associationalists, the Germans set to work establishing cooperatives, and soon Manhattan blossomed with associations of tailors, cabinetmakers, upholsterers, cigarmakers, confectioners, shipwrights, bakers, shoemakers, and grocers.
In addition, the activists combined cooperative formation with labor organizing. In 1850, inspired by the ongoing degradation of the trades and by an inflationary spiral touched off by an influx of California gold that sent prices and rents climbing, newcomers and old-timers alike resurrected New York City’s union movement, all but demolished by the 1837-43 depression. (The Turn-Zeitung ran a series of historical articles informing readers about the 1830s labor movement in their adopted city.) This combination of resurgent unionism and militant cooperationism touched off an “uprising”—replete with mass rallies, marches on City Hall, and some bloody confrontation with the forces of order—that in a very modest way echoed the stormy June Days of Paris.
“WE DID NOT EXPECT TO FIND IN THIS FREE COUNTRY A RUSSIAN POLICE”
In March 1850 German cabinetmakers fanned out through the working-class wards, posting handbills in immigrant boardinghouses calling for a union and a strike. In short order two thousand had walked off work, marched around the laboring districts in grand parades, and forced many masters to increase wages and change work rules. By April unions had blossomed in almost every trade. Greeley reported on their meetings—the just-minted New-York Printers Union elected him its president—and promoted the new cooperatives as well. Weitling too was everywhere, giving speeches, penning exhortations in the Republik der Arbeiter. By month’s end he had brokered formation of a Central Commission of the United German Trades, comprised of seventeen unions representing forty-five hundred members.
The Irish community’s dander was up too. Irish tailors and hatters flocked to labor organizations or organized them where they didn’t exist. Irishmen were prominent in initiatives by blacksmiths, boilermakers, porters, shoemakers, and construction workers. The Irish-American came out for co-ops, declaring that “the principles of Association, can, alone” better the conditions of labor. Unskilled workers took the biggest steps forward. Back in 1843 Irish builders had helped establish the Laborers Union Benevolent Association, New York’s first mutual aid society by and for the unskilled. By 1850 it had enlisted over six thousand workers—many of them famine refugees, many with organizational skills honed in battling landlords. By far the largest organization of wage earners in the city,