Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [615]
Bosses and businessmen were convinced this upheaval was the work of outside agitators—Bennett’s Herald blamed the “vast importations of foreign socialists”—and indeed the overseas influence was decisive. But these “alien” ideas had local analogues. It was, after all, the “American” Brotherhood of the Union that in 1850 denounced the competition fostered by “capitalists, monopolists and tyrants” as tending to “divide, distract, and degrade Labor, and render the laborer and the mechanic a mere tool of those whose only God is Gold.”
During the upheaval, workers strove with considerable success to overcome national divisions. Many remembered 1846, when five hundred Irish laborers at the new Atlantic Docks had struck for an eighty-seven-cent hour and a ten-hour day, only to be replaced by greenhorn Germans provided to boss stevedores by the elite German Society, to the fury of German workers. Cabinetmakers issued their constitution in German, French, and English versions (“for the accommodation of all nations”) and conducted proceedings in several languages. German shoemakers forbade members to scab on their English brethren and adopted parallel wage demands. In virtually none of these cases, however, did labor ecumenicism stretch far enough to embrace African Americans or women.
New York’s white male workers of the world united more formally on June 5, 1850, when eighty-three delegates, representing seventy unions and twenty-eight reform groups, formed the Industrial Congress. The new organization sought an eight-hour day, a minimum wage on public works projects, and direct city hiring of workers rather than the use of private contractors. It also backed the land reformers’ initiatives, favoring a homestead law to open the West and a housing law at home to oversee construction and inspection of tenements to ensure they met appropriate standards of public health. Industrial Congress delegates also urged the municipal government to foster cooperatives, establish a labor exchange, and build reading rooms and public baths throughout the city. Such demands would remain at the core of New York’s labor movement for the remainder of the century.
The Industrial Congress also supported embattled strikers. On July 10, 1850, a mass meeting of German, Irish, and American tailors proposed a scale of prices, and on the fifteenth some nine hundred tailors turned out to enforce it. On July 22 three hundred strikers, most Germans, marched to the Nassau Street offices of Longstreet and Company, one of New York’s largest clothing manufacturers, a firm notorious for low wages and antiunionism. A brawl ensued. Police waded in with nightsticks and arrested the strikers. Organized labor swung into action. On the twenty-seventh thousands swarmed to City Hall Park for a rally. Radicals and unionists denounced the police (“We did not expect to find in this free country a Russian police,” declared the Central Committee), and the Industrial Congress started a campaign to boycott any clothing firm that rejected the tailors’ bill of prices. At another City Hall rally, on August 3, some went farther and called for a general strike. If butchers and bakers were to cut off supplies, “then the aristocrats will all starve,” one militant argued, for “they are the drones and the idlers.”
On August 4 three hundred German tailors marched to 38th Street and Ninth Avenue, where strikebreaking subcontractors were at work. There, according to the Staats-Zeitung, police attacked the tailors; according to English papers, tailors ransacked the nonunion outfit. All agreed that a melee ensued, in which two tailors were killed and dozens severely wounded. Thirty-nine unionists were convicted of rioting and dispatched to prison. For the first time in U.S. history, urban American workers had died at the hands of the forces of order in a trade dispute. The event only outraged and strengthened the strikers. By month’s end almost