Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [616]
But this would be cooperation’s high-water mark. Marx and Engels—Weitling’s opponents in the European radical wars—had derided such efforts as Utopian wishful thinking, and in New York, certainly, their tough-minded analysis proved correct. Businessmen attacked cooperative shops as the opening wedge of socialism. Wholesalers refused to buy their goods. Banks denied them capital or credit. The legislature wouldn’t grant co-ops the legal protections it afforded corporations, leaving individual members liable for collective losses. And with artisan-run shops unwilling to slash their own pay to subsistence levels, they were unable to compete with capitalists willing and able to exploit cheap immigrant outworkers.
By 1852 such obstacles had become evident to all, and mass defections produced a general collapse. Those co-ops that survived did so by accepting individualistic approaches. The one thousand members of Industrial Home Owners Society Number One (1849), determined to escape the orbit of Manhattan land monopolists, bought a 367-acre tract in Westchester County along the New Haven Railroad line, divided up the land into a gridwork of quarter-acre parcels, then distributed plots by lot. As of 1854 these suburban pioneers had built over three hundred homes, planted shade trees, built a commercial section around the railroad station, and incorporated their community as Mount Vernon. This was the kind of land reform that bankers and builders could live with, and legislators had no hesitation in authorizing such associations to incorporate; by 1852 there were nearly seventy. In 1859, similarly, Germans set up the Deutsche Sparbank, and within a year ten thousand depositors—the majority of them tailors, shoemakers, cabinetmakers, and grocers—had put in $2.5 million. For now, the most “cooperative” enterprises would be the corporations themselves, but the vision of a cooperative municipality survived and would be resuscitated repeatedly.
The unions proved far more durable. Some, on winning their immediate goals, did lapse into dormancy or continue on as mutual benefit societies only. But with employers constantly reneging on recent agreements, and inflation biting deeply into wages (the cost of necessities rose 30 percent between 1853 and 1854), unions old and new continued to launch strikes. The mid-1850s witnessed initiatives by omnibus drivers, horsecar drivers on the Third Avenue Railroad, pilots of the Union Ferry Company, Erie Railroad workers, hatmakers, cigarmakers, coopers, printers (now part of a nationwide organization, their local known as Typographical Union No. 6), hotel waiters, drygoods clerks, housepainters, machinists, carpenters, gilders, typesetters, and the German Pianomakers Union of New York City, proud possessors of the flag carried by journeyman pianomakers of Paris “upon the barricades during the stormy days of the French Revolution.”
Good interethnic relations remained an important goal. The Longshoremen’s United Benevolent Society, formed in 1852, had fourteen hundred members by 1854. Though overwhelmingly Irish, the Longshoremen’s Union boasted a banner decorated with the flags of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, Hungary, and Italy, all bound together under an American flag and the word “Unity.” African Americans, again, were conspicuously excepted.
Many, though by no means all, of these strikes were successful. Influential bourgeois opinion tolerated nonviolent protests; there was so much money floating around that union demands seemed both legitimate and affordable. As Harper’s put it in the summer of 1853: “It is reasonable and natural, that in view of the splendid trappings of our growing houses, and our metropolitan hotels, that the gas-fitters, and cordwainers and ladies’ shoemakers, and saloon-servants should hold out their hands for their share of the excess.”
Many unionists accordingly stuck to fighting for wages