Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [617]
Joseph Weydemeyer was among the leaders of those calling for creation of a fullfledged labor party. Newly arrived in 1851, Weydemeyer was a former Prussian army officer who had been converted to socialism and was now a close colleague of Marx and Engels. In New York, Weydemeyer first wrote for the Turn-Zeitung, then (by January 1852) established Die Revolution, which that spring published Marx’s masterly postmortem of the 1848 Revolution, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
In March 1853 Weydemeyer put out a call “To the Workers of All Trades!” for a March meeting at Mechanics Hall, to which eight hundred German-American house-painters, tailors, shoemakers, cabinetmakers, cigarmakers, Turners, and members of Weitling’s Workers League responded. Those assembled endorsed formation of the Amerikanische Arbeiterbund (American Workers League). It issued a call for what by now had become the standard set of working-class cultural, political, and economic demands. These included the ten-hour day, abolition of child labor, free higher education and day care, opposition to temperance, enactment of a mechanic’s lien law, unification of workers across national lines, and establishment of political clubs in working-class wards in order to “strive for the organization of the working class into a cohesive and independent political party.” The organization established a base of support in Kleindeutschland and German communities in Brooklyn, Williamsburgh, and Staten Island but failed to reach much beyond them, although an Irish Societies Convention also emerged in 1853 to push for some of the same reforms.
Though nothing like the scenarios envisioned by enthusiastic immigrant revolutionaries would come to pass, their campaigns, coupled with the Astor riot and patently appalling slum conditions, would have a tremendous impact on reform-minded members of the city’s upper classes, the men and women who though reaping the benefits of the boom were increasingly alarmed by some of its consequences.
44
Into the Crazy-Loved Dens of Death
As New York’s propertied classes surveyed the new metropolitan landscape, their pride in the city and its power was laced with a sour frustration, even revulsion. All around them stretched noisome urban marchlands where the writ of gentility hadn’t run in years—Five Points, Corlear’s Hook, Dutch Hill, the black enclave around Bancker Street, Kleindeutschland, the Hudson River waterfront, and the sprawling eastside industrial precincts between 14th and 23rd streets—nurseries every one of unionism, radicalism, Catholicism, pugilism, vice, squalor, and disease. Take care, respectable citizens, when you descend into these haunts of “rum-degraded human beings,” warned Solon Robinson in Hot Corn (1854), a popular collection of sunlight-and-shadow vignettes. “You may meet someone, perhaps a man, perhaps a woman, who in their drunken frenzy may thrust you, for the very hatred of your better clothes, or the fear that you have come to rescue them from their crazy-loved dens of death.”
In fact no part of town seemed safe anymore. Prostitutes, homeless urchins, vagabonds, beggars, and other “social rats” had free run of the streets, and legislators investigating conditions in Corlear’s Hook worried that the cancerous horrors of the slums were spreading relentlessly through New York’s “veins and arteries.” If nothing were done, they continued, “the heart and limbs of the city will sooner or later suffer, as surely as the vitals of the human system must suffer by the poisoning or disease of the smallest vehicle.” Once bucolic suburbs weren’t immune from infection either, thanks to the ease of travel by railroad and steamboat. On summer Sundays and holidays, growled George Templeton Strong, “the civic scum