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Balked, temperance advocates turned to the state. “Ought law to conform to public sentiment,” Horace Greeley rhetorically asked delegates assembled in 1853 for the World’s Temperance Convention, “or ought law to be based upon essential righteousness, and then challenge a public sentiment to act in conformity therewith?” The reformers answered by successfully pressuring the state legislature into passing the 1855 Act for the Prevention of Intemperance, Paupers, and Crime, a law that, among other things, authorized keeping persons arrested for public drunkenness locked up until they agreed to testify as to the source of their intoxicant. The statute aroused immense hostility in New York City, touching off mass rallies at Tammany Hall and bringing declarations from Bennett’s Herald that it would ruin New York business to the benefit of wet New Jersey. The mayor refused to enforce the law, and in 1856 the state appellate court declared it unconstitutional.

Setbacks in missionary and temperance work were accompanied by abject failure to check the spread of gambling. Jonathan Harrington Green, a reformed gambler turned professional lecturer on tricks of the sharpster’s trade, helped set up a New York Association for the Suppression of Gambling (ASG) in 1850. The board of ministers and businessmen directed executive agent Green to undertake a thorough survey of the problem. He reported back that there were 6,126 gambling houses in town—defined broadly enough to include the first-class “hells” where rich merchants played faro in luxurious surroundings, the dimly lit “penny-poker dens” where small-time thieves congregated, the lottery offices, the policy offices, and indeed anywhere bets were placed, including ten-pin alleys, billiard rooms, saloons, cockfighting pits, and shooting galleries. Green also noted the rarity of arrests: in the previous six years a grand total of fifty-nine people had been indicted for gambling.

The ASG professed great concern about the impact of these establishments on vulnerable young men, and it was true enough that gambling, like much else in New York, had rapidly shifted its nature in recent years. In the past, most recreational betting had been done with peers; monies won generally remained in circulation within the neighborhood. Now much of the wagering went on in commercial settings, organized by oftunscrupulous professionals who lived off customers’ losses. But Green and the ASG proved to be less troubled by gambling’s impact on youths than by its consequences for employers. In general, they bemoaned the gambling-propagated lust for quick wealth that was undermining the industry and sobriety businessmen wanted in their labor force. In particular, they bewailed the rising number of gambling-addicted clerks who dipped into their employers’ tills to make up losses.

Green’s contemporary, a young merchant named George H. Petrie, had visited London for business and to see the Crystal Palace, discovered the Young Men’s Christian Association there, and brought it back to New York in 1852 to “ralley around the young stranger and save him from the snares of this wicked city.” With the help of Mercer Street Presbyterian’s Rev. Isaac Ferris, Petrie set up a temporary sanctuary in two rooms on the third floor of the old New York City Lyceum at 659 Broadway. Clerical workers, many of them new to the city, flocked to the YMCA, attracted by its library and meeting place, network of friends and surrogate family, and help in finding housing, churches, and jobs with YMCA businessman backers. Such men, in turn, responded warmly to the argument (cogently expressed by the Rev. George W. Bethune at the second annual meeting in 1854) that the organization was “a principle of insurance to their interests,” a way “to make their servants—I mean those who are in their employ—faithful to their duty.”

For all its promise, the “Y”—which would itself evolve in unexpected directions—was not intended to transform the immigrant masses in the