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REFORM

In this atmosphere not only did Napoleon and Haussmann look good, but some New York elites looked with interest at a direct action model pioneered by their counterparts in San Francisco. In 1849 and 1851 the prominent men of that city had organized a Committee of Vigilance, which issued warnings to criminals, then banished some and hung others. Dissolved in 1853, it was reborn in 1856 as the San Francisco Vigilance Committee, still dominated by leading merchants. It not only hung crooks and shut up gambling houses but fought corruption in city government—by which it meant wresting control from the dominant Irish Catholic Democratic machine. This had been set in place back in 1849, when David C. Broderick, an old Tammany hand and Gold Rush migrant, had transplanted Manhattan’s political methodology, especially its ward-based apparatus, to the West Coast. Not only were the bulk of the vigilantes middle- and upper-class Protestants—either Whigs or nativists—but most of their victims were Catholics.

In New York, though some were tempted by vigilante or authoritarian models, most opted for exclusionary devices. In 1849 a group of nativists founded the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, a secret society with clandestine meetings, rituals, signs, distress calls, and handshakes. In 1853 the group was informally christened “Know-Nothings” by E. Z. C. Judson (Astor riot leader) after their habitual response to questions about their underground operations. The Know-Nothings’ aboveground operation, the American Party, aimed to eliminate all foreigners and Catholics from public office, to impose a twenty-one-year residency requirement for naturalization (time enough to reeducate victims of papist and monarchist delusions), to deport foreign paupers and criminals, to require Bible reading in the public schools, to ban the use of foreign languages from schools and public documents, and to break up all military companies “founded on and developing foreign sympathy.”

The nativists won support among respectable New Yorkers too, some of whom had been wondering if the city’s newest residents weren’t perhaps beyond redemption—so inferior to their predecessors, both morally and physically, as to constitute a separate species. Watching an Irish crew dig the cellar for his new home, George Templeton Strong remarked on the “prehensile paws supplied them by nature with evident reference to the handling of the spade and the wielding of the pickaxe.” The occupants of Union Square town houses and Fifth Avenue mansions were in fact nearly obsessed by the “brutish” or “simian” physiognomy of the Irish, vesting it with a range of political and social meanings: that Paddy was born, not made; that his physical and moral defects were hereditary; that like blacks, Indians, and women, he was inherently unsuited for republican citizenship. Yet despite some mutterings about disfranchising the immigrants, the city bourgeoisie still lacked the inclination to abandon republicanism—or the power to do so had it wished. Instead it chose to do combat in the political arena.

In 1852 William Dodge, John Harper, Stephen Whitney, and others determined to recapture the municipal ship from the pirates who had boarded and seized it launched not a vigilante group but a City Reform League. By March 1853 Peter Cooper had signed on as President (he would lead the reform movement for the next twenty years) and a host of dignitaries had agreed to serve as vice-presidents—including shipbuilder William Webb, rentier Peter Stuyvesant, Simeon Baldwin (then president of the Merchants’ Exchange), banker Moses Taylor, Times editor Henry Raymond, and several merchants, like William Aspinwall and Henry Grinnell, whose own methods in winning federal mail subsidies wouldn’t have borne close examination. Blasting the use of muscle and corruption, denouncing municipal extravagance, and warning that high taxes would drive businessmen out of the city, they set about the work of reform.

First they changed the charter. The City