Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [663]
On the law-and-order front, the councilmen were stripped of their right to sit as judges in municipal courts and lost the power to appoint policemen. Control of the force shifted to a Board of Commissioners (mayor, recorder, and city judges). Also in 1853, the police were given permanent tenure during good behavior and ordered into blue uniforms; in 1854, arrests jumped 40 percent.
The new charter also strengthened the mayor somewhat, by giving him a stronger veto that only two-thirds majorities of both legislative chambers could override. But the city’s chief magistrate was no Bonaparte. Since 1849 the nine executive departments had been controlled by independently elected heads, not answerable to the mayor, and they, not he, controlled most patronage, in conjunction with the legislature.
The charter secured, the City Reform League turned to the fall 1853 elections and backed those members of the regular parties (mainly Whigs) who agreed to run as reformers. In the nativist atmosphere, the reformers did well, with victory at the polls stemming in large part from a de facto alliance with the resurgent anti-immigrant movement. The Forty Thieves were swept out of office and into obscurity—except for William Tweed, who in 1852, while still an alderman, had run for Congress and won. The reformers were ecstatic; reclaiming the polity from the politicians seemed eminently feasible.
Holding it proved tougher. The new councilmen didn’t grant questionable franchises, nor did they interfere with the newly reorganized police department, yet neither did they succeed in holding down spending. Paying for those new policemen and the burgeoning school system helped boost taxes 25 percent higher in 1854 and 1855 than in Tweed’s two-year term. The disgusted Reform League repudiated its political progeny.
Worse, their alliance with the nativists, and the temperance forces active at the same time, tarnished their image, giving them a narrow and persecuting taint. Given that by 1855 nearly half of the eighty-nine thousand legal voters in New York City were naturalized immigrants, this boded ill. Their reputation was further sullied by continuing nativist street violence. In June 1854 a sailor named John S. Orr, calling himself the Angel Gabriel, clad himself in a long white gown, flourished a brass trumpet, and led a crowd of a thousand nativists to Brooklyn on Catholic-bashing expeditions. The Irish fought back with clubs and stones, then guns came into play, forcing Brooklyn’s mayor to call in the National Guard. Such disorders helped speed Know-Nothingism to total collapse the following year.
In addition, the reform movement split apart in 1854 when a critical mass of the membership, especially old Democrats like Peter Cooper and William Havemeyer, decided that Tammany had come up with a candidate they could live with: a businessman of considerable wealth and a reformer who promised to clean up New York City with Napoleonic efficiency.
“OUR CIVICHERO”
Fernando Wood had commenced his business career in the 1830s, as the owner of a grocery and grogshop near the waterfront, and his political career in 1840, when his immigrant longshoreman patrons sent him to Congress for a term. Returning to New York, Wood had invested his liquor store profits in three small sailing vessels and, by the late 1840s, established himself as a shipping merchant, leasing ships and engaging in the coastal trade with southern markets. A sharp practitioner,