Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [665]
Equally disturbing was his continuing popularity with the immigrant laboring classes. Wood established a “Complaint Book” in which citizens could register charges against crooked or exploiting employers, or obnoxious policemen and public officials. He appointed Irishmen to the police in growing numbers (by 1855, they constituted 27 percent of the force and outnumbered native-born members in heavily Irish wards).
Temperance, but no Maine Law, Pi. Fay’s 1884 depiction of the interior of the Gem Saloon, a fashionably rococo establishment that stood on the corner of Broadway and Worth Street. The top-hatted man shaking hands in the center is Mayor Fernando Wood, who opposed adoption of a state prohibition law and subsequently refused to enforce it on constitutional grounds. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps and Pictures)
Most alarming of all, when the economy buckled, Wood called for aiding the unemployed with public assistance and public jobs.
In the winter of 1854-55, the great boom faltered badly. A string of commercial failures and a flurry of frauds and defalcations failed to touch off a full-scale depression but did precipitate a recessionary crisis. Factories, shipyards, and the building trades laid off massive numbers of employees. As a cold wave drove the temperature to minus ten Fahrenheit, charities tried to succor the suffering. Soup kitchens set up by rich merchants fed twelve thousand a day—A. T. Stewart opened one in the basement of his Marble Palace—but most relief givers were quickly overwhelmed. The AICP warned in January it had nearly exhausted its treasury helping some fifty thousand needy, and issued what for the laissez-faire organization was a humiliating plea to the Municipal Almshouse Department to increase public spending on outdoor relief.
Meanwhile, thousands were listening to more radical solutions to their plight. Rallies in City Hall Park and elsewhere around the city hailed speakers who denounced unemployment, high prices and rents, and speculators in land and bread. Mass meetings passed resolutions calling on the city to “secure to us our right to labor” by providing jobs on public works, including an immediate start to construction on the Central Park reservoir “to furnish employment to those who do not covet the degradation of beggary.” Demonstrators called for an urban homestead act, asking the Common Council to distribute common lands to workers and appropriate half a million dollars with which to build “inalienable homes.” They also wanted evictions of the destitute stopped, with landlords to be indemnified out of public funds, and a three-million-dollar loan fund established to transport idled workers west. These were hardly extrava-
Labor demonstration in City Hall Park, demanding relief for the unemployed. From an 1855 nativist tract, The Crisis; or, the Enemies of America Unmasked. (Courtesy of American Social History Project. Graduate School and University Center. City University of New York)
gant demands, one shoemaker noted, at a time when “Louis Napoleon had given four millions and a half to build houses for the workingmen.”
The unemployed rebuffed the wealthy’s offer of charity and insisted on public aid as a citizen’s right. “Need pounds with heavy fists on the door of public attention,” thundered Wilhelm Weitling, “which has offered only beggars-soup in response. Beggars-soup! Beggars-soup!! In America it has already come to that.”
The Herald