Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [666]
Labor spokesman William West countered such laissez-faire objections from the standpoint of a well-thought-out, alternative moral economy. It was obvious that “private capital is insufficient to satisfy the demands of labor,” West said in laying a mass meeting’s proposals before the Common Council. “Unless you, therefore, substitute the public for private capital, in the employment of these thousands of compulsorily idle workmen, it must be apparent that the men cannot live except upon charity (which they will not ask and are very reluctant to receive) or by theft (which is their last alternative).”
Reformer Peter Cooper agreed, and in an open letter urged that the city either provide land or put men to work quarrying marble for the construction of new docks and piers. Even the Times came out cautiously for public works, while denouncing demonstrators as a “miscellaneous crowd of alien chartists, communists and agrarians.” But it was Mayor Wood who spoke most boldly of all, in his January 1855 inaugural during the height of the panic winter. “Do not let us be ungrateful as well as inhuman,” said the mayor, who supported Cooper’s dock-work plan. “Do not let it be said that labor, which produces every thing, gets nothing and dies of hunger in our midst, while capital, which produces nothing, gets every thing, and pampers in luxury and plenty.”
These opposing worldviews, poised for an all-out clash, never arrived at a confrontation. The economy lurched upward again. Unions returned to narrowly focused issues. Some radicals, discouraged, moved elsewhere: Joseph Weydemeyer headed west to agitate in 1856.
Wood pressed ahead with his reform program. When opponents in the state legislature threatened to curtail his power, particularly over the police, Wood was supported by two mass meetings of the wealthy and powerful including William Havemeyer, James Watson Webb, Commodore Vanderbilt, Horace Greeley, and City Reform League president Peter Cooper. Even the Times, more critical than most, remained beguiled by Wood’s energetic course: “Most of the objects of a city administration are far better carried out,” it declared in best Napoleonic style, “by a vigorous and arbitrary police system than by a representative assembly.” As his term ran out, a hundred wealthy bankers and merchants asked Wood to run again in 1856. Which he did, defeating his Know-Nothing opponent with heavy support from the East Side’s German and Irish precincts, helping send that party into steep and rapid decline. Taking no chances, Wood had also released some patrolmen from normal duties to help with his campaign and furloughed others on election day so that friendly hoodlums had a free hand menacing opposition voters. Despite some outcries, these lapses were not enough to alienate the bulk of the respectable classes, most of whom were overjoyed that Wood seemed capable of maintaining an electoral mandate from the poor at so little cost to the rich.
STATE OVER CITY
Balked in New York City, die-hard nativists, temperancites, and good-government men turned to Albany, where they staged not a Napoleonic coup but something almost as effective.
Upstate New York was a much more congenial stamping ground for such reformers. Not only were nativist and temperance forces far stronger in the countryside, but widespread rural animosity toward the burgeoning metropolis had created a host of potential allies. Upstaters denounced what seemed to them an urban trampling of the rights of man. On the one hand there was the expanding power of New