Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [676]
WOOD REDUX
New Yorkers disagreed on how to respond to the crisis. On October 21 a thoroughly alarmed New York Times wondered if perhaps the metropolis needed a civic hero to rescue it—a Louis Napoleon who would put the unemployed to work rebuilding the city into a second Paris. The very next day, Mayor Fernando Wood, with at least one eye on the upcoming elections, volunteered for the role, proposing to the Common Council that the city both accelerate existing projects and launch new ones. Specifically, he urged the municipal government to build and grade streets, construct engine houses and police stations, repair docks, construct a new reservoir, forge ahead swiftly on the new Central Park, and buy fifty thousand barrels of flour, and a similar amount of cornmeal and potatoes, to be given to laborers on the public works in lieu of money. The cost of this crash program would be covered by issuing long-term 7 percent bonds, redeemable in fifty years.
To mobilize the upper classes behind this agenda, Wood argued that it was in their self-interest. Only swift action could prevent another 1837 riot or 1848 Paris-style upheaval. “Give no man excuse for violence or depredation upon property, that he must have bread for his children,” Wood counseled. “If the present want of employment continues many must rely upon either public or private charity, and I fear that not a few will resort to violence and force rather than submit to either of these precarious and humiliating dependences.”
At the same time, Wood appealed to the affluent’s sense of responsibility, in language (echoing his 1854 remarks) that was also calculated to demonstrate his sympathy for the poor. “In the days of general depression,” Wood argued, workers “are the first to feel the change, without the means to avoid or endure reverses. Truly it may be said that in New York those who produce everything get nothing, and those who produce nothing get everything.” “Is it not our duty,” Wood asked, “to provide some way to afford relief?”
Some merchants supported his program, if not his rhetoric. John Dix, a prominent railroad financier who knew where of he spoke, acknowledged that men of his class had engaged in frenetic speculation, were partly to blame for the panic, and had a responsibility to help their innocent victims: though he condemned the mayor for inflammatory language that might “excite the laborer against the capitalist, the rich against the poor.”
Others totally rejected the proposal. The Evening Post castigated its political premise: “Despotic governments do incur such obligations,” Bryant’s paper said, “but our republican system of government. . . incurs no obligation to take care of the vicious and the thriftless and improvident.” The notion that the state should provide work, the Post fulminated, was “one of the most monstrous doctrines ever broached in revolutionary France.” There was, perhaps, a duty “to relieve the poor and to succor the distressed,” but that was “a Christian duty, not a political duty.”
For all the talk of succoring the distressed, the rich—held firmly in check by the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor—did less of it than ever. The AICP loathed Wood’s proposals, fearing his “words would excite the harassed unemployed rather than allay their fears and lead to humble forbearance.” Hartley was determined that in 1857, unlike 1854, almsgiving would be kept in private and tightfisted hands. He successfully blocked formation of independent ward relief committees, which freed him from having to set up rival AICP branch offices in working-class neighborhoods. He was thus able to force the unemployed to travel to a central office, where trained personnel imposed rigorous means tests, which three-fourths of those applying for aid failed. Though eight thousand families were given assistance in October this was 25 percent fewer than had been helped in the previous prosperous year, a statistic of which Hartley later boasted. The AICP also made some ineffectual efforts to find jobs for the