Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [677]
“WE WANT WORK!”
Albert Komp, James McGuire, and Ira B. Davis thought differently. In October 1857 Komp, an associate of Joseph Weydemeyer’s, gathered together some fellow radical forty-eighters into a Kommunisten Klub, which in turn helped revive the dormant Amerikanische Arbeiterbund. The Germans then joined forces with McGuire, an Irish labor leader, and Davis, an old Loco Foco man and cooperative movement activist, in an effort to organize the unemployed of all nations. As McGuire said, “If one man suffer, it don’t matter whether he is an all American or a foreigner—they all suffer.”
This working-class movement claimed state assistance as a right, not as charity or patronage, a call that resonated powerfully even amongst nonsocialists, especially in an Irish immigrant community profoundly scarred by the recent Great Hunger. As the Irish News wrote: “When famine stares fifty thousand workmen in the face—when their wives and little ones cry to them for bread, it is not time to be laying down stale maxims of economy, quoting Adam Smith, or any other politico-economical old fogy.”
Tired of upper-class bickering while the crisis deepened, the revived American Workers League announced a “work and bread” demonstration to protest the Common Council’s failure to act on Mayor Wood’s suggestions. On November 5 four thousand radicals, unionists, and land reformers gathered in Tompkins Square and marched to City Hall Park behind a banner emblazoned ARBEIT!(work). While a speaker perched on the fountain basin pointed out that “ladies throng Broadway every day buying silk robes, while the wives and children of honest laborers are starving,” a “Mass Petition for the Unemployed” was presented to Mayor Wood.
“Every human being has a RIGHT to live,” it declared, “not as a mere charity, but as RIGHT, and governments, monarchical or republican, MUST FIND work for the people if individual exertion prove not sufficient.” Specifically the unemployed demanded a program of public works at a guaranteed minimum wage, aimed at launching the new Central Park, sewering the city’s streets, “or any other public works so indispensable for the sanitary condition of the people and the comfort and safety of the wealthy themselves.” They also called for municipal construction of low-income housing on city-owned land and for an injunction against evictions of the unemployed. When Wood responded he would give the petition to the aldermen the following week, a spokesman named Bieler said of the massed jobless outside, “We cannot warrant that, their patience being exhausted, they will not help themselves by employing physical power with its accompanying brutalities.” Thus prompted, Wood passed on the plea that evening, and the councilmen announced they would advertise for bids to undertake the project of leveling Hamilton Square.
The next day, November 6, the fight was carried to Wall Street. A procession of five thousand chanting, “We want work,” trooped to the steps of the Merchants’ Exchange and demanded bankers lend funds to businessmen who would employ the poor. Workingmen, a blacksmith named Bowles warned, did not intend to starve while tens of millions in specie was lying unused.
Crowds were bigger than ever on Monday, November 9, and demonstrators flooded into City Hall itself. Councilmen agreed to authorize a $250,000 bond issue for Central Park but rejected further direct relief. Wood, himself troubled by the growing throngs, now decided to post police guards around government buildings and—remembering 1837—the flour warehouses. The next day, when another mass meeting at Tompkins Square dispatched a delegation to confer with the mayor, it found City Hall Park ringed by three hundred police and stocked with a brigade of militia. A few blocks further south, moreover, the