Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [678]
Despite the array of armed might and editorial calls to “shoot down any quantity of Irish or Germans” necessary—“Rioters, like other people, have heads to be broken,” cried the Herald, “and bodies to be perforated with ball and steel”—thousands again swarmed into Tompkins Square, and this time some of the desperately hungry broke discipline and launched a bread riot, seizing bakers’ wagons and invading food shops. Increasingly, however, protesters redirected their attention uptown, gathering in front of Superintendent Frederick Law Olmsted’s office carrying white muslin standards reading WORK/ARBEIT and WE WANT WORK and demanding men be hired from their ranks. The park commissioners, however, were also inundated with four thousand letters from job seekers, and in conjunction with local politicians they proceeded to divide up the patronage positions among this vaster body. By January 1858 a thousand men had been set to work clearing debris from the site; ten months later twenty-five hundred were so employed; by the following year, on a peak day in September 1859, thirty-six hundred were laboring away.
WOOD REMOVED
The winning of job openings—together with the patent inability to wrest further assistance from city government—dissipated the protest movement. By the end of November 1857, the crowds in Tompkins Square had virtually disappeared, and so had the massed police and military presence. Nevertheless, Wood’s combination of class rhetoric and public welfare cost him his remaining elite support. He was now, in their eyes, thoroughly identified with the subterranean city (“the canaille” in Strong’s word).
Days after the first demonstrations, and a scant three weeks before the December 1 election, powerful merchants in the Democratic Party’s inner circle bolted. Men like August Belmont, John A. Dix, William Havemeyer, and John Van Buren made common cause with Republicans, former Know-Nothings, and leaders of the old civic reform movement like Peter Cooper. A Wall Street mass meeting of merchants, industrialists, and bankers—claiming “our metropolis is the worst governed city in Christendom”—nominated Almshouse Governor Daniel F. Tiemann, a Democrat and wealthy German-American paint manufacturer, to run against Wood. Disgruntled Tammanyites (including William Tweed) were happy Tiemann was of their party, Republicans liked his opposition to slavery, and Know-Nothing men applauded his well-known nativism (tempered by a German background).
Spurned by the upper class, Wood garnered support from the organized workers. Ira B. Davis denounced the Wall Street Democratic renegades, noting that none had objected when the state government bailed out the banks: apparently what was “virtuous in them” was “a crime in Mayor Wood or the workingmen.” At a meeting in Steuben Hall on November 26, James McGuire announced: “We mean to make labor the plaintiff and capital the defendant.”
In the December election, Wood carried the heavily German and Irish eastside wards, but enough Democrats deserted him (especially in Tweed’s ward) to narrowly cost him the election. The fusion coalition’s 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent victory was probably aided as well by Republican state-appointed election inspectors, who closed the polls before workmen could leave their jobs to vote.
Over the next two years, business conditions slowly improved. Specie stocks rose as gold shipments began arriving again. Credit eased, and trade expanded steadily if unevenly, with far stronger European demand for cotton than for wheat. Foreign capitalists cautiously began buying securities again, though foreign laborers remained bearish and immigration stayed low. With a reviving economy—by spring 1859 the worst was clearly over—the labor movement girded itself to restore wages to their prepanic level. A new German labor federation was established in 1859, paced by cabinetmakers and pianomakers, and it embarked on a series