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a strong western contingent backing paper, against eastern Democrats led by national chairman August Belmont, Samuel J. Tilden, and Horatio Seymour (all intimately tied to Wall Street financial circles), who insisted on government’s moral obligation to redeem in gold. In the end, Seymour got the nomination, only to lose to Grant and the Republicans, who had more decisively declared themselves for hard and moral money. Their word proved to be their bond. On taking office, Republicans immediately passed the Public Credit Act (in March 1869), which pledged to redeem bonds in coin and to make greenbacks as good as gold, as soon as possible.

To raise the massive supply of specie required for a return to the gold standard, the government planned to sell $i.4 billion worth of federal bonds, the largest securities transaction of the decade. For help, the government turned to a syndicate dominated by New York’s international bankers, including the Seligman Brothers (who had close ties to Grant and strong connections abroad), August Belmont and Company (acting on behalf of the English Rothschilds), and Drexel, Morgan (representing Junius Spencer Morgan of London). Syndicate members succeeded brilliantly, accruing hefty profits in the process, and on January 2, 1879, the country went back on the gold standard, a Wall Street triumph bitterly resented in the West.

52

Reconstructing New York

Southern planters and western greenbackers were far from being the sole concerns of the city’s propertied classes in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Memories of the terrible draft riots remained raw. The lower three-fifths of New York’s population seemed still in thrall to poverty, ignorance, alcohol, Romanism, and the Democratic Party, which some Republicans now believed tainted with treason as well as venality.

The Union League Club’s Committee on Municipal Reform, established in October 1865, caught the prevailing mood among groups like the Citizens Association and Chamber of Commerce when it wondered: “Is there not a member of this Club who had not had fleeting moments of longing for a temporary dictator who would sweep these bad men from our municipal halls and cleanse this Augean stable of its accumulated corruption?” Some Republicans were indeed convinced that setting the city to rights would require methods as vigorous as those employed in reconstructing Georgia or Mississippi, and they yearned for the dispatch of federal troops to New York.

But most preferred to resume the strategy, launched just before the war, of using the state legislature to override and supplant local government, thus bypassing politicians and encrusted special interests. Handing power to state commissions staffed with professionals, moreover, would allow reformers to assess and redress civic wrongs by using “scientific” studies of municipal problems.

Drs. Griscom and Sanger had pioneered the idea of scientific surveys and statistical analyses of municipal problems back in the forties and fifties. The wartime success of agencies like the Sanitary Commission had greatly strengthened reformers’ confidence that the fruits of social intelligence could be brought to bear upon previously intractable urban ills. Now, in the postwar era, “social science” (argued E. L. Godkin in the Nation) could be fully brought to bear on “the arrangement and management” of city life. The new optimism was caught by William Cullen Bryant in an Evening Post editorial. “Thoughtful men,” Bryant said, no longer believed that urban growth was beyond “the control of scientific thought.” Instead they were focusing their attention on “the important problem of how to plan and how to build a city so as best to accommodate business and promote health.”

Many businessmen were prepared to support such initiatives. Even laissez-faire stalwarts who, before the war, had balked at any legislative infringement on property or profits experienced a change of heart after the draft riots. The Citizens Association, formed in that upheaval’s aftermath and heavily stocked with civic leaders, would