Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [767]
The trustees encouraged other-than-wealthy visitors, but with little success, so they too pressed the city for land on which to build an attractive permanent home. After they presented Tweed with a petition signed by men who collectively owned over half the taxable real estate in New York City, the museum was given the use of Manhattan Square, a rocky patch on the wild West Side covered with rocks and stagnant pools. Convinced (correctly) that the municipality would pick up the bill, the trustees forged ahead, got Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould to design a huge structure, and pressed on with its construction. By 1874 the enterprise was far enough along for President Grant to come up from Washington and preside over laying the cornerstone. In haute culture, as well as in more frivolous enterprises, the haute bourgeoisie was making its mark on Manhattan.
55
The Professional-Managerial Class
In 1868 James Dabney McCabe’s The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries, and Crimes of New York City proposed that “the middle class, which is so numerous in other cities, hardly exists at all here.” New York, said McCabe, had only two classes—“the poor and the rich.”
Such a perception was understandable, given the glaring visibility of the city’s social extremities, but wrong. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population were middle class, an amorphous strata encompassing a wide range of conditions and occupations. Its upper ranks were composed of professionals and managers: doctors, lawyers, editors, professors, architects, landscape architects, civil servants, librarians, reporters, engineers, advertising executives, corporate administrators, lesser merchants, nurses, dentists, retailers, ministers, entrepreneurs, department store buyers, realtors, and artists. At its less affluent end lay growing numbers of shopkeepers, schoolteachers, clerks, and salespeople.
Its boundaries were fuzzy. At the top, the Gilded Age middle class bled imperceptibly into the haute bourgeoisie, with the border peopled by independently wealthy professionals descended from mercantile and landholding families. At bottom, the line between clerks and the more prosperous members of the skilled working class could be hard to discern, especially as clerical workers might well earn less than shipwrights or masons. Generally, however, a lower-middle-class New Yorker would probably take home two thousand dollars a year while a mechanic would be happy to make half that. It is only when looking at the mentalité of this new middle class—its values and ideologies, rooted in changing patterns of work and culture—that its contours come more sharply into focus.
NOBLE PROFESSIONS
The professionals and managers who set the tone and tenor of middle-class life believed that mind was mightier than muscle. As organizers and officers in the Civil War, they had mobilized manpower and deployed resources, initiatives crucial to the military effort. Such experiences gave them the psychic wherewithal to challenge the traditional republican conviction that all value flowed from artisanal or agricultural labor—that he who worked with head, not hand, was probably a social leech.
The increasing complexity of postwar technical and organizational projects further demonstrated the growing centrality—and enhanced the valuation—of skilled intellectual labor. The Brooklyn Bridge had continued to rise even as its engineer-designer lay sick abed, and Washington Roebling himself had drawn the appropriate conclusion: “When it comes to planning, one mind can in a few hours think out enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years.” Grasping the underlying