Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [778]
Dick’s trajectory is not from rags to riches but from rags to ’spectability. Alger’s sermons, like those of Beecher and Moody, honored not robber-baron rapacity but middle-class diligence. He counseled ambitious young boys to make themselves useful and acceptable to potential employers—to prepare themselves, as it were, for the dispensation of economic grace. Alger’s secularized vision of salvation demanded ongoing subordination, not manly independence, as illustrated by the once scrappy Dick’s now humble response to his job offer: “I’ll try to serve you so faithfully, sir, that you won’t repent having taken me into your service.” His was a creed for clerks.
THE POLITICS OF DECENCY
The question of how to apply science to society—particularly the affairs of New York City—posed a conundrum for the middle class in general, and its intellectuals in particular. On the one hand, there was continuing enthusiasm in the postwar years for “scientific governance”: action by experts, armed with up-to-date statistical information, to improve urban conditions. On the other hand, “social Darwinism” won many advocates; this credo, as expounded by Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher, and William Graham Sumner, the Yale sociologist, suggested that evolution’s natural workings should not be interfered with by misguided state-based activists, even in the name of science, compassion, or justice. In the 1860s and 1870s New York’s college-educated professionals veered back and forth between purposive social action and a revitalized laissez-faire, but people of both persuasions agreed the government of New York City was in the wrong hands.
Disgruntled observers believed the public sector responded all too readily to particularistic political and economic interests. Politicians pandered to the urban proletariat, dispensing largesse to alien immigrant voters, and self-serving businessmen barged their way into the legislative process, buying what favors they needed. Both streams of corruption commingled in the ample person of Boss Tweed—crony of Jay Gould, patron of the Irish, enemy of good government. There were, to be sure, sanitary engineers, landscape architects, educators, and physicians sprinkled throughout city government who had carved out positions of some independence—witness Croton engineer Craven—but trained intellectuals were generally shunted aside or forced to make dishonorable compromises with ignorant politicians.
What New York needed, argued the American Social Science Association (1865), was a neutral corps of experts, along the lines of the English civil service, in which Oxford and Cambridge graduates found respected positions administering the realm. To achieve it, the association called for civil service reform—taking public jobs away from party spoilsmen and giving them to qualified professionals—and a campaign got underway in which George William Curtis, political editor of Harper’s Weekly, assumed the leading role.
Social Darwinists like E. L. Godkin also supported civil service reform. Godkin, a middle-class Protestant born in Northern Ireland, had emigrated to New York in 1856, having received a rigorous training in classical political economy at Queens College, Belfast. He began a career as free-lance journalist and, in 1865, accepted editorship of the Nation, which Olmsted had urged the Union League Club to establish. Godkin used his magazine pulpit to warn cultivated middle-class readers about looming threats to laissez-faire. Manufacturers wanted tariffs, which would disrupt the free flow of trade between nations. Greenbackers sought to block restoration of the gold standard, the only rational form of specie. The labor movement wanted to tamper with the “eternal laws of political economy” by imposing an eight-hour day, as preposterous an idea as legislating against the attraction of gravity. For Godkin, the most “scientific” government was the