Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [797]
Wealthy New Yorkers, however, were horrified by the red flags, the socialist speeches, the carnage of Bloody Week. Many hailed the violent suppression; George Templeton Strong professed delight that the “foot of the bourgeoisie is on the neck of the dreaded and hated Rouges at last,” rendering them powerless, “if anything short of extermination” could do so.
Equally horrifying was the thought that such scenes might be reenacted in New York. Godkin’s Nation saw the socialist specter “gaining among the working-classes all over the world” and declared one had to be “wilfully blind” to “imagine that America is going to escape the convulsion.” Charles Loring Brace insisted that “there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris,” and the Times concurred. The “terrible proletaire class” had already shown its revolutionary head during the draft riots, the Times recalled, when for a few days in 1863, “New York seemed like Paris, under the Reds in 1870.” Now matters were arguably worse, as there were “communist leaders and ‘philosophers’ and reformers” in New York, ready to stir up the “seething, ignorant, passionate, half-criminal class” who “hate and envy the rich.” Should “some such opportunity occur as was present in Paris,” we should soon see “a sudden storm of communistic revolutions even in New York such as would astonish all who do not know these classes.”
ORANGE AND GREEN
In early July 1871 a group of Protestant Irish-Americans—the Loyal Order of Orange—requested police permission to march through the city streets to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne. Irish Catholic organizations protested that the parade would be an insult to their community and pointed to the Orangemen’s behavior the previous July 12, when they had marched up Eighth Avenue to Elm Park on 92nd Street. As they went they had taunted residents of Hell’s Kitchen, Irish Catholic laborers laying pipelines in 59th Street, and others who were broadening the boulevard farther uptown. They’d spewed epithets and sung insulting tunes, such as “Croppies, Lie Down,” whose refrain ended: “Our foot on the neck of the Croppy we’ll keep.” A crowd of enraged workmen followed along and attacked the Elm Park picnickers with stones and clubs. Shots were exchanged, and eight people were killed.
Such disgraceful scenes, the Catholics argued, must not be repeated. The Orangemen sought “race ascendancy,” argued Patrick Ford, Galway-born editor of the recently established Irish World. They hoped, in league with the nativist “Anglo-American element,” to make the United States a thoroughly “Saxon” nation. But the United States, Ford argued, articulating what would emerge as a major strand of metropolitan thought and feeling, was in fact a multicultured construction—“a political, not a natural, nation.” “This people are not one,” Ford insisted. “In blood, in religion, in traditions, in social and domestic habits, they are many.” It was wrong, therefore, to ask non-English residents to “ignore their own identity and origin” and “become Yankees first, before they can be regarded as Americans.”
City authorities agreed, noting that the use of abusive language or gesture in public streets was a misdemeanor and that courts had declared no organization had the right to provoke violence by inflaming the passions of other groups. On July 10, with Tweed’s backing, Police Superintendent James J. Kelso forbade the parade. Irish organizations and Archbishop John McCloskey (who had succeeded John Hughes on his death in 1864) applauded the decision.
Now Protestants protested. The next day, indignant Wall Street businessmen lined up outside the Produce Exchange to sign a petition denouncing the edict. Leading newspapers raged at the