Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [805]
Now employers organized. On June 18 the industrialists and building contractors joined forces with the woodworking bosses and, at a meeting of over four hundred employers, formed an Executive Committee of the Employers of the City, dedicated to smashing the eight-hour movement—now depicted as the stalking horse for something far worse. As one steam pump manufacturer harangued the meeting: “I see behind all this the specter of Communism. Our duty is to take it by the throat and say it has no business here.”
Soon, indeed, employers brought in the police, who sent platoons, then battalions of men, many of them recent veterans of the Orange Riot suppression, to club picketers away from plants and open avenues for scabs. One after another the strikes crumbled. Steinway and Singer triumphed. The iron men surrendered in July. Many earlier gains were lost, and apart from some in the building trades, most New York workers were forced back to a ten-hour regimen by jubilant employers.
SPECIAL AGENT ANTHONY COMSTOCK
With the municipality’s political and economic order under control, reformers set out to restore decency to its moral affairs, with the earnest young Anthony Comstock serving as point man. Comstock, another New England migrant come to the big city, had been born in 1844 to a once-affluent New Canaan farm family come on hard times, from whom he received a rock-ribbed upbringing as stony as their Connecticut soil. With the outbreak of civil war he joined the army, only to discover it full of “wicked men” who swore and drank. His vigorous opposition to such pursuits did not endear him to his comrades—indeed he discerned a “feeling of hatred” on the part of his fellow soldiers—but, convinced that his critics were “under Satan’s power,” he prayed earnestly, if ineffectually, for their conversion.
After the war, like Horatio Alger, Comstock left Connecticut for New York, where he moved into a rooming house and found work as a porter in a dry-goods store. In a career that Ragged Dick would have envied, he was promoted to shipping clerk and in 1869 made salesman. By 1871 his salary had climbed from five to twenty-seven dollars a week. He used the five hundred dollars he had saved as down payment on a house in Brooklyn, married the daughter of a New York businessman, and joined the Clinton Avenue Congregational Church. For all Comstock’s success, what most occupied his attention was the shocking behavior of his fellow clerks. Comstock didn’t think himself a stuffed shirt—he was fond of practical jokes (of the exploding cigar variety)—but he drew the line at drinking, gambling, whoring, and particularly pornography (a “moral vulture,” which “steals upon our youth in the home, school, and college, silently striking its terrible talons into their vitals, and forcibly bearing them away on hideous wings to shame and death”). Early in 1872 he tried to shut down a circulating library of “vile books,” only to have a policeman warn the owner. Comstock got him dismissed from the force, then teamed up with a reporter from the Tribune, toured the Ann Street and Nassau Street porn purveyors, and organized a (well-publicized) police raid.
The muttonchopped one-man vice squad now came to the attention of Morris Ketchum Jesup, merchant, banker, railroad financier, and president of the Young Men’s Christian Association. Under Jesup’s leadership, the YMCA had been taking a carrot-and-stick approach to combating the deleterious impact of the brothels, gambling dens, saloons, and “licentious books” that distracted young men from serving their employers, saving their money, and rising in the world. In 1868 the Y had built a grand new residence for unmarried men, at Fourth Avenue and 23rd Street, which