Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [813]
Station House Lodgers, engraving by Winslow Homer, Harper’s Weekly, February 7, 1874. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
The Spring Street International (the American reformers recently expelled from the IWA) argued that the unemployed were entitled to better, as a matter of right. The government had showered aid and assistance on the wealthy; now it should “legislate for the good of all, not the few.” In October 1873 it proposed a comprehensive anti-depression program. New York should provide public employment on street and park improvements and in building a rapid transit system. The city should also establish municipally owned markets where people could buy necessities at cost.
Such ideas rapidly gained popularity. The Workingmen’s Central Council announced plans for a mass meeting to demand “Work or Bread.” J. P. McDonnell, an Irish Fenian and socialist, argued in the New York Sun that to make “wealthy citizens and law-makers” listen, labor should mount the “greatest demonstration ever held in New York.” Leading trade unionists endorsed the idea. So did German socialists, currency reformers, and neighborhood mass meetings around the city (including one of fifteen hundred French workers and refugees from the Commune). Wagons paraded through the streets with placards announcing the December 11 gathering at Cooper Institute. On the appointed day four thousand crammed their way in, leaving thousands more outside, as speakers analyzed the nature of the depression (in German and English) and how to respond to it.
Many blamed the financial system. Bankers and brokers—the “moneyocracy”—had obtained special privileges by corrupt deals with politicians, then used their ill-gotten wealth to “speculate in stocks, money, gold, or other commodities.” These operations had brought on the crisis that now endangered the producing classes and the republic itself. One long-term answer was to set limits on the accumulation of personal wealth, at a maximum of three hundred thousand dollars, by imposing a graduated income tax. In the short run, the city should undertake massive street, pier, and park improvements and construct housing for the homeless.
Socialists at the Cooper meeting offered similar prescriptions and added some novel ones, including suspension of evictions for nonpayment of rent during the coming winter and dispensation of a week’s supply of food or money to distressed families. Peter J. McGuire, a young socialist carpenter, later endorsed the meeting’s no-violence pledge but argued that if relief were not forthcoming, then “a provisional committee” in each ward should “take food” to keep people from starving and “send the bills to the city for collection.”
The Cooper meeting appointed a fifty-man Committee of Safety—nomenclature borrowed from the Paris Commune—and selected German, French, Irish, and American representatives. The committee organized ward clubs of the unemployed throughout the city and called for a meeting with city authorities. When Mayor Havemeyer did get together with a delegation of workers, it became clear that they inhabited different universes. Havemeyer expressed concern for the men’s plight but suggested, none too subtly, it was their own fault for not having prepared themselves for such contingencies. “I know that it is hard for you to be out of employment,” he said, “but don’t you think that workingmen should lay up something for a rainy day?” “Yes, sir,” a delegate replied, “that’s all very well, but workingmen can’t save much out of their wages. Rents are so high; and then many of us can only work four or five days out of a week.” The mayor responded with homilies: “Men who get rich, gentlemen, are men who save. When a man has Sioo in a bank he becomes a capitalist.” His father (a wealthy sugar manufacturer), Havemeyer remarked pointedly, “didn’t go to the beer shops and theaters every night.” Besides, public works meant higher taxes and the “confiscation” of property and so were out of the question.
The press was even less diplomatic The New York Graphic