Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [814]
TOMPKINS SQUARE
“Things” got rapidly worse. Unemployment rose as the thermometer dropped, and the Committee of Safety issued a call to all “in sympathy with the suffering poor” to rally in Tompkins Square on January 13, 1874, and then march on City Hall to demand a municipal contribution of a hundred thousand dollars to a Labor Relief Bureau for the unemployed.
The press, badly alarmed, insisted the meeting be suppressed as a “communist agitation.” The Committee of Safety was adopting the “favorite tactics of the worst class of European socialists,” and on behalf of the unemployed—a “thriftless and improvident” lot. More hysterically (or cynically), it was asserted that leaders of the defeated Commune had smuggled diamonds—stolen from the churches of Paris—into the city to buy ammunition and bombs to launch a revolution. The Department of Parks had already given permission to use the square, but the Police Board, composed of wealthy entrepreneurs and powerful politicians, forced it to renege at the last minute. Word of the revocation did not reach the working-class quarters.
The next morning, by eleven o’clock, over seven thousand people had turned out despite below-freezing temperatures. The ten-acre park was filled, and the crowd, which included many women and children, overflowed into the surrounding streets. One corner of the square was occupied by twelve hundred resolute members of the German Tenth Ward Workingmen’s Association.
At that moment the police commissioner and a squad of patrolmen marched into the square. Announcing, “Now, you all go home, right away!” they immediately waded into the assemblage with clubs flailing. The crowd scattered “like wild birds” except for the German workers, who battled back until mounted police drove them from the square. As the demonstrators fled into adjacent streets, a Sun reporter noted, the police kept “close at their heels, their horses galloping full speed on the sidewalks,” their batons flailing. One zealous young German socialist, Justus Schwab, marched boldly back to the square waving the red flag of the Commune, only to be attacked and arrested. The police continued clubbing groups of workers for hours, Samuel Gompers remembered, in “an orgy of brutality,” until, finally, the area was cleared and still.
The Tompkins Square clash was a minor affair materially—a few score bloodied heads and arrested bodies—but a major one symbolically. It hardened attitudes on both sides of the class divide and shaped larger patterns of response to the depression.
Organized labor bitterly attacked the police, asserting their rights of free assembly and free speech had been violated. Iron molders rejected the way “every protest, petition, or demand of labor is met with the cry of ‘Commune.’” Unions and ethnic organizations raised funds for the arrested, tried and failed to oust the police board, and held protest meetings. The New York Graphic and the New York Sun—both editorial antagonists of the unemployed movement—similarly condemned the “clubbing of innocent and peaceful men.”
Police charge the Tompkins Square demonstrators, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 31, 1874. (Library of Congress)
Such reactions were exceptional. The authorities, the press, and the upper and middle classes were virtually united in their satisfaction with the outcome. Mayor Havemeyer was delighted: “Nothing better could have happened,” he declared. The police commissioner was elated: “It was the most glorious sight I ever saw the way the police broke and drove that crowd. Their order