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The press was convinced that vigorous action had forestalled a host of horrors. Behind the Tompkins Square “rabble,” the World was sure, stood “the red spectre of the commune.” The Times reported (incorrectly) that all those arrested were “foreigners,” which at least proved that communism was not a weed of “native growth.” Religious spokesmen were even more ferocious, with one prominent clergyman vowing that if workers “lift their hands against law, order, and good government, they will be mowed down like grass before a scythe.”

The depression overrode middle-class republican inclinations to respect the “rights of labor,” or even labor’s right to public protest. Also set aside was the notion that capital and labor shared a fundamental harmony of interest. In smaller cities and towns the urban middle classes would continue to harbor older republican convictions and even blame the newly rich for many of the nation’s ills. But in New York City a social and cultural chasm had opened up, and for the moment, most of the middle class jumped to the side of the rich and powerful.

In this atmosphere employers rapidly mopped up remaining union resistance. In October 1874 stevedoring companies united to humble the longshoremen’s union. After a five-week strike, the union’s power on the docks was shattered. Wages plummeted to twenty-five cents an hour; they would not return to their 1874 levels for another forty years. Whitelaw Reid, Greeley’s successor at the Tribune, proved as ruthless an employer as editorialist, slashing his printers’ wages and replacing construction workers on the new Tribune building, when they struck in 1874, with Italian laborers.

The city did its part. Police smuggled spies into labor and socialist meetings, pressured landlords to evict radical groups, broke up picket lines. The city also (in 1876) laid off many public employees, hiring day laborers through private contractors instead, resulting in reductions of wages by as much as 65 percent. This in turn helped dampen wages in the private sector.

In these circumstances, union militancy melted away. When the Cigar Makers Union rank and file complained of their leaders’ inaction, they begged members to “remember the adage that prudence is the better part of valor.” Members chose instead to melt away themselves. New York City’s labor movement was not utterly destroyed, as it had been in 1837 and 1857, but by the late 1870s its rolls had shrunk from forty-five thousand to five thousand.

RETRENCHMENT

In the chaotic aftermath of Tweed’s fall, wealthy Democratic Party leaders like Tilden, Belmont, and Hewitt—coming to be known as “Swallowtails” for the cut of their fashionable coats—demanded a housecleaning. To refurbish Tammany’s image they selected former city sheriff John Kelly as the new leader. Kelly was a shrewd choice. “Honest John” had not been implicated in the scandals. As a deeply religious Catholic, a respectable Murray Hill resident, and a relative-by-marriage of Archbishop John McCloskey (who in 1875 was appointed the first American cardinal), Kelly had strong support in the immigrant community, especially among the Irish middle class.

Once installed, Kelly consolidated the Tammany hierarchy, formalized and centralized its lines of command, muted the power of working-class ward heelers, weeded out remaining Tweed supporters, and by 1874 had become the acknowledged boss of a revitalized machine. Setting out to topple the nonpartisan and deeply unpopular Mayor Havemeyer—who had given total support to Comptroller Andrew Haswell Green’s slashing cutbacks, which had only accelerated after the onset of the depression—Kelly ran William H. Wickham, a prominent and Tammany-connected diamond merchant. Wickham campaigned on a platform of kick-starting the economy (and aiding the poor) with a vast program of public works, while simultaneously reassuring the taxpaying community he would continue reducing expenditures.

Wickham won, as did the Democrats generally, and after January 1875 New York City