Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [820]
In a step toward accomplishing Lowell’s program, the SCAA prevailed upon New York City to end the police department’s program of giving free lodging. Those deemed “worthy” were sent to special lodging houses like that established in 1876 by the Night Refuge Association of New York in the Old Strangers Hospital, on Avenue D and 10th Street. The vast majority were arrested as vagrants and jailed. Soaring prison occupancy rates prompted Lowell, in March 1878, to again appeal to the state legislature to construct workhouses.
In 1879 she proposed a law to incarcerate all women under thirty who had been arrested for misdemeanors or who had produced two illegitimate children. To prevent them from transmitting their “moral insanity” to others, they would be sentenced to a reformatory, under the exclusive management of women, where, under “tender care,” the “weak and fallen creatures” would undergo rehabilitation. “The very character of the women must be changed”—they must “learn to enjoy work”—and as this could not be done overnight, the reformatories should be places “where, if necessary they may spend years.” Though the legislature refused to embark on an extensive building program of either workhouses or female reformatories, it did pass an Act Concerning Tramps in 1880 that imposed imprisonment at hard labor in the nearest penitentiary for up to six months.
DISPENSING WITH DEMOCRACY
In 1874 Governor Samuel Tilden, elected in large measure on the strength of his role in prosecuting Tweed, set up a commission to study the “decay of municipal government.” Its members included intellectuals and influentials, like Nation editor E. L. Godkin and railroad lawyer Simon Sterne, who had been arguing for some years that the root of New York City’s problems was an insufficiently fettered franchise. In March 1877, after nearly two years of deliberation, the commission revealed what it thought should be done.
It called for a constitutional amendment that would establish a Board of Finance, to be elected solely by men who paid taxes on property worth over five thousand dollars or an annual rent higher than $250. This board would appoint all financial and legal officers of the city and take control over all municipal revenues and expenditures. The rest of the citizenry could still participate in electing the mayor and Board of Aldermen, but these worthies would be effectively stripped of their power to distribute public goods and services. The city would become more like a business corporation, where ultimate authority was reserved to those who provided the capital, in this case the leading taxpayers. The proposed Board of Finance would in effect institutionalize the power the bourgeois Committee of Seventy had temporarily seized during the fight against Tweed. It would guarantee, Sterne explained, that New York’s propertied elite “would no longer find themselves in contest with the loafer element, which would eventually outnumber and beat them.”
The commission’s proposals were an instant hit in upper-class circles. The Chamber of Commerce, the New York Stock Exchange, the Produce Exchange, the Cotton Exchange—indeed every leading business organization—endorsed them enthusiastically. So did Astor, Vanderbilt, Dodge, Havemeyer, and leading newspapers like the Times, the Herald, and the Tribune, whose publisher Whitelaw Reid opined that “ignorant voters” were “as dangerous to the interests of society as the communists of France.”
At a mass meeting held April 7, 1877, to rally support for the amendment, speakers