Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [824]
Three days after Beecher’s second sermon, the Workingmen’s Party was scheduled to hold a strike support meeting in Tompkins Square. Railroad executive William H. Vanderbilt wrote mayor Smith Ely urging him not to allow it, but the mayor refused. The authorities did, however, cancel all police leaves, call out the First and Second divisions of the New York National Guard, summon the men of the Seventh Regiment back from vacation, connect Tompkins Square to armories by telegraph wires, garrison the New York Central roundhouse and depot, place two gatling guns at the heads of Wall and Pine, and dispatch seventy-five volunteers to defend the subtreasury. Frederick Law Olmsted surrounded Central Park headquarters with loaded howitzers. The Treasury Department, anxious about the millions stored in the Custom House, arranged for troops to be transferred to New York garrisons. The navy secretary sent a vessel that could, if necessary, clear the streets surrounding the Custom House. When told streets in the financial district were too crooked, Evarts responded: “The big guns will straighten them.” Finally, with over a thousand sailors and marines at the ready, and an estimated eight thousand rifles and twelve hundred clubs in place, New York was ready to put down a “Communist riot.”
On the evening of July 25, in the glare of hundreds of torches and calcium light at each corner of Tompkins Square Park, a crowd of twenty thousand turned out to hear socialist orators hold forth from a platform draped with an American flag. (All speeches were repeated in German at a second stand.) David Conroy, labor union leader, opened the giant rally saying: “I hope and trust that you, fellow citizens and workingmen will show to the press of New York tonight that you are an orderly people and that you are no rioters.” Temperate speeches followed, expressing sympathy with the railroad strikers. An address to President Hayes was proposed, decrying the fact that all the government had offered workers hard hit by depression was “the hangman’s rope and the soldier’s bullet.” There were calls for “political revolution through the ballot box” and the nationalization of transport, communication, and banks. John Swinton, editorial writer for the New York Sun, attacked Beecher’s recent effusions as particularly unseemly coming from a man who made thirty thousand dollars a year.
After two hours, just as the meeting adjourned, policemen charged in, clubbing people without apparent provocation, yet without sparking resistance. As Emmons Clark of the Seventh Regiment summed up, the “large and dangerous assemblage in Tompkins Square was inspired with a wholesome terror” and “sullenly dispersed.”
In the strike’s aftermath, the War Department began constructing a system of armories in major cities. The labor press bitterly opposed the notion of establishing a standing army. The New York Sun said it presaged a “radical revolution of our whole republican system of government.” Even the Commercial and Financial Chronicle opposed the armory program, fearing the military could be used “against business itself.”
But an armory program had already been launched in New York City. The Seventh Regiment had been pushing for new quarters since 1873 and in 1874 had asked the city to provide them the plot of land bounded by 66th, 67th, Fourth, and Lexington. In 1875, after the state legislature authorized New York City to spend money erecting new armories, the aldermen appropriated $350,000 and assigned the desired parcel. Then budget cutter Andrew Haswell Green vetoed the expense, and the regiment decided to build the armory itself. At first subscriptions were slow, despite the Tribune’s exhortation that “banks, insurance and trust companies, in fact all the large corporations of every kind, owe to themselves as well as to the regiment, ample aid in this matter.” Then came the 1877 strike, and money poured in. John Jacob Astor, A. T. Stewart, William H. Vanderbilt, Brown Brothers, Harper Brothers,