Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [870]
“HONEST LABOR AGAINST THIEVING LANDLORDS AND POLITICIANS”
Within two weeks the CLU decided to enter politics, something labor had not done effectively since the 1830s, when the Workingmen’s Party, similarly infuriated by court decisions, had taken to the hustings. Badly burned then, and in minor forays since, organized workingmen had shunned the electoral arena. The CLU itself banned politicians, lawyers, and public officials from membership. It refused to elect a permanent president lest he sell out the organization to a political party. But employers’ ease of access to police and courts convinced union men that control of city government was an indispensable prerequisite to workplace organizing.
In August the CLU called all city labor organizations to a meeting, and on the appointed day 402 delegates, representing 165 groups and over fifty thousand wageearners, formed a United Labor Party (ULP). Over the next two months it hammered out a platform and considered candidates. Finally, on September 23, after a mighty speech by Father McGlynn, it nominated Henry George as its candidate for mayor of New York City.
George had been chary of making the race. When a CLU committee first visited him at his new home up in Harlem, he declined the honor, dubious about a third party’s chances in a city where even Republicans were perennial runners-up. A nervous Tammany inadvertently decided George by sending secret emissaries to offer him a safe congressional seat if he declined the nomination. He couldn’t be elected, the delegation explained, but “his running will raise hell.” That settled it for the truculent George: “You have relieved me of an embarrassment,” he responded. “I do not want the responsibility and the work of the office of Mayor of New York, but I do want to raise hell!” He would run, but only if the new party demonstrated its potential strength by getting thirty thousand backers to pledge their support in writing.
On October 5, 1886, George worked his way through the mammoth crowds outside Cooper Union and in the jam-packed interior, finally reaching the Great Hall. There he mounted a stage decorated with sheaves of petitions, arranged like floral offerings, that contained over thirty-four thousand signatures. Formally accepting the ULP nomination for mayor, George addressed the party’s three major concerns: labor, politics, and land.
He ratified the platform’s call for higher pay, shorter hours, better working conditions, government ownership of railroads and telegraph, and an end to “officious intermeddling of the police with peaceful assemblages,” adding his own denunciation of “industrial slavery.”
He declared that “this government of New York City—our whole political system—is rotten to the core.” Politicians had made a trade out of assembling votes and selling them to powerful interests; revelations about horsecar magnate Jacob Sharp’s scandalous bribery of boodle aldermen back in 1884 were front-page news just then, with twenty-two aldermen (Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike) having been arrested. What business got in return was police protection, lax enforcement of housing and health codes, friendly judges, and fat franchises. To purify the political order, working-class voters had to sever ties to all the established parties and choose candidates from their own ranks, not what John Swinton called the “fleecing classes.”
Finally, George applied Progress and Poverty’s analysis to metropolitan landlordism. “Why,” he asked, “should there be such