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By Root 7671 0

abject poverty in this city?” What is it that “forces girls upon the streets and our boys into the grog shops and then into the penitentiaries”? The answer was insanely high levels of rent. New Yorkers sweated for landlords because Manhattan real estate had long since been monopolized: “We are toiling, perhaps, for Mrs. Astor” or “the heirs of some dead Dutchman.” The majority of those piled in tenement barracks, as Peter McGuire had noted, had “paid by way of rent enough to purchase for themselves, not only one house but several,” yet they remained at the mercy of landlords who could and did get an eviction order from a district court judge if rent was three days late.

Worse, while New Yorkers were penned up in the tenement districts—“nowhere else in the civilized world are men and women and children packed together so closely”—there was plenty of empty land available, “miles and miles and miles of land all around this nucleus. Why cannot we take that and build houses upon it for our accommodation?” Because land monopolists were warehousing it, waiting for its price to rise. Taxing their properties would force landlords to disgorge vacant but valuable land and make it available to working people. “There is no good reason whatever why every citizen of New York should not have his own separate house and home; and the aim of this movement is to secure it.”

Taxing away the unearned profits of the idle rich would also generate enormous revenues, which could be used to improve city services, particularly in education and transit. George was grateful to Peter Cooper for providing the hall in which they now met, but education for working people should be a matter of right, not charity. The people of New York should establish twenty Cooper Institutes, and pay for them out of “our own estate.” Streetcars and elevateds should be taken out of the hands of men like Jay Gould and Jacob Sharp and be operated as a public service. “We could take those railroads and run them free, let everybody ride who would, and we could pay for it out of the increased value of the people’s property.”

THE “TAILBOARD” CAMPAIGN

George had proposed an alternative way to run the city and urged formation of a new governing coalition to run it. Now United Labor Party troops poured into the streets to do electoral battle. The German socialists came on board. So did Sam Gompers and the Cigarmakers, albeit reluctantly. Quite apart from the prominence of so many Knights and socialists in the movement, Gompers and his colleagues believed all politicians were crooks and would sell out labor’s interests to the highest bidder. Even if the ULP did elect candidates pledged to prolabor measures, executives would refuse to enforce such laws, or the courts would quickly reverse them. Nevertheless, the “pure and simple” men were as enraged as other workers by the blatant police and judicial support for capital. Given the phenomenal support building up in the working-class districts for George, it seemed that perhaps this crusade would be able to make some fundamental changes in New York City.

The George campaign set up headquarters in the Colonnade Hotel on Broadway (near 8th Street) and translated the enormous amateur enthusiasm into a formidable electoral army. To finance the challenge, union members across the city were assessed twenty-five cents a head. Heaps of pennies poured in, and the candidate could often be seen at headquarters helping roll coins for distribution to campaign managers around town.

Since Tammany ward heelers held sway in saloons, the new organization took to the streets, shop floors, and union halls. Drawing on the CLU’s logistical experience with organizing boycotts, parades, and mass demonstrations, the ULP created an apparatus of neighborhood meetings, streetcorner rallies, campaign clubs, Assembly District organizations, and trade legions—an entire political counterculture.

With the exception of John Swinton’s Paper, Ford’s Irish World, and the socialists’ New Yorker Volkszeitung, every paper in the city opposed George. One of the campaign