Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [872]
Using the elevateds, the candidate whirled around the city addressing labor unions, Irish nationalists, Catholic parish fairs, German Turnverein, and middle-class social reformers. On one typical day, George talked at the opening of a church fair at St. Cecilia’s (106th Street between Third and Lexington), spoke at Waiters Union No. 3 at 40th Street and Third Avenue, addressed a mass meeting of eight thousand at Third and 42nd, marched with the Henry George Bohemian Club, and hopped the el downtown to a tumultuous meeting in Chickering Hall.
Even more striking was the “tailboard” campaign in which speakers rumbled by horsecart from one street throng to another, talking from a makeshift backseat podium. From breakfast to midnight, campaign orators hit the docks, factory yards, elevated stations, churches, and tenement districts. They addressed shoppers by day and, with the aid of torches, carousers at night. Speakers drew on a host of notables, including Father McGlynn, Knights leader Terrence Powderly, editor Patrick Ford, liberal Protestant minister Walter Rauschenbusch, and Columbia professor Daniel DeLeon, but the tailboarders also included men of purely local renown. Some were shop-floor and neighborhood activists addressing mass audiences for the first time. Others were merchants, lawyers, doctors, or teachers, drawn into unprecedented coalition with organized labor by George’s synthesis of piety and political economy.
As the campaign rolled on, and volunteer poll workers began training to counter the ward bosses’ election day “hirelings,” it was clear to the entire city—and to the nation, and to Europe, where the campaign was covered via cable—that something extraordinary was happening in the streets of New York. There had not been such a challenge to the established order since the Sons of Liberty contested merchant control of the city in colonial days. The Workingmen’s Party of the 1830s had flamed out quickly; the draft riots of 1863 had been terrifying but undisciplined and ultimately repressible. Now the possibility that had always lurked in a democratic polity seemed finally to have materialized: working people would use the polls to advance their class interest.
THE COLLEGE-BRED TRIBUNE
The prospect caused consternation among the propertied classes. The “present revolt of the working men of this city,” the Union League Club declared, had “become a matter of the first importance.” To battle George, Fifth Avenue sent into the ring another scrappy young bantamweight, named Theodore Roosevelt. The very name Roosevelt was reassuringly redolent of old New York, indeed old New Amsterdam. After the family’s plate glass business had boomed with Manhattan’s postwar expansion, it shifted much of its capital into banking, investment, and city real estate. When Cornelius died in 1871, he left Theodore Senior over a million dollars and a mansion on 57th Street off Fifth Avenue.
In 1876 Theodore Junior, aged seventeen, had gone off to Harvard, not Columbia as had innumerable Roosevelts before him. Despite his unprepossessing appearance—five feet eight inches, 125 pounds, a thin and piping voice, thick spectacles, and a laugh described by his mother as an “ungreased squeak”—his impeccable upper-class credentials and deep pockets got him into the best clubs. He worked hard too, immersing himself in laissez-faire political economy. After graduating in 1880 Teddy married, entered Columbia Law School, and joined the social whirl of New York’s ultrafashionables, dining at Mrs. Astor’s and dancing at Ward McCallister’s Patriarch’s Balls.
On October 10, 1882, Roosevelt invited a score of “respectable, well educated men” to his home at 55 West 45th Street to launch a City Reform Club. He told the press that the club intended