Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [875]
Kelly died in June 1886, just before the mayoral race got underway, and was replaced at the party’s helm by Richard Croker, his right-hand man and former Tammany bruiser. Croker, born in 1843 in Clonakilty, Ireland, was brought to New York at the age of three. The family had lived in Seneca Village until his father got a veterinarian job with an East Side horsecar line. After a year’s schooling, young Croker worked in the Harlem Railroad’s machine shop and later as engineer on a steamboat. A formidable fighter, Croker also led the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang, whose members served as Tammany musclemen and repeaters. He cast his first ballot in 1864, in fact seventeen of them, and in 1868 he became an alderman at age twenty-five. In 1873, thanks to his new patron Kelly, he was elected coroner of New York; ten years later he was made fire commissioner, and in 1886 Croker stepped into the leadership—and into a full-blown crisis.
The United Labor Party presented a potentially mortal threat to the nexus of Catholics, Democrats, and the Irish-American middle class, if it succeeded in reorganizing New York City politics along class rather than ethnic lines. George was backed by Land League nationalists like Patrick Ford and Michael Davitt and by radical priests like Father McGlynn. If the Irish working class followed their lead and abandoned Tammany, it would leave the bosses high and dry. In addition, many an Irish alderman, grocer, and saloonkeeper was deeply invested in uptown real estate, and such men, perhaps even more than upper-class landlords, were banking on precisely the kind of speculative profits that George threatened to tax away.
Croker understood that solid Swallowtail backing was essential to defeating George, so he insisted on nominating ironmaster Abram Hewitt, the impeccably respectable leader of that opposing faction. The Democratic candidate proceeded to attack the very notion of a labor party as an attempt “to organize one class of our citizens against all other classes.” Between capitalists and laborers “there never is and never can be any antagonism,” but if the working classes “as they are called” ever did need special representation, they had their trade unions to speak for them.
Unions were perfectly legitimate bodies, Hewitt admitted, though he himself thought “self-help is the remedy for all the evils of which men complain.” Certainly Hewitt had a deeper sympathy for workingmen than many of his peers, certainly more than did Theodore Roosevelt. A paternalistic employer, he had kept mills open and men employed during recessions. As congressman during the Great Strike of 1877, he hadn’t howled for blood but held congressional hearings, which demonstrated that industrial interests had cheated and abused labor.
Being the son-in-law of the revered Peter Cooper won him additional support among the city’s laboring classes, and Hewitt held up his family’s support for Cooper Union as an example of responsible charity. He went so far as to criticize the Astors for failing to devote their “unearned increment” to public purposes. He even agreed with George that the city ought to provide education and recreational facilities out of its own coffers. The way to obtain the needed funds, however, was not by taxing land, which Hewitt noted shrewdly would put the burden on modest property holders as well as millionaires. Instead the city should tax the mansions of the wealthy, a levy he was sure the rich wouldn’t mind paying once Tammany was vanquished.
To working-class constituents Hewitt insisted that despite his considerable wealth, he wasn’t the millionaire’s candidate: “These rich Republicans and these rich millionaires—nay, have they not at the Union League Club indorsed Mr. Roosevelt?” At the same time he crudely appealed to the fears of the propertied classes, indicting the