Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [877]
In fact the flame flickered for a year or two, sputtered, and died. The United Labor Party ran George in 1887 for statewide office, but during the campaign the 1886 coalition fragmented into its constituent parts.
First to go were the socialists. George and his single-tax followers, never comfortable with their militant class politics, soon read the Germans out of the party. The socialists retreated to their base in Kleindeutschland, where, amid the post-Haymarket wave of nativist hysteria, they languished, isolated, demoralized, riven by factional brawls. Within a few years, German hegemony in the Socialist Party and socialist press was finished, but not before they passed the torch to a new generation of New Yorkers—chiefly Jewish immigrants—who would carry the red banner into a new century.
The Knights of Labor never recovered from being tagged with the anarchist label. In the red scare that followed Haymarket, the organization disintegrated almost as rapidly as it had grown. Gompers and the business unionists went their own way, now totally persuaded that workers should shun politics. Gompers threw all his energies into building up the new American Federation of Labor. In the 1890s he would accept the free market economy, viciously attack former socialist comrades, and, despite his earlier inclination for a multiethnic, multiracial organization, preside over the growth of an exclusionary bastion for craft workers. The cigarmakers would fail to overcome the structural problems in their industry—tenement shops remained and flourished—but they would win the eight-hour day and a steady increase in pay.
The year 1887 also witnessed the collapse of Catholic support for class-based politics. Archbishop Corrigan saw to that. After the election he issued a pastoral letter counseling parishioners to adopt “the loving docility that becomes dutiful children” and “give no ear to those, whoever they may be, who preach a different Gospel.” Father McGlynn responded by giving weekly orations to crowds of two to three thousand people in which he insisted that bishops, even the pope, shouldn’t interfere with American Catholics’ exercise of their political rights. After some priests gave McGlynn guarded support, Corrigan and the Vatican decided to heed an adviser who said, “Dr. McGlynn must be put down or the Archbishop of New York might as well not be Archbishop of New York.”
McGlynn was summoned to Rome, refused to go, and in January 1887 was removed from his post at St. Stephen’s. Thousands paraded in his support. He told the throng he would not obey the pope. On July 3 he was excommunicated. The archbishop circulated a pledge of loyalty for the priesthood to sign. Some refused and found themselves exiled to upstate parishes. So effectively did Corrigan assert the hierarchy’s power that no Catholic clergyman in New York would ever again repeat McGlynn’s defiance.
Corrigan went after the rebel priest’s lay supporters too. He told Catholics that George’s writings were “false and pernicious”—he tried to get them placed on the Index—and forbade attendance at meetings of the Anti-Poverty Society, McGlynn’s secular reform vehicle. Corrigan ousted supporters of George from the thousandmember Catholic Club, making it a bulwark of lay support for archdiocesan officials. The pressure was so fierce that even Patrick Ford took the Irish World back into the fold. As Corrigan warred on liberalism in theology and social practice, he also emerged as a major backer of the Vatican. The archbishop strongly pushed Peter’s Pence collections among his wealthier parishioners, an important source of income now that