Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [878]
As to the candidates themselves: George, after his disappointing 1887 loss, and an abortive attempt to build a national labor party, formed local clubs to promote the single-tax movement and worked for free trade within the Democratic Party. One of his most ardent followers, Philip G. Hubert, founded the cooperative apartment movement, thus making the Chelsea Hotel an indirect Georgian legacy.
Roosevelt went back to reform work and served as a federal civil service commissioner between 1889 and 1895. He would be heard from again.
Hewitt, the victor, began his mayoralty by pushing a program of harbor, street, and rapid transit improvements designed to aid commerce and provide public works jobs. But his administration soon ran aground. When balked in his reforms, Hewitt, a notoriously obstinate and ill-tempered man given to fits of pique and bursts of anger, vituperatively turned on his 1886 constituents. Having at first channeled Croker some patronage, he cut off the supply. Having made bows to working people, he denounced the Knights of Labor.
Most dramatic, Hewitt reverted to his nativist roots. He pushed for a literacy test and a twenty-one-year naturalization period for immigrants and decreed the closing of small saloons on Sundays. He flatly refused to review the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, something every mayor had done for thirty-seven years. He even refused to fly the shamrock flag at City Hall that day and starchily told his largely Irish Board of Aldermen that “America should be governed by Americans” and that those who preferred another flag should go back where they came from. In the end, it was Hewitt who was sent back where he came from. Croker refused to renominate him, and when the Swallowtails ran him as an independent, he was trounced at the polls.
THE NEW TAMMANY HALL
The biggest winner of the Henry George election was Tammany Hall, which learned a great deal from its near-loss. What impressed Democrats most about the United Labor Party was not its principles but its organization—the network of union locals, Knights of Labor assemblies, and labor clubs the upstart party fielded. They noticed that one Tammany ward that held its own in 1886 had done so by adopting elements of the ULP approach. Henry Purroy, boss of the Twenty-fourth Ward up in the Annexed District, had established a clubhouse in place of the usual saloon. Purroy had also involved the voters’ wives and children on excursions, clambakes, and the like, making the party as much a cultural organization as a political one.
After 1886 Tammany extended this approach throughout the city. By 1893 there was a clubhouse in every Assembly District, all of them linked in the Associated Tammany Societies, with a Tammany Times to report on their activities. The clubs replaced the personal and perishable followings of saloonkeepers and gang leaders and gave a bureaucratic underpinning to the machine. They also gave the party an air of respectability, making it more like the American Legion or the Elks than a bunch of brawlers. Clubs also strengthened the leadership, by making it difficult for insurgents without club endorsements to break into politics. Those who wanted construction and carting work or clerical and professional jobs with the city were well advised to join their local party association, as patronage rewards were now reserved for those who labored long and hard in clubhouse vineyards.
There was patronage aplenty under the dispensation of Croker’s protégé Hugh J. Grant, the man who rebuffed Hewitt’s try for a second term in 1888. Grant, the first New York-born, Irish-American mayor, came from solid middle-class stock. His immigrant father had accumulated a string of successful saloons and left him a substantial inheritance. Grant graduated from St. Francis