Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [880]
The old shanty dweller did quite well in the new order. He joined the elite and adopted its favorite hobby of raising thoroughbred horses. By the end of 1893 Croker had a $250,000 stock farm, $103,000 worth of race horses, and an eighty-thousanddollar mansion on Fifth Avenue. Like other monopolists, he justified his personal gains by pointing to larger social benefits. As he explained the merits of his new system to Lincoln Steffens, a young reporter: “A business man wants to do business with one man, and one who is always there to remember and carry on the business.” The Bankers Magazine agreed: bosses were mercenaries, no doubt, but they offered “financial corporations” the protection of “a Rob Roy who could control the legislative marauders.”
Croker made peace with the city’s working class as well. Tammany arranged some legislative overtures that redressed some of labor’s grievances, and between 1887 and 1894 laws improved working conditions for streetcar workers and provided for arbitration of some labor disputes. But Democratic interventions tended more toward the rhetorical than the substantive. Tammany became the Friend of the Working Man, but not of workingmen. Democratic Party energies—over and under the table—concentrated on maintaining a pro-business climate, particularly low taxes and freedom from regulation. Thomas Byrnes’s police continued to deal ferociously with labor unrest and break up radical meetings while tolerating grafters and boodlers. Armories proliferated, like the Twenty-second Regiment’s fortified new home at 67th and Broadway (1890), which had slits for cannons and a main entrance that afforded easy passage for cavalry troops. By the mid-1890s New York had 12,800 National Guardsmen, specially trained in riot suppression, and available too as a strikebreaking force, as its mostly middle-class members had been carefully screened. “Are you connected in any way with any labor organization?” each applicant to Brooklyn’s Forty-seventh Regiment was asked, and anyone who responded positively was rejected.
The new Democratic Party would be of but not for labor. The failure of Henry George’s campaign meant there would be no Labor Party in New York City of the sort taking shape in Britain and Germany. Nevertheless, as Teddy Roosevelt observed dolefully after the 1886 election, while the large vote for George did “not mean a new party,” it did constitute, “unfortunately, a new element to be bid for by the old parties.”
The alliance of Irish-, German-, and Anglo-American workers forged in the labor and political wars of the mid-1880s had laid out an agenda for transforming the city. It had sought changes in work, transportation, communication, housing, taxation, health care, sanitation, charity, education, policing, and the organization of politics—stressing the need for government provision of social services by using tax revenues or undertaking full-scale “municipalization” of private businesses.
In 1886 the labor radicals failed to force Tammany, much less Albany, to significantly address their concerns. But reinforcements were arriving. Ships in the harbor had begun disembarking tens of thousands of Germans, Irish, and Britons, along with hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews and Southern Italians. Once again, as in the 1840s and 1850s, a vast second city was rising alongside the existing one.
At first this would hamper radical initiatives, as the newcomers had no shared history with New York’s established workforce, had not forged links in the course of common struggle, and often had but limited command of English. But many brought militant traditions of their own and quickly discovered interests in common. When working-class New Yorkers succeeded in overcoming the latest set of barriers to cooperation, the pressures on Tammany would mount once again, until, in the new century, the machine would find itself forced into adopting policies advanced by the radicals