Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [916]
Or such was the premise of popular writer Joaquin Miller’s The Destruction of Gotham, issued by Funk and Wagnalls in the year of the Henry George campaign. While Miller’s book added luster to his reputation, as apocalyptic literature it was soon eclipsed by Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1889), which would sell a quartermillion copies and become one of the century’s bestsellers. Donnelly depicted New York City, a century in the future, as being locked in a death struggle between the Oligarchy, a cabal of acquisitive and vicious Hebrew capitalists who had seized wealth and power through “subtle combinations,” and the Brotherhood of Destruction, composed of “vast, streaming swarms” of beaten-down proletarians of all nations, commanded by the Italian-born giant Caesar Lomellini. After Lomellini’s forces routed the evil Oligarchs with “dynamite bullets,” the “brutal and ravenous multitude”—with no one left to keep order—broke loose “like a huge flood, long damned up” and flowed “full of foam and terror” in every direction. Maddened men chased well-dressed individuals “like hounds after a rabbit,” tore them apart, and whirled the dead bodies to delighted spectators, who hauled them off in gory chariots to Union Square. There, by the light of blazing bonfires, the drunken victors set sixty thousand prisoners (“merchants professional men, etc.”) to stacking and cementing a quarter-million cadavers into a colossal column of corpses—“in commemoration of the death and burial of modern civilization.”
Like Miller, Donnelly saw cities—New York in particular—as breeding millionaires, tramps, and urban Armageddon. “The classes from which we have most to fear,” agreed Josiah Strong in Our Country (1891), “are the two extremes of society—the dangerously rich and the dangerously poor.” Like other popular Cassandras, Strong, who was secretary of the Congregationalist American Home Missionary Society, emphasized that “a mighty emergency is upon us”—us being the country’s imperiled Protestant middle classes, who were fast losing any ability to rein in either irresponsible monopolists or “ignorant and vicious” aliens.
In New York itself, the comfortable middle classes were finding the final decades of the nineteenth century a strange and perplexing time. They knew they lived amid unprecedented progress and prosperity. Yet everywhere they beheld portents of danger: poverty, corruption, licentiousness, militant unionism, political radicalism, open strife between capital and labor, and a surge of immigrants so vast and alien that it was hard to imagine what would become of the old Anglo-Saxon republic.
Badly buffeted by the upheavals of the mid-1880s—the recession, the rise of the Knights of Labor, the great strikes for the eight-hour day, the burgeoning immigration, the near-triumph of the Henry George campaign, and the Haymarket bombings—many middle-class New Yorkers would enlist in movements dedicated to warding off the now so frequently prophesied apocalypse. Some would direct their energies toward checking the unbridled growth of corporate power, others would concentrate on constraining or transforming the disorderly poor, and others still would find their selfassigned mission of preserving order and civility in urban affairs leading them in both directions at once.
ARMIES OF SALVATION
Among those most rattled by contemporary disorders were metropolitan ministers, to whom it had become grimly apparent that Protestantism had lost any influence with the urban working class. This conviction was aired and ratified in December 1888 at a Chickering Hall Christian Conference organized by prominent clergymen. Minister after minister stood up to testify that New York’s Protestant churches, by moving north with their uptown congregations, had abandoned the lower city to Catholicism, Judaism, secularism, anarchism, and socialism.
In Modern Cities and Their Religious Problems (1887), Samuel Lane Loomis suggested another reason that the masses of immigrant workingmen