Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [940]
In the end, however, Riis backed away from state-centric proposals and called on the real estate industry itself to remedy the situation. “The greed of capital that wrought the evil must itself undo it.” Landlords must be shown that building better housing for the poor was both the Christian thing to do and in their own economic interest. The safest way forward, Riis argued, was Alfred Tredway White’s proposal that “the intelligent and wealthy portion of the community” provide homes for the working classes.
“STRIKE AT A GIVEN SIGNAL”
In large measure, Riis’s reluctance to resort to state power was based on the fact that government was in the grip of Tammany Hall. Many in the social gospel movement shared his conviction—as did the purity crusaders under Parkhurst—that existing city and state administrations were problems, not solutions. By the early 1890s, therefore, both wings of genteel reform seemed equally stymied. There was a widespread readiness to support state initiatives on both moral and economic fronts—even the new American Economic Association (1886) denounced “laissez-faire as an excuse for doing nothing while people starve” and called government “an educational and ethical agency whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress”—but the state seemed out of reach.
In 1891 Walter Vrooman, a reporter for the New York World, urged formation of a Union for Concerted Moral Effort. “Only by union” wrote Vrooman, “can the moral forces of society defend themselves against aggressive evil.” Disparate reformers had to link up—allowing “myriads of hammers” to “strike all at a given signal”—and act together “according to intelligent plan.” It was in this spirit that the City Club was incorporated, in April 1892, to take up the work of Theodore Roosevelt’s all but dormant City Reform Club in pressing for honest, efficient government. City Club trustees included August Belmont, Robert Fulton Cutting, Richard Watson Gilder, John Jacob Astor, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and assorted Roosevelts, Stuyvesants, Jays, Grinnells, and Lows. Over half were in the Social Register, many were Union League, Century, or University club members; and all could afford annual dues stiff enough to maintain a magnificent clubhouse on Fifth Avenue, large enough to accommodate all of the several hundred members.
The City Club also set out to establish more broadly based nuclei throughout the city, around which to mobilize reform strength and disseminate reform ideas. Within two years, there was at least one Good Government Club in nearly every Assembly district. With headquarters and outposts thus established, the forces of Good Government—embracing the moral reform wing under Parkhurst and the social reform wing of social gospelers and settlement workers—were ready to mount a unified campaign to wrest political power from Tammany Hall. In their diversity, Good Government men and women (dubbed “goo-goos” by irreverent opponents) bore remarkable resemblance to the working-class confederation that had rallied around Henry George almost a decade earlier. Unlike George, however, this set of reformers would triumph, thanks in part to their formidable assets but even more to the fact that, at just this juncture, the great economic wheel of fortune took another downturn.
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Good Government
The Panic of 1893—unlike those of 1873, 1857, and 1837—did not come as a sudden shock. Americans had seen it brewing since 1890 when Baring Brothers, England’s (and the world’s) mightiest banking house, had crumpled, the victim of overoptimistic loans to Argentina. The Baring crisis had punctured the late 1880s boom and brought hard times to Western Europe. Americans watched anxiously for signs the financial storm was striking out across the Atlantic—rather as they had once scanned the horizon for cholera epidemics.
For three years, European crop failures buoyed up the U.S.