Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [945]
With the return of good weather in spring 1894, nearly all the funds, relief programs, and work projects were dismantled, and for the remainder of the depression of the 1890s, New York City’s unemployed were left to the attentions of churches, conventional charities, and official public agencies.
REVOLT OF THE PRIVILEGED
The depression gave the heretofore stymied coalition of moral and political reformers its chance to win power. Democrats paid the traditional penalty of incumbency during hard times, and Republicans, in fusion with dissident Democrats, swept into office. Their sequence of triumphs began in 1893 in Brooklyn, where rebellious lawyers, professionals, and businessmen challenged Boss Hugh McLaughlin, still running the city and county from the back of Kerrigan’s Auction Rooms on Willoughby Street.
Peppery attorney and gadfly William Jay Gaynor took the lead. Of Irish and English descent, Gaynor had studied for the priesthood at De la Salle Institute and taught with the Christian Brothers but left the Church before taking his vows. Turning to the law, he was admitted to the bar in 1871 and got his start in Flatbush, where he represented with equal fervor the saloonkeepers of East New York and the bluenose opponents of roadhouses that catered to weekenders en route to Coney Island. By the mid-1880s, Gaynor’s firm, now housed in Montague Street near City Hall, was representing far more influential Brooklynites, like Abraham Abraham, whom he helped to set up Abraham and Straus, and William Ziegler, who ran the multimillion-dollar Baking Powder Trust. By 1886, worth nearly a million himself, the blue- and cold-eyed lawyer who parted his reddish-brown hair in the middle was comfortably ensconced in a Park Slope brownstone.
Though a Democrat, the cantankerous Gaynor had been repeatedly riled by Boss McLaughlin’s shadier activities. Backed by Ziegler’s zeal and money, Gaynor battled the padding of public payrolls and brought a variety of taxpayers’ suits to block giveaways of franchises for elevateds and streetcars. As the personification of honest government, Gaynor became an extremely popular man with Brooklyn’s respectable classes.
In the 1893 mayoral campaign, McLaughlin renominated the scandal-tainted David A. Boody for a second term. Gaynor, together with other dissident Democrats like Edward Shepard, endorsed the Republican candidate, businessman Charles A. Schieren, who was popular with the city’s Germans and the brewing interests, and Gaynor himself became a fusion candidate for justice of the state supreme court.
In the course of campaigning, Gaynor called attention to the fraudulent electoral practices of McLaughlin henchman John Y. McKane, boss of the independent town of Gravesend and its appendage, Coney Island. McKane routinely registered Coney’s large summertime population—cooks, waiters, barkeeps, stableboys—as permanent residents, then cast their votes for them. Out of a total Gravesend population of 8,418, 6,218 were registered to vote when, as Gaynor argued, the figure, after subtracting women and minors, should have been closer to 1,628. With the election less than two weeks away, Gaynor sent a crew of clerks to copy the registration books so the names could be checked. McKane denied them access. With five days to go, Gaynor got a writ ordering the list be made available, but when his representatives stepped off the train at Gravesend they were pounced on by a posse (led by the barrel-chested McKane himself), roughed up, and booked as vagrants. Finally, on election day, Gaynor sent six carriages’ worth of inspectors to monitor the vote counting, only to be knocked down by armed police and locked up in the jail’s privy, while McKane maintained a tight cordon around the town’s sole polling place all day.
A firestorm of outrage, fanned by the press of both cities, helped sweep fusion candidates Schieren and Gaynor into office. The overwhelming victory—though due as much to hard times as to boss