Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [947]
In September, at a Madison Square Garden meeting called by the Council of Good Government Clubs, a constellation of Chamber of Commerce luminaries—including J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, William E. Dodge, Abram Hewitt, Jacob Schiff, James Speyer, Morris K. Jesup, Gustav Schwab, and Elihu Root—engineered the formation of a Committee of Seventy (so named to evoke the group that had toppled Tweed).
Under its banner the Committee of Seventy established a formidable campaign operation, run out of the Chamber of Commerce building, on behalf of their mayoral candidate, William L. Strong. A millionaire dry-goods merchant turned banker, Strong was a longtime member of the Union League Club and former president of the Business Men’s Republican Club. His inner core of supporters were similarly wealthy Yankee Protestant Republicans, most of whom were active in the City Club, Good Government Clubs, Civil Service Reform Association, and various moral reform agencies. In addition, Josephine Shaw Lowell, at Parkhurst’s suggestion, organized a Women’s Municipal League, which drew in the wives of many prominent reformers. University Settlement workers carried Strong’s campaign into immigrant and Tammany strongholds. The one hundred constituent organizations of the German American Reform Union signed on too, angered by the numerically inferior Irish Americans’ grip on Tammany.
Tammany countered by nominating German-Jewish dry-goods merchant Nathan Straus, philanthropic hero of the previous depression winter. But the reformers drove Straus from the field, threatening him with social ostracism for his disreputable affiliation with Boss Croker: nine days after his nomination he withdrew and embarked on an extended vacation to Europe. A desperate Tammany drafted former mayor Hugh Grant, a reluctant candidate, having been himself badly tarred by the Lexow exposes. Grant would run an apathetic campaign.
The reformers, on the other hand, launched an energetic effort built around their twin themes of moral and political reform. The Rev. Parkhurst bore the standard for purification. Hurling denunciations at Tammany’s Lexow-exposed connivance in vice and corruption, he summoned supporters to “fight the devil” with the “incisive edge of bare-bladed righteousness.” Parkhurst’s calls to reject cultural laissez-faire and embrace moral unity—or impose it, if necessary—rallied some but repelled others. Alarmed Catholics scented a revived nativism, and several priests would condemn the fusion ticket at preelection masses, echoing, albeit from a different perspective, the Church’s anti-George efforts of 1886.
Businessmen concentrated more on secular concerns. They promised a reform administration that would run the city government “solely in the interests of efficiency and economy.” Proponents of a “businessmen’s administration” stressed that ending extravagance and corruption would diminish the tax burden on property owners. They also offered inducements to working-class voters. A reformed city would be a cleaner city (with improved street sweeping, garbage disposal, and public baths), a pleasanter city (more small parks), a smarter city (more public schools), a healthier city (more TB prevention programs and a vigilant health board), and an efficient city (more use of experts, better rapid transit, an expanded civil service).
In November 1894 New Yorkers voted at sites monitored by the over two thousand poll watchers put in the field by the now twenty-four Good Government Clubs. Strong won decisively, reaping nearly three votes for every two cast for Grant. The bulk of his support came from uptown silk-stocking wards and from the Yorkville, Harlem, and Upper West Side preserves of middle-class Germans. Strong also made some inroads in downtown, depression-disaffected, working-class districts, racking up substantial backing from Jewish voters (though many Jewish protest votes went to socialist candidates). The bulk of the Irish stayed loyal to Tammany. On the state level, Republican