Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [958]
FUSION DEFUSED
What McKinley’s victory did not do was restore prosperity. The depression dragged on. So did class tensions, as was evidenced in the winter of 1897 when Mrs. Bradley Martin, having read of the sufferings of the poor, decided to throw a ball “to give an impetus to trade.” With colossal symbolic ineptitude—and at a cost of $370,000—the Bradley Martins rented the ballroom of the Waldorf Hotel and transformed it into a replica of Versailles. Mr. Bradley Martin dressed up as Louis XV, and Mrs. Bradley Martin—attired as Mary Queen of Scots (replete with a massive ruby necklace once worn by Marie Antoinette)—perched herself on a throne while liveried lackeys announced the seven hundred moneyed guests who incautiously flocked to the affair. With anarchists rumored to be planting bombs, the windows were boarded up, and the police kept massed spectators at bay. Editors, clergymen, college debating societies, and Democratic politicians denounced the heartless extravagance. New York authorities doubled the Bradley Martins’ tax assessment. Hounded out of town by the storm of notoriety, the couple moved permanently to England after receiving a sendoff by a dinner of unrepentant multimillionaires.
The Bradley Martin fiasco helped usher New York City Republicans out of power, though the problems confronting the Good Government coalition in 1897 were manifold. Just as the Henry George coalition, having failed to win office in 1886, had flown apart in 1887, the reformers discovered that victory could be equally problematic, and their alliance fissured into its component parts.
Roosevelt’s liquor policy drove the Germans back to the Democrats, and his rigorous Sabbatarianism alienated Jewish supporters. Strong’s disbursal of patronage to Republicans enraged purist nonpartisans, and his handouts to independent Democrats enraged Boss Platt. The former sat out the 1897 campaign in high-minded disgust. The latter decided to run as the Republican candidate, fatally splitting the anti-Tammany forces (possibly in collusion with Boss Croker, as they had a mutual interest in getting rid of pesky reformers). Mayor Strong himself declined a bid for reelection; his own business having failed, he was eager to refurbish his private affairs.
The reform enterprise did not disintegrate completely, however. With the upcoming mayoral election as spur, the hard core of the coalition decided to build a permanent third party devoted to the pursuit of municipal power. They named their vehicle the Citizens Union. The new organization included the leaders of organized charity, with Robert Fulton Cutting as the party’s chair. Businessmen and professionals occupied leadership and financial backer positions, with Morgan, Speyer, Dodge, Schiff, and Hewitt, and such luminaries of the Bar as Joseph Choate and Elihu Root, in prominent positions. The Good Government Clubs were converted into Citizens Union district headquarters. And around this nucleus clustered crucial auxiliaries: Protestant clergymen, reform-minded women, and settlement house workers, with James Reynolds of University Settlement serving as executive director.
For a standard bearer the Citizens Union chose Seth Low. The stout and stolid burgher—a former two-term mayor of Brooklyn and currently president of Columbia University—seemed an ideal choice. Low took a leaf from George’s 1886 campaign and demanded the Citizens Union gather a convincing number of preelection pledges of support. This done, he accepted the nomination, as had George, at a Cooper Union rally, only in this case the frock-coated candidate was escorted to the podium by the president of the Bar Association, and his audience consisted of wealthy, respectable, and welleducated bankers and