Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [967]
Other New York City companies also steamed down to the Caribbean. The Tobacco Trust built the world’s largest factory in Havana, and its affiliate, the American Cigar Company, soon dominated 90 percent of the export trade in Havana cigars. A group of New York capitalists took over manganese mining. The Cuba Company, a syndicate formed in 1900, had the Cuba Central Railroad up and running by 1902. Another Wall Street syndicate won control of the Havana Street Railway. And Manhattan’s North American Trust Company was appointed the occupying government’s fiscal agent; in time, it evolved into the Banco National de Cuba, which would dominate the island’s financial system. The Yankee invasion had a tremendous impact on Cuba’s society as well as its economy: the elite was cut in, the rural middle classes were wiped out, and the peasantry was reduced to seasonal wage-work. Protests were suppressed by the marines.
Puerto Rico was made an official American colony, and its residents were granted limited local participation in government. U.S.-dominated sugar and tobacco production supplanted the old coffee-based agronomy and pumped profits off-island, perpetuating or worsening poverty. Within a decade of the occupation, four U.S. corporations produced 50 percent of all sugar cultivated in Puerto Rico, and the island’s inclusion in the Coastwise Shipping Act had given the United States a monopoly over Puerto Rican commerce. When Samuel Gompers returned from a 1904 visit, he told a New York press conference: “In all my life I have never witnessed such misery, sickness, and suffering.” In 1917 Puerto Ricans would be made citizens—a step of great significance for the future of New York City, as, dislodged from the land, earning some of the lowest wages in the world in exchange for ten- to twelve-hour days, some of these new citizens would begin to migrate from the edge of America’s new empire to its center.
America’s war with Spain provided one final benefit: it helped boost the country out of depression. The initial upward shove had come in 1897 when simultaneous crop disasters in Europe, Asia, and South America drove the price of American wheat to a dollar a bushel. Ecstatic farmers paid off burdensome mortgages and started a round of heavy purchases. Agricultural traffic boosted railroad earnings and spurred the iron and steel industry. The next year brought not only wartime government spending but discoveries of gold in South Africa and the Yukon. The combination of stimuli jolted the economy into action. Factories started up, the stock market reached its highest level in years, the unemployed began trooping back to work, and the country clambered its way toward prosperity.
69
Imperial City
On New Year’s Eve, with 1897 turning into 1898, thousands of New Yorkers cascaded into lower Manhattan’s streets despite a cold and driving rain. Soaked but celebratory, they were gearing up for one of the greatest Festivals of Connection in the city’s history. This time they would not be hailing New York’s insertion into some larger grid—as they had on completion of the Erie Canal or the Atlantic Cable—but rather the city’s new internal linkages, its own municipal consolidation. At midnight, the nation’s first- and fourth-largest cities would merge into a supercity—Greater New York—that would encompass not only Manhattan and Brooklyn, but Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx as well. Other metropolises had been engaging in similar combinations, but New York’s would be the grandest—a municipal counterpart of the giant corporations busily being born.
The master of ceremonies, oddly, was not Mayor Strong. The lame-duck reformer had grumpily suggested holding a funeral service for the old city rather than a jamboree for the new one. When this met with widespread derision,