Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [972]
Planning the whole area as a single unit—as Green had on a smaller scale while head of the Central Park Commission—would ensure better relations between centers and suburbs. Only if a Greater City controlled its outlying territories could it reserve them for, say, healthful parks, rather than having them eaten up piecemeal. Only a Greater City could solve the “difficult question of taxation of non-residents that now exists,” with people on the periphery drawing sustenance from New York’s commerce but contributing little to its governance.
If taxpayers could easily cross city lines, so could rogues and criminals. Lawbreakers were truly “cosmopolitan,” Green noted, heedless of political boundaries, and disorderly persons often overwhelmed small towns. Only a unified metropolitan police command could check them.
There were other, more dangerous criminals on Green’s mind: he believed New York was in mortal peril from “lawless enterprise,” by which he meant modern combinations of capital—“leagues, guilds, combinations, federations, monopolies, pools and trusts.” For a man who’d spent much of his career helping Samuel Tilden arrange giant mergers—or perhaps precisely because of that experience—Andrew Haswell Green was extremely wary about the growth of corporations.
Their rise and impact was nowhere more evident than in cities, where “people live, move, and have their being by sufferance of the corporate power.” A citizen buys food from one, water from another, light from a third, and heat from a fourth, works on the road of a fifth, is paid in bills from a sixth, has his life insured by a seventh, and is buried in the grounds of an eighth. Green was not hostile to “modern forms of corporate contrivances” but insisted they “must be regulated and controlled by governmental intervention.”
The consequences of insufficient public purview were most apparent in the case of Green’s bete noire, railroad corporations—one he shared with merchants, populists, labor unions and social gospelers. While it was true that their lines made cities possible by allowing them to draw upon the resources and markets of a vast hinterland, they also “usurp[ed] control over approaches from the interior by land” and forced their way into the city, plowing through areas of their own choosing, laying tracks with no regard for street patterns, topography, or the public welfare. Their decisions, moreover, were laying down “lines of abnormal development or desolation,” deciding the character “of future growth or decay”; yet “if there are any who dispute their right, there are none to resist their might.”
The populace massed in cities represented a potentially countervailing power, but at a time when all private interests, “actuated by selfish motives,” were tending to consolidation, the only interests not combining were “our unselfish, thoughtless peoples, and their fatuous municipalities, which in broken form, carry on desultory and futile war against the organized forces of relentless and absentee capitalism.” For all his angry declamations about “popular rights” being subordinated to “corporate power,” however, Green had nothing much to say about actual people, and the issues like slums and sweatshops that agitated working people didn’t make it onto his agenda.
Green was hopeful about the future outcome of this war “between the corporate power and the power of the people” because he discerned evolutionary laws at work in the history of great cities,