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By Root 1154 0

of New York manufacturing. The vast majority of the contractors had their shops below Fourteenth Street, within easy walking distance of the tenements. In 1890, before the slump, 10,000 garment firms had employed around 236,000 workers. In early 1896 the tailors of New York went on strike for more pay against the wealthier contractors who filled orders for the large clothing companies. In good times a tailor might have made $12 or $15 a week, but during the depression he was often lucky to receive only half a week’s work. Now 20,000 tailors, all members of the Brotherhood of Tailors union, were out of work. This meant that about 100,000 residents of the tenements clustered around the intersection of Hester and Essex Streets were without means of support. A reporter walking along Hester Street at night found “at least half of the population of that street seeking sleep on the fire escapes, the stairways or the doorsteps. In most cases, fighting for air, they had carried their blankets and mattresses from their dens, but often I found men and women scantily clothed sleeping, or trying in vain to sleep, upon bare wood or iron, glad of the fresh air—fresh only by comparison with the evil atmosphere of their living rooms.”

The strike had left the tailors in a desperate situation. Local grocers and merchants stopped extending credit to the strikers. Thousands were forced to sustain themselves with “bad fruit, questionable meat, and stale bread,” one New York paper noted. Bad air and bad food combined to make many sick, though they were unable to afford a doctor. Esther Greenhaum lived in a tenement on Essex Street and had fallen very ill. Her husband, a striking tailor, failed to return home, apparently ashamed he could not provide for his wife. Not wanting to ask her neighbors for help, Esther suffered in her room quietly until she cried out in pain. Hearing this, a neighbor summoned a doctor, who asked if Esther could pay his fee. “Yes,” the neighbor woman lied, “she will pay,” knowing that this was the only way to lure the doctor to the tenement. When Esther could not pay, the doctor became enraged. The neighbor cut him off, saying, “God will pay. No one else can.”

IT WAS THE AGE of reform. While the suffering of the urban poor in New York had led to the rise of labor radicalism and various efforts at city reform, in the West and South farmers also sought relief from the tyranny of eastern business interests. Farmers relied on credit, but bankers from eastern cities like New York controlled the money supply. They also relied on the railroads to bring their crops to market, but the railroads collaborated to set rates, giving large discounts to big customers like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, while squeezing the individual customer with higher rates. Manufacturing interests kept tariffs high to protect American industry from cheaper imports, but this raised the prices of everyday necessities. Banks, railroads, big business, and political leaders made their headquarters in the big cities of the East, while there appeared to be nobody willing to be the voice of the farmer. The North-South division of the Civil War had given way to new American divisions, that between city and country, farmer and banker, East and West.

In 1892, 1,300 delegates from various labor and farmers’ groups met in Omaha, Nebraska, to form the People’s Party. The Populists, as they would come to be called, adopted a platform that included many of the remedies agrarian and labor advocates had been discussing for years: government ownership of railroads, redistribution of wealth through a graduated income tax, the eight-hour day, and direct election of U.S. senators. Many of these ideas would remain the cornerstone of the so-called Progressive Era, the age of reform that lasted through the First World War and culminated in women’s suffrage and Prohibition.

Central to the Populist platform was reform of the money supply. By 1896 the United States had been on the gold standard for almost a quarter of a century. Every paper dollar circulating in the country