Chapter five of Joanne Reitano’s The Restless City explains the political, social, and economic questions that sprung up during the Gilded age in New York City. She uses Horatio Alger’s words from his novel Ragged Dick to demonstrate how New York City during the late-nineteenth century period of modernization was a place of curiosity and opportunity as well as a place of hardship and crime. Throughout the city there was a huge separation between the rich and the poor and the ideas of social Darwinism controlled many people’s thoughts. Although social Darwinism flooded the minds of many with the ideas of faith in material values, the survival of the fittest, the inevitability of progress, and the futility of reform, many New Yorkers were starting to reexamine those ideas to bring about change for the better.
At this time, New York’s largest companies were monopolizing their businesses. The famous robber baron John D. Rockefeller controlled the oil business with his Standard Oil Trust. His social Darwinian way of thinking eliminated all of his competitors and created a trust that shocked the people and the government to start regulating business practices. Despite the government starting to regulate business, the trusts grew stronger and stronger which also strengthened New York City as a center of the American economy. To keep up with the growing economy of the city, physical aspects of the city were updated as well.
As the city was expanding, corruption and urban bossism grew as well. William M. Tweed dominated both the Democratic Party and Tammany Hall while becoming the nation’s first true political boss. He provided jobs, naturalization, money, food, and other services to the middle and working class people in return for votes. He used race to garner support from the white working class and appealed to mostly everyone besides the African Americans and the wealthy Protestant reformers. Tweed became so powerful that something had to be done to stop him. Thomas Nast first publicly exposed Tweed when he published his cartoons showing the members of the Tweed Ring as robbers and wrongdoers in 1869. The New York Times eventually was able to find enough evidence to uncover his corruption and finally arrest him. The Gilded Age bosses such as Tweed forced America to make good government a national priority and pushed New York City into change.
During this time, many people began to actively help the poor out. Whether they saw them as inferiors that needed correction or acted out of good character to help them, everyone agreed that it was in their own self-interest to bring about change. Jacob Riis’ collection of photos, How the Other Half Lives, unmasked the poverty and horrors of living in a tenement. His book spurred a social revolution where reformers tried many different ways to help the poor. The reformers elected William L. Strong as mayor in 1894 to unseat Tammany and bring improvements for the city’s lower class. The reformers were even able to make schooling for all children under twelve mandatory in New York in 1901 and desegregated schools in 1900. Even the wealthy were becoming more involved in helping the poor. A member of an upper class family, Josephine Shaw Lowell, the first female commissioner of the State Board of Charities and head of the New York Charity Organization Society (COS), advocated for a living wage where people would make enough to sustain a decent life. To continue to aid the poor, settlement houses were created that offered inexpensive meals, free kindergartens, health clinics, language classes, and taught job skills. Social reform was on the rise and the public reassessed urban problems.
Modernization provoked people to question, “why there was so much strife in a booming capitalist economy” (95). At the beginning of the 1860s, New York City’s unions started to grow and gain more power. Wealthy New Yorkers looked down upon unions in the light of social Darwinism and the police used brutality to stop any and all action from the unions. In 1877, Samuel Gompers proved to be one of the most important union organizers of the time. Led by Gompers, the Cigarmakers’ Union raised funds from America and from across Europe to provide for fifteen thousand strikers and their families. He later learned about striking, boycotting, and other union ideals from the Central Labor Union (CLU) while labor activism was peaking across the country.
The CLU started in politics to further demonstrate the power of labor. They nominated Henry George to run for mayor which surprisingly unified all different type of laborites in the city. Although George was not voted into office, the sheer amount of votes he did receive startled many people into facing the problems of society and even forced Tammany to recognize the problem of labor in New York.
In 1886, Gompers formed the American Federation of Labor to work for better hours, wages, benefits, and working conditions. Even though Gompers got labor to be a national issue, it was still a problem in the 1890s as demonstrated by the Brooklyn Trolley Strike of 1895.
Even the young children who worked as newsies were forming a union and striking. Their strike was mirrored all around the country in cities like Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Providence. It was evident from this strike that these children will eventually become adults and become America’s future. Improving their lives and implementing social change is, “a wise social investment in a better life for all” (104).
