In Chapter 5 of The Restless City, Joanne Reitano discusses late nineteenth century New York City—the center of modernization in America. The growing metropolis, particularly in finance, trade and industry, was aptly titled the Empire City, but digging deeper into the political, social, and economic climates of the urban environment reveals much strife and ultimately progress.
Reviewing literature of the time, the first novel to depict New York in a positive light was Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick with New York being home to the “rags to riches” narrative, a place of both suffering and opportunity. The main character of the dime novel became the face of Social Darwinism, explaining the gap between rich and poor because those fit for the city would prosper in it. However, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) shows a poor girl’s fate as an unfortunate product of circumstance rather than a fatal flaw. The myth that the rich were deserving of their position in society was questioned especially with wealth concentrated in the few hands of robber barons. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad, and Carnegie’s steel trust, just to name a few, were examples of expansive monopolies controlled by individual men, yet these men were New York City’s heroes on Wall Street.
John D. Rockefeller is a prime example of the farm boy from West New York who achieved success and wealth in the Empire City through hard work and frugality. In his modernization of the American economy, he was both the greatest villain and a most brilliant innovator. The idea that monopolies are a natural ascension of the most effective businesses yields two very different responses in late nineteenth century New York City. The first is one of horror that yielded government intervention and a regulation of business practices to stem systematic consolidation. The second, though, is a proliferation of trusts with weak regulations that made New York City the great organizer of American Commerce.
The immense wealth gap also led to the questioning of what progress looked like during this time. Mayor Abram Hewitt’s belief that New York came to be “by natural causes” opposed renown reformer Henry George’s view that the juxtaposition between the increasingly wealthy rich and exacerbating poverty is proof that progress isn’t real. In all its wealth, New York City did blossom but was also politically seen as “the worst governed city in the world”. Bossism paralleled expanding capitalism in the Gilded Age with William Tweed heading machine politics between 1965 and 1971. With his cronies serving positions such as governor, mayor, city comptroller, and city commissioner simultaneously, in 1868, Tweed ruled both city and state. However, despite the politically disreputable methods employed, the Tweed Ring ultimately allowed for the flourishing of public works and facilities in New York.
While Tammany’s empire did contribute to the development of schools, hospitals, public baths and orphanages, it wasn’t really until Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) that the country’s social conscience was awakened and social reform was provoked. Riis targeted the “ignorant wealthy” in his humanistic view of poverty to show that poverty was not exclusively a function of individual morality but of societal responsibility to provide just wages and conditions. The New York City Consumers’ League mobilized upper and middle class women to boycott stores that exploited female workers which ultimately led to New York State setting minimum standards for working conditions, and out of the Settlement House Movement by the young and educated of the upper and middle classes emerged the field of social work.
The trusts and tenements, resulting from modernization, that ever-elucidated the wealth gap and threatened the American Dream also led to the beginning of labor unionization in the 1860s and 70s. Contrary to the pursuit of social harmony by the already established Knights of Labor, striking became a crucial weapon for labor’s self advancement in the late nineteenth century, and in response, industrial management retaliated by employing strike breakers, circulating blacklists and enforcing lockouts and evictions. There were 1,200 strikes in 1886 in New York City alone, and often coordinated with strikes were boycotts. However, after boycotts were declared illegal, workers found themselves limited and resorted to political activism.
Overall, the political, social and economic climates of New York City during the Gilded Age were very much entwined with closing the gap between rich and poor that was produced by rapid modernization. Like freedom and capitalism, reform was becoming symbolic of the Empire City.
