“The Empire City”, Chapter 5 of Joanne Reitano’s The Restless City discusses the Gilded Age in New York. Ragged Dick, a dime novel by Horatio Alger, portrayed New York City as a place of fascination and opportunity, believing in the rags-to-riches myth of the American Dream. Ragged Dick showed the optimistic side of Social Darwinism: one did not have to be a ruthless person in the Big Apple to live. On the other hand, Stephen Crane’s novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets showed the pessimistic side of Social Darwinism, and viewed New York City as a place of temptation and desperation.
Robber barons, merciless magnates of industry, dominated businesses by being cold-hearted and doing whatever it takes to be on top. Wall Street became the home of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad, Andrew Carnegie’s steel trust, Jay Gould’s brokerage firm, and J.P. Morgan’s banking house. Rockefeller, especially, was the epitome of the rags-to-riches myth with his frugality, cleverness, and diligence. He believed in a survival of the fittest in the business world and used it to fuel his success. Trusts led to governmental regulation of businesses, no longer a strict laissez-faire policy. Along with the evolution of the economy, the city itself was transformed with the help of inventions like electricity and the telephone. The new rich developed and modernized New York City with many structures that became iconic to New York, like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty.
In the late nineteenth century, New York became the center for finance, trade, industry, and immigration. With this fame came the infamy of political corruption led by the Tweed Ring. William M. Tweed controlled the Democratic Party and Tammany Hall. Tammany cheated democracy by having judges naturalize new immigrants in time for elections, pushing men to vote multiple times under different names, and using gangs to intimidate opposing voters. Tweed used his power for not only his own greed and selfish reasons, but for the improvement of the city. Under his domain, the Bronx was added to the boroughs, Central Park was completed, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Metropolitan Museum of art were constructed, He budgeted for orphans, schools, public baths, hospitals, public transportation, a paid fire department, and other improvements for the city. Riots like the 1871 Orange Riot plagued Tweed’s time in office and tested his control over the city. Tweed was finally arrested for corruption when the Ring’s account books were leaked to the New York Times. The Cooper Union rally led to the Committee of Seventy, a group set up to save the city from Tammany’s reigns.
Socially, the city showed a more Ragged Dick side, the hopeful and helpful face. Jacob Riis, initially a police reporter for the New York Tribune, released his book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. This book, filled with statistics, graphic images, and descriptions of the living conditions that people endured, exposed the sad truth and provoked social reform, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had for slavery. Josephine Shaw Lowell, a dedicated philanthropist, was the first female commissioner of the State Board of Charities and the head of the New York Charity Organization Society (COS). She improved prisons, workhouses, and reformatories, and promoted a minimum living wage. The New York City Consumers’ League helped mainly females in the workforce who were treated unfairly. The League compiled a list known as the “White List” that named all the establishments that met their standards of acceptable working conditions. The National Consumers’ League worked to ban child labor for adolescents under the age of sixteen so that they can go to school. Private charities like The Salvation Army and the Young Men’s Christian Association reached out to the poor, while others like the Children’s Aid Society helped the children of the city.
Economically, the city strayed away from individualism and moved towards collectivism. Samuel Gompers, the most famous labor organizer, believed that the strike was a key weapon to fight for labor rights and that only an organization run of, by, and for the workers would persistently work to improve labor conditions. To combat unions and strikers, employers used strikebreakers, blacklists, lockouts and evictions. In contrast to the Knights of Labor, the Central Labor Union (CLU) used a broad range of strategies including boycotts and political activism, and accepted all races, immigrant or native. CLU nominated Henry George to run for mayor against Democratic Abram Hewitt and Republican Theodore Roosevelt. Although George did not win the election, he still secured almost a third of the votes, which surprised many and showed the power of the labor force.
