Co-op City Plebeian opposition to the new urban order: the Astor Riot, land reform, co-ops, nativism, red republicanism, unionism.

Astor Opera is anoder nice place; / If you go thar, jest wash your face! / put on your ‘kids,’ and fix up

neat, / For dis am de spot of de eliteet!”

“De spot” itself was provocative. During the recent metropolitan expansion, two parallel avenues

had been driving north, constituting the cultural spines of two different class worlds. On the west:

Broadway, with its retail shops, department stores, monster hotels, and porpoise-parade of the

fashionable. On the east: the Bowery, the thoroughfare of sportsmen, dandies, gangsters, and fire

laddies. The thoroughfares, however, were not exactly parallel. At one point—Astor Place, just south

of Union Square—the two avenues, and worlds, collided. And at just that point of convergence,

capping it and in a sense claiming it, entrepreneurs had erected a splendid opera house for the

exclusive enjoyment of the Broadway world’s most self-proclaimedly aristocratic segment.

It was the combination of the “English” Macready and the “aristocratic” opera house that had so

aroused the ire of native American and Irish immigrant alike, but it was not these animosities that

made the May 7 affair (and its explosive aftermath) remarkable. What made this fracas different was

the response of the city’s upper classes.

They were not amused. Against the frightening backdrop of the 1848 European revolutions and the

alarmingly autonomous politics and culture of New York’s working-class quarters, the theater riot no

longer seemed innocent. It appeared to signal a new aggressiveness, a willingness to break out of the

Bowery world and invade Broadway’s. The elite had built an institution behind whose august portals

they could take refuge from the vulgarity of the streets. Now a senseless mob had violated their inner

sanctum. The barbarians were at—indeed well past—the gates. It was too much. It was time to act. It

was time to draw a line and say thus far and no farther.

Forty-seven of the city’s most prominent citizens sent Macready a joint letter urging him to return

to the opera house stage. They assured him “that the good sense and respect for order prevailing in

this community will sustain you on the subsequent nights of your performance.” Macready agreed.

Then they published the letter in the papers. Their gauntlet thus thrown down, they set about

assembling the firepower necessary to sustain their challenge. They turned to the newly elected Whig

mayor, Caleb S. Woodhull, and insisted he protect the lawful rights and personal liberty of actor

Macready.

At a City Hall meeting on the morning of Thursday, May 10, with Macready scheduled to reappear

that evening, Police Chief Matsell informed Mayor Woodhull that he lacked the force to quell a

serious riot. Terrified of chaos on his second day in office, the mayor ordered General Charles

Sandford, commander of the military forces in New York City, to have his men ready in Washington

Square Park. Sandford called out two hundred of the elite’s crack militia, the Twenty-seventh

Regiment—since 1847 renumbered and renamed as the Seventh Regiment—along with two troops of

horse, one troop of light artillery, and two companies of hussars, 350 men altogether. In addition, 150

police were placed inside the theater and another hundred on its perimeter; still more were

dispatched to guard nearby homes of the wealthy.

The Bowery responded to the challenge. Captain Isaiah Rynders swung into action. Forrest’s most

ardent backer, the man who had distributed tickets to barroom habitues and mobilized hundreds more

for the initial May 7 affair, and the Tammany stalwart who had made a career out of exploiting

resentment against the social and cultural elite, Rynders now salivated at the chance to embarrass the

new Whig administration. Devising a handbill, he had copies printed, delivered to a Park Row

tavern, and then distributed to runners, who on Wednesday, May 9, posted them at saloons and



eateries throughout the city. “SHALL AMERICANS or ENGLISH RULE IN THIS CITY?” it demanded to know,

and it called on all workingmen to “express their opinions this night at the ENGLISH ARISTOCRATIC

OPERA HOUSE!” It was signed by the “American Committee,” a group headed by Rynders’s chief

assistant, Ned Buntline, author the previous year of Myster-ies and Miseries of New York, saga of a

city riven along class lines.

Tickets to the performance, along with marching orders, were handed out to assorted b’hoys at Jim

McNulty’s saloon, on the corner of Chatham Square and Dover Street. By show(down) time,

Rynders’s activists were in place, under Judson’s field management, and thousands more had turned

out to watch or participate; the majority were native born, but there was a considerable minority of

Irish immigrants—butchers and laborers united in mutual Anglo-aristophobia.

Tight security screened out many of Rynders’s ticket holders, and their yells about discrimination

against those who didn’t have “kid gloves and a white vest, damn ‘em!” merged with the general roar.

The play commenced promptly at 7:30. Anti-Macready forces as promptly disrupted it. The actors

went into dumb-show mode while police made their way through the audience, seizing and arresting

protestors.

Outside, the crowd, now grown to ten thousand, began hurling paving stones, which smashed

through the windows and sailed into the audience. Massing their ranks, the crowd rammed at the

doors, intent on breaking in. The police, way out of their depth, called on the militia for support,

which arrived at 9:15 P.M. and took up positions. The crowd pressed forward, wrestling with the

militia. Matsell warned the crowd that force would be used, a notification drowned out by enraged

voices crying, “Burn the damned den of the aristocracy!” One fellow in a red flannel shirt bared his

breast, screaming, “Fire, fire you damned sons of bitches; you durs’n’t fire, you durs’n’t fire.” But

they did, first in the air, then directly into the bodies massed in front of them. Moving up Astor Place,

they discharged several more volleys, working relentlessly now to clear the area.



Soldiers fire on rioters outside the Astor Place Theater, May 10, 1849. Lithograph by

Nathaniel Currier. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

When it was over, eighteen of the crowd lay dead, none of them Rynders’s men, most bystanders.

Four more would die within the week. Over 150 were wounded or injured, and 117 were arrested,

mostly workingmen: coopers, printers, butchers, carpenters, servants, sailmakers, machinists, clerks,

masons, bakers, plumbers, and laborers. Of the twenty-two killed, seven were Irish laborers.

Friday, May 11, the day after the riot, the streets bristled with a display of civilian and military

power: a thousand special deputies, two thousand infantry, a squadron of cavalry, four troops of

horse artillery. Handbills went up around town calling for a mass rally at City Hall Park that evening,

and at six P.M. an enraged crowd cheered speakers who condemned the mayor, police, and military.

Rynders declared that mass murder had been perpetrated “to please the aristocracy of the city at the

expense of the lives of inoffensive citizens—to please an aristocratic Englishman backed by a few

sycophantic Americans. (Loud cries of indignation.)” Mike Walsh called for a murder prosecution,

told the crowd to arm itself in future frays and said that only his high respect for the law restrained

him from urging the crowd to emulate their European counterparts and mount the barricades. Several

thousand auditors boiled out of the park, roaring for vengeance, and marched up to Astor Place to

confront the troops again. They hurled stones from behind hastily erected barricades, but the militia

leveled their muskets, fixed bayonets, and charged, and the crowd dispersed. The June Days were not

to be replayed in Manhattan. Not yet.

The danger passed, the gentry rejoiced. The old Whig warhorse James Watson Webb applauded



the troops in his Courier and Enquirer and underscored a larger message the bloody affair had

delivered: “The promptness of authorities in calling out the armed forces and the unwavering

steadiness with which the citizens obeyed the order to fire upon the assembled mob, was,” Webb

declared, “an excellent advertisement to the Capitalists of the old world, that they might send their

property to New York and rely upon the certainty that it would be safe from the clutches of red

republicanism, or chartists, or communionists [sic] of any description.”

Some tender-hearted souls looked askance at the use of force—surely republics didn’t do this sort

of thing! The Democratic Review noted that more lives had been lost than in many of the Mexican

War battles in which b’hoys had served as volunteers. Nathaniel Parker Willis, of all people, noted

in his upperten Home Journal that the riot was a protest “from Mose and the soap-lock-ery” against

“aristocratizing the pit” and suggested the rich “be mindful where its luxuries offend.”

Future entertainment entrepreneurs would follow Willis’s advice, especially once the opera house

itself proved a casualty of the affair. Burlesque shows were soon calling it the “Massacre Opera

House” at “DisAster Place”; when it reopened in September, attendance was dismal, and it was

eventually sold off. The upper classes relocated their sanctum a bit farther north, to the more

defensible precincts of Union Square. In 1853 Moses H. Grinnell (a staunch Macready supporter) and

others formed a corporation to build the Academy of Music at 14th Street and Irving Place.

Embodying the grandest metropolitan ambitions, it was the largest opera hall in the world when it

opened in 1854. Like the ill-fated Astor, it boasted a plush interior and a small number of private

boxes. But in a manifest bit of caution, enhanced by the need to fill the space, many of the four

thousand seats were priced inexpensively, and management forswore all claims to aristocratic

exclusiveness, insisting rather that its mission now was to cultivate taste and knowledge among the

citizenry at large.

In the immediate aftermath of the riot, however, Judge Charles Patrick Daly, who presided over

the trial of those arrested, pushed hard for their conviction, to serve notice that the old republican

acceptance of crowd actions as inevitable, even legitimate, even functional, had come to a definitive

end. Judson, convicted, got a year in jail and was treated as a hero on his release. Rynders got off

with the help of attorney John Van Buren, the former president’s son, a sign from Tammany that the

party would look after its own.

What was clear to all concerned was that the Astor Place affair signaled (in the Herald’s words) a

“collision between those who have been styled the ‘exclusives,’ or ‘upper ten,’ and the great popular

masses.” It was left to a reporter from Philadelphia to sum up the newly hardened positions. The riot,

he wrote, “leaves behind it a feeling to which this community has hitherto been a stranger—an

opposition of classes—the rich and the poor—white kids and no kids at all; in fact, to speak right out,

a feeling that there is now, in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot has hitherto felt

it his duty to deny—a high class and a low class.”

The riot at Astor Place, a frenzied challenge to the cultural authority of New York’s nascent

bourgeoisie, was swiftly followed by a far more disciplined attack on its right to set the city’s

economic agenda. Since at least the 1820s—the heyday of Thomas Skidmore, Fanny Wright, and the

Workingmen’s Party—plebeian New Yorkers had been fashioning analyses and programs to contest

the degradation of their working and living conditions. Now another upheaval got underway, rooted

in prior protests but boosted by thousands of feisty immigrant agitators who contributed their own

radical traditions and energies. Laissez-faire polemics, it turned out, were not the only ideas capable



of crossing the Atlantic.

TENANTS VERSUS LANDLORDS



One way to improve the quality of life in New York Gty, said the “land reformers,” was to get a lot of

New Yorkers to leave town. Given the vast numbers surging into what was still an overwhelmingly

rural continent, this approach had many advocates, but the leading tribune was George Henry Evans.

The old workingmen’s spokesman of the 1830s had retreated to a New Jersey farm during the

depression era, where he pondered the work of Tom Paine and Thomas Skidmore. Evans became

convinced that labor’s problems, at home and work, were chiefly due to its swollen ranks. A surplus

of workers allowed bosses to dictate low wages; a surplus of people seeking shelter allowed

landlords to extract high rents. It followed that moving substantial numbers from city to country would

improve the lot of those who stayed behind as well as those who departed. The chief obstacle, as

Evans saw it, was that landlords—often large speculative companies based in New York City—were

hogging the public domain out west.

The solution was to use labor’s political power to break the grip of land monopolists as President

Jackson had broken the reign of bank monopolists. In 1844 Evans organized the National Reform

Association, whose slogan was “Vote Yourself a Farm.” The idea was to give publicly owned land

to actual settlers, free of charge, while barring speculators and absentee landlords. The government—

crucially—would also subsidize construction of republican villages and build government-owned

railroads to get settlers to them.

Immigrant radicals also liked land reform. In 1840 Thomas Ainge Devyr, who had been a leader

of the Chartist movement in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, escaped to Brooklyn, where he began agitating for

free public land grants, government-owned railroads, and laws restricting wealth and landownership,

and in 1844 linked up with Evans’s National Reformers.

Evans and Devyr were soon joined by Hermann Kriege, a Westphalian journalist and member of

the outlawed Communist Bund der Gerechten (which later would publish the Communist Manifesto).

Kriege arrived in New York in 1845 and formed the Sozialreformassoziatin (Social Reform

Association), which drew nearly a thousand members, making it the city’s leading verein. The SRA

soon had its own newspaper, the Volks-Tribun, and a Social Reform Halle on Grand Street that

would remain one of Kleindeutschland’s most important public meeting places for decades to come.

Kriege backed Evans’s free-land-for-settlers campaign, and soon land reform societies had

germinated in New York and cities across the country. This popular demand for access to western

lands partly accounts for the enthusiasm with which many New York workers greeted imperial

expansion into Mexico and Oregon.1

For most city workers, however, garnering western lands at gunpoint, while perhaps symbolically

satisfying, remained basically irrelevant. Without government support—as yet nowhere in sight—

escape to the West was utterly impractical. Indeed some critics, who believed emigration schemes

sidestepped rather than confronted New York’s housing problems, proposed tackling the land issue in

the city itself. Mike Walsh, the Irish Protestant editor of the Subterranean (and Evans’s sometimes

ally), believed that urban crowding was “the cause of more vice and misery, more suffering in every

way, sickness, debauchery, seduction, assaults, and even murder, than all other causes put together.”

But rather than blasting western monopolists, Walsh took aim at the most powerful landlords in New

York City: Trinity Church and John Jacob Astor. Walsh declared Astor a “worthless wealthy drone”



whose rent extortions amounted to a “legalized system of plunder,” and Trinity’s property, Walsh

wrote in 1845, should be confiscated for public use, beginning with St. John’s Park. To encourage the

Common Council to action, he blazed a direct action trail by climbing over the park’s fence and

tramping on forbidden ground.

Astor’s death in 1848 at the age of eighty-five provoked others to pointed commentary. Bennett

reprinted Astor’s will on the Herald’s front page and charged that at least half the estate’s enormous

value was unearned. It was, rather, a by-product of the general rise in the value of New York City

real estate, which in turn was due primarily to improvements effected by the city’s working people.

Yet the millionaire’s legacy—apart from a bequest of four hundred thousand dollars for an Astor

Library—passed not to New Yorkers in general but to Astor’s family, creating in the process a most

unrepublican dynasty. Greeley took the occasion to propose limiting individual ownership of city

land to a thousand acres. He also urged passage of an income tax law, on the grounds that it had been

unjust for city government “to protect Mr. Astor’s houses, lands, ships, stocks, etc.,” without having

exacted recompense from him commensurate to his income.

Such demands, which already transgressed the bounds of the politically possible, paled next to

those promulgated by the Tenant League. In February 1848, with landlords cashing in on economic

recovery and immigrant desperation, Irish radicals and native land reformers established what they

hoped would become a citywide organization of wage-earning tenants. Its goal, they declared, was to

attack the “system of landlordism” as “one of the most blighting curses that ever was inflicted on the

human race.” Specifically, the Tenant League called on the legislature to limit landlord profit from

rents to 7 percent of the property’s assessed valuation, guarantee security of possession to tenants

who paid their “legal rents,” impose a city tax of 3 percent on all unimproved lots (to discourage

owners from keeping them off the market for speculative purposes), and halt the incorporation of

building companies, which allowed combinations of capitalists to oppress the poor.

Picking up on Evans’s ideas but applying them locally, the Tenant League urged New York City to

sell its public “common lands” only to those who did not already own other lots; this would allow

urban “homesteaders” to build their own houses on city soil. The league also asked the legislature to

forbid the renting of cellar apartments and the building of rear houses that left no part of the lot

uncovered. It called for repeal of the northward extension of the fire limits, calling it a “scheme of

speculators” to push Irish shanty dwellers off leased land. It denounced Moving Day—still going

strong—as a landlord trick to raise rents each May. It formed lodgers’ leagues and kept track of

land​lords who evicted tenants and charged high rents, creating a counterpart to the landlords’

blacklist of delinquent tenants. Finally, it demanded the city establish a housing code and oversee

landlord compliance.

The Tenant League proposals, which flew in the face of laissez-faire ideology and the interests of

the wealthy, proved beyond the ability of the radicals to organize. There would be no direct

collective confrontation by tenants of landlord power in this era. Poor people unable to keep up with

burgeoning rents settled for individual but achievable tactics—fleeing without paying, or searching

out ever more squalid quarters. But ideas like rent control and taxation of speculative profits had

been placed on the metropolitan agenda. They’d be back.

TOWARD A COOPERATIVE METROPOLIS



In the meantime, the working-class quarters were afire with even more startling challenges to the



metropolitan status quo. For decades Europe had been buzzing with a variety of “socialist” notions,

nowhere more so than in Paris, where Charles Fourier’s sweeping indictment of capitalist

civilization as one based on fraud, waste, and exploitation resonated widely. So did his proposal that

dissenters should withdraw into cooperative communities—“phalanxes,” he called them—that would

be the seeds of an alternative society.

Fourierism had reached New York during the panic years, courtesy of Albert Brisbane. The

idealistic son of a wealthy upstate merchant and landowner, Brisbane was no intellectual; he always

looked, said Whitman, “as if he were attempting to think out some problem a little too hard for him.”

But if his versions of Fourier’s teachings were glib, he promulgated them with tremendous energy and

swiftly won a crucial convert in Horace Greeley. During 1842 and 1843, the editor gave Brisbane

regular access to the Tribune’s front page and added his own explanations and plaudits for

Fourierism.

Horace Greeley was no socialist. A staunch Whig, he was convinced that capitalist growth would

eventually benefit the working-class, that the interests of employers and employees were ultimately hi

harmony, and that strikes raised the specter of class conflict and should be vigorously opposed. But

Greeley was not prepared to dismiss depression-spawned misery as an inevitable by-product of the

free market, and he refused to root the plight of wage-earners in their own moral deficiencies.

Greeley reported so regularly on foul conditions in the capitalizing trades that his archrival, Bennett,

took him to task in the Herald for “eternally harping on the misery, destitution and terrible sufferings

of the poor of this city.”

It was, however, primarily from the middling classes that Greeley and Brisbane won most support

—from people who concurred with their analysis of the negative impact of the “system of Free

Competition” on life in the city. Charles Dana, Greeley’s assistant, deplored its economic fallout

(“periodical crises and bankruptcies”), its psychological repercussions (“killing cares, harassing

anxieties, hopes blasted, and unforeseen reverses and ruin”), and its ethical iniquity (fostering

selfishness and duplicity). Most alarming was its tendency to concentrate economic and political

power in fewer and fewer hands. Fourier had predicted that capitalism would lead to “Commercial

and Industrial Feudalism,” with producers in bondage to large corporations and banking houses. His

American disciples pointed to New York City, with its “ascendancy of a monied oligarchy and a

commercial feudality” and attendant “degradation of the laboring classes,” as clear vindication of the

master’s theories.

Greeley didn’t buy Fourier’s solutions, but he did believe that a moderate version, dubbed

Associationalism, would sort out the problems of capitalist society without impinging on property

rights or fueling class resentments. If artisans simply pooled their talents and money and established

cooperative workshops, they could control their working conditions, retain the profits of their labor,

preserve republican traditions of mutuality, and still survive in the larger free market economy.

As promulgated by middle-class activists, Associationalism drew some modest support from

urban mechanics—a band of Brooklyn artisans organized the first American phalanx—and the city’s

most effective cooperative was established by professional musicians. In 1842 the men who played in

local theaters created the New York Philharmonic, a self-governing and profit-sharing orchestra. The

Philharmonic, significantly, was 42 percent German at its inception, a percentage that leapt to nearly

three-quarters with the arrival of revolutionary exiles, who brought with them not only a proclivity

for cooperatives but considerable experience in their formation.



When Louis Philippe abdicated in February of 1848, the Parisian working class, so instrumental in

his overthrow, won establishment of a Second Republic with adult male suffrage. But socialist (or

“red”) republicans like Louis Blanc had pressed for more profound changes, including a guaranteed

“right to work” in government-backed “cooperative” workshops. Blanc’s message had wide appeal

in 1848. The provisional government emptied Clichy prison of debtors and converted it to a

cooperative association in which some two thousand tailors made uniforms for the new national

guard. Soon saddlers, spinners, cabinetmakers, masons—eventually more than 120 Parisian trades—

had formed nearly three hundred production cooperatives, which collectively enrolled some fifty

thousand members. Some were brilliantly successful, others failed miserably, but all alarmed the

moderate republican leadership and horrified the bourgeoisie. Few co-ops long survived the terrible

“June Days” when barricades went up and workers battled the army until being crushed in fighting

that killed or injured over ten thousand.

When the refugees from this and other upheavals poured into New York City, among then- ranks

was Wilhelm Weitling, a German tailor. Like thousands of his mobile countrymen, Weitling had spent

time in Paris learning the skills of his trade and the language of socialism and had fought on the

barricades in forty-eight. Now, in Manhattan, he proposed that New York workers create producer

cooperatives, which would in turn sell their goods to a worker-run Trade-Exchange Bank. Co-op

workers would be paid in paper money, valid in worker-run stores and warehouses, which would

sell both finished products and raw materials. The profits gained from cutting out capitalists and

middlemen would be plowed back into expanding the cooperative sector until, eventually,

competitive capitalism would be superseded by a cooperative commonwealth. As vehicles for this

transformation, Weitling launched the Arbeiterbund (Workers League) in 1849 and a newspaper

called Die Republik der Arbeiter (Worker’s Republic) the following year.

Weitling’s initiatives resonated in New York’s German community, where most people, whatever

their politics, were culturally predisposed toward organizations. British radicals, too, were familiar

with producers’ cooperatives, which had been established in the north of England, and natives had

already been inspired by the associationist and Fourierist movement of the mid-1840s.

Among the most powerful and militant groups to get behind the idea was the Turnverein—the

gymnastics society—which combined a passion for physical culture with socialist activism.

Thousands of Turners had fought in the 1848 uprisings. Now, as refugees, they formed the New

Yorker Socialistischen Turnverein, whose newspaper, the Turn-Zeitung, promoted a wide range of

radical programs, including Weitling’s. Together with English Chartists, Irish nationalists, and

American Associationalists, the Germans set to work establishing cooperatives, and soon Manhattan

blossomed with associations of tailors, cabinetmakers, upholsterers, cigarmakers, confectioners,

shipwrights, bakers, shoemakers, and grocers.

In addition, the activists combined cooperative formation with labor organizing. In 1850, inspired

by the ongoing degradation of the trades and by an inflationary spiral touched off by an influx of

California gold that sent prices and rents climbing, newcomers and old-timers alike resurrected New

York City’s union movement, all but demolished by the 1837-43 depression. (The Turn-Zeitung ran a

series of historical articles informing readers about the 1830s labor movement in their adopted city.)

This combination of resurgent unionism and militant cooperationism touched off an “uprising”—

replete with mass rallies, marches on City Hall, and some bloody confrontation with the forces of

order—that in a very modest way echoed the stormy June Days of Paris.



“WE DID NOT EXPECT TO FIND IN THIS FREE COUNTRY A RUSSIAN POLICE”



In March 1850 German cabinetmakers fanned out through the working-class wards, posting handbills

in immigrant boardinghouses calling for a union and a strike. In short order two thousand had walked

off work, marched around the laboring districts in grand parades, and forced many masters to

increase wages and change work rules. By April unions had blossomed in almost every trade.

Greeley reported on their meetings—the just-minted New-York Printers Union elected him its

president—and promoted the new cooperatives as well. Weitling too was everywhere, giving

speeches, penning exhortations in the Republik der Arbeiter. By month’s end he had brokered

formation of a Central Commission of the United German Trades, comprised of seventeen unions

representing forty-five hundred members.

The Irish community’s dander was up too. Irish tailors and hatters flocked to labor organizations

or organized them where they didn’t exist. Irishmen were prominent in initiatives by blacksmiths,

boilermakers, porters, shoemakers, and construction workers. The Irish-American came out for coops, declaring that “the principles of Association, can, alone” better the conditions of labor.

Unskilled workers took the biggest steps forward. Back in 1843 Irish builders had helped establish

the Laborers Union Benevolent Association, New York’s first mutual aid society by and for the

unskilled. By 1850 it had enlisted over six thousand workers—many of them famine refugees, many

with organizational skills honed in battling landlords. By far the largest organization of wage earners

in the city, it supported the striking craft workers and called its own men out on behalf of higher

wages and an end to the sweating system in the building trades.

Bosses and businessmen were convinced this upheaval was the work of outside agitators—

Bennett’s Herald blamed the “vast importations of foreign socialists”—and indeed the overseas

influence was decisive. But these “alien” ideas had local analogues. It was, after all, the “American”

Brotherhood of the Union that in 1850 denounced the competition fostered by “capitalists,

monopolists and tyrants” as tending to “divide, distract, and degrade Labor, and render the laborer

and the mechanic a mere tool of those whose only God is Gold.”

During the upheaval, workers strove with considerable success to overcome national divisions.

Many remembered 1846, when five hundred Irish laborers at the new Atlantic Docks had struck for

an eighty-seven-cent hour and a ten-hour day, only to be replaced by greenhorn Germans provided to

boss stevedores by the elite German Society, to the fury of German workers. Cabinetmakers issued

their constitution in German, French, and English versions (“for the accommodation of all nations”)

and conducted proceedings in several languages. German shoemakers forbade members to scab on

their English brethren and adopted parallel wage demands. In virtually none of these cases, however,

did labor ecumenicism stretch far enough to embrace African Americans or women.

New York’s white male workers of the world united more formally on June 5, 1850, when eightythree delegates, representing seventy unions and twenty-eight reform groups, formed the Industrial

Congress. The new organization sought an eight-hour day, a minimum wage on public works projects,

and direct city hiring of workers rather than the use of private contractors. It also backed the land

reformers’ initiatives, favoring a homestead law to open the West and a housing law at home to

oversee construction and inspection of tenements to ensure they met appropriate standards of public

health. Industrial Congress delegates also urged the municipal government to foster cooperatives,

establish a labor exchange, and build reading rooms and public baths throughout the city. Such

demands would remain at the core of New York’s labor movement for the remainder of the century.



The Industrial Congress also supported embattled strikers. On July 10, 1850, a mass meeting of

German, Irish, and American tailors proposed a scale of prices, and on the fifteenth some nine

hundred tailors turned out to enforce it. On July 22 three hundred strikers, most Germans, marched to

the Nassau Street offices of Longstreet and Company, one of New York’s largest clothing

manufacturers, a firm notorious for low wages and antiunionism. A brawl ensued. Police waded in

with nightsticks and arrested the strikers. Organized labor swung into action. On the twenty-seventh

thousands swarmed to City Hall Park for a rally. Radicals and unionists denounced the police (“We

did not expect to find in this free country a Russian police,” declared the Central Committee), and the

Industrial Congress started a campaign to boycott any clothing firm that rejected the tailors’ bill of

prices. At another City Hall rally, on August 3, some went farther and called for a general strike. If

butchers and bakers were to cut off supplies, “then the aristocrats will all starve,” one militant

argued, for “they are the drones and the idlers.”

On August 4 three hundred German tailors marched to 38th Street and Ninth Avenue, where

strikebreaking subcontractors were at work. There, according to the Staats-Zeitung, police attacked

the tailors; according to English papers, tailors ransacked the nonunion outfit. All agreed that a melee

ensued, in which two tailors were killed and dozens severely wounded. Thirty-nine unionists were

convicted of rioting and dispatched to prison. For the first time in U.S. history, urban American

workers had died at the hands of the forces of order in a trade dispute. The event only outraged and

strengthened the strikers. By month’s end almost every employer had come to terms with the union,

and three thousand German and Irish tailors had formed a Cooperative Union Tailoring

Establishment.

But this would be cooperation’s high-water mark. Marx and Engels—Weitling’s opponents in the

European radical wars—had derided such efforts as Utopian wishful thinking, and in New York,

certainly, their tough-minded analysis proved correct. Businessmen attacked cooperative shops as the

opening wedge of socialism. Wholesalers refused to buy their goods. Banks denied them capital or

credit. The legislature wouldn’t grant co-ops the legal protections it afforded corporations, leaving

individual members liable for collective losses. And with artisan-run shops unwilling to slash their

own pay to subsistence levels, they were unable to compete with capitalists willing and able to

exploit cheap immigrant outworkers.

By 1852 such obstacles had become evident to all, and mass defections produced a general

collapse. Those co-ops that survived did so by accepting individualistic approaches. The one

thousand members of Industrial Home Owners Society Number One (1849), determined to escape the

orbit of Manhattan land monopolists, bought a 367-acre tract in Westchester County along the New

Haven Railroad line, divided up the land into a gridwork of quarter-acre parcels, then distributed

plots by lot. As of 1854 these suburban pioneers had built over three hundred homes, planted shade

trees, built a commercial section around the railroad station, and incorporated their community as

Mount Vernon. This was the kind of land reform that bankers and builders could live with, and

legislators had no hesitation in authorizing such associations to incorporate; by 1852 there were

nearly seventy. In 1859, similarly, Germans set up the Deutsche Sparbank, and within a year ten

thousand depositors—the majority of them tailors, shoemakers, cabinetmakers, and grocers—had put

in $2.5 million. For now, the most “cooperative” enterprises would be the corporations themselves,

but the vision of a cooperative municipality survived and would be resuscitated repeatedly.

The unions proved far more durable. Some, on winning their immediate goals, did lapse into

dormancy or continue on as mutual benefit societies only. But with employers constantly reneging on



recent agreements, and inflation biting deeply into wages (the cost of necessities rose 30 percent

between 1853 and 1854), unions old and new continued to launch strikes. The mid-1850s witnessed

initiatives by omnibus drivers, horsecar drivers on the Third Avenue Railroad, pilots of the Union

Ferry Company, Erie Railroad workers, hatmakers, cigarmakers, coopers, printers (now part of a

nationwide organization, their local known as Typographical Union No. 6), hotel waiters, drygoods

clerks, housepainters, machinists, carpenters, gilders, typesetters, and the German Pianomakers Union

of New York City, proud possessors of the flag carried by journeyman pianomakers of Paris “upon

the barricades during the stormy days of the French Revolution.”

Good interethnic relations remained an important goal. The Longshoremen’s United Benevolent

Society, formed in 1852, had fourteen hundred members by 1854. Though overwhelmingly Irish, the

Longshoremen’s Union boasted a banner decorated with the flags of France, Germany, the

Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, Hungary, and Italy, all bound together under an American

flag and the word “Unity.” African Americans, again, were conspicuously excepted.

Many, though by no means all, of these strikes were successful. Influential bourgeois opinion

tolerated nonviolent protests; there was so much money floating around that union demands seemed

both legitimate and affordable. As Harper’s put it in the summer of 1853: “It is reasonable and

natural, that in view of the splendid trappings of our growing houses, and our metropolitan hotels, that

the gas-fitters, and cordwainers and ladies’ shoemakers, and saloon-servants should hold out their

hands for their share of the excess.”

Many unionists accordingly stuck to fighting for wages and work rules and avoided larger political

initiatives: this was the guiding philosophy of a new central labor congress established in 1853, the

Amalgamated Trades Convention. However, others continued to believe that only broad-based

pressure on city and state authorities would effect fundamental change.

Joseph Weydemeyer was among the leaders of those calling for creation of a fullfledged labor

party. Newly arrived in 1851, Weydemeyer was a former Prussian army officer who had been

converted to socialism and was now a close colleague of Marx and Engels. In New York,

Weydemeyer first wrote for the Turn-Zeitung, then (by January 1852) established Die Revolution,

which that spring published Marx’s masterly postmortem of the 1848 Revolution, The Eighteenth

Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

In March 1853 Weydemeyer put out a call “To the Workers of All Trades!” for a March meeting at

Mechanics Hall, to which eight hundred German-American house-painters, tailors, shoemakers,

cabinetmakers, cigarmakers, Turners, and members of Weitling’s Workers League responded. Those

assembled endorsed formation of the Amerikanische Arbeiterbund (American Workers League). It

issued a call for what by now had become the standard set of working-class cultural, political, and

economic demands. These included the ten-hour day, abolition of child labor, free higher education

and day care, opposition to temperance, enactment of a mechanic’s lien law, unification of workers

across national lines, and establishment of political clubs in working-class wards in order to “strive

for the organization of the working class into a cohesive and independent political party.” The

organization established a base of support in Kleindeutschland and German communities in Brooklyn,

Williamsburgh, and Staten Island but failed to reach much beyond them, although an Irish Societies

Convention also emerged in 1853 to push for some of the same reforms.

Though nothing like the scenarios envisioned by enthusiastic immigrant revolutionaries would

come to pass, their campaigns, coupled with the Astor riot and patently appalling slum conditions,