The New York Commune? The Tweed Ring toppled in early 1870s, for running up a massive municipal debt and for failing, at a time when the Paris Commune has unnerved local elites, to “manage” the Irish working class ⠀愀猀 攀瘀椀搀攀渀挀攀搀 椀渀 琀栀攀 戀氀漀漀搀礀 伀爀愀渀最攀 爀椀漀琀猀

Nation saw the socialist specter “gaining among the working-classes all over the world” and

declared one had to be “wilfully blind” to “imagine that America is going to escape the convulsion.”

Charles Loring Brace insisted that “there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the

surface of New York as of Paris,” and the Times concurred. The “terrible proletaire class” had

already shown its revolutionary head during the draft riots, the Times recalled, when for a few days

in 1863, “New York seemed like Paris, under the Reds in 1870.” Now matters were arguably worse,

as there were “communist leaders and ‘philosophers’ and reformers” in New York, ready to stir up

the “seething, ignorant, passionate, half-criminal class” who “hate and envy the rich.” Should “some

such opportunity occur as was present in Paris,” we should soon see “a sudden storm of communistic

revolutions even in New York such as would astonish all who do not know these classes.”

ORANGE AND GREEN



In early July 1871 a group of Protestant Irish-Americans—the Loyal Order of Orange—requested

police permission to march through the city streets to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne. Irish Catholic

organizations protested that the parade would be an insult to their community and pointed to the

Orangemen’s behavior the previous July 12, when they had marched up Eighth Avenue to Elm Park on

92nd Street. As they went they had taunted residents of Hell’s Kitchen, Irish Catholic laborers laying

pipelines in 59th Street, and others who were broadening the boulevard farther uptown. They’d

spewed epithets and sung insulting tunes, such as “Croppies, Lie Down,” whose refrain ended: “Our

foot on the neck of the Croppy we’ll keep.” A crowd of enraged workmen followed along and

attacked the Elm Park picnickers with stones and clubs. Shots were exchanged, and eight people were

killed.

Such disgraceful scenes, the Catholics argued, must not be repeated. The Orangemen sought “race

ascendancy,” argued Patrick Ford, Galway-born editor of the recent​ly established Irish World. They

hoped, in league with the nativist “Anglo-American element,” to make the United States a thoroughly

“Saxon” nation. But the United States, Ford argued, articulating what would emerge as a major strand

of metropolitan thought and feeling, was in fact a multicultured construction—“a political, not a

natural, nation.” “This people are not one,” Ford insisted. “In blood, in religion, in traditions, in

social and domestic habits, they are many.” It was wrong, therefore, to ask non-English residents to

“ignore their own identity and origin” and “become Yankees first, before they can be regarded as

Americans.”

City authorities agreed, noting that the use of abusive language or gesture in public streets was a

misdemeanor and that courts had declared no organization had the right to provoke violence by

inflaming the passions of other groups. On July 10, with Tweed’s backing, Police Superintendent

James J. Kelso forbade the parade. Irish organizations and Archbishop John McCloskey (who had

succeeded John Hughes on his death in 1864) applauded the decision.

Now Protestants protested. The next day, indignant Wall Street businessmen lined up outside the

Produce Exchange to sign a petition denouncing the edict. Leading newspapers raged at the cowardly

surrender to a Catholic mob and demanded an instant reversal. Protestant New Yorkers viewed the

parade issue through the prism of events in France. Thus the Herald argued that Irish Catholic

outcries against Orangemen manifested “the same spirit which prompted the Paris Commune.”

Protestants also feared that Catholic political power menaced republican liberties, an old worry

recently revived by Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), eighty in all, that condemned such



tendencies of the bourgeois era as naturalism, rationalism, separation of church and state, liberty of

conscience, and (error number eighty) the notion that “the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile

himself and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” The Times suggested

that Catholics intended to set up a state church and drive Protestants “to take shelter in holes and

corners,” and Thomas Nast, cartoonist for Harper’s, fashioned images of mitred crocodiles slithering

up on the beaches of America.



“The American River Ganges: The Priests and the Children,” by Thomas Nast,

Harper’s Weekly, September 30, 1871. (General Research. The New York Public

Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

These anxieties had been boosted by Tammanyite Mayor Abraham Oakey Hall, who had taken to

reviewing the St. Patrick’s Day parade in full Irish regalia, showing up at balls in bottle-green flytail

coats and emerald silk shirts, and jocularly claiming his initials really stood for “Ancient Order of

Hibernians.” Tweed and company had, moreover, authorized state and city aid to parochial schools

and Catholic private charities: the Church got nearly $1,500,000 from public sources between 1869

and 1871. To the Tribune it seemed quite apparent that the Irish, “under the leadership of Mr.

William M. Tweed, had taken possession of this City and State.” Superintendent Kelso’s order

banning the Orange Parade seemed brutal confirmation of this.

Protestants also fought the banning order because it gave comfort to Irish nationalists, Fenians

chief among them. After the war, the Fenians had come up from underground, declared themselves a

sovereign government-in-exile, and hoisted their harp-and-sunburst flag over the old Moffat mansion



(opposite Union Square), now their capitol. A faction led by William R. Roberts, a wealthy New

York dry-goods merchant, pushed to capture British Canada and hold it hostage for Irish

independence. This would hopefully embroil the United States in an Anglo-American war, during

which Ireland could break for freedom.

This program roused tremendous enthusiasm among New York’s working-class Irish. In March

1866 over a hundred thousand turned out for a Fenian rally in Jones’ Woods—despite the opposition

of Archbishop McCloskey. The savings of domestics and longshoremen (not, for the most part, the

more conservative Irish middle classes) helped purchase a cache of arms from the U.S. government.

But money, enthusiasm, and some tacit support from American officials still fuming at England’s

Confederate leanings were no substitute for military competence, and the Fenian invasion forces were

easily routed by Canadian militiamen.

This invasion fiasco stimulated the growth of the Clan na Gael (founded 1867), a far more

disciplined and secretive organization. Because Irish nationalists retained broad popular support,

they were vigorously wooed by Tammany politicians, and Grant Republicans gave them federal jobs

in New York City. But leading Irish exiles aligned themselves with the International, which strongly

supported Irish independence. Ford of the Irish World linked the nationalist cause to radical

enthusiasms by denouncing the “money interest” as “a huge boa constrictor” that “has wound itself

about the nation, crushing its bones and sucking the life blood from its heart.”

This combination of concerns about Commune-style radicalism, Irish Catholicism’s growing

power in the city, and the emergence of left-leaning Irish nationalism generated intense elite pressure

on Tammany to reverse its stand and let the Orangemen parade. Tweed, already feeling the heat from

some initial exposés of Tammany corruption, decided he had no choice but to acquiesce. Governor

Hoffman came down from Albany on the eleventh and, after conferring with Tweed and Hall,

rescinded Kelso’s decision. He also ordered regiments of National Guardsmen and cavalry to guard

the marchers the following day.

SLAUGHTER ON EIGHTH AVENUE



July 12 dawned bright and hot. Five thousand troops reported to their armories at seven A.M. Some

were old hands at this kind of thing—notably the elite Seventh Regiment. At the other extreme was the

new-minted Ninth Regiment, a Jim Fisk creation. The master of Erie had bankrolled the troop but put

far more energy into its scarlet-coated hundred-piece band than into imparting military discipline.

Most Guardsmen were Protestant employees of the city’s financial and business firms (the Irish Sixtyninth would be kept in its armory all day). Most shared their employers’ fear or hatred of the tenement

house denizens whose paths they would cross that day. In addition to the military, fifteen hundred

policemen gathered at headquarters in Mulberry Street.

Catholic forces readied themselves as well. For a week there had been vigorous debates in

nationalist circles about how to respond should a parade go forward. Ancient Order of Hibernians

lodges around New York and Brooklyn had called for violent resistance. Some had undergone street

drills in preparation. Fenian leaders were in unusual agreement with the Catholic hierarchy that

violence would only make the Irish appear incapable of self-government, but neither priests nor

moderate nationalists had much influence that morning.

From all over the city groups of people made their way toward Lamartine Hall, on the northwest

corner of Eighth Avenue and 29th Street, where the Orangemen were forming up their tiny contingent.



The Green forces came from scattered worksites: longshoremen from East River docks, laborers from

the Jackson and Badgers Foundry on 14th Street, plasterers, Boulevard workers, quarrymen at Mount

Morris, Central Park laborers, men doing repairs on the Third Avenue Railroad or digging sewers in

Fourth Avenue or manning the Harlem Gas Works. They came from a morning mass meeting at

Hibernian Hall—Ancient Order of Hibernians headquarters, at Prince and Mulberry—where there

had already been a violent clash with the Eighty-fourth Regiment and the police (except for two

“copps” who had refused to fight fellow Irishmen and been promptly fired and jailed). And, of

course, they came from the working-class quarters, from Mackerelville (around 13th Street between

First Avenue and Avenue A), from Yorkville, from Brooklyn, and—in greatest numbers—from Hell’s

Kitchen.

By 1:30 crowds lined both sides of Eighth Avenue, from 21st to 33rd, and jammed the cross

streets. Most were laborers, wearing the long black coats and dirty white shirts of their calling. Many

neighborhood women mingled in the crowd, and others took up positions at windows and on roofs

(reminding one reporter of “the Paris pétroleuse”).

Now the troops and police arrived and took up their positions, to jeers and hisses. At two o’clock,

the Orange women and children were sent off, and the men donned their regalia (often with pistols

under their coats) and formed up in 29th Street. The men of the Eighty-fourth Regiment, to make clear

their unabashed sympathy with the marchers, placed their caps on their bayonets and cheered. The

Orangemen were now surrounded by regimental units—the Seventh in front, Sixth and Ninth in rear,

Twenty-second and Eighty-fourth to the sides. After some preliminary street clearing by mounted and

club-wielding police, a cannon was fired, the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the

Orangemen unfurled their purple silk banner of the Prince Glorious on horseback, and the parade set

off.

Almost immediately, to howls of “Give them hell, the infernal Englishmen!” a shower of stones,

bricks, bottles, and old shoes was unleashed. Some militiamen fired musket shots, pistols were fired

from the crowd, police charged and clubbed the bystanders, and the parade moved ahead. A block

further on came more stones and sniper fire; Seventh Regiment soldiers responded, on command, with

sporadic shots. Eighth Avenue ahead of the line of march grew choked with crowds. The procession



“The Orange Riot of July 12th,” from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 29,

1871. This view shows the soldiers firing into protesters massed on the east side of

Eighth Avenue near 24th Street. (Courtesy of American Social History Project.

Graduate School and University Center. City University of New York)

halted. One woman broke through the troops and tore the regalia off an Orangeman before being

pushed back at bayonet point, shrieking and raging. The police smashed into the crowd ahead, bashing

heads open. Stones and crockery rained down from rooftops and windows. More gunshots rang out.

Two Eighty-fourth Guardsmen were hit. The troops, without orders and without warning, began

blasting volleys at pointblank range into the throngs along the sidewalk at 24th Street. Other regiments

began firing indiscriminately into the screaming and terrified crowds. Mounted police followed up

with charges.

The parade re-formed ranks. The band struck up a festive Orange tune, banners were lifted aloft,

and the assemblage ground on. The police had to batter their way into 23rd Street, where immense

numbers had regrouped at Booth’s Theater, but the parade successfully negotiated the left turn and

headed east, its rear protected from angry crowds, until it reached Fifth Avenue, where, for a moment,

it entered a different world: at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, two to three thousand well-dressed people

cheered lustily. Further ovations greeted them as they made their way south along Fifth Avenue. Then

marchers and troops and police entered Rialto territory at 14th Street. Once again they had to wade

through hissing and jeering crowds (except for Protestant oases like the American Bible Society

building, from which girls merrily waved orange ribbons). Wearily they made their way across town



toward Cooper Union, where finally, at four o’clock, they shed their regalia and quietly dispersed.

Back at Eighth Avenue it was quiet too, apart from the groans of the injured and dying and the

lamentations of priests and women. A shaken Herald correspondent found the steps of a basement

barbershop “were smeared and slippery with human blood and brains while the landing beneath was

covered two inches deep with clotted gore, pieces of brain, and the half digested contents of a human

stomach and intestines.” The walls of a butter store, he observed, were “speckled with bullet marks

and splashed with blood,” and the sidewalk in front was “thickly coated with a red mud.”

Over sixty civilians were killed outright or later died from wounds. Over one hundred were

wounded (and another hundred arrested). Most were Irish laborers, but there were many German and

American casualties. Twenty-odd policemen were injured by stones, clubs, and rocks, and four were

shot, none fatally. Three Guardsmen were killed (possibly by wild firing from other troops) and

twenty-two injured. One Orangeman was wounded.

The next day twenty thousand Irish mourners converged on Bellevue’s morgue, adjacent to the

outpatient dispensary for the poor, to pay respects. Massive funeral processions, composed of somber

delegations from the Society of the Immaculate Conception, St. Patrick’s Mutual Alliance, and the

Ancient Order of Hibernians in white mourning scarves, traveled by the Greenpoint ferry to

Brooklyn’s Calvary Cemetery. There were other, angrier responses to what Ford’s Irish World

called the “Slaughter on Eighth Avenue.” The Brooklyn Irish hanged Governor Hoffman in effigy in a

parade down Hamilton Avenue, and barroom poets composed ballads like “The Great Orange

Massacre.” There were, however, prominent nationalists—Fenians and Irish Brigade Association

leaders from the ranks of business and the professional classes—who distanced themselves from the

whole affair, a sign of divisions to come.

The day after the riot, fashionable men and women rode along Eighth Avenue in comfortable

carriages, matching up street corners or buildings with descriptions in the morning papers. But the

forces of order, while triumphant, were also in a fury. One banker declared that the riot eclipsed “the

worst religious outrage of the Commune.” A Times editor found it final proof that the “Dangerous

Classes” cared nothing for “our liberty or civilization” other than to “come forth in the darkness and

in times of disturbance, to plunder and prey on the good things which surround them.” Police

Commissioner (and banker) Henry Smith only regretted “that there were not a larger number killed.”

As he explained to the Tribune, “in any large city such a lesson was needed every few years. Had one

thousand of the rioters been killed, it would have had the effect of completely cowing the remainder.”

Democratic authorities got no points for having ordered out the troops. Their “criminal weakness

and vacillation,” the Tribune charged, had encouraged the mob in the first place. One of the reasons

many in the upper and middle classes had grudgingly acquiesced in Tammany’s hold on power was

its presumed ability to maintain political stability. That saving grace was gone: Tweed could not keep

the Irish in line. The time had come, said Congregational minister Merrill Richardson from the pulpit

of his fashionable Madison Avenue church, to take back New York City, for if “the higher classes

will not govern, the lower classes mil.”

TWEED TOPPLED



Six months earlier, Tweed had seemed impregnable, despite assaults by the New York Times and the

vitriolic Harper’s Weekly cartoons of Thomas Nast, which portrayed Tweed as a leering hulk of

corruption and Tammany’s inner circle as a conspiratorial Ring. The campaign, long on invective,



was short on facts, and the Times insisted the city’s books be examined. Just before the election,

Mayor Hall established a blue ribbon panel of six businessmen with unimpeachable reputations—

including rentier John Jacob Astor, banker Moses Taylor, and Marshall O. Roberts of the West Side

Association—and gave them access to municipal accounts. On election eve, the panel issued its

findings. The books had been “faithfully kept,” avowed these leading beneficiaries of Tweed’s

policies, and the debt levels were manageable. Tweed and his men swept to victory.

Accordingly, 1871 had looked to be a very good year. On New Year’s Day, A. Oakey Hall was

again sworn in as mayor, and John T. Hoffman took office as governor. With luck, by 1872, Hoffman

would be president, Hall would move up to governor, and Tweed would become a United States

senator. The annual Americus Club Ball, held in early January at Indian Harbor, Connecticut (near

Tweed’s summer place at Greenwich), was a jubilant affair. As late as May, Tweed was still riding

high. On May 31 he arranged a spectacular wedding, at Trinity Chapel, for his daughter Mary Amelia.

At the Delmonico’s-catered reception that followed at Tweed’s Fifth Avenue (and 43rd Street)

mansion, guests brought a vast outpouring of dazzling gifts (including forty sets of sterling silver).

Tammany’s growth-oriented coalition, like the Gilded Age boom itself, was in fine fettle.

Within weeks, however, the visceral response to the Commune and the Orange Riot had rallied

support for the war the Times and Harper’s were waging against Tweedite corruption. On July 22,

ten days after the Boyne Day battle, the Times began publishing solid evidence of Ring rascality,

turned over to the paper by an aggrieved insider. Day after day, publisher George Jones reproduced

whole pages from the cooked account books of James Watson, who until his recent death in a

sleighing accident up in Harlem Lane had been the Ring’s trusted bookkeeper. The series culminated

in a special fourpage supplement, on July 29, that quickly sold out its run of two hundred thousand

copies. Under screaming headlines—“Gigantic Frauds of the Ring Exposed”—the paper detailed

Watson’s system of kickbacks. Contractors on public projects padded their bills and slipped the

overcharge back under the table. The surcharge to the city usually ranged from 10 to 85 percent,

though on occasions it soared to truly empyrean heights of corruption. One member of a Tweedaffiliated club was paid $23,553.51 for furnishing thirty-six awnings, boosting the per-awning price

from the market rate of $12.50 to a Ring rate of $654.26. Construction of the county courthouse

allowed for an orgy of such creative accounting, and the building wound up costing four times as

much as the Houses of Parliament and twice the price of Alaska.

The Times stories brought to a head a growing international crisis of confidence in New York

City’s ability to pay its debts. Earlier in the year, rumors of mismanagement had so undermined trust

that only the unimpeachable credentials of the city’s underwriters were keeping New York’s

securities afloat. Now overseas bankers refused to extend further credit. The Berlin stock exchange

struck the city’s bonds from its official list.

This jolted New York’s financial and mercantile community into action. Mammoth interest

payments on outstanding debt were due in weeks, and in a few months twenty-five million dollars’

worth of short-term notes would come due for payment. If the city’s credit collapsed, noted Henry

Clews, a leading private banker, every bank in New York might go down with it. It was time, Qews

said, to oust “this brazen band of plunderers, root and branch.”

On a Monday evening in early September, after the elite had returned from their summer vacations,

a great reform meeting was held at Cooper Union. In attendance, besides Republicans, nativists, civil

service reformers, and frightened financiers, were powerful upper-class Democrats, like corporate



lawyer Samuel J. Tilden, who had been forced to take a back seat to Tweed; Germans, led by StaatsZeitung editor Oswald Ottendorfer, who had felt pushed aside by the Irish; and those small property

owners, merchants, and manufacturers who feared Tammany corruption would hike taxes and

pauperize them.

The meeting quickly agreed that the “wisest and best citizens” should take control of the city

government—as intellectuals and reform groups had been arguing since the draft riots. Extremists,

Godkin of the Nation among them, talked cholerically of forming a Vigilance Committee to lynch

Tweed. Cooler heads established instead an Executive Committee of Citizens and Taxpayers for

Financial Reform of the City, popularly known as the Committee of Seventy. Chaired by sugar refiner

William Havemeyer, and packed with Bar Association lawyers, it decided to bring Tweed down by

choking off the city’s funds. Setting up offices in the Brown Brothers building—making the banking

house de facto center of city government—the committee spearheaded a concerted refusal by a

thousand property owners to pay municipal taxes until the books of the city were audited. On

September 7 they went before Judge Barnard, who now deserted his former comrades and gave them

an injunction that barred Comptroller Connolly from issuing new bonds or spending any money. As

Tweed later noted, this “destroyed all our power to raise money from the banks or elsewhere and left

us trapped.” Crowds of workmen now gathered at City Hall demanding their pay—a crisis relieved

only temporarily by Tweed’s handing out fifty thousand dollars from his own pocket. Organized labor

turned against him too, even those in the construction trades who had benefited mightily from his

programs. On Wednesday, September 13, eight thousand workmen marched in the rain to City Hall to

denounce Tammany rule.

Five days later, Comptroller Connolly jumped ship. At Committee of Seventy insistence, he

appointed Tilden associate Andrew Haswell Green as acting comptroller. Escorted by a hollow

square of mounted policemen, Green took possession of the office, giving investigators access to Ring

financial records and further isolating Tweed. (Barnard allowed the city to borrow from the banks

again, but only departments not under Tweed’s control.) At the end of October Green and Tilden

traced money from city contractors directly to Tweed’s bank account, and the following day Tweed

was arrested, though immediately released on a million dollars bail.

Tweed appealed to the ballot box and held rallies on the Lower East Side, to no avail. In the

November 1871 elections—with the polls closely guarded—Tweed retained his state senate seat

(and he would remain a Robin Hood hero, “poverty’s best screen,” to his local constituents), but most

of his associates were defeated by wide margins. Ring members large and small slipped out of the

city for foreign climes. Tweed stood his ground. Indicted in December, he was arrested, forced to

resign his powerful public works position, and voted out as grand sachem of Tammany.

His personal world unraveled too. In January 1872 his old comrade Jim Fisk was fatally shot,

while walking up the marble staircase of the Grand Central Hotel, by Edward S. Stokes, the

spendthrift son of a prominent New York family, who had taken up with Fisk’s mistress Josie

Mansfield. As he lay dying, Tweed (out on bail) was at his side. Another bedside mourner was Jay

Gould, who had his own problems, stemming directly from Tweed’s fall. The Erie president’s

powerful enemies had been circling, but he had successfully fended them off with the aid of Tweed’s

judges. Now Tweed was forced to resign from the Erie board of directors, Judge Barnard was

impeached and convicted (at the insistence of the Bar Association), and Gould’s position became

untenable. He too was forced to resign.



Though his power was shattered, Tweed continually wriggled out of reach of his prosecutors. His

trial in January 1873 ended with a hung—some said bribed—jury. In November 1873 he fared less

well and was sentenced to a twelve-year term. But after a year in jail, the decision was reversed, and

in January 1875 he was released. His enemies immediately slapped him with a civil suit to recover

six million of his ill-gotten gains. Unable to come up with the three-million-dollar bail, he was

reincarcerated and languished in Ludlow Street Jail. The monotony was broken, however, by

repeated home furloughs. In the course of one of these, he escaped and made his way to Florida, then

to Cuba, then (disguised as a seaman) attempted to flee to Spain. Arrested by Spanish authorities,

Tweed was delivered to an American warship for return to New York. Back again in the Ludlow

Street Jail, and now desperate, he agreed to testify (in return for his freedom) about the workings of

the Ring. After he did so at great length, however, vengeful authorities (including now-governor

Tilden) refused to release him. His spirit broken, he died in prison, of a combination of diseases, on

April 12, 1878.

To consolidate their takeover of municipal power, the Committee of Seventy ran their own

chairman, William Havemeyer, for the mayoralty in 1872. Havemeyer, now sixty-eight, had been

mayor in 1848-49 and didn’t like much of what had happened since then. Elected to City Hall in a

divided campaign, Havemeyer and Comptroller Andrew Haswell Green imposed a vigorous

retrenchment policy on New York. They laid off city workers and cut salaries of government

officials, hoping to drive out professional politicians and draw in public-spirited elites. They jammed

the brakes on development to cut costs and lower the taxes of the propertied classes who were

Havemeyer’s biggest supporters. Work on the uptown boulevards ceased. Grading of West Side

thoroughfares was halted. The viaduct railway was scuttled. Central Park expansion (and

maintenance) was curtailed, and work on the proposed Riverside and Morningside parks was pushed

off into the future. The elaborate plans to develop the waterfront were canceled and a cheaper, more

circumscribed plan adopted. Declaring the city “finished,” the mayor even argued that New York

should refuse any further assistance to the Brooklyn Bridge, then rising in the East River

Also in 1872, some of the outraged businessmen and professionals who had toppled Tweed tried

to displace the corruption-ridden Grant administration. The collection of dissidents formed a third

party, called themselves Liberal Republicans, and nominated the sixty-one-year-old Horace Greeley

to run against President Grant. The Democratic Party seconded Greeley’s nomination, hoping to ride

his coattails to the White House—against the better judgment of Democratic national chairman August

Belmont, who thought the Greeley nomination “one of those stupendous mistakes which it is difficult

even to comprehend.” Belmont was right. Grant, the old war hero, aided by boom-time prosperity and

a last spurt of northern outrage at Klan outrages, won every northern state. Few municipal reformers

backed Greeley, whom they saw as too close to the Democratic Party. They endorsed independent

candidates instead, including Frederick Law Olmsted for vice-president. The city’s bourgeoisie stuck

with Grant. “I was the worst beaten man that ever ran for that high office,” Greeley lamented.

Weakened by the arduous campaign and depressed over the death of his wife just before election,

Horace Greeley came home to his beloved New York City to find that Whitelaw Reid had seized

control of the Tribune in his absence. Broken in spirit, he died three weeks later on November 29,

1872.

BACK TO THE TEN-HOUR DAY



Having crushed Tweed, the forces of order lit into the labor movement, which, in the spring of 1872,



had launched its strongest bid yet to institute the eight-hour day. Building trades struck first and, to

their delight, got a boost from President Grant. Bricklayers working on the new post office had

complained to him about ten-hour workloads. Grant, with one eye on the upcoming elections,

denounced this violation of the federal eight-hour law and issued an Executive Proclamation entitling

them to overtime pay. This galvanized other construction workers to join the strike, and by early June

most small building contractors had knuckled under.

Inspired by these successes, other workers downed tools and walked off. Soon twenty thousand—

including plumbers, upholsterers, pianomakers, masons, marble cutters, quarrymen, tin and slate

roofers, sugar refiners, and gas men—were fighting for the eight-hour day. The city’s employers dug

in their heels, and the test of wills spiraled upward into a near-general strike—the biggest labor

conflict in New York’s history thus far—pitting a hundred thousand workers from fifty-two crafts

(two-thirds of the manufacturing workforce) against a newly unified manufacturing elite supported by

most of the city’s bourgeoisie.

The fiercest clashes came in the woodworking trades. In May militant German journeymen of the

Furniture Workers League shut down various woodworking factories. On the other side were the

piano manufacturers, who ran the most highly mechanized and subdivided woodworking trades. The

most vigorous opposition came from Steinway and Sons, a firm far larger and wealthier than most of

the vulnerable cabinetmaker shops who had given in to union demands. Seeking to head off trouble,

the company offered workers at its Fourth Avenue plant an increase in pay if they would stick with

ten hours. When some accepted, a mass meeting of piano workers (held June 5) denounced the rankbreakers and marched, thousands strong, to ring the factory and muscle the ten-hour men away.

Steinway called on the new probusiness city government for police protection, and got it. “Captain

Gunner arrived with about 80 men,” William Steinway noted in his diary, “who charged on the

strikers and clubbed them on the arms and legs, they running as fast as their legs can carry them.”



The Eight-hour Movement—Procession of Workingmen on a “Strike,” in the Bowery,

June 10, 1872, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 29, 1872. Note that

many marchers are smoking cigars. Cigar-making remained a major source of

employment in New York, although production was shifting from small craft shops to

factories and tenement houses. (Courtesy of American Social History Project. Graduate

School and University Center. City University of New York)

With momentum faltering, the Iron and Metal Workers League called out its fifteen thousand

members, and the strike revved up again. Crowds of blacksmiths surrounded J. B. Brewster’s

Carriage Factory and the Singer Sewing Machine’s plant—both bastions of the ten-hour day in

metallurgy—and brass founders, pattern makers, wireworkers, pen and pencil makers, church organ

builders, brewery workers, packinghouse butchers, and bakers entered the fray.

Now employers organized. On June 18 the industrialists and building contractors joined forces

with the woodworking bosses and, at a meeting of over four hundred employers, formed an Executive

Committee of the Employers of the City, dedicated to smashing the eight-hour movement—now

depicted as the stalking horse for something far worse. As one steam pump manufacturer harangued

the meeting: “I see behind all this the specter of Communism. Our duty is to take it by the throat and

say it has no business here.”

Soon, indeed, employers brought in the police, who sent platoons, then battalions of men, many of

them recent veterans of the Orange Riot suppression, to club picketers away from plants and open

avenues for scabs. One after another the strikes crumbled. Steinway and Singer triumphed. The iron

men surrendered in July. Many earlier gains were lost, and apart from some in the building trades,