American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  And one could seek to flee the machine. On the Lower East Side, Bernard Weinryb noted, a worker might open a candy store or grocery, or become a jobber and then a factory owner himself; the carpenter might become a builder or contractor; the peddler might become a storekeeper. A man or a woman might marry “up” and escape the factory. Others might lose themselves in radicalism or religion, or study evenings in order to take up a profession. Upward mobility often meant lateral motion as well. New York Jews were moving their stores from 14th Street to 23rd Street and then up to 34th, while some moved their families to the upper East Side. Italians, Poles, Slovaks, French Canadians often found the going harder, but they too pursued the American dream.

  The Irish, after all, had long since shown that hod carriers and ditchdiggers—or at least their children or grandchildren—could rise from rags to riches. Particularly in less hierarchically structured societies, such as San Francisco during and after the gold strike, Irish immigrants like Peter Donahue and James Phelan had founded businesses and banks, prospered, and ended up among the city’s richest men. Tom Maguire built the Jenny Lind Theater, seating 2,000 persons—the biggest theater on the West Coast. There were countless success stories in other cities. To be sure, the “lace curtain Irish” were vulnerable to scornful remarks about their alleged social pretensions; a San Francisco weekly imagined the “MacShinnegan coat of arms” as a “spalpeen rampant on a field of gold.” The successful Irish, for their part, had a tendency to look down on later waves of immigrants—the Poles, the Jews, the Italians—almost as much as they despised blacks. But virtually all the nationality groups tended to decry the others, in large part because they were thrown into competition for jobs. Even co-religionists tended to divide: witness the separation of American Catholicism into Irish, French, Italian, and Polish churches that often kept their distance from one another on their local turfs.

  For the few thousands who found room at the top, hundreds of thousands remained at the bottom of the social heap in the industrializing cities of America. Yet there remained a paradox. On the one hand, rarely in industrializing societies had the “objective” physical and economic nature of workers’ existence seemed more conducive to proletarianization—the forcing of masses of men and women into a homogeneous and poverty-stricken collectivity. “Big industry,” Marx and Engels asserted in The German Ideology, “destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc., … resolved all natural relationships into money relationships ... in place of naturally grown towns created the modern, large industrial cities … created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society and thus destroyed the peculiar individuality of the various nationalities … makes labor itself, unbearable.”

  On the other hand, a proletariat in the social-psychological-political sense did not develop. For the American industrializing city seemed to inspire opposite tendencies—a huge and continuous flow of labor into and out of the cities; the recruitment of workers off farms, whether European or American, where pay and hours were far worse than even the factories would offer; tensions between native-born Americans and immigrants, and conflict among immigrants from diverse national and regional backgrounds; the relatively open access for some workers to middle-class occupations and status, if not to the top. Marx did not assume that class existence automatically meant class consciousness. But Marxist theory was drawn more from the European and British experience of relatively stable working-class populations, common language, lack of mobility—in Stephan Thernstrom’s words, “some continuity of class membership in one setting so that workers come to know each other and to develop bonds of solidarity and common opposition to the ruling group above them.” The Americans did not—at least, not yet—fit the Marxist model.

  Nor were the lower strata of the middle class— “the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants”—sinking into the proletariat, as the Communist Manifesto predicted. Most of the urban lower middle class, at least, changed its white-collar jobs rather than donning overalls. Many moved into the thousands of positions that were opening up in the towering new office buildings, banks, department stores, in the expanding corporate, educational, and government bureaucracies. The industrializing city required armies of technicians to staff the busy headquarters of communications and transport.

  Middle-class women were finding more and more job opportunities in the industrial city, at the same time that industrialization was liberating them from some of their old household drudgery. Aluminum utensils were now taking the place of the old cast-iron pans, seasoned with beeswax and hard to clean. Refrigeration and faster shipping were bringing tomatoes into middle-class kitchens year-round, and oranges, lemons, plums, and grapes in season. Housewives were still baking bread at home, but now could more easily send out for baked goods. Still firmly entrenched as a housebound chore, however, was laundry, in part because of the intensive development and promotion of washing machines.

  Some women found jobs teaching the home skills they had learned as daughters and mothers. The domestic science movement, led by Ellen Swallow Richards, gave birth to a host of training centers. Thus the Armour Institute in Chicago schooled Annie Thompson in sewing and nutrition, enabling her to clothe and feed her younger siblings after her mother’s death; later, she became a dietitian and teacher of domestic science herself. A multitude of women found teaching jobs as school systems expanded to meet the spurt in city populations.

  Other women, however, wanted to move out of home and classroom. Perhaps they remembered Louisa May Alcott writing to her father: “I can’t do much with my hands, so I will make a battering-ram of my head and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.” Sometimes a battering ram seemed necessary. When Myra Bradwell, publisher of the Chicago Legal News, sought admission to the Illinois state bar in 1869, the Illinois supreme court rejected her because she was a married woman and not an independent agent. Her appeal to the United States Supreme Court failed. “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother,” a justice pontificated in a concurring opinion. “This is the law of the Creator.” Bradwell was finally admitted to the bar in 1890.

  In cities big and small, middle-class women were joining the swelling women’s club movement. Although this movement brought cultural enlightenment and good works, perhaps even more it fostered solidarity among women otherwise isolated in separate households and attached to men competing in the business world. A dawning awareness of female identity and autonomy and a heightened sense of social effectiveness transformed some of these clubwomen’s lives. Still, the movement was by no means radical: the clubs adhered to accepted views of “woman’s sphere.” Few openly supported woman’s suffrage until after the turn of the century.

  Indeed, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, launched in 1890, soon became associated in the public mind with exclusive, fashionable society, for its membership included many of the wives of the nation’s best-known business magnates—Phoebe Hearst in San Francisco, Mrs. George Pullman, Mrs. Cyrus McCormick, Mrs. Potter Palmer in Chicago. “The women were gowned to the Queen’s taste,” wrote a disconsolate delegate from Maine about the 1894 biennial convention in Philadelphia. “The president of the club was one blaze of diamonds.….”

  The wealthy husbands—the Vanderbilts and Morgans and Rockefellers and the rest—continued to flourish and to prosper in the great economic boom after the turn of the century. Concentration and trustification brought them into closer collaboration, if not harmony. A powerful intercity class of business elites was intensifying in unity and purpose, communicating through the business press, Pullman car talk, rich men’s clubs, corporate board meetings, and their increasing use of the telephone. All in all, the industrial cities were potent forces in fortifying the class system.

  At the base of the pyramid lived and toiled the millions of industrial workers. “Assimilate” quickly or “face a quiet but sure extermi
nation,” the Scientific American had warned the “ruder” laborers of Europe in 1869. “Forget your past, your customs, and your ideals,” a guidebook for immigrant Jews advised in the 1890s. “Do not take a moment’s rest. Run, do, work.” A Yiddish poet struck back at the “clock in the workshop” that urged him to labor and still labor on:

  The tick of the clock is the boss in his anger.

  The face of the clock has the eyes of the foe.

  The clock—I shudder—Dost hear how it draws me?

  It calls me “Machine” and it cries to me “Sew”!

  The Leaders of the City

  About two in the morning of a summer’s day around the turn of the century, a Tammany district leader was awakened by the ringing of his doorbell: it was a bartender asking him to walk down to the police station and bail out a saloon-keeper who had run afoul of the law. The leader did so, got back to bed around three, only to be awakened again at six by fire engines. He followed the engines to the fire, met there with several of his district captains, took several burned-out tenants to a hotel, found them food, clothes, and temporary quarters.

  After breakfast the leader repaired to the police court, where he found six of his people charged with drunkenness. He persuaded the judge to release four of them, and paid the fines of the other two. Half an hour later, at the municipal district court, he instructed one of his captains to represent a widow who was being dispossessed, and he paid the rent of a poor family also facing eviction, handing them a dollar for food. When he returned home at eleven A.M. he found three men who said they were looking for work. He found them jobs with the subway, the Consolidated Gas Company, and on the road, and he fixed things up for a fourth man who had been sacked by the Metropolitan Railway Company for neglect of duty.

  The leader had only an hour for lunch before attending the funeral of an Italian constituent over by the ferry, and then rushing to the funeral of a Jewish voter. He made himself quietly conspicuous at both rites. Later he attended Hebrew confirmation ceremonies at a synagogue.

  After dinner the leader presided over an hour-long meeting of his election district captains. Each reported on the political situation in his district, constituents in trouble and needing help, their attitude toward the party and its candidates. Then the leader visited a church fair, bought chances on everything, kissed the babies, jollied their mothers, and walked the fathers around the corner for a drink. Back at the clubhouse he bought tickets to a local baseball game, promised a subscription for a new church bell, and told a group of pushcart peddlers complaining about police persecution that he would go to the precinct station in the morning and see about it. Later in the evening he attended a Jewish wedding reception and dance, and got to bed by midnight.

  The name of this Tammany Hall leader was George Washington Plunkitt and he would attain a special niche in American history not because his activities were unusual—on the contrary, this sort of thing was what he and scores of others did day after day—but because he was unusually candid about his activities, remarkably perceptive about the political world he lived in, and had a reporter friend, William L. Riordon, who carefully listened to him. To some, Plunkitt seemed almost a caricature, but allowing for a little blarney and a measure of exaggeration, the picture that emerged of him was true-to-life and important. Plunkitt was a leader in one of the most enduring power structures in American history.

  Tammany as an organization was well over a century old by the time it reached its zenith in the 1890s. It had long since shed its old role as primarily a patriotic and philanthropic society. As political parties became more highly organized during the century, Tammany had turned into the power center of the Manhattan Democracy. Just as its sachems had championed the right to vote for the propertyless during earlier years, now the district leaders saw to it that immigrants and the rest of the poor had the practical right to vote. Tammany was unique in its longevity, not its organization. Similar “machines” existed in most of the big industrializing cities—some Republican, as in Philadelphia; some less centralized, as in Chicago; some less polyglot in membership, as in Detroit; but all with the same essential grass-roots structure and function.

  That structure, in scores of cities across the nation, embraced a ward-and-precinct organization of party activists who might hold patronage or other jobs but made party business their main business. The party was organized in near-military fashion, with committeemen reporting to district captains, the captains to the district leader, and that leader to the boss or bosses of the whole organization. Typically the committeemen had deep and enduring roots in their neighborhoods. They formed a durable cadre that continued through the decades even while the top bosses came and went. Control at the top might be in the hands of one boss or a collectivity, but in either event the core of the organization was grass-roots leadership.

  The formal function of the party machine was to help nominate and elect officeholders across the whole range of government, from the most local office to the President of the United States. Its informal functions included diverse activities all designed to ensure its continued influence. The burden of its business was dispensing the kind of assistance to constituents to which the Plunkitts devoted so much of their time. Not only were there turkeys at Christmas, and legal aid and help with authorities, but splendid treats—excursions up the river with bands playing, St. Patrick’s Day parades, picnics, ball, sports events. Plunkitt had his own baseball team, and a glee club for the young folks. Catering to polyglot immigrant neighborhoods, the organization usually played no ethnic favorites, at least among whites. And the aid was usually specific, concrete, practical.

  “I think that there s got to be in every ward somebody that any bloke can come to—no matter what he’s done—and get help,” Boston ward leader Martin Lomasney said to Lincoln Steffens. “Help, you understand; none of your law and justice, but help.” Perhaps the party bosses’ greatest achievement was to meet people’s basic needs of food and shelter without robbing them of their equal need for self-esteem.

  But the city parties were more than welfare-dispensing machines. “As part of the developing relationship between bosses and immigrants, the political machine became an avenue of advance—and, quite possibly, of ‘Americanization’—for many citizens with foreign names,” according to Charles Glaab and A. Theodore Brown. “The machine offered more than labor jobs in public or utility construction. For the brighter and more ambitious young men, there were clerical and other white collar positions in the machine itself; such positions represented for many the first step toward middle class respectability.” The Horatio Alger ideal was not unknown in the precincts.

  In the process of helping people, the bosses performed another function, even to a perverse degree—they united a fragmented governmental system and made it perform. The organizations turned the checks and balances upside down. If state constitutions, like the national, were ingeniously designed to divide local, county, and state power through separate electoral arrangements, the bosses with their grip on the nominating and electing mechanism at every level could make mayors and state legislators and county officials and governors work together. If city charters cleverly diked off executive and legislative and judicial power at the local level, the bosses often chose the aldermen, municipal judges, mayors, and—civil service laws to the contrary notwithstanding—administrative officials, and hence could make government perform.

  This capacity to unite government was even more important for the organization’s key role, in the big industrial cities, in helping businessmen gain contracts, franchises, and other grants from government, to avoid regulation, to get the right streets and bridges built, to subdue and stabilize the often anarchical world around them. The corporations, wrote Robert Merton, wanted the security of the “economic czar” who controlled, regulated, and organized competition, provided that his decisions were not subject to public scrutiny and control. Often the protected activities of business merged into the underworld of gamblin
g, prostitution, liquor, outright crime. Operating in a political shadowland, the bosses often were able to provide business, legitimate or not, with the quiet help it needed.

  Arrayed against the bosses in most of the big cities were the lords of reform. The conflict between these two sets of leaders provided most of the drama and much of the importance of political activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was in many respects a conflict of ideologies—a clash between value systems, ethnic groups, class outlooks, power systems.

  The reform movement in the big cities was essentially a bourgeois phenomenon, rooted in middle-class fears of urban disorder, immigrant ways, family disruption. A powerful rural myth of almost Jeffersonian dimensions persisted. Common to many of these reformers, according to Paul Boyer, “was the conviction—explicit or implicit—that the city, although obviously different from the village in its external, physical aspects, should nevertheless replicate the moral order of the village.” Still responding to the old genteel, mugwump, independent thrust in the two major parties, as indignant as ever over the excesses of party spoils and patronage, still clinging to the Nation and Harper’s Weekly and other journals of reformist tendencies, the reformers viewed the bosses as representing all they disliked in politics—corruption, manipulation, links with the underworld, and ties with monopolistic, favor-seeking businessmen.

  Much earlier, a regiment of reformers had clashed with the most powerful and corrupt of bosses—and the reformers had won such a glorious battle that the victory colored their thoughts and tactics ever after. Their target and ultimate victim was William Magear Tweed, Jr. Of Scottish descent, son of a New York City chairmaker who invested in a small brush factory, Tweed by the age of twenty-one had learned bookkeeping, clerked in a mercantile office, become a member of the brush firm—and married the daughter of the principal owner. A good-natured, strapping young man of sober habits, he found his main recreation in running Americus Engine Company, Number 6, which with its emblem of a snarling red tiger became one of the best-known fire companies under the leadership of its dashing chief in his red flannel shirt and white firecoat.