Wilentz – Popular Politics in Early America

November 5, 2013

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

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Here’s the Drunk History of Oney Judge, Washington’s slave ( Drunk History of Orey Judge )

Chapters 7 and 8 Wilentz have the feel of a parable of greed and redemption. The boisterous lower-class patrons of Bowery Street gain power in the political machine by politicizing their actions, but which spirals out of control in the chaos and loss of the Panic of 1837. It seems that Bowery is the embodiment of the Roman Coliseum and the Elizabethan Round Theatre, except that the top tiers held the prostitutes and not the Patricians. This is what the lower classes did when the upper classes were not around.

Like Ben Hartshorn ’13 and Michael Lamoureux ’14, I was left with the impression that Wilentz hit the nail on the head by presenting Bowery Street as a microcosm of the working class in Jacksonian America. I think this microcosm is more believable as a frame of reference for Northern cities than in “Shopkeeper’s Millennium”. That said, you see some of the same issues with sustaining the temperance movement on Bowery as you do in Rochester. Joseph Brainerd’s Presbyterian Church, which was determined to help workers to better achieve the fruits of their labor, in 1836 was only 37% new members, and of these 87% were women. Overall, very few masters (14.9%) and even fewer journeymen partook (only Frederick Byrd) (280-81).

The great difference between Rochester and Bowery is the role of the Unions in temperance. In Rochester, it seemed that the workers didn’t stay around too long to settle down and join a union. In New York, the Unions found an enemy in the Temperance movement. To the Temperance movement, they had become too similar to the drunken Fire Brigades and “benevolent societies” by creating “foolish nostrums, panaceas, and social hatreds” and meeting in taverns and porterhouses (283).

November 5, 2013

Racism, Xenophobia, and Republicanism: A Night Out on the Bowery

Sean Wilentz utilized Chapters 4-5 of Chants Democratic to document the failure of labor to successfully challenge the major political parties in Jacksonian New York City due to the Working Men’s lack of a solidified class-consciousness. However, Chapters 7-8 exhibit the evident consciousness of ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries amongst the lower classes throughout the city. As Alex noted last week, the workers’ employers had “distanced themselves further from their workers and receded into private terms” during the 1820s, largely leaving them to their own social and cultural circles. These working-class congregations were anything but homogenous; workers typically united around their respective neighborhoods and localities. The groups often radicalized around specific issues, such as hyper-patriotism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-abolition. Even trade unionists saw these groups as uncontrollable renegades in need of “a complete transformation of character centered on temperance”. (255) Through the economic turmoil of the late 1830s, Wilentz argues, these radical congregations such as the Native American Democratic Association and the American Republican Party gained immense political power in the city on a platform of xenophobic rhetoric against Irish Catholics, abolition, and “anti-republican” peoples. (268)

After the fall of the Working Men in 1830, disaffected workers hit the streets and formed their own organizations to represent their interests. Volunteer fire groups were a popular source of fraternal bonding and local identity in poorer parts of the city. In the Bowery, known as “New York’s plebian boulevard,” nativist sentiment amongst the working-class was enflamed by newspapers such as the Spirit of ’76, published by the Native American Democratic Association. (257) They argued that Irish-Catholic immigrants were an inherent threat to the ideals and purity of American republicanism by carrying the “papist monarchical” conspiracy across the ocean from Europe and swelling their presence in America. (267) The intellectualism of the Working Men’s Party had been replaced by the macho-nativism and muscle of the freikorps-like street gangs of angry workers throughout the city, and their power, unfortunately, was destined to increase.

In the Panic of 1837, more of a third of New York workers lost their jobs. After public unrest and rioting, it appeared as though the traditional union movement had surrendered to the “street tactics of the Bowery”. (295) As labor competition increased in the city, the nativist circles gained power by labeling immigrants (especially Irishmen) as lecherous job thieves. Wilentz utilizes the street propaganda of these powerful groups (the Native American Democratic Association, the American Republican Party, and the Loco Focos) as primary sources along with the concerned responses from the entrepreneurial classes (the American Institute, the Washington Temperance Benevolent Society, etc). They targeted both major political parties- the Whigs were accused of upper-class preference and the Democrats of corruption and pandering to immigrants for votes. (320) At the height of the nativist furor, the American Republican Party candidate James Harper succeeded in winning the mayor’s office, although he failed to implement a thorough nativist policy.

According to Wilentz, the emergence of Bowery-style politics in the 1830s reveals one major point: there was no Rochesterian revival of religion, temperance, and civility in NYC. The revivalists largely gave up and moved on, and the booze continued to flow without obstruction. However, he never seems to examine why New York resisted the Second Great Awakening. Was it due to the militarism and ferocity of the working classes, or the passiveness of the business elite? Also, he fails to document the perspective of the Irish Catholics and immigrants vehemently targeted by the nativists. How did they react to their persecution? Did they fight back, or just roll over when push came to shove? While he may have covered these topics in different portions of the book, I hoped to gain a better understanding of the underlying causes and consequences of the nativist furor that dominated the city. Fear of global papist dominance (while frightening!) can only convince me to a certain degree.

October 31, 2013

Wilentz's Workies: Labor Power in the Big Apple

Twenty years prior to The Communist Manifesto, the Working Men’s Party (“Workies” colloquially) proposed some incredibly revolutionary ideas in New York City, such as the abolition of private property, universal suffrage, and universal public education. Sean Wilentz, in his epic study Chants Democratic, analyzes the causes, context, and consequences of these critical labor groups. Wilentz rejects the notion that the Workies were a Marxist phenomenon of the proletariat uniting against the oppressive bourgeois. He instead argues that worker groups and their leaders were not “class conscious” of exactly who or what they represented. (15) Were they the party of all working men, or just unskilled urban laborers who rejected capitalism and revivalism? Wilentz portrays how the workingmen’s inability to establish a clear identity of their political goals and base made them susceptible to interference and coercion from the major political parties in the early 1830s.

Wilentz describes how, around 1825, the great “artisan republic” crafted by the Founders had collapsed “gradually but decisively” under the weight of modern capitalism. (145) A new entrepreneurial class, with (then-defunct) Federalist leanings, rose up to claim their foothold in the city. As thoroughly described in The Shopkeeper’s Millennium, these businessmen fueled the religious revivals of the 1820s. As a result, as Michael Lamoreaux pointed out, they “imposed a sense of religion on the poor of their community because they believed a void of morality existed”. The entrepreneurs and businessmen now became the spiritual as well as the economic protectors of the working classes, who were either too incompetent or too drunk to establish a decent code of conduct. Many workers undoubtedly resented this new form of bourgeois condescension onto their lives and chose instead to form political societies based on their own interests.

Wilentz’s description of the Working Men’s leadership is simply fascinating; the party was a hodgepodge of French Jacobins, Painite deists, Owenite Utopians, and even women, such as Frances Wright, who was “the first woman of importance to ascend a lecture platform in the United States.” (182) The party’s figurehead was a agrarian socialist named Thomas Skidmore, whose The Rights of Man to Property!, added a socialist spin to the work of Thomas Paine. Wilentz utilizes the worker-friendly newspapers of New York as primary sources for the events and philosophies of the Workies, such as the Radical, the Working Man’s Advocate, the Free Enquirer, and the Sentinel (205). The party, steadfast in its progressivism, reached into territory uncovered by neither Clayites nor Jacksonians: equal distribution of private property, universal suffrage regardless of race, freethinking independence from religious institutions, and public education. At first, the party experienced surprising local successes, with candidates receiving over six thousand votes in the race for State Senate. (199) However, the party’s working-class unity was soon to falter.

By the turn of 1830, Wilentz reveals how the Workies lack of class-consciousness came back to haunt them. In what Wilentz calls “The Coup”, a coalition of urban workers and Tammany Democrats brought down the agrarian Skidmore from power in a scene worthy of the 1917 Russian Duma. The Democrats then “co-opted” the issues of the Working Men’s Party for their own, effectively sealing former Workies inside their bubble. (202) The party’s newspapers, individually allied with a certain faction of the party, also turned on Skidmore, leaving him without public vindication. Wilentz describes the political coercion and the downfall of Skidmore as rather tragic; the united working class, the only true threat to the two-party system, had been subjugated by coercion and deceit. For years to come, the Tammany political machine would dominate the city using the same tactics displayed against the Workies to consolidate their power in an unrivaled fashion. For now, the great socialist vision of urban America would have to wait.