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NY Review of Books, DECEMBER 21, 2017 ISSUE
Rome on the Hudson
by Jackson Lears
Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919
by Mike Wallace
Oxford University Press, 1,182 pp., $45.00
Despite the durable tale of liberation from Victorian repression,
American history during the early twentieth century was less a linear
drive toward emancipation than a recasting of centrifugal and
centripetal forces. The two tendencies coexisted, calling each other
into being, sometimes within the same cultural figure. Consider the
chorus girl, whose vibrant sexuality was constrained by close-order
drill; or the militant imperialist, whose lust for vicarious risk was
countered by a dream of regimented order.
The interplay between new sources of chaos and new ways to contain it
characterized the epoch as a whole. Centrifugal forces arose from
exploding markets for labor, goods, and entertainment; from women’s
demands for personal autonomy and a larger part in public life; from
immigrants of multiple ethnicities crowding into cities and striking
workers filling the streets; and from a vague but pervasive fascination
with Force (invariably capitalized), which seemed to be quickening
pulses as never before. Yet this ferment coexisted with centripetal
forces, embodied in new idioms (hygiene, normality, scientific racism,
managerial rationality) and new institutions (monopolistic corporations,
government bureaucracies)—all of which channeled and contained the
energies unleashed by modern urban life.
The apparently hedonistic culture that emerged before World War I was a
muddle of flagrant gestures toward personal liberation and subtle new
forms of social coercion—the spread of compulsory heterosexuality in the
guise of sexual freedom, the standardization of ideals of health and
beauty through national advertising, the codification of racial
hierarchies in an ideology of empire, and the imposition of higher
standards of efficiency in the workplace as well as unprecedented
demands for conformity in the public sphere. The loosening of strictures
on personal behavior coincided with the creation of new definitions of
what was permissible and normal, which advanced under the banners of
progress and liberation. Early-twentieth-century American society was on
the verge of a reshuffling of values and power relations in which the
rich would come out just fine. And New York City was where that new
synthesis would be worked out, in all its messy and contradictory details.
Mike Wallace knows this. In fact he knows nearly everything worth
knowing about New York during the years leading up to World War I. He
knows where the Heinz Company mounted the biggest electric pickle in the
world (Madison Square), how Sophie Tucker started out as a
“World-Renowned Coon Shouter,” how many pounds a typical longshoreman
loaded in an hour (three thousand), and how the City College of New York
(CCNY) became “the Jewish University of America,” despite expecting its
students to check their religion and their radical politics at the gate.
Wallace packs these and a multitude of other fascinating details into
his enormous book, Greater Gotham, which somehow remains astonishingly
readable. But he also gets the big picture right—the balance of cultural
tensions, the centrifugal exuberance vs. the new forms of power and
control. He never forgets that early-twentieth-century New York was
awash in global flows of capital and embedded in regional, national, and
international markets. And he knows that every liberation, no matter how
genuine, contains the possibility of renewed constraint. One could not
ask for a more thorough or thoughtful guide to the emergence of New York
as the Empire City.
The consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater Gotham, in January
1898, coincided with the beginning of a corporate war on “ruinous
competition” that created Standard Oil, General Electric, US Steel, and
other titanic monopolies, mostly midwived by the House of Morgan. Freed
from fear that the Democrat William Jennings Bryan would be elected
president in 1896, investors poured capital into the firms traded
publicly on Wall Street, sustaining a run of mergers that lasted six
years. Consolidation was in the air.
So was empire. New imperial possessions and protectorates—Puerto Rico,
the Philippine Islands, Cuba—became magnets for New York capital. James
B. Duke, who had just moved the headquarters of his American Tobacco
Company to New York, took his American Cigar Company to Cuba. Other
businessmen followed his lead. Soon 85 percent of the island’s tobacco
manufacturing was owned by Americans, and 90 percent of its exports went
to the United States. The pattern quickly fell into place: “Washington
would ride shotgun on Wall Street’s stagecoach,” Wallace writes.
But empire was about military glory as well as commercial profit, and
New York would not be outdone on that front either. “Surely no Roman
general, surely no Roman Emperor ever received such a tribute from the
populace of the Eternal City,” The New York Times declared of the
tribute Admiral George Dewey, the victor of the Battle of Manila Bay in
the Spanish-American War, received from the thousands who turned out for
the parade in his honor that the city held in 1899. Fears of imperial
hubris, voiced by republican moralists from John Quincy Adams to William
James, melted away amid fantasies of New York as a second Rome.
The foundation of the fantasies was money. Capital began flowing from
Wall Street to Europe in 1900, as Great Britain struggled to meet the
mounting costs of the Boer War. Money managers pooled capital by
creating syndicates, interlocking directorates, and gentlemen’s
agreements—deals done in downtown dining clubs. Muckraking critics
caught the scent of corruption and exposed “Frenzied Finance” in
emerging mass-circulation magazines.
Middle- and upper-class citizens who feared being fleeced took to
calling themselves “progressives.” Their hero was Theodore Roosevelt, a
scion of the Anglo-Dutch elite who lived on his investments but sought
to rein in conscienceless capital—though as the steel baron Henry Clay
Frick recalled, Roosevelt “got down on his knees before us” begging for
contributions to his 1904 presidential campaign. “We bought the son of a
bitch but he didn’t stay bought,” Frick complained. When J.P. Morgan and
other prominent bankers succeeded in stopping the Panic of 1907,
progressives raised alarms about private bankers’ control over public
life, demanding regulation of the “money trust.” The result was the
Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which appeared to curb the concentrated
power of New York banks but actually legitimated it.
Like money power, political power was centralized in a powerful
institutional structure. Progressive reformers kept trying to wrest
control of it from the Tammany Hall Democratic machine, with occasional
success. They increasingly promoted the influence of self-proclaimed
neutral experts operating out of organizations like the Bureau of
Municipal Research and promising to replace corrupt patronage with
efficient administration by the competent. In 1913 the (mostly
Protestant) reformers backed the mayoral candidacy of the Irish Catholic
John Mitchel, who reorganized city finances by borrowing to promote
metropolitan growth and raising real estate values—and with them tax
revenues.
The growth was already underway, upward as well as outward. The builder
Harry Black had hired Daniel Burnham to design the Flatiron Building,
which went up in 1902 to widespread amazement and acclaim. It was the
beginning of what Wallace calls a “Sky Boom” in tall buildings. In less
than a decade, the skyline replaced the harbor as New York’s emblem.
Skyscrapers epitomized the coexistence of centripetal and centrifugal
force. They were the embodiments of America’s consolidating and
internationalizing corporate economy. Outsize variants of Heinz’s
electric pickle—the Singer Tower, the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Building, the Woolworth Building—aimed to enhance brand recognition
among an emerging mass of consumers. Symbols of corporate identity, they
strove to evoke emergent empire but also traditional civic authority, as
Met Life did with its Venetian bell tower. Yet despite their sponsors’
dream of order, skyscrapers went up in what Wallace calls a “Promethean
frenzy” of construction.
Intellectuals found tall buildings exhilarating. “Here is our poetry,”
said Ezra Pound in 1910, “for we have pulled down the stars to our
will.” The young Lewis Mumford, viewing Manhattan from the Brooklyn
Bridge, agreed: “Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with
energy and light.” These were early expressions of what became a
characteristic New York rhapsody: the urban sublime.
Henry James was less impressed: “Skyscrapers are the last word of
economic ingenuity only till another word be written,” he observed. “The
consciousness of the finite, the menaced, the essentially invented state
twinkles ever, to my perception, in the thousand glassy eyes of these
giants of the mere market.” James caught the “aura of temporariness,” in
Wallace’s words, that suffused lower and midtown Manhattan; it arose
from the city’s refusal to interfere with property owners’ right to do
anything they wanted with their property. The tallest skyscrapers did
not remain tallest for long, and even the most magnificent could be torn
down in less than a decade.
Straining to tie its parts together, the city kept flying apart. The
completion of the subway system made access to Greater Gotham an
everyday experience, but the emerging car culture created a new source
of chaotic movement and class conflict, as innocent urchins were
regularly run down by rich twits. Yet Scientific American predicted that
the swift noiseless movement of cars over clean (horseless) streets
“would eliminate a greater part of the nervousness, distraction, and
strain of modern metropolitan life.” Even chuffing cars could be
integrated into visions of a well-managed utopia.
Street-level class conflict surfaced as retail commerce moved to
midtown. By the 1910s, Fifth Avenue was full of cavernous bazaars
offering women shoppers escape from domestic propriety into a glamorous
commercial public sphere. The only problem was the scruffy crowd—mostly
garment workers on lunch break—that jostled the ladies in the street.
Upscale retailers fought back, and in 1916, they managed to zone
manufacturing out of the rectangle formed by 33rd to 59th Streets and
Third to Seventh Avenues.
As the battle over Fifth Avenue shopping suggested, class conflict was
nearly always shaped by interethnic hostilities. Italians and Russian
Jews joined Irish and Germans in the restless horde that provoked
anxiety among the Anglo-Dutch elite. The anxiety was most acute when the
working classes overcame their own ethnic rivalries and began to form
industrial unions. But that took some doing. Samuel Gompers’s American
Federation of Labor was committed to trade unionism, which tended to
fragment along craft and ethnic lines—German cigarmakers, Irish ironworkers.
The needle trades were different, partly because of their Jewishness. By
1914, New York City had the greatest number of Jews in the world, many
of whom were committed to socialism and worked in the needle trades. The
mechanization of the garment industry was well underway, as production
shifted from sweatshop to factory. More workers were consolidated in one
place, which made them easier to organize. “It is a regular slave
factory,” said the radical organizer Clara Lemlich. “Not only your hands
and your time but your mind is sold.” Garment workers’ locals gravitated
toward the Women’s Trade Union League and enlisted upper-class allies,
including Anne Morgan (J.P.’s daughter). Tensions among workers arose
between Italians and Jews, and among owners between the “cockroach
capitalists” who still operated sweatshops and the more established
capitalists who wanted to drive them out of business. Concentration of
force was the order of the day, for management and employees alike.
The Italian–Jewish conflict had political resonances. Many Italian
artisans were displaced labor militants who inclined toward
anarcho-syndicalist strategies—a decentralized communitarianism centered
on small groups of workers asserting control over their workplace.
Jewish radicals tended to be socialists and parliamentarians. When the
Industrial Workers of the World appeared on the scene, led by a one-eyed
giant from the Far West called Big Bill Haywood, anarcho-syndicalism
acquired a forceful presence. Haywood urged “sabotage” in the workplace,
by which he meant work slowdowns. He debated the Socialist Party leader
Morris Hillquit in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union, where Hillquit
insisted on the power of the ballot box. The election of 1912 appeared
to vindicate Hillquit’s strategy: the Socialist Eugene Debs won a
million votes, 6 percent of the total. This was unprecedented and seemed
to offer an electoral foundation to build on. Haywood was expelled from
the Socialist Party.
Politics and culture intertwined. In the elite imagination, immigrants
were easily equated with anarchists, and vice versa. Feeling engulfed,
custodians of culture counterattacked, creating and revitalizing
institutions to assimilate, uplift, or inspire the immigrant
masses—ranging from CCNY and the new, uptown Columbia University to the
Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Zoo, and the New York Public Library, not to
mention the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural
History, and the Metropolitan Opera.
The last was a case study in ethnic tensions, as Protestants clustered
cheek by jowl with assimilated German Jews—among them the dapper,
cultivated Otto Kahn, a partner in the Wall Street investment firm Kuhn,
Loeb. Despite Jews’ financial backing of the Met, they were not allowed
to buy their own boxes (though an exception was made in 1917 for Kahn,
its biggest shareholder and patron). This was the sort of genteel
anti-Semitism that prompted Kahn’s sardonic remark: “A kike is a Jewish
gentleman who has just left the room.” The Met increasingly employed
Italian performers, led by the tenor Enrico Caruso, who became embroiled
in controversy when a woman accused him of pinching her buttocks in the
Monkey House at the Central Park Zoo. Wallace thinks “The Monkey House
Scandal” was probably a frame-up; in any case it did nothing to damage
Caruso’s popularity. “New York still loves me,” he told the press.
The conflict between an obstreperous multiethnic mass audience and
elites attempting to control it is a familiar but inadequate trope in
cultural histories of the period. Wallace transcends this formula by
recognizing that strategies of control also originated among ethnic
entrepreneurs who were struggling to regulate the flow of products out
of New York and into the nation’s theaters—in effect standardizing New
York–based entertainment for a national mass audience. The most
successful was the Shubert Organization, the creation of two ambitious
Jewish impresarios, which came to control 75 percent of theater tickets
sold in the United States. Meanwhile popular music was also becoming
more industrialized and centralized in songwriting firms dominated by
assimilated German Jews on 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth
Avenues—the block that came to be called Tin Pan Alley, for the din of
pianos one could hear from the street.
Amid all the standardization, a spectacular nightlife arose around Times
Square. Much of the excitement was the setting itself, which was
transformed by Oscar Gude, New York’s master of outdoor advertising and
the designer of Heinz’s fifty-foot pickle. Hired by advertisers for
humble products like beer and bran flakes, cigarettes and chewing gum,
Gude transformed Times Square into what the British writer Arnold
Bennett called “an enfevered phantasmagoria” of moving electric
images—girls walking tightropes, boys in shorts boxing. Times Square
joined Coney Island as an entertainment zone.
But Coney Island was in a class by itself—“the most popular resort on
the planet,” according to Wallace, and also a suggestive expression of
mass culture as an antidote to daily life. The extravagant constellation
of amusement parks was an early example of what became a common
practice—the mass marketing of remedies for the disorders bred by mass
society. As Wallace writes (summarizing “radical analysts”): “Attendees
were offered and consumed scientifically managed and industrially
engineered experiences. They were turned into articles on a movable
assembly line. The only things turned upside down were the patrons.”
Coney Island captured the careful management of consumers that
characterized mass culture.
Still there were some areas where the new energies were too intense to
be easily managed—particularly those where African-Americans influenced
entertainment styles. That influence was often hemmed in by caricature:
the black performers Bert Williams and George Walker made their
vaudeville debut in 1896 as “Two Real Coons.” At about the same time,
the composer James Reese Europe, the writer James Weldon Johnson, and
other black cultural figures created a (temporarily) thriving cultural
scene at the Hotel Marshall on West 53rd Street, where musicians could
make connections that might lead to employment. Ragtime piano players
were everywhere, and their music was influencing the likes of Irving
Berlin. Bert Williams became the black star in Florenz Ziegfeld’s revue,
a counterpoint to the sanitized white sexuality of the chorus girls.
But what really brought race and sex together was the Dance Craze of
1911–1913. Animal dances proliferated—the Turkey Trot, the Bunny Hug,
the Grizzly Bear. The psychoanalyst A.A. Brill was certain that this was
a return of the repressed. Dancers imitated animal movements and engaged
in mock sex, loins pressed together. Commercial dance halls offered
unprecedented opportunities for cross-class and cross-race mixing.
Swarthy Italians could serve as “tango pirates,” but the black poet Paul
Laurence Dunbar caught the fundamental dynamic of the dance hall with
these lines from the musical revue In Dahomey: “When dey hear dem
ragtime tunes/White fo’ks try to pass fo’ coons.” Moralists’ “deepest
worry,” Wallace writes, was “dance-driven sexual congress between white
women and black men.”
All this could be dangerous for black men. New York was a Jim Crow town.
In movie theaters, black people were consigned to the balcony—“nigger
heaven.” On the street, police brutality was routine. As veteran cops
told rookies: “‘unlawful resistance’ covers a multitude of sins.” Small
wonder that in 1904, when the Lenox Avenue subway arrived uptown and a
young black developer named Philip Payton started evicting whites from
his apartment buildings and renting them to blacks, Harlem became a
magnet for African-Americans from throughout the city, as well as from
the rural south.
A smaller and more scattered population was also headed for Gotham, as
Greenwich Village began attracting would-be bohemians from the
provinces—Mary Heaton Vorse from Amherst, Massachusetts; John Reed from
Portland, Oregon; Floyd Dell from Davenport, Iowa. If an aspiring
bohemian woman had a feminist bent, she might join Heterodoxy, “a little
band of willful women” that met at Polly’s Restaurant in the Village to
provide a forum “for women who did things and did them openly.” Village
feminists in general emphasized sex as personal fulfillment, but a
broader shift in sexual attitudes tended toward compulsory
heterosexuality, along with the invention and pathologizing of
“homosexuality.”
Artists, like feminists, were committed to transcending “genteel
protocols”—especially the marriage of Morality and Beauty. John Sloan,
George Bellows, and the other painters who proudly embraced the label
“Ash Can School” all loved the “fabulous energy and dynamic busyness” of
crowds scurrying for a subway and “the real ‘vulgar’ human life” of
immigrant kids capering down Delancey. But what really posed a challenge
to American ways of seeing was the Armory Show, the legendary exhibition
in 1913 that introduced Americans to European modernists. Among them,
Francis Picabia in particular deployed a futurist rhetoric that
resonated with the urban sublime. He painted skyscrapers, he said, to
catch “the rush of upward movement, the feeling of those who attempted
to build the Tower of Babel—man’s desire to reach the heavens, to
achieve infinity.” The same sentiments inspired Joseph Stella’s
admiration for New York’s “violent blaze of electricity,” its permanent
light show that epitomized what Picabia had dubbed “the futurist city.”
New York was all about Force, all the time.
The forces of order and stability continued to assert their claims as
well. Florence Kelley fought what the Social Gospel minister Walter
Rauschenbusch called “institutionalized sinfulness” by leading public
health campaigns against the tuberculosis that thrived in tenements and
the adulteration that pervaded the food industry. Other progressives
sought to assimilate immigrants by standardizing public
education—lifting them “out of the swamp in which they were born and
brought up,” as one reformer put it. Another sort of progressive
crusaded against commercial vice, driving it into private venues; the
high-end prostitute known as the “call girl” appeared on the scene. The
centripetal force of government was policing behavior once thought
exempt from public scrutiny.
The coming of World War I brought unprecedented pressures for
regimentation. The Anglo-Dutch elite began a sustained assault on
“hyphenated Americanism.” Roosevelt himself preferred coercive
Americanization to immigration restriction. This was the enlightened
progressive view; few paid much attention to the cogent calls of Horace
Kallen and Randolph Bourne for a pluralistic, “Trans-National America.”
Uniformity trumped multiplicity.
After American entry into the war, centripetal forces intensified. The
Espionage Act of 1917 criminalized even casual utterances if they could
be deemed disrespectful to flag or country. Vigilantes patrolled the
streets of New York, searching for “slackers” who had not registered for
the draft or answered the call-up. “Bolshevik” emerged as a new epithet
for radicals and subversives. The drive for order culminated when the
1919 strike wave was used to justify a nationwide Red Scare that led to
the deportation of thousands of radicals. New York Governor Al Smith
eventually denounced the overreach as the prelude to the imposition of a
police state. It was not a moment too soon.
In March 1917, Leon Trotsky returned to Russia from the Bronx, where he
had been sojourning for just over two months after being deported from
Spain. “I was leaving for Europe,” Trotsky recalled, “with the feeling
of a man who has had only a peep into the foundry in which the fate of
man is to be forged.” But what was the common fate that was being forged
in New York? Devotees of the urban sublime did not address the question
and only occasionally reflected on New York’s world-historical
significance, beyond ritual celebration. One of those occasions was in
1902, when Harper’s Weekly traced the city’s ceaseless tumult to the
nation’s newfound prosperity, which was centered in New York. Commerce
pulsed through the streets as “an electrified current of financial
strength that is charged with an energy unknown before in the field of
human endeavor.” The “mighty force” astir beneath Gotham was money.
What Harper’s failed to acknowledge was that the effects of that force
on everyday life were not always liberating. Investment capital created
the subway system, which most people rode at “rush hour,” when they were
going to and from work. At such times, one tour guide noted, “to do as
the crowd does, is almost compulsory.” The routine of office and factory
exacerbated the periodic crush of mass society. The city exerted its own
centripetal forces, through the pressure exerted by its crowds, but also
through the various forms of social discipline exacted by the employers,
managers, and owners of capital. Power mattered, and capital was its
instrument. But so, it turned out, was government. The mass mobilization
of thought demanded by the war effort revealed how times could come—who
knew when or how often?—when the requirement “to do as the crowd does”
would be “almost compulsory” by fiat of the state. Freedom in the
kingdom of force was always provisional.
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