The Finest Building in America by Edwin G. Burrows

Author:Edwin G. Burrows
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190681234
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

True, Silliman and Goodrich acknowledged, the effect of good taste “is much too subtle to be exactly appreciated. It is not possible to determine just how much it benefits a man to see an exquisite vase, or to hear a fine strain of music, or contemplate a masterful statue. But it is very easy to perceive that he who is subject to the constant influence of beautiful forms is in a fair way to have beautiful feelings.” And with those forms now available to everyone, no one had any excuse for boorish behavior.

As it happened, however, “beautiful feelings” between the classes were in short supply, especially in New York, during the booming 1850s. Few working people would likely have admitted to the “serene enjoyment” of their relations with those richer and more influential than themselves. The kind of men who, as the writer N. P. Willis described them, “keep carriages, live above Bleecker, are subscribers to the opera, go to Grace Church, have a town house and country house, give balls and parties”—men such as this spoke openly about the need to use force to suppress popular disorders, in America as well as in Europe, and wondered if warfare with the “dangerous classes” lay just around the corner. Some of this worrying was a reaction to the confrontational Young America movement and to John O’Sullivan’s influential journal, The Democratic Review, which could whip itself into a lather of enthusiasm for almost anything that sounded youthful, fresh, or revolutionary. Some of this concern was triggered, too, by the popularity of egalitarian, anti-monopolistic, Locofoco, or Barnburner elements within the Democratic Party.13

At least in New York, most of this bourgeois anxiety stemmed from a succession of riots, brawls, strikes, and other public disturbances in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Prosperity for some, it seems, did not float all boats. The great Astor Place Riot of 1849—the worst example of urban disorder before the Draft Riots in 1863—saw the militia firing on a large crowd of workingmen outside the Opera House, many of them Irish, killing 22 and wounding 150. Evidently, according to one account of the affray, the “hatred of wealth and privilege is increasing over the world, and ready to burst out whenever there is the slightest occasion.”

In the summer of 1850, a demonstration by German tailors escalated quickly to bloody brawls with the police, threats of a general strike, and progress toward the unity of everyone who labored for a wage, regardless of craft or ethnicity. Another battle with the police in August of that same year killed two tailors and left dozens wounded. A few months later, in early October 1850, the city’s African American population organized a mass interracial rally on behalf of James Hamlet, a free man seized by federal agents enforcing the new Fugitive Slave Act—perhaps the first time in the city’s history that whites had turned out in such numbers for an event staged by blacks. In May 1851 one person was killed and many

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