Progressive Inequality

Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920

David Huyssen

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780674281400
• eBook ISBN: 9780674419537
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

The Progressive Era has been depicted as a seismic event in American history—a landslide of reform that curbed capitalist excesses and reduced the gulf between rich and poor. Progressive Inequality cuts against the grain of this popular consensus, demonstrating how income inequality's growth prior to the stock market crash of 1929 continued to aggravate class divisions. As David Huyssen makes clear, Progressive attempts to alleviate economic injustice often had the effect of entrenching class animosity, making it more, not less, acute.

Huyssen interweaves dramatic stories of wealthy and poor New Yorkers at the turn of the twentieth century, uncovering how initiatives in charity, labor struggles, and housing reform chafed against social, economic, and cultural differences. These cross-class actions took three main forms: prescription, in which the rich attempted to dictate the behavior of the poor; cooperation, in which mutual interest engendered good-faith collaboration; and conflict, in which sharply diverging interests produced escalating class violence. In cases where reform backfired, it reinforced a set of class biases that remain prevalent in America today, especially the notion that wealth derives from individual merit and poverty from lack of initiative.

A major contribution to the history of American capitalism, Progressive Inequality makes tangible the abstract dynamics of class relations by recovering the lived encounters between rich and poor—as allies, adversaries, or subjects to inculcate—and opens a rare window onto economic and social debates in our own time.

1

Invading the Tenements

… dull grey smoke, faintly luminous in the night, writhed out from the tops of the second story windows, and from the basement there glared a deep and terrible hue of red, the color of satanic wrath, the color of murder.

—Stephen Crane, “The Fire”

JUST BEFORE DAWN on May 31, 1894, Solomon Kleinrock’s liquor store at 129 Suffolk Street exploded. The flames flew down the tenement hallways in a deadly rush, climbing stairwells and dumbwaiters, writhing under doors and licking at lintels. The blast had reverberated through the rickety old house, startling Peter Rutz from sleep in his third-floor rear-apartment bed. Rutz went to his door to find the source of the commotion. “The minute I opened the door,” he later recounted, “I was blinded with smoke and dirt and blaze. I was chucked right clean back on the floor, and my wife commenced to holler, and the children came running out of the bed room.”¹ Rutz slammed the door shut, but the apartment was already filling with smoke as the fire gathered strength. “I saw the flames bursting through the floors,” Rutz said. “I got them right in my face.”² Rutz and his wife rushed to save their sons, struggling past obstructions on the fire escape as they frantically pushed the children out of the doomed tenement.³

Finally, Rutz turned back for his four-year-old niece, Lizzie Jaeger, still in a side bedroom. “When I went to go in for her,” he explained, “why the flame was away over my head, already; couldn’t get in any more.”⁴ Helpless against the heat and choking on smoke, Rutz was forced to flee without the girl. The next time he saw his niece, “I saw her on the sidewalk, right after the firemen got her out; she was lying on a pillow; she was just like all swollen up. I looked at her; saw her face.”⁵ The firemen had been battling another blaze in Broome Street when the Suffolk Street alarm went out, fatally lengthening their response, and by the time they discovered Lizzie in Rutz’s rooms, the girl was horribly burned. She died at Gouverneur Hospital shortly thereafter.⁶ When her father, Charles Jaeger, came to see her body in the hospital the next day, he recalled, “I hardly knowed her.”⁷

It is unlikely that Richard Watson Gilder—poet, club man, and editor of arguably the most influential English-language literary magazine of the day, the Century—would have taken notice of Lizzie’s death under ordinary circumstances. Her demise by fire, after all, was only one among dozens that occurred each year in New York’s tenements.⁸ These fire victims were almost always from poor immigrant families, neither readers of nor contributors to the Century. Many lived not far physically from the editor’s house just off Washington Square Park, but “The Studio,” as Gilder’s friends in New York’s fashionable circles called his Clinton Place home, might as well have been in another galaxy for all it had in common with the tenements. Gilder’s professional interests lay in expanding and championing American literature and in forging a distinctive national identity in the arts. Tenement reform was not an obvious priority for him.⁹

Only by seeming accident of fate did the worlds of the poor, doomed child and the successful, refined litterateur collide. A few weeks earlier, the New York state and city governments had initiated a program to reform the tenements, and Governor Roswell P. Flower had appointed Gilder to the Tenement House Committee of 1894. The Committee met on May 12, and appointed Gilder its chairman.¹⁰ The group’s mandate identified its first duty as making “a careful examination into the tenement-houses of the city of New York; their condition as to the construction, healthfulness, safety, rentals and the effect of tenement-house life on the health, education, savings and morals of those who live in such habitations.”¹¹

Gilder was a devout Christian, an obsessive worker, and a civil service reform advocate who abhorred corruption of any kind. He would not be derelict in his duties to the tenements. In the first of what would be several such investigations, he rushed to the scene of Lizzie’s death as soon as he heard of the fire, anxious to play his role in bettering the lives of less eminent New Yorkers. The visit launched a cross-class reform project that would consume him for over a year and have him wading “heart-deep in misery all summer long.”¹²

The same year Gilder waded in misery, his good friend Stanford White was overseeing a signature construction project in the same neighborhood. White, an interior designer, architect, and New York Society bon vivant, had recently enjoyed a triumph at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The Agricultural Building designed by his firm, McKim, Mead & White, had received prime placement in the Fair’s “Court of Honor.”¹³ The building’s neoclassical grandeur, sparkling white façade, and gorgeously sculpted pediments provided a consummate aesthetic symbol of America’s industrial prowess and imperial ambition. As an article in Scientific American magazine gushed, “The glory of the Exposition is the Court of Honor, and the glory of the Court of Honor is the Agricultural Building.”¹⁴ The fairgrounds’ layout reflected the reigning spirit of a powerful, expanding United States at the center of the world, surrounded by exhibits depicting exoticized visions of foreign cultures, all prostrate before America.¹⁵

It is no wonder that when the Bowery Savings Bank commissioned McKim, Mead & White that same year to design a structure stretching from Elizabeth Street to the Bowery across Grand Street, White’s creative impulses returned to the themes of the Agricultural Building. It was the perfect vision to construct in more permanent form on the Lower East Side of New York: an emblem of American promise at the epicenter of poor, unassimilated foreigners, the literal crossroads of the Irish, Italian, German, and Russian immigrant communities.¹⁶ Within limits determined by the constrained setting on the Bowery, White’s design for the bank’s exterior—particularly its Bowery and Grand Street façades—mirrored the Agricultural Building. He used many of the same artists, friends, and aesthetic collaborators for the stonework. Construction lasted from 1893 to 1895, and the result endures as a historic landmark today. That its marble magnificence sprang up surrounded by slums, in the midst of the worst economic calamity the United States had ever known, has been almost entirely forgotten.

Superficially, Lizzie Jaeger’s death and the work of Gilder’s Tenement House Committee bear no obvious relation to the building of White’s Bowery Savings Bank beyond a shared geography on New York’s Lower East Side and a chronological coincidence in the 1890s. The Committee’s work (and, to all appearances, Lizzie’s death) grew out of an increasingly urgent crisis in tenement conditions, whose sensational exposure a few years earlier in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives had helped stimulate a public, political response. Gilder’s work would be handled through committee meetings, hearings with published minutes, consultation with every relevant municipal department, and exhaustive forays into the neighborhoods themselves by a team of investigators. The bank building, meanwhile, was a private business venture. The bank’s trustees, designer, and developer, all of whom moved in a world of club lunches and European vacations, had largely unfettered control over a giant chunk of one city block.

Despite these differences, both Gilder’s and White’s projects illustrate a particular type of prescriptive class encounter endemic to the Progressive Era, in which private notions of taste and civilization entwined with public-spirited reformism, bringing the wealthy to the poor’s doorstep with a spirit we might call imperial progressivism.¹⁷ They were imperial in the same way that U.S. foreign policy was imperial in those years: affluent white Americans and their agents, armed with executive authority provided or endorsed by the state, inserted themselves into the spaces and lives of overwhelmingly poor and foreign-born populations. Once there, they asserted allegedly superior knowledge of politics, economics, science, and aesthetics to justify remolding those spaces and lives, maintaining or extending political and economic power over them.¹⁸ In the case of White’s bank design, those aesthetics were themselves imperial, derived explicitly from the idiom of the Roman Empire. The projects were also Progressive because the methods and motives fueling both were distinctive to the era. Employing empiricist investigation and environmentalist behavioral theory, Gilder and White pursued programs consisting variously of mugwump anticorruption, class reconciliation, and civic, social efficiency. The men leading each project believed not only in the justice of the power they wielded, but in the vision of a better, more harmonious city, a vision they aimed to realize.¹⁹

Both endeavors harnessed the privileges of wealth and power to reshape urban space, intending to improve the lives of poor New Yorkers such as Lizzie Jaeger. The Committee did so more directly, through investigation and analysis of tenement life by well-off, credentialed researchers aiming to produce an irrefutable, scientific argument to legislate tenements more strictly. The wealthy New Yorkers on the Committee and their state sponsors hoped to improve both the actual living quarters and “morals” of the poor.²⁰ The Bowery Savings Bank’s approach was seemingly less invasive but even more abrupt, mobilizing resources and artistic talent possessed by the rich to transform the streetscape of a poor neighborhood. The bank’s new home would be as stunning as one of the countless palaces for plutocrats being raised on the Upper East Side, but its doors would be open to the poorest of the city in their own world, on the Bowery. It intended to teach them the value of thrift and hard work in part by sheer physical symbolism, a marble and limestone allegory planted in their midst. It would also enable the expansion of mutual savings services to local depositors—services that the bank’s founders in 1834 had already promoted as helping to assimilate immigrants to the American economic order.²¹

In their prescriptive intentions, both enterprises evoked America’s imperial aspirations at the turn of the century. A renewed drive to create Thomas Jefferson’s imagined “Empire of Liberty” had burst from the wreckage of the Civil War, spurring incursions of expropriation and occupation overseas throughout the Progressive Era—Hawaii in 1893, Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, Nicaragua in 1909, and Haiti in 1915.²² Such foreign ventures aimed at opening new markets, directing economic policy, and promoting propertied American interests abroad, but they found public justification in potent domestic ideologies championing the economic, political, and racial superiority of “Anglo-Saxon civilization.”²³

These ideologies found various avenues for domestic expression: a movement to remake American cityscapes in the imperial aesthetic of ancient Rome; the fascination for evolutionary logic in emerging academic fields of social science that underwrote social Darwinism; and a post-Reconstruction revival of white supremacy in both South and North.²⁴ Such trends ensured that the corrective logic of spreading capitalism and civilization to benighted foreigners—logic that provided powerful rationalizations for conquest, occupation, and financial reorganization by U.S. elites abroad—would serve equally well in projects turning inward, toward spaces and persons of largely immigrant and nonwhite (or differently white) working poor within America’s borders.²⁵

To be clear, both the Tenement House Committee and the Bowery Savings Bank addressed serious problems on the Lower East Side. The squalor of New York tenements constituted an ongoing threat to public health in the 1890s, and working men and women absolutely needed a safe repository for their savings.²⁶ Neither project’s participants were social-control fanatics, nor were they self-conscious domestic imperialists bent on exploiting the nonwhite working class. They understood themselves to be progressive men seeking solutions to the visible challenges of urban life, using the intellectual and material tools at their disposal.²⁷

Yet the imperial flavor of these two projects, in approach and aesthetic, conveys an important aspect not only of Progressive Era class relations but also of the relationship between the progressivism and imperialism of the time. Among white Progressives in the 1890s, impulses toward social improvement through meticulous accumulation of data, scientific analysis, and reasoned regulation almost always existed in uneasy tension with racialized assumptions of civilizational superiority.²⁸ Such assumptions underwrote robust, often unilateral exercises of power not only overseas but on the domestic s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue: Fault Lines of Rich and Poor
• 1. Invading the Tenements
• 2. Bank on the Bowery
• 3. Prescribing Reform
• 4. Loving the Poor with Severity
• 5. The Business of Godly Charity
• 6. Reaching Out to the Rich
• 7. Between Empathy and Prejudice
• 8. The Limits of Private Philanthropy
• 9. Killing Workers for Profit
• 10. The Primacy of Property
• 11. Sisters in Struggle
• 12. To Cooperate or Condescend
• 13. Sisters at Odds
• 14. Hard Fists, Short Fuses on the City Rails
• 15. Making the World Safe for Inequality
• Epilogue: Recognizing Class in Ourselves
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index