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the George campaign, a number of prominent Tammany leaders revealed that they approached Corrigan in 1886 to urge him to discipline McGlynn.

Corrigan had good reason, apart from his own philosophical conservatism, to accede to their request: the Church in New York City had long relied on Tammany Hall for protection and special favors, such as subsidies for parochial schools and giveaway land deals for building new churches. So when the archbishop was approached by a posse of Tammany operatives on the McGlynn matter, he felt compelled to act. He not only agreed to silence McGlynn, but also, according to the account, to issue a pointed condemnation of George’s ideas just before the election.52 “A Movement of the Masses Against Robbery by the Classes”

As the United Labor Party worked to overcome these substantial obstacles, it also articulated the reasons behind its creation and campaign. This was not a mere gesture of symbolic protest, but a real movement seeking to reassert workers’ place within the polity by seizing political power. By 1886, the experiences with the streetcar monopolies, hostile judges, abusive policemen, and corrupt public officials—all indifferent to their needs and mistreatment—had demonstrated the immense degree to which politics, business, and the law were intertwined, and the extent to which the voice of society’s producers had been stifled and trampled. “As Labor stands today,” wrote James Smith, “it is practically disfranchised, because it has hitherto handed over to one or the other of the old political parties its strength.” Condemning the political establishment, “Printer” observed in a letter to the Boycotter: “What a sarcastic misnomer is the phrase ‘the people’s servants!’ Do servants dress better than their masters? Do they strut and swell out with self-conscious importance? Do they make laws against the interests of their masters? As a matter of fact, they are the people’s masters.”53 The ULP thus represented a fundamental effort by labor to redeem workers’ citizenship—a citizenship that carried with it not merely political and social, but also economic rights. “In this country, the most important of modern republics, the degradation of citizenship flourishes, becoming

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more and more general every year, till to-day we are not far distant from pure and unadulterated oligarchy,” one activist warned. The United States would soon see “the separation of the people into two classes—monarch and serf.”54 By responding to the republican crisis with the formation of a labor party bent on reasserting the power of the producers, the city’s workingmen declared their intent to resume their proper role as “the people,” with elected officials of their choosing representing their interests, not those of commerce, privilege, or monopoly. The interests of capital had gained unfettered access to state power in recent decades, influence which they used to expand and solidify their power in society. A victory by the ULP would shake up this emerging hierarchy and begin to reverse this trend.

“We are going to the polls,” Henry George told the crowds on the eve of the mayoral election, “and we will show the politicians that we are the masters and not the servants.”55 This implicit effort to revitalize citizenship and re-empower the working class was explicit throughout the ULP’s platform, campaign literature, and stump speeches. “Class movement!” cried George in his acceptance speech, referring charges by Hewitt and Roosevelt that he was fomenting class conflict. “What class is it? The working class!” In an earlier age, everyone had to work for a living; no such distinction of a “working class” could be made. But now, remarked George, men had devised ways of living off the labor of others. “If this is a class movement, then it is a movement of the working class against the beggar-men and the thieves. . . . It is a movement of the masses against robbery by the classes.”56 An editorial in the Boycotter echoed this line when it deemed both Hewitt and Roosevelt as “class candidates” representing the interests of corrupt businessmen and politicians.

The truth about this class issue is that the men who have raised it really desire that the wage-earner should allow the wage-payer to do his voting for him. Here we have indeed an alarming and dangerous class movement to deal with. Henry George’s candidacy means that an effort is now being made in New York City to arrest this most unAmerican class movement . . . at the ballot box.57

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As important as this broad philosophical ideal of restored citizenship was, what practical results did George and the ULP envision should they win? George himself admitted that the powers of the executive in New York City were circumscribed; the city charter reserved authority over taxation, budget, and law-making to the Board of Aldermen and the state legislature. Yet he disagreed with the editor of the New York Times, who charged that he “does not seek the office of Mayor with any thought that he can directly promote the application of his peculiar theories.” Quite to the contrary, George and his ULP supporters outlined a very specific set of goals for labor’s mayor should he be elected.58 These goals were detailed in the ULP platform that George helped draft in August. While at least one historian has argued that George made the platform weaker and more cautious in comparison to its predecessors in the ULP campaigns of 1882 and 1883, the document is more accurately understood as a strategic mix of both radical demands and moderate platitudes designed to attract the maximum number of voters.59 In this effort, the ULP proved remarkably successful. It did not suffer a single defection from its coalition despite changes in the platform.

It appealed to relatively conservative trade unionists in the State Workingmen’s Association, the trade-union political body headed by Samuel Gompers. The State Workingmen’s Association recognized the ULP and cast its support behind George even though they had eschewed the idea of independent labor politics for years.60 The revised platform also garnered the support of radicals such as the Socialist Labor Party, which backed the ULP. As the editor of Der Socialist put it, “Henry George is no socialist. His program is not socialistic. But Henry George stands for socialistic demands and if his program is carried out, it would be an advantage for the workers and a heavy blow for capitalism.”61 Still, George’s decision to depart from the 1882 and 1883 platforms requires an explanation. To begin with, many changes were made for purely practical reasons. The demand in the original platform for national currency reform, for instance, was completely irrelevant to New York City and its mayor. Its call to establish a state bureau of labor statistics and abolish contract convict labor had been recently accomplished. The decision to limit the number of specific demands in the new platform—leaving out the

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establishment of the eight-hour workday and the abolition of the truck-pay system while retaining calls for equal pay for men and women and public ownership of mass transit, among others—was likely meant blunt any political attacks from Hewitt and Roosevelt whereby labor’s cause could be misrepresented as dangerous radicalism. It also gave the platform a more universal appeal, targeting disaffected middle-class voters who did not identify as wage earners but who nonetheless opposed monopoly and corruption.

Of far greater consequence than what George and other ULP leaders removed from the platform was what he added to it. For example, the passionate demand that “the people of New York City should have full control of their local affairs” (e.g., home rule) and be freed from undemocratic control by state officials in Albany was an explicit call for the restoration of democracy and self-representation. The powers of the mayor ought to be broadened, argued the platform, to more effectively carry out the will of the people. The city needed “one executive responsible to the people.”

To achieve this end, the platform called for a referendum to convene a state constitutional convention.62 If George won the election and the referendum passed, he could lead a city delegation to the state constitutional convention to gain home rule. The city would then be free to make its own decisions under leadership attuned to popular concerns on key matters such as the eight-hour workday, first lien laws, child labor, improved factory and tenement safety, and public ownership of mass transit.

Even before these structural changes in city politics were made, George declared his intention to use the mayor’s existing limited powers to the fullest extent possible, particularly the power to appoint the heads of important city departments like Public Works, Streets, and Charity. After a thorough housecleaning of corrupt officials, he told a reporter, he would appoint “men of character, capacity and courage, on whom I could rely to work for the purification of the city administration.”63 George also had a bigger target to morally wield the city executive’s power against: the established political machines. As their platform put it, the ULP campaign “affords the only hope of exposing and breaking up the extortion and peculation by which a standing army of professional politicians corrupt the public whom they plunder.” Winning the mayoralty

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would firmly establish the ULP in municipal (and eventually state and national) politics, resulting in the subsequent election of aldermen, assemblymen, and judges from the ranks of “the people.” This would dismantle the system of patronage that the corrupt machines relied on. “Jack Plane,” writing to John Swinton’s Paper, summed up this aspiration in the following call to action: Up and cleanse your city offices of the filthy slugs, roaches and bloated spiders of politics that fatten on the stealings from city treasury and banks. Pitch from their snuggeries the adulterous issues of the debauched ballot-box. The hour of order is closing in upon you. . . . The period of wholesale peculation is fast passing away.64 The 1886 ULP platform also went beyond the original in committing the next mayor to establishing classless rule by vetoing “class legislation” passed by the Board of Aldermen. Reflecting the republican ideal of the common good, George and the ULP vowed to abolish “all laws which give to any class of citizens advantages, either judicial, financial, industrial, or political, that are not equally shared by all others.” Mayor George, for example, could veto the Board of Aldermen’s decisions to award streetcar franchises to corrupt and abusive corporations. He could also use his authority to compel the streetcar and elevated railroad companies to reform by launching investigations into whether they paid their proper amount of taxes, treated their employees fairly, charged reasonable fares, and provided quality service.

Furthermore, as both the platform and George made clear, these would be but the first steps toward a comprehensive public takeover of the transportation and communication systems, wresting them from corporations that garner “enormous profits” while they “oppress their employe[e]s and provoke strikes that interrupt travel and imperil the public peace”—a clear reference to the streetcar corruption scandals and strikes that rocked the city that past spring and that contributed to labor’s political mobilization.65 George and ULP leaders also augmented the 1886 platform to take on other aspects of class rule, especially the police. Although the head of the New York City Police Department was one of the few positions not under executive control, the mayor’s office possessed sufficient authority, moral

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and otherwise, to curb the department’s excesses. This understanding was particularly compelling given the extraordinary actions taken by the police during the spring’s tumultuous protests. As the Boycotter put it, with a genuine representative of labor as mayor, “the police of the city would be confined to their legitimate functions of preserving the peace instead of being turned over to the corporations to do the work of the striking cardrivers.”66 The platform went further by pledging to simplify the legal system and to abolish property requirements for jurors—a particularly salient point in the wake of the boycotter verdicts. This would eliminate class rule by expanding the jury pool, enabling workers brought before the bench a chance to be judged by their economic peers and diminishing the power of hostile, activist judges.

The labor campaign also believed the mayor possessed a potential that far exceeded its actual powers as delineated by law. As the chief executive of the nation’s largest city, as well as the de facto leader of a new political party, George could further the objectives of labor and the ULP by using his position as a bully pulpit for social reform. “The Mayor of New York has not only the large powers of the office,” George noted, “but is in a position to appeal effectually to the still larger power of public opinion, that can always be relied on to support reforms of which the people feel the need.” Just as his election, in and of itself, would have a powerful symbolic impact on the American working class, so too would his high office. With ready access to national media, Mayor George could provide labor with an unparalleled mouthpiece for making known its plight and advocating radical social reform.67 A final critical element added to the 1886 ULP platform was an explicit condemnation of economic exploitation. “We aim at the abolition of the system which compels men to pay their fellow-creatures for the use of God’s gifts to all,” read the ULP platform in a clear allusion to George’s criticism of unchallenged private property rights. Such a system, argued the ULP, “permits monopolizers to deprive labor of natural opportunities for employment,” thus boosting unemployment, driving down wages “to starvation rates,” and making “the wealth producer the industrial slave of those who grow rich by his toil.” It also forced hundreds of thousands of citizens to live in crowded, unsanitary tenements. “We declare the crowding of so

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many of our people into narrow tenements at enormous rents while half the area of the city is yet unbuilt upon to be a scandalous evil.”68 The ULP’s proposed remedy, unsurprisingly, was George’s single tax reform. The platform demanded an end to all taxes excepting those on land, which would be taxed at full value “so that those who are now holding land vacant [to gain by speculation] shall be compelled either to build on it themselves, or give up the land to those who will.” For all its flaws and idiosyncrasies, George’s single tax plan added an explicitly progressive character to the campaign. Although Progress and Poverty advocated a conversion to land-value taxation and the abolition of absolute private property rights in land on a national scale, George’s mayoral platform essentially called upon the city government, in P. J. McGuire’s words, to “municipalize” the land.

This was no abstract consideration; New York in 1886 was driven perhaps more than any other city in the United States by real estate development and speculation, and was racked by overcrowded and unhealthy housing.

Throughout the campaign, George spoke out against the horrors of tenement life: Nowhere else in the civilized world are men and women and children packed together so closely. . . . Now, is there any reason for such overcrowding? There is plenty of room on this island. There are miles and miles and miles of land all around this nucleus. Why cannot we take that land and build houses upon it for our accommodation? Simply because it is held by dogs in the manger who will not use it themselves, nor allow anyone else to use it, unless they pay an enormous price for it.69 In contrast, the old ULP platform raised no explicit challenge to absolute private property rights, nor to the private ownership of utilities, railroads, or telegraphs.70 Nor did it argue in communitarian terms, as the 1886 version did, that “the enormous value which the presence of a million and a half of people gives to the land of this city belongs properly to the whole community,” and that it “should be taken in taxation and applied to the improvement and beautifying of the city, to the promotion of health, comfort, education, and recreation of its people.” Revenue generated from

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land-value taxation would be “for the use of the whole people, and for the beautifying and adornment of the city, for providing public accommodations, playgrounds, schools, and facilities for education and recreation.”71 Careful consideration of the 1886 ULP platform and George’s rhetoric on the campaign trail makes it clear that the city’s workers did not form a labor party and nominate Henry George simply out of anger or to “send a message” to the established parties. They developed a specific agenda that called for radical political, economic, and social change.

Now all they had to do was pull off the impossible.

“A Tailboard Campaign”

The United Labor Party campaign, which had commenced back in September 1886 with the organized effort to collect the signatures in support of George, began in earnest in early October. From the official headquarters at the Colonnade Hotel at 141 East 8th Street, the party coordinated an army of volunteers and established Henry George Clubs and political organizations in all twenty-four state assembly districts. Significantly, these institutions were situated in storefront offices—a sharp contrast to Tammany’s traditional use of saloons as campaign centers. Some of the larger individual trade organizations—in particular, the cigar makers, printers, and builders—established Henry George Trade Legions to lead parades and place men at the polls.72 One of the greatest obstacles facing the Labor campaign was the lack of money. As George wrote to a friend just after the nomination, “Money will flow like water to beat me.”73 To another he confided, “Tammany, or no Tammany, I think I will be the next Mayor of New York. . . . Our only difficulty is shortness of money.”74 To counteract this problem, labor leaders devised a grassroots fundraising campaign, requesting a twenty-five cent donation from each of the CLU’s more than one hundred thousand unionized workers, as well as assessing each labor organization for five cents per man, per week. Workers unable to give money often donated time. Others gave both in the form of “$1-and-a-day’s-time pledges.” Labor organizations, including those far beyond the city limits (workers from St. Louis, for example, sent $500), sent financial support.75