The Epic of New York City (64 page)

The Met's stage was made bigger than the stages of the opera houses of Paris and St. Petersburg. Its seating capacity of nearly 3,500 almost equaled the capacity of the largest opera house in the world, Milan's La Scala, which could accommodate 3,600. For all its interior opulence the Met's exterior was as bleak as a warehouse. Finished in Italian Renaissance style, its façade consisted of plain yellow bricks. Colonel James H. Mapleson, impresario of the Academy, sneeringly called the Met that “new yellow brewery on Broadway.” Even disinterested persons were struck by the ugliness of the seven-story building, whose Broadway side included rent-producing stores.

Both the Metropolitan Opera House and the Academy of Music scheduled the opening of their 1883-84 season for the evening of October 22. Manager Henry E. Abbey of the Met presented Gounod's
Faust,
starring Christine Nilsson in the role of Marguerite. Colonel Mapleson of the Academy featured Bellini's
La Sonnambula,
with diva Etelka Gerster in the starring role. A certain Mrs. Paran Stevens, torn between curiosity and tradition, compromised by spending half the evening at the Met and the other half at the Academy.

At 3
P.M
. on the day the Met was due to open, its several floor levels were still littered with plaster shavings, powdered whitewash, raw lumber, messy paintpots, and a carpet of dirt. Could it really open on schedule? “It will be ready by eight o'clock,” proclaimed impresario Abbey. Inside the building 700 cleaning women bustled about, while on the outside gangs of husky men tore down the last of the scaffoldings. By 7:30
P.M
. 10,000 curiosity seekers were thronging nearby streets. About half an hour later carriages were snarled in a traffic jam extending three blocks in every direction from the Met. Silk-hatted gentiemen and bejeweled ladies stepped out of their stalled vehicles to push and shove their way through crowds to the doors of the new house.

After pressing inside, they were shown to their seats by ushers
clad in bottle-green uniforms studded with gold buttons. The Goulds and Morgans and Schurzes—representing the new plutocracy—were gratified to note the presence of the Astors and Belmonts and Goelets—representing the old aristocracy. As for the Vanderbilts, members of this family occupied no fewer than five loges. William Henry Vanderbilt himself, savoring to the utmost this moment of triumph, had as honored guest in his box none other than Sir John Duke Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice of England.

The resplendent evening marked a transition in the history of New York, as power passed from the old order to the new. Before this, no such audience had ever gathered in one spot in America. The Met was crowded with men whose total wealth was estimated at more than $500,000,000. The Met won the battle hands down; Colonel Mapleson soon thereafter closed the Academy of Music with the melancholy words “I cannot fight Wall Street.”

It was an era of velvet and vice, of magnificence and misery. Henry George, the economist and reformer, who had moved to New York three years earlier, wrote in the year the Met opened: “Civilization, as it progresses,
requires
a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit. Failing these, civilization must pass into destruction.” George pointed out that shirtmakers were paid only thirty-five cents for every dozen shirts they produced. “The main source of the difficulties that menace us,” he went on to say, “is the growing inequality in the distribution of wealth.” Then he painted a verbal picture of life outside the Metropolitan Opera House:

Not only were the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, as Henry George pointed out, but there was also a dizzying increase
in the
tempo
of this widening split. Economically and socially, America was disintegrating, and nowhere in the nation could this be noted more vividly than in New York. Oppression by the rich evoked rebellion by the poor. Sobersided Grover Cleveland said:

The year 1886 was blotched by depression, mass unemployment, strikes, and lockouts. Among other labor disorders, New York's streetcar employees struck for shorter hours. While city aldermen took bribes in exchange for franchises paying enormous profits to rapid transit owners, the workers themselves were paid a pittance for slaving up to 16 hours a day. Most aldermen were indicted for bribery, New Yorkers turned in anger on their public servants, and labor leaders decided to channel the mood to their own ends. The Central Labor Union (C.L.U.), organized in 1882, now banded together 207 separate unions, representing 50,000 workers in New York, Brooklyn, and Jersey City. Then, deciding to plunge into politics, the C.L.U. pledged support to Henry George in the forthcoming mayoralty race. The Democrats nominated Abram S. Hewitt. The Republicans picked Theodore Roosevelt.

“Thus began the most stirring campaign in the city's history,” according to historian Allan Nevins, “for never before or since have men of such ability contended for the prize.” Labor leader Samuel Gompers, who supported Henry George, said in his autobiography that “the campaign was notable in that it united people of unusual abilities from all walks of life.” With labor trying to seize control of America's largest city and with amateurs warring on the nation's most powerful political machine—Tammany—the eyes of all Americans turned toward the New York battleground.

Henry George was already famous. His classic,
Progress and Poverty,
had been translated into German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Russian, Magyar, Hebrew, and Chinese and had sold millions of copies. In this book George argued that rent is robbery; that wealth is the product of labor applied to natural resources; that interest is the part of the result of labor that is paid to capital;
and that capital is the fruit of labor, not its master. His theories influenced tax legislation around the world and colored the thinking of people as different as Leo Tolstoy and Sun Yat-sen. In the fall of 1886 Henry George was forty-seven years old. Short, quivering with nervous energy, his reddish hair fringing the bald spot on his head and his strong jaw encased in a sandy beard, George was sometimes called the little red rooster.

Abram Hewitt felt ancient and weary that election season. He was sixty-four years old and had a white beard. The eminent son-in-law of Peter Cooper and himself a millionaire and philanthropist, Hewitt had served for many years in Congress and did not care to return to Washington. Ironically, six years earlier he had employed Henry George as a ghostwriter. Now he scorned his former hired hand, declaring that only Abram Hewitt could save New York from socialism, communism, anarchism, nihilism, and revolution.

Theodore Roosevelt was a mere twenty-eight years of age and only six years out of Harvard. However, he had written three books and served three years in the New York state legislature. An aristocrat, Roosevelt was regarded as a maverick by his peers, who considered a political career beneath the dignity of a gentleman. But the thin-waisted scion, even then sporting the mustache that later delighted caricaturists, threw himself into the campaign with cyclonic fervor.

When 34,000 laborers signed pledges to work and vote for Henry George; when the United Labor party was organized in behalf of George; when a priest, named Edward McGlynn, declared George to be inspired “by the same love of justice as was taught by Christ”; when the brilliant agnostic, attorney, and orator Robert Ingersoll called on fellow Republicans “to show that their sympathies are not given to bankers, corporations and millionaires,” Tammany became frightened.

Richard Croker, the new boss of Tammany, sent an emissary to George, offering a deal: If George would stay out of the mayoralty race, Tammany would guarantee his election to Congress. George rejected the offer and then charged that Hewitt was a captive of Tammany. Hewitt, in turn, charged that George was a captive of radicals. The campaign developed into a duel between George and Hewitt, with Roosevelt largely ignored. Young Teddy tried to attract attention by shouting about “the countless evils and abuses already existing,” but some Republicans joined Ingersoll in crossing party lines and voting for George.

Hewitt won the election, and Roosevelt came in a poor third. Second-place Henry George complained that he had been cheated out of the mayor's office by Tammany trickery. Certainly there were illegal registrations, bribery, and manipulation of the ballot count, but historians disagree on whether this fraud was sufficiently widespread to throw the election to Hewitt. In any event, he gave the city an able administration.

Chapter 30

T
HE
S
TATUE OF
L
IBERTY
was the brainchild of a Frenchman, named Edouard René de Laboulaye. He once wrote that “the folly of love and the madness of ambition are sometimes curable, but no one was ever cured of a mania for liberty.” A popular author, liberal politician, student of the American Constitution, and hero worshiper of George Washington, De Laboulaye rivaled the dead Lafayette in his extravagant admiration of everything American. He venerated the American Revolution more than the French Revolution because he was deeply religious and the revolution in his fatherland had taken on antireligious overtones.

A Parisian, he owned a country house in Glatigny, near Versailles,
and in the summer of 1865 he invited a number of French intellectuals to visit him there. Among these writers, artists, and politicians was a thirty-one-year-old sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, busily working on a bust of his host. That pleasant afternoon the conversation turned to the subject of gratitude among men of different nations; whereupon someone recited the heroic deeds of Frenchmen in America during the American Revolution.

“There,” said De Laboulaye, “you have the basis of the American feeling for the French—an indestructible basis. The feeling honors the Americans as well as us, and if a monument should rise in the United States as a memorial to their independence, I should think it only natural if it were built by united effort—a common work of both our nations.” As chairman of the French Antislavery Society, he thought partly of American abolitionists, whom he admired. As a historian, he looked forward to 1876, when America would celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her independence.

The idea of a monument was novel, but nothing was done immediately to translate it into reality. Bartholdi never forgot it, though, and six years later he again visited De Laboulaye. They discussed the coming centennial of American independence. Bartholdi said, “I think it would be well to offer the Americans a statue—a statue of liberty.” He toyed with the thought of leaving for the United States to suggest the idea to Americans and to ask them to share the cost. De Laboulaye cried, “Go to America! Go see the country, and bring us back your impressions. If you find a happy idea—one that will rouse public enthusiasm—we may take up a subscription in France.”