The Dangerous Classes-Then and Now

...In 1832, returning from a particularly raucous July 4 celebration, Philip Hone complained bitterly about the decline of the city of which he had once been mayor: "Squibs [firecrackers] were thrown with a perfect indifference to life and property, while ill-mannered boys shouted about the glories of a Republic...

...The only way to halt the spread of the "dangerous classes" —Brace popularized the phrase in a book by that name in 1872—was to remove their children from parental supervision...

...Perhaps we might expect such jeremiads from the old social elite as they were displaced from office holding through the years of the Jacksonian revolution...

...In the face of such plebeian antics, both Hone and Strong joined the first "flight" from the city to the suburbs, which in their time, and for their class, meant the residential gentility of the Fifteenth Ward above Bleecker Street...

...Sections of the waterfront and the notorious Five Points, just north of City Hall, were viewed as nests of degradation from which all kinds of contagion— sexual, moral, and political—would spread to infect the rest of the city...

...In an obvious contrast to today's fears, it was popularly believed, or earnestly wished, that children could be saved from entering the dangerous classes given a touch of charity, religion, or removal...

...To deal with the adults of the dangerous classes, the first line of defense was New York's "Finest" —a phrase from the midseventies...

...He concluded that it "would take a Napoleon or a Caesar" to govern New York effectively...

...A decade later, George Templeton Strong also lamented the changes that were sweeping over the "old" New York...

...The appearance of "syndicates" for prostitution, gambling, and theft only seemed to prove that crime was a discrete phenomenon that had to be matched by specialized laws and concerted policing...

...Much of the recent work on Progressive reform has stressed its continuity with earlier Protestant anxiety over immigrant morals, showing that the spirit was more Calvinist than Hegelian...

...By the Civil War, there was a general willingness to see an armed police at the center of the criminal justice system rather than a judiciary that New Yorkers have traditionally thought too lenient...

...With others, he founded the Children's Aid Society in 1854 for that purpose...

...The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP), established in 1843, eagerly learned the language of poverty "science" from work done in London by Colquhoun and Chadwick...

...The establishment of a professional police force in the same year did little to allay residents' fears...

...Perhaps because it appears more practical to think of urban politics as a brokering of interests or as an engine for the provision of services and welfare, there is little left of the language of social cohesion that the Progressives once possessed...

...yet people of more modest means and pretensions also detected a threat to the city's social order...

...As the Herald stated, if to check the dangerous classes "it were necessary for us to have a Turk as Chief of police, we, for our own parts, would go for the Turk, turban, Koran, and all...

...He soon 260 • DISSENT Dangerous Classes —Then and Now found, however, that he encountered a class of men who showed no sign of being redeemed...

...Respectable New Yorkers appear to have viewed their police as inefficient, corrupt, and somewhat effective...

...Making new distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor, it attempted to end the many forms of indiscriminate charity by locating the poor at "home" and dispensing with older forms of outdoor relief, such as soup kitchens...

...Though the dangerous classes still remained, the presumed links between ethnic poverty, crime, and political corruption that had energized nineteenth-century reformers fell apart...

...Tying the hands of the police with formal procedures could be detrimental to social order...

...Quite late in the century, reformers still saw an answer to problems now considered "social" in the maintenance of political virtue and the strengthening of political institutions...

...instead, they tolerated a wide degree of discretion, which meant a number of acknowledged extralegal options in dealing with suspected criminals...

...One young reformer, Charles Loring Brace, caught up in the enthusiasm for rehabilitation, arrived from New Haven in 1849 to work with prisoners on Blackwell's Island...

...After the depression of 1893 and, more significantly, the defeat of Tammany a year later, middle-class New Yorkers and many of the "new" immigrants transferred their allegiance to municipal authority...

...q SPRING • 1991 • 261...

...However, progressivism certainly was novel in its wholesale questioning of laissez-faire principles in politics, policing, and charity...

...In 1845, the grocer Michael Roy was outraged at a case of assault as far north as the Bowery village and wondered whether God was punishing the city for its venality through unusual agents...

...Hope seemed to be reborn with that "revival of civic spirit" that historians once labeled the Progressive Era...

...From his home on Greenwich Street he could hear "sounds of drunkenness, mayhem and debauchery coming from Dutch lust-houses...

...Then as now, reformers and philanthropists tried to find the origins and answers to such social decline, to identify the populations at risk, and to sort out the connections between crime and poverty...

...The Astor Place Riot of 1849, the Draft Riots of 1863, and the Orange Riot of 1871 appeared to confirm a well-worn metaphor of the century — tthhaatt New Yorkers were sleeping over a volcano of "the dangerous classes...

...The hankering after police "discretion," the rise of neighborhood vigilance groups, and the state's sponsorship of special businessdistrict assessments for additional surveillance and protection show a rise in private solutions...

...By the 1840s there were areas of downtown Manhattan that many residents considered inadvisable to enter without police protection...

...and the issue of race, after the First World War, was treated more as a matter of social and genetic pathology...

...Today many New Yorkers are heading back to some of the features of Gilded Age rhetoric and practice, at least at the level of enforcement...

...The main threat from the irredeemable tough was not a life of organized crime—that was to arrive in the 1880s—but rather a career in the kind of politics likely to subvert civic order...

...The police, after the Lexow commission of 1893 had exposed the extent of corruption, began the long process, in Wilbur Miller's words, of seeking "a more professional, impersonal image, tying themselves more closely to the rule of law than in the past through both external pressures and internal efforts...

...Because of the ties between police and ward politicians, the middle classes were reluctant to enlarge police powers...

...Of course, the assumption in Brace's and other writings was that immigrants, mainly unskilled Irish, overwhelmingly contributed to the ranks of the dangerous classes, and because of universal male suffrage and generous access to citizenship, individual crimes and violence translated into a political problem...

...Though the home visitors, forerunners of social workers, still handed out biblical tracts, the AICP was the first organization to trace petty crime to environmental causes...

...Certainly a wide range of social groups, sharing in a language of civic improvement, expected from the newly consolidated Greater New York more equitable control of housing and transportation and increasing provision for education...

...they were certainly not calmed by the arrival of a vigorous "penny" press whose "Court Reports," rather than presenting a calendar of royal appointments, disclosed a steady stream of dog-nappings, muggings, and sundry acts of gang and domestic violence...