It was this declaration that led Mr. Seth Low to join the Citizens’ Union, which he had not previously done. About the middle of the year, the ticket which had long been current as to the advisability of nominating Seth Low for the Mayoralty began to crystallise into action. The Citizens’ Union had increased its membership from 6,000 to 25,000, and it had secured nearly 100,000 signatures to a memorial requesting Mr. Low to be put in nomination as a candidate for the Mayoralty. Earlier in the year he had contemplated standing only as a unifying force among the friends of good government, but when the memorial was presented, and the Citizens’ Union insisted upon taking independent action without conferring with the other organisations, he accepted the nomination, and in the beginning of September issued his address.
His appeal to the constituency was based, according to his own statements, upon the following principles. First, he stood for the idea of having a free man in the Mayor’s chair, a man who would be responsible to the people who put him there, and not to any party machine. The Reform Mayor of New York, he said, in a passage which stung General Tracy into unwonted fury, must be in the City Hall of New York, and not on a racecourse in England, or in the Senate Chamber of Washington. The suggestion, of course, being that if the Tammany candidate were elected, its master would be Richard Croker, who was supposed to spend his time on English race tracks, while if General Tracy were elected, he would take his orders from Senator Platt, the Republican Boss. Secondly, Mr. Low stood for the idea of Home Rule—Home Rule for New York. A community of three million and a quarter of people ought to be entitled to shape their own destinies in matters that are purely local. Further, he stood as the advocate of good city civic administration, which he defined as a civic government so well administered that no interest in the great metropolis shall be so small as to be beneath its care, and no interest so great that it shall timidly shrink from attempting to deal with it. In Mr. Seth Low’s address, accepting the nomination, he frankly avowed that he was a Republican, and expected to remain one; but he would pledge himself that, in making appointments, he would fill every place with an eye single to the public good. “The patronage of the city shall not be used, so far as it is in the mayor’s power to prevent it, for purposes of either strengthening or weakening one party or another, or any fraction of another party.” On the subject of public franchises, by which the streets of New York have been practically handed over to irresponsible corporations, he made the significant suggestion that the city should be able to deal with every application for a change of the power by which the street railways were worked, as being equivalent to a demand for a new franchise. There is more in this than is discernible at first sight by an English reader. The tramways of New York are largely operated at present by cables and horses. These are being superseded as rapidly as possible by electricity. If no street railway were to be allowed to adopt electricity as a mode of traction, unless it surrendered what we should call its local Act of Parliament, empowering it to use the streets, and had to make terms de novo for that privilege, the relation between the public and the companies would be immediately transformed. At present the companies have got all they want, and pay the city next to nothing. It may not be possible to adopt Mr. Seth Low’s suggestion, but the idea is well worth consideration.
In his reference to the Labour Laws of the City, he maintained that they should be administered in the letter and in the spirit. The vexed question of the saloon was dealt with in a lengthy paragraph, in which he balanced himself as best he could between the two schools of restriction and of freedom. The Raines Liquor Law, which was imposed upon the City of New York by the State Legislature, has created an immense amount of irritation by its attempt to secure Sunday closing, and to enforce stricter discipline on the saloons. Mr. Low condemned the Raines law for not taking into account the public sentiment of so cosmopolitan a city as New York. This being interpreted, means that the German citizens object to be deprived of their Sunday beer, and that, to adopt the local vernacular, you cannot swing a great world-city on principles of the hayseed legislators up at Albany. What Mr. Low would do in relation to the licensing does not precisely appear, beyond desiring to adopt some system of local option:—
In my opinion, an excise law, so far as it affects the daily life and the habits of the people, should reflect the public opinion of the city. On such points, in case of radical differences of opinion, I should take the appeal to the people themselves.
The keynote, therefore, of his address lay in the sentence that he desired to secure for “this Imperial City” the opportunity to start upon its new career under an administration pledged to make the interests of the city its supreme care. Mr. Low had the great advantage of not being a mere theorist, but one who had had four years’ experience in the application of the principles upon which he would propose to act as Mayor of Greater New York. The city government, he maintained, should be organised on business principles. Quite recently he contributed a chapter to Mr. Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” on City Government in the United States, in which he embodied the result of his experience and observation as Mayor of Brooklyn. His dominant idea is that the government of a city should be conducted upon very much the same principles as the management of any corporation, railroad, or joint stock company. The Mayor should be general manager, and the head of every department should hold office at his supreme discretion. Another principle upon which he insists is that wherever executive work is to be done, it must be put in the hands of one man, but that wherever it is not an affair for action, but for discretion, in the multitude of councillors there is wisdom. Where the work is discretionary have a board, where it is executive have one man.
The second candidate to enter the field was one as well known in this country as he is in his native land. Henry George, whose sudden death on the eve of the poll gave so tragic a note to the contest, was nominated by the Bryanite section of the Democratic party. He commanded, and deserved to command, a great deal of public support, and still more of popular sympathy. Henry George stood as candidate for Mayor some years since, and was defeated by Tammany Hall joining hands with the Republicans, in order to elect Mr. Hewitt. Mr. Croker talked over that ancient history with me on the steamer, and then expressed a confident conviction that the Labour Unions would never again support Henry George. They were all in line, he said, with Tammany. Henry George, whose book, “Progress and Poverty,” was practically discovered in Great Britain after it had fallen very flat in the United States, was an honest man, full of all generous enthusiasms, and his candidature deserved and obtained general sympathy, because it was the most emphatic, picturesque, and sensational method of expressing dissatisfaction with things as they are. Mr. George was a strong Free Trader, but he was not an advocate of Free Silver.
His followers, however, tolerated all differences of opinion in return for the value of his support. They even left him to nominate his own ticket. He was selected as candidate for a party calling itself the United Democracy, which adopted the Liberty Bell as its emblem. The speaker who moved the nomination of Mr. George in the Convention, spoke of him as “the great, the immortal Henry George, the man who had shown the working people the way out of their difficulties. When George is mayor, the problems which vexed the municipality will cease. Corruption and bribery will keep away from the City Hall if George is there. They fear him as the inhabitants of the lower regions do the angels of heaven.” When he accepted the nomination, he declared that he stood not as a Silver Democrat or a Gold Democrat, but as one who believed in the cardinal principles of Jeffersonian Democracy. The defeat of Bryan, he declared, was “the defeat of everything for which our fathers had stood, and it looked to him as though the United States were fast verging into a virtual aristocracy and despotism.” He stood, therefore, upon the doctrine of the equality of men, and in the conviction that in the democracy that believed that all men were created equal lay the power that would vivify not merely New York, but the world.
The platform of the United Democracy, after denouncing unscrupulous corporations and corrupt combinations, whose influence is felt alike in local and national courts, proceeds to define the aims and aspirations of its supporters in a manifesto, of which the following is a summary:—
It reaffirms the Chicago platform, demands home rule in municipal affairs, denounces the Excise laws, demands not only municipal ownership of franchises but their operation by the municipal government, three cent (or less) car fares on surface and “L” roads, dollar gas, the abolition of contract work for the city, enforcement of the eight-hour law on city work, the representation of labour in the Administration, increase of school accommodation and the introduction into the schools of industrial training: the designation of public places for free exercise of the right of free speech, the opening of court houses and schools for the free use of the people in the evening: it denounces the abuse of injunctions by the courts, and demands the abolition of property qualifications for grand and petit jurors.
The clause in the plank of the Tammany platform which refers to the Raines Liquor Law ran as follows:—