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Chapter 1 analyzes the nineteenth-century battles over government reform that precipitated the twentieth-century campaigns for proportional representation. This section positions the movement for electoral reform within the context of long-standing competition between political coalitions for power in municipal affairs. It argues that the birth of municipal reform as an organized political platform coincided with elite New Yorkers’ loss of local authority to Tammany Hall (the Democratic Party’s Manhattan-based apparatus) in the nineteenth century. As part of this struggle for urban political power, PR gained credence with reformers as a policy for improving city governance through the transformation of municipal representation—a transformation they hoped would entail the return of political power to an elite cohort and diminish popular influence in government.

Chapter 2 argues that reformers’ definition of democracy shifted in the late nineteenth century to incorporate the broader electorate as crucial participants in what they labeled a “good-government” movement. This change occurred as a diverse coalition of political activists joined good-government groups in calling for the ouster of Tammany Hall and affiliated organizations that had long monopolized power in New York City. By the time Judge Samuel Seabury, appointed by then-governor Franklin Roosevelt, concluded his investigations of municipal corruption at the height of the Great Depression, a reform alliance had coalesced that included elite civic associations, Communists, Socialists, labor unions, anti-Tammany Democrats, Republicans, and women’s rights activists. Activists from across the city’s political spectrum saw proportional representation as the key to their quest for municipal power. This coalition campaigned to fundamentally alter the city’s balance of political power, culminating in the victories for charter reform and PR in 1936.

Chapter One examines the impact of New Deal politics on the Chinese American communities of San Francisco and New York. During the 1930s, Chinese politics remained an almost obsessive preoccupation in both communities, while the China-born segment of the community often derided the native-born citizens as “brainless” and weak, neither wholly Chinese nor American. Yet as the Depression increasingly affected Chinese Americans, New Deal programs offered them hope and a new vision of the way politics could affect their communities and give their citizenship actual meaning.

Chapter 4 argues that the onset of World War II in Europe and the Little Red Scare in the United States fundamentally shifted the nature of political discourse in New York City. PR’s opponents altered their rhetoric to more directly portray the electoral system as part of a Communist plot to weaken American security. By the fall of 1940, Tammany Hall’s attacks on PR fully incorporated rhetoric of national security, anti-radicalism, and anti-Communism. The system’s supporters altered their arguments in ways that mirrored the tactics of their opposition. Long-time PR advocates developed visions of Tammany Hall that equated the political machine with international threats to domestic safety. As PR’s detractors inflamed and directed anti-Communist sentiment toward the system, PR’s supporters mobilized anti-fascist and anti-Nazi rhetoric to target organizers of the repeal movement.

This chapter examines Henry George's election campaign for the mayor of New York City in 1886 under the banner of the Central Labor Union's (CLU) United Labor Party. If elected, George pledged he would be mayor to all classes and interests in the city, not just the wealthy. He vowed to uphold law and order, and to eliminate the rampant abuses of the law enforcement establishment—direct appeals to the central tenets of working-class republicanism that had been so dramatically violated in the recent crackdown on organized labor. George saw himself in a no-lose situation. He might very well lose the election, but at the very least he would attract significant attention to his single tax reform. The election returns indicate that George succeeded in garnering substantial ethnic working-class votes. He garnered an impressive 68,110 votes (31 percent), finishing second to Democrat Abram Hewitt (41 percent) and ahead of Republican Theodore Roosevelt (28 percent). Despite Tammany Hall's still strong hold on New York politics, the election results revealed the great opportunities that lay before the ULP.

Examines the 1888 and 1892 presidential campaigns that pitted Republican Benjamin Harrison, who favored a protective tariff, against Democrat Grover Cleveland, who wanted to lower taxes on imports. The New York press was predominantly Democratic, which enabled Cleveland to win the 1884 election. The pro-Republican Protective Tariff League sponsored Judge John L. Wheeler’s wildly popular stereopticon lecture The Tariff Illustrated in 1888x, which was hailed as contributing to Harrison’s victory (a brief recession and Tammany Hall’s hostility to Cleveland were additional factors). In 1892 Republicans nominated New York Tribune publisher Whitelaw Reid as vice-president and had six orators who toured the Northeast, delivering illustrated lectures and promoting the protective tariff. Nevertheless, Cleveland proved victorious in the rematch.

As the first Catholic nominee of a major party, Al Smith faced suspicions that there was something intrinsically anti-American about allegiance to a foreign Pope. Even some of Smith’s supporters expressed concerns that Catholicism’s emphasis on obedience to clerical rule inculcated illiberal habits of passivity and deference to institutional authority. Smith responded that anti-Catholicism violated the separation of church and state. Challenging the equation of Protestant voluntarism and American citizenship, Smith defended his urban, working-class, Tammanyite, and Catholic loyalties. In his practical assessment, arguments for individual freedom that excluded Catholics advanced the interests of a Protestant majority. The logic of his argument for the separation of church and state held that secularism was not only a formal legal requirement for public institutions but was also an ethos that required American citizens to respect the religious identities of others. By allowing Smith to condemn all religious criticism as bigotry, his rhetoric provided a vehicle for an identity politics that protected the collective loyalties of religious minorities.

This chapter examines Henry George's decision to pursue his radical plan of social reform in New York City. George set out to New York in the first week of August 1880. It had been eleven years since his last visit to the city, when the extremes of poverty and plenty so disturbed him. This chapter first describes the economic, social, and geographical changes that had occurred in New York since George's last visit there, along with the signs that embodied the “great enigma” George warned about in Progress and Poverty—a place experiencing the growth of poverty amidst extraordinary wealth. It then looks at the poor of Gotham, many of them immigrants, and how the poverty of the city's workers was exacerbated by squalid tenement housing. In particular, it considers the problem of tenement overcrowding which George argued offered a perfect real-life example of the pernicious effects of land monopoly. It also discusses New York's industrial progress; its politics, in particular the faction of the Democratic Party known as Tammany Hall; and labor activism.

New York City women civic activists avidly followed the Seabury investigations’ hearings and revelations. They passed resolutions demanding reform and traveled to Albany to confront legislators and urge Governor Roosevelt to take action. When the investigations’ focus turned from the women’s court to city governance, women were on the front lines of discussions of the city’s future and then helped bring a reform administration into power under the leadership of independent Republican Fiorello La Guardia. Women were thus engaged in not only the specifics of the corruption Samuel Seabury exposed but also the consequences of that exposure for New York City’s future.

After New York women won the vote in 1917, many joined political party clubs and some ran for office. In the 1920s, only a few won seats in the state legislature, and only one served more than one term. A few women won other posts—register of New York County and alderwoman—and a few others won appointive government and judicial posts. Local and state political party committees elected women as officers. These small victories encouraged other women to keep trying. The obstacles to women’s political success in the first decade after suffrage remained high, however. Some suffragists were ambivalent toward partisanship and discouraged women from being active party members; party men remained prejudiced against women politicians and government officials. In the 1920s African American women and Socialists had no electoral success at all.

In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an investigation first into New York City’s lower court system and then into its entire government. The investigation, known by the name of its head, retired judge Samuel Seabury, had a dramatic impact on the city’s politics and its powerful Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall. Because the investigation began with an inquiry into the entrapment of women for alleged sex crimes and their subsequent treatment in the city’s women’s court, it attracted great interest from the city’s women civic activists. These women played significant roles in encouraging and later broadening the Seabury investigation and in making decisions about its consequences.

This chapter covers the first public hearings of the Rapp-Coudert investigation, held in December 1940 and directed by liberal Paul Windels, protégé of reformer and Fusion activist Judge Samuel Seabury. Though challenged by the teachers unions (Locals 5 and 537 of the American Federation of Teachers) and civil libertarians, Windels unfolded a sophisticated witch-hunt based on the investigative powers of the state legislature. Violating fundamental constitutional rights, including those protected by the First and Fifth Amendments, Windels forced teachers to lie about their political associations in order to avoid fingering friends and colleagues while under oath. Meanwhile, Windels built a case against the Communist party based on his and others misrepresentations—a “countersubversive” myth that teachers used their classrooms to propagandize for the party and to subvert American democracy

Making good use of his connections within New York’s Tammany Hall political machine led by William “Boss” Tweed, John Morrissey was elected to U.S. Congress in 1866 and again in 1868. Throughout his political career, Morrissey was criticized in the press for his criminal record, his prizefighting exploits, and his associations with gambling. He was notably inactive as a legislator, though he did lead a group called the Young Democracy in failed revolt against the Tweed Ring in 1870.

This chapter discusses how the FDNY’s cultural of insularity evolved during the 19th Century as the department shifted from volunteerism and became professionalized. The chapter also chronicles how Irish Americans came to dominate the FDNY and used this workplace culture to consolidate and maintain an ethnic niche within the department.

This chapter explores the origins of the Rapp-Coudert probe in the battles between teachers and fiscal conservatives over the 1940 state budget, just before the Assembly and Senate authorize the investigation that March. The chapter also introduces two key leaders of the union, legislative representative Bella Dodd and Local 5 President Charles Hendley.

This chapter recounts the history of conflicts between communist teachers and liberal educators, inside the teachers union and in the educational reform movement generally. It focuses on communist teacher-activists Alice Citron, Isidor Begun, and Williana Burroughs, who came into conflict with liberal union leaders over their emphases on the use of “mass action” and community mobilization to achieve higher salaries, better schools, and racial equality, as well as to promote the Popular Front against fascism. In reaction to their confrontational activism, perceived as a challenge to his authority, Linville and other liberals and social democrats tried once more to oust the communist “factions” from the union in 1935, supported by liberals, social democrats, and conservatives in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Failing, the liberals walked out of Local 5 to form an explicitly anti-communist organization, the Teachers Guild.