Do You Have Permission to Disturb the Peace?

by Emmet Stackelberg

In early January, 1874, pamphlets and posters promoting a mass meeting began appearing all around the eleventh and seventeenth wards of Manhattan, the two political divisions of the city on either side of Tompkins Square Park. The pamphlets were short but emphatic. “Winter is upon us, and nearly all employment has been suspended,” began one. “Cold and hunger are staring in our faces. Nobody can tell how long the misery will last; nobody will attempt to help, if we don’t do something ourselves.” Another called the planned gathering “A MONSTER MASS-MEETING OF THE UNEMPLOYED” and invited the jobless, “irrespective of occupation,” and “likewise all those who are in sympathy with the suffering poor of this city.”

The pamphlets were all signed the same way: “–Committee of Safety.” This Committee was a loose coalition of immigrant groups and labor leaders, formed in December of 1873 to organize protests and marches on behalf of the struggling poor. Future labor leader Samuel Gompers later wrote, “It was a folk-movement born of primitive need.” By January 1874, though, its leadership was in flux, with prominent members resigning, as other labor leaders accused it of being a communist organization. Nonetheless, it claimed to have twenty thousand followers.

The mass meeting that was held on January 13th in Tompkins Square did not threaten to turn riotous, until, minutes into the proceedings, officers of the New York Police Department charged into the square. After police withdrew the Blood or Bread Riot became, in press accounts, an overreach by the enforcers of order — but over insurgent forces of communism and revolution. It was neither.

The meeting was a demand for help from a community that was struggling during the worst economic recession America had yet experienced. The reasons for the economic depression that had reached its way across the US and Europe by 1874 were myriad: In 1872, twin urban fires in Chicago and Boston destroyed valuable property, affecting investors across the country, while an outbreak of horse flu hurt crop yields; in 1873, Germany and the U.S. abandoned silver-backed currency, which badly depressed the price of the precious metal; and, perhaps most catastrophically, the railroad bubble burst after decades of speculation and frantic building, which precipitated the failures of banks that had heavily invested in the railroads. One such bank was Jay Cooke and Company, which declared bankruptcy in September of 1873, after it could not find a buyer for a slew of railroad bonds. Cooke’s failure paralyzed the market, spurring more bank failures and a stock sell-off; the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days. By the end of 1873, over fifty railroads had failed. Unemployment soared and among working class families hunger set in. The crisis reverberated across the industrialized world, to Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Britain and its colonies. Until 1929, this worldwide economic cataclysm was known as the Great Depression.

Tompkins Square Park began as swampland owned by John Jacob Astor, who hunted snipe there before he sold it to the city in 1834. Not long after, the city decided to make it a park — preserved from development by its generalized unsuitability, it became one of a Manhattan’s few parks by virtue, really, of its ickiness. After becoming a city park, it was widely used and nicely appointed. By the late eighteen fifties, it was increasingly used as a site for mass meetings decrying working conditions and rallying for union organization. In the eighteen sixties, the military began using it for exercises, and in 1866, the state officially declared the park a military parade ground for New York’s First Division, cutting the square off from public leisure, over the protestations of locals. Residents of the eleventh and seventeenth wards, largely European immigrants, could find a proper park by going to Central Park — still under construction. but already declared the “People’s Park,” if they were willing to travel fifty blocks uptown.

New York law required a permit from the police for any “procession or parade” that occupied a public site, along with a permit from the Parks Department for public gatherings in parks; the Committee of Safety obtained both permits for the protest. But on Monday, the day before the meeting, authorities informed the group that its permits had been revoked. The mass meeting posed too great a risk to “public safety.” The committee was charged with spreading news of the cancellation, but many leaders were away from home, and didn’t find out until late in the night or the next morning. Meanwhile, over the course of weeks, the meeting had been growing in stature, anticipation accumulating like the snow on tenement stoops.

While the requirements for permits had been in place for a couple of years, the idea that authorities could deny a group permission to use a public space was still novel in New York. This instance was to be the first real test of this process. By granting and then revoking the permits just hours before the mass meeting, the NYPD and the Parks Department were effectively forcing a massive group of unemployed workers to test the boundaries of the law. The meeting became a kind of experiment, demonstrators the test subjects, caged off by the bounds of the square.

Inevitably, many thousands of people still assembled the next day at the park. The gathering’s attitude was urgent, but peaceful; it included many women and children. At around 10:30 that morning, fifteen hundred policemen assembled around the park, waiting. Then, they invaded the park, all at once. Mounted police rode horses into the masses; others on foot swung their batons indiscriminately. They arrested a token few, some under the charge of inciting a riot. Gompers, who was there that day, barely kept his head “from being cracked.” He later called it an “orgy of brutality.”

In all, more than forty workers and tradesmen were arrested, most of whom were unemployed, although they plied many trades. In an incisive study of the riot in her book Triumph of Order, historian Lisa Keller compiles a long list of their occupations: brewers and waiters, plumbers and masons, carpenters and painters, stonecutters and machinists, hairdressers and shoemakers. Together they exposed the wide netting of deprivation that had descended on not just some, but all of the trades of the working class in the aftermath of the economic depression that had started the previous year.

In the days after the riot, press attacked both the protestors and the police. New York papers called the assembled communists and immigrant instigators. But many in the press called into question police actions. The Daily Graphic declared that the police “by their excessive zeal for order made an attack which looks despotic.” It continued: “New Yorkers do not live and move and have their being by the suffrance of a squad of blue-coated patrolmen with batons in their hands, whose business is to keep the peace and not to break it.”

The system by which police had to issue (and could at any time revoke) permits for gatherings meant, however, that peace was whatever the police said it was. They were charged with, in the words of the law, furnishing “such escort as may be necessary to protect persons and property and maintain the public peace and order.” They deemed the mass meeting, officially, a break in the peace. The department’s actions signaled the political dimensions of peacekeeping: the voicing of political protest becomes, in the eyes of law enforcement, a disruption of peace.

Nine months later, on August 31st, workers gathered in Tompkins Square Park for the first time since the riot to demonstrate their right to free assembly. The police this time issued a permit, and Governor John Dix signed a pardon for a man who had been sentenced to six months in prison after the riot. It was a celebratory day. John Swinton, editor of labor-friendly newspaper the New York Sun, declared to the crowd of thousands that authorities “have learned that the liberties of the people cannot be trifled with.”

In parks and in squares, symmetry abounds. Benches face each other across a circular clearing; a playground in one corner is matched by another one in the opposite corner. But it’s still jarring to observe how this park’s history has its own kind of symmetry. In August of 1988, over a hundred years after Tompkins Square Park’s first riot, New York police attacked and fought with hundreds of demonstrators gathered to protest a recently instated 1 A.M. curfew in the park. (All parks in New York now have curfews.) The department’s own report on the incident found that the police incited the riot. It sometimes seems that in a city, parks are where history reverberates the loudest.

It Was a Riot is an occasional column about riots in American history.

Top image via Wikimedia; second image via Painting Bohemia