Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920 by David Huyssen (review)

Given the title chosen by David Huyssen and the debates sparked by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2014), I expected the book under review to delineate the measureable inequalities that separated rich and poor in early twentieth-century New York City. Instead Huyssen dissects the qualitative and discursive aspects of class relations and the rhetorical devices that cloaked the reality of inequality. He takes as a given that Progressive-era New York was characterized by a two-class social structure, a ruling class that owned property (or capital) and a subaltern class that faced a precarious existence and lacked adequate and secure income. Huyssen also emphasizes the shifting relationship between class and gender. For Huyssen domestic progressive reform as instituted by the city’s upper class became an integral part of the nation’s larger imperial project.

What does Huyssen add to a story that has had a myriad of narrators and consumed reams of paper from scholars such as Sven Beckert, Allen Davis, Nancy Schrom Dye, and Robin Jacoby? Certainly it is not a single-city variation of Piketty’s thesis on how unregulated capitalism creates ever greater levels of inequality. It does not alter Beckert’s tale of how moneyed New Yorkers cemented their class power in the city and wielded it in practice. Nor do I think that Huyssen alters what others have previously written about strikes in early twentieth-century New York, the activities of the Women’s Trade Union League (wtul), and the role of social settlements. He does, however, approach the role of the wtul through the lens of contemporary gender studies and relate the attitudes of upper-class social reformers to the era of high Western imperialism.

Huyssen’s choice of subjects raises questions as does his selection of actors. Why choose Richard Watson Gilder, Stanford White, Josephine Shaw Lowell, Jacob Schiff, and Lillian Wald as primary reformers? The choice of Gilder makes some sense as he was a key architect of the tenement house reform movement. White seems an odd choice beyond serving as the favoured architect of the city’s wealthy and as designer of the new Bowery Savings Bank, a building that Huyssen designates as symbolic of the imperialistic ambitions of New York’s dominant class. Lowell personifies the governing values of the city’s dominant private charity, the Charity Organization Society (cos), another subject of the book’s opening chapters. The cos introduced modern scientific methods of studying and assisting the needy, yet continued to rely on traditional notions that distinguished the deserving from the undeserving poor.

Similar questions concern Huyssen’s choice of strikes to investigate, the subject of the book’s final six chapters. More than half those chapters examine the strikes of immigrant women garment workers, most notably the “uprising of the 20,000,” the 1909–10 struggle by shirtwaist makers, in which Huyssen toys with gender relations as exposed in the interactions between immigrant workers and upper class women in the wtul. In actuality the 1910 cloakmaker’s strike that involved three times as many workers proved far more significant than the “uprising of the 20,000.” The final two chapters cover the tumultuous 1916 transit strikes that sparked endless newspaper reports about striker-induced violence, nearly precipitated a city-wide general strike, and enable Huyssen to prove how capital rules through the power of property and the sway it holds over city hall and the courts. Huyssen portrays Theodore Shonts, the chief executive of the dominant transit company, as a leading exemplar of a new style of capitalism that offers employees welfare and company unions in place of independent trade unionism and collective bargaining. Shonts acted in fact more like old-time labour baiters Commodore Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Henry Clay Frick than as a model public relations-conscious capitalist. If Huyssen wanted to explore the changing face of capitalism as influenced...