Greater Gotham Quotes

“Grant emerged from his immersion in this literature filled with dire forebodings about the implications for the future of his beloved New York City. As he now saw it, Gotham’s native Teutons were being overwhelmed by arriving Alpines and Mediterraneans, and if history repeated itself—if the superior stock intermingled with the inferior—a racial cataclysm loomed. In 1916 Grant would summarize these worries in a book entitled The Passing of the Great Race. In it he warned that “in the city of New York and elsewhere in the United States there is a native American aristocracy resting upon layer after layer of immigrants of lower races.” These lower races were hereditarily impervious to uplift. Worse, the Nordic races who had built America were being overwhelmed by “a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken, and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“it was a synecdoche for the larger fury that Grant felt at his city’s seeming inundation by immigrants. The Rubbish War took place at the crest of a demographic tsunami, which between 1900 and 1908 had brought over 6 million newcomers onto American shores—one-quarter the number that had arrived since the founding of the Republic. Grant’s classical education told him that Rome had fallen when it opened the gates to inferior races. Perhaps, he obsessed, it was native-stock humans he should be preserving, rather than moose and bison.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Sinclair was implicitly insisting that financial crises were not systemic—inherent by-products of the capitalist accumulation process—but rather the consequence of machinations by Wall Street insiders. This assessment of causation affected what could be done about them. If panics were attributable to greedy financiers, their makers could be exposed and held morally accountable or criminally liable. If they were rooted in the larger economic order, citizens would have to undertake the more difficult and perhaps impossible task of either reversing the incorporation process (as populist writers desired), or putting the management or regulation of corporations in the hands of “the people” (as socialists or progressives urged).”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“The transition from competitive to corporate capitalism, and the emergence of Wall Street bankers as organizers of the industrial economy, created new facts on the ground. On the one hand, the tremendous concentration of power gave even greater cause for worry about individual malfeasance. But on the other, the magnitude and complexity of the new economy seemed to transcend the ability of any set of actors to control it.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“own independent exhibition, marketing it as an American Salon des Refusés. In February 1908 eight painters showcased their work at the Macbeth Galleries. The Eight, as critic James Huneker baptized them, included Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, and Shinn—the Philadelphia Five—and three others, stylistically different but equally determined to crack open NAD’s restrictive practices: symbolist Arthur B. Davies (who was well wired into wealthy New York collector circles), Impressionist/realist Ernest Lawson, and Postimpressionist Maurice Prendergast. (Davies and Lawson had been among the blackballed in 1907.)”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Robert Underwood Johnson, should advocate “dignity, moderation and purity of expression” and oppose “vulgarity, sensationalism, meretriciousness, lubricity and other forms of degeneracy.” The academy should also resist “the tyranny of novelty,” said Johnson, and consider drawing up “well considered lists of words or meanings taboo.” Academicians inveighed against “polyglot corrupters” of Anglo-Saxon English, and insisted that fiction uplift coarse and sordid people, not describe them.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Nor was her support for the urban realists a one-off affair. In 1907 she set up an apartment and studio in Greenwich Village, remodeling a stable at 19 MacDougal Alley, just north of Washington Square, and made it available for informal exhibitions. In 1914 she bought the adjacent building (8 West 8th Street) and established therein a professional gallery, the Whitney Studio,”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Poor breeders were also slackers in a demographic war at home. Yankees were being outbred by fecund ethnics; they were committing “race suicide.” Families of “better stock” should raise at least six children. Birth-dodgers should be made “the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.” Roosevelt firmly believed that the altruistic female world of home and family was an essential counterweight to the competitive, selfish male world of business and politics. “The whole fabric of society rests upon the home,” as he put it. If women abandoned their roles as moral custodians, they might bring down not just a class, or an empire, but civilization itself.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“In 1906 Gulick and others founded the Playground Association of America (PAA) to spread the New York gospel to the country. (Crucial funding would come from the Russell Sage Foundation.) Honorary President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in the organization’s magazine, the Playground (1907), that cities must find “some other place than the streets” for children to play “if we would have our citizens content and law-abiding.” Members were ecstatic about playgrounds’ ability to produce “more loyal as well as more efficient citizens.” One PAA director noted in 1907 that Tompkins Square Park, where once “the rally to the red flag” had been commonplace, was now “the scene of games . . . and other forms of patriotic play.” Another suggested that six weeks of playground interaction between Jews and Italians so reduced animosities that “they did not know whether they were Jews or Italians.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“Reformers believed moral and political relationships were learned in play. Given street-afforded license, kids would grow up bad. “If we let the gutter set its stamp upon their early days,” Jacob Riis warned in 1904, “we shall have the gutter reproduced in our politics.” The antidote to the street was the supervised playground. Settlement houses had opened rudimentary play spaces in the 1890s. In 1898 the Outdoor Recreation League (ORL), founded by Lillian Wald and Charles B. Stover and housed in the College Settlement, opened the city’s first outdoor playground in Hudsonbank Park (at West 53rd Street), whose sand gardens, running track, and equipment were supervised by Hartley House’s headworker. Playground proponents insisted the city take over and expand these programs. An 1898 University Settlement report argued: “Waterloo was won in part on the playing fields of Eton said Wellington; good government for New York may partially be won on the playgrounds of the East Side.” In 1902 the city assumed responsibility for the nine ORL playgrounds created to date. And in 1903 Seward Park became the first municipal park in the country to be equipped as a playground.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919

“pollution and public health. In 1908 Gotham’s 120,000 horses deposited 60,000 gallons of urine and 2.5 million pounds of manure on the city streets every day.”
― Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919