ABSTRACT

Sven Beckert On 7 April 1877, a crowd of New York merchants, industrialists, bankers and elite professionals marched into Chickering Hall at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street in Manhattan for a meeting of ‘taxpayers’. Despite their historic distaste for collective mobilisations, they assembled on this spring day to discuss a weighty issue: a proposed amendment to the constitution of the State of New York that set out to limit universal male suffrage in municipal elections. This remarkably anti-democratic amendment, unveiled only four weeks earlier, promised to consolidate significant areas of municipal government in a newly created Board of Finance. Property owners would elect the board, in effect excluding about half of the city’s voters. ‘The real object for which this meeting was called was to assail the principle of universal suffrage’, the ‘Labor Standard’ commented with genuine alarm.1