On this day in New York · January 13, 1874
The Tompkins Square Riot
Thousands of jobless New Yorkers showed up in the East Village to demand work, and mounted police answered with clubs.
The facts
- Date
- January 13, 1874
- Location
- Tompkins Square Park, Manhattan
- Police deployed
- About 1,600 officers
- Arrests
- 46, held on $1,000 bail each
New York was deep in the Panic of 1873's depression, and by January 13, 1874, thousands of unemployed workers gathered in Tompkins Square Park to march for public relief and an eight-hour workday. The city had quietly pulled the group's parade permit the night before, and organizers say they were never properly told. Around 7,000 people showed up anyway to a park ringed by some 1,600 police officers. Just after 10 a.m. police moved in with clubs, and mounted officers rode into the crowd on the surrounding streets, sending people running for doorways and cellars. Forty-six people were arrested, and two men, Christian Mayer and Joseph Hoefflicher, spent months in jail on assault charges afterward.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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mounted police charged the crowd on Eighth Street, riding them down and attacking men, women, and children without discrimination. It was an orgy of brutality. I was caught in the crowd on the street and barely saved my head from being cracked by jumping down a cellarway.
Samuel Gompers, labor organizer who later founded the American Federation of Labor, recalling the riot
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The crackdown broke the momentum of the city's unemployed movement almost overnight and put a generation of labor organizers, Gompers included, on notice about how far the city would go to clear a park of people just asking for work.
Sources
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