Margaret Thatcher and her successors should have read the history of New York

I am continuing with my reading of the hefty history of New York City, and came across something that will seem extremely apposite to my friends in the UK.

 

By the 1780s ‘contamination of Manhattan’s underground streams had fouled nearly every source of drinking water.’ In 1788 citizens of New York petitioned the Common Council to install pipes to bring fresh water to the city (in 1774 an Irish-born engineer had begun installing thirteen miles of bored pine logs to provide water to the city but the Revolutionary War interrupted the project). The Council claimed that it could not afford to invest in water infrastructure.

 

Then came some devastating epidemics and the Council changed its mind: it drafted a proposal to form a municipal waterworks, rejecting a for-profit solution on the grounds that water would be supplied ‘at the expense of the City.’ However, Aaron Burr and two other influential citizens argued for a private water company, a proposal supported by Alexander Hamilton, who would later be killed by Burr in a duel at Weehawken, NJ. Burr drafted a charter of incorporation for the company, which authorized it to build dams, dig wells, divert streams, lay pipes, all clearly necessary to supply fresh water – and all things which it would fail signally to do. However, Burr slipped into the charter a ‘crucial vaguely worded clause [that] also permitted the company to use its surplus capital for any “monied transactions or operations” consistent with the law – including trade, insurance, and, Burr’s real object, a bank.’ Burr and his rich supporters had long wished to form a. bank because the city’s first two banks had made a lot of money and controlled a duopoly.

 

Burr’s new water company, it turned out, had no intention of tying its capital up in anything as unattractive was water works or, still less, modern technology capable of meeting the public’s needs. The company refused to use modern iron pipes, sticking instead with hollowed-out logs. New York needed an estimated thee million gallons a day, but the company’s reservoir held only 132,600. Instead of investing in steam technology, it opted for a horse-powered pump. In 1803 the company president, De Witt Clinton, became mayor of the city and sent a bill to the Common Council ordering that all city money be held by the bank of the water company. Despite a public outcry about the lack of fresh water, the Council renewed the company’s charter in 1808.

 

Since the days of Mrs Thatcher, the dogma of the Conservative Party, which has ruled the UK for most of those years, has been that private enterprise is the only way to deliver public services. In the case of water companies, investors bought the companies, sheltered themselves, and the large amounts of cash they extracted, behind elaborate company structures, failed to invest and charged the users for the pleasure. It turns out that companies that pumped human excrement into rivers, streams, lakes and the sea, could be given a rating of ‘excellent’ provided that they met certain other targets set by the regulator. And this rating justified bonuses for company executives. Now most of our waterways are contaminated (not only by water companies, it is true – farming, industrial pollutions and runoff from highways plays their part). Aaron Burr would have been very happy.

 

Jan and I will be leaving for Mexico on 9 September, returning in mid-October. I’ll send any interesting items I come across in Mexico.

Crooked US elections?

 

My friends in the USA will no doubt be thoroughly tired of unsubstantiated cries of ‘Stop the Steal’ etc. But I read today that Republican representatives on the election board of Fulton County, GA, approved a new rule that would allow them to withhold certification of the presidential election result if they consider that there has been any irregularity. No doubt there will be other similar manoeuvres before November.

 

However, election gerrymandering is nearly as old as the United States itself. I am reading a wonderful, enormous, history of New York City to 1898*. In the spring of 1800 elections were due to choose representatives in New York state’s Assembly, and the congressman who would represent New York City in Washington. The Federalists (led by Alexander Hamilton), who advocated property restrictions to limit the vote to the better type of person and rule by the most successful better type of person (e.g. A. Hamilton), had been accustomed to winning elections. But in 1800 they faced a relatively new group, the Democratic-Republicans, whose leading light was Aaron Burr.

 

Burr, who turned out to be ‘a master of the electioneering arts,’ invented a new concept called ‘fagot voting.’ A property requirement (£20) limited those able to vote and excluded the likes of bakers, potters, ship’s chandlers and the like, but Burr’s scheme expanded the franchise to supporters of his party by making them joint owners of a single piece of property. Burr’s fagots (or bundles) of voters tipped the balance in favour of the Democratic- Republicans. A Columbia College professor won the New York City Congressional seat for the Democratic party, and all thirteen of the state’s Assembly seats. Democrats now had a narrow majority in the Assembly, which was critical for the upcoming presidential election, since the Assembly chose the state’s federal electors. Thus, New York was guaranteed to back Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson against the Federalist incumbent John Adams. Asked by a Federalist how he had pulled off such a result, Burr replied: ‘We have beat you by superior Management.’

 

Nothing daunted, Hamilton wrote to New York governor John Jay to propose that he call a special session of the outgoing state Assembly (with a Federalist majority) which would alter the procedure for choosing Federal electors to guarantee their votes for the Federalist candidate. ‘Jay, whose sense of rectitude wasn’t so easily laid aside, refused.’ The result: Jefferson was elected, and his Vice President was none other than Aaron Burr.

 

If John Jay is the 1800 equivalent of Mike Pence in refusing to rig the vote, there is another parallel in this story, since a bullet also played a part in its dénouement. Hamilton and Burr were bitter enemies. In early 1804 Hamilton made it known that Burr was unfit to rule. Burr challenged him to a duel. On 11 July the two men crossed the Hudson to Weehawken, NJ. Today Weehawken is essentially a large commuter parking lot, with a hotel and some shops. You reach it by ferry from the end of 42^nd Street, but in 1804 in a more bucolic setting the two men stood ten paces apart. Hamilton had declared that he would let Burr shoot first: he did and mortally wounded his foe. Hamilton died the next day in what is now Greenwich Village. Tributes ‘poured in from all over the country.’ Burr, about to be indicted for murder and fearing for his safety, ‘slipped out of town into obloquy everlasting.’

 

I noted with interest that in 1803, Dewitt Clinton, the nephew of seven-times governor of New York George Clinton, was elected governor with a salary of $15,000. By coincidence, this was my own annual salary when I arrived in Washington one hundred and sevety three years later.

 

* Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford University Press, New York 1999 (1,383pp.)