Prologue

America’s Brooklyn

Brooklyn, New York, is a place like no other. There is hardly a city in America, or even a large section of a city, that is not, like Brooklyn, ethnically, racially, economically, and culturally diverse. But the mosaic of Brooklyn’s sections and neighborhoods—scores of them—many with names and identities known well beyond the borders of this “outer” borough of New York City, seems different from other places. Coney Island, Prospect Park, the long-lost Dodgers (“dem Bums”), the breathtaking views of lower Manhattan—these too lend a distinctive identity to the borough. And a striking stereotype of Brooklyn and its inhabitants endures through many years and changes, including the flood of up-and-coming artists and well-heeled professionals that has gentrified old neighborhoods. The stereotypical Brooklynite would not be from any other place. If challenged about the prospect of Brooklyn’s becoming something unrecognizably new—perhaps even ordinary—this dyed-in-the-wool Brooklynite might well respond in the borough’s once-distinctive language: Fuhgeddaboudit!

Brooklyn’s uniqueness stems in no small measure from the borough’s location just across the East River from Manhattan, New York’s only “inner” borough and the center of America’s most powerful metropolis. The dominance of Manhattan has been a constant in Brooklyn’s history and an ongoing annoyance to boosters who point out that by 1855, when it absorbed neighboring Williamsburgh—which in the process dropped its concluding “h”—Brooklyn had become the nation’s third largest city; that by 1930, thirty-two years after Brooklyn joined Greater New York City, its population exceeded Manhattan’s; and that Brooklyn’s East River piers and basins had long been the real center of the Port of New York. But for all that, Brooklyn grew up as and has remained a satellite of Manhattan—a “town across the river,” even to the point where the first bridge that finally spanned that river, though a Brooklyn-based initiative, was ultimately named from the point of view of Manhattan (as was the East River itself). It is the Brooklyn Bridge, the bridge that leads to Brooklyn, not the other way around. True, a Manhattan Bridge was built some years later, but with much less fanfare and no discernible contribution to American urban legend. The Manhattan Bridge awaits its Hart Crane, its Joseph Stella, and its David McCullough. No one will try to sell it to you.

America has many towns across the river—Somerville and Cambridge across the Charles from Boston, Camden across the Delaware from Philadelphia, Covington across the Ohio from Cincinnati, East St. Louis across the Mississippi from, well, St. Louis, to name a few. But none is as large, as complex, and as significant as Brooklyn, and none has so interesting a history. Brooklynites will hate reading this, but the uniqueness of their town across the river does reflect the uniqueness of that place on the other side. Only New York could have created Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn it did create is known for that mosaic of neighborhoods within which ethnicity and race have been the primary modes of local identity. Williamsburg and Brownsville were known for their Jews; Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst for their Italians; Sunset Park for its Norwegians (and then its Chinese); Bedford-Stuyvesant for its African Americans. The boundaries between such places are not always clear, and many ethnic and racial transitions—and conflicts—have occurred within areas once clearly associated with a particular population. The banker Nathan Jonas, who grew up in Williamsburg, recalls that “the Jewish boy in Brooklyn was more than ordinarily likely to get into a fight.”¹ In Gravesend, which was predominantly Italian in the 1920s, but with an adjacent Jewish community north of Avenue U, the Protestant memoirist Lionel Lindsay tells us, “there were Italian kids who were willing to accept me for being not Jewish, and Jewish kids who warmed up to me because I was not Italian.” For many, the path between ethnic hostilities was not so easy to navigate. Lindsay’s father, ironically enough the neighborhood’s Dutch Reformed minister, was known as the “false-priest” to his Catholic neighbors, many of whom crossed the street to avoid walking by his “false-church.” One can imagine how much more difficult it was for the Jews (“morte-christas”) and Italians (“swartzers”) of Lindsay’s Gravesend to get along with each other.²

How—and whether—Brooklyn’s ethnic groups got along is an important subject of this book. Here we merely note that the familiar story of massive ethnic migrations from Manhattan’s Lower East Side does not capture the whole of the history of this town across the river. Far less well known is another story, of a Brooklyn vast and vanished, yet hidden in plain sight; of a new and rapidly growing city and suburb of busy wharves and waterside factories, wealthy brownstone neighborhoods and middle-class streets of brick and frame single-family homes, boulevards and parks, open spaces and not-yet-leveled hills, and above all proliferating churches, many of them grand, and built of stone in then-fashionable neo-Gothic styles.

Even before it received its city charter in 1834, and throughout the nineteenth century, Brooklyn was “the City of Churches.” To Brooklynites, this sobriquet was far more than a booster’s slogan and more than a way of contrasting the new city with the Sodom across the river (though it was certainly both of these things). And it was more than a census of steeples. Brooklyn did indeed have more churches in proportion to its population than Manhattan, but that often-repeated boast only began to express the meaning of City of Churches. Above all, it signified the dominance of a New England-style Protestantism, still Calvinist in spirit if not in the letter of old New England ecclesiastical law, that permeated the Presbyterian and Congregational churches formed in Brooklyn Heights and other neighborhoods during the early days of village and city growth, and that deeply affected Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Reformed, and other churches rooted in different Protestant traditions. To be sure, there were also Roman Catholic churches from the earliest periods of Brooklyn’s growth, and somewhat later a small number of synagogues. But these served far less influential populations. The understood elision from City of Churches—the part written in invisible ink—was “Protestant.”

Rooted in social class as well as religious thought and practice, Protestant dominance extended to the politics, economy, society, and culture of the new city to the east of Manhattan. Although the term defies precise measurement and is revealed more in outcomes than in explicit expressions of intent, hegemony, defined as a preponderant influence or authority over others, is not too strong a term for the nature and force of Protestantism—particularly Yankee Protestantism—in nineteenth-century Brooklyn. We use it in this book to refer to the extension and power of certain religious norms beyond the church to the shaping and control of Brooklyn’s secular institutions, public space, values, and discourse. This Protestant cultural hegemony was by no means absolute in its reach; it was repeatedly challenged as Brooklyn grew from a small village to one of the nation’s largest cities. But it was notable for its endurance in the face of these challenges, especially the growing ethnic and religious diversity that finally overcame its influence. The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn describes a nineteenth-century city that contrasted markedly with the borough that succeeded it and tells the story of the transformation from one to the other.

That transformation was far from complete in 1905, when the Tammany Hall ward boss George Washington Plunkitt, seated comfortably at the bootblack stand of the New York County courthouse, and surrounded by his Manhattan-based cronies, dictated a series of “very plain talks on very practical politics” to the newspaperman William L. Riordon. Riordon’s popular volume reporting (and no doubt embellishing) these lectures includes Plunkitt’s dismissive account of the “hayseeds” of Brooklyn, who can never become real New Yorkers:

And why? Because Brooklyn don’t seem to be like any other place on earth. Once let a man grow up amidst Brooklyn’s cobblestones, with the odor of Newtown Creek and Gowanus Canal ever in his nostrils, and there’s no place in the world for him except Brooklyn. And even if he don’t grow up there; if he is born there and lives there only in his boyhood and then moves away, he is still beyond redemption.³

Plunkitt offers as proof of his contention the story of just such a Brooklyn native, discovered as a young boy, nurtured by Plunkitt in the art of New York City politics, and sent eventually to the State Assembly from a Manhattan district. “You’d think,” asks Plunkitt, “he had forgotten all about Brooklyn, wouldn’t you? I did, but I was dead wrong.” The young assemblyman showed no interest at all in Manhattan’s political affairs and was eventually caught by his mentor trying to hide a Brooklyn newspaper. To Plunkitt this was the final indignity:

“Jimmy, I’m afraid New York ain’t fascinatin’ enough for you. You had better move back to Brooklyn after your present term.” And he did. I met him the other day crossin’ the Brooklyn Bridge, carryin’ a hobbyhorse under one arm, and a doll’s carriage under the other, and lookin’ perfectly happy.⁴

To Plunkitt, Brooklyn had already developed a special magnetism, at least for the hayseeds who were born there, and we are again invited to believe in the uniqueness of the place, even before the crowding in of ethnic and racial communities in the twentieth century. Not identified with any ethnic group, Jimmy migrated to New York well before the unraveling of the Protestant domination that characterized his native city. Should we be convinced that Brooklyn, even then, “don’t seem to be like any other place on earth”? Perhaps, but we would point to something else about Plunkitt’s description of the liberated Jimmy: the hobbyhorse and doll’s carriage he so happily carried home to his children. The Jimmy we see on the Brooklyn Bridge was a young husband and father, and his traipse across the bridge was most likely that of the metropolitan suburbanite. Rather than some sort of mystical magnetism of place, that little scene evokes one of the most American of experiences, the family lives of the men, women, and children who moved into or were born and raised in the emerging suburban neighborhoods that surrounded every nineteenth-century American city. Brooklyn, more specifically Brooklyn Heights, has been called America’s first suburb, a claim not only of its uniqueness, but also of its participation in what would become a far more widely shared phenomenon.⁵

This broader perspective should include “Greater” Brooklyn, for as Manhattan continued to grow, so did its largest town across the river, as a suburb of New York and of its own expanding urban center. Nineteenth-century Brooklyn did become a city, and not just in its form of local governance. As the maritime and canal-borne commerce of New York dramatically increased, so did the demand for new wharves and warehouses, many of which were built on the Brooklyn side of the East River above and below the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The new Atlantic Basin in the South Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook became the main destination for upstate and Midwestern grain shipped through the Erie Canal and down the Hudson to the metropolis. The new port facilities also attracted manufacturing firms to the Brooklyn waterfront. This added to the demand for dockside and industrial workers who settled in Williamsburg and parts of South Brooklyn, having neither the need nor the means to ferry across the river to New York. Banks, insurance companies, newspapers, and a downtown to house these and other businesses were the secondary and tertiary effects of industrial and commercial growth. And as urban Brooklyn grew, so did suburban Brooklyn, well beyond the Heights, first to nearby South Brooklyn and toward Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, then, relentlessly into the farmland of Kings County, eventually consuming it all. It may be true that no other American city developed in quite this way and that Brooklyn really was a place like no other. But all the elements of its growth, urban and suburban, were the same as those that drove and defined other American cities and suburbs.

The same developmental pattern applies to Protestant hegemony in the City of Churches. Its various manifestations—rigid Sabbatarian laws, an active temperance movement, resistance to the presence of theaters and other morally threatening amusements, a public discourse that revolved around expressions of Christian piety and moral correctness, proliferating Sunday schools and an annual Sunday school celebration—all but the latter were present in cities and towns all over New England and across a wide swath of the northern United States, especially in upstate New York and the upper Midwest, where New Englanders had migrated in force. Brooklyn’s Protestantism may have been peculiarly strong, but it was not peculiar.

Nor, as we have said, was Protestantism’s power absolute. Opposition, particularly to its strictures on drinking and Sunday entertainments, came from a variety of sources familiar to readers of nineteenth-century American history: Irish Catholic workers from the docks and dockside factories, Germans (Protestant and Catholic alike) who cherished the conviviality of their beer gardens, restive young bucks from the “best” native Protestant families. Nineteenth-century Brooklyn was not a social or cultural monolith, but a fairly diverse city in which an atypically large middle- and upper-class suburban population gave extra force to that population’s Protestant traditions and values.

That force receded during the early decades of the twentieth century with the settlement in Brooklyn of vast numbers of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Increasingly, elegant suburban neighborhoods were hemmed in by miles of tenements and apartment buildings inhabited by working-class Jews and Catholics. Erasmus Hall, the great high school that once prepared Protestant boys for college, taught a decidedly different clientele. The newcomers expressed their own ideas about the meaning of “Americanization.” And many Protestant families decamped for greener, more homogeneous pastures on Long Island and in other distant suburbs. Albeit in different ways, at different times, and with a different scale and scope, these developments occurred in many other places besides Brooklyn. As our subtitle suggests, this book in all its dimensions tells an American story.

Even as we depict Brooklyn as a lively laboratory for changes that swept across much of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we are in no sense surrendering our claim that the County of Kings “don’t seem to be like any other place on earth.” In this book, we have tried to capture the special character of this special place and the unique as well as representative ways in which Brooklyn experienced the cultural, social, and political power of native-born Protestants and the eventually overwhelming challenge to that power posed by waves of immigrants who claimed no descent from Pilgrim Fathers.