Background
In the late 1820s, corruption was rampant in the municipal administration of New York City. Public services like street lighting, were rendered by friends of the politicians who got monopolies for almost no payment to the city. "Charter dealers", among them Samuel B. Romaine, bribed assemblymen in Albany to get a large number of banks chartered. These banks issued their own currency with which working men were paid but which was not well accepted by the commerce, and devaluated quickly. Contractors built houses, but did not pay the workers after delivering the house, without consequences.
Read more about this topic: Workingmen's Party Of New York
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)