In Union There Is Strength - Andrew Heath America in the Nineteenth Century

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gentlemen limited the damage this capitalist ethic could do, but by the 1850s, the old elite had begun to give way to professional politicians. These political specialists brokered competing class and cultural interests, as Philadelphia’s myopic working-class and nationally oriented businessmen lacked either the capacity or inclination to intervene. Consolidation itself appears as a belated and barely adequate response to rapid growth, which only served to hasten the rise of the party boss.9

      Through tracing the careers of the men who fought over the terms of Philadelphia’s consolidation, this book offers a different interpretation. Between that old elite and the machine politician stood a cohort who could hardly afford to retreat to the counting house. In their enduring engagement with civic life, cosmopolitan orientation that located Philadelphia in a world of “great cities,” and belief in urban interdependence that stood at odds with laissez-faire, they sought an alternative to both an insular, individualistic privatism, and the late nineteenth-century bourgeois reform movement historians have termed “liberalism.” That is not to say that I see virtue where previous historians saw vice. The people I write about usually expected to prosper individually and collectively from urban expansion. They were just unsure whether unbridled capitalism was the best way to do so.10

      The consolidation cohort’s doubts about privatism sprang too from an enduring attachment to the city. In charting the making of the modern world, historians have traced the subordination of self-governing cities to expanding national states. If their narrative has been tailored to the particularities of European state formation, a similar story can be told in the United States, where the nationalizing impulses of war and railroads reoriented loyalties from metropolis to nation. After 1865, the argument goes, victorious northern elites had less attachment to their locality: amor patriae and economic centralization trumped civic loyalties. Rather than focusing on city- and nation-building as rival processes in this era, however, the following chapters argue that as political, economic, and cultural projects, they were closely connected. Although municipal consolidators never had to face a problem as vexing as slavery, they grappled with many of the same difficulties that confronted their counterparts at the national level: not least, how to incorporate territory and people; how to balance central power and local control; and how to preserve order in a divided polity. The challenge of spurring rapid growth in a manner that staved off the threat of dissolution became a burning question in both city and nation at around the same time; the Philadelphia riots of 1844, indeed, coincided with fierce debates over the extension of a slaveholders’ empire into Texas. But more than mere coincidence linked consolidationist designs for civic and national union. Battles over the terms of municipal Consolidation were shaped by—and in turn shaped—citizens’ relationships to the nation.11

      Across the midcentury decades, the city mattered as much as ever. For rich and poor Philadelphians the metropolis was a site of work and play: a place of collective consumption in which visions of social and spatial order coalesced and clashed. Those who wanted to sell the city—to maximize the exchange values of metropolitan property—often confronted defenders of an urban commons. Those who wanted to save the city—to redeem it from sin, riot, or “the crimes of Capital”—often tried to reshape the social organization of urban space in a way that would cultivate better citizens. In the designs of park advocates, boulevard builders, and land reformers, we encounter ideas of what the city might become. And over the course of the period covered in this book—a moment before the “labor question” came to dominate social thought in the North—space seemed, at least to some, to exert a determinative influence in shaping society and politics. Whether through cleansing “plague spots,” laying out wide streets, or building the small homes Thompson extolled on the metropolitan frontier, Philadelphians seemed to be molding the character of a city and its people.12

      Even as citizens engaged in local battles, however, they looked far and wide for inspiration. As an industrial hub producing largely for domestic markets, nineteenth-century Philadelphia can appear less cosmopolitan than the eighteenth-century port that preceded it; its foremost political economists, indeed, preached a doctrine of economic nationalism over free trade. Rapid urbanization, though, had convinced many residents by the 1840s that their metropolis belonged among the “great cites” of the Atlantic World, and this sense of a shared destiny—and the new rivalries it opened up—created the “common referents” for a series of halting attempts to learn lessons from European capitals. When turning their eyes across the ocean, Philadelphians chose what they wanted to see. For a radical like Lippard, the National Workshops of the 1848 Revolution in Paris provided a model of the social republic; for a booster like McMichael, on the other hand, Baron Haussmann’s debt-financed city-building seemed an intriguing experiment. But cosmopolitanism did not only find expression in debates over which elements of Old World cities might be translated to the New. Promoters hoped that the steam power, military force, and industrial might that hastened American expansion in the 1840s would open up the opportunity for their metropolis to occupy a central place in a new global order. Philadelphia, they earnestly believed, could become an imperial node between the Atlantic and Pacific. The reconstruction of the city’s interior arrangements would proceed apace with the reordering of its external relations: the annihilation of municipal borders in 1854, for example, was closely tied to railroads’ annihilation of space. Here the city provides a prime vantage point to understand the interplay between local battles and global designs.13

      As their cosmopolitan ambitions required fixating citizens’ gaze on distant horizons and grand destinies, advocates of consolidation came into conflict with localism and tradition. Growth, consolidators feared, had fragmented the metropolis into dozens of tiny fiefdoms dominated by fire companies, street gangs, and ward bosses. Here, parochial needs were privileged ahead of the common good, and shortsightedness held back urban ascent. The exemplary figure was “King” William McMullen, an Irish American ward boss, who fought to defend his territory from meddling reformers. Elsewhere, especially among wealthy citizens with property and bonds to defend, consolidators encountered what they derisively referred to as “fogyism,” a reluctance to take the financial and political risks required to make Philadelphia great. The attorney Horace Binney provides one of the best examples. Although he eventually embraced civic union, his conservative investments, wariness of growing state power, and reluctance to back railroad-building irritated self-styled modernizers. Politics sometimes became a matter of perspective: Could citizens see the city from a position that enabled them to comprehend its imperial future, or were their eyes trained only on immediate surroundings and personal portfolios? In boosters’ telling, at least, battles over space, money, and government arrayed farsighted visionaries against myopic opponents.14

      It also pitted consolidators against the disintegrative tendencies of individualism. Figures like McMichael and Lippard took “association” as a guiding principle. Like its close cousin, consolidation, “association” became a keyword of midcentury American politics. The French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville used it to describe the Jacksonian city’s flourishing civil society: the space between the individual and the state in which civic life takes hold. But “association” had a history that Tocqueville missed. Philadelphians joined together well before 1776, and in the early national era, when wealthy Federalists were driven out of office, they turned to association to shield their power in cultural institutions and business corporations. By the 1830s, as urbanization frayed old communal bonds, associations proliferated. Although many Jacksonian-era associations crossed neighborhood boundaries, others accelerated the city’s territorial balkanization, as fire companies, street gangs, and new municipal districts cut the metropolis up into dozens of jurisdictions and spheres of influence. Association here involved marking difference rather than promoting unity.15

      Yet by 1850, association had acquired a wider meaning—as a principle as much as a practice—that tied it closely to consolidationist projects. For utopian socialists, it captured their ideal of a cooperative social order; for political economists, it held out the promise of a “harmony of interests” between labor and capital; for supporters of civic and national union, it served as a riposte to the claims of suburban districts or states’ rights. Association in this regard moved easily between the politics of class, city, and nation. Indeed, the rallying cry “In Union There Is Strength” rang out in meetings of craft unions, municipal Consolidators, and defenders

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