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

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all, association was a force multiplier: a “technology” that had the capacity to change the world through combined effort. Otherwise antagonistic advocates of association shared a suspicion of individualism. They took as their starting point the assumption that competition had to be tempered by cooperation and that citizens could achieve more by recognizing mutual interdependence than they could by denying the social character of human nature. Here the utopian community, labor union, business corporation, building society, consolidated city, and national state each became expressions of a type. Association could even be cast as a new epoch in historical development: a centripetal counterweight to the centrifugal forces of an earlier, individualistic era.17

      In such respects, association provides an alternative perspective on the midcentury city to that of privatism. Where the former focuses our attention on collective organization, the latter directs us to the competitive marketplace. Yet the two were not necessarily in tension. In the history of American capitalism, the self-made man is more myth than reality, and Philadelphia’s economic elite, like investors before and after them, proved adept at seeking public favors to pursue private ends. Both railroadbuilding and municipal Consolidation—schemes sold in the lofty language of the common good—lined the pockets of the boosters who backed them. But consolidators often saw privatism as a threat to their class vision. The same economic forces that enriched them as individuals frequently undermined their collective ideas about how Philadelphia (and indeed the nation) should look and function. How to balance capitalist growth with collective needs vexed the subjects of this book.18 It led them to ponder the problem of power.

      Producing Power

      Morton McMichael, the so-called father of Consolidation Eli Kirk Price remembered after his death, “lifted up the city into power.” Power fascinated consolidators. Although the word had rich meanings in American political thought, most would have recognized the German sociologist Max Weber’s definition as the capacity to exert will over resistance. That resistance sprang from different sources. It could come from the “petty sovereignties” of fire companies, ward bosses, and suburban districts that had taken root in the age of Jacksonian Democracy. It could come from the rival cities that jostled with Philadelphia for command of seaborne commerce and western trade. And it could come too from the process of urban growth itself, which proved magnificent to behold but difficult to direct. How to control city government, capture remote markets, and manipulate the metropolitan form perplexed figures like McMichael.19

      Consolidators saw power as both concentrated and dispersed. “The city, as one finds it in history,” Lewis Mumford wrote in 1938, “is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community.” Philadelphians intuitively understood as much; their claims to imperial status, they realized, would stand or fall on the condition of their metropolis. Yet within its bounds, the question of who ruled whom was by no means easy to answer. Power lay in the people and their politicians, in various branches of government, in quasi-public institutions like banks and railroads, and was even encoded in urban places and processes. To ask who controlled the city in this era and focus exclusively on electoral politics, then, misunderstands the character of American governance. Consolidators did not always seek to center decision-making in one place, yet men like McMichael continually looked for ways to produce power: to concentrate the means, that is, to reconstruct their city.20

      Their first priority lay in seizing and shaping the local state. In this regard, the Consolidation of 1854 bore striking similarities to better-known state-building projects in the nineteenth century. Modernizing states aimed to expand their empires, build up bureaucracies, improve tax collection, provide public goods, and incorporate new ideas about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Simultaneously they sought to make an opaque social order legible through surveys, maps, and censuses. Consolidators turned to these tools in trying to transform Philadelphia’s municipal regime into a powerful entity subject to their control: one capable of pursuing imperial ambitions.21

      Such designs required command of finance as well as government. Histories of late nineteenth-century American cities are frequently filled with battles between profligate bosses and miserly reformers, but in the midcentury metropolis, the roles were often reversed. Boosters accused parsimonious politicians of muzzling the metropolis in its fight for supremacy with urban rivals. Debt, they argued instead, had the alchemical power to transform sleepy streets into bustling avenues of commerce and culture. And if Philadelphians were to seize the opportunities opened by technologies like railroads and sewers, then capital had to be mobilized. Yet borrowing came with risks, and it proved hard to persuade some bourgeois Philadelphians of its merits when their property served as a lien on any loan. Debates over debt-financed expansion reveal concerns over the capacity to reconcile growth, democracy, and order across the period.22

      Citizens tried to produce power outside the channels of party politics. One of the most controversial measures I explore, the municipal financing of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1846, inspired public meetings and petition drives that eventually fed into electoral battles. Popular agitation of this type, which was common across the era, sometimes pitted businessmen against the laboring classes. McMichael and Lippard, for instance, both believed class could serve as an axis of association, and sometimes tried to organize around the common economic interests of people they labeled “capitalists” and “producers.” Class formation here became a project as much as a process: a means of popular mobilization that cut across the socially heterogeneous composition of political parties. But more often than not, movements from railroad-building to municipal consolidation tried to unite Philadelphians around a common commitment to growth through grandiose (and usually debt-financed) schemes. Indeed, McMichael, perhaps more than any other figure, aimed to construct a “growth regime” that sought to justify urban expansion as beneficial to all. Lippard and his allies continually challenged the claim that growth was good.23

      Power sprang from cultural as well as economic mobilization. Where consolidators struggled to capture the state, they could turn to this sphere instead, shielding the cultural realm from democratic control, and using private institutions to reform behavior and reshape space. In league with evangelical reformers and secular organizations, they sought to sculpt streets, squares, and parks. If power lay in a citizen’s capacity to leave an imprint on the city, though, it also lay in the city’s capacity to leave its imprint on the citizen. By the 1850s, many consolidators took for granted the idea that the urban form could influence character and civilize the “barbarians” within their bounds. Here, parks, boulevards, and houses all acquired the power to determine Philadelphia’s course, and had the potential, their advocates believed, to transform force into consent.24

      Finally, power lay in the ability to project a vision that linked past, present, and future. McMichael, Lippard, and their respective allies moved back and forth between what city and nation had once been, what they were now, and what they might yet be. Looking ahead a century, McMichael imagined Philadelphia in 1950 as the empire city of the New World, while Lippard foresaw the remains of a ruined Independence Hall being ransacked to build a royal palace. Used in such ways, history and prophecy both became political interventions. Analogies to a mythical past inspired action in the present; predictions of the future, meanwhile, called on citizens to either forestall of fulfill what was to come.25

      The following chapters show how, over the middle decades of the nineteenth century, citizens fought for the power to shape city and nation. My focus is more on McMichael’s allies—the merchants, manufacturers, and professions who led the campaign for Consolidation—than on Lippard’s producers, but because consolidation involved conflict and coalitionbuilding, I pay close attention to radicalism too. Debates over property, design, and order entangle here as citizens battled over reconstruction.

      The city Thompson lauded in 1880 was not just produced by a process of rapid urbanization or the logic of a liberal tradition of privatism. In the 1840s, as riots reminded onlookers of the French Revolution, citizens had questioned whether their republic really was exceptional. Four decades later, though, the “city of homes” appeared to offer an American alternative to the Paris Commune. In its imposing center, immense residential periphery, and skilled industrial workforce, Gilded Age Philadelphia became a symbol (rightly or wrongly) of how capitalism

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