4
The Emerging Service City:
Fighting Fire and Crime

Proliferation and growth are only portions of the story of nineteenth-century urban change. Cities also changed internally during this period, as evidenced by their changing roles in government, war, social control, law, and fire fighting. In 1790 cities were passive, limited in scope, and organizationally simple. By the end of the Civil War the foundation for more complex, aggressive, and highly bureaucratized cities had been laid. And the post-1870 era saw many of these latent capacities made manifest. This periodization of internal urban change does not parallel exactly the periods of overall urban growth portrayed in the previous chapter, for although the internal and external changes were related, they were not yoked in a direct or mechanical fashion.

Emergent Urban Complexity

In the long transition from city-states to states filled with cities, the city's formal role has been restricted, because it no longer functions as a self-defended military enclave. The notion of maintaining the city's defenses would sound outlandish in a contemporary city council meeting. However, for the most part, even within their older formal functions, cities do far more than they used to. While they still administer welfare, for instance, the scope of welfare, its detailed complexity, has grown vastly. Everything from job training programs to specialized kinds of care has replaced or supplemented direct in-kind or cash payments to individuals. Vast industrial enterprises supply water and drain cities. Solid waste management specialists have replaced pigs and night soil haulers. Financial officers design complex strategies for city in-

vestments. City engineers map subsurface geological structures. The formal legal functions of the city may be fewer, but the nature of these functions has become dramatically more specialized, complex, and sophisticated.

Colonial cities employed formal procedures inherited from medieval cities and towns. Only Massachusetts cities did not imitate their predecessors directly, in part because the colony itself was a chartered company and was not empowered to grant city charters. The cities and towns of Massachusetts were not closed corporations, as were, for instance, New York and Philadelphia. In contrast with most major colonial cities, consequently, Boston transacted its business in town meetings until it became a chartered city in 1822.^[1]

The model of city government with which we are familiar today reverses the power relationship of colonial city and inhabitant. To begin with, virtually all of a modern city's inhabitants are its citizens, even though they do not share its services equally. There is no such thing as "freemanship"; even the concept is difficult to fathom today. The city's lordly power has been dissolved. Moreover, the city government explicitly claims that it "serves" its inhabitants, a claim that would have been equally incomprehensible to the colonists. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, we have become so accustomed to city services that we no longer are aware that they exist. But in the nineteenth century, as the transition occurred, the contrast between a regulatory and a service oriented city government was often made starkly clear.

Modern cities are not only more organizationally complex than the concept of "service" predicates but also contain widely differing cultural groups, yielding varied and complex urban societies. In traditional societies, individuals shared enough central cultural conceptions to create and maintain an operating vision of order. Individuals knew what was expected in their public behavior and in turn what to expect from others. Public interactions among strangers or persons not well known had predictable qualities and ranges, and even deviant or conflictual behavior conformed to certain norms. For city life such structured expectations were an important social control mechanism. But in the period between 1790 and 1870, new cities, new governmental organizations, and new social groups fractured the old rules.

American cities had more unpredictable and volatile social

New York City, 1855.
In this finely detailed view, New York looks like a modern metropolis, yet
it did not yet have a professional fire department and its formal police 
department was legs than a decade old.
Source: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

bases than their Old World and colonial predecessors. By virtue of their rate of growth, to which was added an influx of immigrants from different nations, from different rural areas, and from different religious and economic backgrounds, U.S. cities simply did not have the personal networks that anchored more established communities. The recurrent idea that cities lacking in public conventions and a common culture are prone to explosive upheavals underlies our view of frontier violence. Popular conceptions of frontier cities in the West have usually allowed for high degrees of violence, simply in recognition of the more unpredictable nature of a society made up of strangers.

Nineteenth-century urban developments specifically facilitated new environments designed to tolerate complex, nonsharing cultures; American cities made what could have been social chaos at least minimally functional. Formal organizations to provide public safety created cities where multiple cultures and classes could coexist or even conflict, without cooperation or shared cultures. This process could encompass individualism, but equally it could encompass tribalism of wildly different ethnic and racial groups. It occurred independently of the rise of individualism or capitalism and was not a teleological process. However, it provided a fertile ground for the burgeoning capitalist system, helping make American cities engines of economic expansion. A formal organizational structure meant that, in activity after activity, professionals replaced volunteers. And voluntary organizations, from unions to churches to chambers of commerce to temperance groups, learned to expect transiency and rapid membership turnover. A mobile people created a stable society.

Rampant individualism and plural, nonsharing cultures can coexist and function only when each culture is willing to adapt and change or where the environment specifically accommodates culturally divergent groups. The latter can be accomplished by replacing social structures carried in each individual's head with formally and externally enforced ones. This argument does not invoke the standard notions of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft , of traditional face-to-face communities contrasted with modern mass societies. It simply asserts that without shared cultural and behavioral norms, a formal organization of some sort is required to produce a smoothly working social entity like a city. Without the

proper organizational forms, the setting for irreconcilable cultural conflict exists, as for instance in Beirut in the 1980s.

From Regulation to Service Government

In the transition to the modern urban nation, therefore, city government has changed its role radically. Its essentially responsive, regulatory nature has disappeared. The city government that emerged from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century emphasizes active service, not passive regulation. This assertion may come as a shock to someone constructing a new building, who has to file for dozens of permits and go through multiple inspections. But modern city regulations are in fact significant services, laying out the best-known modes of construction, of planning, and of achieving physical urban goals. It is a service to all city highrise users, for instance, to have fire-resistant structures. The cooperation between industry and the city rulemakers is all too often ignored by some commentators, who somehow envision city rulemakers in conflict with good practice or private interests. As a recent analysis of the real estate industry makes abundantly clear, the very nature of twentieth-century infrastructural city services has derived from the efforts of private developers, not the other way around.^[2] Thus the word "service," its implications contrasting vividly with the old image of city government, has become the appropriate term with which to label modern city government activities.

When they created fire departments, public health boards, or police departments, American cities did something bold and innovative. Even when they were not the first to establish such services, the individual city governments took risky stances against tradition, inertia, and the municipal budget, for new services entailed new expenditures and therefore required far greater revenues. One historian, Jonathan Prude, has shown how in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts even such an innocuous town issue as public responsibility for road building was in fact a troublesome and unresolved political question. In the case Prude analyzes, mill owner Samuel Slater worked from 1816 to 1830 to make roads more convenient to his textile mills. As Slater promoted the building of local turnpikes and invested heavily in them, he tried to get

town and county governments to build new roads and change the courses of existing ones. His requests were quite often resisted, not so much for their obvious self-servingness, but because they would require local governments to initiate long-term capital intensive, enterprises. Americans had long used "natural" roads and any improvements necessitated costly governmental action.^[3] In fact, the first half of the nineteenth century saw many subsidies granted to canals and railroads, but it was not until the last decade of the nineteenth-century that heavy governmental investment in hard surfaced roads became commonplace. Yet, within forty years, city council minutes recorded almost weekly their massive expansions of street networks.

All these actions taken by nineteenth-century city governments have come only in retrospect to seem like "natural responses" to local needs. And nowhere was this more true than for social control. Of course, the changes were neither sudden nor dramatic for the nation as a whole. They had begun brewing in the eighteenth century. For instance, one historian has analyzed city ordinances in Albany and New York City to show how between 1707 and 1773 public safety issues pertained to a rising percentage—from about 10 percent to about 30 percent—of all ordinances. Arguably, these eighteenth-century ordinances may have been responsive rather than regulatory, but clearly they also intimated the nature of things to come.^[4]

There have been three related yet independent components to the history of urban public safety. One is the actual growth, in numbers as well as in organizational complexity and structure, of the various safety organizations, beginning around the middle of the nineteenth century. Another is the change in levels and kinds of threats to public safety, from crimes of violence to accidents and fires. And a third, which developed as an unintended consequence of the first two, was the new and pervasive assumption that government has an obligation to provide safety.

This analytic scheme explicitly diverges from the pervasive social control thesis, which argues that changes and reforms aimed at the public welfare actually masked mechanisms that were intended to control ethnic groups, the working class, or other potentially disruptive social groups. Social reforms, proponents of the social control perspective argue, simply hid increases in oppression by the elite. For instance, one historian has argued forcefully that

capitalists created the police purely to control the potentially rebellious working class, while another has argued that in late nineteenth-century Chicago, reformers who wanted to control immigrants' children designed a juvenile justice system for this purpose alone.^[5] Although these interpretations sound farfetched when stated so bluntly, the social control perspective does underscore an important if not essential aspect of nineteenth-century social reform: reformers had complex and not always totally benevolent motivations. Even though public safety organizations in cities directly controlled some aspects of social behavior and were very often class or ethnically biased, their purposes, functions, and actual roles were far more subtle and important than the social control thesis implies.^[6]

City Services and Urban Problems

Fear of Crime

In the course of American history the fear of predatory violence has migrated from the country to the city. And not without reason, as anyone who has arrived in the center of a large U.S. city on a late-night bus, walked outside the depot and experienced the sense of danger poised there can testify. Three hundred years ago, European colonists experienced similar feelings when they left the protection of their towns for the woods. In his famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Jonathan Edwards terrified his parishioners with images of the wilderness, of Indians lurking in ambush. The intent of these images was to awaken his flock to the dangers of eternal damnation, for he knew their latent fears of personal and spiritual violence when outside of the protection of the town. By the late twentieth century, the wilderness itself has become a place needing protection; it represents a source of deep peace, a place for spiritual renewal. Today, ministers take their congregations there to discover God. If they wished to terrify their parishioners, they would use the image of the inner city terror, of muggers, of subways.

The reasons for this modern fear of city crime are at once simple and complex. Simple because most people, including both predators (no longer visualized as Indians or wild animals) and their victims, have moved to the city. Thus crime, while causally un-

related to the city, is an urban problem simply by virtue of its location. Complex because the nature of criminal offenses and the crime control system have both changed dramatically. Crimes of personal violence—homicides and various kinds of assaults—have declined, while crimes against personal property—theft and assorted types of fraud—have risen. The crime control system, once largely funded by its users, hapless victims and convicted felons, has become an autonomous set of highly visible organizations run by the state.

For nearly two centuries urbanization has transformed the American landscape so continuously and rapidly that no one can escape noticing and being affected by the physical aspects of the change. As a consequence, we tend to attribute all sorts of phenomena to the city, simply because they are located in the city. Pollution, crime, physical decay, and mental illness have all at one time or another been seen as the result of urbanization. The supposed urban cause of each problem has several reasonable-sounding explanations. Aggregation, population density, diseconomies of scale, and other theoretical arguments have been brought forward to account for these phenomena. Aggregation—the massing of so many dissimilar social groups—seems to be the wellspring of conflict. Density creates anomie, by crowding millions of strangers together. Diseconomies of scale cause waste, creating heat and smog concentrations which accelerate photochemical pollution. However, social theorists no longer unequivocally accept the urban origins of all of these urban problems.^[7]

The city does not necessarily cause the problems, even though it provides the location for them. Strikingly, the empirical evidence, though imperfect, suggests that the social consequences of urbanization do not in themselves cause crime. Growing cities turned neither their inhabitants nor their newcomers into criminals, but they did make painfully visible social problems that up to then had been seen only on a small scale in a world of scattered villages and towns. Indeed, newspaper articles in the mid-nine-teenth century speculated that urbanization caused crime in part because the writers were ignorant of higher rural crime rates. One particularly strong and carefully supported argument posits that nineteenth-century cities actually "civilized" people, making them less homicidal and violent. Research on Philadelphia shows that over the last half of the nineteenth century, Philadelphians not

only murdered each other less but learned to deal better with the technologies of city life, dying less often in accidents.^[8] Even if the causal mechanisms remain unclear, the evidence assembled by some historians suggests that until approximately World War II, crime and violence in the Western world had been on the decline, not on the rise.^[9] Rather than presenting the modern world as a place progressively plagued with more criminal violence, most evidence suggests a cautiously optimistic evaluation, a long, slow decrease in recorded levels of violence since at least the Middle Ages. And in the United States alone, violence and possibly theft declined from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s, and perhaps until even more recently.

The prosecution and punishment of criminal behavior have also changed, along with the rates of different types of offense. In the seventeenth century, offenses against morality and God appeared to dominate the courts, combined with a solid proportion of felony crimes which we still punish—theft, homicide, assault, and the like. It is difficult to compare crime trends from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, if for no other reason than that the relatively homogenous population represented in the colonies was soon replaced by an ethnically and racially diverse one. However, crimes of personal violence, for instance, seem to have declined since the late eighteenth century. Given the rapid increase in movable property, it might also be the case that crimes against property saw a decrease, relative to the amount of movable property available to be stolen. And economic crimes, those involving fraudulent manipulation of fiscal instruments in the burgeoning money economy, have clearly increased.

None of these trends should be taken to mean that crime has lessened as an urban problem. It may in fact be just the opposite: that the decline in crime has made it seem more open to control, hence less a continous social presence and more problematic. This would provide strong motivation to emphasize and augment the various formal mechanisms of crime control, thus continuing to reduce the incidence of crime. However, given our present state of knowledge about the effectiveness of crime control, it is premature to make absolute claims that changes in the system have directly affected crime rates. Thus we can really only draw cautious and conditional inferences about crime and what makes it increase or decrease.

While per capita rates of crime are important for comparative purposes, whether across time or between places, our day-to-day perceptions are another matter.^[10] Ordinarily, in the twentieth century we report social phenomena per capita of some broad population at risk: yet we often fear crime because of its absolute numbers, not because of the per capita amount in some geographical area. From the urban point of view, crime is a problem because it exists: the causal explanations and appropriate measurement techniques are problems only to the historians, and not to those people whom they study.

Moreover, the question of why and when societies take organized action against crime is perhaps unanswerable. Does tolerance of crime decrease when control technologies become more effective? When norms and expectations change? With an increase in spendable social wealth, crime control being something of a luxury social good? Or might a decreasing tolerance for crime be simply a by-product of the evolving expectation that social organizations can and should deal with various disorderly behaviors?

It is important, here as elsewhere, to avoid taking the category of "problem" for granted. The identification of something as a "problem" is in itself an important action which in turn may be causally related to the ability to deal with the problem. Equally important, if not more so, is the second step, for a group to decide to confront the "problem." Crime, for instance, has probably always been considered a problem, but it becomes analytically interesting when a group—in this case, the city government—decides it has both the ability and the obligation to act to solve the problem. The way a city approaches crime can tell us much about the relationship of politics to organizations to action.

The New Police

Unlike fire fighting, police systems in big cities have always depended on more than volunteer efforts. In fact, the constable and watch system was based on a combination of user fees, forced labor, and direct taxes. In the Middle Ages, the constable served as a court officer, performing a variety of services, all for fees. The services ranged from making arrests to serving warrants to holding prisoners and producing witnesses. The constables often organized the night watch, made up of men who donated a few nights a year to patrol

their community. By the early eighteenth century in some American cities, city government paid for the watch, though formally the paid watchmen were substitutes for volunteers, and revenues to pay them were raised through fines levied on those who did not show up for watch duty. By tradition the watch patrolled only in the dark, from sundown to sunup. The constables, in theory, at least, responded to complaints, usually in the day. By the 1820s Boston's constables patrolled regular daytime routes, consistently earning fees that amounted to salaries by arresting drunks and other petty offenders.^[11]

The reform of London's Metropolitan Police in 1829 introduced the basic elements of a new police: they were to be regularly paid, organized in a hierarchical fashion with uniforms, and responsible to the executive rather than the judicial arm of government. Parliament soon created police for all of England and Wales. In the 1830s and 1840s city government reformers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia urged that the constable and watch system be replaced by one modeled after London's Metropolitan Police. Arguing that the new police would be more efficient, would seek out and deter crime, and would provide a more controllable force, the reformers pressured city governments for two decades before the transition was complete. At first most cities created separate day and night police, a cumbersome organizational structure that formalized the established daytime constabulary and somewhat upgraded the night watch, while still preserving the medieval distinction between the day and night organizations. From these two separate organizations, cities then moved toward a unified day and night police. With this unification, cities created a quasi-military organization form, complete with uniforms, regular patrol beats, and bureaucratic rules and norms. Symbolized by the uniform, the new police owed their allegiance and regular salaries to the city. They no longer responded solely to citizen complaints but actively sought out unreported criminal offenses and prevented other offenses. Prevention, rather than pure reponse to offenses already accomplished, was to be the character of the new police.

Americans copied the visible features of London's Metropolitan Police, but made a significant and uniquely American modification. From their first establishment in New York City in the 1850s, police forces in the United States were created at the local level and on local initiative. American police then, were creatures

of municipal government, while London and all other British police reported, finally, to the Home Office. Thus the United States laid the foundations for what would become the most decentralized form of uniformed civil police in the world.

No single conflict or conflagration accounts for the spread of the uniformed police across nineteenth-century urban America. Each city had different individual and immediate reasons for creating its police force, from beer riots in St. Louis to business concerns about labor unrest in Buffalo to elite New Yorkers' fear of street crime.^[12] Whatever the momentary reason, the deeper, underlying pressures had little to do with rising crime or class or ethnic conflict. Instead the formally structured and uniformed police were an early step in the creation of the new service providing city government. The transformation of an ancient and theoretically passive urban service to an active one was dramatic, though it was probably not recognized as such at the time. The change was dramatic only in retrospect, when the new police actually began performing their multiple services. Then, in the context of a changing urban government that had begun providing more and more services, services increasingly thought of as services, the police became an important part of the late nineteenth-century city.

The new police officers themselves, those who actually provided the first city services that were available to all, often did not like the new service oriented government. The creation of new police forces out of the traditional constable and night watches in the 1840s and 1850s caused an unanticipated stir within police departments. None of the city governments intended to create an organization that would provide a broad range of social services. They simply wanted to prevent crime in the latest manner, as was done in London. But they did, in fact, end up unintentionally inventing a service organization. The police officers themselves recognized this before anyone else in city government. When Philadelphia reorganized and modernized its police in 1855–1856, for instance, it demanded that they wear uniforms. Police officers vigorously resisted; many quit, others went home and took off their uniforms as soon as they had left the station for patrol, and all protested that they would not wear "servants' livery."^[13]

The first U.S cities that modernized and uniformed their police ran into similar protests. Police officers refused to see themselves as servants, or their role as one of serving. The uniforms

made the police servants in two ways. First, of course, they looked a bit like traditional servants' livery. Second, their visible presence on the city streets made them servants to the requests of all, and they could no longer hide behind their anonymous citizen's clothing. Ironically then, today, though it may seem as though the police provide less service than in the nineteenth century, some cities, like Los Angeles, emblazed the motto on their police cars, "To Protect and to Serve." No matter how well or poorly the motto may reflect reality, it does signify the modern conception of the role of city government, a role developed only as recently as the last century.

As nineteenth-century cities became more active agents, their formal organizations of social control reflected the larger process. By definition, the traditional constable and watch form of policing responded only after a crime had been committed. The new police had as their mission the prevention and detection of crime. The difference is subtle but significant: the change, one from response to action. Not only did the new police symbolize urban change but they also partly enabled the transition from cities with common cultural bonds to those without. The creation of public order was a high priority for emerging, growing cities, particularly for their promoters.

The growth of formal urban crime control organizations completed a slow and deep transition in criminal justice which had been occurring throughout the Western world. This involved the demise of a loose criminal justice system that emphasized individual wrongs and retributions, and its replacement by one in which the state assumed responsibility for justice and crime prevention in a more general sense. This new attention to crime control required a dramatic reevaluation of criminal behavior and its control, moving both from the periphery to the center of social thought and action. Consequently, the history of crime and crime control takes us to a central juncture in modern history. From the history of society and social organizations we learn about crime and crime control; from crime and crime control we learn about the city.

Many of the earliest and most important services provided by the nineteenth-century city found their first organizational home in crime control organizations, especially the police. Indeed, the range of specific activities the police engaged in so multiplied and

ramified that it must often have seemed that their least important activity was crime control. But almost as quickly as specific police services multiplied, city governments or voluntary, semipublic agencies stripped them away, creating new, permanent, and specialized bureaucracies to take over and professionalize each service. Jobs that the police had originated on a regular basis in the 1850s and 1860s and that devolved to specialists by the turn of the century included a wide range of activities, from health and boiler inspections to the detection and protection of abused children.

All too often historians have tried to account for the creation of the uniformed urban police with the crisis model, which looks for some criminal event or set of events to explain when and why cities suddenly invested scarce fiscal resources in policing. The underlying form of this argument is purely mechanical and ahistorical. It asserts that when some problem increases beyond a limit of tolerability, then a reaction occurs. But political action, which was required to create uniform police, does not operate like the laws of mechanics, and all too often problems which should by all reason demand political action result instead in inaction, sometimes in political extinction. Even if there had been crime waves in nineteenth-century American cities which prompted the creation of police departments, or fire outbreaks which prompted the creation of fire departments, we still have not explained these innovations. Why, after all, should any organization try to solve anew an age-old problem? For a crisis to precipitate action therefore requires a potential actor; the concept of passive response is not enough. Close examination of the political battles—often decades long—involved in creating fire departments, police departments, or public health departments shows that contrary to what many historians have claimed, there was nothing at all inevitable about these services.

In my study of the police in the United States, I asked what seemed at first simple questions, such as: when were the modern police created? what did they do? and how have they changed? just finding a way to date the police turned out to be a highly ambiguous task. For several reasons, I settled on the dates when cities first uniformed their forces as an index. These dates show the timing of the spread of the police throughout the network of U.S. cities. They emphasize that the innovation occurred slowly, for it was not a simple or obviously necessary change for cities to make. Such

organizations, entirely ordinary today, took considerable creative political effort. Each city that undertook this effort had to disband old organizations, fire some personnel, hire new personnel, make complex and uncertain decisions about budgeting, about responsibility, and myriad other concrete problems. In enactment and in content these decisions were political, highly visible, and controversial.

Punishment Moves from the City to the Country

As the locale and mode of crime control shifted, so did the locale and mode of the penitentiary. In the first decades of the nineteenth century Americans developed two somewhat different, internationally famous penitentiary models. The first was the Walnut Street Jail or Philadelphia system; the second was the Auburn system in New York State. Both demanded that their inmates maintain total silence, labor at productive work daily, and read the Bible in heavy doses. The Auburn system allowed the prisoners to work silently in groups, while the Philadelphia system enforced complete physical isolation. Hence they were often referred to as the silent system and the separate system. Both assumed that an inherent and universal moral sense, if given the opportunity to exercise itself, would convince the offender of the wrongfulness of his criminal offense. Solitude provided reflective opportunity, and when the prisoner found himself "alone, in view of his crime, he [would learn] to hate it." Subsequent remorse would ensure that when released, the offender would never again turn to evil.^[14] Penitentiaries in the United States, mostly built in the nineteenth century, allowed them to come close to realizing European ideals of the time. Reformers came from Europe to observe these two penitentiaries, not quite aware that the notion of imprisonment with the intent to rehabilitate the prisoner was not a uniquely American invention.

It was an urban one, however. The birth of the urban prison occurred as the growth of nation-states slowly pacified the countryside, and it became less and less feasible to banish offenders to the social wilderness beyond the city walls.^[15] First in Amsterdam, later in London, and finally in colonial America, city authorities created urban workhouses in the hopes of changing the basic personality and behavior of criminal offenders. Although called by

names other than "penitentiary"—one of Philadelphia's prisons was the "Bettering House," for instance—the distinguishing feature of these places was that they emphasized reformation over retribution. In the late 1700s, Philadelphia Quakers expanded the concept of such centuries—old and often forgotten institutions to include the Christian notion of penitence and change from within. With Quakers' contribution of silence, the Walnut Street Prison appeared to be a new invention. Such a novel program, embodying the hopes of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy in a new nation, was a subject made to order for discourse by foreign visitors like de Tocqueville. For visitors, such institutions provided models on which to project contemporary European visions of the potential for social and human change.

As late as the eighteenth century, the penitentary seemed a quintessentially urban institution. The two best-known American prisons, famous for introducing solitary confinement as the means of inducing offenders' pentience, were located in the two largest cities, Newgate (1791) in New York City and the Walnut Street Jail (1790) in Philadelphia. Yet as they became the subject of public attention and the recipients of larger sums of government money, prisons quickly shed their urban origins and moved to the country, or at least away from the major seaboard centers.

There were two primary reasons for this move. First, under the Constitution, state governments had jurisdiction over felony offenses, bearing the costs of their prosecution and punishment. When governments with felony crime responsibilities had had urban locations, as they did from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, then pentientiaries could be located near or in the centers of formal state power, in cities. But after the American Revolution and the growth of the federal system, cities no longer represented the locus of political power. And when state governments began investing heavily in penitentiaries, the logic that had once linked government, punishment, and the city no longer obtained in a literal sense.

Second, after penitentiaries were no longer city institutions, state investment in their building and operating became an important form of political patronage. There was no locational imperative in their setting, and the jobs and other patronage they provided were, therefore, to be manipulated for political purposes. Most often states made the penitentiary a part of central state gov-

ernment, building it right in the capital. But not always. Like other state institutions, penitentiaries could be located to pay political debts, win friends, and reinforce partisan power. In the last half of the nineteenth century, when rural voters still represented more political power than urban voters, a penitentiary in a small city, an agricultural center, or county seat, earned more votes than did one in a city. So by midcentury, most state penitentiaries were built near small cities or in rural areas, moving farther away from urban centers.^[16]

Consequently, the penitentiary seems today like an institution anything but urban in its origins or nature. Certainly, for most of its subsequent history, this has been the case. But it is accurate to say that penitentiaries, just as much as police, began as urban institutions.

Fire Fighting

The histories of nineteenth-century urban police and fire departments resemble one another in significant ways. Both institutions began the century as voluntary organizations with ancient pedigrees and histories. Since the early middle ages, the Anglo-American world had demanded that citizens "volunteer" to serve on the night watch, to be ready to join the posse comitatus whenever a felon was on the loose, and to keep some sort of weapon and firefighting bucket ready for use. City governments had begun to intervene by the late sixteenth century in England, hiring "substitutes" for the constable and watch system, and in eighteenth-century America by providing stationhouses, hoses, carts, and other equipment for fire companies. The fines levied upon those unwilling to serve in these voluntary safety organizations were simply a means of taxation to raise revenue for paid substitutes.

Cautious and fiscally conservative city officials and voters struggled for years to convince themselves and one another of the worthiness of establishing the earliest police and fire departments. Such innovations represented unprecedented and costly categories of fixed annual expenditures for local governments: something no politician could afford to treat casually. The resistance to regularized police and fire departments makes it clear that there was nothing very natural about these new organizational forms. Constables and other traditional police officers resisted the new police because

their uniforms made them more directly and easily supervised, cutting in on the entrepreneurial aspect of the old police. And "volunteer" fire departments were in some cases virtual private clubs whose "costly houses, beautiful apparatus and extravagant furniture and supplies" the city furnished. They elected their chiefs, who then drew large city salaries, and who aggressively resisted any attempts at outside control by the city council. Their hold over the city was more powerful than the police, for they could refuse to fight fires. If anything, then, the new police and fire departments were unnatural developments, requiring some twenty years of struggle to create in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. They were in fact early aspects of the new service governments that emerged more fully in the twentieth century: their creation and institutional solidification represent a series of dramatic political initiatives rather than passive responses.^[17]

In his colorful account of Philadelphia's fire companies, Bruce Laurie stresses how by the 1830s, the formerly sedate volunteer fire-fighting groups had become rallying points for ethnic and neighborhood youth gangs. On some occasions, established gangs took over the fire companies: the Killers took over the Moyamensing Hose Company, for instance. And in at least one case, the split also subsumed the working-class issue of temperance: the Bouncers infiltrated the membership of the Weccacoe Hose Company, whose former members then reconstituted themselves as a temperate fire company, the Weccacoe Engine Company. Thus the fire companies both contained and promoted gang violence, channeling it at some times toward competitive fire fighting and at others just toward fighting. New York's firehouse conflicts show that in keeping the fire-fighting companies "voluntary," considerable resources were put in the hands of fierce groups of young men. In 1852, for instance, four major conflicts erupted, involving five different companies, during which several people were "dreadfully injured by the stones, brick-bats, & c., which were hurled at them." Or, on July 13, 1860, the New York Times , p. 8, could calmly print the following item:

Dennis Ryan, a member of Engine Company No. 21, died at the New-York Hospital on Wednesday night, in consequence of the injuries he received on the evening of the 3d inst., during the progress of the firemen's riot opposite French's Hotel. The combatants on the occasion referred to were the members of Ryan's

company and those of Engine Company No. 13, between whom a grudge has long existed. . . . Deceased was 21 years of age. . . .

And one historian has made the explicitly functionalist argument that in Philadelphia, it was not until fire-fighting technology changed and steam engines became the new and very costly mode of fighting fires that the city began to worry about the fire gangs. The new technology, which required considerable capital outlay by the city and a degree of expertise to operate, forced the creation of a new professional organization in 1871.^[18]

As intuitively appealing as this account is, it would be more accurate to see the costly new technology and higher levels of expertise required as a political means of substituting fire-fighting technology for firemen. At this time, steam pumps were not superior to hand pumps either in height or distance (although no one considered volume), but steam did not require so many husky young volunteers. The political struggle over steam versus hand pumps in New York, for instance, centered on the issue of who controlled the streets, the city government or the fire departments. In a special comparison test of hand versus steam in 1855, Northern Liberty's hand-powered engine (known as "Old Hay-Wagon," or "Man-Killer") outpumped a steam engine 200 feet to 185 feet. Yet the New York city council, a year later, specified two self propelled steam engines at $17,000. Nonetheless, it took another nine years before they managed to eliminate the volunteers. In New York, the final blow to the volunteers came from the city's merchants and property holders, spearheaded by a committee of fire insurance underwriters, who provided the additional political pressure needed to achieve stricter building codes and fire-fighting capabilities.^[19]

Thus fire became the target of governmental concern. Previously the realm of voluntary organizations and private subscription fire-fighting companies, this age-old threat to crowded cities may have been greater in the cities built of wood and steel in the United States than in those built of stone in Europe. The conditional may should emphasized here, for there is no way to adequately measure the relative risks of seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century cities. Perhaps more difficult to explain than the suddenness with which fire-fighting became systematically controlled, is the long period in which U.S. cities tolerated haphazard techniques. In analyzing this problem, the notion of a regulatory versus a promotional

city proves useful. The regulatory city could insist on rules within which a voluntary organization could operate, but only the promotional city could provide a safe business and social environment in its effort to attract capital and people. The increased scope of urban public goods incorporated what had been an individual and personal liability. Cities invested in fire fighting just as they subsidized railroads and other forms of private enterprise. They used their debt issuing privileges to fund the new capital requirements that technology-intensive fire departments posed. This also relieved individuals of the costly burdens of fire protection, for in fact fire was an economic risk which any growth promoting city would have been wise to control. Just as medieval city walls protected the merchant's warehouses against destructive armies, nineteenth-century fire departments protected a wide range of economic activities in the city. The service aided downtown property owners (suburban property was not nearly so threatened by the spread of fire). Because the capital cost of fire fighting provided an important investment opportunity for the private money market, city governments neatly mediated between two private sectors, downtown property owners and investors. City government had created a public good which seemed logical and natural, and which virtually as soon as it existed became an essential component of modern urban life.

The City as a Source of New Ideas for Government Activities

The transition of the penitentiary from a city-administered institution to one overseen by state government, often located in a rural place or on the suburban fringe of a city, foreshadowed a subsequent pattern in urban service organizations. These umbrella organizations served a variety of purposes, and in so doing they often fostered other special-purpose organizations which then stripped away some of the umbrella organization's functions. Thus it may appear that the ongoing umbrella organization has become more specialized, when in fact the creation of other, narrower groups has reduced it to a specialized role, at least until it takes on new general duties. This is a subtle but important distinction. It suggests that we should not consider all regularly administered city services throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as

tending toward more fragmentation and specialization. Instead, we should regard them as general service organizations that unconsciously provided experimental testing grounds for the trial of new services.^[20]

This distinction is particularly important in the case of the urban police. They all too easily appear as a crime-fighting organization frustrated and distracted by peripheral service duties. The police, as their name implies, in fact provided a practical model of the new urban service government. Derived from the Greek polis , meaning city or city polity, the term police by the early nineteenth century referred to the legal power of the state to regulate a broad range of activities within its boundaries. Police power meant the equivalent of political housekeeping. In the post-civil War era, American legal theorists began to develop a narrower definition of police power, tying the concept more closely to the city and social control.

The new police performed a wide variety of functions, the more legitimate of which devolved to specialized city services as the century waned.^[21] They inspected various sources of public health nuisances, like open sewers or faulty boilers, looked for lost children, sometimes illegally controlled voting, took in the indigent and homeless, controlled roaming animals. Their other, less regular jobs varied from city to city. Often their assignments were done for the simple reason that there was no other around-the-clock, readily available government representative. The police represented a unique tool of government administration, one that attracted tasks no government had previously considered doing. Lost children, for instance, had previously been a private problem; parents, neighbors, and relatives had had to search for them as best they could.

Throughout the nineteenth century many tasks at first allocated to the police became the mandates of other, newly specialized branches of local government. The police originally did many of these jobs because of the strategic communication advantages provided by their organizational mode. The state of communication within cities in the early nineteenth century was chaotic.^[22] Even sending a simple message across New York City could take longer than communicating with another city. Most cities lacked an accessible and centralized communications hierarchy of any kind. Only the daily newspapers served as a forum for common intelli-

gence. The police, with their centralized, hierarchical structure and their easily identified uniforms, unexpectedly provided a new form of urban communication. Coupled with their regular patrol, their organizational structure provided a new urban mode of service: integrated, accessible, regular, and free.

Thus, from the first continuously uniformed police introduced in New York City in 1856 to their relatively quick spread across the country to smaller and farther-flung cities, innovation followed upon innovation. Even in regard to criminal prosecutions, police provide a major change, making the arrest and prosecution of offenders an activity based not on fees paid by individual victims, but a public service funded by city government. Urban crime control at once became a public good, like streets. Unlike streets, the police spawned other specialized services which in turn also became public goods, like sewage control, boiler inspection, and animal control.

The national crisis of the Civil War came at a time when cities were busy expanding their services, feeling their ways to new modes of government. The war did not undo any of the internal changes described in this chapter, but the heavy fiscal burden that it imposed on local governments ensured that further changes had to be compatible with low taxes and a restricted budget. Because the nineteenth-century cities could finance much of their new activities on the expectations of expanding future incomes, they had little to worry about except growing. While the complete range of city services would continue to develop in the period between 1870 and 1930, the conceptual and practical foundations were well established before 1870. Important details had to be worked out, but the new form of a service city had begun.