5
From Closed Corporation to Electoral Democracy

It is unclear whether or not cities are "natural" creatures, that is, phenomena that would have arisen in any historical, social, political, and economic context. Our current inability to understand enormous third world cities suggests that their very sprawling and explosive growth is a phenomenon independent of factors traditionally considered by urban historians; this kind of growth therefore seems "natural," unstoppable. But more likely, we use the concept of "natural" to avoid trying to understand the complex phenomena that contribute to urban growth. Either way, it is clear that American cities are definitely not "natural": from their beginnings they have been creatures dependent on legal tradition, on enabling legislation, and on judicial interpretation of legislation.

The City Corporation

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, incorporation was a legal device used by legislatures to encourage and protect large capital investment ventures that benefited the public good. City charters, although not issued for the purpose of protecting capital accumulation, had been legislated in such a spirit, along with other such corporate ventures as toll bridges and roads, and various public enterprises. The corporate charter protected investors by limiting liability to the amount invested, and guaranteeing investors a handsome return on their investment through monopolies. One might invest in a bridge company, for instance, knowing that the bridge would have a monopoly on tolls over the river in perpetuity. The public benefited from such a monopoly, because the charter created the capital fund with which to build

the bridge in the first place. In a sense the public traded the toll monopoly for no bridge at all. Thus the corporate charter was a positive legislative tool for the public good.

In the early nineteenth century, with a series of Supreme Court decisions and the mobilization of increasing amounts of capital, the nature of the corporate charter began to shift. By 1840, the charter was no longer a special privilege granted to do public good, but a license to increase private capital. The Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution as giving corporations the status of persons. Their regional character disappeared when the Court decided, in Bank of Augusta v. Earle (1839), that the principle of comity—in international law, the assumption that one nation respects another's laws—applied within the United States. In practice, this meant that a corporation chartered in one state could act as a legal person in another state. Within the span of half a century, an ancient and seldom used legal device had been turned into a powerful tool for economic action.

Although both Philadelphia and New York City had corporate charters in the eighteenth century, the city corporations were superficial imitations of their powerful English models. Prior to the Revolution, for instance, Philadelphia's city corporation seems to have restricted its activities to hosting visiting dignitaries and supervising the markets, fairs, and wharves. The corporation apparently acted as no more than an exclusive city club: certainly it did not foreshadow the aggressive cities of a century later. And it was a moribund club whose aldermen held their positions for life, with only rare resignations. Often the aldermen paid for city costs out of their own pockets, emphasizing both the lack of an effective tax levy, and the extent to which the city corporation truly represented an elite club whose commercial interests were identical with those of the city.^[1]

Who Ran the City?

The extension of the franchise to adult white males in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, prior to the midcentury explosion of towns and cities and their peopling with immigrants, ensured local political participation. Within a few decades after its extension, the all-white male franchise unseated the local elite from city governments.^[2] Almost certainly, the elite would have

San Pedro, California, 1893.
This small village was soon to become a major urban port. On the left is 
the dirt embankment where a half century earlier Richard Henry Dana 
had camped. Already a terminus for a rail line to Los Angeles (in the 
foreground), within two decades after this view, Los Angeles had annexed 
the town in order to make it the city's harbor.
Source: Seaver Center for Western History Research, 
Museum of Natural History, Los Angeles.

been less generous with the franchise had they envisioned the ensuing decline of their own power and the rise of working-class and immigrant voters. Its extension in older cities like New York and Philadelphia, with their prerevolutionary charters establishing freemanship as a prerequisite to political participation, required state intervention; the city corporations argued that their ancient charters protected their essentially closed membership. Protected though the corporations were, their privileges contradicted the principles of democracy, and their "ancient" status reeked of aristocratic privilege. Moreover, these closed city councils combined legislative, judicial, and executive functions in one body, as anomalous in the constitutional era as restricted corporation membership. By the early nineteenth century state legislators began simply abolishing the old charters, establishing new ones on more democratic and constitutional principles. The possibility that such legislation might open the floodgates to democratic action seemed real indeed. By the late 1820s New York City saw the Workingmen's party challenging (though ultimately losing to) established political parties. It has been argued that in the early part of the nineteenth century, working-class politics and near victories had more impact than in the latter part of the century, when immigrant political machines gave voting power to the poor, but squandered this power to support the urban status quo.^[3]

Who held positions of power matters for several reasons. First, if only one social group holds power, other groups are denied the opportunity to govern, whether or not the eventual policy outcomes are similar. Similarly, if a single group governs and it consistently favors its own members above others, then its dominance is unjust. However, the social analysis of urban political power is subtle because of the difficulty in separating intention and outcome. As the American city has taken its various unprecedented forms, the power elite have often found it difficult or even impossible to establish the most self-serving policy directions. When an agenda cannot be comprehensibly established, power can appear to be divided, for its directions are.

The ties of class and status to local political power were more clearly visible in eighteenth-century New England towns, where one historian, Edward M. Cook, Jr., has analyzed the nature of elections to town offices. Two important points emerge from his research. First, local prominence made a specific difference in the age

at which people were elected selectmen, the usual entry-level position in town politics. Prominent people were elected on average seven years earlier than the nonprominent. Second, in the larger cities, such as Boston and Salem, there was less father-to-son continuity in office than in smaller places. There, membership in the elite was determined by wealth, not family: "Major offices in cities went overwhelmingly to the current merchant princes and to the leaders of popular political factions, many of whom were recent immigrants or newly risen to prominence." In a sense, Cook's research establishes both the presence of elites in politics, and their differing natures in city and farm village. The villages had multigenerational elites compared with the cities, but both voted for elite members with greater alacrity than they did for the nonelite.^[4]

Immigration and Politics

Urban political shifts synchronized the broader shift from regulation to service in city government. Similarly, the changing electoral politics of U.S. cities had an interlocking social, political, and economic basis. The first and most obvious reason for this transfer of political power is demographic. The white male franchise had been extended prior to the first heavy waves of immigration from the British Isles in the late 1840s. Successive waves of immigrants quickly transformed the ethnic base of voters from native-born whites to a complex ethnic mix. As shown in table 4, many cities quickly gained immigrant populations of poor, Irish Catholics and a broad range of Germans by midcentury. Given the intense and active hostility of the native-born and immigrant Protestants toward the Irish, and the linguistic separation of the Germans, their distinct, appositional voting came as no surprise. Many voting studies have documented the power of this "ethno-cultural" voting throughout the nineteenth century, with splits often coming not over substantive issues but developing simply as ethnic opposition.^[5]

The relatively small stakes involved in municipal elections only partially explains the apparent lack of elite resistance to the immigrant accession to political power. Until about the 1890s, all city voters could agree on one thing, that the role of government had to be fiscally limited. Working-class voters in particular wanted a limited and inexpensive government, often opposing such things

Table 4
Percent Foreign-Born For Selected Cities, 1900 and 1920
Source: Bureau of the Census,  Population 1920 , Vol. II (Washington, D.C.: Government 
Printing Office, 1922), table 12, 729–733; Bureau of the Census,  Compendium of the Eleventh 
Census: 1890 , Pt. II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), table 2, 604–611.

as city-run employment bureaus.^[6] Moreover, local commercial and new industrial elites had expanded their bases of economic operations on a regional scale by the second half of the century, so that their fortunes were no longer inextricable from those of the city. Their loss of local power simply did not have the economic consequences it might have had earlier, nor did the notion of responsibility for local affairs carry such weight as it had. As long as the elite did not want the role of government to expand considerably, city politics could remain factional but not substantive. Additionally, in new communities springing up to the west of the established colonial cities and towns, if the elite had rigidly refused to yield political power, the already badly fragmented social structures would have split even further, hindering whole towns in their search for new immigrants and capital.

Usually such issues were not explicitly articulated, but in the case of Scranton, Pennsylvania, we do get a sense of the trade-offs involved. The elite of Scranton were boldly presented with competing class interests when they decided to incorporate a large area around the town in order to support their own economic expansion. Scranton was a relatively new city; its iron and coal entrepreneurs had come from outside the region. Their competitive world spread far beyond the bounds of their day-to-day operations, and their acquisitiveness far exceeded its dependence on local power and prestige. They knew the incorporation would bring the town's working-class Irish voters into numerical dominance: the trade-off was the town's enhanced economic power to aid industry versus a loss in elite political power. In choosing the former, those in power decided to "endure the ills we have [rather] than to fly to others we know not of."^[7] They choose Irish politicians and expanded fiscal power for the city over a political status quo that carried with it the threat of economic stagnation.

The Dahl Model of Urban Political Sequences

Thus, as political constituencies changed in cities, so did those who governed. Based on New Haven, Connecticut, political scientist Robert A. Dahl has established a schematic, four-period model of American urban political change, which integrates policy, politicians, and changing political constituencies and structure, looking at who occupied different slots rather than at what they

did. Like many models, this one does not fit all cities (San Francisco is a notable exception), and it has the further weakness of making political changes seem to be autonomic responses to an economic imperative. But it does serve as a useful starting point in thinking about those who governed. In Dahl's model city, governments evolved from early domination by "patrician elites" to ones run by immigrants and bosses, who in turn were followed by reformers, and finally by modern professional politicians, often "explebes," that is, of working class origins.^[8] This change in politicians and their constituencies has often paralleled the shift in urban government's role from regulation to service. The two have not occurred in lockstep, nor have the four eras of urban government first delineated by Dahl proven to be as precisely clear in reality as they have in theory. Cities have varied greatly, and not all bosses were the cigar-smoking Irishmen so often caricatured by reformers. But Dahl's model of a sequence of urban political leadership does capture some of the broader trends of succeeding political styles and groups of political constituencies.

The Dahl model works to summarize the mayoral history of New York City. Vignettes of four different New York City mayors exemplify his simplified, four-period description of the sequence of American urban political development. From the colonial period until the Civil War era, a city government dominated by patricians yielded almost imperceptibly to one led by a commercial elite. Cornelius Van Wyck Lawrence, mayor of New York from 1834 until 1837, typifies this first, transitional era. His mother was of an old, wealthy Dutch family, his father from a not-quite-so-old but wealthy English family. Raised on the family estate in Flushing, Lawrence prospered as a New York City merchant and ran for office at the age of forty-three, a Jacksonian Democrat. After three terms as mayor, he returned to business, becoming a bank president.

Following the Civil War, with large influxes of immigrants into the city, there was a shift to government by large, often corrupt, political machines. Often these were run by bosses who were immigrants themselves, or who catered to the immigrants who usurped power from the old elite. As the elite lost power and abandoned interest in local politics, they either returned to the business of amassing wealth or went on to regional or national politics. William M. Tweed, born in 1823, joined Tammany in 1859 and quickly became a major power broker in New York City's Democratic ma-

chine, until his criminal trial in 1873. Probably the best-known boss of the nineteenth century, Tweed never actually held the mayor's office. He was not an immigrant, having been born in New York City. He was not even clearly ethnic, though he was probably of Scottish descent. Nor was he from the impoverished working class; his artisan father made and sold chairs.^[9] More typical of this second period was Thomas Coman, born in Ireland in 1836, who became a Tammany Hall mayor briefly when he was thirty-two, and remained an alderman until the downfall of the Tweed Ring in 1872. Prior to his political career, he had been a newspaper reporter and worked in the post office, where he had been accused though not convicted of embezzlement.

Dahl's third period of urban political development falls into the early twentieth century, when native born, middle-class reformers defeated the machines, ousted the corrupt bosses, and ended their illegal control of voters and the ballot box. Seth Low, mayor for one term, 1902–1903, typified the reform era. Born to an old and wealthy Yankee family in Brooklyn, he became president of Columbia University in 1889. He ran for mayor at the age of fifty, as a candidate of the Citizen's Union, and during his year as mayor he tried to apply rational principles of modern management to the corrupt city government.

The fourth and current era of city politics began in the Depression decade, and saw the rise of a new, professional politician. Robert Wagner, mayor from 1954 to 1965, exemplifies this era. The son of a U.S. senator, Wagner went directly from law school into a lifelong political career, becoming mayor at the age of forty-four.^[10]

Loosely defined, these four periods in New York City's political history also reflect the city's changing economy. The first phase reminds us of its function as a commercial entrepôt, its commercial elite blending comfortably with landholders, separation between commerce and landed wealth never acquiring quite the distinctive force it had in England. This era of commercial dominance disappeared as industry moved from the countryside into the city in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The owners of industry never entered local politics to the extent that earlier businessmen did, partly because their political interests were better represented on a state and national level. The extension of the franchise and the peopling of cities with immigrants to run the factories precluded any easy political dominance except by the party

machines, and this second era thus reflects the industrial growth of the city. Finally, the third and fourth phases of urban politics represent the submergence of immigrant voters, an assertion of middle-class and professional control, and the solidification of the emergent service city. In short, the political phases of New York represent the commercial, industrial, and postindustrial city economies.

If we take St. Louis as another example, and look at its mayors from 1822 to the mid-1960s, the following years (with slight interruptions) had mayors who were native born Protestants with nonworking-class, nonpolitical career backgrounds: 1822–1842, 1854–1864, 1902–1925, 1933–1943. These years sketch in the early patrician elite period, their loss of personal dominance in the late nineteenth century, their return to power in the progressive era, and finally the post-World War II growth of a new breed of professional politician.

Southern Cities

Just as the model of urban political sequences articulated above does not describe the precise political processes in different cities, it is also somewhat geocentric, for it ignores southern cities altogether. Thus it must be modified even further. Southern cities developed somewhat differently from their northeastern counterparts, and must therefore be contrasted carefully. In the South, only a handful of cities went through a period that had anything resembling northern industrial growth and immigration. Even these cities—Richmond, Birmingham, Memphis, and perhaps New Orleans—tended to have immigrants or industry, but never the intense combination of both so common in northern cities large and small. Table 4, which displays some regional cities and their proportions of foreign-born inhabitants, emphasizes the native born character of southern cities.

In part because they had resisted enfranchising black voters, or had disenfranchised them, southern cities never really experienced as powerfully the three factors that had underwritten political machines—immigration, industrialization, and the widespread franchise. Consequently the political sequence in southern cities was less likely to include the political machines, dependent as they were on immigrant votes. There were some southern political ma-

chines, which easily matched those in the North for corruption, but they did not need to mobilize immigrant voters. Memphis's Boss Crump, for instance, ran an effective political machine for over thirty years, from 1909 to 1915 and 1927 to 1954. Crump's twentieth-century machine carefully cultivated commercial interests and personal ties rather than immigrant loyalties, as it purchased votes.^[11]

Most southern cities remained in the earlier phase of dominance by either commercial leaders or wealthy landowners well into the mid-twentieth century. Urbanist Blaine A. Brownell has termed this the "commercial-civic elite," maintaining that the apex of its "unquestioned" political power came in the 1920s. But this pattern has persisted in some cities up to the present. In some southern cities, even the business elite had difficulty attaining power. In Charleston, for instance, wealthy planters had slightly more political power than did people with commercial interests. In a study comparing Charleston and Boston in the early nineteenth century, William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease explicitly draw this contrast, showing how by the mid-nineteenth century the internal political structure of Charleston remained a "web spun of personal ties; Boston's was one increasingly of institutional linkages."^[12] Thus the familiar stereotype of the impersonal, business-like, Yankee city and the personal, paternalistic, and less commercial southern city had some basis in reality.

Local Politics and Industry

How cities were governed is a much more particular question than describing who held office. One study of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre contrasts the nineteenth-century economic and political leadership of these two neighboring Pennsylvania coal and steel towns. It shows how the older city, Wilkes-Barre, which had grown first as a farming and market center in the late eighteenth century, remained in the political stranglehold of a family-dominated elite throughout the nineteenth century. The town's leaders used their considerable political skill in manipulating the state government to restrict the opportunities of outsiders and of other, competing towns such as Scranton. Between 1820 and 1840 Wilkes-Barre's elite had made a quick and profitable transition from agriculture to coal exporting, but once engaged in a profitable enterprise, its

caution and defensiveness put an end to further entrepreneurship. In addition, the town's leaders protected their political hegemony by refusing to expand its boundaries, for fear of incorporating the votes of immigrants living outside the city limits.

Scranton, in contrast, was settled by a diverse group of outside capitalists in order to develop it as an industrial city. They used the city government to expand their opportunities, incorporating in 1866, five years earlier than Wilkes-Barre, and aggressively expanding the city boundaries to promote their own mining and foundery ventures. As one consequence of this boundary expansion, in 1866, Irish immigrants took over the city's political machinery. The most notable mayor came in 1880 with the election of Terrence V. Powderly, national president of the Knights of Labor. Yet the city's economic elite consciously choose this democratic "ill" over restricted economic expansion.^[13]

Thus Wilkes-Barre exemplified a city where family, political, and economic power, and the daily running of the city government, were all integrated. There was one elite, its interests coterminous with the economy and the polity. Consequently, Wilkes-Barre remained in the first stage of urban governance, one that had characterized colonial cities and that persisted for varying periods into the nineteenth century. In Wilkes-Barre the commercial elite, though it became an industrial elite, still behaved in the manner it had established at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Scranton, however, represented a city where the industrial leaders abandoned political hegemony, albeit unwillingly, in favor of economic advantage, thus becoming an archetypal industrial city of the late nineteenth century.

Urban Diversity and Political Sequences

Few cities had their political history so purely determined by their economic heritage as these two Pennsylvania towns. For instance, one analysis of nineteenth-century San Francisco politics emphasizes the enormous constraints on the political actions of officeholders. The fiscal conservatism of the voters profoundly shaped politicians' options, whether they represented highly politicized working-class constituencies or more elite interest groups. City policy had much less margin for variation than we might now imagine, so that bosses and reformers did not do things all that

differently. This example provides an important counterbalance to what might be called a personalistic understanding of city politics, for it shows how legislative limits, budgetary rules, and the voters' concern about their personal tax burdens operated powerfully to restrict the actual behavior of city officials.^[14]

The four-act drama of urban political succession—with the bosses and reformers clashing in the climactic third act, and with professionals and, lurking in the background, the federal government, marching onstage for the final act—encompasses most major cities in the United States, although it requires substantial modification for the South. It is an incomplete scenario for all U.S. cities, however, because for every New York or Omaha, there were many more small places. Although individually these small places may seem insignificant to larger issues in American urban history, their net importance has actually been greater than is usually recognized, for they enhanced agriculture, fed the larger cities, and helped build a rich network of transportation and manufacturing throughout the country. In addition, these smaller places were repositories of entrepreneurial activity, often translated into sheer local boosterism. This booster spirit manifested itself in economic activity as well as political. In fact, so entrepreneurially aggressive were smaller urban places that their inhabitants sent in far more inventions to be patented than did either farmers or big-city folk. The numerical importance of smaller cities and towns to political history may be illustrated by comparing the total population of the major cities selected for analysis in the Biographical Dictionary of American Mayors with the remaining cities in the United States. The fifteen cities documented only accounted for about one-third of those living in towns and cities with populations greater than 2,500.^[15] Even if one looks at cities above 25,000 persons in 1900, well over 40 percent of the urban population lived in smaller cities.

Arguably, the importance of the largest cities has been greater even when inventions and political changes came from small towns. Both the city manager and the commission forms of government, for instance, originated in smaller places, although big-city usage legitimized the innovations. But the histories of the small places have often differed significantly from those of the larger ones, and these separate stories are important in their own right. Henry Binford's history of Boston's antebellum suburbs, for instance, establishes how their relationship to growth changed

qualitatively in the 1850s. Previously, the towns had conceived of themselves as politically and economically separate places, exploiting the nearby city as a resource: their character changed decidedly with population growth resulting from Boston's metropolitan influence. The earlier vision, Binford calls the "New Model," one that emphasized "small enterprise and scattered residential settlement" as well as "simple, cheap, municipal corporations." But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the conception of suburban city changed to one of middle-class, commuter homes. The literal growth of the central city and suburbs, then, had changed their understanding of growth.^[16]

Introducing the political histories of smaller cities and towns to an urban history of the United States might at first appear to pose a difficult question: to the extent that there has been a political progression from commercial elites to professional politicians, how much has this been a function of urban growth? Some historians have argued that the transition from patrician government was simply a function of the urbanization process.^[17] If there were natural stages of political change, then might not smaller cities and towns simply represent the earlier stages? Conversely, if the political transitions discussed in this chapter represented a historical process across all but the South, what reasons are there to predict that smaller places would not have experienced corresponding development? For instance, why not expect that Watertown, Wisconsin, with its 6,400 people in 1870, would have gone from elite to machine to progressive to professional politicians in the past century and a half?

One obvious fact about the government of smaller cities and towns stands out: their size and subsequent scope of government put an effective, if historically flexible, upper limit on the number of full-time, paid politicians they could support. This in turn inhibited the development of machine politics, of professional reformers, and of twentieth-century career politicians. The tendency of the smaller towns and villages should have been toward a maintenance of the status quo, not out of any natural conservatism but out of demographically and fiscally limited opportunities for change. Even if the political development of small towns and cities had moved in lockstep with larger cities, the consequences would have been far more limited and less visible.

Smaller cities and towns had a second difference that made

them more likely to appear conservative and resistant to political change. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, larger, more central cities experienced a regional and national extension of their economies.^[18] Inefficient local industries died out when transportation made competition and specialization more powerful. The successful local industrialists operated in an expanding world whose fortunes were visibly tied to other cities, other regions, and even other nations. Their economic affairs no longer mirrored the fate of their city. The control of local government no longer mattered to their businesses as it had in the early part of the century. This spatial broadening and overlaying of the economic base affected everyone in the economy, but smaller cities and towns continued to retain more of the old unity of business and city interests.

Booster Politics

By 1890, what was good for New York City was no longer necessarily good for J. P. Morgan, while what was good for Watertown, Wisconsin, was quite often still good for its bankers, newspapers, and wage earners—and vice versa. The governments and businesses of smaller places seemed provincial because they were: local events meant more to them than purely local events did to the big cities. George Babbitt boosted Zenith because his business depended on it. Economic circumstances denied blasé metropolitan sophistication to small cities and towns, so that when Sinclair Lewis wrote of life in small towns and cities in the early twentieth century, he could caricature the local greed and shameless self-promotion. Efforts by local businessmen to boost a city through the chamber of commerce simply were neither so all-pervasive nor so necessary in larger places. But residents of new cities recognized along with Chicago that: "to induce immigrants to come here and settle the vacant lands . . . to control and center here the trade and travel of the West . . . to induce capitalists to make investments here in works of public and private improvement, are, all of them, objects worthy of the best exertion of her citizens."^[19]

Local boosters often had even less credibility than traveling snake-oil salesmen. The hypocrisy inherent in making claims about a city's advantages purely to achieve personal profit forced many small-town officials and business leaders into positions which by the early twentieth century seemed anomalous. The eco-

nomic fates of the biggest cities were no longer so easily affected, and once in place the network of U.S. cities became relatively stable. Boosterism of the most egregious kind lost its effectiveness. That the major cities of the early twentieth century could scorn such shameless behavior simply demonstrated their own short memories, for they had promoted themselves similarly in the previous century.

Not every small city had an ethos dominated by promotional histrionics. Many were dominated by factional splits and conflicts which left no one energy for self-promotion. Small industrial cities such as Scranton, or Homestead, Pennsylvania, or Troy, New York, housed heavy industries that drew immigrant workers, who dominated local politics.^[20] In Scranton, in the decades after the Civil War, the patrician and commercial leaders grudgingly accepted the power of the Irish, working class. In Troy, the iron workers fought a constant battle to retain the political power that they had gained in the immediate post-Civil War period. The predominance of working-class voters within Troy's boundaries forced the city's conservatives to unite with county activists. Together they attempted to dilute working-class electoral impact by broadening control of the police to the county level. The county would then be able to order the police to side with factory owners rather than workers during strikes. In Homestead, with only 25,000 people, a corrupt political machine depended on graft from vice. Carnegie's steel mills, located just over the city boundaries, operated in a national economy, so that local politics remained relatively unimportant to the company's business. When the infamous strike of 1892 occurred, the Carnegie Steel Company turned immediately to a private, nonlocal army, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, rather than trust any local police forces.

The fates of these three small cities suggest that whenever ethnic voters predominated, one could expect, logically enough, to find ethnic politicians. But machines were not necessary correlates of ethnic voters in these smaller cities, perhaps because their small size meant a less fragmented political environment than in large cities. Small city elites did not always gracefully acquiesce to ethnic predominance. In Watertown, a vicious split over the city debt in the mid-1870s set the local economic elite in opposition to German and Irish ethnics for over two decades. Conducting bilingual meetings, the Irish and Germans managed to dominate the town's

unofficial government by coalition and to regularly send a representative to the state legislature. The split stifled town government and extended to the state legislature, where factional representation continued. This factionalism also weakened the town's economic growth, or at least so thought the upper classes.

That local conflict might inhibit a town's economic growth by frightening away entrepreneurs, immigrants, and investors did not escape the notice of the small cities springing up throughout the West. Historians have long observed that the desperate nature of local boosterism sprang from the realization that only through unity could a town and its inhabitants prosper. Political historian Allan Bogue has argued that the lack of any real community in the new towns made political conflict and fragmentation endemic.^[21] Don H. Doyle's detailed study of Jacksonville, Illinois, supports Bogue's thesis. Doyle shows how the town had potentially irreversible splits: its Southerners and Northerners conflicted, often violently, first over slavery and then the Civil War; its native-born and its ethnics—Germans, Portuguese, Irish, and blacks—disagreed over issues ranging from temperance to housing; religious disagreements caused constant friction among the town's dozens of denominations; the town aristocracy despised the fighting and drinking class that gathered in the square on weekends, a rough underbelly to the decorous Victorian veneer. Yet the desperate spirit of boosterism managed to put a smile on these potentially deadly conflicts. Everyone in Jacksonville knew that their economic future depended on outdoing neighboring Springfield in the competition to attract business, new inhabitants, and legislative largess. Of necessity then, the "ethos of boosterism equated social unity with progress."^[22]

Economic promise was incentive enough to overcome or at least ignore otherwise irreparable schisms. In a sense, the newer small cities and towns of the nineteenth century had to live with internal conflict. Because real property ownership was possible for even the working poor, the prospects of population growth and thus increase in property values united a fragmented but expanding society. The elite had to tolerate ethnic political participation. Ethnic groups had to tolerate one another. In Jacksonville, the temperance movement occasionally gained enough power to make the town dry: the Irish and Germans reluctantly then held separate, wet, Fourth of July celebrations outside the town. When the town was

wet, proper teetotalers avoided the town center on weekends. Each faction was unwilling to give up the prospect of economic growth to fight for its own successful dominance of the other factions. Tolerance paid.

In towns and cities where economic prospects appeared poor, where boosterism's seed did not sprout, the impetus to tolerate conflict was not so strong. Such was often the case in the urban South, where failure to achieve the West's economic and demographic growth undermined the credibility of urban boosters.^[23] The image a community gave to investors did not really matter where there were no investors and little hope for economic and demographic growth. Those in power sometimes resorted to violence to keep it. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, for example, local whites burned the offices of a black newspaper after its editor wrote in favor of political equality. Local whites then threatened black politicians with death if they did not immediately abdicate their elected positions. The Democrats used the opportunity provided by statewide outrage over the editorial as a pretext to expel the Republican and Populist government of the city.^[24]

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the major economic resource of the South was a staple crop agricultural system remarkable for its economic independence from nearby cities. While cotton left the South through urban entrepôts like Mobile and New Orleans, its transshipping did not create mercantile or manufacturing opportunities. Cotton did not support the dense network of cities, towns, villages, and economic activities that wheat and corn did in Illinois, for instance. In place of agricultural service towns, the post-Civil War South saw the oppressive emergence of the general store. Antithetical to the small town or city, the general store resisted all economies of scale and agglomeration, charged usurious fees for credit, and blocked more creative forms of economic activity. Two historians, in fact, argue that the general store provided a major force for retarding the economic growth of the South during the post-Civil War era.^[25]

The Interrelationship of Federal, State, and Local Governments

A truism in need of revision is that larger, constitutional governments, in particular those of the states, hold American city gov-

ernments hostage. Constitutional theorists in the late nineteenth century affirmed the dependent position of city governments. In addition, some dramatic partisan confrontations between state and city governments seem to have confirmed the theory, which conceptualized state government as granting only conditional governing power to cities, liable to revocation at any moment. Combine with this the notion that city governments have recently become passive dependents on federal aid, and one has the present popular vision of the abject status of city government.

The work of three scholars in particular provides strong grounds for revising this legal and constitutional picture. First, in a book primarily focusing on federal-state relations, Daniel J. Elazar demonstrates how from early in the nineteenth century, federal-state relations were cooperative and supportive, not separate and independent. In one chapter devoted to city-federal relationships, he points out how during the first half of the nineteenth century, the federal government aided cities in conscious, crucial, and varied ways. These particularly included the dredging of harbors and rivers, either conducted or supervised by the Army Engineers, actions explicitly authorized by the Constitution and detailed by the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1826. For instance, in the 1850s, the city of Richmond purchased a steam dredge which it then leased back to the Army, a lease which paid for the dredge. And the Army supervised the whole dredging operation. Elazar shows how most harbor and river projects were initiated and supervised by the Army, with cities funding costs of completion. Even earlier, in the 1820s, Norfolk had been an investor in the federal-state building of the Dismal Swamp Canal. And the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, another federal-state venture, had over 25 percent of its stock purchased by the cities of Alexandria, Georgetown, and Washington alone. In the case of Minnesota, Elazar estimates the relative contributions made to railroads in the nineteenth century by federal, state, and local governments: of the $66 million total, the federal government conveyed land valued at $60 million, but the state and local governments contributed the most cash, about $3 million each. From very early on, the three levels of government worked together, committing cash, land, and expertise in cooperative ventures.^[26]

Intergovernmental cooperation, not conflict, also characterized city-state relationships. Hendrik Hartog has shown how the early

nineteenth-century charters of New York City, which on the surface appeared to lessen city power, actually pointed it in the direction of the modern service city. And Jon C. Teaford makes the crucial point that legislation affecting cities relied on expert evaluation, which was most likely to be supplied by the cities themselves. Standing committees on legislation affecting cities needed city representatives, and much of the rural-urban legislative conflict had to be rhetorical, as no one understood the ramifications of technical legislation other than the city representatives. In an identical development at the level of state government, Elazar cites several examples of governors and legislators affirming the separation of state and federal powers at the same time that they accepted and managed various forms of federal aid. The point that comes across consistently is that local urban government was not the passive victim of the whims of rural legislators, but did pretty much as it wished.^[27]

Less clear is the perceived importance of local government. In a challenging article based on an analysis of Cleveland newspapers for the middle six decades of the nineteenth century, Samuel Kernell argues that local government diminished in its share of public discourse in the early decades of the century. Analyzed from another perspective, his data show that all forms of government earned more public discussion in that period, and that it was only in proportion to national political news that local political news diminished. And in fact, local news occupied more newspaper space than state political news for the years from 1860 to the end of the survey data, 1876. Given the argument of this chapter, that by the 1870s the foundation for the service-oriented city had become established, one can only wish that it were possible to extend Kernell's analysis three decades further. It seems quite likely that the service model of city government would have become less newsworthy and less visible as it became more successfully entrenched and silently bureaucratized.^[28]