1. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1891, 3d ed., 1917), II, 660-661, 666.

2. Surveys include Howard P. Chudacoff, The Evolution of American Urban Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981), and Sam Bass Warner, Jr. The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). More topically specialized surveys include Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); David R. Goldfield and Blaine A. Brownell, Urban America: From Downtown to No Town (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979); Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); and Zane L. Miller, The Urbanization of Modern America: A Brief History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973). For bibliography, see Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., ed., Los Angeles and Its Environs in the Twentieth Century: A Bibliography of a Metropolis , compiled under the auspices of the Los Angeles Metropolitan History Project (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1973).

3. Frederick H. Wines, Punishment and Reform (New York, 1895), cited by William R. Brock, Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 102.

4. I try in this book to avoid the pitfalls of two competing intellectual paradigms that have come to characterize much historical writing about the city. Often interesting history has come from both perspectives, but neither has been able to build a truly city-focused urban history. Neither has been able to stress the developing relationship between formal organizations and social change, and their city-based interaction. These two dominant and mutually exclusive paradigms have fragmented urban history, fragmented the history of government from the history of various city institutions like schools and police, and from the Social history of the city. They have led to an impasse in the field itself, producing more and more research but fewer and fewer central questions. And as the history of cities is itself a relatively narrow aspect of American history, we are too often left with a rich landscape of research ignored by its own producers. One of these models conceptualizes the history of the city within the context of social control. Essentially this position assumes that urban and industrial growth have bred misery and potential rebellion and that dozens of urban institutions, from political machines to welfare systems and schools, have all worked deliberately to prevent city dwellers from rebelling. Although this book does not disagree that many city organizations did indeed control the behavior of their citizens, it argues that this is a meaningless point, that all societies have controlling organizations and enforced behaviors. If anything, the degree of control in nineteenth-century U.S. cities was remarkable in its latitude, not its restrictiveness. The other historical model is functionalism, its central and unstated argument contrasting with the social control position. The functionalist perspective sees urban history as an unproblematic and natural sequence of causes and consequences: first a problem appears, e.g., poverty; then a solution, e.g., welfare agencies. While the social control analysis sees hidden motives behind every urban innovator, the functionalist approach is to pick an agency, and then show how it responded to a ''problem." The elemental dynamics of stories cast in such molds show the struggle of the forces of reform against the forces of conservatism.

5. Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), xii.

6. Quotation in Clay McShane, Technology and Reform: Street Railways and the Growth of Milwaukee, 1887-1900 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1974), 67.

7. For notable exceptions, see J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth, Dimensions in Urban History: History and Social Science Perspectives on Middle-Size American Cities (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), and Daniel J. Elazar et al., Cities of the Prairie Revisited: The Closing of the Metropolitan Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), and Cities of the Prairie: The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1970). For the postwar city, see Kenneth Fox, Metropolitan America (London: Macmillan, 1985).

8. Cited in Douglas E. Booth, "Transportation, City Building, and Financial Crisis: Milwaukee, 1852-1868," Journal of Urban History 9 (May 1983), 347, from Bayrd Still, Milwaukee: The History of a City (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1965), 174-175.

1. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, 1938), 346,495-496,551.

2. Ibid., 548, 543.

3. Ibid., 201, 519, figure 28; Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of The American City: 1878-1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning From Los Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972).

4. Mumford, The Culture of Cities , 166-167.

5. Ibid., 58, figure 30, 72.

6. Daniel Schaffer, Garden Cities for America: The Radburn Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 11, 169. Schaffer, in a remarkably even-handed assessment, points out that Radburn achieved its social harmony by using realtors who "discouraged" Jews and blacks, and that the town itself had no government, that it was run by the company that developed it.

7. Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1963), 9.

8. Mumford, The Culture of Cities , 165, figure 21.

9. Mumford, "Megalopolis as Anti-City," in The Urban Prospect (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 138-140.

10. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Town Planning (New York: Random House, 1961), 9.

11. Ibid., 15.

12. Ibid., 105.

13. T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Two Richard Sennetts," Journal of American Studies 19 (Fall 1985), 81-94; Richard Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872-1890 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).

14. Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).

15. James Leiby, Carroll Wright and Labor Reform: The Origins of Labor Statistics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960) describes Wright's career as an enlightened missionary of the movement to gather data that made an enormous impact, perhaps the impact, on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century census data collection. See especially the bibliography of Wright's publications (222-234). The career of his more visible predecessor, Francis A. Walker, director of the 1870 and 1880 census, president of MIT and early activist in the founding of the American Economic Association, is described in James P. Munroe, A Life of Francis Amasa Walker (New York: Holt, 1922). Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975).

16. Residual Plot of All Data Series Added (Natural Logs), 1790-1960

Source: Calculated from Bureau of the Census,  Historical Statistics of the United States, 
Colonial Times to 1970  (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), A-4-A-9.

17. Adna F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (New York: Macmillan, 1899); Katharine L. Bradbury, Anthony Downs, and Kenneth A. Small, Urban Decline and the Future of American Cities (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1982), 172-173: the authors look at the relationship of urban poverty to other problems, such as crime, and conclude that perhaps eliminating or at least moving the poor, "deconcentrating the poor," might not be a "long-term remed[y]," but it is "probably a prerequisite" for such long-term remedies. A quick glance at historical and comparative information contradicts their policy recommendation, yet they do not even pursue this intriguing avenue.

18. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) best exemplifies this perception of a fragmented reality. For my discussion of synthesis, see Eric H. Monkkonen, "The Dangers of Synthesis," American Historical Review 91 (December 1986), 1146-1157.

19. Some of the better-known city biographies include Bessie L. Pierce, A History of Chicago , 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937-57); Bayrd Still, Milwaukee: The History of a City (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1965); Blake McKelvey, Rochester , 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, and Rochester: Christopher Press, 1945-61); and Constance M. Green, Holyoke, Massachusetts: A Case History of the Industrial Revolution in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939). Recent examples of this important genre include Don H. Doyle, Nashville in the New South: 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); and Don H. Doyle, Nashville since the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). A recent specialized study is Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

20. Eric H. Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860-1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).

21. The "old" urban history is wonderfully summarized in Charles N. Glaab, "The Historian and the American City: A Bibliographic Survey," in Philip M. Hauser and Leo F. Schnore, eds., The Study of Urbanization (New York: John Wiley, 1965), 53-80. He presciently observes that a "rather dramatic academic breakthrough seems imminent" (72). He cites fourteen essays on historiography, including three in the 1940s; four in the 1950s; and four in the 1960s. For some examples of the new urban history, see Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); idem, The other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973); Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History , Yale Conference on the Nineteenth-Century Industrial City, 1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); Thernstrom, "Reflections on the New Urban History,'' Daedalus C (Spring 1971), 359-375; idem, "The New Urban History," in Charles F. Delzell, ed., The Future of History: Essays in the Vanderbilt University Centennial Symposium (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1877), 43-52; Kathleen N. Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth Century Poughkeepsie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); idem, The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

22. Robert Sweirenga, "Towards the 'The New Rural History': A Review Essay," Historical Methods 6 (1972), 111-122; Hal S. Barron, "Rediscovering the Majority: The New Rural History of the Nineteenth-Century North," Historical Methods 19 (Fall 1986), 141-152.

23. Richard Jensen, "Found: Fifty Million Missing Americans," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association (Rochester, November 1980).

24. Gary W. Cox, David Galenson, and J. Morgan Kousser, "The Log-Linear Analysis of Contingency Tables: An Introduction for Historians," Historical Methods 15 (1982), 152-169; Patrick M. Horan, "Occupational Mobility and Historical Social Structure," Social Science History 9 (1985), 25-48.

25. Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

26. Monkkonen, "Residential Mobility in England and the United States, 1850-1900," in Themes in British and American History: A Comparative Approach, c.1760-1970 , (Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1985), 77-83.

27. Michael Frisch, "American Urban History as an Example of Recent Historiography," History and Theory 18 (1979), 350-377; idem, "Ladders, Forests, and Racing Trails," Labor History 15 (1973), 461-466; James Henretta, ''Social History as Lived and Written," American Historical Review 84 (December 1979), 1293-1322; James Henretta, "The Study of Social Mobility: Ideological Assumptions and Conceptual Bias," Labor History XVIII (1977), 165-178; John E. Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town, 1870-1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).

The radical relativist critique of history is particularly vulnerable. It claims that we must take the past on its own terms, just as some anthropologists claim to do with other cultures. But this assumes that we can know the culturally different and very distant past, a nonrelativist assumption. Thus, we come to the crux of the relativist dilemma: the assumption that other cultures have other mentalities leads to the corollary that they cannot properly be understood from the outside. It may be cultural imperialism to see the past with our modes of analysis, but to do otherwise is an epistemological impossibility, by definition. How could one, for instance, write a properly cultural relativistic history of a group that had as a fundamental belief that there was no such thing as history, only an eternal present? Or could there be a properly appreciative understanding of a group that did not share the modern belief in culture?

28. Some of the new urban historians continue to be optimistic about mobility research; see Howard P. Chudacoff, "Success and Security: The Meaning of Social Mobility in America," Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982), 101-112. The two reanalyses of Thernstrom's data include Gary W. Cox, David Galenson, and I. Morgan Kousser, "The Log-Linear Analysis of Contingency Tables: An Introduction for Historians," Historical Methods 15 (Fall 1982), 152-169, and Patrick M. Horan, "Occupational Mobility and Historical Social Structure," Social Science History 9 (Winter 1985), 25-48.

29. Susanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984); Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality .

1. Giorgio Buccelatti, "The 'Urban Revolution' in a Socio-Historical Perspective," Mesopotamia XII (1977), 19-39; see also his "The Origin of Writing and the Beginning of History," in Giorgio Buccelatti and Charles Speroni, eds., The Shape of the Past: Studies in Honor of Franklin D. Murphy (Los Angeles: Institute of Archeology, 1981). Ira M. Lapidus, "Cities and Societies: A Comparative Study of the Emergence of Urban Civilization in Mesopotamia and Greece," Journal of Urban History 12 (May 1986), 257-292. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

2. There is an extensive anthropological literature about "lazy hunters and gatherers," arguing that the invention of agriculture actually reduced the amount of leisure time. See, for instance, Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972). Peter Just, "Time and Leisure in the Elaboration of Culture," Journal of Anthropological Research 36 (1980), 105-115, argues that only when leisure time became scarce could it become valuable and therefore worth rationalizing.

3. Peter Hall's justly renowned The World Cities , 3d ed. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 246, typifies the easy association of the industrial revolution and the modern city; he characterizes that period important to cities as beginning with this revolution.

4. Larry Long and Diana DeAre, "The Slowing of Urbanization in the U.S.," Scientific American 249 (July 1983), 33-41; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York: Charles Scribner, 1966), 9, points out that for most people in premodern England, the parish church was the "single group activity which they ordinarily shared with others outside their own families"; E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541 to 1871 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

5. Robert Higgs, "Cities and Yankee Ingenuity, 1870-1920," in Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz, eds., Cities in American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 16-22. The contribution of smaller cities to entrepreneurship is suggested also by the conclusions of John N. Ingham, "Rags to Riches Revisited: The Effect of City Size and Related Factors on the Recruitment of Business Leaders," Journal of American History 63 (1976), 615-637, who found that in smaller, newer cities, manufacturers were from nonelite backgrounds, contrary to larger and older cities.

6. Gunter Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

7. For instance, Cotton Mather spoke as though Boston were a walled city in 1693: "But as a proof that Contempt which this Unbelief has cast upon these proffers, I would seriously ask of the so many Hundreds above a Thousand People within these Walls: which of you all, O how few of you, can indeed say, Christ is mine, and I am his, and he is the Beloved of my Soul?" The Wonders of the Invisible World (London, 1862; orig. pub. Boston, 1693); citation supplied by Jon Butler.

8. On militias, see Lawrence D. Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); John K. Mahon, History of the Militia and the National Guard (New York: Macmillan, 1983). Quotation on Boston from John F. Sly, Town Government in Massachusetts (1620-1930) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 41.

For walls in St. Louis, see James B. Musick, St. Louis as a Fortified Town (St. Louis: R. F. Miller, 1941). Musick says that after 1812 the towers were dismantled so that the stones might be used for other construction, though one tower served as a jail until 1819 (112-114), both fates commonly met by the walls and entry gates of British and European cities. Howard J. Nelson, "Walled Cities of the United States," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 51 (March 1961), 1. It is interesting that Latin American cities often seem to have been planned as unwalled, grid pattern cities, influenced by some very small cities in Southern France, perhaps; see George Kubler, "Open-Grid Towns in Europe and America," in Richard P. Schaedel, Jorge E. Hardoy, and Nora Scott Kinzer, eds., Urbanization in the Americas from its Beginnings to the Present (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978), 327-342.

In Canada, Louisburg seems to have been much like a fortified European town although it was functionally a fort. The English tore down its walls in 1758 and the town disappeared; John W. Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America (Princeton University Press, 1971), 78-80.

9. Max Weber, The City , trans. and ed. Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York: The Free Press, 1958).

10. Sam B. Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

11. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (New York: Capricorn, 1955), 154-155, 325. Pigs, for instance, were a visible feature of American cities through the first half of the nineteenth century. They lived on garbage and human and animal excrement in the city streets and underneath stables. As late as 1865 the Superintendent of Health in Providence had to make arguments in favor of ridding the city of pigs, estimating that there were 400 hogs in Providence: Edwin M. Snow, "Report on Swine," Providence City Documents (Providence, 1865). Michael H. Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 159, reports that in 1865 Springfield similarly tried to ban pigs. For additional evidence on pigs, see Bettina Bradbury, "Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival among Montreal Families, 1861-1891," Labour/le Travail 14 (Fall 1984), 9-46; Richard L. Bushman, "Family Security in the Transition from Farm to City, 1750-1850," Journal of Family History 6 (Fall 1981), 238-256; Constance M. Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 78; Harold L. Peterson, Americans at Home: From Colonists to Late Victorians (New York: Charles Scribner, 1971), plate 103, cartoon; Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Property: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 139-142, 151, 201; idem, "Pigs and Positivism," Wisconsin Law Review no. 4 (1985), 899-935.

12. John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 99.

13. Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness , 155.

14. Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 41-67.

15. For a careful study that shows the low degree of urban networks, see Carville V. Earle, The Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement System: All Hallow's Parish, Maryland, 1650-1783 (Research Paper no. 10, Department of Geography, University of Chicago, 1975), who calculates "urban potentials of an agricultural parish": these show a continuous increase (with only one deviant year) from 1680 to 1789 (table 20). These potentials contrast with the actual development of urban nodes. In figures 9-16 Earle maps the location of occupational specialists, like merchants, ministers, and millwrights, in order to look at the clustering characteristics of urban or potentially urban sites. With the exception of London Town and its court house, there is surprising flux and no clear pattern of urban hierarchy. Richard Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). For an example of how a nearby big city pulled away urban functions, see Stephanie G. Wolf, Urban Village: Family, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Quotation from James T. Lemon, "The Urbanization and Development of Eighteenth Century South East Pennsylvania and Adjacent Delaware," William and Mary Quarterly 24 (October 1967), 508, 510-511.

16. Walter Christaller, Central Places of Southern Germany (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966); August Losch, The Economies of Location (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954). For a discussion of Philadelphia's economic ties to its hinterland towns and farms, see Diane Lindstrom, Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region, 1810-1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).

17. Brian J. L. Berry, "Cities as Systems within Systems of Cities," Papers and Proceedings of the Regional Science Association 13 (1964), 147-163, quotation on 161. This article contains the classic statement of the systems theory view. Berry saw cities as a part of a system that could be studied scientifically by regional science. For the historical application of a looser concept of urban systems, see: Michael P. Conzen, "The Maturing Urban System in the United States, 1840-1910," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (March 1977), 88-108; Michael P. Conzen, "A Transport Interpretation of the Growth of Urban Regions: An American Example," Journal of Historical Geography 1 (October 1975), 361-382; Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973); Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and City-Systems in the United States, 1840-1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Jeffrey Williamson and Joseph Swanson, "The Growth of Cities in the American Northeast, 1820-1870," Explorations in Entrepreneurial History IV (Fall 1966) Supplement, 1-101; Eric E. Lampard, "The Evolving System of Cities in the United States: Urbanization and Economic Development," in Harvey S. Perloff and Lowdon Wingo, Jr., eds., Issues in Urban Economics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 81-139.

18. Wyatt W. Belcher, The Economic Rivalry Between St. Louis and Chicago, 1850-1880 (New York: Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, 1947); James W. Livingood, The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 1780-1860 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1947); Jeffrey S. Adler, "Vagging the Demons and Scoundrels: Vagrancy and the Growth of St. Louis, 1830-1861," Journal of Urban History 13 (November 1986), 3-30, shows how this rivalry affected even the crime control policy of St. Louis. Michael P. Conzen, Farming in an Urban Shadow: The Influence of Madison's Proximity on the Agricultural Development of Blooming Grove, Wisconsin (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971).

19. For an excellent introduction, see Leslie J. King, Central Place Theory (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Press, 1984); Christaller, Central Places of Southern Germany ; Losch, Economies of Location .

20. B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750-1970 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 13-14; Department of International Economic and Social Affairs, Demographic Yearbook (New York: United Nations, 1983), 268; Los Angeles Times (8 April 1984), 11. Geographers debate the relationship of primacy and distributed urban networks to economic development or dependency, political dominance, and other issues: for a succinct summary with bibliography, see Nancy Ettlinger, "A Note on Rank-Size and Primacy: In Pursuit of a Parsimonious Explanation," Urban Studies 21 (May 1984), 195-197. For Paris, see Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830-1852 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

21. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information , 14-15.

22. On coffee house functions see, for instance, Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860 (New York: Charles Scribner, 1939), 260-286, where he places them in a larger description of New York City's commercial world.

23. James H. Johnson, Urban Geography: An Introductory Analysis (New York: Pergamon Press, 1967), discusses the rank size rule, 99-103; see also, King, Central Place Theory .

24. Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness , 109. Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 82, shows how seventeenth-century New England merchants maintained "without exception, close ties—usually kinship relations—with merchants in England"; Albion, The Rise of New York Port , 230-241; and Christine L. Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1730 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984).

25. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information.

26. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) shows the power of mass politics in the colonial cities and in turn the importance of these cities in the American Revolution.

27. Ken Young and Patricia L. Garside, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change, 1837-1981 (London: Arnold, 1982), 22-23.

28. Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979); D. B. White, A History of the Corporation of Liverpool, 1835-1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961); Clive Emsley, Policing and Its Context, 1750-1870 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 68.

29. Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 12, discusses the prosperous Royalist merchant's extensive property holdings in Boston, his suburban country house, and hundred of acres of farm land. In The New England Merchants , Bailyn shows how for merchants "real property was the most secure, if not the only secure, form of investment" (99). As a result, "one commodity absorbed the intense interest of every merchant without exception—land" (101). For a brief exposition of the consuming drive for land as wealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see G. R. Elton, "Contentment and Discontent on the Eve of Colonization," in David B. Quinn, ed., Early Maryland in a Wider World (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 114-118.

30. Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition, 1500-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 46-61.

31. Albion, The Rise of New York Port . The importance of initial advantages in determining city growth relative to other factors, from changing technology of transportation to specialization to size, has generated considerable debate among economists and geographers who are interested in building general models of growth. For a summary of this literature with extensive bibliographic notes, see Edward K. Muller, "Regional Urbanization and the Selective Growth of Towns in North American Regions," Journal of Historical Geography 3 (January 1977), 21-39. Carville V. Earle, "The First English Towns of North America," Geographical Review 67 (January 1977), 34-50, argues that the English conceived of the settlements as towns with monopolies, thus deliberately creating small primate towns. Natural advantages favored some over others, but only after the initial settlement decisions had been reached. Thus the process was political. Elsewhere, Earle and Ronald Hoffman, "Urban Development in the Eighteenth-Century South," Perspectives in American History X (1976), 7-80, make a different argument, claiming that the nature of the region's staple crops determines the nature of urbanization, in particular of networks; cotton and tobacco needing only minimal port towns, wheat supporting a more developed urban network. Hence the differences between Maryland and the colonies further to the south.

Joseph A. Ernst and H. Roy Merrens, "'Camden's Turrets Pierce the Skies!' The Urban Process in the Southern Colonies in the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly 30 (October 1973), 555, make the bizarre argument that size is unimportant relative to economic function: thus tiny southern colonial hamlets that performed vital economic functions constituted cities. Presumably then, a tiny inn or gas station in the middle of the desert or even a turnpike toll booth could be a city, if not a metropolis!

32. Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), argues that the "idea of a collective society" was contradicted by "endorsement of the subjugation of wild lands" (3). The Puritans' "inability to produce a suitable theory of society . . . reveals the importance of the wilderness" (4). Stilgoe, Common Landscape , 52-54, emphasizes the New Englanders' consciousness of a dichotomy between the town and its cultivated fields and cleared meadows versus the uncontrolled and feared wilderness. Even the woodlots were often considered wilderness.

33. Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 1-6, has developed the notion of a "fragment culture." Hartz draws certain conclusions for this concept which I do not intend to invoke here, in particular the notion that the "fragments" of European culture in the new world ceased their evolution but continued to progress in Europe. The founding fathers saw the Constitution as documenting the United States's escape from feudal ties.

34. Gideon Sjoberg The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (New York: Free Press, 1960), 91-92. For a summary of the declining utility of walls see Josef W. Konvitz, The Urban Millennium: The City-Building Process from the Early Middle Ages to the Present (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 47-53.

35. John Borchert, "American Metropolitan Evolution," American Geographical Review 57 (July 1967), 301-332; note that Warner, Urban Wilderness , acknowledges his periodization scheme to Borchert, 60.

36. Johnson, Urban Geography , discusses density gradients, 52-57, 172-173; see also, Werner Z. Hirsch, Urban Economics (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 60-67, 72, 76.

37. Kenneth A. Lockridge, "Land, Population, and the Evolution of New England Society, 1630-1790," Past & Present 39 (April 1968), 62-80; Kenneth T. Jackson, "Urban Deconcentration in the Nineteenth Century: A Statistical Inquiry," in Leo F. Schnore, ed., The New Urban History: Quantitative Explorations by American Historians (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 110-142; John W. Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), quotation from 428. Reps cites the authorities Alberti and Thomas More, who in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had advocated moving noisy or smelly industry outside of the city (7, 12). in addition he cites a 1695 law in Annapolis, which required that all trades that "annoy, or disquiet the neighbors or inhabitants of the town" must be located outside of its boundaries (135).

38. Richard R. Beeman, "The New Social History and the Search for 'Community' in Colonial America," American Quarterly 29 (Fall 1977), 422-443.

39. Albion, New York Port , 373-386, describes the early nineteenth-century competition of New York City with Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore for the "Western front," the opening up of cities and the agricultural west through rail and canal trade.

40. Henry C. Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Binford establishes that the suburban communities of Boston preceded commuting, that they were independent political and cultural communities, "trying to exploit opportunities available at the city's edge" (2). Thus he makes clear that even for suburbs, politics determined transportation shape, the antitechnological determinist position this book develops. Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (306), notes "the unique development . . . the appearance of suburbs" with mansions for the wealthy in the 1740s. Boston and New York, he says, remained compact, but the wealthy there may simply have maintained two places of residence, thus avoiding the appearance of suburban development. And the very wealthiest Bostonians, like John Winthrop, from the outset, granted themselves huge country estates to provide incomes (Rutman, Winthrop's Boston , 45).

41. The work on individual New England towns has been systematically tested for New Hampshire and confirms the finding that when towns reached an optimal density, out-migration began to occur. Darrett B. Rutman, "People in Process: The New Hampshire Towns of the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Urban History 1 (1975), 268-292; see also, Charles Wetherell, "A Note on Hierarchical Clustering," Historical Methods 10 (Summer 1977), 109-116.

42. Jon A. Peterson, "The City Beautiful Movement: Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings," Journal of Urban History 2 (August 1976), 415-434.

43. Population pressure and the resolution of selective out-migration functioned in small towns from the colonial era onward. Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970) established the pattern of family control over population relative to the increasingly scarce agricultural resources for seventeenth-century New England towns. John P. Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 136, 499, argues for social tension brought on by community. Douglas L. Jones, "The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts," Journal of Social History 3 (January 1975), 28-54. Daniel S. Smith, "The Estimates of Early American Historical Demographers: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, What Steps in the Future?" Historical Methods 12 (Winter 1979), 24-38, has shown how colonial towns with limited growth possibilities used migration as a "safety-valve." Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) shows how Chelsea, New Hampshire, handled limited opportunities for growth and kept a stable community through the last half of the nineteenth century through no in-migration and the out-migration of older children.

44. Nash, The Urban Crucible , 126-127, 172, 179.

45. At least through the first half of the nineteenth century, cities constructed public market buildings. See Don H. Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 195, for a discussion of a small city's market built in 1834.

46. James Stirling Young, The Washington Community, 1800-28 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966).

47. Ibid., 19-20.

48. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans., Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

49. See Jon C. Teaford, The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650-1825 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 39-43, which discusses Boston's refusal to license a market, casting an interesting light upon the benefits and costs of city market control.

50. Ibid.,

51. Ibid., 97, 99, 106, 115. Teaford argues that economic ideologies of unrestricted trade and freedom from governmental interference motivated the sweeping away of the city's regulatory power. But the early nineteenth-century belief was that the "power to tax involves the power to destroy," which suggests that postrevolutionary city charters were not actually designed to facilitate Adam Smith's principles of free trade. This famous view on tax as a power to destroy was expressed in 1819 by Chief Justice John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland .

1. During the Revolution, the British occupation of the city sent the population over 30,000, according to Oscar T. Barck, Jr., New York During the War for Independence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 215. Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 8, reports from Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), a population of 21,863 for the whole of the island of Manhattan in 1771, 13,046 for 1756. Of course, there was no federal census prior to 1790. By using the log of the city's population from 1790 to 1870, which is a virtual straight line, one can estimate the previous two decade's populations without the mid-1770s wartime bulges. These give population estimates of 14,762 for 1770 and 22,971 for 1780, considerably less than those in the colonial censuses. Constant = 4.36, coefficient = 0.192, R = 0.9978, R ² = 0.996. Source: 1970 Census of Population: Characteristics of the Population , vol. 1, Pt 1., Sect. 1, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, June 1973) 116-119. England, of course, did see some enormous new cities constructed in the nineteenth century in the industrial midlands. Nevertheless, most of its cities built upon the legal precedents of ancient charters and corporate privileges.

2. Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800 (London: Methuen, 1984), 21-22, 53-54, deals deftly with this problem, the "tar baby of urban studies."

3. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas, or SMSAs, introduced as an urban accounting measure in 1950, are designed to capture the "natural" boundaries of cities, many of which are now composed of dozens of smaller political entities but whose population merges across boundaries to make up one large urban area. These measures have been improved by a newer measure, the Standard Consolidated Statistical Area, which ignores the county boundaries used in the SMSA measure. See Bureau of the Census, Standard Consolidated Statistical Areas and Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas; Defined by the Office of Management and Budget, January 1981 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), and Ira Rosenwaike, "A Critical Examination of the Designation of Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas," Social Forces 48 (March 1970), 322-333. About three-fourths of the U.S. population lived in SMSAs in 1980. Statistical Abstract of the United States: National Data Book and Guide to Sources, 1982-83 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), 649.

4. Brian J. L. Berry, ''The Counterurbanization Process: America since 1970," in Berry, ed., Urbanization and Counterurbanization (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1976). Statistical Abstract, 1982-1983 , 15.

5. de Vries, European Urbanization , 45, 74, 146.

6. The relative growth rates of cities under 10,000 compared to those larger may be estimated by regression, using the numbers in each category by decade.

For a discussion of probable sizes and numbers of British cities and towns, see Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., English Towns in Transition, 1500-1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 8-9 and maps 1 and 2.

8. English statistic calculated from data in C. M. Law, "The Growth of the Urban Population in England and Wales, 1801-1911," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41 (June 1967) 125-143. U.S. statistics from Rosenwaike, Population History , 58, and the Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1975). Note that Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973) has emphasized New York's dominance by showing how it has remained the primary metropolis. The point I wish to make here is comparative; that while number one, the city most emphatically was not the only metropolis.

9. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951); Edward K. Muller, "Selective Urban Growth in the Middle Ohio Valley, 1800-1860," Geographical Review 66 (April 1976), 199.

10. Robert W. Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964) and Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Antebellum Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).

11. John Borchert, "American Metropolitan Evolution," American Geographical Review 57 (July 1967), 301-332. In some places, North Dakota, for instance, railroad companies did determine both location and forms of small towns, see John C. Hudson, Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). For a general discussion, see Michael Conzen, "The American Urban System in the Nineteenth Century," in David T. Herbert and Ronald J. Johnston, eds., Geography and the Urban Environment: Progress in Research and Applications (London, 1981), IV, 295-347.

12. Herbert W. Rice, "Early Rivalry among Wisconsin Cities for Railroads," Wisconsin Magazine of History 35 (Autumn 1951), 15, shows that between 1836 and 1859, 125 Wisconsin cities and towns were granted charters for railroad corporations: of these only fourteen built any railroad at all.

13. See the summary of the federal support of roads in Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, America's Highways, 1776-1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), 16-27. Carter Goodrich, "National Planning of Internal Improvements," Political Science Quarterly LXIII (March 1948), 16-44, provides a classic summary and critique of early federal transportation aid: although the focus of his article is federal, it is clear that local transportation seemed far less important that did national. One can only surmise that the historian's interest in national underwriting of long transport routes came as a consequence of local, urban successes, and the unexamined assumption that national transportation was somehow more important to economic growth than local.

14. Roberta B. Miller, City and Hinterland: A Case Study of Urban Regional Growth and Regional Development (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Hal S. Barron, "Rediscovering the Majority: The New Rural History of the Nineteenth-Century North," Historical Methods 19 (Fall 1986), 141-152. Robert Doherty, Society and Power: Five New England Towns, 1800-1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977) examines the mobility patterns of five small towns, including a declining one, in a regional network. Stephanie Graumman Wolf, Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania 1683-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); John C. Hudson, Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Edward K. Muller, "Selective Urban Growth," and also "Regional Urbanization and the Selective Urban Growth of Towns in the North American Regions,'' Journal of Historical Geography 3 (January 1977), 21-39.

15. On entrepreneurial rivalry, see Harry N. Scheiber, "Urban Rivalry and Internal Improvements in the Old Northwest, 1820-1860," Ohio History 71 (October 1962), 227-239, or the classic, James W. Livingood, The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 1780-1860 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1947). See Harold L. Platt, City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston, Texas, 1830-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), Chapter 1, and 175-176, for a sensitive analysis of one side of a local rivalry, its entrepreneurial, environmental, and to a lesser extent systematic facets. H. T. Johns, Duluth , (Duluth: n.p., c.1873), 1.

16. Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah and Nevada (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); Lyle Dorsett, The Queen City: A History of Denver (Denver: Pruett, 1977); 1970 Census of Population: Characteristics of the Population , vol. 1, Pt. 1, Sect. 1, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, June 1973), 116-119.

17. Ellen Liebman, California Farmland: A History of Large Agricultural Landholdings (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983) analyzes the historical growth of California's large land holdings, identifying quite different reasons and usages for such parcels over the past two centuries. Essential to her explanation is the role of government—in the Spanish period, the explicit policy of nonprivate land holding and urban-oriented settlement patterns; and in the second half of the nineteenth century, the creation of parcels and private sales schemes of state and federal governments, both facilitating large-scale land accumulation patterns.

18. Jane M. Pederson, "The Country Visitor: Patterns of Hospitality in Rural Wisconsin, 1880-1925," Agricultural History 58 (July 1984), 347-364.

19. Statistical Abstract, 1982-1983, 16, 20.

20. David Clark, Urban Geography (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 49, cited in deVries, European Urbanization , 6.

1. See Jon C. Teaford, The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins Of Modern Urban Government, 1650-1825 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 3-34. Teaford emphasizes the reforming zeal of the Massachusetts Bay colonists, without pointing out their caution in reminding England of the precarious state of their charter. One wonders how much this resulted from reforming zeal and how much from a rural power bias created in the fifty years prior to the revocation. Nathan Mathews, Jr., The City Government of Boston (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1895), 164, discusses Boston's first charter of 1822.

2. Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: American Real Estate Developers, Urban Planners, and the Creation of Modern Residential Subdivisions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

3. Bayrd Still characterizes the growth of formal, bureaucratized city services in Milwaukee as "inevitable," even though his own detailed research shows nothing of the kind. Quoted by David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 31.

For a general discussion of resistance to roads in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries see John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 128-132. For the specific local instance of resistance to Slater, see Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 170-173.

4. See Teaford, The Municipal Revolution , 18, 52.

5. Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Juvenile Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). See Michael B. Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History (New York: Academic Press, 1983) for an empirical analysis of poor relief systems in New York from the social control perspective. See also Andrew Scull and Stanley Cohen, eds., Social Control and the State: Comparative and Historical Essays (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983). For critiques of the social control thesis as it relates to social welfare, see Walter I. Trattner, ed., Social Welfare or Social Control? Some Historical Reflections on Regulating the Poor (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983); Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

6. Racist utterances, ethnic hostility, and class bias have only become unfashionable and in bad taste in the past thirty years or so. Virtually any nineteenth- or early twentieth-century newspaper contains statements outrageous enough to offend the sensibilities of any contemporary reader. When in the post-World War II era scholars began to become more sensitive to such explicit biases, they began to question the benign motives of earlier social activists. The contemporary historian should feel obligated to point out racism, sexism, and class bias, but must be equally cautious in making such negative social attitudes or actions the sole explanation for past behavior. It is important and appropriate to be aware of the unfair aspects of crime control, but one must not let these aspects become the central focus of analysis. In letting them dominate, far more significant underlying dynamics can disappear. For a sustained critique of the erroneous thinking that the social control approach has fostered, see Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I," American Historical Review 90 (April 1985), 339-361.

A major conceptual complexity in the broad history of crime and its control in the United States emerges from the disparity between the levels of government involved in defining and enforcing the criminal law. While the definition of criminal behavior has always been predominantly at the level of the colonial or state government, certain offenses have been reserved for higher sovereignty. However, the government level which assumes the greatest obligation for crime control has changed considerably from the seventeenth century, reflecting in part the changing nature of the state itself. The publicly imputed sense of obligation first grew from its traditional level with the adoption of city- and state-run penitentiaries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, then escalated with urban policing through the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally the federal government assumed new responsibilities in the early twentieth century with the newly designated federal crimes of kidnapping and bank robbery and the creation of the FBI. See Ernest K. Alix, Ransom Kidnapping in America, 1874-1974: The Creation of a Capital Crime (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); David K. Watson, "Growth of the Criminal Law of the United States," Congressional Serial Set, 57th Congress, 1st Session, Doc. 362 (1902).

7. For a classic early empirical analysis purporting to show how urbanization causes crime, see Marshall B. Clinard, "The Process of Urbanization and Criminal Behavior," American Journal of Sociology 48 (September 1942), 202-213. Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860-1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975) builds a criticism of the hypothesis that urbanization causes crime.

8. Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).

9. Ted R. Gurr, "Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence," in Norval Morris and Michael Tonry, eds., Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research , vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 295-353; for England and Wales, see V. A. C. Gatrell, "The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England," in Gatrell, B. P. Lenman, and G. Parker, eds., Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1850 (London: Europa, 1980), 238-370.

10. Richard Block, ed., Victimization and Fear of Crime: World Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1984); Dan A. Lewis and Greta Salem, Fear of Crime: Incivility and the Production of a Social Problem (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1986). For a brief summary of the relationship of reporting to crime, see Herbert Jacob and Robert L. Lineberry, "Governmental Responses to Crime," Executive Summary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1981), 12-14.

11. Arthur P. Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), 218-219, cites the example of Williamsburg, where four night watchmen were voted annual salaries in 1722; the continuity of this arrangement is doubtful. Philadelphia's first night watch was not created until 1702, and existed as a voluntary watch until 1751, when a paid watch was created. All persons chosen by the council had to serve on the voluntary force or were fined. Howard O. Sproggle, The Philadelphia Police, Past and Present (Philadelphia, 1887), 39-44; Theodore N. Ferdinand, "Criminality, the Courts, and the Constabulary in Boston: 1702-1967," Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 17 (July 1980), 193.

12. Harring, Policing a Class Society , 33-34, claims that there was a "direct link" between riots like the Chicago lager beer riots and the creation of the police. I fundamentally disagree, see Monkkonen, Police in Urban America , 49-58. Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

13. For resistance to uniforms, see Monkkonen, Police in Urban America , 44-46.

14. Gustave Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979, 1st American edition, 1833), 55.

15. Pieter Spierenburg, ed., The Emergence of Carceral Institutions: Prisons, Galleys and Lunatic Asylums, 1550-1900 , Centrum voor Maatschappijgeschiedenis, 12 (Rotterdam: Erasmus University, 1984), 22-24; Gary B. Nash, "Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia," William and Mary Quarterly 33 (January 1976), 3-30. Reflecting their medieval perspective, the early English colonizers of Virginia saw cities and towns as institutions of social control, since their inhabitants could be under surveillance. See Sylvia D. Fries, The Urban Idea in Colonial America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), 110-111; Stephen S. Webb, "Army and Empire: English Garrison Government in Britain and America, 1569 to 1763," William and Mary Quarterly , 3d ser., 34 (January 1977), 1-31.

16. Nicole H. Rafter, Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons, 1800-1935 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), 35. Don H. Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 62-91, devotes a chapter to Jacksonville's institution and railroad hunting: it succeeded in getting some state institutions, like the deaf and dumb asylum, but failed to get the penitentiary. See W. David Lewis, From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796-1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965); Negley K. Teeters, The Origins of the Penitentiary: The Walnut Street Jail at Philadelphia, 1773-1835 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Prison Society, 1955).

17. Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); James F. Richardson, The New York Police, Colonial Times to 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Lowell M. Limpus, History of the New York Fire Department (New York: Dutton, 1940), 243, quoting an 1864 report by the volunteers which made a last ditch attempt at self-reform. For a different interpretation, see Richard B. Calhoun, "New York Fire Department Modernization, 1865-1870: A Civil War Legacy," New-York Historical Society Quarterly (January/April 1976), 7-34.

18. Bruce Laurie, "Fire Companies and Gangs in Southwark: The 1840s," 71-87, and David R. Johnson, "Crime Patterns in Philadelphia, 1840-1870," 103, both in Allan F. Davis and Mark Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790-1840 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973); New York Times (3 January 1853), p. 6, col. 1.

19. Limpus, History of the New York Fire Department , 187-188, 196-198, 210-211, 241-242. Letty Anderson, "Hard Choices: Supplying Water to New England Towns," Journal of Interdisciplinary History XV (Autumn 1984), 216-217, discusses fire insurance in relation to water supply, an essential element of the changing fire fighting technology. In the 1880s, lower fire insurance rates for cities with water systems were assured, and by 1888, she notes, the American Water Works Association claimed insurance rate reductions of 20% to 50% in towns with adequate water supply. Essentially, one may argue, the insurance industry rationalized and distributed the risks of fire so that it made economic sense for property owners to opt for higher taxes imposed by municipal water and fire fighting. Prior to such cost sharing, property owners would be willing to take the risk that their property would not be destroyed by fire.

20. Judith W. Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 42, dates the creation of the Milwaukee Board of Health to 1867: the police, created in 1874, provided the city with regular, if low-level, health control in parallel with the Board's more direct and medically oriented work. While one attended to basic sanitation problems—open sewers, improper disposal of slaughterhouse offal—the other worked on more specific diseases.

21. For my discussion of the many activities of the police, see Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 86-128, T. D. Woolsey, "Nature and Sphere of Police Power," Journal of Social Science (1871), 97-114: this article comes at what may he an important transitional point in the concept of the police power of the state. Originally it was considered, as a legal concept, to express the power of any state entity to control the order and housekeeping, in a behavioral sense, of its inhabitants and visitors. Woolsey's article uses the concept of a dangerous class to reorient the term toward the exclusive control of criminal behavior. Twenty-five years later, authors writing on police power did not even mention earlier and broader concepts: by the end of the nineteenth century the term applied specifically to the duties and obligations of the city police departments in the very narrowest sense. See for the latter, H. C. Kudlich, "The Abuse of Police Power," The Forum (1897-98), 487-500.

22. Seymour J. Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York (New York: John Wiley, 1966).

1. Judith M. Diamondstone "Philadelphia's Municipal Corporation, 1701-1776," Pennsylvania Magazine of History XC (April 1966), 183-201.

2. Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).

3. Jon C. Teaford, The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650-1825 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 68-90, provides the details of the charter challenges and revisions. Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

4. Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 98, 111-112.

5. Lee Benson introduced this concept in his analysis of voter support for Andrew Jackson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); see also the review article by Richard L. McCormick, "Ethno-Cultural Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century American Voting Behavior," Political Science Quarterly 89 (June 1974), 351-377.

6. Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 262.

7. Terrence McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socio-economic Change, Political Culture and Fiscal Policy in San Francisco, 1850-1906 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986), 240, states that "the public sector was bound by chains that the policymakers themselves had formed." McDonald also shows how pluralistic reform came from the elite boss, with James Phelan's explicit electoral strategy to woo voters to a new, positive conception of the state. "Reform in San Francisco, therefore, was forced, because of its politically insurgent status, to be pluralistic in its class and ethnic bases" (260). Burton W. Folsom, Jr., Urban Capitalists: Entrepreneurs and City Growth in Pennsylvania's Lackawanna and Lehigh Regions, 1800-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 76, quotes from the Scranton Republican (18, 25 May and 8 June 1866).

8. Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) developed this scenario based upon a prosopographical analysis of the elected officials of New Haven. For an application of Dahl's typology to the mayors of Chicago, see Donald S. Bradley and Mayer N. Zald, "From Commercial Elite to Political Administrators: The Recruitment of the Mayors of Chicago," American Journal of Sociology 71 (September 1965), 153-167. Michael H. Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 243-244, shows that Dahl's model obscures at least at much as it illuminates about Springfield between 1840 and 1880. Working-class aldermen actually decreased in proportional representation by 1880, although Frisch's narrative suggests that they regained power in the next two decades.

9. For a book that clears up much Tweed apocrypha, see Leo Hershkowitz, Tweed's New York: Another Look (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1977).

10. The four biographies here are based on articles in Melvin G. Holli and Peter d'A. Jones, eds., Biographical Dictionary of American Mayors, 1820-1980: Big City Mayors, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St. Louis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981). These are: (Lawrence) Jacob Judd, 211-212; (Coman) Leo Hershkowitz, 75; (Low) W. Roger Biles, 221-222; (Wagner) Lurton W. Blasingame, 377-378.

11. David M. Tucker, Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948-1968 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 17-39.

12. Blame A. Brownell, "The Urban South Comes of Age, 1900-1940," in Brownell and David R. Goldfield, The City in Southern History: The Growth of Urban Civilization in the South (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1977), 142-143.

William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 224. The Peases argue that Buston's entrepreneurs operated in a friendly political milieu, but that they did not use it or expect it to supply them capital or decrease risk (39). Charleston's entrepreneurs, on the other hand, acted only when the government would support their activities (52). This limited their scope of activity and contributed to a less aggressive entrepreneurial community. The Pease's argument depends on an analysis of a large sample of elites, economic and political. They present the results of their careful collective biographies in table A-4 (236). A reanalysis of the tables shows that while their assertions are statistically significant, the size of the differences is not substantively large. For instance, for the two cities' economic elites to have had exactly the same levels of political participation, 18 of 1,000 in Boston's economic elite would have to have been more active, and 17 of 424 in Charleston's would have to have been less active. These are quite small differences, some of which may be due to Boston's much greater size. For a social analysis of the backgrounds of Atlanta office holders, see Eugene J. Watts, The Social Bases of City Politics: Atlanta, 1865-1903 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).

13. Folsom, Urban Capitalists , 76.

14. See McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy .

15. Note that because smaller cities displayed more of the booster spirit, the older eastern cities seemed to be less self-promoting, but this was simply a matter of size, rather than any inherent difference. Carl Abbott, Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 206, contrasts the East with the rest of the United States, ignoring smaller eastern towns, and focusing on the historical literature of antiurbanism which came from reformers. For a discussion of eastern boosterism in a small city, see Carl Abbott, "Norfolk in the New Century: The Jamestown Exposition and Urban Boosterism," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85 (1977), 86-96; for the South, see Justin Fuller, "Boom Towns and Blast Furnaces: Town Promotion in Alabama, 1885-1893," Alabama Review 29 (1976), 37-48. Robert Higgs, "Cities and Yankee Ingenuity, 1870-1914,'' in Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz, eds., Cities in American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 16-22. Holli and Jones, Biographical Dictionary of American Mayors, 1820-1980 .

16. Don H. Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978). For local government in Jacksonville, see Don H. Doyle, "Chaos and Community in a Frontier Town: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1860" (Ph. D. diss., Northwestern University, 1973), 266-280. For a systematic and rich study that intentionally avoids a focus on large cities, see J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth, Dimensions in Urban History: Historical and Social Science Perspectives on Middle-Size American Cities (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979). Henry Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 154.

17. Michael H. Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); Stuart M. Blumin, The Urban Threshold: Growth and Change in a Nineteenth-Century American Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Lewis Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954); Robert Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968).

18. Michael Conzen, "The Maturing Urban System in the United States, 1840-1910," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (1977), 88-108.

19. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Harcourt, 1922). Chicago Press and Tribune , 4 January 1859, quoted by Abbott, Boosters and Businessmen , 128. See Abbott, 227-258, for an extensive and valuable bibliography of materials on boosterism, government, and economic growth.

20. Folsom, Urban Capitalists ; Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974).

21. On boosterism generally, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), 113-168; Allan Bogue, "Social Theory and the Pioneer," Agricultural History 34 (January 1960), 21-34; Dykstra, The Cattle Towns ; and Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community , especially 62-91.

22. Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community , 62.

23. Blaine A. Brownell, The Urban Ethos in the New South, 1920-1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976).

24. Laura A. Brockington, "Redeeming North Carolina: The Wilmington Race Riot of November 1898" (Honors Thesis, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983) shows how Democrats promoted a "race riot" to expel the Republican and Populist government of the city.

25. Richard L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); see also the debate stimulated by this book, Gary M. Walton and James F. Sheperd, eds., Market Institutions and Economic Progress in the New South, 1865-1900 (New York: Academic Press, 1981).

26. Daniel J. Elazar, The American Partnership: Intergovernmental Cooperation in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 42, 61, 171, 265, 266-277.

27. Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 83-102; Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Elazar, The American Partnership , 208-209.

28. Samuel Kernell, "The Early Nationalization of Political News in America," Studies in American Political Development: An Annual 1 (1986), 255-278, and Monkkonen, "Comment on Kernell," Studies in American Political Development: An Annual 2 (1987), 337-340.

For a study that analyzes the notion of community, public and private, as envisioned by newspapers, see David P. Nord, "The Public Community: The Urbanization of Journalism in Chicago," Journal of Urban History 11 (August 1985), 411-442. Although Nord is concerned with the issue of community, his article also provides an illuminating contrast between the relatively backward looking Times in a full-fledged, antigovernment stance, contrasted with the probusiness, proservice stance of the city's two other leading newspapers, the Tribune and the Daily News . The latter two papers fully supported the emerging service city, even though one was "conservative" and the other pro-working class. The difference exemplifies the transition front a regulatory to a service city.

Some of the details in this chapter have been drawn from my research presented in "The Politics of Municipal Indebtedness and Default, 1850-1936," in Terrence J. McDonald and Sally Ward, eds., The Politics of Urban Fiscal Policy (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1984), 125-159. I wish to thank Pat Thane for sharing her insights and bibliographic knowledge of British public policy with me.

1. Terrence J. McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change, Political Culture and Fiscal Policy in San Francisco, 1860-1906 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987), 158-261, shows how politically sensitive all politicians were in making the annual budget. He argues that because of this delicacy, incrementalism rather than any more dramatic actions surrounded the urban budget: see also McDonald and Ward, eds., The Politics of Urban Fiscal Policy , 13-37. Michael H. Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 174, provides evidence for a similar view, although he also argues that the impact of local wartime expenditures, in particular for hiring draft substitutes during the Civil War, changed and enlarged the sense of the city budget (66). Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 34, makes a similar argument for those particular cases where explicitly labor-oriented parties won local elections, claiming that the Knights of Labor had a more limited conception of the role of the state than did industrial leaders. However, at least some of his evidence shows that local Knights candidates did actually increase local expenditures (58).

For a useful summary of the structure of local government as created by the Northwest Ordinance in the late eighteenth century, see Edward W. Bemis, "Local Government in Michigan and the Northwest," John Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 5 (March 1883).

2. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964). For a historical discussion of public goods, the free rider problem, and governmental expenditures, see Roger L. Ransom, "In Search of Security: The Growth of Government in the United States, 1902-1970," in Ransom, Richard Sutch, and Gary M. Walton, eds., Explorations in the New Economic History: Essays in Honor of Douglass C. North (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 131-136 and n. 11. For a background theory of local government see Charles M. Tiebout, "A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures," The Journal of Political Economy LXIV October 1956), 416-424.

3. Joseph Schumpeter, "The Crisis of the Tax State," International Economic Papers 4 (1954, first published in 1918), 5-38. Aaron Wildavsky, Budgeting: A Comparative Theory of the Budget Process (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975). For background on tax, see Summer Benson, "A History of the General Property Tax," in G. C. S. Benson, S. Benson, H. McClelland, and P. Thompson, eds., The American Property Tax: Its History, Administration, and Economic Impact (Claremont, Cal.: College Press, 1965), 11-81; and Richard T. Ely, Taxation in American States and Cities (New York: Crowell, 1888), especially on tax history (25-54), and his reform proposals (251-263), which he makes in the context of a sophisticated analysis of the role of local government. In fact, Ely took the strength and taxing ability of local government as the main index of social and economic development, arguing that "as the South develops, local government must become more important" (261). H. Secrist, "An Economic Analysis of the Constitutional Restrictions on Public Indebtedness in the United States," Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin 637, Economic and Political Sciences, 8, 1 (Madison, 1914); E. R. A. Seligman, Essays in Taxation (New York: Macmillan, 1923).

4. See, for instance, Paul V. Betters, Recent Federal City Relations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Conference of Mayors, 1936), for the range of federal programs with urban impact; Clarence E. Ridley and Orin F. Nolting, eds., What the Depression Has Done to Cities (Chicago: International City Managers' Association, 1935).

5. Paul V. Betters, Municipal Finance Problems and Proposals for Federal Legislation (chicago: American Municipal Association, n.d.), and Cities and the 1936 Congress (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Conference of Mayors, 1936).

6. The National Income and Product Accounts of the United States, 1929-76: A Supplement to the Survey of Current Business (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, 1981), table 3.3, 128-129.

7. Glenn W. Fisher and Robert R Fairbanks, Illinois Municipal Finance: A Financial and Economic Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), table 35, 160-161.

8. For Illinois proportions of total local government revenues by tax sources, see Bureau of the Census, Census of Governments 5, 6 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1967), Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics on Governmental Finances and Employment (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), 86. For 1962, Fisher and Fairbanks, Illinois Municipal Finance , 161; for 1977, Bureau of the Census, City and County Data Book, 1983 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983), table A, 11.

9. Terry Schwadron, ed., California and the American Tax Revolt: Proposition 13 Five Year Later (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984).

10. Ransom, "In Search of Security," 127.

11. Eric H, Monkkonen, " Bank of Augusta v. Earle : Corporate Growth v. States' Rights," The Alabama Historical Quarterly 34 (Summer 1972), 113-130.

12. New York City met its last draft call in cooperation with the county: the county board of supervisors authorized individual bounties of up to $1,000 to be paid to the men after they had volunteered and mustered. The money came from a county bonded debt of $4,000,000. The stipulation that the bonds be countersigned by the mayor and that he be responsible for actually finding the volunteers makes clear the joint city-county responsibility. New York Times (2 January 1865), p. 8, col. 4.

13. Henry Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 222-225; Frisch, Town into City , 53-113; Ely, Taxation in American States and Cities , 456-457; Richard Sylla, "The Economics of State and Local Government Sources and Uses of Funds in North Carolina, 1800-1977" (paper presented at National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Williamsburg, Virginia, March 22-24, 1984).

15. Alberta Sbragia, "Cities, Capital, and Banks: The Politics of Debt in the United States, United Kingdom, and France," in Kenneth Newton, ed., Urban Political Economy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), cited by John Modell, "Afterword," in McDonald and Ward, eds., The Politics of Urban Fiscal Policy , 161-174. For an excellent discussion of the local role of bonds in Houston, see Harold L. Platt, City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston, Texas, 1830-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 37-39.

16. Henry Roseveare, The Treasury (London: Allen Lane, 1969); J. Roland Phillips, "Local Taxation in England and Wales," in J. W. Probyn, ed., Local Government and Taxation in the United Kingdom (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1882), 471-472; J. Thackeray Bunch, "Municipal Boroughs and Urban Districts," in Probyn, Local Government, 291.

Bureau of the Census, Report on Valuation, Taxation and Public Indebtedness in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884), table XXI, 882. Pages 649-672 summarize state constitutional debt restrictions and ceilings. By 1881, fifteen of thirty-eight states had set ceilings, and three had authorized legislatures to set ceilings, most at 5%. Twenty-four had restricted the right of cities to invest in railways and twenty-five the right to own stocks of private corporations. And one, Massachusetts, began to legislate limits in 1875; Royal S. Van de Woestyne, State Control of Local Finance in Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 10.

To estimate crudely the comparative debt ceilings, assume a real property tax of 1%. Two year's collection of this tax would equal approximately 2% of the property's value, the British ceiling. This contrasts to a ceiling in the United States of 5% to 25% of the property value! For a discussion of debt ceilings, see Arthur M. Hillhouse, Defaulted Municipal Bonds, 1830-1930 (Chicago: Municipal Finance Officers' Association, 1935). A modern manual on debt concludes that "debt restrictions have not significantly restrained the total volume of state-local borrowing. To avoid these limits, special districts have often been created . . . [resulting in] an increase in the cost of borrowing." J. Richard Aronson and Eli Schwartz, eds., Management Policies in Local Government Finance (Washington, D.C.: International City Management Association, 1975), 234.

For a useful analysis of the experience of Massachusetts, see Van de Woestyne, State Control of Local Finance in Massachusetts . He concludes variously that debt ceilings were "effective" (32) and that they gave cities an upward goal, thereby increasing local debt (71). More to the point, he shows how between 1875 and 1911 Massachusetts granted over 1,500 exceptions to its own legislated debt and taxation limits (34): the state collection and publication of statistics was partially mandated to keep such exemptions down (55). He also cites a Fall River tax strike in 1930 (136-137) and gives sources for was partially mandated to keep such exemptions down (55). He also cites a Fall River tax strike in 1930 (136-137) and gives sources for annual data: 1871-1910, State Tax Commissioner; 1906-1935, Statistics of Municipal Finance.

For a survey of debt restriction, see State Constitutional and Statutory Restrictions on Local Government Debt (n.p.: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, September 1961) and State Constitutional and Statutory Restrictions on Local Taxing Powers (n.p.: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, October 1962). That a tax rate estimate of one percent is reasonable, consider the estimated national capital of Britain in buildings and farm capital, about 2.3 billion pounds in 1885: Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), table 71, 274.

17. Quotation from Platt, City Building in the New South , 179. Source for U.S. debt for 1880, Bureau of the Census, Report on Valuation, Taxation and Public Indebtedness in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884), table XXI, 882. Pages 649-672, state constitutional debt restrictions and ceilings.

The equation, based on thirty-five States, as the cases, excluding the city of Washington, D.C., Maine (with very little debt), Maryland (with the greatest per capita debt) as outliers:

as an independent variable which captures the effect of all forces affecting debt such as region, age of state, and other unknown ecological factors. To this is added a single additional independent variable, whether or not the state had debt limitation. Again, the states of Maryland and Maine have been excluded as outliers, although the equation estimates are similar with them included. The two per capita debt figures may have some slight differences, as that for 1870 is per capitized on all cities over 4,000, as opposed to 7,500.

The estimate results confirm the test above. Limitation had no effect on per capita local debt.

Although this state-by-state test may be the best way to see if debt limitation movements had any measurable impact, it should be noted here that this may not be the best level at which to capture the impact of local debt for individual cities.

18. In the same year rates, that is real property taxes, brought local government an income of 25.7 million pounds, B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), table 9, 414. These estimates must be seen as crude and suggestive only, for differences in taxation, forms of land tenure, and the like make clear comparisons difficult. See David Cannadine, ''Urban Development in England and America in the Nineteenth Century: Some Comparisons and Contrasts," The Economic History Review XXXIII (August 1980), 309-325. The tax rate of 1.1% on total value conforms with the twentieth century expectation that a 1% tax on property is about "right." For example, in the long struggle to simplify and rationalize British tenure and taxation, the bill coming closest to passing advocated a 1% tax on the capital value of the land, Avner Offer, Property and Politics, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 247.

Population base for these estimates from P. J. Waller, Town, City and Nation: England, 1850-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 7.

The range of projects in England and Wales for which the Treasury's Board of Public Works Loan Commissioners had outstanding local government indebtedness in 1880 included: public housing, baths, bridges, burial grounds, canals, cattle disease prevention, churches, harbors, parks, local government buildings, asylums, prisons, public works, schools, workhouses, and one railway (Portpatrick); Phillips, "Local Taxation," 485-486.

19. Phillips, "Local Taxation," 481. Each department of Glasgow's government borrowed independently until the 1883 Glasgow Corporation Loans Act. See Tom Hart, "Urban Growth and Municipal Government: Glasgow in a Comparative Context, 1846-1914," in Anthony Slaven and Derek H. Aldcroft, eds. Business, Banking and Urban History; Essays in Honor of S. G. Checkland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 202. See also his table 2, 202, reproduced below.

Note: "Other" includes city "trading" as profit made by its gas companies and municipal transportation.

For the building of the Leeds city hall, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1982), 139-183; for a detailed discussion of the controversy over the funding of the city hall, see Derek Fraser, "Politics in Leeds, 1830-1852" (Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, 1969), 459-466, 504-505, 517. Water profits paid for the town hall in twelve years according to one source: Brian Barber, "Municipal Government in Leeds, 1835-1914," in Derek Fraser, ed., Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 106. Barber shows how for Leeds the national government subsidized local government, beginning with a 25% police supplement in 1856. He estimates a total subsidy of city income which rose from 8% in 1895 to 21% by 1905 and 22% by 1910 (107).

20. City count from United States Postal Service, National Zipcode and Post Office Directory (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Postal Service, 1981. For an account of railroad-directed town building, see John C. Hudson, Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

21. James Willard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956); Robert A. Lively, "The American System: A Review Article," Business History Review XXIX (March 1955), 81-96.

22. Literature on incorporation is extensive, but the studies of Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, Commonwealth, A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), and Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), remain classics. Bayrd Still, "Patterns of Mid-Nineteenth Century Urbanization in the Middle West," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28 (1941), 187-206, shows how the first charters of Buffalo (1832), Chicago (1837), and Cleveland (1836) "were strikingly similar in form" (190), Chicago's differing from Buffalo's in only a dozen trivial instances. See Binford, The First Suburbs , "The Community as Business Corporation," 118-124, for an excellent discussion of the incorporation of Cambridge, Mass., in the 1840s.

23. This argument deliberately paraphrases Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1950), 409-424.

24. Ransom, "In Search of Security," 125-148; and Lance Davis and John Legler, "The Government in the American Economy, 1815-1902: A Quantitative Study," Journal of Economic History 26 (December 1966), 514-552, estimate nonfederal spending in lieu of aggregated, published data.

25. These values calculated from Bureau of the Census, The Statistics of the Wealth and Industry of the United States (Ninth Census, vol. III) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), 11; Report on Wealth, Debt, and Taxation; Part I . Public Debt (Eleventh Census) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892), 57. The per capita figures are approximately $23.80 for 1880 and $21.90 for 1890: it is impossible to per capitize this figure correctly, for there is no way to know the base population. The two values reported above for 1870 and 1880 are more reasonably accurate, for the Census Bureau reported the population base of the cities reporting their debts. There is no doubt that these comparative figures for 1880 and 1890 are deflated, but they have been deflated by the same unknown amount, so are comparable to each other.

The 1880 census contains a table summarizing indebtedness for places over 7,500 people and per capitizes by state with the population base representing only that of reporting cities. Here the average net debt per capita is $51.09, but the range by state is large, from $2.62 in Colorado to $127.66 for Washington, D.C. Bureau of the Census, Report on Valuation, Taxation and Public Indebtedness in the United States (Tenth Census, vol. VIII) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884), table XXI, p. 882.

Post-1902 data from U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Census of Governments, 1962 , VI, no. 4, Historical Statistics on Government Finances and Employment , tables 3, 5, 6.

26. See Hendrik Hartog, "Because All the World Was Not New York City: Governance, Property Rights, and the State in the Changing Definition of a Corporation, 1730-1860," Buffalo Law Review 28 (1979), 91-109, and Hendrik Hartog, "Property as Government in Eighteenth-Century America," The Journal of Legal Studies 10 (June 1981), 305-348, especially 344.

27. This scenario diverts considerably from that so subtly presented by Hartog, "Because All the World Was Not New York City," and "Property as Government in Eighteenth-Century America." Hartog's concern is with establishing the origins of the modern distinction between public and private corporations. He shows how in the eighteenth century the notion of municipality referred to any local delegation of state power, and how the city was best considered as its corporation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the separation between public corporations, such as the city, and ones for private gain became articulated. In the eighteenth century, he argues, no such separate conception was possible because each corporation, by its very nature, was based on a singular and unique charter.

28. Hartog, "Because All the World Was Not New York City," 92-100.

29. Clyde F. Steiner, Gilbert Y. Steiner, and Lois Langdon, Local Taxing Units: The Illinois Experience (Urbana: The Institute of Government and Public Affairs, 1954); Glenn W. Fisher and Robert P. Fairbanks, Illinois Municipal Finance: A Financial and Economic Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), table 35, 160-161.

30. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times To 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), 368, 1086; Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States , 105th ed., (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984), 283.

31. On the school centralization movement, see David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 129-147; Bureau of the Census, Census of Governments: 1962 , vol. I, 29, 66; Fisher and Fairbanks, Illinois Municipal Finance , 95-96.

32. William F. Whyte, "The Watertown Railway Bond Fight," Proceedings of the Wisconsin State Historical Society (1916), 273.

33. Ibid., 277, 278.

34. Ibid., 281.

35. Watertown Democrat (10 September 1874 and 9 March 1876).

36. Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude, Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975); Watertown Republican (26 June 1872).

37. Cited in Whyte, "The Watertown Railway Bond Fight," 297; 2 January 1873.

38. Watertown Republican (4 September 1872).

39. Kathleen H. Underwood, "Town Building on the Frontier: Grand Junction, Colorado, 1880-1900" (Ph. D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1982). Home ownership was so accessible in late nineteenth-century Detroit that Oliver Zunz sees it as an ethnic choice that reflected neither occupational status nor wealth; The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). He states, "owning one's own home was more an ethnocultural phenomenon than one of class" (153). California's four major cities had 37% home ownership in 1900 as compared to a national average of 26%. Calculated from Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Twelfth Census, 1900 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), table 90, 133-135.

40. James E. Cooley, Recollections of Early Days in Duluth (Duluth: by the author, 1925), 19. Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) shows how the wooing of industry in the case of Samuel Slater's mills did not mean blind acceptance of factory political power. Thus, the mill owners and the town fought over power (168).

41. Whyte, "The Watertown Railway Bond Fight," 285.

42. Kenneth Fox, Better City Government: Innovation in American Urban Politics, 1850-1937 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).

43. This analysis is developed in greater detail in Monkkonen, "Politics of Municipal Indebtedness."

44. These remarks and the data discussion for 1929-1982 are based on detailed information presented in Eric H. Monkkonen, "What Urban Crisis? A Historian's Point of View," Urban Affairs Quarterly 20 (June 1985), 429-448.

45. See Gerald E. Frug, "The City as a Legal Concept," Harvard Law Review 93 (April 1980), 1059-1154, for a discussion of the city as a corporation.

46. George C. Daly, "The Burden of Debt and Future Generations in Local Finance," Southern Economic Journal 36 (July 1969), 44-51, summarizes the logical arguments over the bearers of debt burden. A recent book on the fiscal crisis of New York State lays much of the blame for the current state and city fiscal crisis at the feet of Nelson Rockefeller. Although the book greatly exaggerates his culpability, there is an underlying and insightful premise—the debts that politicians accrue can come due well after their deaths. Peter D. McClelland and Alan L. Magdovitz, Crisis in the Making: The Political Economy of New York State Since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 136.

47. Historical Statistics of the United States , 1126-1127. For the years 1902, 1913, 1922, and 1927, the following values may he estimated. Revenue from the federal government: 0.7%, 0.6%, 2.1%, 1.5%. Revenue from property taxes: 67%, 66%, 64%, 60%. Expenditure on debt interest: 7.2%, 7.7%, 7.6%, 8.5%. These are not directly comparable to the data presented in note 48.

48. Percent of Expenditures in Interest on Debt, Local and State Government, 1929-1982

icizes the incrementalist view, see Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton, "Retrenchment and Recovery: American Cities and the New York Experience," Public Administration Review 45 (March/April 1985), 267-274.

50. Monkkonen, "Politics of Municipal indebtedness."

I am indebted to the work of Scott L. Bottles, which challenged me to rethink many traditional notions about urban transit. By showing the positive role of the automobile in Los Angeles, he has made the most difficult case the most convincing: see Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1987). See also Martin Wachs, "Automobiles, Transport, and the Sprawl of Los Angeles: The 1920s," Journal of the American Planning Association 50 (1984), 297-310, and Carlos A. Schwantes, "The West Adopts the Automobile: Technology, Unemployment, and the Jitney Phenomenon of 1914-1917," Western Historical Quarterly 16 (July 1985), 307-326. For an excellent overall coverage of land transportation, see Richard Bessel, "Transport," in Science, Technology, and Everyday Life (Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1988).

1. Thus U.S. cities are less dense than Canadian cities, see Barry Edmonston, Michael A. Goldberg, and John Mercer, "Urban Form in Canada and the United States: An Examination of Urban Density Gradients," Urban Studies 22 (1985), 209-217.

2. Ray Hebert, "Ventura Freeway—It's Now No. 1," Los Angeles Times (10 March 1985), II, 1, 5.

3. Mark S. Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University press, 1981), 3-24.

4. David Ward, "A Comparative Historical Geography of Streetcar Suburbs in Boston, Massachusetts and Leeds, England, 1850-1920," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 54 (1964), 477-489, shows that the system in Boston truly was superior to that of Leeds. Scott L. Bottles, "The Making of the Modern City: Los Angeles and the Automobile, 1900-1950" (Ph. D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1984).

5. The auto replaced walking as much as it did public transit in Pittsburgh. Joel A. Tarr, Transportation Innovation and Changing Spatial Patterns in Pittsburgh, 1850-1934 , Essays in Public Works History, no. 6 (Chicago: Public Works Historical Society, 1978), 38. David O. Wise and Marguerite Dupree, "The Choice of the Automobile for Urban Passenger Transportation: Baltimore in the 1920s," South Atlantic Urban Studies II (1978), 153-179, show how the main advantage of the automobile in Baltimore was more housing for the dollar, as the city had a dense streetcar network.

6. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Penguin, 1979; 1st ed. 1906).

For a clear demonstration of the relationship between high costs of fixed rail urban transport and suburban homes, see Gary R. Hovinen, "Suburbanization in Greater Philadelphia, 1880-1941," Journal of Historical Geography 11 (April 1985), 174-195. Joel A. Tarr, "From City to Suburb: The 'Moral' Influence of Transportation Technology," in Alexander B. Callow, Jr., ed., American Urban History: An Interpretive Reader with Commentaries 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 202-212, and Tarr, Transportation Innovation and Changing Spatial Patterns , 5, 6, 11, 14, 20-21, details the inaccessibility of fixed rail transit for most urban workers, for whom a round trip would cost between 15% and 20% of their daily wage.

7. Gary A. Tobin, "Suburbanization and the Development of Motor Transportation: Transportation Technology and the Suburbanization Process," in Barry Schwartz, ed., The Changing Face of the Suburbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 101. Tobin's essay provides a subtle analysis of suburban expansion. The socialist government of Milwaukee argued that accessible suburbs would solve the "problem of congestion"; Milwaukee Municipal Campaign Book, 1912 (Milwaukee: Social Democratic Party, 1912), 12. Quotation from Clay McShane, Technology and Reform: Street Railways and the Growth of Milwaukee, 1887-1900 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1974), 67; on working-class political attitudes, see his chapters 7 and 8.

8. Theodore Hershberg, Harold E. Cox, Dale B. Light, Jr., and Richard R. Greenfield, "The 'Journey-to-Work': An Empirical Investigation of Work, Residence, and Transportation, Philadelphia, 1850 and 1880," in Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the 19th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 128-173.

9. John R. Borchert, "American Metropolitan Evolution," The Geographical Review (July 1967), 301-332; for a more precise analysis within one of Borchert's grander periods, see Michael P. Conzen, "A Transport Interpretation of the Growth of Urban Regions: An American Example," Journal of Historical Geography I (October 1975), 361-382.

10. Sam B. Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). Or see James J. Flink, "The Metropolis in the Horseless Age," in Margaret Latimer, Brooke Hindle, and Melvin Kranzberg, eds., "Bridge to the Future: A Centennial Celebration of the Brooklyn Bridge," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 424 (May 1984), 289. Flink asserts that "the settlement patterns and lifeways of contemporary metropolitan America, however, have been most of all shaped by the motor vehicle." The construction of this sentence exemplifies technological determinism: the car shapes the city. Such a causal construction is true only in the same trivial sense as, "chunks of hot metal cause death by bleeding," substitutes for, "thousands of Americans deliberately kill one another each year.''

11. Fred Viehe, "Black Gold Suburbs: The Influence of the Extractive Industry on the Suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1890-1930," Journal of Urban History 8 (November 1981), 3-26; Spencer A. Crump, Ride the Big Red Cars: How Trolleys Helped Build Southern California (Los Angeles: Crest Publications, 1962).

12. Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast (New York: Penguin, 1981), 146-147; Bottles, "The Making of the Modern City"; Martin J. Schiesl, "Airplanes to Aerospace: Defense Spending and Economic Growth in the Los Angeles Region, 1945-60," in Roger W. Lotchin, ed., The Martial Metropolis: U.S. Cities in War and Peace (New York: Praeger, 1984), 135-150.

13. Compiled from list of members, National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, Facts and Figures of the Automobile Industry, 1926 (New York: National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, 1926); Bottles, "The Making of the Modern City."

14. For charioteers, see Alan Cameron, Porphyrius—The Charioteer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 136-149, and idem, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). For locomotive names, see Freeman H. Hubbard, Encyclopedia of North American Railroading: 150 Years of Railroading in the United States and Canada (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 306, and Benjamin A. Botkin and Alvin F. Harlow, eds., A Treasury of Railroad Folklore: The Stories, Tall Tales, Traditions, Ballads, and Songs of the American Railroad Man (New York: Crown, 1953), 382-383. For a discussion of Lexington and an exquisitely reproduced picture, see Roy King and Burke Davis, The World of Currier and Ives (New York: Random House, 1968), 78-79. According to King and Davis, Lexington sired 236 champions. They quote the poet Huder All's verse: "Whispers fly about the race-tracks when some mighty deed is done; 'Tis no more than we expected from the blood of Lexington!"

Twain example cited by Frederick Alderson, Bicycling: A History (New York: Praeger, 1972), 104.

15. Gerald Silk, Automobiles and Culture (New York: Museum of Contemporary Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1984); Janicemarie A. Holty, "The 'Low Riders': Portrait of a Youth Subculture," Youth and Society 6 (1975), 495-512; Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, 1965).

16. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the bicycle was the mode of high fashion promenade in Paris: Vanity Fair , 1897, cited by Alderson, Bicycling: A History , 87. The automobile supplanted the bicycle as the mode of promenade during the first decade of the twentieth century, as is perhaps best exemplified in Lartigue's photos of the rich in the Bois de Boulogne. See Fred C. Kelly, "The Great Bicycle Craze," American Heritage 8 (December 1956), 69-73; Sidney H. Aronson, "The Sociology of the Bicycle (1879-1900)," Social Forces 30 (March 1952), 311.

17. This contradicts the analysis of James J. Flink, America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 210-213, which merits some detailed attention. Flink first cites contemporary literature, 1899-1909, as evidence "that the development of adequate automobile roads lagged well behind the diffusion of the motor vehicle . . . and that the automobile was widely adopted here [the United States] despite a relative scarcity of suitable roads . . ." (211). As a further empirical test of this plausible argument, he correlates states by their rank ordering on three different variables—automobiles per capita, roads per square mile and percent of all roads that were improved, the latter two for 1904 and 1914, the former for 1910. The relationship with the earlier variables and the number of automobiles was modest, for the later period even slighter. From this he concludes that the number of automobiles had a "short-range deleterious effect . . . on roads" (212).

The two models he tests may be written like this:

I. Number of Automobiles / Population Over 18 = Miles of Roads / Surface Area of State and,

II. Number of Automobiles / Population Over 18 = Miles of Improved Roads / Total Road Miles

(Both equations use rankings of states and both use lagged or led time periods. Flink does not explain why he ranks rather than uses actual values.)

Equation I as tested by Flink makes no sense: presumably the greater the population of a state, the more the miles of roads; yet a greater number of square miles only occasionally meant lesser population, considering the large, sparsely populated western states at the turn of the century. Thus as it stands his results for Equation I test nothing. To capture the relationship Flink intended to, the equation should have been constructed thus:

Ia. Number of Automobiles = Population + Miles of Roads + Miles of Surface Area

Equation II examines the relationship between automobiles per capita and the proportion of all roads which was improved. Presumably, some states could have had very limited yet highly improved mileage, hardly an advantage for automobile owners. Again, to capture the relationship Flink wanted to, the equation might be rephrased as follows:

IIa. Number of Automobiles = Population + Miles of Roads + Miles of Improved Roads

This would capture the sense he intended, that automobiles had some relationship with improved rather than merely all roads.

As Flink's conclusions stand, then, they cannot be justified, for the empirical analysis captures neither the claimed relationship nor any other. Flink does not state his data sources; probably they were from the Department of Commerce, Highway Statistics, Summary to 1955 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1957), cited in his bibliography.

Paul Barrett, The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago, 1900-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 69-70, 139-153. The only theoretically informed history of roads is Hillaire Belloc's prescient The Road (London: Unwin, 1924). For an engineering history of American nonurban roads, see Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, America's Highways, 1776-1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), and Thomas H. MacDonald, "The History and Development of Road Building in the United States," Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 92 (1928), 1181-1206. Edward C. Kirkland, Men, Cities and Transportation: A Study in New England History, 1820-1900 , (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), analyzes transportation only between cities.

18. Calculated from Good Roads I (January-June 1892), "Contract Notes," 171, 233, 291, 351. Philip P. Mason, "The League of American Wheelmen and the Good Roads Movement, 1890-1905" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1958). Ballard C. Campbell, "The Good Roads Movement in Wisconsin, 1890-1911," Wisconsin Magazine of History 49 (Summer 1966), 276, 289-290. Quotation: E. G. Harrison from, "Gen. Harrison Tells How the Road was Built," The Road Maker , 1, 3 (Port Huron, Mich., c. 1900), 6, cited in Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, America's Highways , 1776-1976, 47-48.

Interest in high-quality paving came as an early recognition that paying facilitated the movement of commercial freight. In New York in 1887, the issue of annexing surrounding cities such as Brooklyn was partly motivated by the poor quality of its streets, which directly lowered the efficiency of docks and wharfs in the city's harbor. In importance for facilitating commerce, streets—their paving and decongestion—were equal to docks and street railways. See Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, cited in David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1981), 192, 193, 233.

19. Alderson, Bicycling: A History , 85-106; Jerry Sandvick, "Early Airport Development and the Emergence of the Metropolitan Airport Commission," Hennepin County History 43 (Fall 1984), 3-17, describes how a group of Minneapolis businessmen purchased the defunct auto racetrack for airport land by subscription in 1920, not all that different from the funding for mid-nineteenth-century urban projects in England.

20. Glenn Yago, The Decline of Transit: Urban Transportation in German and United States Cities, 1900-1970 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984) perpetuates the argument that mass transit did pose a viable alternative to the automobile early in the twentieth century. Few of the historians who study urban technology agree: the main reason for the perpetuation of the myth seems to be ignorance about fixed rail transit as it did exist and experience with successful Technology and Reform , 38-39, for a summary of the reasons the automobile proved to be superior to fixed rail.

21. Of necessity, the uncertain quality of early automobile data render such tests crude and suggestive. On the one hand, if road building represented a passive local response to the new technological imperative introduced by the automobile, then new roads should have followed increases in automobile registrations; on the other hand, should people have purchased automobiles following the expansion of the road system, then we can interpret the automobile transport revolution as technology following essential political decisions. The first hypothesis represents a technological determinist argument, the second a nondeterminist historical argument. Unfortunately, neither hypothesis can be clearly evaluated. If people in fact purchased cars in response to the opportunity to drive them, i.e., in response to more roads, and if they also purchased them on the basis of "neighborhood" or "contagion" effects, having observed the utility of their neighbors' cars, the model for change would look like this: Increase in Cars = Utility + Contagion. This can be operationalized as: Cars Added = Roads Added + Cars Added (For previous year) or, C = R + C (t-1), but, because, by definition, C (t-1) = R (t-2) + C (t-2), etc., the model has circular causation and therefore cannot accurately be tested except in the form, C = R (t-1), or, in the obverse, R = C (t-1).

The following correlation matrix presents a simple test of these two hypotheses. Notice that the variable for cars added is a cumulative one in that it represents change in annual registrations, not simply new cars purchased. The results are ambiguous: both road and automobile expansion seem to account for each other.

Similarly, the hypothesis that the diffusion of the automobile technology responded to increased utility may also be tested. Here a slightly more complex test must be used, for the idea is more subtle. Let us hypothesize that the annual change in the number of automobiles registered results from a combination of two major factors: first, the contagion effect of a spreading consumption item—"everyone else is getting one"; and second, the expanding hard surfaced road network which continuously increased the automobile's utility. Again, the micro-computer is a clarifying analog: purchases result from a combination of the contagion effect and the actual utility, the latter of which is driven by software (like roads for cars). For the automobile, these two factors can be specified as independent variables measured by, respectively, the change in total automobile registration in the previous year, and hard surfaced miles added each year, again including changes in the over-eighteen population in the previous year and again for the period prior to 1930. The second part of the figure reports the estimated regression for this model.

Several suggestive insights emerge from these regression estimates. First, roads did respond to cars and population the previous year, but the previous addition of roads was far more important. Holding all else constant, each added mile of hard surfaced road required only 1.4 miles of road the previous year, while requiring 286 cars or 322 additional people.

For automobiles, the regression must be estimated on annual changes, rather than the actual values of the variables. Contagion best explains the increase in automobiles (this emerged from the correlations, but the regression is much stronger). The number of roads added has virtually no effect, forcing us to strongly question if not simply reject the notion that more places to drive meant more car registrations. On the other hand, it is possible that the all-powerful variable, car registrations in the previous year, cumulatively captures both contagion and utility, for when estimated for hard surfaced roads in the previous year, the results show a positive relationship.

It is likely that these estimated relationships mask more significant urban relationships which conformed more closely to the earlier predictions made in this chapter. The specific urban cases may have been asked by national trends which aggregate city and county, state and local.

Brooklyn after the race, and counted 13,048 persons, of whom fewer than one-fourth were on horses or in wheeled vehicles. Survey citations in Ralph F. Weld, Brooklyn Village, 1816-1834 (New York: AMS Press, 1938), 278-279.

23. For a summary of the urban problems associated with horses, see Flink, "The Metropolis in the Horseless Age," 289-290. Tobin, "Suburbanization and the Development of Motor Transportation," 99, cites the horse-drawn rail statistics. On the horse manure problem, see Joel A. Tarr, "Urban Pollution Many Long Years Ago," American Heritage 22 (October 1971), 65-70. Ironically, in the early nineteenth century, horse manure had been much less of a problem, for the poor kept pigs which roamed the streets, eating manure and other organic waste. Social reformers outlawed pigs in the mid-nineteenth century, creating new waste problems that necessitated the hiring of street cleaners.

24. State of Minnesota, Biennial Report of the Secretary of State, 1907-08 and 1909-10 (Minneapolis, 1908, 1910), 4, 6. Tarr, Transportation Innovation , 26-28, cites the Pittsburgh survey information.

25. National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, Facts and Figures of the Automobile Industry, 1921-29 (New York: National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, 1921-29). In fact, some states did not achieve systematic registration until 1921; Historical Statistics , 730.

26. For a discussion of the Model T Ford and rural road conditions, see Peter J. Hugill, "Good Roads and the Automobile in the United States, 1880-1929," The Geographical Review 72 (July 1982), 327-349, esp. 336-337. This is a useful and comprehensive summary article. J. Interrante, "The Road to Autopia: The Automobile and the Transformation of American Culture," in David L. Lewis, ed., The Automobile in American Culture: Michigan Quarterly Review 19 and 20 (1980/1981), 502-517, argues that the car was more important for rural people—based on proportionally higher ownership by the 1920s.

28. McShane, Technology and Reform , 67, cites a newspaper mention in the 1890s of the "half hour limit." The first commuter train appeared in New York City in 1837, carrying riders up to Harlem; in less than ten years service extended to Westchester County: Kenneth T. Jackson, "Technology and the City: Transportation and Social Form in New York," in Latimer, Hindle, and Kranzberg, eds., "Bridge to the Future," 284. The foremost expert on urban rail transit contrasts rail and auto transit as point-to-point and lateral travel mechanisms: see George W. Hilton, "Rail Transit and the Pattern of Modern Cities. The California Case," Traffic Quarterly 21 (July 1967), 379-393.

29. Compare the major freeways and urban rail lines in Reyner Banham, Los Angeles, Architecture of the Four Ecologies (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 32, 92.

30. Larry Long and Diana DeAre, "The Slowing of Urbanization in the U.S.," Scientific American 249 (July 1983), 39. Specifically, they report densities of twenty-five "supercities," those over one million, in 1980.

31. Leon Moses and Harold F. Williamson, "The Location of Economic Activity in Cities," American Economic Review LVII (May 1967), 211-222.

32. See Clay McShane, "Transforming the Use of Urban Space: A Look at the Revolution in Street Pavements, 1880-1924," Journal of Urban History 5 (May 1979), 279-307. "These changes in streets literally paved the way for the automobile . . ." (300). McShane develops a convincing argument for the prior causality of the paving revolution, mixing two strands: one, the lobbying efforts of the good roads movement and engineers and two, somewhat less convincing to me, a changed attitude toward streets, which no longer regards them as play areas and undifferentiated public, social space. Pavement innovation came, McShane concludes, for "shifts in the cultural and political climate of nineteenth century cities" (302). Campbell, "The Good Roads Movement in Wisconsin," 290-291, develops convincing evidence based on voting patterns and numbers of automobiles that support for good roads developed independent of and prior to the diffusion of the automobile in Wisconsin.

33. Federal Highway Administration, America's Highways, 1776-1976 , 16. Richard Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 110-140, provides a useful summary and analysis of the role of nineteenth-century urban transport in England; for the generally disputed argument that in Britain demand led transport, see P. W. Daniels and A. M. Warnes, Movement in Cities: Spatial Perspectives on Urban Transport and Travel (London: Methuen, 1980), 2-3.

34. William Fulton, "Those Were the Best Days: The Streetcar and the Development of Hollywood before 1910," Southern California Quarterly 66 (Fall 1984), 235-256: Sherman quoted on 238.

35. Peter Hall, The World Cities , 3d ed. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), 150, map 6.3b.

36. John C. Schneider, Detroit and the Problem of Order, 1830-1880. A Geography of Crime, Riot, and Policing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).

1. Hal S. Barren, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: The Jungle Publishing Co., 1906). Probably, the Rudkisses moved to a ''working man's reward," an inexpensive suburban development as pictured in Clifford E. Clark, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 98. John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815-1970 (London: Methuen, 1980), 295; Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), 646.

2. This formula, DEBT causes GROWTH which lower TAXES, was an explicit strategy of nineteenth-century city dwellers. In 1888 New York Mayor Abram S. Hewitt advocated funding new transit to the upper end of Manhattan, for the good of all city property owners: "Our rate of taxation depends upon the growth of the unoccupied portion of the city." He proposed that the city borrow the money, and then in rum contract to a private developer for new rail lines. Three years later, Hewitt said in specific reference to mass transit, "Our object should be to develop as much of the annexed district as possible, in order to get the benefit of taxation upon the increased value of the property." Cited by David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1981), 233, 237.

3. For examples of borrowing procedures, see Clark, The American Family Home., 87, 96-97 . Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: National Data Book and Guide to Sources, 1982-83 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), 762; Historical Statistics , 651. For a recent discussion of the nature of mortgages and the rental industry in general, see Michael Doucet and John Weaver, "The North American Shelter Business, 1860-1920: A Study of a Canadian Real Estate and Property Management Agency," Business History Review 58 (Summer 1984), 234-262.

Helena Flam, "Democracy in Debt: Credit and Politics in Paterson, N.J., 189001930," Journal of Social History 18 (Spring 1985), 439-462, has analyzed the occupations of some mortgage holders in the 1893-95 and 1925-27 periods, and claims to find "trends" toward increased class differences, more rich getting bigger mortgages on bigger houses and fewer poor getting smaller mortgages on smaller houses, a practice which "reinforced" or "sustained" class differences (449-450, and especially the table on 449). The table below reproduces the data given by Flam to support her claim of "trends." She failed to analyze the data with even a Chi-square test: the test shows that there was no meaningful change in the distribution over time. In addition, it shows that the Rudkisses were not alone in having access to housing, that 20% of the Flam sample of mortgages went to unskilled workers.

4. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Dutton, 1957), 52, 215. See also Sharon Salinger and Charles Wetherell, "Wealth and Renting in Prerevolutionary Philadelphia," Journal of American History 71 (March 1985), 826-840, esp. 836-837, which in a detailed exploration of rent and real property shows how real property ownership may have been quite fluid and have had little of the meaning which we, or Crèvecoeur, attach to it.

5. Morris Janowitz, The Last Half Century: Societal Change and Politics in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 269-270, on politics of residence, which he claims has grown; contrast with Mark Gottdiener, The Decline of Urban Politics: Political Theory and the Crisis of the Local State (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1987). For one of the few books that recognizes the political and economic importance of home ownership, see David Halle, America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics among Blue-Collar Property Owners (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 42-44, 115-118, 302; appropriately, Halle is English.

6. David Cannadine, "Urban Development in England and America in the Nineteenth Century: Some Comparisons and Contrasts," The Economic History Review XXXIII (August 1980), 309-325, shows how land tenure has incorrectly been used to explain urban housing and planning differences. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 269, notes about recent neighborhood politics that "labels of 'right' and 'left' do not easily apply." See Matthew Edel, Elliot D. Sclar, and Daniel Luria, Shaky Palaces: Homeownership and Social Mobility in Boston's Suburbanization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 297-302, for a subtle discussion of Marx. For the dupes argument, see Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973); for a brief summary of the mobility argument see Edel, Sclar, and Luria, 134-135, who reexamine the notion that property provided an avenue of wealth mobility for working-class Bostonians at the end of the nineteenth century, an argument developed by Stephan Thernstrom in The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). To do so they reanalyze Thernstrom's data, claiming to show that a father's home ownership decreased a son's chances of upward occupational or other mobility. If the question of ownership is wrongly cast as one of wealth, it has also wrongly been reflected in the debate over freehold and leasehold land.

This conclusion certainly seems counterintuitive, and a reexamination of their statistics shows that the home ownership probably is associated with upward mobility. The critical issue is the coefficient sign of home ownership in regression equation 2, table 5.11, p. 148. The sign is negative, which they mistakenly interpret as meaning that home ownership associates negatively with sons' occupational positions. Yet a careful examination of their regression analysis table and its notes shows that the variable Home Ownership is actually the ratio between the estimated value of a home and the total nonhome wealth of a father. If a millionaire father had a home worth $100,000 his ratio would be 0.1; a father with smaller resources other than his home would have a high, positive ratio. Consider some hypothetical cases, estimated with their equation: Son's 1910 Occupation = 2.966 + 0.32 (Father's Occupation) + 0.0089 (Father's Wealth) - 0.958 (Father's Home Ownership: Ratio).

considerably weakens the argument pursued so avidly by Edel, Sclar, and Luria, that home ownership neither reflects nor contributes to wealth accumulation. However, as the present chapter argues, even the relationship of home ownership is not as important as the notion that through real property taxes, home ownership ties ordinary citizens to their local government in a direct and significant way.

7. Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), esp. 219-221.

8. James Ford, "Introduction," in Blanche Halbert, ed., The Better Homes Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), ix-x; Herbert Hoover, "Home Ownership," in Halbert, The Better Homes Manual , 6-7.

9. "Beverly High Juniors Win Bonds for Property Essays," Los Angeles Times (12 May 1985), Part VIII, 18.

10. For an important analysis of the urban house, see Robert G. Barrows, "Beyond the Tenement: Patterns of American Urban Housing 1870-1930," Journal of Urban History 9 (1983), 395-420. Jules Tygiel, "Housing in Late Nineteenth Century America: Suggestions for Research," Historical Methods 12 (Spring 1979), 84-97. Sam B. Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962); Carolyn T. Kirk and Gordon W. Kirk, "The Impact of the City on Home Ownership: A Comparison of Immigrants and Native Whites at the Turn of the Century,'' Journal of Urban History VII (August 1981), 471-498, all provide an excellent introduction to urban housing. For a detailed discussion of home ownership mechanisms, see Howard P. Chudacoff, Mobile Americans: Residential and Social Mobility in Omaha, 1880-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 111-129; and on Hamilton, Ontario and Buffalo, New York, see Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 131-157.

11. For the life course perspective, see John Demos and Sarane S. Boocock, eds., Turning Points, Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). In the sociological literature, the word has become one: "lifecourse." For an example of this concept applied to the analysis of black suburbanization prospects, see William H. Frey, "Lifecourse Migration of Metropolitan Whites and Blacks and the Strength of Demographic Change in Large Central Cities," American Sociological Review 49 (December 1984), 803-827: white suburbs of the post-World War II era absorbed a demographic cohort which has caused them in the 1980s to become filled with an aging population, while forced black migration has kept central cities more demographically mixed. A reduction in legal discrimination will not bring about quick changes, because of the relationship of migration to life course for the two demographically and geographically different groups.

12. John Modell and Tamara Haraven, "Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families," in Haraven, ed., Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700-1930 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1977), 163-186. S. J. Kleinberg, "The Systematic Study of Urban Women," Historical Methods 9 (December 1975), 14-25, and Kleinberg, "Technology's Stepdaughters: The impact of Industrialization Upon Working Class Women, Pittsburgh, 1865-1890" (Ph. D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1973), 94-103.

13. Statistical Abstract of the United States; Historical Statistics 1982-1983 , 19, 43.

14. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).

15. Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians , 15-16. Peter R. Knights, "The Contours of Nineteenth Century Lives: Lessons from a Study of Internal Migration Based on Boston" (paper presented at the Social Science History Association, Nashville, Tenn., 24 October 1981); R. M. Pritchard, Housing and the Spatial Structure of the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). See also Charles Stephenson, "Tracing Those Who Left: Mobility Studies and the Soundex Indexes to the U.S. Census," Journal of Urban History I (1974), 73-84. On Omaha voting and mobility, see Chudacoff, Mobile Americans , 111-129.

16. Robert G. Barrows, "'Hurrying Hoosiers' and the American Pattern: Geographic Mobility in Urban North America," Social Science History (Spring 1981), 197-222; Michael Katz, Michael Doucet, and Mark Stern, "Migration and Social Order in Erie County, New York: 1855," Journal of Interdisciplinary History VIII (1978), 669-701, and Katz, Doucet, and Stern, "Population Persistence and Early Industrialization in Canadian City: Hamilton, Ontario, 1851-1871," Social Science History II (1978), 208-229; and Michael Katz, "Social Class in North American Urban History,'' Journal of Interdisciplinary History XI (Spring 1981), 579-605. For the most extensive consideration of mobility, see Katz, Doucet, and Stern, The Social Organization , 102-130. For England, the evidence is that home owners stayed put; of course, they were a tiny fraction of the population. See Richard Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 260.

17. Doucet and Weaver, "The North American Shelter Business."

Stephanie G. Wolf, Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 86-87. Bruce Wilkenfield, "The Social and Economic Structure of New York City, 1695-1795" (Ph. D. diss., Columbia University, 1973) has data on ownership among taxpayers which establishes a declining proportion of ownership throughout the eighteenth century; these are suggestive but not definitive. See Betsy Blackmar, "Re-walking the 'Walking City': Housing and Property Relations in New York City, 1780-1840," Radical History Review 21 (Fall 1979), 131-148, for further speculations on housing and the meaning of ownership.

19. The scattered mid-nineteenth-century data come from Katz, Doucet, and Stern, The Social Organization , 131-157; Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, Seventh Annual Report , Public Document 31 (Boston, 1876), xii, cited by Katz, Doucet, and Stern, 133; David Goldfield, Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism: Virginia, 1847-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 62-63; Robert A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848-1880 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980), 62. Katz, Doucet, and Stern, and Edel, Sclar, and Luria, all try to account for the mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon of relatively well-off middle-class people renting while manual laborers owned. It may be that home owning has had very different economic implications in different eras.

Other nonfarm home ownership rates include: Robert Doherty, Society and Power: Five New England Towns, 1800-1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 28: Worchester, 1850, from 16% poorest ward to 32% "some other parts"; Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth in the United States, 1850-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975): free adult males owning real property, all of the U.S., nonfarm = 26%, 1850 (p. 41). Adult white males owning real property, 1860, 43%. Nonfarm units occupied by owners, 1870, 38% (p. 50).

History, Laguna Beach, Cal., May 2-4, 1986, is twice as steep as that of the Soltow estimates, reflecting the relatively high income of the skilled workers. But the important thing is that both give nineteenth-century evidence on age and home owning: the range suggested is that for every year added, between 0.6 and 1.6 percent more of all nonfarm wealth groups together owned homes.

Another estimate of the relationship of the country's changing age to its number of home owners, is simply to regress percent of homes owned on median age, hardly a subtle technique, for it ignores the peculiar properties of a dependent variable that can only range from 0 to 100 and an independent variable with similar properties. However, the estimate at least allows us to see in a crude way which decades were high, which low in home ownership.

20. The 1890-1970 data are from Historical Statistics , 646. Post-1975 data, from Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1982-1983 , 25, 757. For occupation, ethnicity, and home ownership see Katz, "Social Class," and Kirk and Kirk, "Impact of the City on Home Ownership." Katz speculates that the lack of middle-class home ownership shows a class interest in other forms of capital investment. The Kirks, on the other hand, show that age accounts for the apparently unusual high immigrant ownership levels, a result similar to mine.

The purpose of discussing home ownership in this chapter emphasizes its consequences for taxation and local expenditures. The relationship to overall wealth holding and well-being is a separate and quite different topic. The apparently high proportion of colonial home owning, its dip to maybe 30% in the mid-nineteenth century, and its rise to over 60% in the 1970s is not to be taken as a direct index to wealth.

21. Stepwise Regression, with Urban Population Included at First Step, Rejected at Fourth

For a suggestive use of housing information, see Richard K. Lieberman, "A Measure for the Quality of Life: Housing," Historical Methods 11 (Summer 1978), 129-134.

23. Ransom and Sutch, "The Life-Cycle Transition."

24. Allen H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), reprinted in Richard J. Meister, The Black Ghetto: Promised Land or Colony? (Boston: Heath, 1972), 35. Lawrence B. De Graff, "The City of Black Angeles: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930," Pacific Historical Review XXXIX (August 1970), 323-352, esp. 351-352, shows that Los Angeles by the 1920s, in spite of racial discrimination, offered blacks a better chance at home ownership than other cities with large black populations. Over one-third owned homes, as opposed to 10% in Chicago and 15% in Detroit. For racial covenants, see Clement E. Vose, Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and Restrictive Covenant Cases (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). A comprehensive view of housing discrimination which places it in the larger and more complex topic of zoning and planning is in Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: American Real Estate Developers, Urban Planners, and the Creation of Modern Residential Subdivisions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), esp. chap. 6.

25. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1982-1983 , 757. By 1980, the percentage of black households with both spouses present had declined to 38%, contrasted to 62% for whites (45). Whatever else this means, it suggests that relative earning power by family was substantially less for blacks.

26. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , esp. 190-218.

27. The Bohemian Flats , Compiled by the Workers of the Writer's Program of the Works Project Administration (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986); Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962); David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); David Ward and John P. Radford, North American Cities in the Victorian Age: Two Essays (Norwich, Conn.: Geo Books, 1983); Howard P. Chudacoff, The Evolution of American Urban Society , 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981); Kathleen N. Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Rudolph J. Vecoli, "The Contadini in Chicago," Journal of American History (December 1964), 404-417.

1. Adna F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics , Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 427, 432. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 346, suggests a similar notion might inform the whole history of Anglo-America in the "rise of impersonal contexts of interaction." Max Weber, The City , Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth, trans. and eds. (New York: Free Press, 1966); Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel , Kurt H. Wolff, trans. and ed. (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1950).

2. Frederick C. Howe, The Modern City and Its Problems (New York: Charles Scribner, 1915), 252; Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 241-244. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977) develops the idea of increased rationalization, decreased individual responsiveness, on the national level. But see also the review of Keller by Rowland Berthoff, Journal of American History 64 (March 1978), 1140-1142.

3. There is an enormous and rich literature on the history of welfare for the poor. For an introduction see James Leiby, A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Michael B. Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History (New York: Academic Press, 1983) and Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), and the continuing bibliography in the Social Welfare History Group Newsletter .

4. M. Craig Brown and Charles N. Halaby, "Machine Politics in America, 1870-1945," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (Winter 1987), 587-612, and Brown and Halaby, "Bosses, Reform, and the Socioeconomic Bases of Urban Expenditure, 1890-1940," in Terrence J. McDonald and Sally Ward, eds., The Politics of Urban Fiscal Policy (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1984), 69-100. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, N.Y.: Free Press, 1949). Terrence J. McDonald, ''Comment," Journal of Urban History 8 (August 1984), 454-462. Brown and Halaby point out that possibly the least-known bosses, Tom Dennison of Omaha (1906-1933) and George Alderidge of Rochester (1899-1921), had the longest-lived regimes. Both men and cities contradict the stereotypical urban boss's image.

5. William L. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, Delivered by Ex-Senator George Washington Plunkitt, The Tammany Philosopher, From His Rostrum—The New York County Court-House Bootblack Strand—and Recorded by William L. Riordan (New York: McClure, 1905).

This lively and fascinating book has been taken at face value by historians for decades; I am dubious about its authenticity, given its broad humor and the fact that it was published by a reformist publisher. See note 7 below.

6. Melvin G. Holli, "Samuel H. Ashbridge," in Holli and Peter d'A. Jones, eds., Biographical Dictionary of American Mayors, 1820-1980:Big City Mayors (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 10: from Lincoln Steffens, "Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented," McClure's Magazine 21 (July 1903), reprinted in Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), quotation on 153.

7. Richard J. Daley, Quotations from Mayor Daley , compiled by Peter Yessne (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1969); clearly modeled on Riordan, this book takes self-damning quotations attributed to Daley by the press and arranges them topically. Both preserve the speakers' bad grammar. Compared to Plunkitt, Daley was a model of caution in his public statements on graft.

8. John M. Alswang, Bosses, Machines, and Urban Voters: An American Symbiosis (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977), 150, argues, with no evidence at all, that urban political machines from Tweed to Daley "existed because of the very large numbers of dependent or semidependent people who have been found in the modern American city, and because it has been better able to respond quickly and directly to their needs." Alswang implicitly claims that the efficient social welfare services of the political machine contrast with the inefficient welfare systems of nonmachine-governed cities.

9. Seth M. Scheiner, "Commission Government in the Progressive Era: The New Brunswick, New Jersey, Example," Journal of Urban History 12 (February 1986), 157-180. See also Bradley R. Rice, Progressive Cities: The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901-1920 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977).

Scheiner's data are all in percentages, the basis and limitation of the following reanalysis. His sums indicate that the wards were relatively evenly divided in their voting populations, but it is impossible to derive the actual numbers to use. There are two pairs of highly intercorrelated variables, and I have used only one of each pair in the regressions. Thus Natives may be read as the reciprocal of Foreign, Professional as the reciprocal of Blue Collar. The dependent variables are two votes on whether or not to create a nonpartisan commission form of government in New Brunswick, one in 1913 and one in 1915. The cases are the nineteen wards. Independent variables are each ward's proportion of Democrats (the reciprocal of Republicans), Factory Workers, Retail Workers, Professionals, and Native Borns.

ment of a Western State, Missouri, 1820-1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 35. For the classic exposition of the law as an agent of economic change, see J. Willard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956) and Hurst, Law and Economic Growth: The Legal history of the Wisconsin Lumber Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964). John A. Fairlie, "Municipal Corporations in the Colonies," Essays in Municipal Administration (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 48-94. See the several works by Hendrik A. Hertog: The Properties of the Corporation: New York City and its Law, 1730 to 1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); "Property as Government in Eighteenth Century America: The Case of New York City," Journal of Legal Studies 10 (1981), 305-348; ''Because All the World Was Not New York City: Governance, Property Rights, and the State in the Changing Definition of a Corporation, 1730-1860," Buffalo Law Review 29 (1979), 91-109; "The Public Law of a County Court: Judicial Government in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts," American Journal of Legal History 20 (1976), 282-329. For a history of city corporations which focuses on the issues of public v. private, see Gerald Frug, "The City as a Legal Concept," Harvard Law Review 99 (1980), 1059-1154. Morton J. Horowitz, " Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory," West Virginia Law Review 88 (Winter 1985-1986), 173-224, argues for a late nineteenth-century redefinition of corporations as persons.

11. Eric H. Monkkonen, " Bank of August v. Earle : Corporate Growth v. States' Rights," The Alabama Historical Quarterly 34 (Summer 1972), 113-130. R. Kent Newmeyer, The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney (New York: Crowell, 1968), 72-81. According to Newmeyer, through the early court decisions on corporations, "the legal foundation was being laid for the promotional, non-regulatory state of post-Civil War America" (81).

12. Paul Studenski and Herman E. Kroos, Financial history of the United States: Fiscal, Monetary, Banking, and Tariff, Including Financial, Administrative, State, and Local Finance , 2d ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 59-60. They cite Edward D. Durand, The Finances of the City of New York (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 30.

13. On the conservatism of local government, see Studenski and Kroos, Financial History , 131-132. Note that Prude, Coming of Industrial Order , 243, mentions parenthetically how as Oxford began to provide urban services within its "expanded conception of the public good," its also went into debt. I argue that it was precisely this ability and activity that made possible a new conception of public good, of the service city.

14. Seth Low, former mayor of Brooklyn, contributed a chapter to James Bryce's monumental study, The American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan, 1891) rev. 3d ed., 1917, vol. 1, 624-625, where he stated that the "motive" to achieve incorporated city status has been "to make available the credit of the community in order to provide adequately for its own growth."

15. David H. Pinckney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958).

16. On general incorporation, see Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 447. See also, Thomas K. McCraw, ed., Regulation in Perspective: Historical Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), and idem, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

17. Jerome M. Clubb and Howard W. Allen, "Collective Biography and the Progressive Movement: The 'Status Revolution' Revisited," Social Science History 1 (Summer 1977), 518-534.

18. David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century , (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982), 320-326; Estelle F. Feinstein, Stamford in the Gilded Age: The Political Life of a Connecticut Town, 1868-1893 (Stamford, Conn.: Stamford Historical Society, 1973); Carl V. Harris, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871-1921 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977); Harold L. Platt, City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston, Texas, 1830-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983). Hammack's book contains a fine-grained analysis of New York City politics and decision making, while his notes constitute an excellent bibliography of the sociological, historical, and political science literature constituting the pluralist school of political analysis.

19. Hammack, Power and Society , 320, 322, 323, 322-326.

20. Ibid., 309.

21. Paul F. Lazersfeld, "The Logical and Methodological Foundations of Latent Structure Analysis," in Samuel A. Stouffer, ed., Measurement and Prediction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). For an introduction to the complex ideas implied, see Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization (New York: Free Press, 1976), "On the Concept of Organizational Goal," 257-278.

22. John R. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Data on railroads and towns greater than 10,000 calculated from Bureau of the Census Office, Report on the Social Statistics of Cities . . . 1890 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), table 74, 133-137.

23. For the role of the private builder in forcing on cities planning codes and zoning, see Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: American Real Estate Developers, Urban Planners, and the Creation of Modern Residential Subdivisions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Weiss compares the real estate industry's creation of planning to the participation of other industries in the creation of regulatory law.

24. Maris A. Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) reanalyzes the thesis proposed by Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), who claimed that the working class of Beverly opposed high schools. Diane Ravitch, The Revisionists Revisited: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1978), and Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York: Praeger, 1971); David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). Quotation from Carl F. Kaestle and Maris A. Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 140. See their separate analysis of two places, which highlights the differences between an aggressive small city, lively Lynn, and a rural area, boring Boxford, 140-184.

25. Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). Finally, when schooling is considered as investment in human capital, the urban contribution to the overall national investment far exceed the rural contribution, once again highlighting the urban promotion of the economic transformation of the nineteenth century. Kaestle and Vinovskis, Education and Social Change , 194, shows how rural per capita schooling expenditures were only about half those of small cities, one-fourth those of a metropolis, even though schooling expenditures took up a larger share of the rural budget.

26. For a detailed set of analyses of the relationship of tramping to economic growth, see the articles in Eric H. Monkkonen, ed., Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).

27. A list of pre-1935 urban technical and reform journals includes the following, listed by title, founding organization, date of journal's founding, and other titles:

State organizations: The Municipality: Devoted to the Interests of Local Government (League of Wisconsin Municipalities, 1900); Municipal Law Reporter (1909) followed by The Borough Bulletin (1917) Penn.; followed by Pennsylvanian: The Magazine of Local Governments, Incorporating The Authority, The Hub, The Township Commissioner, The Borough Bulletin, Pennsylvania League of Cities, Assessors' Newsletter, Horizons ); Kansas Municipalities: A Monthly Review of Municipal Progress and Problems (League of Kansas Municipalities, 1914); American Municipalities (Iowa and Nebraska, pre-1914); Texas Municipalities (League of Texas Municipalities, 1914); Minnesota Municipalities (League of Minnesota Municipalities, 1916); New Jersey Municipalities (New Jersey State League of Municipalities, 1917); Nebraska Municipal Review (League of Nebraska Municipalities, 1917); Illinois Municipal Review (The Illinois Municipal League, 1922); Virginia Municipal Review (League of Virginia Municipalities, 1924); Colorado Municipalities: The City Officials Magazine "A Review of Civic Progress: Official Organ of The Colorado Municipal League" (1925); Oklahoma Municipal Review (The Oklahoma Municipal League, 1926); Michigan Municipal Review (League of Michigan Municipalities, 1928); The Kentucky City (The Kentucky Municipal League, 1930).

National organizations: National Municipal Review , succeeding Proceedings of The . . . Conference for Good City Government And the . . . Annual Meeting of The National Municipal League (Title Varies: Proceedings of The National Conference For Good City Government , Philadelphia, 1894); City Government: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to The Practical Affairs of Municipalities (Related to American Society of Municipal Improvements (?), 1896; originally may have been Municipal Journal ; changed name to Public Works ); Municipal Affairs: A Quarterly Magazine Devoted to The Consideration of City Problems from the Standpoint of the Taxpayer and Citizen (New York Reform Club, Committee On Municipal Administration, 1897); League of American Municipalities (1898); The American City (1909); City Manager Bulletin , succeeded by Public Management (City Managers Association, 1933); The United States Municipal News (American Municipal Association, and U. S. Conference of Mayors, 1934); succeeded by The Mayor , 1934-71; Local Government Administration: An International Quarterly Review (1935); Legal Notes on Local Government (Section of Municipal Lawyers of American Bar Association, 1936).

City engineering journals: Plumber & Sanitary Engineer (December 1877-November 1880); Sanitary Engineer (December 1880-October 1886); Sanitary Engineer And Construction Record (November 1886-October, 1887); Engineering & Building Record and The Sanitary Engineer (October 8, 1887-November 1890); The Engineering Record, Building Record and Sanitary Engineer (1890-1902); Engineering News (1902-1917); Engineering News-Record (1917). Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers (American Society of Civil Engineers, 1867).

28. John D. Buenker and Nicholas C. Burckel, Progressive Reform: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1980); Judith W. Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Judith Rosenberg Raftery, "The Invention of Modern Urban Schooling: Los Angeles, 1885-1941," (Ph. D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1984). For the fascinating story of school dental clinics and the surprising illustration of how their half-century existence was forgotten in the 1960s, see Steven L. Schlossman, JoAnne Brown, and Michael Sedlak, The Public School in American Dentistry (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1986). On the professionalization of progressives, see Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), and Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

29. For a discussion of "incremental" fiscal history, see McDonald and Ward, "Introduction," The Politics of Urban Fiscal Policy , 13-38.

30. Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933-1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

31. Frank Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Eric H. Monkkonen, review of Morn in American Historical Review 88 (April 1983), 488; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, "Review Essay on U.S. Detectives," in Journal of American Studies 17 (August 1983), 265-274.

32. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), esp. 94-108.

33. For a discussion of the complex issues surrounding historical indicators of crime, see Eric H. Monkkonen, "The Quantitative Historical Study of Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States," in James Inciardi and Charles Faupel, eds., History and Crime: Implications for Contemporary Criminal Justice Policy (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1980), 53-73; Monkkonen, "Municipal Reports as an Indicator Source: The Nineteenth Century Police," Historical Methods 12 (Spring 1979), 57-65; and V. A. C. Gatrell, "The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England," in Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker, eds., Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa, 1980), 238-370.

34. Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691-1776 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), 216, finds a rise in crimes of violence in the eighteenth century. In "Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America," American Journal of Legal History 26 (October 1982), 304, Greenberg claims that colonial offenses against morality declined in the eighteenth century. William E. Nelson, "Emerging Notions of Criminal Law in the Revolutionary Era," New York University Law Review 42 (May 1967), 450-482; Theodore N. Ferdinand, "Criminality, the Courts, and the Constabulary in Boston: 1702-1967," Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 17 (July 1980), 198-199, table 3, has good evidence that the apparent concern with crimes against morality in the colonial era is to a certain extent an artifact of the way in which researchers, particularly Nelson, have analyzed the data. By looking at the proportion of offenses, rather than the per capita or even absolute rates, the low amounts of property crime and crimes Of violence make crimes against morals seem high. For Boston, between the year 1702 and the nineteenth century, all offenses had actually increased, including those against morality, except that the latter had increased less than others.

For rise in thefts of deception, see Eric H. Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860-1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 35-39. John D. Hewitt and Dwight W. Hoover, "Local Modernization and Crime: The Effects of Modernization on Crime in Middletown, 1845-1910," Law and Human Behavior 6 (1982), 313-325, find no rise in thefts by deception for the period they analyze in Muncie. Evidence for decline in public disorder is analyzed in Monkkonen, "A Disorderly People? Urban Order in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century America," Journal of American History 68 (December 1981), 539-559; for comparable data on homicide, see Lane, Violent Death in the City .

35. Howard Zehr, "The Modernization of Crime in Germany and France, 1830-1913," Journal of Social History 8 (Summer 1975), 117-141; idem, Crime and the Development of Modern Society: Patterns of Criminality in Nineteenth Century Germany and France (London: Croom Helm, 1976); Vincent McHale and Eric A. Johnson, "Urbanization, Industrialization and Crime in Imperial Germany," Social Science History 1 (Fall 1976/Winter 1977), 45-78, 210-247; Abdul Q. Lodhi and Charles Tily, "Urbanization, Crime and Collective Violence in 19th-century France," American Sociological Review 37 (October 1972), 520-532.

36. Monkkonen, "A Disorderly People?"; Monkkonen, "Toward an Understanding of Urbanization: Drunk Arrests in Los Angeles," Pacific Historical Review L (May 1981), 234-244. This pattern did not hold true for St. Louis: see Eugene J. Watts, "Police Response to Crime and Disorder in Twentieth-Century St. Louis," Journal of American History 70 (September 1983), 340-358. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process , Edmond Jephcatt, trans. (New York: Urizen, 1978).

37. Lane, Violent Death in the City , shows that even though homicide rates declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the chances of being killed by a stranger or by a gun increased. Christopher Stone, "Vandalism: Property, Gentility, and the Rhetoric of Crime in New York City, 1890-1920," Radical History Review 26 (October 1982), 13-36, shows how the consciousness or concern—it is not clear which—about public destructiveness increased in New York.

38. T. D. Woolsey, "Nature and Sphere of Police Power," Journal of Social Science (1871), 111. Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class . Earliest British source in Oxford English Dictionary, 1859, citing Arthur Helps, Friends in Council: A Series of Readings and Discourses Thereon , Ser. II, vol. I, ii (London, 1859), 131. Clive Emsley, Policing and Its Context, 1750-1870 (New York: Schocken, 1983), 87, identifies the earliest usage of the phrase by Henri Fregier, in France, as 1840. Thomas Duesterberg, "The Origins of Criminology in France: Penal Reform and Scientific Criminology in the Age of Revolution, 17891840," 11-12, in John A. Conley, ed., Theory and Research in Criminal Justice: Current Perspectives (n.p.: Anderson, 1979), argues that Fregier's Des Classes Dangereuses de ]a Population dans les Grandes Villes (Paris: Bailliere, 1840) represented the position of liberal social economists, put forward to counter those who explained crime by examining the individual.

39. Thomas M. Pitkin, The Black Hand: A Chapter in Ethnic Crime (Totowa, N.J.: Bowman and Littlefield, 1977).

40. Henry George, Social Problems (Chicago, 1883), 317, cited by Weber, The Growth of Cities , 368, 407.

41. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 109-128. James Q. Wilson in Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) shows how some police departments have made their "catch-all" function into the main orientation of the department, in what Wilson terms a "service style."

42. For studies on trash and traffic, see Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880-1980 (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1981), and John A. Gardiner, Traffic and the Police: Variations in Law-Enforcement Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).

43. Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (West Compton House, England: Open Books, 1981).

44. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1977).

45. Douglas L. Jones, "The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts," Journal of Social History 8 (Spring 1975), 36.

46. Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Vintage, 1970).

47. Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1974); William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970).

48. Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 153-154, has shown that ethnicity of New York City officers had little measurable relationship to the ethnicity of those whom they arrested. John C. Schneider, Detroit and the Problem of Order, 1830-1880: A Geography of Crime, Riots, and Policing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 138, discusses the lack of ethnic riots.

49. Bruce Laurie,"Fire Companies and Gangs in Southwark: The 1840s," in Allan F. Davis and Mark Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790-1840 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 71-87.

50. Four South Boston high school students visited Charlotte, North Carolina, to observe in person an example of successful crosstown busing to achieve integration, New York Times (24, October 1974), 36. See Jone Malloy Southie Won't Go: A Teacher's Diary of the Desegregation of South Boston High School (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

51. On black mayors in the South, see the discussion by Edward F. Haas, "The Southern Metropolis, 1940-1976," in Blaine A. Brownell and David R. Goldfield, The City in Southern History: The Growth of Urban Civilization in the South (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1977), 185.

52. See Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 3-10, for a historiographical analysis of the media phenomenon of the "sunbelt" mystique. For an excellent survey of the literature in addition to the phenomenon itself, see the introduction to Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice, Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth since World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 1-30. Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (New York: Random House, 1975).

53. Edwin D. Shurter, ed., The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry W. Grady ([Austin?] Tex.: South-West, 1910): Grady's constant refrain was for the South to diversify and industrialize, to become like the manufacturing belt. An audience at the Dallas State Fair in 1887 heard him use Grand Rapids, Michigan, as a model for the South. Grand Rapids specialized in manufacturing furniture from nearby forest products; Grady argued that forested parts of the South could do the same, ignoring the obvious problems of transportation, population, and competing manufacturing enterprises (51). Presumably he would have been pleased with the belt of furniture manufacturing cities stretching along Interstate 85 from High Point to Thomasville in North Carolina, but disappointed that this enterprise has not diversified the regional economy to the extent he desired. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1878-1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 1-21, for a discussion of the city in the South.

54. Keay Davidson, "San Diego Loses to Austin in Luring High-Tech Firm," Los Angeles Times (18 May 1983), 1, 18. Also, in the San Diego Union , Fred Muir, "Hopes Fade for Research Firm Here" (17 May 1983), A-1,9; and Fred Muir, "Three Factors Cited in Loss of Big Research Center" (18 May 1983), A-1, 5; and editorial, "Lessons of Defeat" (13 May 1986), B-6. Also, Lawrence Ingrassia, "Four Cities Vie for High-Tech Joint Venture,'' The Wall Street Journal (12 May 1983), 35, 39; Robert S. Jones, "City Rejected for Research Center," Atlanta Constitution (18 May 1983), C-1,3; John Walsh, "Texans Woo and Whelm MCC," Science , 220 (3, June 1983), 1025; Joseph P. Kahn, "The Isosceles of Texas is Upon Us," Inc. 5 (October 1983), 155-158. For an advice-giving analysis of city/business partnerships, see Richard Erickson, "Trends for Economic Development," The American City & County 100 (October 1985), 50-54.

1. Adna F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (New York: Macmillan, 1899). Frederick C. Howe, The Modern City and Its Problems (New York: Scribners, 1915). Howe also lists libraries, schools, and playgrounds as U.S. city achievements.

2. Eric H. Monkkonen, "The Sense of Crisis: A Historian's Point of View," in Mark Gottdiener, ed., Cities in Stress: A New Look at the Urban Crisis (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, 1986), 20-38.

3. For the pension problem, see Robert M. Fogelson, Pensions, The Hidden Costs of Public Safety (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

4. Weber, Growth of Cities , 474, 475. Historians have only begun to analyze the growth of the national government and the lessened visibility of local government: for a recent summary, see John J. Wallis, "Why 1933? the Origins and Timing of National Government Growth, 1933-1940," Research in Economic History , Suppl. 4, (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1985), 1-51. For recent works that offer promising avenues to urban analysis, see Carl Abbott, Urban America in the Modern Age: 1920 to the Present (Chicago: Harlan Davidson, 1987); Kenneth Fox, Metropolitan America: Urban Life and Urban Policy in the United States, 1940-1980 (London: Macmillan, 1985); Jon C. Teaford, The Twentieth Century American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); John Moellenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Ira Katznelson, Urban Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Royce Hanson, The Evolution of National Urban Policy, 1970-1980: Lessons from the Past (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1982); Christopher B. Leinberger and Charles Lockwood, "How Business is Reshaping America," The Atlantic Monthly (October 1986), 43-52.

5. John Herbers, "Now Even the Suburbs Have Suburbs," New York Times (5 May 1985), 6E; John Herbers, "Many in Poll Prefer Small Towns," New York Times (24 March 1985), 28L.