America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780-1980 - Couverture rigide

Monkkonen, Eric H.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0520061918 ISBN 13 : 9780520061910

Editeur : University of California Press, 1988

Synopsis

America's cities: celebrated by poets, courted by politicians, castigated by social reformers. In their numbers and complexity they challenge comprehension. Why is urban America the way it is? Eric Monkkonen offers a fresh approach to the myths and the history of US urban development, giving us an unexpected and welcome sense of our urban origins. His historically anchored vision of our cities places topics of finance, housing, social mobility, transportation, crime, planning, and growth into a perspective which explains the present in terms of the past and ofers a point from which to plan for the future.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Eric H. Monkkonen is Professor of History and Policy Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Author of The Local State (1995) and America Becomes Urban (California, 1988), he is also editor of the eleven-volume Crime and Justice in American History (1991).

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

"The best reinterpretation of American urban history in the last twenty-five years."—Roger w. Lotchin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"A challenging analytical framework that can guide the discipline of urban history into its second half century."—Kenneth t. Jackson, Mellon Professor of History and of the Social Sciences, Columbia University

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780 - 1980

By Eric Henry Monkkonen

University of California Press

Copyright © 1988 Eric Henry Monkkonen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520061918
Introduction

The United States has become one of the world's most urban nations, but strangely, it has a rural sense of its own history. Because it lacked a single dominating, capital city in the beginning and because it still lacks urban primacy today—no one Tokyo, no Paris, no London, no Moscow—it continues to conceal its urbanness from itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, James Bryce, a Scottish visitor, was so struck by this absence that he devoted a whole chapter of The American Commonwealth to "The Absence of a Capital." "The United States," he observed, "are the only great country in the world which has no capital." Explaining what a capital city meant to a nation, he discussed the benefits of the "heaping together in such a place of these various elements of power, the conjunction of the forces of rank, wealth, knowledge, intellect." This missing urban element troubled Bryce greatly, for it accounted for the diffuse, genial plainness of the country. He finally concluded that the loss of a capital city's advantages exceeded the gain afforded by the widespread distribution of its cultural and economic virtues throughout many cities. He hoped, but with little conviction, that "local independence" might in return produce future benefits.1

As a consequence, the United States is urban but not urbane. I wish to amend this partial, rural self-understanding through a study that implicitly addresses the history of U.S. cities from a world historical context. This history is about U.S. cities; thus it compares indirectly. It is designed to account for the American side of the differences between cities of Western Europe and the United States which are so apparent in the late twentieth century but which had their roots in much earlier events. In so doing it delib-

erately bridges several different research traditions, incorporating and building on "old" and "new," political and social, urban histories. A deliberate awareness of the city's long history and the rather short history of the United States makes apparent how the cities we live in are much closer in kind to those of a century ago than they are to virtually all the rest of cities in history. We are at once a more urban nation and a nation with a different kind of "urban" than we sometimes realize.

This book falls between the comprehensive textbook and the more substantively focused scholarly monograph. In spirit, though not content, it owes much to the late nineteenth-century American social scientist, Adna F. Weber. It builds upon the specialized work produced by urban historians in the past two decades. The notes indicate, if only slightly, the depth, complexity, and specialization of this corpus, which has been accessible mainly to subspecialists. There are clusters of historians specializing in urban pavements, urban finance, urban reform, urban women, urban blacks, urban crime, urban mobility (written by both geographers and social historians), urban government, urban education, and urban society. And, of course, many individual cities—notably Boston, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee—have dozens of specialists. Los Angeles alone has a thick reference book of nothing but bibliographic citations to books and articles about its history. In addition to these varied specialist literatures, a rich lode of individual city biographies—a branch of local history which began in the late nineteenth century and still thrives—blesses the historian of the American city. These individual city stories contain a wealth of narrative detail and of visual evidence, and often convey a highly personalized, visceral sense of a city's past. The genre has recently been raised to a new literary status by novelist William Kennedy's O Albany! , which deliberately exploits the form to convey a sense of time and place for one "improbable city" (an adjective used, not surprisingly, for many American cities).2

Historians have much primary information about our cities. The details, images, visceral evidence, social analyses, pile up like the pages of a nineteenth-century statistical compendium. For example, the stereo photos archived at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside literally allow us to see the late nineteenth-century city in three dimensions. For example, one can position oneself on the top of a four-story building, and look down

on early turn-of-the-century Asheville, North Carolina, seeing the downtown with stunning precision. But the information we have about our cities becomes cacophonous unless we know how to order it. This book is a guide to help organize the details of the city, from buildings to bread lines, freeways to flophouses. It suggests how to go about making the present intelligible in terms of the past, and suggests those aspects of our cities about which we should wonder. It also expresses my own appreciation of the way in which the social foundations of our cities require constant human energy and effort; that they require our constant action. This is an assessment well understood by policy activists. In 1895, Frederick H. Wines, an active reformer and prison official, in a fight to maintain the presence of the Illinois State Board of Charities, which oversaw county poorhouses, jails, and similar institutions, wrote, "Eternal vigilance is the price, not only of liberty, but of everything else worth having or preserving."3

In the post-World War II era, most urban observers have grown accustomed to analyzing our cities in a peculiarly passive context, envisioning them not as historically, and therefore humanly, determined, but as passive creations of vague "forces," in particular the forces of technological and economic determinism. It is important, therefore, to keep in mind that human action has been the principal force shaping our cities. When we hide our actions from ourselves—when we invent, finance, build, and make viable railroads, for instance, and then embed the railroad in our thinking as a causal rather than a caused urban feature—we create for ourselves the strange notion that we have come to where we are by some "natural" process unrelated to human history. History is about human actions, about contingencies, unexpected consequences, unplanned chains of events, and ungrasped opportunities. But when we are still in the midst of a dramatic historical process, that thought process that allows us to see things as technologically determined, as macrohuman, comforts us by deception.4

A central historical precondition underlies the larger course of American urban history: timing. Richard Hofstadter emphasized this aspect of American development, reminding us that the United States was "the first post-feudal nation, the first nation in the world to be formed and to grow from its earliest days under the influence of Protestantism, nationalism, and modern capitalist enterprise."5 This aspect of historical timing meant that by the nineteenth cen-

tury, when United States city formation began in earnest, cities began building under the protective aegis of the nation state, which in its grasp for political power assumed the cost and management of the military. Cities were freed to be more than fortified, mercantile warehouses, to design themselves as service oriented, debt financed, growth (and therefore capital) promoting, economic (not social) centers.

In both structure and form the modern American city was born in the nineteenth century, a century of dramatic transformation on practically every front. The temptation to the retrospective analyst is to see the city as a passive respondent to other larger changes, rather than an initiator of change. From the functionalist point of view, the urban promoters, politicians, and citizens, inventing and implementing the urban institutions that actually accomplished these goals, seemed to be responding to needs. And all too often historians have readily acquiesced to this causal analysis. Consider, for instance, the deceptively simple statement that "cities created modern proactive police in response to the threat of rising crime." This statement raises two questions. First, without the police to gather data systematically, how could one have known that crime was rising? Second, why should the city have responded at all? "Response" is an inappropriate word, for in fact the city acted, perhaps rationalizing its actions with the passive verbal construction of responses. The city's acceptance of responsibility for problems within its purview constituted a historically significant act worthy of our careful attention.

Cities could have chosen to ignore sewage, crime, unschooled children, and slow transportation by simply tolerating higher disease rates, offense rates, illiteracy rates, and traffic tangles. That there is indeed wide variation in tolerance between cities today illustrates that no "natural" level generating a response to problems exists. Instead, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, cities chose to intervene aggressively in the local economic setting, intentionally creating what they hoped would be ideal environments for economic growth. By these actions individual villages, towns, and cities attempted to amplify their existing locational or economic advantages. Success, defined as population growth, increased the wealth of all real property owners. A conservative Milwaukee newspaper observed in 1887 that it was the city's "paramount duty . . . that she grow just as rapidly as circumstances aided

by increasing vim and push and good judgment will permit."6 The capital returns from simple population growth justified expansive policies for local residents. And the consequences of growth integrated the disparate activities of nineteenth-century local governments.

Because U.S. cities took their corporate status from that of commercial, profit-oriented corporations, they were able to act with few limitations other than their politicians' imaginations. The new, powerful, corporate borrowing privileges of the mid-nineteenth century set the political preconditions with which any incorporated municipality might create or seize economic advantages in unprecedented ways. Not until after the Civil War did local governments experience formal limitations on their financial activities. Their corporate status provided them the basis for both the minimal, regulatory city and the maximal, promotional, service providing city, allowing them intentionally to create the optimal environment for economic growth and population expansion. Unintentionally, these city-provided services have become the basis of our modern expectation that cities will protect us from crime, keep public behavior orderly, and cushion or protect citizens from threats to their health and welfare, both social and physical. These formal urban organizations made possible the orderly expansion of cities filled with strangers, conflicting ethnic and racial groups, and highly fluid and mobile populations.

Three Eras of American City Growth

The basic chronology of U.S. cities has three parts:

First, the premodern era, which came to a close in the period 1790–1830, retained a deep similarity to and continuity with European cities. Containing about 5 percent or less of any region's population, cities functioned as commercial and political centers. Although both the population and the number of cities had begun to expand, this era was quiescent compared with the explosive century that followed.

Second, the century-long period of local economic and population growth from 1830 to 1930 saw a dynamic and historically unprecedented expansion of cities—in absolute size, in proportion of the total population, and in number. Prior to this century, cities had been much more responsive agents. But during this phase, cit-

ies began to work out their new mode of providing services, acting positively in local affairs, and doing so as competitive entrepreneurs. Local governments financed two transportation revolutions, in railroads and hard surfaced roads. Demographically, European migration fueled a substantial portion of this expansion. When this ended prior to World War I, rural migration took up the slack, only to cease during the Great Depression, which abruptly terminated the era. The individualistic local underwriting of growth ended unpredictably and, equally as unpredictably, a reluctant federal government stepped in to support the end of a century of urban growth.

Finally, post-Depression cities made the innovations of the previous century permanent and somewhat invisible, by creating bureaucracies to accomplish the new services. New federal government actions during the Depression helped dissipate intense local concerns about cities. The subsequent federal period of American cities had its organizational basis laid during the Depression and World War II, and continued until the mid-1970s. Demographic change in this period continued to be as important as it had been earlier, with the very form of the residential city consciously reorganized around the burgeoning nuclear families of the baby boomers. Intracity finance of transportation continued the transportation revolution begun by cities in the late nineteenth century with hard surfaced roads. Thousands of intensely local governments built new, competing small cities on the fringes of older ones, continuing the expansion and significance of small- and medium-sized cities, cities all too often ignored by urban analysts.7 The result has been the decentralized metropolis. Since the mid-1970s, the proportion of the population living outside of cities has stabilized, and change now occurs within and between cities and regions. Metropolitan spread continues, following the network of hard surfaced roads.

A Century and a Half of Growth and Its Influence on Thinking about Cities

A deep shift in the role of the city undergirded this three-phased demographic and organizational expansion. In 1790, the city was a passive, regulatory, noninstitutionalized, and voluntary organization, described in detail in chapters two and four. By the Depression, the U.S. city had been transformed into a very differ-

ent, nearly opposite, model, actively providing a range of services; it is described in chapter nine. In its firmly established, modern mode, this new city foreshadowed the federal programs of the New Deal. Detroit, for instance, responded to unemployment by instituting its own extensive relief programs. But because the long swing of the city's growth came to an abrupt halt during the Depression, it could not successfully finance its programs. Across the country, expected increases in property values failed to materialize. Weeds grew in lots platted on these expectations. The crisis triggered massive tax defaults, temporarily undermining local government revenues. Thus the Depression closed an era of city building, both physically and organizationally, which set the limits to our contemporary urban world.

The benefits of simple population growth made a range of policy outcomes seem successful. Without the economic consequences of rising property values for generation after generation, local governments would not have been quite so able to combine conservative taxation with generous indebtedness policies and get the same benefits. These economic prospects loosened up otherwise cautious property owners, who knew that increases in land value compensated for the costs of city expansion. For instance, a letter written by a leading Milwaukee capitalist in 1857 explicitly made the connections between population growth and wealth:

But there is another mode of investment capital here that is very profitable. Our city has grown up within 20 years from an entire wilderness—it now has a population of about 40,000 souls. You readily see how rapidly all real estate must be increasing in value. Many fine fortunes are made simply by the purchase of real estate which after a year or two may be sold for perhaps double its cost. The constant immigration, the construction of our system of railroads, and the rapid improvement of our farming lands around us all assure us that this increase in the value of real estate will continue for a great number of years.8

We have articulated much of our understanding of American cities within the context of nearly continuous population growth, the cessation of which usually brings local disaster. In the past century and a half the United States has changed from almost purely rural to almost purely urban, a process now virtually completed. New growth cannot be transitional in the same fundamental way. As a consequence, we have not come to grips with the historical departure our cities have made from their medieval pred-

ecessors, nor, subsequently, have we learned how to conceptualize this new kind of urban world. I come to these fundamental changes and intellectual problems from my own research, interest in urban history, which derives from both professional specialization, in particular the study of crime and police, and from a deeper need for self-understanding. I need to know why life in late twentieth-century urban America is the way it is in order to understand my own personal circumstances. This, for me, is what history is for: to gain in self-understanding through social understanding. And the understanding of society must come through history, both to describe what now is and to analyze simultaneously the salient features of how it got that way.

Much of this book is a sketch. It cannot pretend to be comprehensive. Thousands and thousands of pages have been written on the urban working class, on ethnic groups, on women, on racial groups, on politics, on disorder, and on a host of other fascinating details that have gone into the diverse past of everyday urban life. As in a pencil sketch, a line suffices for a whole, white space a background. The sketches and their frames are there only to guide the reader's imagination. The notes are there both to establish my own claims and to guide the curious to further reading.

Continues...

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 1988
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0520061918
• ISBN 13: 9780520061910
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 336
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible