Editor's Introduction: The Politics of Urban Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1870–1920

Not only is the city involved most deeply in the great political experiment of the present and the future, but it is the dominating element in that experiment. The United States, along with the other nations of the western world, is rapidly coming to be a nation of cities, and even while the majority of the American people remain rural, so far as residence is concerned, the influence of the cities upon national life is quite out of proportion to their population. For the city is the distributing center of intelligence as well as of goods. The city stands for organization. It is the center of the complex web of national life. (Wilcox 1904: 14) At the turn of the 20th century, interest in urban reform reached new and impressive levels. Decades of unprecedented growth and expansion, fueled in large measure by industrialization, created a perfect storm of problems municipal governments were ill-equipped to address. A growing cadre of middle- and upper- class reformers directed their attention to the complex challenges facing North American and European cities. These reformers hoped to solve emerging urban problems because they recognized the essential role of the city in modern life as well as its potential to promote social progress and the highest ideals of human civilization. The articles in this issue examine the ways urban reformers—mayors and city planners, in particular—confronted the serious trials of modern urban life and, in doing so, contributed to a transatlantic dialogue about the nature of progress in the modern industrial world. Although they utilized different approaches, the leaders drew from a common pool of ideas that challenged traditional laissez-faire attitudes about government and recognized an expanded role for the state as a positive agent in social and economic development. Towards that end, many supported public ownership of natural monopolies such as power, gas, and water. They also pursued policies that promoted greater civic awareness and interest in the city as a collective experiment in self-government. Such policies included the construction of public farms, parks, libraries, sewage facilities, and bathhouses. In this introduction, I will first provide a brief overview of the evolution of attitudes toward the city—from a necessary evil to the prime catalyst of national social and economic development. Following that, I will summarize each of the articles in this issue. While the building of towns was a crucial feature of American colonization, the towns were to be thought of as instruments of control—not as laboratories of democracy or experiments in individual freedom. (Glaab and Brown 1967: 4–5) Social and economic life in colonial cities was highly regulated, and unapproved exploration beyond the town's borders was strictly prohibited. Despite the restrictions against, and dangers associated with, expansion, the diffusion of settlers into the North American back country outpaced the growth of American towns and cities throughout the 18th and most of the 19th centuries. In 1800, only 6 percent of the American population lived in urban places of 2,500 or more. By 1820, that number had only grown to 7 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 1949: 24). Cities in the early decades of the 19th century were relatively small and focused on commercial activity. Most of the workforce was still directly involved in the production of goods, with as many as one-third of workers involved in skilled or semi-skilled labor (Klein and Kantor 1976: 71). Within a relatively short time-frame—from roughly 1820 to 1870—the nature and size of the city changed rapidly. Powered by new and improved sources of energy, the machine replaced manual labor as the dominant source of productivity. The shop system was supplanted by large and impersonal factories. New cities formed, and old cities re-formed around those factories, which processed raw materials and manufactured finished products on an incredible scale. Demanding a steady stream of workers, urban populations ballooned. In 1840, nearly 2 million or 12 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas. In 1860, that number had jumped to 24 percent of the total population, and by 1890, more than one-third of the American people lived in urban places (U.S. Census Bureau 1949: 24). In addition to adding more people, urban economies specialized in one or two major industries, which provided the bulk of city jobs and wealth. For Chicago, that industry was wholesale slaughtering and meatpacking, for Philadelphia it was carpet and rugs. Specialization was even more pronounced in smaller urban areas. In 1900, for example, Troy, New York produced 85 percent of the total value of cuffs and collars sold in the United States. Similarly, Baltimore, Maryland contributed 64 percent of the total national value of canned oysters (U.S. Census Bureau 1902: ccix). If a plant declined or failed, stockholders lost money, managers were fired, and workers were laid off. Railroads, warehouses, and other service industries soon felt the pinch. Everyone from the grocer to the barber lost business. As unemployment spread and incomes declined, people confined their spending to the bare necessities, setting off a wave of contraction among merchants … Unless the cycle was reversed by a renewal of industrial activity or an infusion of new business, the town was likely to stagnate. (Klein and Kantor 1976: 99) The success of a city's primary industry, however, had the opposite effect. In addition to becoming densely populated, highly specialized, and full of interdependencies, by the turn of the 20th century, American cities also were shamefully mismanaged. “There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States,” according to Viscount James Bryce ([1888] 1906: 643), Britain's ambassador to the United States. One of the primary reasons for the failure of cities to meet the growing needs of their residents resulted from the structure of government they inherited from the state. “Instead of organizing our municipalities with due reference to the problems with which they have to deal, we have consciously and unconsciously applied analogies taken from our state and national governments,” explained Leo S. Rowe (1897: 318), a lecturer and expert in municipal government. A strong system of separation of powers and checks and balances prevented municipal governments from quick or effective action. The typical structure of city government in the 19th century included a mayor, a legislative body usually known as a council, and several administrative boards and departments. The legislature often consisted of two houses: a popularly elected Common Council and a Board of Alderman, elected or appointed by wards (Bryce [1888] 1906: 631). In the early decades of the 19th century, before universal white male suffrage, state governors appointed city mayors. By the 1820s, however, mayors were elected by the voters of each city. This change was not accompanied, however, by an increase in local authority. If anything, as Glaab and Brown (1967: 170) have pointed out, “cities appeared to be losing powers as the 19th century wore on.” The power to raise taxes, borrow money, or finance public improvements remained with the state, as did the authority to create administrative boards or appoint department heads. To do almost anything substantial, city governments had to appeal to state legislatures for the necessary authorization. By the 1870s, the state's involvement in urban affairs reached stupefying levels. “The New York legislature passed more laws in New York City alone in the three years from 1867 to 1870 than Parliament passed for all cities in the United Kingdom; in the year 1870, thirty-nine state laws were passed for the city of Brooklyn alone” (Glaab and Brown 1967: 173). Municipalities offered several enticements to state political chieftains. They possessed large numbers of voters in a compact area, which meant they could be organized with relative ease … By extending the state's role in municipal government, the parties could seize a lucrative share of the action for their own purposes. Lacking either the authority or revenue to provide much-needed services to their growing populations, city leaders appealed to party officials or “bosses.” Well-connected and financed, political bosses could gain the necessary authorizations from the state to finance improvements or contract debt much faster than city bureaucrats. In exchange for their help, however, party bosses demanded valuable contracts, city jobs for their followers, and public franchises for the corporations they controlled. By the close of the 19th century, the granting of public franchises had become the chief source of corruption in urban politics. The complexities and challenges facing local governments at the turn of the 20th century attracted the attention of a burgeoning class of social activists and political reformers. Historians generally refer to them as “progressives.” Although they lacked a political party or common background, progressives promoted what Rodgers (1998: 30) has called a common “agenda of social politics.” At the heart of this agenda was the belief that not everything belonged in the private market. “Against the onrush of commodification, the advocates of social politics tried to hold certain elements out of the market's processes, indeed to roll back those parts of the market whose social costs had proved to high” (Rodgers 1998: 30). At the city level, those elements included water, power, housing, and transportation. The effort to transfer the provision of these services from private to public control was called municipal ownership. Given a progressive community, in which population is increasing and one improvement succeeds another, land must constantly increase in value. This steady increase naturally leads to speculation in which future increase is anticipated, and land values are carried beyond the point at which, under the existing conditions of production, their accustomed returns would be left to labor and capital. Production, therefore, begins to stop. To check monopolization of land and real estate speculation, George called for the replacement of all taxes with one tax on the full value of land. His proposal became known as the “single tax.” Because George's proposal involved sharing the economic value of land, his ideas were considered by many contemporaries to be uncomfortably close to socialism. As a result, the single tax was never fully implemented anywhere in the world. Still, George's concept animated many of the most notable reform movements of the era, including the effort to municipalize natural monopolies. Advocates of municipal ownership drew heavily from George's description of the social nature of land values to justify public control of city streets and rights-of-way. As Rodgers (1998: 140) has pointed out: “Recapturing the socially created value of the city's streets and franchises meant confiscating the franchisers’ unearned profit; practically, it meant municipalization. Through this logical chain, the municipal ownership movement was to be heavily stocked with single-taxers.” Supporters of municipal ownership attacked the injustice of allowing private corporations to amass huge profits for providing services required by all residents and using public property, such as streets or gas lines, to do so. The thing which distinguishes the public-utility corporation, whether it be a railway, transmission or franchise corporation, from all other industries is its identity with the land. It is this that makes it a monopoly. It is this that excludes competition. It is this that lies at the root of the great problems of transit and service which are concerning the nation, state and city. And no solution of these problems can be secured, and no just system of taxation devised which does not recognize the similarity of their values with those of the land itself. (Howe 1907: 313) Urban reformers advocated increasing the taxes on the property of franchise corporations in order to reduce taxes on construction or other forms of output that tend to depress production. In addition to the single tax, progressive urban reformers also expressed the shared belief in the potential of the city to promote the highest ideals of democracy and civilization. By the turn of the 20th century, cities had begun to replace the state and nation as the prime source of civic identity. “In cities, men are brought more closely together and have a greater number of vital interests in common than in the country,” Boston's mayor, Josiah Quincy (1897: 537), explained. “The sentiment of municipal solidarity is constantly growing, and the conception of the true functions of the city government is constantly widening.” In addition to becoming more important in the everyday lives of their residents, cities had become a vital component of national identity. The articles in this issue examine the efforts of local leaders in Birmingham, England and a variety of North American cities to revitalize municipal government at the turn of the 20th century. In particular, these articles chart the structural and ideological obstacles to progressive reform as well as the various strategies local leaders employed to overcome them. Although the mayors profiled in this issue utilized different methods and pursued different policies, they faced similar problems and largely drew from the same ideas to justify fundamental changes to municipal governance. The relative success of these leaders in solving complex problems of urban life provides important insights for better understanding the nature and scope of local politics today. Joseph Chamberlain's short tenure as mayor of Birmingham from 1873 to 1876 not only jump-started what would become a very long and successful political career but also served as a model for urban reform at the end of the 19th century. His success in establishing public gas and water works in Birmingham formed the basis, author Jules Gehrke writes, for the municipal ownership movement and provided important lessons for other urban leaders, including several of those profiled in this issue. In “A Radical Endeavor: Joseph Chamberlain and the Emergence of Municipal Socialism in Birmingham,” Gehrke also shows how Chamberlain's commitment to the public ownership of natural monopolies was an extension of his Unitarian philosophy and colored by his business experience. Chamberlain was an active member of Birmingham's Unitarian community and even taught Sunday School at the Church of the Messiah. In contrast to the older Anglican tradition, which emphasized scripture and individual salvation, Unitarianism, Gehrke explains, “emphasized social progress and the moral duties of the individual to the community.” Chamberlain justified his municipal waterworks plan in part on the belief that the city had a “moral obligation” to provide clean and safe water to its residents. 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