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The Pursuit of Happiness in the City: Changing Opportunities and Options in America (The Prothero Lecture)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Eric E. Lampard
Eric E. Lampard
Affiliation:
State University of New YorkStony Brook
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Extract

In 1790 a population numbering less than four millions was said, according to a later census calculation, to be almost 95 per cent rural in residence and, by implication, proportionately agricultural in occupation. By 1970 a population well in excess of 204 millions was almost 75 per cent urbanized and, in terms of labour force, less than 5 percent involved in agricultural pursuits.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 23 , January 1973 , pp. 175 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1973

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References

The Society expresses its wannest thanks to the Prothero lecturer for the generous help which has made it possible to print this extended version of his lecture in the Transactions.

1 Transl. by Wogrom, W. H. as The Economics of Location (New Haven, 1958), p. 508 (quoted by permission of Yale University Press)Google Scholar. I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Maldwyn Jones, Peter Mathias, and J. R. Pole, among others, when this lecture was given.

2 Sources of concepts and data are given in Lampard, E. E., ‘The Evolving System of Cities in the United States: Urbanization and Economic Development’, Issues in Urban Economics, ed. Perloff, H. S. and Wingo, L. Jr, (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 81–139Google Scholar. The classic analysis of agrarian sentiment is Johnstone, P. H., ‘Old Ideals versus New Ideas in Farm Life’, Yearbook of Agriculture 1940 (Washington D.C., 1940), pp. 111–67Google Scholar.

3 Turner, F. J., ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, American Historical Association Annual Report for 1893 (Washington, D.C., 1894), pp. 199–227Google Scholar. On antebellum ‘space’ and ‘time’ dilemmas: Wilson, M. L., ‘The Controversy Over Slavery Expansion and the Concept of the Safety Valve: Ideological Confusion in the 1850s’, Mississippi Quarterly, xxiv (1971)Google Scholar.

4 Turner, , ‘Social Forces in American History’, American Historical Review, xvi (1911), pp. 217–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Earlier historians such as W. H. Prescott, George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and Henry Adams had all expressed misgiving or hostility to large cities and elements in their populations.

5 The long and influential ‘booster’ tradition has had little impact on literature or historiography. But Freidel, Frank, ‘Boosters, Intellectuals, and the American City’, The Historian and The City, ed. Handlin, O. and Burchard, J. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 115–20Google Scholar, offers an illuminating synopsis of its possibilities in response to M. White, ‘Two Stages in the Critique of the American City’, ibid., pp. 84–94. An early urban booster was Jesup W. Scott of Toledo, Ohio: see Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, xix (1848), pp. 383–86, and xxv (1851), pp. 559–65Google Scholar. Hesseltine, W. B., ‘Four American Traditions’, Journal of Southern History, xxvii (1961), pp. 3–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, suggests a wider range of public rôles.

6 Turner, letter to Curti, Merle, 11 June 1927, in The Historical World ofF. J. Turner: With Selections from His Correspondence, narrative by Jacobs, W. R. (New Haven, 1968), pp. 238–39Google Scholar. In his introduction to Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961), pp. 8–9Google Scholar, Billington, R. A. suggests that, shortly before his death in 1932, Turner had planned an essay on ‘The Significance of the City in American Civilization’Google Scholar.

7 Beard, C. A., The Industrial Revolution (London, 1901), passimGoogle Scholar. Beard became too preoccupied with the political problem of democratizing the capitalist system to make any enduring contribution to economic or urban history. His 1912 text American City Government is scarcely a footnote today. In his ‘The City's Place in Civilization’, The Survey, lxi (1928), pp. 213–15Google Scholar, Beard accepts Jefferson's strictures on eighteenth-century cities in Europe but reaffirms the rfiles of science and the machine in fulfilling the promise of city civilization. He concludes, pace Lord Bryce, that: ‘County, not city, government is the most conspicuous failure of American democracy’. An early example of faith in education and knowledge as the mutually beneficial solvents of town and country relations is Vaux, Roberts, ‘Importance of Education’, address to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, The Agricultural Almanack for 1827 (Philadelphia, 1827)Google Scholar.

8 Turner, letter to Schlesinger, A. M. Sr, 25 05 1925, in Historical World of F. J. Turner, pp. 163–64Google Scholar. On American usage of the word ‘frontier’ see Jurick, J. T. in American Philosophical Society Proceedings, cx (1966), pp. 10–34Google Scholar.

9 Gressley, G. M., ‘The Turner Thesis—A Problem in Historiography’, Agricultural History, xxxii (1958), pp. 227–49Google Scholar. Also, Wright, B. F. Jr, Consensus and Continuity, 1776–1787 (Northampton, Mass., 1958)Google Scholar.

10 Lampard, E. E., ‘American Historians and the Study of Urbanization’, American Historical Review, lxvii (1961), pp. 49–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in a broader context, idem, ‘Urbanization and Social Change’, The Historian and The City, ed. Burchard, Handlin and, pp. 225–47Google Scholar.

11 Beard, C. A., The Economic Basis of Politics (New York, 1922)Google Scholar, went through many printings and was re-issued in 1945, when Beard added his reflections on the recent politicization of economics.

12 Wiebe's, R. H. influential study The Search For Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar, for example, makes full reference to the conservation movement and agricultural interest groups but not to the country-life movement.

13 Veblen's sour comments appear in Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (New York, 1923), chap. 7Google Scholar, on the ‘independent farmer’ and the ‘small town’. Also, Anderson, W. L., Country Town, A Study of Rural Evolution (New York, 1906)Google Scholar; Galpin, C. J., ‘The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community’, Research Bulletin 34, (Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station, Madison, 05 1915)Google Scholar. The predicament of the small Midwestern town is presented by Atherton, L., Main Street on the Middle Border (Bloomington, Ind., 1954)Google Scholar. The decline of the small town has long been deplored: Fletcher, H. J., ‘The Doom of the Small Town’, Forum, xix (1895), PP. 214–23Google Scholar, and The Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 30, 1972, p. 7. But see Schnore, L. F., ‘The Rural-Urban Variable: An Urbanite's Perspective’, Rural Sociology, xxxi (1966), pp. 131–55Google Scholar. But the small town lives in the ideal of the city ‘neighbourhood’.

14 U.S. Senate Document No. 705, 60 Cong., 2 Sess. Bailey, L. H., The Country Life Movement in the United States (New York, 1911), pp. 1–30, 97Google Scholar; Fiske, G. W., The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunities (New York, 1913), pp. 1–58Google Scholar, and Douglass, H. Paul, The Little Town, Especially in Its Rural Relationship (New York, 1919), which postulated the need for a ‘half-way’ house between town and countryGoogle Scholar.

15 ‘The City in American Civilization’, in Schlesinger, , Paths To The Pre-sent, pp. 210–33, 297–99Google Scholar. The original essay in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, xxvii (1940), p. 43–66Google Scholar, was criticized by Diamond, W. A., ‘On the Dangers of an Urban Interpretation of History’, History and Urbanization, ed. Goldman, E. F. (Baltimore, 1914), pp. 67–108Google Scholar, for loose use of terms and neglect of economic and class conflicts. Schlesinger did not feel that ‘the urban and class interpretations’ were ‘mutually exclusive’.

16 Lubove, R., ‘New Cities for Old: the Urban Reconstruction Program of the 1930s’, Social Studies, liii (1962), pp. 203–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnold, J. A., The New Deal in the Suburbs: a History of the Greenbelt Town Program (Columbus, Ohio, 1971)Google Scholar. Perkins, V. L., Crisis in Agriculture: The AAA and the New Deal, 1933 (Berkeley, 1969)Google Scholar, attempts a realistic defence of the early farm policy, but see Arrington, L. J., ‘Western Agriculture and the New Deal’, Agricultural History, xliv (1970), pp. 337–53Google Scholar, which shows that per capita loans and expenditures by federal farm agencies, 1933–39, were directed towards richer rather than poorer farm states, to those which had experienced the greatest drop in per capita farm incomes, 1929–32. Also, D. Holley, ‘The Negro and the New Deal Resettlement Program’, ibid., xlv (1971), pp. 179–93.

17 Schlesinger, A. M. Jr, The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945), forewordGoogle Scholar.

18 Schlesinger, A. M. Jr, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, 1949), pp. vii–x, 219–42Google Scholar.

19 Almost 90 per cent of federal outlays on urban problems down to 1970 had been devoted to highways and subsidies to the largely middle class and segregated home-mortgage industry. Notwithstanding the promise of ‘a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family’ in the 1949 Act, only one-fifth of housing built on renewal sites was required to be for ‘low and moderate-income families’. Between 1937 and 1970 only 900,000 units of federally subsidized low cost housing units were built, although an array of other federal programmes contributed to the sale of a majority of new housing units. By 1970 more than 77 per cent of the 70 million housing units in the country were subject to the terms of Title VIII of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Urban renewal programmes were originally designed to raise the tax base of local authorities and to make private real estate development more profitable. Such programmes also created jobs, especially for planners, whose expertise is mandatory since 1949. Membership in the American Institute of Planners rose from 240 in 1945 to 3,800 in 1965. Federal employment in housing agencies had climbed to c. 14,000 by 1965, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was finally established. Proposals for such a federal department go back to the Roosevelt and Taft days before World War I. According to the Housing Census of 1060, nearly 12 million units were dilapidated or deteriorating. On ‘abandonment’ of federal housing, see New York Times, 13 Jan. 1972, pp. 1, 28; on widespread corruption in administration of some federal programmes, see admission by Secretary Romney, George, New York Times, 28 03 1972Google Scholar.

20 A. R. Pred, ‘Large-City Interdependence and the Pre-Telegraphic Diffusion of Innovations in the U.S.’, The New Urban History: Quantitative Exploration, ed. L. F. Schnore (forthcoming). Also Lemon, J. T., ‘Urbanization and the Development of 18th-century Southeastern Pennsylvania and Adjacent Delaware’, Williams & Mary Quarterly, xxiv (1967), pp. 501–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Letters From An American Farmer (Dutton Paperback, New York, 1957), p. 36Google Scholar.

22 Griffith, E. S., History of American City Government: The Colonial Period (New York, 1938)Google Scholar; Bridenbaugh, C., Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (New York, 1938)Google Scholar; Fairlie, J. A., Essays in Municipal Administration (New York, 1908)Google Scholar, contains a n excellent study of colonial municipalities. On growth, see The Growth of Seaport Cities 1700–1825, ed. Gilchrist, D. T. (Charlottesville, Va., 1967)Google Scholar.

23 I apologize for my jargon but not for my models, who are the Scottish moral philosopher, Adam Smith, the English political economist, Alfred Marshall, and a necessary French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. I also need a Canadian, Innis, Harold A., an d his The Bias of Communication (Toronto, 1951)Google Scholar, to complete my entente intellectuelle.

24 Lampard, , ‘Evolving System of Cities’, Issues in Urban Economics, pp. 99–106Google Scholar. Already in the second quarter of the century, the system pivoted around three axes of transport and communication—the North-east coast from Boston to Baltimore; the Ohio–Mississippi valleys from Pittsburgh to New Orleans; and the Great Lakes from Buffalo, N.Y., to Chicago. Southern ports from Norfolk to Mobile linked themselves more or less individually to the North-east coast rather than with each other. All regional sub-systems hinged on New York, Albion, R. G., The Rise of New York Port (New York, 1939)Google Scholar; Buck, S., The Development of the Organization of Anglo-American Trade, 1800–1850 (New Haven, 1925)Google Scholar.

25 Lampard, , ‘Evolving System of Cities’, Issues in Urban Economics, pp. 116–24Google Scholar; Wooster, H. A., ‘Manufacturer and Artisan’, Journal of Political Economy, xxxiv (1926), pp. 61–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Temin, P., ‘Steam and Water Power in the Early 19th Century’, Journal of Economic History, xxvi (1966), pp. 187–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. G. Williamson, ‘Ante Bellum Urbanization in the American North-east’, ibid., xxv (1965), pp. 592–608; Zevin, R. B., ‘The Growth of Cotton Textile Production after 1815’, The Reinterpretation of American Economic History, ed. Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L. (New York, 1971), pp. 122–147Google Scholar; Walsh, M., The Manufacturing Frontier: Pioneer Industry in Ante-bellum Wisconsin, 1830–1860 (Madison, Wis., 1972)Google Scholar; Perloff, H. S. et al. , Regions, Resources, and Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1960), pp. 122–221Google Scholar.

26 Taylor, G. R., The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951)Google Scholar; Haites, E. F. and Mak, J., ‘Ohio and Mississippi River Transportation, 1810–1860’, Exploration in Economic History, viii (1970–1971)Google Scholar; Scheiber, H. N., The Ohio Canal Era, 1820–1861 (Athens, Ohio, 1969)Google Scholar; Fishlow, A., Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-bellum Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar; Pred, A. R., The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-Industrial Growth, 1800–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 12–83Google Scholar; Goodrich, C., ‘Internal Improvements Reconsidered’, Journal of Economic History, xxx (1970), pp. 289–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Chandler, A. D. Jr, ‘The Beginnings of “Big Business” in American Industry’, Business History Review, xxxiii (1959), pp. 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herbert, L., ‘A Perspective of Accounting’, Accounting Review, xlvi (1971), pp. 433–40Google Scholar; Metcalf, E. B., ‘Business Planning an d Employment Stabilization, 1915–1960’ (unpublished MA Thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1969)Google Scholar. More generally, M. E. and Dimock, G. O., Public Administration (4th edn., New York, 1969), pt. ivGoogle Scholar.

28 Of 185 industrial combinations, reported by 12th U.S. Census, 1900, vii, pt. i, p. lxxxvi, et seq., no less than 70 headquarters were located in New York, 18 in Chicago, 16 in Pittsburgh, 6 in Cleveland, and 5 each in Philadelphia and San Francisco. No other city had more than four. Lampard, , ‘Evolving System of Cities’, Issues in Urban Economics, 125–33Google Scholar. Also, Duncan, B. and Lieberson, S., Metropolis and Region in Transition (Beverly Hills, Cal., 1970)Google Scholar, which treats th e changing metropolitan organization of manufactures an d banking services. More generally, Lukermann, F., ‘Empirical Expressions of Nodality and Hierarchy in a Circulation Manifold’, East Lakes Geographer, ii (1966), pp. 17–43Google Scholar.

29 J. A. Swanson and J. G. Williamson, ‘Firm Location and Optimal City Size in American History’, The New Urban History, ed. Schnore (forthcoming); Vernon, R., The Changing Economic Function of the Central City (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; City and Suburbs: The Economics of Metropolitan Growth, ed. Chinitz, B. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964)Google Scholar. More generally, Wolpert, J., ‘The Decision Process in a Spatial Context’, American Association of Geographers, Annals, liv (1964), pp. 537–58Google Scholar.

30 Thompson, W. R., ‘The Future of the Detroit Metropolitan Area’, Michigan in the 1970's, ed. Haber, W. et al. (Ann Arbor, 1965), pp. 203–40Google Scholar. Also, Greenhut, M. L., Plant Location in Theory and Practice: the Economics of Space (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956)Google Scholar.

31 Jefferson, letter to Thomas Leiper, Jan. 21, 1809, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Lipscomb, A. A. and Bergh, A. E. (Washington, D.C., 1904–1905), xii, pp. 236–38Google Scholar. He refers to 1785 when he had published his Notes on Virginia in Paris; he went on, ‘But who in 1785 could foresee the rapid depravity which was to render the close of that century the disgrace of the history of man?… We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist… experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort’. He, nevertheless, thought that immigration would be ‘as a drop in a bucket’ compared to natural increase; he welcomed foreign settlers for the West, especially colonies of English farmers but he thought Germans should distribute themselves sparsely among the natives for ‘quicker amalgamation’: letter to George Flower, Sept. 12, 1817. In 1805, Jan. 4, his letter to J. Lithgow, rejects the idea of allowing ‘dissolute and demoralized handicraftsmen’ to enter and he wondered whether even ‘good’ craftsmen should not go to the culture of the earth: The Writings, ed. Lipscomb, and Bergh, , xv, pp. 139–42Google Scholar; xi, pp. 55–56.

32 Not all farmers were pathetic or polemical Populists. For the bumptious faith in science and economic progress of dairy leaders in the Upper Mississippi Valley, see Lampard, E. E., The Rise of the Dairy Industry in Wisconsin: a Study of Agricultural Change, 1820–1020 (Madison, Wis., 1963), pp. 333–51Google Scholar. Also, Bogue, A. G., From Prairie to Corn Belt (Chicago, 1963)Google Scholar. See Conzen, M. P., Frontier Farming in an Urban Shadow (Madison, Wis., 1971)Google Scholar, for the influence of local urban growth on farming.

33 Lampard, E. E., ‘Historical Contours of Contemporary Urba n Society’, Journal of Contemporary History, iv (1969), pp. 3–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for conditions of nineteenth-century rural-to-urban migration and problems in the analysis of ‘occupational status’ change. The use of national occupational ‘prestige’ ratings as a measure of individual status in diverse local contexts is further criticized in Lampard, ‘Two Cheers for Quantitative History’, The New Urban History, ed. Schnore (forthcoming), note 25.

34 Thernstrom, S. and Knights, P. R., ‘Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in 19th-century America’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, i (1970), pp. 7–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galloway, L. E. and Vedder, R. K., ‘Mobility of Native Americans’, Journal of Economic History, xxxi (1971), pp. 613–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eblen, J. E., ‘An Analysis of 19th-century Frontier Populations’, Demography, ii (1965), pp. 399–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The fate of different cohorts of urban migrants needs to be interpreted in light of Easterlin, R. A., Population, Labor Force and Long Swings in Economic Growth: the American Experience (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

35 Knights, P. R., The Plain People of Boston, 1830–1860: a Study in City Growth (New York, 1971), pp. 19–47Google Scholar. Only Milwaukee, Chicago, and St Louis had foreign-born majorities.

36 10th U.S. Census, 1880, Population, pp. 471, 538–41; 13th U.S. Census, 1910, Populations, i, pp. 178, 826–28, 1007.

37 Ibid. The estimates of religious affiliation are based on unpublished data provided by S. B. Warner Jr. More generally, Rosenberg, C. S., Religion and the Rise of the American City (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971)Google Scholar, on the religious roots of mid-nineteenth-century Urban reform movements.

38 Statistical View of the United States: A Compendium of the Seventh Census, 1850, pp. 192–93, 395–98; Compendium of the Tenth Census, 1880, pt. I, pp. 380–405, 453–63. C. D. Goldin, ‘An Economic Model to Explain the Relative Decline of Slavery in Cities, 1820–1860’, The New Urban History, ed. Schnore (forthcoming). As late as 1850 only Charleston, S.C., and Wilmington, N.C., had black majorities.

39 Kennedy, L. V., The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward (New York, 1930), pp. 23–40Google Scholar. Data from 19th U.S. Census, 1970, reported New York Times, 11, Feb. 1972, pp. 1, 24.

40 Non-white families comprised only 10 per cent of all families in the 100 great metropolitan areas of 1960 but they contributed 72 per cent of families resident in census-demarcated ‘poverty areas’; 28–5 per cent of families in such environmentally inferior areas were classified as below the federal ‘poverty level’. The poverty areas covered almost a quarter of the surface area of the metropolitan central cities: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Poverty Areas in the 100 Largest Metropolitan Areas, Report PC(Si)—54, Nov. 1967. On housing conditions in ‘poverty areas’, see National Commission on Urban Problems, Research Report, no. 9 (Washington D.C., 1968)Google Scholar. Also, Moynihan, D. P., ‘Poverty in Cities’, The Metropolitan Enigma, ed. Wilson, J. Q. (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)Google Scholar.

41 KulikoS, A., ‘The Progress of Inequality in Revolutionary Boston’, William & Mary Quarterly, xxviii (1971), pp. 375–412CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Warner, S. B. Jr, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia, 1968), pp. 49–62Google Scholar; Pessen, E., ‘A Social and Economic Portrait of Jacksonian Brooklyn’, New York Historical Society Quarterly, lv (1971)Google Scholar; Blumin, S. M., ‘Mobility and Change in Ante Bellum Philadelphia’, Nineteenth-Century Cities, ed. Thernstrom, S. and Sennett, R. (New Haven, 1969), pp. 165–208Google Scholar; and Knights, , Plain People of Boston, pp. 48–102Google Scholar. Also, Mohl, R. A., Poverty in New York, 1783–1825 (New York, 1971)Google Scholar, and Smolensky, E., ‘The Past and Present Poor’, Reinterpretation of American Economic History, pp. 84–96Google Scholar.

42 ‘A prejudice has existed in the community… against them on account of their color, and on account of their being descendents of slaves. They cannot obtain employment on equal terms with whites, and wherever they go a sneer is passed upon them, as if this sportive inhumanity were an act of merit… Thus, though their legal rights are the same as those of whites, their condition is one of degradation and dependence’: Chickering, Jesse, A Statistical View of the Population of Massachusetts from 1765 to 1840 (Boston, 1846), p. 156Google Scholar. Chickering's sympathy did not extend to the Irish immigrants later in the decade.

43 Warner, S. B. Jr, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston 1870–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962)Google Scholar. Warner, S. B. Jr, and Burke, C., ‘Cultural Change and the Ghetto’, Journal of Contemporary History, iv (1969), pp. 173–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, sharply modifies the traditional view of early immigrant ‘ghetto’ experience which D. P. Moynihan, among others, considers analogous to present-day Negro experience. SeeHearings, Senate Committee on Government Operations on S–843, July 27, 1967, 90th Cong. I Sess. The classic source on the ‘ghetto’ process is Handlin, O., The Uprooted: the Epic Story of the Great Migration that Made The American People (New York, 1951), pp. 144–69Google Scholar. But see Easterlin, R. A., ‘Influences in European Overseas Emigration Before World War I’, Reinterpretation of American Economic History, pp. 384—95Google Scholar.

44 Gordon, M. M., Assimilation in American Life (New York, 1965), passimGoogle Scholar. Also, McKelvey, B., ‘Cities as Nurseries of Self-conscious Minorities’, Pacific Historical Review, xxxix (1970), pp. 367–81Google Scholar. McKelvey seems to accept D. P. Moynihan's notion that Negroes are only now beginning to form ethnic separatist allegiances after the pattern of earlier ‘minorities’: Moynihan, , Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York, 1969), p. 161Google Scholar.

45 The 20 colonial boroughs had lost their virtual ‘home rule’ after the Revolution and had become creatures of the states under their respective constitutional provisions; such large centres as Boston, Newport, R.I., and Charleston had never achieved municipal status. The development of administrative competence was subsequently frustrated by the incorporation of ‘division of powers’ and ‘checks and balances’ notions into new charter provisions. State legislatures continually intervened throughout the 19th-century, variously redistributing authority among mayors, bicameral councils, and other branches, occasionally superseding local authority altogether. By the 1830s, moreover, local restrictions on white male voting were being removed in order to make local franchises more congruent with state provisions. State courts, meanwhile, generally denied that municipal corporations had retained any ‘inherent’ powers and most initiatives were made conditional on powers granted or implied in ordinary state legislation: Dillon, J. F., The Law of Municipal Corporations (5 vols, Boston, 1911), i, pp. 448–449Google Scholar. Spaulding v. Lowell, 23 Pickering (Mass.), 71, in Beale, J. H., Selection of Cases on Municipal Corporations (Cambridge, Mass., 1911), p. 240Google Scholar. Also, Goodnow, F. J., Municipal Government (New York, 1906)Google Scholar, chapter on ‘legal powers of municipalities’.

46 Parkman, F., ‘The Failure of Universal Suffrage’, North American Review, cxxvii (1878), pp. 1–20Google Scholar, condemned the ‘barbarism’ tha t had overwhelmed the cities and made them ‘a prey’. The barbarism was, of course, almost exclusively white adult male, native and foreign-born. On profession-alization and ethno-religious electoral politics, see Warner, , The Private City, PP. 79–157Google Scholar; Mandelbaum, S. J., Boss Tweed's New York (New York, 1965), pp. 1–58Google Scholar. On services, Blake, N., Water for The Cities (Syracuse, N.Y., 1956)Google Scholar; Lane, R., Policing the City, Boston, 1822–1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richardson, J., The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Katz, M., The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar; Greer, C., The Great School Legend (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Rosenberg, C., The Cholera Years (Chicago, 1962)Google Scholar; Deutsch, A, The Mentally III in America (2nd edn, New York, 1949)Google Scholar; Smillie, W. G., Public Health: Its Promise For the Future, 1603–1014 (New York, 1955)Google Scholar.

47 Simkhovich, M. K., Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House (New York, 1938)Google Scholar. On the perceptions and approaches of voluntary associations, see National Conference of Charities and Correction, 17th Annual Proceedings 1890 (Boston, 1890), passimGoogle Scholar. Also, Levine, D., Jane Addams and The Liberal Tradition (Madison, Wis., 1971)Google Scholar; Davis, A. F., Spearheads for Reform, 1800–1914 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Huggins, N. I., Protestants Against Poverty: Boston's Charities, 1870–1900 (Westport, Conn., 1970)Google Scholar.

48 Hourwich, I. A., Immigration and Labor (New York, 1912)Google Scholar, is a useful corrective to contemporary and later stereotypes. See also Higgs, R., ‘Race, Skills, and Earnings: American Immigrants in 1909’, Journal of Economic History, xxxi (1971), pp. 420–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kuznets, S., ‘Contribution of Immigration to the Growth of the Labor Force’, Reinterpretation of American Economic History, pp. 396–401Google Scholar. On women's work, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 175, (Washington D.C., 1915)Google Scholar; Abbott, E. and Breckinridge, S. P., ‘Employment of Women in Industries’, Journal of Political Economy, xiv (1906), pp. 14–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smuts, R. W., Women and Work in America (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; Baker, E. F., Technology and Woman's Work (New York, 1964)Google Scholar. On the greater contribution of women to incremental labour force growth after the end of unrestricted immigration and the lesser rôle of Negro migration, see Miller, A. R., ‘Components of Labor Force Growth’, Journal of Economic History, xxii (1962), pp. 47–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Carroll D. Wright's study of slum conditions was greatly restricted by reduced appropriations; he only developed data on four major cities. Some 360,000 people were classified as ‘slum dwellers’ in New York; 162,000 in Chicago, 35,000 in Philadelphia, and 25,000 in Baltimore, where 530 families were found domiciled each in one room. In New York 44·6 per cent of families lived in two rooms or less; 27·9 per cent in Baltimore, 19·4 per cent in Philadelphia, and 19·1 per cent in Chicago: U.S. Commissioner of Labor, Special Report no. 7 (Washington D. C, 1894)Google Scholar. Also Weber, A. F., The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1899), pp. 460–62Google Scholar. For con-temporary concepts of housing reform, see Lubove, R., The Progressives and the Slums, 1800–1017 (Pittsburgh, 1962)Google Scholar. In Jones v. Meyer, 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court finally determined that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 had prohibited ‘all racial discrimination, private as well as public, in the sale or rental of property’. The Negro American Family, DuBois, W. E. B., ed. (Atlanta, 1908), pp. 64–65Google Scholar. Also Gaston, P. M., The New South Creed: a Study in Southern Mythmahing (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

50 Conzen, K. N., ‘“The German Athens”: Milwaukee and the Accommodation of its Immigrants, 1836–1860’ (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1972)Google Scholar; and Simon, R. D., ‘The Expansion of An Industrial City: Milwaukee, 1880–1910’ (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1971)Google Scholar. Also, Z. L. Miller, ‘Urban Blacks in the South, 1865–1920’, The New Urban History, ed. Schnore (forthcoming). Graaf, L. B. De, ‘The City of Black Angels: Emergence of th e Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890–1930’, Pacific Historical Review, xxxix (1970), pp. 323–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In contrast to the high level of black Angeleno home ownership in 1930, th e figure for Detroit was 15 per cent, 10·5 per cent in Chicago, an d 5·6 per cent in New York. Only six cities, 100,000 an d over, exceeded the Los Angeles level of black ownership an d none had a large Negro population. In 1930 the ratio of blacks t o black-owned homes in L.A. was 10, compared with 8 whites per white-owned home. Ratios for Detroit were 31:10, Chicago 44:12, New York 77:15: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the U.S., 1020–1030 (Washington D.C., 1935), pp. 277–79Google Scholar. The 13th U.S. Census, 1910, reported the ratio of all home-owning families to be 33·7 per cent in Baltimore, 26·2 per cent in Chicago, 17·1 per cent in Boston, and 11·7 per cent in New York (13·1 per cent the Bronx, only 2·9 per cent Manhattan); 63 per cent of farm families owned their own farm homes.

51 Lieberson, S., Ethnic Patterns in American Cities (New York, 1963), pp. 49–91Google Scholar, demonstrates the persistence of ethnic separation and shows the diffusion of groups to the ‘suburbs’. Also, Beshers, J. M.et al., ‘Ethnic Congregation-Segregation, Assimilation, and Stratification’, Social Forces, 05 1964Google Scholar; Kennedy, R. J. R., ‘Single or Triple Melting Pot ? Inter-marriage in New Haven 1870–1940’, American Journal of Sociology, xlix (1944), pp. 331–339Google Scholar; Herberg, W., Protestant, Catholic, Jew (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Lenski, G., The Religious Factor: A Sociological Study of Religion's Impact on Politics, Economics, and Family Life (New York, 1964)Google Scholar. The Yearbook of Churches 1967 indicates that Jews comprised 4·5 per cent, Roman Catholics 37·0 per cent, and Protestants, 54·6 per cent of all church membership. Church members were said to constitute 64·3 per cent of the estimated population. In 1960 well over 20 million residents of the U.S. had a mother tongue other than English. Spanish and French were the other major ‘colonial tongues’ but ‘maintenance prospects’ for 21 other languages are discussed in Language Loyalty in the United States, ed. Fishman, J. A. (The Hague, 1966)Google Scholar.

52 , K.E. and Taeuber, A. F., Negroes in Cities (Chicago, 1965), pp. 52–5, 94–5Google Scholar. The Taeubers also give a critical discussion of the ‘Index of Dissimilarity’ technique for measuring group separation, pp. 43–62, 197–242. Woofter, T. J. et al. , The Problems of Negroes in Cities (Garden City, N.Y., 1928)Google Scholar. National Academy of Sciences, Freedom of Choice in Housing: Opportunities and Constraints (Washington D.C., 1972)Google Scholar. Also, Tabb, W. K., The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. Small wonder that some poor young blacks are attracted to narcotics, like some of their better-off white counterparts. But American whites were hooked long before the blacks. See DrMusto, D. and Trachtenberg, A., ‘As American As Apple Pie’, Yale Alumni Magazine, 01 1972, pp. 17–21Google Scholar. Narcotic addiction was widespread in the U.S. before World War I; per capita consumption of opiates was about 18 times that of Germany or France and neither blacks nor Chinese could afford the habit. Musto attributes the source to pharmaceutical advertising and incompetent medical prescription.

53 Schrag, P., The Decline of the Wasp (New York, 1971), p. 14Google Scholar, and Novak, M., The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York, 1971)Google Scholar are typical and symmetrical examples of the mutual disregard in which hyphenated Americans, especially sophisticated ones, have come to hold each other. The acronym ‘Wasp’ (from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is applied to more or less anything and anybody who is not obviously ‘Catholic’, ‘Jewish’, ‘ethnic’ or ‘Third World’; it hyphenates the America that is descended from the ‘old stock’ and, while it allows for the settling of old scores and the projection of personal insecurities, it does not seem to make non-Wasps more amenable to each other. A more stinging social criticism is given by Hacker, A., The End of The American Era (New York, 1970)Google Scholar, who locates his targets with greater precision. See also Parr, A. E., ‘City and Psyche’, Yale Review, lx (1965), pp. 71–85Google Scholar.

54 From Lindsay, J. V., ‘Cities Solve Problems’, an address at Colorado College, New York Times, 14 08 1972Google Scholar.

55 A celebrated recommendation is Moynihan's, ‘Memorandum for the President’ published by the New York Times, 1 03 1970, p. 69Google Scholar. Moynihan confirmed the document and expressed a hope that its content would be considered as a whole. It is remembered, however, for its advocacy of ‘benign neglect’ toward ‘the issue of race’. Moynihan attributed the term to the Earl of Durham in 1839 but he apparently did not realize that ‘Radical Jack’ did not become a culture hero of les Canadiens. He recently confirmed his optimistic posture on the basis of proposed legislation to place a minimum $2,400 annual income floor under every family of four and to share the huge federal revenue deficit with state and local government: New York Times, 27 Sept. 1972, p. 47. See also Lilley, W. III, ‘Housing Report’, Center for Political Research, National Journal, 10 17, 1970, pp. 225–62Google Scholar. On dispersion, see Downs, A., Opening Up The Suburbs (New Haven, 1971)Google Scholar; on revenue sharing, Revenue Sharing and the City, ed. Perloff, H. S. and Nathan, R. P. (Baltimore, 1968)Google Scholar.

56 Remarks of Mayor K. Gibson of Newark, N.J., Mayor F. W. Burke of Louisville, Ky, and Mayor T. A. Luken of Cincinnati, Ohio, cited by Shannon, W. V., New York Times, 25 06 1972Google Scholar. But there were also 14 million impoverished people left in rural America in the 1960s whose situation had not been improved by agricultural policies of the Kennedy–Johnson years: The People Left Behind, Report of the President's National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty (Washington, D.C., 1967), p. ixGoogle Scholar.

57 Statement of Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney to officials of Warren, Mich., 27 July 1970, on ‘fair housing’ as distinct from ‘forced integration’: HUD News, released 27 July 1970. With the Warren uprising, the ‘suburbs’ departed from the hard-won compliance indicated by suburban Dayton, Ohio, 1970: New York Times, 21 Dec. 1970, pp. 1, 42, Romney's earlier encounter with Mayor Ted Bates and Warren city council members is given in The Detroit News, 24 July 1970. On zoning and annexation, see Toll, S. I., Zoned American (New York, 1969)Google Scholar, and Scott, M., American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley, 1969)Google Scholar. In 1940 the suburban and satellite rings outside the central cities contained 27 million residents, or 2 out of every 10 Americans. By 1970 their 76 millions represented 4 out of every 10; their total exceeded the aggregate of central city dwellers by 12 millions. From 40 to 60 per cent of their working populations were employed in the rings. Two-thirds of all U.S. new residential construction value is located in the rings. These massive and, on the whole, focus-less ‘free way’ settlements are becoming the dpminant ecological pattern. Some recent evidence from the ‘outer-urbs’ of Baltimore, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Houston, and Atlanta suggests that such settlements already have ‘grave problems’ of their own-making: New York Times, 30 May 1971, and four subsequent issues. A Los Angeles ‘urbanologist’, E. Contini, asserted that the ‘suburban house’ is ‘the idealization of every immigrant's dream—the vassal's dream of his own castle’. Apparently, it was not the realization of the dream! Mean-while, ‘quiet decay erodes Downtown Areas of Small Cities’, New York Times, 8 Feb. 1972. Many of these problems were foreshadowed and foreseen, with less urgency, in the 1920s, see McKenzie, R. D., ‘The Rise of Metropolitan Communities’, Report of the President's Research Committee, Recent Social Trends in the U.S. (New York, 1933), i, pp. 443–96Google Scholar. The cruel irony is that, according to the polls of the National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, white willingness to accept a high degree of integration in every-thing except mixed marriages and residential neighbourhoods has risen steadily since the 1940s: New York Times, 8 Dec. 1971.

58 Crèvecoeur, , Letters From An American Farmer, pp. 39–40Google Scholar. For an optimistic appraisal, Burchard, J., ‘The Culture of Urban America’, Environment and Change, ed. Ewald, W. Jr (Bloomington, Ind., 1968)Google Scholar.

59 Hofstadter, R., The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard and Parrington (New York, 1968), pp. 437–66Google Scholar. Pole, J. R., ‘The American Past: is it Still Useable?’, Journal of American Studies, i (1967), pp. 63–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem in The Times, London, a notice reprinted in Columbia Forum, xiii (1970), p. 8. As far back as 1963, however, Hofstadter, while arguing that ‘a technical elite of lawyers and economists’ had removed anti-trust policy out of the area of significant controversy, was gravely concerned that the economy seemed unable to free the ‘urban mass society’ from ‘widespread poverty’ and a deep ‘malaise’: The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York, 1965), pp. 235–37Google Scholar. See also the perceptive review of Hofstadter's Progressive Historians by White, M. in American Historical Review, Ixxv (1969), pp. 601–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But White continues to regard criticism of urban conditions as reflecting an ‘anti-urban’ bias and surely misses the mark on Charles Beard.

60 ‘In the long last, the probabilities are that, instead of adjusting automobiles to the city as it is, the city will be adjusted to the automobiles as they are, either by increasing the number of streets or by providing special thoroughfares for them. That would be in line with what took place when the automobiles proved destructive to the macadamed roads that once were so highly regarded. It was not the cars that were banished, but the paving that was changed’: New York Times, 23 March 1923. ‘Not long ago, a home meant something. It was the location of our birth… and where we held our family functions. Today… there is no tie to home and fireside… There is no neighborhood standard of conduct… Parents do not understand children, as they once did, however little that was; for the children react to changed life-conditions. There is need of inner control in the family, as against so much outside influence. It is all a question of adjustment and the right choice of “technique”. Mr Damrosch hopes that the radio, by keeping people at home, will save family life from disruption by the automobile’: New York Times, 13 June 1930.