The City in American Political Development

Richardson Dilworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415990998
• eBook ISBN: 9781135853174
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There are nearly 20,000 general-purpose municipal governments—cities—in the United States, employing more people than the federal government. About twenty of those cities received charters of incorporation well before ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and several others were established urban centers more than a century before the American Revolution. Yet despite their estimable size and prevalence in the United States, city government and politics has been a woefully neglected topic within the recent study of American political development.

The volume brings together some of the best of both the most established and the newest urban scholars in political science, sociology, and history, each of whom makes a new argument for rethinking the relationship between cities and the larger project of state-building. Each chapter shows explicitly how the American city demonstrates durable shifts in governing authority throughout the nation's history. By filling an important gap in scholarship the book will thus become an indispensable part of the American political development canon, a crucial component of graduate and undergraduate courses in APD, urban politics, urban sociology, and urban history, and a key guide for future scholarship.

Part I
American Exceptionalism and the City

1 The City and Exceptionalism in American Political Development

Robert C. Lieberman

In 1813, in the middle of their extraordinary correspondence on the evolving government of the fledgling republic they both helped to found, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams:

Before the establishment of the American states, nothing was known to History but the man of the old world, crowded within limits either small or overcharged, and steeped in the vices which that situation generates. A government adapted to such men would be one thing; but a very different one, that for the man of these States. Here every one may have land to labor for himself if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age. Every one, by his property, or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private. The history of the last twenty-five years of France, and of the last forty years in America, nay of its last two hundred years, proves the truth of both parts of this observation.¹

This quotation reveals most fully and subtly Jefferson’s deep antipathy to cities and his conviction that they were profoundly harmful to the political life of a nation with democratic aspirations. Democracy, he believed, required an independent citizenry, self-sufficient, virtuous, and fully capable of self-government. These qualities resided in the countryside of the yeoman farmer, not in cities, which he thought pestilential, crowded places that bred corruption, dependence, and tyranny. Some years earlier he wrote even more bluntly and shockingly to Benjamin Rush, a leading citizen of one of North America’s largest and most cosmopolitan cities, that the yellow fever epidemic then afflicting several American cities would

discourage the growth of great cities in our nation, and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom would be my choice.²

In these passages and elsewhere, Jefferson expressed the already-common theme of American exceptionalism, the conviction that American society was fundamentally different from the sclerotic feudalism of the Old World. In the great capitals of Europe such as Paris and London political, economic, cultural, and social power mingled to create singular centers of national dominance that held sway over their national peripheries, symbolizing the dominance of the absolutist courts of European monarchs, which Jefferson particularly feared. Jefferson’s antipathy toward cities and the connection he made between cities and aristocratic corruption anticipated Tocqueville, the first systematic American exceptionalist. “America,” Tocqueville wrote, “does not have a great capital whose direct or indirect influence makes itself felt over the whole extent of its territory,” distinctly drawing a contrast between the United States and his home country of France, where Paris held sway politically, economically, socially, and culturally over the entire country. The lack of a metropolis, Tocqueville went on to say, “I consider to be one of the first causes of the maintenance of republican institutions in the United States” because cities—like Paris during the French Revolution—were especially prone to disorder and, in the extreme, the dangerous plebiscitary action of easily manipulable crowds.³ Cities thus posed a dual danger for American democracy: aristocratic despotism on the one hand and mob rule on the other. For Jefferson, as for others of the founding generation, the future of the republic lay in the sturdy independence of the American countryside.

Jefferson’s cultural and political hostility toward cities has been a constant theme in American political life ever since. Cities, moreover, have repeatedly and consistently been at the center of national political, economic, and cultural controversies. Jefferson himself, along with James Madison, clashed with Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s over the location of the national capital and the role of commerce and finance, centered in cities such as New York and Philadelphia, in the political economy. Draft riots in New York City in 1863 highlighted conflicts across lines of class and race that threatened the precarious unity of the Union’s war effort, and urban violence has continued to be a national flashpoint, inflaming divisive tensions within American society.⁴ In the Progressive era, cities were the focal point of fundamental conflicts over the form and content of American governance and political institutions—conflict over political parties and municipal reform, immigration and race, labor rights, poverty, and public health.⁵ And in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cities have again come under assault from national political leaders and governing coalitions, a trend visible both in policies—the slow but dramatic decline in federal support for city governments, for example—and in often pungent expression: “God damn New York,” Richard Nixon said in a taped conversation in 1972, complaining that the city was full of “Jews, and Catholics, and blacks and Puerto Ricans.” This new round of national antipathy for cities was neatly summed up in the banner headline on the front page of the New York Daily News on October 30, 1975, summarizing the president’s refusal to bail the city out of impending bankruptcy: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”⁶

But Americans have not always been so consistently and relentlessly anti-urban in their political sensibilities. This picture of American anti-urbanism obscures substantial and significant variation in the place that cities have occupied in American national politics over time and across lines of region, race, and ideology. Against this background of profound fear and loathing, cities have at times been essential parts of the American state—of national governing coalitions that have exercised power and shaped public policy, of associational networks that connect public authorities to civil society, and of the common cultural notion of the state.⁷ During a few periods in American political history—in particular the late nineteenth century and the New Deal era—cities, and their residents and political elites, were especially powerful presences in American politics. At these moments, cities seem to have been central to the national political regime in ways that defied the general anti-urban bias that affects American politics both culturally and institutionally.⁸ In these periods, urban voters and party organizations were critical to national electoral and governing coalitions; their representatives carried unusual weight in Congress (despite Congress’s structural representational bias toward geography and against dense concentrations of people); and contributed substantially to the ideological and cultural valence of policy debates. In addition to providing more than their usual share of inputs in American national politics in these periods, cities also received more outputs than at other times, especially in terms of policy benefits but also of prestige and attention. In short, in these periods particularly, the American city was a key component of the American state; this was, however, a rather uncommon state of affairs. These observations, moreover, puncture the Jeffersonian mythology of American exceptionalism by suggesting that American politics is, at least under some circumstances, susceptible to the same political forces that have made European cities centers of power and prestige.

What was it about these periods—if indeed these periods were as I describe them—that made them moments of urban triumph, in which cities overcame the cultural and institutional odds that the basic structure of American politics seems to lay against them? What configurations of political conditions prevailed to make this happen, and what can we learn from these patterns both about the prospects for cities and their residents in the new suburban (or exurban or posturban) era in which American politics now finds itself and about American political development more generally? In this chapter, I do not even begin to answer these questions but rather to lay the groundwork for a possible approach to them. I will first lay out briefly some of the conceptual, analytical, and empirical issues that these questions pose, with a view toward developing an agenda for research. I will then present a broad empirical sketch of some of the key demographic and political characteristics of the major American cities from the beginning of the republic until the present. This empirical portrait will further sharpen the analytical questions with which I begin. Finally, I will suggest possible further directions for connecting the city and the state in American political development.

Cities in the Study of American Political Development

One of the principal issues in American political development that this study potentially engages is the status of ideology or political culture and institutions as potentially competing or conflicting explanatory factors and analytical modes. The basic cultural anxiety about cities that Jefferson expressed has long been a dominant theme, or at least a prominent motif, of American political culture. It coincided with the partisan struggles that Jefferson, along with his fellow Virginia squire James Madison, waged with Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s on issues including the creation of the First Bank of the United States and the construction of an interlocking system of public and private finance, Hamilton’s proposals to promote commerce and manufacturing, and especially the location of the national capital. In the last of these battles, the cosmopolitan Hamilton favored New York but would have settled for Philadelphia, both centers of culture and commerce to which he thought power was naturally and necessarily connected. Jefferson and Madison preferred to separate power from commerce and culture, preventing the creation of a single urban center like Paris or London around which the provincial hinterlands would revolve. They instead sought to create a new capital on the unpromising swampy banks of the Potomac River that quite by design lacked the commercial core that typically nurtured the growth of powerful cities, even when their origins were military or ecclesiastical, or even political.⁹ This anti-urban ideological bias has persisted, as Grant McConnell noted, in the mythology of the small constituency, rooted in a Jeffersonian image of small communities as “repositories of social virtue.”¹⁰ Cities, by contrast, have often been portrayed as sites of vice and corruption. At the same time, this mythology of rural virtue has parallels in the imagery of the countryside of “Merrie Olde England” and “la France profonde,” suggesting that anti-urban cultural patterns, while important, may not be sufficient to explain national differences in the political power and prestige of cities in national regimes.

At the same time, the institutional structure of American politics is also biased against cities, or against any densely concentrated areas of population. The representational structures of the Senate and the Electoral College, which allocate votes to territorial units rather than people, confer extra power on sparsely populated states. Before the Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” decisions of the early 1960s, this imbalance was, in many instances, exacerbated by states that replicated this territory-based districting scheme that privileged rural counties over cities.¹¹ Some analysts have argued that the decentralized and fragmented institutional structure of the American state has systematically nurtured and enhanced the privileged position of rural agricultural interests (although others have challenged this interpretation).¹²

The question that emerges from these overlapping and reinforcing forces is how and why American cities have been able to overcome both the ideological and institutional barriers to their power. Both of these anti-urban currents in the American political tradition—the cultural and the institutional—are generally posited to be relatively stable, ordered patterns that organize large swaths of political life over reasonably long spans of time. But to the extent that these patterns are stable, they cannot explain the apparent ups and downs of the political fortunes of cities over time. What is it that changed at those moments when cities fared better in national politics? Were these moments when pro-urban cultural forces surged and prevailed? If so, how did they overcome pervasive institutional barriers? Or were these moments primarily the consequence of institutional changes that challenged prevailing cultural norms about cities? These questions not only frame the key causal axis of this inquiry, they also connect this project to some of the most central and urgent questions at the forefront of the subfield of American political development.¹³

These considerations suggest a range of potential explanations for overtime variation in the political fortunes of cities. First, there might be variations in cultural patterns and ideological beliefs about cities. It is a grave mistake, as Rogers Smith has shown, to consider the American political tradition as monolithic; American political culture, rather, consists of multiple strands whose contest for dominance shapes political arrangements and outcomes.¹⁴ In order to paint a complete picture of this phenomenon and assess the role of political culture and ideas in affecting the shifting power and prestige of cities in the American state, it will be necessary to identify, unpack, and measure these competing ideological strands, one that regards cities as dangerous, dirty, and corrupt and another that celebrates cities as civilized, tolerant, and dynamic—a challenge that I acknowledge but do not begin to undertake here.¹⁵ Second, the political and institutional circumstances of cities have clearly bee...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Bringing the City Back In
• PART I American Exceptionalism and the City
• PART II Rethinking Urban Politics
• PART III City, Space, and Nation
• PART IV The National Significance of Urban Immigrant, Racial, and Ethnic Politics
• Conclusion: On Diversity and the Accommodation of Injustice: A Coda on Cities, Liberalism, and American Political Development