Chapter II–From Book

As the Twig is Bent: Pre-Civil War Migration & Political Culture

 

In these Early Republic years the foundations of our state/sub-state communities-jurisdictions, their governance, policy-making processes were first poured. This history views American ED policy as outputs from a policy system that was initially constructed to reflect a series of implicit values and beliefs important to the jurisdiction’s first settlers. Normally many associate political culture with values, beliefs and, above all, attitudes. Our history, however, downplays these for the most part, and centers on “structures and relationships” into which the values and beliefs (and the economic bases as well) were embedded.

 

Upon their first arrival in America, distinctive groups of immigrants devised their initial policy system, structures, processes and relationships—and then their sons and daughters carried them across America. Several structures proved quite “sustainable”. Today we call it “city-building”. These “first settlers” formalized relationships among levels of government and between government and the private sector through initial state constitutions. Subsequent judicial decisions preserved these relationships while updating them to then-current realities. The twigs of contemporary economic development (ED) jurisdictional policy-systems were thus bent. So with the structures of policy-making set in place, the keels of our “two ships” laid (our third tired metaphor), two distinctive approaches to American ED emerged and set forth on their journey. That journey was not only across time, but also place. A constant in American history has been the movement of people, both into the country and within it. That is the dominant theme of this chapter.

 

In particular, the original levels of government (towns/townships, incorporated cities, or large swatches of unincorporated and/or privately-owned land) installed into the first territory/state constitutions. These levels of government informally incorporated key relationships that had earlier evolved in the “mother” community. Two proved especially important: the relationship of private sector to the public/community, and a tendency to sort out “who does what” policy-wise. Distinctive levels of government often contained preferences as to which level of government (state or local) would assume primary responsibility for a policy area (ED in our case). In a few states this latter relationship was contested as several different population movements collided structurally. Diffusion of cultures and structures was neither determinative nor neat. That is why we have fifty noticeably different state systems today.

 

A last word about economic bases is helpful in our journey thru the following pages. In this chapter, agriculture is primary. These are agricultural economies—not industrial. Our contemporary ED history is chiefly a derivative of American-style industrialism and the industrial urban areas it created. The industrial revolution had just started as our tale unfolds and so in some regions, not others, a fledgling industrialism is developing. The interweaving of uneven industrialism but more importantly different agricultural economic bases (individual farm or plantation, crop, and market) came to define regions within the nation. Coupled with time of settlement and distinctions among immigrant/migrant populations American state/sub-state ED variated by region. Each region developed a tendency toward a distinctive type of jurisdictional economic base—and our ED history was greatly affected by these differences. Regional “accents” in conducting ED continue to this very day. There is a reason for them!

 

The specific tasks tackled in this chapter are to (1) introduce our two ships passing in the night, the Privatist and Progressive political cultures; (2) describe colonial and Early Republic city-building caused by internal migration and pre-Civil War foreign immigration; and (3) simultaneously introduce the diffusion of structures and relationships important to ED policy-making.

 

Early Republic Privatist and Progressive Cultures

 

The keels of our two ships of American economic development were laid during the colonial period in the coastal cities of America. In colonial years religious beliefs were incorporated into governance structures through royal/municipal charters, compacts, and initial colonial constitutions. Older values and structures were adjusted to fit our agrarian frontier-wilderness economy (Fisher, 1989). The American Revolution, Articles of Confederation, and later ratification of the 1789 Constitution required updating state/local governance to fit democracy as understood by the dominant political forces within each state. The reality that emerged from the shift to the American Early Republic is that so much of past colonial governance, religious values, and administrative structures endured.

 

The colonies were never clones of each other. The diversity in structures and governance found among the colonies was striking—and that diversity resulted from the varied political cultures, past experience with government and religion, and the timing of their arrival. Colin Woodard outlined eleven colonial “rival regional cultures” that form the basis for the regional cultures of present day United States (Woodard, 2011). I would add a twelfth: African-American. Woodard’s model serves as foundation for the varieties of regional political cultures and for variation within our two dominant political cultures: Privatism and Progressivism.

 

The first task of this chapter provide flesh and bone to the two dominant political cultures. My purpose is not merely to prove these “two ships” existed in colonial America, persisting into the Early Republic, but to briefly outline how they evolved over two hundred years. Hindsight and Woodard’s “Yankee” culture suggest our search for Progressive origins start (and end) with Boston (and New England’s) Puritan governance. The search for an Early American Privatist example, however, is more complicated. The example of Philadelphia was chosen in part because of its standing in American urban history.

 

Philadelphia and Pennsylvania

 

Penn’s Privatism

Pennsylvania’s and Philadelphia’s governments were devised by Penn himself (1682, Frame of Government). Penn disliked government intensely. “Meddle not with government; never speak of it, let others say and do what they please …. I have said little to you about distributing justice, or being just in power or government, for I should desire you should never be concerned therein” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 369).  Quakers perceived government as tyranny and the source of religious persecution. Moreover, if any belief had gotten them in consistent trouble back in England, it was their volatile and innate rebellion against imposed authority. Quakers by nature questioned order and tradition, refused deference to elites, rejected formal religion and church hierarchies, and proclaimed salvation could only be found through individual study and revelation. Authority was unnecessary–left alone humans were all good and equal before the face of God. Pennsylvania, accordingly, was initially set up to provide as little “governance” as conditions permitted.

 

So government, no matter the level, was secondary, intended to be weak, and limited. Penn’s colony-level government was framed to be the weakest of all. State government as created by Penn was even unwilling to defend itself when it was attacked by Indians (who were being displaced by Scotch-Irish and Germans). Unsurprisingly, Penn’s initial government framework collapsed in his lifetime; he was forced to import non-Quakers to run the colony’s affairs—and they failed as well. Government power, such as was permitted, was dispersed to a semi-autonomous county. While intended to be the principal operating unit of government, county powers and governance simply was not up to the task. County and municipal governments were infused with many separately-elected administrative offices that fragmented executive and legislative authority.

 

Penn originally recreated the classic medieval agricultural village in Pennsylvania. Individual farms extended outward from the village center periphery. For the first twenty years or so, the colony/state government surveyed and platted land accordingly: Germantown, Newtown and Bucks County reflected the medieval vision. Planned commercial centers were envisioned as “county seats” whose purpose was both commercial and administrative. Philadelphia, Bristol, Chester and New Castle were examples of these early planned centers. As other settlers (non-Quaker) moved into more rural areas, however, Penn’s hodge-podge system broke down.

 

Settlers moving into the western hinterlands, beyond Penn’s effective control established diverse homesteads, more resembling southern-style scattered communities than his planned medieval village. The farther from Philadelphia these planned centers were, the more they functioned as strong central units of government with their own hinterland; York, Reading, Carlisle, Easton, Bedford and Sunbury are examples. Following yet another governance model, Gettysburg, Chambersburg and Lebanon were established by a private city-builder (Russo, 2001, pp. 16-17). This city-building by private speculators prevailed in the mountain areas of Pennsylvania, expressed in towns or boroughs that served as county seat. Bellefonte, for example, was founded by speculator Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord[i] around a spring and an iron ore mine. “During the course of the eighteenth century Pennsylvania became blanketed with clustered settlements”. (Russo, 2001, p. 17). Quakers were followed by German, and then Scotch-Irish immigrants, Pennsylvania degenerated into America’s first version of aggressive sprawl—a style of city-building personified by one of its most famous resident, the pioneer Daniel Boone, “who set out on his wanderings westward from Pennsylvania, where his Quaker ancestors … had settled” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 121). Boone didn’t stop until he reached Kentucky and founded Boone’s borough.

 

Weak and fragmented state/local governments eventually produced a politics that was more radical, volatile, individualistic and anti-authoritarian than anywhere else in America. Philadelphia’s economic privatism coexisted wonderfully with democracy. Through the American Revolution until the establishment of the Republic in 1789, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania could charitably be described “as the most vital participatory democracy in the world …. [with] cosmopolitan contentious citizens [who] destroyed institutions, overturned traditions, subverted received authority, [and]  rejected established elites” (Wescott, 1884, p. 318)—near anarchy prevailed. Pennsylvania went through three state constitutions in twenty years (contrasted with Massachusetts which approved a 1780 state constitution still in effect today)[ii]. Still, Henry Adams described Philadelphia/Pennsylvania in rather positive terms:

 

The only true democratic community … Pennsylvania contained no hierarchy like New England, no great families like New York, no oligarchy like the planters of Virginia and South Carolina …. Pennsylvania became the ideal American State, easy, tolerant and contented …. With twenty different religious creeds … and a strong Quaker element made it humane …. To politics the Pennsylvanians did not take kindly. Perhaps their democracy was so deep an instinct that they knew not what to do with political power when they gained it… (Adams, 1961, pp. 82-83).

 

 

 

The net effect of all this was a distinctive Mid-Atlantic style of decentralized, weak, and fragmented governance. Its city-building was driven by private investment and investment/business elites. The irony is Penn’s unintended Privatism attracted settlers who, if they did not agree with it, could tolerate it and make profits from it. The withdrawal from governance by wealthy Quaker elites following their Inner Light or pursuing private profit created a vacuum, soon filled, mostly by Philadelphia’s commercial elites who evolved into a version of Privatism later made famous by urban historian Sam Bass Warner.

 

Warner’s Private City

Warner’s Philadelphia was a community of individuals seeking jobs and profit for themselves-families. Provision of public goods was afforded little priority–the role of the state government in municipal affairs or in the provision of public goods was noticeably absent. Business and government were separate worlds with the weakened/decentralized latter facilitating the expansion and prosperity of the former.

 

[Philadelphia’s citizens] depended for their wages, employment, and general prosperity upon the aggregate successes and failures of thousands of individual enterprises, not upon community action … the physical forms of … [Philadelphia], their lots, houses, factories, and streets have been the outcome of a real estate market of profit-seeking builders, land speculators and large investors. Finally, the tradition of privatism has meant that the local politics of [Philadelphia] have depended … on the changing focus of men’s private economic activities. The tradition assumed that there would be no major conflict between private interest … and the public welfare. The modes of eighteenth century town life encouraged this expectation that if each man would look to his own prosperity the entire town would prosper. (Warner, 1968, p. xii)

 

Warner’s Philadelphia’s governance, as had Penn’s, rested on a system of committees in which each committee performed a specific municipal function, loosely under mayoral-council control. The independence of multiple policy-making committees facilitated dominance by commercial businessman (made possible by withdrawal of wealthy Quaker elites):

 

The wealthy presided over a municipal regime of little government. Both in form and function the town’s government advertised the lack of concern for public management of the community. The municipal corporation of Philadelphia, copied from the forms of an old English borough, counted for little. Its only important functions were the management of the markets and the holding of the Recorder’s Court. A closed corporation, [the municipal government] choosing its members by co-option, it had become a club of wealthy merchants…. the town was hardly governed at all….ineffective police… streets went unpaved, the public wharves little repaired…no public schools, no public water, and at best a thin charity (Warner, 1968, p. 10)[iii]

 

Biases and limitations in Philadelphia policy-making became more apparent as the city developed into an industrial city. Warner’s case study of Philadelphia’s water works revealed three phases of Philadelphia’s municipal history. Initially, municipal governance was left to business elites, relying on consensus decision-making tempered by a “good for the community” filter. As the industrial city grew, problems become divisive, consensus fractured, and the city was unable to govern effectively. Warner concludes policy-making by business elites was managed with great difficulty and considerable inequality. Business elites no matter the historical phase pursued low-tax solutions rather than long-term community-wide policies.

 

Was this Privatism-thing successful?

Whatever its limitations, however, Philadelphia’s Privatism attracted more than its fair share of future population growth. Philadelphia developed a more an innovative, diversified and prosperous industrial economic base– its focus on chemicals and machine tools for example was every bit as pioneering as New England’s textile mills. An obvious example of Philadelphia entrepreneurism and its commercial elite is Benjamin Franklin who left Boston for Philadelphia, made his fortune, retired in his forties and became a world famous scientist and statesman. Between 1791 and 1800 Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, home to Washington’s second term and most of the Adam’s Presidency. The National Bank was headquartered in Philadelphia. Canals and railroads constructed by its business leadership ensured Philadelphia’s competitive position in the American hierarchy of cities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. In such an open policy system, Philadelphia’s Privatist economic development approach evidently worked–and worked brilliantly—although politically nineteenth century Philadelphia and Pennsylvania developed a series of political machines, distinctive from NYC;s Tammany that lasted to almost 1950.

 

Penn’s weak system of governance fostered a political culture Woodard describes as “the most American of [his eleven] nations … welcomed people from many nations … pluralistic and [focused] on the middle class … where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate even apathetic …. Midlanders believe society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, but they are extremely skeptical of top-down governmental intervention” (Woodard, 2011, pp. 6-7). Midlanders brought their culture to Middle America: central Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, the Dakotas, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska—even Chicago and St. Louis.

 

Boston and Massachusetts

Boston was settled by Puritans, not Quakers, rather Calvinists who preached an “angry” God, a corrupt humanity, a heaven open to only those predestined (the Elect), but an intense preference for a community based on Puritan values/morals, and an intense obligation of the Elect to address needs of the community’s unfortunates. Puritanism rested upon a state-level Puritan “Elect” hierarchy that “guided” shareholder-based New England town democracy. In the Puritan system, town democracy and Puritanism were lodged in the town church–unlike Penn’s Pennsylvania, church and state were united. Structurally and morally the two systems of policy and governance were almost polar opposites.

 

John Winthrop

Boston’s equivalent to Penn (founder of the Town of Boston 1629)[iv] was the former English country squire John Winthrop. Winthrop established a Puritan policy system that distinguished between the roles of private and public in the Puritan community. Puritanism may have combined church and state, but it delinked the state from private profit and economic growth. Instead Winthrop’s Puritanism believed private profits should accrue to the community’s disadvantaged, and business elites distanced from policy-making.  In his famous “A Modell of Christian Charity” Winthrop advocated

 

[that] under a due forme of government, both civill and ecclesiastical” in which the concern for “the publique” must outweigh all private interests. We must bear one another’s burdens … We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of other’s necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality.… For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world. (Winthrop, 1630)

 

If this “modell” were applied to municipal governance—as Winthrop meant it to —the Model of Christian Charity would be Philadelphia Privatism turned upside-down, inside-out or both. Winthrop’s Puritanism perceived government as primary, to be an instrument to make men holy, and provide for the needs of the community’s most desperate. This (1) primary use of government (2) to care for the disadvantaged are two critical divides between Privatist and Progressivist political cultures. They are as evident in the seventeenth century—as they are today.  The focus upon private sector success as key to community economic growth suggest Progressive and Privatist economic development pursue different goals.

 

Massachusetts Political/Administrative Structures and Relationships

Winthrop stressed the unity of church and state, less in his municipal corporation, than at the state level. The State, led by Elect was entrusted to infuse municipal governance with moral purpose and lead in policy-making. The state of Massachusetts assumed responsibility that towns and residents be moral, hard-working, prosperous citizens, deserving of a future with God in heaven. Municipal government was thus held accountable, not only to the will of the shareholder town meeting (established in 1636 Massachusetts)[v], but to God and his Elect in the state capital as well. Accordingly in 1642 the Massachusetts General Court instructed each town to “train their children in learning, and labor and other imployments“. In 1647, the General Court required towns of fifty inhabitants to retain someone to teach children to “write and reade“, and a town of one hundred to set up a”grammer schoole” supported by public funds. The intention underlying education was each individual was expected to read his Bible. Literacy was essential, a prerequisite for self-governance at the town level. The role of the Massachusetts General Court in municipally-relevant affairs was significant, and remains so today.

 

As intense their desire to practice their religion, Puritans emigrated to unleash their middle class entrepreneurial spirits—reflected in the “business” purpose of town meetings and democracy. The Puritans secured their charter from the crown as a “trading company” owned by shareholders. City-building in early New England was a legal, economic enterprise, closely regulated by the state. Town shareholders included investors as well as residents. Each town formed an agreement/contract with its shareholders to perform tasks for the maintenance of the commons and designating tracts of land the proprietor solely owned and paid taxes. Originally, most of the land went unused and a function of town government was to attract and sell such unused units to new residents. This may be the earliest expression of Puritan town economic development. The town, as a private corporation, left to the discretion of the General Court (state government) most public policy areas. With few exceptions[vi], this tightly controlled unit of sub-state government was not replicated elsewhere in the United States. The Town evolved into a pure service delivery unit (Russo, 2001, pp. 10-11).

 

Wealthy families (Russo, 2001, pp. 49-52, 7-10) invested in new towns across the whole of southern New England (Connecticut and Rhode Island separated in 1662 and 1640’s respectively) and contested New York borders. By 1700 nearly all of New England, excepting the most northern areas, was incorporated. During the seventeenth century, original towns sold off land to form smaller towns. . Commercial centers developed (Cambridge, New Haven, Hartford, Salem, Providence, Springfield, and Boston). Most were ports (on the Atlantic or rivers). Nearly all were grid-platted. Dramatic growth occurred post-1700 with “clustering” of town centers. From that time, New England’s population growth lacked a “place to go”, and “pent up”, it awaited a future Yankee Diaspora.

 

The now-famous New England town democracy was not formalized by state legislation until 1660 (Massachusetts Open Town Meeting Law); the first town that practiced town democracy in the current sense of the expression was Ashfield. (Robinson, 2011). Over time, town meetings offered an opportunity for rival elites to crystalize; it is no accident that a Boston town meeting (1772), not the Bay State legislature, voted into existence the first Committee for Correspondence (including John Adams, Sam Adams, James Otis, Joseph Warren, and Josiah Quincy Sr. (Baltzell, 1979, p. 148).

 

The Evolution of Puritan Elites

After Winthrop Massachusetts Puritans softened the tough edges of his original system. As the Bay Colony matured, the religious intensity of Massachusetts’ Puritan governance wilted; a secular humanism displaced the harsh and demanding Puritan value system. This new mentality, however, left untouched critical values associated with Winthrop’s “city on a hill” passage. Commitment to community, a distrust of profit in public policy, the sharp separation of business from government, moral elite leadership of state government, the use of government to address needs of the disadvantaged, and the almost evangelistic function of the city on the hill as the “modell” of civic duty for others to imitate remained at the core of New England’s system of policy-making.  The transition from a Puritan Elect to Boston Brahmin took nearly 150 years,

 

The shift from raw Puritanism (Congregationalism) to Unitarianism[vii] commenced in the late eighteenth century. Long before Unitarianism was first preached at King’s Chapel in Boston (1784), however, generational change prompted by Puritan intolerance and inflexibility, and the development of a maritime sector to balance agriculture, weathered the old Puritanism. Authority, formerly derived from religion and morality, shifted to more secular foundations. Substituting for Calvinism was a Weberian Protestant ethic (hard work, a moral life) and commercial success.

 

Fifty years after its initial settlement the Puritan Religious Elect was replaced by a new Elect composed of morally-bound, highly-educated commercial elites most of financed or sailed the seas of the planet. Their new-found wealth, used for investment in maritime initiatives, was accumulated through the land sales associated with New England town-building. Post Puritan, pre-Unitarian business elites had evolved into a “codfish” aristocracy, based on fishing, whaling, and trade with Europe and the Far East. But success in business carried with it an obligation to serve the community by helping the disadvantaged and the general public welfare through service in government—a noblesse oblige. “The pulpit and the quarterdeck were the sacred and secular symbols of authority in the family, in society and in politics …. Boston federalism was a secularized version of the Puritan ethic.” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 199)

 

So unlike Quaker elites, post-Puritan elites accepted responsibility for governmental leadership. Governors after 1688 were drawn from this codfish aristocracy. “They modeled themselves not only on the Puritan ideal of authority, but also on the old Roman ideal of gravitas: self-interest yes, self-indulgence no …. They stood rather than ran for office, they listened to their own consciences, not to the voice of the people …. were collectivists rather than individualists, believing in family and class as organic communities and society as the family writ large” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 199). These men presided over what Baltzell calls a “deference democracy”—a democracy where aristocratic elites made policy on behalf of the “best interests” of its citizenry—“the best people were elected to office, time after time, in town after town for over two hundred years”[viii].

 

Transcendental Unitarianism replaced the fire, brimstone and sinners in the hands of an angry God with concern for humanity, a separation of church and state, a tolerance for religious diversity, and the essential goodness for mankind that, if protected from the evils of civilization, would “live long and prosper”. Education, always a first order Puritan priority, became the key vehicle to achieve both moral and economic ends. Education enabled, enlightened, empowered and was core to addressing needs of the disadvantaged. Almost imperceptibly, economic growth meant transforming “people”. Improving business profitability was separate and apart from government’s purposes—it was the responsibility of businessmen themselves. Boston-style Progressivism entrusted policy-making to a business elite, but sharply divorced private and business profit from policy-making as harmful to the overall community, and a bane to the community’s disadvantaged.

 

With the arrival of the Early Republic Boston’s agricultural and maritime economic base was disrupted by an emerging entrepreneurial business elite: textile manufacturers. As early as 1810 this manufacturing elite, accumulated wealth from factories built in Lowell, Andover, Salem and southern New Hampshire. Using a new form of business structure (the corporation), textile entrepreneurs made fortunes quickly, moved into Bulfinch-designed mansions in Boston high status neighborhoods, and by the 1830’s not only lived alongside the codfish aristocracy, but increasingly married into it. The Boston Brahmin, the Frankenstein-like fusion of these two elites, resulted.[ix] The Brahmin Elect carried with it the old Winthrop mission:

 

[an] obligation on the part of older families to the welfare of “their town” and new determination to participate actively once again in local political affairs … Boston could be saved if members of the “better class” took over their responsibilities and regained positions of social and political leadership in the community …. [They] emphasized the responsibility of “the happy and respectable classes” to watch over those laws that affected “the less prosperous portions of the community”. Their obvious desire for political control of Boston carried with it a sense of responsibility for the prosperity of the town and the welfare of its less fortunate classes–a sort of moral stewardship, a form of noblesse oblige–that would continue to be an integral part of Boston’s political heritage. (O’Connor, 2002, pp. 87-88).

Josiah Quincy

Only in 1820 did Boston petition the state legislature to change from town into city. By then Boston, a thriving cosmopolitan trading city of 18,000 in 1790 had increased to 43,000.  Boston desperately needed modernization of its infrastructure to accommodate population and a fishing industry that needed dredged harbors and rebuilt wharfs. Towns, however, lacked the authority to accomplish these tasks. City status, achieved in 1822, brought with it a charter that permitted a bicameral city council and a strong-Winthrop-style mayor in whom “the administration of all the fiscal, prudential and municipal concerns” were vested.

 

Elected in 1823 as Boston’s second mayor, Brahmin Josiah Quincy[x] stepped up to Boston’s infrastructure and service crisis. Concentrating on the oldest sections of the city, crushing the determined opposition of old Town elites, he established a municipal bureaucracy of experts accountable to him. Quincy then appointed himself as chairman ex-officio of the considerable number of independent boards and commissions and assumed authority not contemplated by the state constitution or the shift to city status (O’Connor, 2002, p. 93). While Philadelphia’s Privatist, weak, committee-dominated municipal government neglected its infrastructure and services, Quincy hired teams of sweepers to remove six tons of “dirt” from the city’s streets, established municipal garbage pickup service, established municipal level police and fire departments, created a department of corrections for youth offenders, acquired control over the city’s sewers and minimized their pollution–oh, and in case you missed it, conducted Boston’s first municipal-level urban renewal program–building in the cleared land the first Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market (ironically Logue’s initial 1960 urban renewal project rebuilt both). The Boston that Quincy left behind in 1828 was rated as the healthiest city in America–and the most indebted.

 

Traveling on a time machine to 1898, we would see his great-grandson Josiah Quincy IV (son of yet another Mayor John Quincy Jr.), the last of the Quincy dynasty as the Democratic mayor of Boston, a political party which included Boston’s immigrant Irish. Still very much a Brahmin, Quincy IV supported “extension of the powers of government and in the rights of organized labor and as mayor employed settlement worker Robert A. Woods, the social worker Alice N. Lincoln, and the founder of the playground movement, Joseph Lee.… [Quincy as Mayor] made Boston’s city government for a brief time the cutting edge of urban reform in America. (Baltzell, 1979, p. 373) In short, the first Josiah Quincy was no exception, his Progressive style of governance and economic development persisted through the nineteenth century.

 

Boston Progressivism stressed local governmental executive leadership by a Brahmin elite, pursuing the community’s greater good, with an emphasis on education and people related services. Called “Yankee” and “secular Puritans” by Woodard, our Progressives exhibited since the earliest days of the American Republic “the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives …. For more than four centuries, Yankees have sought to build a more perfect society here on earth through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process and aggressive assimilation of foreigners”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 5)  Its discomfort with unbridled capitalism, corporate conflicts of interest, and persistent efforts to assist the disadvantaged thru municipal policy distinguish the approach.

 

“Government … could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce morals through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 60)

 

Boston infused into Progressivism its sense of “mission”, its propensity to “impose its ways on everybody else”. “For the Puritans didn’t merely believe they were God’s chosen people, they believed God had charged each and every one of them to propagate his will on a corrupt and sinful world”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 61) This sense of mission overlaps profoundly into contemporary ED. Most evident in our “Policy World”, composed largely of Progressive-inclined academics—setting it apart from the more Privatist “Practitioner World”.

 

Observations and Questions before Moving On

There’s no mistaking Boston and Massachusetts for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Warner’s Privatism is not replicated in Boston. Nor should we think these are the only forms Progressivism and Privatism assumed. One might assume Privatist elites in Charleston behaved and thought differently than Philadelphia because their Privatism has different roots. A perhaps not-so-obvious lesson to be learned is variation among municipal business elites. Assuming a common unity of purpose, vision and action across cities and regions, a pursuit of profit for example, did not create a unified approach to policy.

 

 

The Philadelphia business community stressed low taxes, and economic/population growth and Philadelphia politics was supposedly the most democratic and open in America at that time—in contrast to the more imperial rule of Boston’s Progressive elite to which the masses were expected to defer. The concern for infrastructure, physical redevelopment, education, assisting the disadvantaged—and services to people and neighborhoods was pretty much the opposite of Philadelphia. In any case, leadership by municipal business elites does not justify the conclusion that the outputs of such policy-making will be identical across cities and can be reduced to the simple grubbing for personal gain and business profit. There is something deeper going on—this history suggests a major factor in that difference is political culture.

 

If so, political culture played a significant role in the municipal policy process. Perhaps, it’s most significant impact is to define goals and beneficiaries for ED policy initiatives and strategies. The existence of such radically different political cultures as demonstrated by Philadelphia and Boston supports our assertion that American economic development has not followed a uniform, monolithic, nation-wide set of economic development goals. There is two visibly different ways to conduct sub-state economic development that preceded the industrial city. As to which is better, the answer rests upon which set of goals one posits. Is one set of goals and beneficiaries better than the other—well …? Philadelphia proved remarkably innovative and through much of the nineteenth century increased population sufficient to make it competitive with its neighbors and the elite cities in America’s urban hierarchy. Less so Boston. But Boston defined its economic development in different terms—terms that worked well enough until Irish immigration smashed the ethnic and religious homogeneity of the Boston community. There are complexity, value preferences, and locational advantages all at play in providing answers to these questions. Ideology and political preferences are much simpler?

 

 

Population Migration and Culture Diffusion

 

This section concerns itself with geography and city-building—but underlying both is, of course, the diffusion of coastal political cultures into the interior, straight thru to the Pacific. In diffusing cultures, it is argued, getting there first is critical. The first settlers set up the political and administrative system in their initial state constitution. Things, of course, get more complicated when two or more sets of first settlers arrive at the same constitutional convention and have to duke it out. Latecomers, mostly immigrants that follow after the state constitution, can affect popular culture, politics, and much more, but changing state constitutions is not always easy—besides, it’s not always apparent that fundamental structural change is an answer to less fundamental policy issues, priorities and processes. That so-called “neutral” structures contain values, preferences, beliefs, beneficiaries, processes, and priorities, is not inherently obvious. Structures harden into traditions over time, and tradition becomes accepted as simply “the way we do it around here”—that’s one reason why city-building is so important to ED.

 

Our fascination with political culture requires us to understand how, and by whom, our cities were established. As different population streams came into contact, hybrids and variations of the two cultures developed. The flows of different and distinctive populations was not hap-hazard or random. Each population stream followed geographic/economic patterns that led to regional variations that were institutionalized in state constitutions and municipal charters. In the nineteenth century, population mobility was constant. As a starting point, this chapter describes key migrations (and cultures).  Population migration became inseparably linked with the formation of new cities and towns. Migration and city-building were also inescapably linked to the diffusion of our two ships-the Progressive and Privatist cultures— and establishment of their structural and institutional expressions.

 

The first migration to be briefly considered, the Scotch-Irish, began early in the 18^th century, picking up considerable steam after 1763. The second and third migrations, New Englanders and Deep South plantation owners, overlapped in time and fostered serious tension and considerable national debate. There were other important migrations (Midlands and African-Americans in particular) which are only minimally discussed. The fourth (starting in the 1840’s), were new waves of foreign immigration: Irish and Germans. Finally, the flood gates opened after the 1870’s and immigrants from Southern/Eastern Europe—as well as Asia poured into our cities—each left their mark on our history.

 

The Scotch-Irish[xi]

Fleeing the English-Scottish enclosure movement, Scotch-Irish arrived in five distinct waves between 1717 and 1776 (Woodard, 2011, p. 8). Philadelphia was their chief port of entry. Fiercely independent, but experienced agriculturalists, they seldom settled in cities (New Londonderry, New Hampshire an exception) before heading into wilderness frontiers. Waiting with open arms (usually holding a tomahawk or rifle) were Native Americans. In the eighteenth century Scotch-Irish moved into southern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Texas. Others moved through Pennsylvania, then onto western Maryland into today’s West Virginia and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (fairly unsettled). Continuing along the Great Wagon Road, Scotch-Irish crossed the Appalachians into the North Carolina Piedmont by 1740 and eventually reached into unsettled western South Carolina (1760’s). By 1796 they crossed over into Kentucky and Tennessee and stopped at the Mississippi River. By that time (1800) nearly 2 million Scotch-Irish had immigrated to the United States. (Barone, 2013, p. 19)

 

Using scorch and burn agriculture, Scotch-Irish homesteads were temporary, loosely tied to small agricultural towns and villages. Scotch-Irish did not create or settle cities; the territories they settled still maintain a small cities, small town bias. They wanted no part of the industrial city which was rising during their settlement period. Their innate reaction to political authority was to break it up, fragment it, and inject strong doses of citizen participation into governance and administration so to best preserve individual liberty. One Scotch-Irishman that participated in this trek was our seventh President, Andrew Jackson.  Born in 1767 South Carolina, he settled permanently in Tennessee. The political values carried in his DNA were etched into the nation’s cites and American economic development when his new-founded Democrat Party swept into power in 1828. Newly-settled cities and counties for the next half-century established fragmented, weak mayor, non-profession municipal government.

 

Jacksonian-dominated State/sub-state policy systems resulted from the nineteenth century small town Privatist Scotch-Irish culture. Building on the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer political systems, Jacksonian Scotch-Irish stressed self-sufficiency, limited government, low taxes, close to the people decision-making, and a reluctance to deal with urban commercial markets (preferring to barter liquor than use banks and currency). The Western Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion (1791) vividly makes apparent the instinctual Scotch-Irish resistance to centralized government. By default most policy areas were left to the private sector—economic development was no exception.

 

Concerned with their own unwritten code of behavior, priding themselves on their independence, and ever ready to uphold personal honor and retaliate on attacks on family or community; they were punctilious about being rambunctious. The point was personal independence, natural liberty; Presbyterianism tended to be in line with this …. These people didn’t much like commerce or commercial society… seemed more set on self-sufficiency … They wanted to conquer territory—oust the British, expel the Indians, take over vast lands from Mexico…. They wanted lordship rather than economic cultivation (Barone, 2013, pp. 17-19).

 

Woodard labels Scotch-Irish as “Greater Appalachia”; he devotes particular attention to their bellicose nature asserting their “culture had been formed in a state of near-constant war an upheaval, fostering a warrior ethic and a deep commitment to individual liberty and personal sovereignty” (Woodard, 2011, p. 102). Imperialistic by nature, they fought Native Americans for land, invading Cherokee lands as early as the 1750’s. They crossed swords with anyone who sought to impose limits on their behavior; the Tidewater plantation aristocrats and the moral Yankee “on a mission” raised their wrath exceedingly. When the time came, many fought for the North, and Scotch Irish led the succession of West Virginia from Virginia during the Civil War. But in the Reconstruction aftermath, Scotch-Irish bitterly resisted Yankee attempts to restructure society and economy through black emancipation.

 

Highly individualistic, the Scotch-Irish mostly opposed income redistribution; they tolerated extremes of wealth within their communities. Scotch-Irish sharecroppers worked for Scotch-Irish plantation lords. For many, many years Scotch Irish lived on the economic margins of the south and southeastern states–constituting the core element of white poverty that helped make those regions the poorest, least urban in the nation. Their continued propensity to move will consume many a page in this history. During the early years of the 19^th century they drifted into parts of Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. During the Great Migration, they were the “Okies” who fled the Dust Bowl for Los Angeles, and they rode trains to work the assembly plants of Detroit, Dayton and Akron. It was the Scotch-Irish who innovated something called BAWI—which during the Depression polarized American economic development to this very day.

 

New England Yankee Diaspora

“New England Yankees were almost entirely the descendants of 21,000 Puritans who arrived between 1629 and 1640 (Barone, 2013, p. 52). For the next 150 years confined, except through sea trade, to the borders of today’s six New England states, they prospered, became Unitarians, and procreated. The American Revolution, triggered by Yankee belligerence, and the Constitution that followed in 1789 set the stage, but Mad Anthony Wayne’s victory over Native Americans at Fallen Timbers in 1796 pulled the cork from the bottle. First was migration within New England itself, to Vermont and Maine– both populations tripled between 1790 and 1810. But then New Englanders surged across upstate New York —and with that the Yankee dash to the Pacific really started.

 

Upstate New York

New England shared upstate New York settlement with downstate New York and Philadelphia land speculators such as Robert Morris, of Revolutionary War fame. Morris bought huge swatches of upstate New York in earlier days, but his bankruptcy transferred title to the Dutch-based Holland Company. The Holland Company hired Joseph Ellicott, and he hired Pierre L’Enfant (designer of Washington D.C.); together, they platted central and Western New York, which was subsequently sold to New England emigrants. Other speculators such as William Bingham (could you guess Binghamton) did the same for central/southwestern New York. Bingham sold the land to New Englanders who came in groups, often extended families from the same town. For example, thirty fishermen from Martha’s Vineyard/ Nantucket founded Hudson in Columbia County along the Hudson in 1783.

 

Eastern and east central New York was settled as a consequence of a little known compromise between New York and Massachusetts. Massachusetts claimed the area (about six million acres) and New York, of course, contested Massachusetts ownership. In 1786 a compromise was negotiated in which New York got the title for the land, but Massachusetts got the proceeds from its sale. So, Boston land financiers put the land up for sale and sold it to New Englanders. And that is how New Englanders moved into New York. In 1805 New Englanders incorporated the city of Syracuse (Woodard, 2011, p. 174). Upstate New York’s 1790 population of 121,000 exploded and increased to nearly 1.4 million by 1830—“at which point Upstate New York had more people than any other single state”. (Barone, 2013, p. 66). New York State, little more than New York City at the time, was minimally involved in the settlement itself—in effect it had contracted it out to out of state land speculators.

 

From the beginning, it was abundantly clear that Yankee migration meant city-building—industrial cities and commercial trade. New Englanders didn’t just hack out a homestead: “Entire families would pack their possessions, rendezvous with their neighbors, and journey en masse to their new destination, often led by their minister. On arrival they planted a new town—not just a collection of individual farms—complete with master plot plan, with specific sites set aside for streets, the town green and commons, a … meeting house, and the all-important public school. They also brought their town meeting government with them. (Woodard, 2011, p. 176). The resulting settlement, predominately New Englanders, created tension between the State and municipal government. New England towns contested with New York cities. To remedy this, New York State empowered county government as an administrative partner to deliver state services and coordinate those New England-style municipal government activities. That structural heritage continues, today.

 

The Erie Canal (established in 1810, started in 1817 and completed in 1825) was another effort by New York State to control its upstate counties. The Canal, in any case, facilitated upstate manufacturing and linked Midwestern agriculture to New York City. So textiles in Utica and flour milling in Rochester flourished. Buffalo, its innovation, the grain mill, developed into a great logistics and transshipment center between the Midwest and New York City. That meant upstate New York was developing cutting edge industrial cities. Textiles, familiar to New Englanders, and agricultural processing were the first agglomerations that developed. Transportation, the source of raw materials and export of the finished product, was critical. Upstate New York was transshipment center on a regional scale. Its export economy was not based on native raw materials or resources.

 

Ohio, Michigan to Iowa and Indiana

Ohio came next. The Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery and divided land for private sale into 36 square mile townships, each sub-divided into 35 sections including one section reserved to build a public school. Believe it or not, the state of Connecticut held title to a strip of Ohio land (the Western Reserve) not included in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. The Western Reserve included present day Youngstown, Akron and Cleveland—and (in theory) extended across several states beyond. Connecticut (1795) sold much of the Western Reserve to the Connecticut Land Company. With the 1796 Fallen Timbers victory, land speculators and surveyors quickly headed west. In 1796 Moses Cleaveland, lead surveyor for the Connecticut Land Company, platted the Reserve into townships, formally founding Cleveland and Youngstown.[xii]

 

Settlers from Connecticut did stake out land there, including Moses Cleaveland …and was settled almost entirely by Yankees and in the years after the Civil War, when New England cities were thronged with Irish Catholic immigrants, the Western Reserve was, with Vermont, the most Yankee dominated part of the country. Yankee domination lasted until the early twentieth century, when Ellis Islanders thronged to work in the new steel, auto and tire factories in Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown (Barone, 2013, p. 64)

 

The remainder of Ohio was settled by just about everybody—Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Scotch-Irish and as we shall soon see, Germans. That is why it remains a political swing state to this day. In the north half, Yankees dominated. Following Yankee tradition, settlers founded colleges: Ohio University (first President being William McGuffey), Hiram College (President Garfield’s alma mater), Baldwin-Wallace College, Antioch (Horace Mann first President), Oberlin (1833 by Vermonters), Kenyon (Rutherford B. Hayes) and, Western Reserve College.

 

When the first Great Lakes steamship launched in 1818, Yankee immigrants, (disproportionately Vermonters) left Western New York and moved into Michigan’s Saginaw River Valley to start a lumber industry (Barone, 2013, p. 69). The Michigan Territory, governed by General Lewis Cass, a New Hampshire native, became home to quite a few transplanted New Englanders. Solomon Sibley, Massachusetts-born and a Brown University graduate was Detroit’s first mayor (1806) and Elijah Brush, a Vermonter (Dartmouth), it’s second. Northern Indiana, Iowa and Illinois followed the same pattern as Michigan. Though far less numerous in Indiana than Ohio, Vermonters and Connecticut men established northern Indiana towns such as Montpelier, Wolcottville, and Orland. Among its first Vermont-born settlers was Governor James Whitcomb, who set up the state’s public school system and Caleb Mills, the first President of Wabash College. (Barone, 2013, p. 69)

 

Yankees laid down the cultural infrastructure of a large part of Ohio, portions of Iowa and Illinois, and almost the entirety of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. They had almost near-total control over the politics in the latter three states for much of the nineteenth century. Five of the first six governors of Michigan were Yankees, and four had been born in New England. In Wisconsin nine of the first twelve governors were Yankees ….(By contrast, in Illinois—where Midlands and Appalachian cultures were in the majority—not one of the first six governors was of Yankee descent—all had been born south of the Mason-Dixon line). A third of Minnesota’s first territorial legislature was New England-born and a great many of the rest were [New Englanders] from Upstate New York … In all three Upper Great Lake states, Yankees dominated discussions in the constitutional conventions and transplanted their legal, political and religious norms (Woodard, 2011, p. 177).

 

New England’s “jewel in the crown”, however, was Chicago. Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard (Vermont), following the Black Hawk War’s end (1832), hired William B. Ogden (Delaware County New York) as his lawyer, and along with Grant Goodrich (Chautauqua County New York), formed “Chicago’s first urban elite … made up mostly of young, self-made men from New England and New York State”. As the original city-builders of Chicago, they transformed a wilderness outpost into the great metropolis. (Barone, 2013, p. 70).

 

Chicago, however, was far from the end of the line for Yankee immigration. Vermont born John Deere set up a plow factory on the Mississippi at Moline (Illinois). From the 1830’s onward, Yankees piled into Wisconsin, and after the 1840’s saturated Iowa. Burlington, Iowa, named for another Burlington back east, and Grenville Dodge (from Danvers Massachusetts, later chief surveyor for transcontinental Union Pacific) founded Grinnell Iowa. Yankees rushed into Kansas and Nebraska to prevent slavery from expanding into those territories (John Brown, for example, was born in Torrington Connecticut–Interesting irony: John Brown’s father Owen, owner of a Connecticut tannery, hired as his apprentice Jesse Grant, the father of Ulysses).

 

Left to another chapter is the tale of New Englanders in Oregon and San Francisco—not to mention Hawaii. Yankees liked to travel.

 

Diaspora Structures

More interested in government at the state and national level, Yankees were noticeably less focused on sub-state policy. Yankee first settlers installed the New England Township with its preference for schools, internal improvements, and people-focused policy outputs such as education, caring for the widows, disabled, and economically disadvantaged. Such townships, aside from infrastructure, rarely ranked Privatist-style economic development as a high priority. Even today, townships, compared to other governmental forms, towns are the least involved in sub-state economic development—leaving that policy area to higher levels of government.

 

The New England system was not applied uniformly in states settled by the Yankee Diaspora. The Yankee Diaspora spread into lands governed by another state (New York), or was shared with settlers from the Midlands and Scotch-Irish. Middle Atlantic States developed their own style of sub-state governance reflecting their New Netherlands, Greater Appalachia, and Midlands political cultures. As Mid-West states set up their initial government and state constitution, the structures incorporated into their state constitutions reflect influences from different first settlement cultures, tempered by the nature of constitution-making, a process naturally dominated by elites. Consider the Wisconsin constitution approved in 1848 (still in effect today).

 

Wisconsin counties, absent a court system, possessed considerable autonomy from the state, and were robustly empowered to assume responsibility for many policy areas (enjoying powers relevant to economic development, for instance). Yet, Wisconsin townships adopted New England town meetings, highly prioritized road and bridge infrastructure, while providing indigent residents base line medical care and funeral expenses. Fiscal affairs, however, were a “complicated mix of state-county-township revenue-raising and spending”. (Russo, 2001, pp. 103-104) From this example, it is evident that development of various sub-state systems came early in economic development history, thus having ample time to harden into distinct patterns that subtlety affect contemporary policy-making. Wisconsin was a typical example of the patchwork blend of administrative cultural experiences.

 

Sector Innovation, Agricultural Economy & Migration

The Virginia colonial charter established a trading company (a private corporation) not dissimilar from the more well-known British East Indies Company. Subsequent Virginia, and later Maryland, colonists stumbled upon tobacco as their principal crop—a crop that required lots of acreage and the cheapest of labor. A plantation economy developed resting on an owner class of “land entrepreneurs”, who established individual homesteads so large as to be a self-sufficient and self-contained. With direct access to rivers or the Atlantic, plantations directly exported and imported from the plantation’s own piers and harbor. Where the plantation system/economy flourished, urban communities were secondary. Plantation owners felt little need to establish towns or commercial centers.

 

This plantation system, the pillar of the Tidewater culture, spread through the South, reaching as far as the Mississippi River. The South accordingly was characterized by a “dispersed rural population occupied plantations and adjoining small farms [that] relied for community services on crossroad churches, courthouses and markets. These constituted a kind of ‘shredded community’ as scattered focal points for farming, trading, politics and religion”. (Russo, 2001, p. 11) The shredded community reinforced an inherent Privatist individual self-sufficiency, and what minimal governance was necessary was provided by an almost informal county courthouse patrician elite. The few municipal governments as existed, or were later created, were treated legally as “counties” rather than a municipality. The heritage of this remains more or less in tact today in Maryland and Virginia, especially—but is still found throughout the South.

 

Times were tough in the late 1700’s for Tidewater (Maryland/Virginia) tobacco growers. Tobacco, hard on the soil, meant its continued use produced decreasing yields, and increasing bankruptcies. Scotch-Irish tobacco-planting immigrants had moved into areas not suitable to tobacco, increasing supply of poor quality tobacco that depressed prices. The Tideland tobacco economy was in irreversible decline. The situation was little better for South Carolina indigo plantations as market demand dissipated after the Revolution and prices “went south”. On top of all this, the newly adopted Constitution required ending import of slaves as early as 1808 (which happened—although it was “phased in” to 1820). The 1787 Northwest Ordinance precluded slavery and a movement to incorporate anti-slavery provisions in state constitutions was gathering momentum.

 

But at this timely juncture innovation sprang into action. Nathaniel Greene, a Connecticut Yankee, and Washington’s most consistent Revolutionary War general, stayed in the south after the Revolution. He died in 1786 on his Georgia plantation named Mulberry Grove, leaving his widow, Cary, to carry on as best she could. Cary Greene in 1792 hired a tutor, a Massachusetts born, Connecticut-educated young man to teach her kids. Her Connecticut born, Yale-grad plantation manager, Phineas Miller, encouraged the young tutor to fiddle around with the farm machinery to see if the latter could make it work better. The tutor fiddled/innovated machine parts that greatly improved productivity of existing machinery—and the cotton gin was born (1793). Eli Whitney and Phineas Miller formed up a partnership and, the rest, as they say, was history.

 

In 1790 only 3,000 bales of cotton were produced in the entire of the United States. By 1800 cotton had increased to 73,000 bales, increasing again in 1810 to 178,000, 335,000 by 1820, 732,000 in 1830, 1,348,000 in 1840, 2,136,000 in 1850, and 4,491,000 in 1860 (Barone, 2013, pp. 61-62). To accomplish this production feat cotton acreage had expanded greatly, and a new labor force found to plant and harvest the cotton had to be found. Cotton is land and water intensive, an ideal plantation-based crop. Sustained demand for cotton prompted southern entrepreneurs to find suitable locations and start new fields. Suitable locations were found in areas included in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, but the problem was the Creek and Cherokee Indians who lived on these lands were unwilling to move. Enter Andrew Jackson and the Scotch-Irish.

A series of Indian wars started by Jackson after the War of 1812 (Davy Crockett and Sam Houston were in Jackson’s expedition), followed by outright land seizures, expelled the Indians and drove them out on a “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma (1831-1838). Having removed the existing workforce (the first slaves on cotton fields were Native Americans), southern cotton planters who had moved into Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi required another quickly. The “Passage to the Interior” drove over one million former Tidewater tobacco slaves into the nation’s interior by foot, in chains, taking six to eight weeks.[xiii] “Some 85 percent of the migrant slaves were from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas and some 75 percent of them went to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas”. In 1810, 79% of American slaves lived in sea coast states; in 1860, 33%. In 1810 10% of American slaves lived in cotton producing states—that increased to 55% by 1860 (Barone, 2013, pp. 75-77). Cotton had its workforce.

 

Indian displacement and slavery beclouds discussion of an economic sector. In function, the plantation was an agricultural factory, and cotton, the raw material of the textile sector, were exported as a national and international commodity. Plantation planters were a self-perceived economic class, surprisingly entrepreneurial and sometimes innovative, and the principal sector of the southern economy. Planters from South Carolina financed startups in Alabama and Mississippi, and scale being advantageous, larger planters were economically successful. In 1860, Adams County Mississippi was the wealthiest county per capita in the nation. The dynamism commonly associated with present-day emerging industry-technology sectors was not absent in the new cotton industry; considerable turnover in plantation owners occurred as incompetents were replaced by young startup owners.

 

Who bought this stuff? The world textile industry was chiefly located in Old England and New England. Here was a marriage made in heaven.  Francis Cabot Lowell, a Newburyport (MA) born, Harvard grad, Boston Brahmin (whose dad served in the Continental Congress) established his Boston Manufacturing Company (1814) to operate factories that converted raw cotton from the South into textile products. These factories, pioneer of the American factory with its famous “mill girls” or “Lowell system”, launched the American industrial revolution, the rise of manufacturing, and the famous textile industry of Massachusetts and New England. Lowell, the namesake founder of Lowell Massachusetts, and the industry sector he founded, was yet another instance of innovation and entrepreneurism.

 

Cotton was king in the pre-Civil War era and with it an agricultural southern economy based on free trade-export, dependent on a workforce composed of slaves and near subsistence white farmers. Originally founded in what would be labeled the “cotton belt” (Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina), this economy/culture spread into the Mississippi valley, Arkansas, northern Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, eastern Texas and southern Missouri. It was stopped in Nebraska, and most brutally, in Kansas during the 1850’s. The plantation/export-based southern agricultural economic system deeply impacted the South as a region and defined future southern economic development—an the American nation..

 

Among these consequences was that northern industrial city-building was virtually non-existent in the South. Aside from New Orleans, an old French-Spanish creation with its own distinctive Creole culture, the South developed no real industrial cities before the Civil War. Another important consequence of the plantation economy was southern internal transportation infrastructure (railroads) was under-invested. Southern transportation was by sea, on Massachusetts’ Yankee ships. So as of the early 1800’s, the two regions had developed separate, yet inter-related, economic systems. Each, as if independent of the other, walked down two different paths, destined, we now know, to war.

 

The Deep South Political Culture

Woodard labeled the culture that underlay the southern agricultural plantation-export economy “the Deep South”. The origins of that culture, colonial South Carolina (Charleston), originally had been settled by “Barbados [West Indies-Caribbean] slave lords”. Its defining systemic values included racial supremacy and aristocratic privilege, derived from “a version of classical [i.e. Greek-Roman] Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 9) The overlap with the Royalist Tidewater plantation elites allowed Carolina Deep Southerners to assume the Tidewater patrician image “of being descendants of the aristocratic Normans, lording over their colony’s crass Anglo-Saxon and Celtic underclass (Taylor, 1993) or the “Southern Cavalier” personified in “Gone with the Wind”. If so, the Deep South culture does not fit into our Privatist model based on individualism, liberty and free enterprise. This is not Jackson’s or Jefferson’s farmer yeoman. The pre-Civil War Deep South was a feudal culture[xiv].

 

From an ED perspective this culture rested upon plantations, each autonomous economically and geared to one export crop. Grow and harvest the cotton, and process/ship it to the export market were all that were required of sub-state ED. The system required land-based minimal infrastructure. The price of cotton did the rest. Port towns and cotton towns were its urban manifestations. Deep South government capacity was minimal indeed, and regretfully, often was fixated upon preservation of a political and economic system that ran counter to human decency, national democracy and industrial development. Policy-making was private, although private in a sense not contemplated by our Privatist model of political culture.

 

Impact of Foreign Immigration on Political Cultures

New England Yankees and Southern Planters were internal migrations—as were the post-Revolutionary War movements of the Scotch-Irish. Until the 1840’s foreign immigration was minimal (1820 less than 8,400). Immigration picked up after mid-1830, building to an 1846-1855 pre-Civil War peak (nearly 1.3 million). (Barone, 2013, p. 105) Domestic migrants, already socialized into an American political culture, were our “first settlers” who set in place the initial east of the Mississippi state constitutions, and municipal charters. These initial documents contained the basic structures and core principles that configured the relationships between levels of government, the nature of public/private interaction, and the forms of government for local communities.

 

The question whether foreign immigration modified, to some degree, the American first settler culture needs thought.  Did foreign immigration modify the administrative framework established by the first state constitutions? Did immigrants adjust their cultures to American cultures and/or accept the existing administrative policy-making framework? Deep South and Greater Appalachian cultures encountered remarkably few foreign immigrants? Woodard’s answer is unequivocal: “These great immigration … did not displace their [eleven original] regional nations [political cultures]. The [regional cultures] remained the ‘dominant cultures’ which nineteenth-and early twentieth-century immigrant’s children and grandchildren either assimilated into or reacted against. Immigrant communities might achieve political dominance over a city or state (as the Irish did in Boston or the Italians in New York), but the system they controlled was the product of the regional culture …. Indeed, in many ways, the immigrants of 1830-1924 actually accentuated the differences among [the regional cultures] (Woodard, 2011, pp. 254-255).

 

Woodard’s position corresponds closely to the position advanced in this history. It was first come, first served in the case of structure. Both Irish and Germans were ‘Johnny come late”, inheriting state constitutional frameworks already approved and in operation. Immigrants typically did not engage in city-building; they moved into cities/towns already established. The sub-state structural framework set up by the original settlers remained largely unaltered until the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century. New immigrants, whatever their cultural values and predispositions, were politically weak initially—and not disposed to fundamental administrative change. Economically desperate and isolated in ethnic ghettos or resident on rural farms they had other priorities. Immigrants were refugees who, to wanted to retain old traditions/values in the new world, while contradictorily make a new start in a political system/culture which offered opportunities and freedoms their home country did not. They did not come to America determined to change its political structures and local policy processes—but rather to take advantage of them. Succeeding generations aspired to assimilate into the American system/ culture. This is the “stuff” behind melting pots and ethnic stews.

 

Political culture change was further weakened because the immigrant ports of entry were the Yankee North (Boston and San Francisco), Midlands Philadelphia, New Netherlands New York, and Tidewater Baltimore. Hybrid/multi-culture Chicago captured a goodly number of immigrants and is the best example of an exception to our position. Few immigrants ventured into Scotch-Irish, Deep South, or the other seven Woodard cultures. Germans penetrated into some border cities, (Cincinnati and St. Louis), but immigrants stayed up north. As Woodard further observed, New York City/Netherlands and Pennsylvania Midlands cultures were inherently multi-cultural—heterogeneous from their start. Both emphasized individuality and tolerance in reaction. Tidewater Baltimore and Yankee New England, on the other hand, were predicated on homogeneity and reacted with considerable intolerance toward immigrants—a statement which the Boston Irish would heartily concur.

 

Pre-Civil War foreign immigration was mostly Irish and German. Little-remembered, the potato famine, totally associated with Ireland, had serious continental European economic repercussions, especially in Southern Germany. European revolutions of 1848 produced substantial uncertainty, insecurity and considerable numbers of refugees as well.  Irish and southern Germans shared their Catholic faith—they constituted the first sizeable Catholic immigration into America. In 1840 5% of Americans were Catholics; by 1860, 12%. The Irish entered Boston and New York mostly; the Germans New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

 

Irish

The initial wave of Irish immigrants stayed in port cities; the Irish were the first primarily urban immigrants. Clustered in Eastern city ghettos with high crime rates and disease-ridden, about a quarter spoke Gaelic only. The Catholic Church played a major role in Irish identity and American assimilation. The Church established its parochial school system and social organizations in Irish neighborhoods. A minority of Irish (mostly young men) moved into new geographies– into the army, out west as railroad laborers, and Chicago. Those that moved out of port cities entered areas settled by the Yankee Diaspora or Midlands regional cultures. The Irish were not innovative Yankee entrepreneurs. Their work experience more closely mirrored contemporary Hispanic employment trends: entry-level jobs and women engaged in personal and household services. “The jobs the Irish did find were those considered too hard, too menial, too dirty or too dangerous for others.” (Sowell, 1981, p. 1)

 

Irish Catholics became a major presence in the big cities by the 1850’s—more than one quarter the population in New York, Boston and Philadelphia and in smaller cities in between: Providence, New Haven, Hartford, Jersey City, and Newark (Erie, 1988, p. 532). For the first time, something resembling an ethnic neighborhood of some size sprang into existence. The Irish were the first immigrants that settled into already old, beat up housing and deteriorating neighborhoods—commencing the process later described as neighborhood succession and housing reform. Since the city at this time could not build “up”, it had to build “out”. Brooklyn’s 1840 population exceeded Albany’s by only 2,500; by 1860 Brooklyn, however, had 200,000 more residents. “Journey to work” became an issue as the separation of work from residence revolutionized the physical landscape and infrastructural needs of the greatly expanding northern and Midwestern cities. The need for internal municipal transportation systems and increasing stress on water and sewer raising serious public health concerns became persistent crises. Crime and fires required development of police and fire services. These policy areas became increasingly salient as the decades unfolded and became the first targets of early American ED.

 

The most significant impact pre-Civil War Irish exerted on early American Ed, however, was a new form of municipal government: the political machine. The political machine, a distinctive urban political system, produced its own forms of economic development policy which shall be discussed in future chapters. New York City’s Tammany Hall Tweed Machine, initially dependent on Irish votes, developed during the 1850’s. Two Boston’s mayors during the 1850’s, on the other hand, hailed from something called the “Native American Party” or Know Nothings—an anti-Irish political movement. The response of the New Netherlands regional culture to Irish immigration was noticeably different from that of Yankee Boston in this period. Within ten years Irish immigrants had found a way into New York City politics, by 1870 Tammany Hall, had an Irish boss. Boston elected its first Irish mayor (Hugh O’Brian (1885) nearly a generation later. Boston never developed a city-wide Irish boss similar to Tammany.

 

Germans

Germans were long included in the American cultural fabric. Penn’s Midland regional culture included Germans. The post-1840 flood, however, should be treated separately. Nearly half of German immigrants headed into the nation’s interior–to homestead on farms. When they stayed in cities Germans left entry seaports and headed inland (excepting New York City’s 15%). Of the Germans that settled on farms, Rhinelanders moved along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers; Cincinnati (27% and St. Louis (27% also) were the chief urban beneficiaries. Germans also settled in Chicago and Louisville, each with 20% German population, Cleveland (21%), Detroit (16%) got a share. Things got a bit more complicated in Wisconsin.

 

Pre-Civil War German migration did not reach into Wisconsin’s rural areas. Not until the 1870’s when the German migration blended with a huge Scandinavian (Norway, Sweden and Denmark) immigration did Wisconsin acquire large numbers of Germans. Post-1870 German/ Scandinavian migrations flowed, not only to Wisconsin, but also to adjoining Iowa, Minnesota and the two Dakotas[xv].  Because census records collapsed Scandinavian, Danish and Norwegians into the German category, one must be wary of the “German” label[xvi]. Southern Germans proved to be noticeably different from later northern German and Scandinavian immigrants; this matters in a discussion about political culture. The post-1840 and pre-1870 German immigrants held distinctive political attitudes.

 

The concept of a rationalized, disinterested, apolitical government bureaucracy, operating under credentialed experts rather than at the direction of crass politicians, had considerable appeal to German voters. Government ownership of utilities, railroads, and major industries was not antithetical to this… their aversion to temperance made them suspicious of Republicans … they were wary as well of the increasingly Irish-dominated patronage politics of the Democrats and attendant corruption, and were sympathetic [to] civil service reform (Barone, 2013, p. 138).

 

Germans set up their own schools and volunteer fire/militia companies, gave America the Christmas tree, kindergartens, and pinochle. Germans valued a close family, were associated with low rates of crime, intensely opposed slavery, and formed mutual-benefit insurance companies. Germans carried manufacturing (and brewing) entrepreneurship in their genes, but also rose in professions such as finance and law. John Jacob Astor (fur trader and Manhattan real estate developer) was German. German innovators included: Steinway (musical instruments); breweries: in Milwaukee (Pabst, Schlitz, Miller and Blatz), St. Louis (Anheuser-Busch), and NYC’s Jacob Ruppert Sr. (Ruppert’s son Jake bought the Yankees (1915), plus NYC’s Walter Lippmann (1889).

 

What’s Going On?

 

In an age of “multi-culturalism”, ethnic and religious political cultures seem out of place. Tying religiously-derived values to contemporary ED policy/strategies might seem to many a bit of a stretch. But this is the beginning of our ED history. What we have just outlined is the “First Sort”, the foundation for today’s “Big Sort”. ED policy and strategies was first fabricated from the policy systems set up in newly-founded cities and newly-settled States. That these policy systems produced outputs relevant today will be made more evident in the following chapters. This chapter fleshed out our two ships of economic development and described the geographies into which they reached, and how they institutionalized themselves into state and local policy-making systems. Political culture matters in economic development; different populations, states, regions and cities have their own history and legacy of values which were developed over time and experience by the people who settled them and the people who followed. Structures such as state constitutions and municipal charters is how these initial values were sustained over time.

 

Political cultures would matter little if they produced roughly similar outputs. Our two ships, however, are sailing in different seas and heading to different ports. The first and fundamental observation is from our very beginning, economic development has included two different policy cultures, each injecting its own definition of what ED should do, and whom it should help. Those two ships exist today and they have not played well in the harbor. Our history reflects the struggle between these almost polar opposite cultures. Pennsylvania Privatism and Yankee Progressivism, functioned at the same time, but each produced a wildly different policy system and defined economic development so differently that economic development priorities of either one almost repudiated the priorities of the other. There were other cultures and policy systems which we did not elaborate upon—Charleston for one, New York City for another.

 

Divergence of ED goals among distinctive political cultures will, therefore, be a central theme in this history.  In this history there has never has been a single, universal, nationwide definition of what economic development is, should do, who should do it, and how it should serve the community/ jurisdiction. This theme is in its infancy, however. The story is vastly more complicated as we go forward. In particular, it is more complicated by outlining how political cultures diffused into new territories, established new jurisdictions, and injected cultural values and priorities into structural frameworks central to governance. In most cases new territories were shared with other migrating political cultures and foreign immigrants. Hybrid structural systems resulted.

 

Population mobility is interrelated with political culture—and through political culture devised the structural framework of governance, underlying political and value consensus of the community/jurisdiction, and importantly legitimized selected elites to play within the structural framework. From Early America on, not everybody plays ball in the ED policy-making process. In the pre-Civil War period, elites were exclusively from the private sector. Professional politics like Quincy were rare indeed in these years. But, we also learned private sector elites do not inherently share identical values—they clearly do not, never have, and not likely ever will. Business elites travel on each of our two ships. Who plays ball in ED policy-making will follow from distinctly different jurisdictional policy systems.

 

ED is different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as each of our national regions occupy a different “space”, history, population flows and jurisdictional economic bases. One size has never fit all. For more than seventy years, pre-Civil War America was two vastly different “nations”—with an undiscovered and largely unsettled third nation (the West) lurking off-stage. North and South were poles apart. Each chose its own path; each path had consequences. At the time many increasingly saw these paths as zero-sum. The South chose a path that developed a feudal agricultural and political system in nineteenth century. It didn’t go so well—but it left a heritage that affected the course and direction of American economic development.

 

 

[i] This is the famous Talleyrand of Congress of Vienna fame. Visiting Pennsylvania in 1790m he entered into a land speculation that founded Bellefonte.

[ii] Pennsylvania voters since 1790 have approved four state constitutions (1790, 1838, 1873, and 1967).

[iii] See also, Judith M. Diamondstone, “Philadelphia’s Municipal Corporation, 1701-1776,” Pennsylvania Magazine, XC (April, 1966), pp. 183-201; Edward P. Allinson and Boise Penrose, “The City Government of Philadelphia“, Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, V, (Baltimore, 1887), pp. 14-33.

[iv] Winthrop served twelve terms as Governor (never Mayor of Boston which at that time was a town). If Winthrop has an image today, it is as an inflexible, sexless, staunchly conservative Puritan. In his day, however, Winthrop was a moderate authoritarian, not mean-spirited (he warned Roger Williams secretly to get the heck out of Salem, and was criticized for being too lenient with Anne Hutchinson). He outlived five wives, and was father of eight, maybe nine, children–many sadly dying young –as did his first four wives. Upon landing at Logan Airport, think of Winthrop—he owned the land.

[v] Approved by the Massachusetts General Court in March 1636. Cities were latecomers to New England. New Haven was the first in 1784, Boston, 1822, New Hampshire the 1840’s, and Springfield in 1852. Hartford is a city/town consolidation.

[vi] Moravians, religious refugees, founded settlements exclusively for themselves. They carefully planned their towns, the first being Bethlehem in 1741 Pennsylvania (followed by several other Pennsylvania boroughs) and a second set in North Carolina, the town of Economy in 1753 and Salem in 1766—others followed.

[vii] Unitarianism first appeared in Lithuania and, of all places, Transylvania in the mid-1500’s.Traveling to London, then to New England, it was first preached in Boston’s King Chapel in 1784. Inclined toward Deism (which rejects religion as a source of authority, but asserts through reason and science the existence of a God can be discovered), Unitarianism, from its earliest days, appealed to the wealthy and intellectual. In 1805 Harvard taught its first course in Unitarian theology. As New England Unitarianism evolved, it morphed into “transcendental Unitarianism” (from German liberal theology) associated with Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendental Unitarians stressed the essential goodness of mankind and adopted a more intellectual, semi-secular humanistic approach.

[viii] Baltzell’s observation was supported by no less than John Adams who wrote in his Defense of the Constitution: “Go into every village in New England, and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most” (Baltzell, p. 170).

[ix] Samuel Eliot Morrison described this elite fusion as the marriage between “the wharf and the waterfall“. In an 1861 novel, Elsie Venner (1861), Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dubbed the new business elite the “Boston Brahmin“. Holmes’s novel characterized this elite as “harmless, inoffensive, and untitled”, with houses by Bulfinch, their monopoly on Beacon Street, humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of their mind, Yankee shrewdness, and New England exclusiveness“. Our description of Puritanism’s evolution is indebted to O’Connor’s, the Hub: From Town to City.

[x] Quincy, a former Congressman, a strong Federalist and a stolid Brahmin was quite the charismatic personae. Related to John and John Quincy Adams (Abigail’s mother was a Quincy), Quincy devoted his life to politics, subsequently served six terms as Mayor leaving to become President of Harvard for seventeen years.

[xi] We rely heavily on Barone for detailing the path of the various migrations. Barone describes Scotch-Irish migration as “one of the largest immigrations in proportion to preexisting population in American history, similar in magnitude to the Irish and German immigration of 1847-56 and the Ellis Island immigration of 1900-14”. The number arriving each year approximated the population of Boston, then the third largest city” (p. 27).

[xii] The story has it that the “a” was dropped out of Cleveland by a printer who wanted to crowd a sentence into a single line of print.

[xiii] Statistics are from Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York, Norton, 1989), p. 46; Ira Berlin, The Making of African America (New York, Viking, 2010) coined the title “Passage to the Interior”.

[xiv] With considerable irony, these slave lords hired John Locke to write the South Carolina colonial constitution that permitted slavery and provided 150 free acres for each slave brought into the colony. Locke’s guarantees of religious toleration, however, encouraged French Huguenot and Sephardic Jew immigration and were eliminate in 1700—making the state an Anglican theocracy.

[xv] Edwinton was a railroad city founded in 1872. A year later, some marketing whiz renamed the city, Bismarck to attract German immigrants.

[xvi] Scandinavians (1876-85: 475,000, 598,000 in 1886-95) settled in the Great Lakes Northwest, Cleveland and Buffalo, also Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado, Houston and Pittsburgh got a share.  Post-Civil War, southern Catholic German immigration declined; northern, rural, Protestant Germans (including Volga Germans who settled in the Dakotas) replaced them. After 1881 most Scandinavians were Norwegians.

OLDER EXPANDED VERSION OF CHAPTER 2

Chapter 2:

As the Twig is Bent: Sub-State Political Culture and Pre-Civil War Population Migration

 

Lost in the fog of ancient American history the profession, and policy streams of American economic development began their long journey. In these very early years the foundations of our communities, their governance, policy-making processes, and initial political culture were set in place. In these years the twig of current policy system was bent. In pre-industrial Early Republic the reader can more clearly see our three drivers of change “bending the twig” of economic development.

 

The tasks tackled in this introductory chapter are to (1) introduce our two ships passing in the night, the Privatist and Progressive political cultures; and (2) describe the initial waves of Early Republic city-building caused by internal migration and pre-Civil War foreign immigration. These migrations and consequent city-building carried colonial coastal political cultures and governance structures not only to the Mississippi River. As such these early migrations constitute “first settlement” political cultures which approved the critical enabling constitutions and laws that set up their initial state/sub-state governance—bending “the twig” to follow their Privatist and Progressive inclinations.

 

Early Republic Privatist and Progressive Cultures

 

The keels of our two ships of American economic development were laid during the Colonial and Early Republic periods. In colonial years religious beliefs reflected in historical governance structures were implanted into American state and local government, through royal/municipal charters, compacts, and initial colonial constitutions. Older values and structures were adjusted to fit our agrarian frontier-wilderness economy[1]. The American Revolution, subsequent Articles of Confederation, and later ratification of the 1789 Constitution, required updating state and local governance to fit the principles of democracy as understood by the dominant political forces within each state at that time. The amazing reality that emerged from this shift into the American Early Republic is that so much of past governance, values, and structures endured, and through subsequent migration carried into the newly settled states.

 

Equally amazing was that American colonies were never clones of each other. The diversity in structures and governance found among the colonies was striking—and that diversity could best be attributed to the varied backgrounds and cultures of their first settlers. Immigrants that settled in each colony did not mirror each other in culture, political expectations or aspirations. Colin Woodard describes eleven colonial “rival regional cultures” that form the basis for the regional cultures of present day United States[2]. Woodard’s model will serve as foundation for our description of the varieties of regional political cultures and for variation within our two dominant political cultures: Privatism and Progressivism. These “first settlers” formalized relationships among levels of government and between government and the private sector through these initial state constitutions. Subsequent judicial decisions preserved these relationships and updated them to accommodate present day realities.

 

The first task of this chapter is to detail the basis underlying the two dominant political cultures that I assert still characterize twenty-first century American sub-state economic development policy-making. My purpose is not only to prove these “two ships passing in the night” existed in early colonial America and persisted into the Early Republic, but to provide case studies to demonstrate how they evolved over two hundred years and describe their core governance relationships which still distinguish each from the other. Hindsight and Woodard’s “Yankee” culture suggest our search for Progressive origins start (and end) with New England’s Puritan governance. The search for an Early American Privatist example, however, is more complicated. Our choice for an example of Early Republic Privatism is Sam Bass Warner’s Philadelphia.

 

Penn’s Privatism

Pennsylvania’s and Philadelphia’s governments were devised by Penn himself (1682, Frame of Government). Penn disliked government intensely; Quakers perceived government as both a tyranny and the source of their religious persecution. If any belief had gotten them in consistent trouble back in England, it was their volatile and innate rebellion against imposed authority. Quakers by nature questioned order and tradition, refused deference to elites, rejected formal religion and church hierarchies, and proclaimed salvation could only be found through individual study and revelation. Authority was unnecessary–left alone humans were all good and equal before the face of God. “Meddle not with government; never speak of it, let others say and do what they please …. I have said little to you about distributing justice, or being just in power or government, for I should desire you should never be concerned therein”[3]. Pennsylvania, accordingly, was set up to provide as little “governance” as conditions would permit.

 

Government, no matter the level, was secondary, intended to be weak, and limited. Penn’s state or colony-level government was framed to be the weakest of all. State government as created by Penn was even unwilling to defend itself when it was attacked by Indians (who were being displaced and attacked by Scotch-Irish and Germans). Unsurprisingly, Penn’s initial government framework collapsed in his lifetime; he was forced to import non-Quakers to run the colony’s affairs—and they failed as well. Government power, such as was permitted, was dispersed to a semi-autonomous county. While intended to be the principal operating unit of government, county powers and governance simply was not up to the task. Both county and municipal governments were infused with separately elected administrative offices that fragmented executive and legislative authority.

 

Penn originally recreated the classic medieval agricultural village in Pennsylvania. In this model, individual l farms extended outward from the village center periphery. For the first twenty years or so, the colonial (state) government surveyed and platted the land accordingly: Germantown, Newtown and Bucks Counties reflected this structural pattern. Planned commercial centers were envisioned as “county seats” whose purpose was both commercial and administrative. Philadelphia, Bristol, Chester and New Castle were examples of these early planned centers. As other settlers moved into more rural areas Penn’s hodge-podge system broke down.

 

Settlers moving into the western hinterlands, beyond Penn’s effective control established diverse homesteads, more resembling the southern shredded community than his planned medieval village communities.[4] Instead, the farther out from Philadelphia these planned centers were, the more they functioned as strong central units of government with their own hinterland; York, Reading, Carlisle, Easton, Bedford and Sunbury are examples. Following yet another governance model, Gettysburg, Chambersburg and Lebanon were established by a private city-builder.[5] This latter model was prevalent in the mountain areas of Pennsylvania where the town or borough served as a county seat and was founded by a private city-builder. Bellefonte, for example, was founded by speculator Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord[6] around a spring and an iron ore mine. “During the course of the eighteenth century Pennsylvania became blanketed with clustered settlements”.[7] The net effect of all this was a distinctive Mid-Atlantic style of governance:

 

Fragmented and weak government was not created because it advanced capitalism or accommodated the greed of commercial elites. Capitalism and businessmen merely inherited it from Penn and the Quakers. The irony is Penn’s Privatism attracted settlers who, if they did not agree with it, could tolerate it and make profits from it. This shift in elites was facilitated by the withdrawal from governance by wealthy Quaker elites following their Inner Light or pursuing private profit. Absentee Quaker leadership created a vacuum, soon filled, mostly by Philadelphia’s commercial elites who evolved into Sam Bass Warner’s Privatism. When Quakers were quickly followed by German, and then Scotch-Irish immigrants, Pennsylvania degenerated into America’s first version of aggressive sprawl—a style of city-building personified by one of its most famous residents, the pioneer Daniel Boone, “who set out on his wanderings westward from Pennsylvania, where his Quaker ancestors … had settled”[8]. Boone as we know didn’t stop until he reached Kentucky and founded Boone’s borough.

 

Weak and fragmented state and local governments eventually produced a politics that was more radical, volatile, individualistic and anti-authoritarian than anywhere else in America. Philadelphia’s economic privatism coexisted wonderfully with Philadelphia political democracy. Through the American Revolution, and until the establishment of the Republic in 1789, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania could charitably be described “as the most vital participatory democracy in the world …. The Revolution had transformed insular, docile freeman bowing to their cultural betters, into cosmopolitan contentious citizens [who] destroyed institutions, overturned traditions, subverted received authority, [and]  rejected established elites”[9]—in other words, near anarchy prevailed. Pennsylvania went through three state constitutions in twenty years (contrasted with Massachusetts which approved a state constitution in 1780 which is still in effect at the time of writing this history)[10] This is the historical heritage upon which Sam Bass Warner constructed his Privatist Philadelphia.

 

Warner’s Private City

Warner’s Philadelphia was a community of individuals seeking jobs and profit for themselves-families. Provision of public goods was afforded little priority–and the role of the state government in municipal affairs or in the provision of public goods was noticeably absent. Warner conceived Privatist Philadelphia as:

 

[Philadelphia’s citizens] depended for their wages, employment, and general prosperity upon the aggregate successes and failures of thousands of individual enterprises, not upon community action. It has also meant that the physical forms of … [Philadelphia], their lots, houses, factories, and streets have been the outcome of a real estate market of profit-seeking builders, land speculators and large investors. Finally, the tradition of privatism has meant that the local politics of [Philadelphia] have depended … on the changing focus of men’s private economic activities. The tradition assumed that there would be no major conflict between private interest … and the public welfare. The modes of eighteenth century town life encouraged this expectation that if each man [and woman] would look to his own prosperity the entire town would prosper.[11]

 

Warner’s Philadelphia’s governance, as had Penn’s, rested on a system of committees in which each committee performed a specific municipal function, loosely under mayoral-council control. The separateness and independence of these committees facilitated dominance of a lower (less wealthy) elite stratum, the commercial businessman (made possible by the withdrawal of wealthy Quaker elites):

 

The wealthy presided over a municipal regime of little government. Both in form and function the town’s government advertised the lack of concern for public management of the community. The municipal corporation of Philadelphia, copied from the forms of an old English borough, counted for little. Its only important functions were the management of the markets and the holding of the Recorder’s Court. A closed corporation, [the municipal government] choosing its members by co-option, it had become a club of wealthy merchants…. By modern standards the town was hardly governed at all….ineffective police… streets went unpaved, the public wharves little repaired…no public schools, no public water, and at best a thin charity.[12]

 

Warner does not like Privatism discerning that Privatism did have biases and limitations in policy-making that were more apparent as the city developed into the  industrial city. Warner presents a case study of Philadelphia’s water works from which he derives three phases of Philadelphia’s municipal history. Municipal governance was left to municipal business elites, relying on consensus decision-making tempered by “it must be good for the community” filter. As the industrial city grew, problems become more divisive, consensus fractured, and the city was unable to govern effectively. Warner concludes policy-making by business elites was managed with great difficulty and considerable inequity. Mostly, business elites pursued low-tax solutions not than long-term community-wide health solutions.

 

Delving into Warner’s critique helps us to see key distinctions between Progressivist and Privatist policy-making. In effect, Warner delivers a Progressive critique on Philadelphia’s governance. He prefers a municipal government acting for the benefit of the community as a whole, independent of business elites who make decisions from self-interest, rather than a rational “process” that evaluates costs and benefits to the community and the effects of policy-outcomes on the less advantaged.

 

Was this Privatism-thing successful?

Whatever its limitations, however, Philadelphia’s Privatism attracted more than its fair share of future population growth. Considerable business/economic expansion followed as well. An obvious example, is Benjamin Franklin who left Boston for Philadelphia, made his fortune, retired in his forties and became a world famous scientist and statesman. Unmentioned by Warner is that between 1791 and 1800 Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. Washington’s second term of office and most of the Adam’s administration operated from Philadelphia. The National Bank was headquartered in Philadelphia. Philadelphia did not miss the industrial revolution—its focus on chemicals and machine tools for example was every bit as pioneering as New England’s textile mills. Canals and railroads constructed by its business leadership ensured (admittedly hap-hazard) Philadelphia’s competitive position in the American hierarchy of cities throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century. As a counter-balance to Warner, Henry Adams described Philadelphia/Pennsylvania in rather positive terms:

 

The only true democratic community … Pennsylvania contained no hierarchy like New England, no great families like New York, no oligarchy like the planters of Virginia and South Carolina …. Pennsylvania became the ideal American State, easy, tolerant and contented …. With twenty different religious creeds, and a strong Quaker element made it humane …. To politics the Pennsylvanians did not take kindly. Perhaps their democracy was so deep an instinct that they knew not what to do with political power when they gained it….[13]

 

In such an open policy system, Philadelphia’s Privatist economic development approach evidently worked–and worked brilliantly—although it departed from Warner’s preferences. Philadelphia was a success story.

 

In short, Penn’s weak system of governance facilitated the development of a political culture which Woodard describes as “the most American of [his eleven] nations … welcomed people from many nations … pluralistic and [focused] on the middle class … where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate even apathetic …. Midlanders believe society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, but they are extremely skeptical of top-down governmental intervention”.[14] In Pennsylvania, municipal boroughs flourished, and still do today. Midlanders emigrated from Pennsylvania transporting their culture to Middle America: central Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, the Dakotas, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska—even Chicago and St. Louis.

 

Boston and Massachusetts

Boston was settled by Puritans, not Quakers. Puritans or Calvinists preached an “angry” God, a corrupt humanity, a heaven open to only those predestined (the Elect), intense and inward-looking preference for community based on Puritan values/morals, and an intense obligation of the Elect to address needs of the community’s unfortunates. Puritanism rested upon a state-level[15] moral Puritan hierarchy that “managed” a shareholder-based New England town democracy. Town government will follow in the wake of future Progressive migration. Symbolically in the Puritan system, town democracy and the Puritan religion were lodged in the town church –unlike Penn’s Pennsylvania, church and state were united, Structurally and morally the two systems of policy and governance were almost polar opposites.

 

John Winthrop: Laying the Keel of the Progressive Ship

Boston’s equivalent to Penn (founder of the Town of Boston 1629)[16] was the former English country squire John Winthrop. Winthrop established the Puritan policy system, distinguishing the purpose-mission of the private and public sectors, separating the roles each would play in the Puritan community. Puritanism may have combined church and state, but it delinked the state from private profit and corporate growth.

 

Winthrop proposed in his famous “’A Modell of Christian Charity’… (that) under a due forme of government, both civill and ecclesiasticall” in which the concern for “the publique” must outweigh all private interests. We must bear one another’s burdens .… We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of other’s necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality .… For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.[17]

 

This is the famous “city on a shining hill” quote. If this “modell” were applied to municipal governance—as Winthrop meant it to —the Model of Christian Charity would be Privatism turned upside-down, inside-out, or both. Winthrop’s Puritanism perceived government as primary, to be an instrument to make men holy, and provide for the needs of the community’s most desperate. This (1) primary use of government (2) to care for the disadvantaged are two critical divides between Privatist and Progressivist political cultures. They are as evident in the seventeenth century—as they are today.  The secondary focus upon private sector success as key to community economic growth/prosperity suggests that Progressive and Privatist economic development, “come of the beat of a different drummer”, and pursue different goals.

 

Massachusetts Political/Administrative Structures and Relationships

Penn intended Pennsylvania to be free of a state religion—government. Church was separated from government to secure religious toleration. Winthrop, to the contrary, retained the unity of church and state, less in his municipal corporation, than at the state level. The State, led by Elect was intended to infuse municipal governance with moral purpose and lead in policy. The state of Massachusetts assumed responsibility that the towns and their residents be moral, hard-working, prosperous citizens, deserving of a future with God in heaven.

 

Accordingly in 1642 the Massachusetts General Court instructed each town to “train their children in learning, and labor and other imployments“. In 1647, the General Court required towns of fifty inhabitants to retain someone to teach children to “write and reade“, and a town of one hundred to set up a”grammer schoole” supported by public funds. The intention underlying education was each individual was expected to read his Bible. Literacy was essential, a prerequisite for self-governance at the town level. The role of the Massachusetts General Court in municipally-relevant affairs was significant then, and remains so today.

 

 

Municipal government was thus held accountable, not only to the will of the shareholder town meeting (established in 1636 Massachusetts)[18], but to God and his Elect as well—epitomized in state government. The Puritans secured their charter from the crown as a “trading company” owned by shareholders. As intense their desire to practice their religion, Puritans also emigrated to unleash their middle class entrepreneurial spirits—this was reflected in the “business” purpose of town meetings.. City-building in early New England differed radically from Pennsylvania. It was a formal, legal, economic enterprise, closely regulated by the state. Wealthy families[19] invested in new towns across the whole of southern New England (Connecticut and Rhode Island separated in 1662 and 1640’s respectively) and contested New York borders. Town shareholders included investors as well as residents.  By the end of the 1600’s nearly all of New England, excepting the most northern areas, was carved up. In the seventeenth century the original towns sold off land to form smaller towns within their borders. City-building in New England rested on government-regulated private investment.

 

Commercial centers did eventually develop (Cambridge, New Haven, Hartford, Salem, Providence, Springfield, and Boston). Most were ports (on the Atlantic or rivers). Nearly all were grid-platted. Growth dramatically occurred during the 1700’s with “clustering” or development of town centers. From that time on, New England population growth lacked a “place to go” and “pent up”, it awaited a future Yankee Diaspora. The now-famous New England town democracy was not formalized by state legislation until 1860 (Massachusetts Open Town Meeting Law); the first town that practiced town democracy in the current sense of the expression was Ashfield.[20] Over time, town meetings offered an opportunity for rival elites to develop, and it is no accident that a Boston town meeting (1772), not the Bay State legislature, voted into existence the first Committee for Correspondence (including John Adams, Sam Adams, James Otis, Joseph Warren, and Josiah Quincy Sr.).[21]

 

Counties (created in 1643) were secondary. Internally, each town formed an agreement/contract with its shareholders to perform tasks for the maintenance of the commons and designating tracts of land the proprietor solely owned and paid taxes. Originally, most of the land went unused and a function of town government was to attract and sell such unused units to new residents. This may be the earliest expression of Puritan town economic development. The town, as a private corporation, left to the discretion of the General Court (state government) most public policy areas. With few exceptions[22], this tightly controlled and administered sub-state government was not replicated elsewhere in the United States. The Town evolved into a pure service delivery unit of government.

 

While many states have chosen in recent years to strengthen their reliance upon counties, Massachusetts has emasculated theirs to the point that in 2015 half no longer exist– as did Connecticut and Rhode Island. The General Court has since regulated activities of their town and city service delivery units very closely. Massachusetts history is littered with state legislature’s inability to loosen policy control over its sub-state jurisdictions.

 

The Evolution of Puritan Elites

Pennsylvania’s Quaker-founded Privatism did not develop an opportunity for governmental leadership by the state’s most wealthy elite. By encouraging Quaker wealthy to stay away from politics and governance, Penn’s Privatism left Pennsylvania government to the vicissitudes of a laissez-faire merchant business community unfettered by Puritan moral obligation[23].  Massachusetts Puritans, however, evolved in their own style after Winthrop, and they were able to develop an amended version of Winthrop’s Puritan elite which preserved much of Winthrop’s original system. The transition across nearly 150 years, from a Puritan Elect to a Boston Brahmin solidified to me the importance of business elites in both our history of economic development and their importance in economic development policy. Departure from a raw Puritanism to an Unitarian Elect accomplished through an evolution of business elites injects two very important elements into our model: (1) the importance of recognizing the distinctions among types of business elites and (2) insight in how political culture is transmitted across historical time periods.

 

As the Bay Colony matured, the religious intensity of Massachusetts’ Puritan governance wilted; a secular humanism displaced the harsh and demanding Puritan value system. This new mentality, however, left untouched the critical values associated with Winthrop’s “city on a hill” passage. Commitment to community, a distrust of profit in public policy, the sharp separation of business from government,  moral elite leadership of state government, the use of government to address needs of the disadvantaged, and the almost evangelistic function of the city on the hill as the “modele” of civic duty for others to imitate remained at the core of New England’s system of policy-making.

 

The shift from raw Puritanism (Congregationalism) to Unitarianism[24] commenced in the late eighteenth century. Long before Unitarianism was first preached at King’s Chapel in Boston (1784), however, generational change prompted by Puritan intolerance and inflexibility, and the development of a maritime sector to balance agriculture, weathered the old Puritanism and reduced its centrality in daily life. Authority, formerly derived from religion and morality, shifted to more secular foundations. Substituted for Calvinism was a Weberian Protestant ethic (hard work, a moral life) and commercial success. Fifty years after its initial settlement the Puritan Religious Elect was replaced by a new Elect composed of morally-bound, highly-educated commercial elites most of financed or sailed the seas of the planet. Their original wealth, used for investment in maritime initiatives, was gathered through previously discussed land sales associated with New England town-building.

 

Post Puritan, pre-Unitarian business elites had evolved into a “codfish” aristocracy, based on fishing, whaling, and foreign trade with Europe and the Far East. The codfish business elite replaced Winthrop’s stern Puritans, and by the Early Republic governed Massachusetts. Success in business defined the new Unitarian Elect, but it carried with it an obligation to serve the community by helping the disadvantaged and the general public welfare through service in government—a noblesse oblige. “The pulpit and the quarterdeck were the sacred and secular symbols of authority in the family, in society and in politics …. Boston federalism was a secularized version of the Puritan ethic.”[25]

 

Unlike Quaker elites, post-Puritan elites assumed responsibility for governmental leadership. Governors after 1688 were drawn from this codfish aristocracy. “They modeled themselves not only on the Puritan ideal of authority, but also on the old Roman ideal of gravitas: self interest yes, self-indulgence no …. They stood rather than ran for office, they listened to their own consciences, not to the voice of the people …. (W)ere collectivists rather than individualists, believing in family and class as organic communities and society as the family writ large”[26]. These men presided over what Baltzell calls a “deference democracy”—a democracy where aristocratic elites made policy on behalf of the “best interests” of its citizenry—“the best people were elected to office, time after time, in town after town for over 200 years”[27].

 

Transcendental Unitarianism replaced the fire, brimstone and sinners in the hands of an angry God, with concern for humanity, a separation of church and state, a tolerance for religious diversity, and the essential goodness for mankind that if protected from the evils of civilization would “live long and prosper”. Education, always a first order priority, became the key vehicle to achieve both moral and economic ends. Education enabled, enlightened, empowered was core to addressing needs of the disadvantaged. Almost imperceptibly, economic growth meant transforming “people”. To improve business profitability was separate and distinct from government purposes—the responsibility of businessmen themselves. Boston style Progressivism entrusted policy-making to a business elite, but sharply divorced private business profit from government/ policy-making as harmful to the overall community good and a bane to the community’s disadvantaged.

 

Early Republic codfish aristocratic purity, however, was threatened by emerging entrepreneurial business elite: the textile manufacturers. The new manufacturing elite, accumulated its wealth from innovative factories set up in Lowell, Andover, Salem and southern New Hampshire as early as 1810. Using a new form of business structure (the corporation), textile entrepreneurs made fortunes quickly (gazelles do that), moved into Bulfinch-designed mansions in Boston high status neighborhoods, and by the 1830’s not only lived alongside the codfish aristocracy, but increasingly married into it. The Boston Brahmin, the Frankenstein-like fusion of these two elites, soon resulted.[28] The Brahmin Elect carried with it the old Winthrop-Elect mission:

 

[an] … obligation on the part of older families to the welfare of “their town” and new determination to participate actively once again in local political affairs … Boston could be saved if members of the “better class” took over their responsibilities and regained positions of social and political leadership in the community….Pitching their appeals to the Boston working class [they] emphasized the responsibility of “the happy and respectable classes” to watch over those laws that affected “the less prosperous portions of the community”. Their obvious desire for political control of Boston carried with it a sense of responsibility for the prosperity of the town and the welfare of its less fortunate classes–a sort of moral stewardship, a form of noblesse oblige–that would continue to be an integral part of Boston’s political heritage.[29]

Josiah Quincy: Strong Mayor in an Era of Weak Mayors

Only in 1820 did Boston petition the state legislature to change from town into city. Boston had grown into a thriving cosmopolitan trading city; its population (18,000 in 1790) had increased to 43,000 in 1820.  Boston desperately needed modernization; its physical infrastructure was distressed and inadequate;. Also, new industries needed to be accommodated, and the older fishing industry needed harbors and wharfs rebuilt. Towns lacked the authority to accomplish this task; the shift to city status enabled the city to exercise powers it did not enjoy as a town. Modernization required centralizing municipal authority around a bicameral city council and a strong-Winthrop-style mayor in whom “the administration of all the fiscal, prudential and municipal concerns” were vested. Accordingly, in 1822, the city of Boston was officially chartered.

 

Elected in 1823 as Boston’s second mayor, Brahmin Josiah Quincy[30] stepped up to Boston’s infrastructure and service crisis. Concentrating on the oldest sections of the city, crushing the determined opposition of old Town elites, setting up a brand new municipal bureaucracy of experts accountable to him personally, Quincy then appointed himself as chairman ex officio of the considerable number of independent boards and commissions and assumed authority not contemplated by the state constitution or the shift to city status.[31] While Philadelphia’s Privatist, weak, committee-dominated municipal government neglected its infrastructure and services, Quincy’s Boston hired teams of sweepers to remove six tons of “dirt” from the city’s streets, established municipal garbage pickup service, established municipal level police and fire departments, created a department of corrections for youth offenders, acquired control over the city’s sewers and minimized their pollution–oh, and in case you missed it, conducting a municipal-level urban renewal program–building in the cleared land the first Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market[32]. The Boston  Quincy left behind in 1828 was rated as the healthiest city in America–and the most indebted.

 

Traveling on a time machine to 1898, we would see his great-grandson Josiah Quincy IV (son of another Mayor John Quincy Jr.), the last of the Quincy dynasty as the Democratic mayor of Boston, a political party which included Boston’s immigrant Irish. Still very much a Brahmin Quincy IV had evolved to support “extension of the powers of government and in the rights of organized labor and as mayor employed settlement worker Robert A. Woods, the social worker Alice N. Lincoln, and the founder of the playground movement, Joseph Lee.… [Quincy as Mayor] made Boston’s city government for a brief time the cutting edge of urban reform in America.[33] In short, the first Josiah Quincy was no exception, his Progressive style of governance and economic development persisted throughout the nineteenth century.

 

Yankee Style Progressivism Contrasted to Philadelphia Privatism

There is no mistaking Boston and Massachusetts for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania—that is why I chose to contrast them in our opening presentation. Boston Progressivism stressed local governmental executive leadership by a Brahmin elite, pursuing the community’s greater good, with an emphasis on education and people related services. Called “Yankee” and “secular Puritans” by Woodard,  our Progressives exhibited since the earliest days of the American Republic “the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives …. For more than four centuries, Yankees have sought to build a more perfect society here on earth through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process and aggressive assimilation of foreigners”.[34]

 

Boston’s Quincy dynasty was consistent in its use of this style throughout the nineteenth century. Its discomfort with unbridled capitalism, corporate conflicts of interest and persistent efforts to assist the disadvantaged thru municipal policy distinguish the approach. “Government … could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce morals through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools”.[35] There was variation within New England—Rhode Island, in particular, departed from the state-centric “tightly regulated founding and settling of towns (with) much detailed legislation”.[36] Indeed, the Massachusetts system itself broke down during the eighteenth century, when towns in western Massachusetts were granted more autonomy from the state. Maine, always resentful of Massachusetts took special pride in devising its governmental structures (and its economic development policy) in its own manner and custom. Nevertheless, while notable, there New England deviations were variations on a core theme of New England Progressivism.

 

Boston infused into Progressivism its sense of “mission”, its propensity to “impose its ways on everybody else”. “For the Puritans didn’t merely believe they were God’s chosen people, they believed God had charged each and every one of them to propagate his will on a corrupt and sinful world”.[37] This sense of mission overlaps profoundly into contemporary economic development. Most evident in our “Policy World”, composed largely of progressively-inclined academics—setting it apart from the more Privatist “Practitioner World”.

 

A perhaps not-so-obvious lesson to be learned from our discussion of Philadelphia and Boston is the variation in the cultural heritage, held by its business community. The “business community” obviously holds different values and attitudes across regions and communities. The alleged unity of purpose, their pursuit of private profit, was not sufficient to create a unified approach to policy. The Boston Elect were rich businessmen who, however imperfectly, set aside private goals to assist the disadvantaged and to conduct a statesman-like, community-wide approach to governance and economic development policy.

 

The Philadelphia business community, absent its Quaker counterpart to the Boston Elect,  however, stressed economy, and economic/population growth achieved by its unrestrained corporations and businesses that did little to help the disadvantaged. Yet, Philadelphia policy and politics was supposedly the most democratic and open in America at that time—in contrast to the more imperial rule of Boston’s Progressive elite to which the masses were expected to defer. In any case, leadership by business elites in municipal government and economic development policy certainly exists, but it does not justify the conclusion that the outputs of such policy-making will be identical across cities.

 

Finally, political culture plays a significant role in the municipal policy process. It’s most significant impact is to define  goals for policy initiatives and strategies. The existence of such radically different political cultures as demonstrated by Philadelphia and Boston logically lends support to our assertion that American economic development has not followed a uniform, monolithic, nation-wide set of economic development goals. There is in fact two visibly different ways to conduct sub-state economic development that has been evident from our earliest years—preceding even the industrial city. Culture, therefore, is the transmission belt of local democracy—carrying with it the energy of peoples’ values, wants, and needs.

 

Population Migration: Political Culture and City-building

 

America, always a mobile nation, usually takes into account short-term and recent population migration into politics and policy–without truly appreciating the deeper effects of past population migration on our established structures and governance systems. Our fascination with the impact of political culture, however, requires us to understand how our cities were established, who established them, and if, and how, these first settlers infused their values on the political systems and structures they created in their travels and settlement patterns. Our two macro-political cultures, Privatism and Progressivism, were diffused throughout the nation by the migration of settlers who adhered to the differing values and goals traveling on our two ships.

 

As different population streams came into contact, hybrids and variations of these two cultures were developed—and expressed in the systems of governance and policy-making they established. Diversity of policy naturally followed, but the flows of different and distinctive populations was not hap-hazard or random. Adherents of each population stream followed geographic patterns that gave rise to regional patterns of politics and policy systems that were institutionalized in state constitutions and municipal charters. In short, regions contained variations on a dominant cultural theme, hybrids forming where different population flows intersected.

 

In the nineteenth century, population mobility was constant—but for the most part they are forgotten today. The cities and political structures the migrants created are uncritically shoved into the “back of our minds” and assumed now to be the natural order of things. Present day approaches to policy studies mostly ignore the effects of older structures and relationships, giving priority to more current paradigms and research foci. So, to better understand present day migration and cultural effects on policy, we must isolate them and reacquaint the reader to their present day implications. As a starting point, this chapter will describe how these migrations (and the cultures of their populations) penetrated into the largely unsettled interior of the American continent. Population migration became inseparably linked with the formation and subsequent growth of new cities and towns. Migration and city-building were also inescapably linked to the diffusion of our two ships-the Progressive and Privatist cultures— and establishment of their structural and institutional expressions.

 

This history cannot dwell in detail on any one migration, any particular individual city-building, or (at this point) the establishment of any particular economic development structure or innovation. The first migration to be briefly considered, the Scotch-Irish, began early in the 18^th century, picking up considerable steam after 1763. The second and third migrations, New Englanders and Deep South plantation owners, overlapped in time and fostered serious tension and considerable national debate. The fourth (starting in the 1840’s), was the Irish and, shortly after came Germans who left their yet unformed nation. Finally, the flood gates opened after the 1870’s and immigrants from Southern/Eastern Europe—as well as Asia poured into our cities. We shall briefly trace each.

 

The Scotch-Irish

Fleeing the English-Scottish enclosure movement, the Scotch-Irish immigrants) arrived in America in five distinct waves between 1717 and 1776[38]. Philadelphia their chief port of entry, these fiercely independent, but experienced agriculturalists seldom settled in cities (New Londonderry, New Hampshire was an exception) before heading into wilderness frontiers of their day. Waiting with open arms (usually holding a tomahawk or rifle) were the Native Americans. In the eighteenth century they moved in southern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Texas. Others moved through Pennsylvania, then western Maryland into what is today West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (fairly unsettled), the Scotch-Irish first settled in the border areas of the original colonies. Continuing along the Great Wagon Road, the Scotch-Irish crossed the Appalachians into the North Carolina Piedmont by 1740 and eventually reached into unsettled western South Carolina (1760’s). By 1796 they had crossed over into Kentucky and Tennessee and stopped at the Mississippi River. By that time (1800) nearly 2 million Scotch-Irish had immigrated to the United States.[39]

 

One Scotch-Irishman that participated in this trek into the inward continent was our seventh President, Andrew Jackson.  Born in 1767 South Carolina, he eventually settled permanently in Tennessee. The political values carried either in his DNA or picked up en route to Tennessee were etched into the nation’s cites and American economic development when his Democrat Party swept into power in 1828 when newly settled cities and counties established a fragmented, weak mayor, non-profession municipal government. Using scorch and burn agriculture, Scotch-Irish homesteads were temporary,  loosely tied to small agricultural towns and villages. Scotch-Irish did not create or settle cities; the territories they settled still maintain a small cities, small town bias. They wanted no part of the industrial city which was rising during their settlement period.

 

These state/sub-state policy systems became the foundation of  nineteenth century small town Privatist culture. Building on earlier Jeffersonian yeoman farmer political systems, the Jacksonian Scotch-Irish stressed self-sufficiency, limited government, low taxes, close to the people decision-making, and a reluctance to deal with urban commercial markets (preferring, for instance, to barter liquor to banks and currency rather than trade). The Western Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion (1791) vividly makes apparent the instinctual Scotch-Irish resistance to centralized government. Government, especially local government, was consciously set up to be weak and fragmented so to best preserve individual liberty. By default, most policy areas were left to the private sector—economic development was no exception.

 

… concerned with their own unwritten code of behavior, priding themselves on their independence, and ever ready to uphold personal honor and retaliate on attacks on family or community; they were punctilious about being rambunctious. The point was personal independence, natural liberty; Presbyterianism tended to be in line with this …. These people didn’t much like commerce or commercial society… seemed more set on self-sufficiency … They wanted to conquer territory—oust the British, expel the Indians, take over vast lands from Mexico…. They wanted lordship rather than economic cultivation.[40]

 

Woodard labels Scotch-Irish as “Greater Appalachia”; he devotes particular attention to their bellicose nature asserting their “culture had been formed in a state of near-constant war an upheaval, fostering a warrior ethic and a deep commitment to individual liberty and personal sovereignty”[41]. Imperialistic by nature, they fought Native Americans for land. They invaded Cherokee lands as early as the 1750’s. They crossed swords with anyone who sought to impose limits on their behavior; the Tidewater plantation aristocrats and the moral Yankee “on a mission” raised their wrath exceedingly. When the time came, many fought for the North, and Scotch Irish led the succession of West Virginia from Virginia during the Civil War. But in the Reconstruction aftermath, Scotch-Irish bitterly resisted Yankee attempts to restructure society and economy through black emancipation.

 

Highly individualistic, the Scotch-Irish mostly opposed income redistribution; they tolerated extremes of wealth within their communities. Scotch-Irish sharecroppers worked for Scotch-Irish plantation lords. For many, many years Scotch Irish lived on the economic margins of the south and southeastern states–constituting the core element of white poverty that helped make those regions the poorest, least urban in the nation. Their continued propensity to move will consume many a page in this history. During the early years of the 19^th century they drifted into parts of Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. During the Great Migration, they were the “Okies” who fled the Dust Bowl for Los Angeles, and they rode trains to work the assembly plants of Detroit, Dayton and Akron. Scotch-Irish innovated something called BAWI—which (during the Depression) polarized American economic development.

 

The New England Yankee Diaspora

“New England Yankees … were almost entirely the descendants of 21,000 Puritans who arrived between 1629 and 1640.”[42] For the next 150 years confined, except through sea trade, to the borders of today’s six New England states, they prospered, became Unitarians, and procreated. The American Revolution, triggered by Yankee belligerence, and the Constitution that followed in 1789 set the stage, but Mad Anthony Wayne’s victory over Native Americans at Fallen Timbers in 1796 pulled the cork from the wine bottle. First was migration within New England itself, to Vermont and Maine– both populations tripled between 1790 and 1810. But then New Englanders surged across  upstate New York —and with that the Yankee dash to the Pacific really started.

 

New England shared upstate New York settlement with downstate New York, Philadelphia capital and speculators. Speculators such as Robert Morris, of Revolutionary War fame, had bought huge swatches of upstate New York in earlier days. Morris’s bankruptcy resulted in the land being transferred to the Dutch-based Holland Company. The Holland Company hired Joseph Ellicott and he hired Pierre L’Enfant (who would later design Washington D.C.); together they platted central and Western New York, which was subsequently sold to New England emigrants. Other speculators such as William Bingham (could you guess Binghamton) did the same for central/southwestern New York. Bingham sold the land to New Englanders who came in groups, often extended families from the same town. For example, thirty fishermen from Martha’s Vineyard/Nantucket founded Hudson in Columbia County along the Hudson in 1783.

 

Eastern and east central New York was settled as a consequence of a little known compromise between New York and Massachusetts. Massachusetts claimed the area (about six million acres) and New York, of course, contested Massachusetts ownership. In 1786 a compromise was negotiated in which New York got the title for the land, but Massachusetts was the owner of the land and got the proceeds from its sale. So, Boston land financiers and speculators put the land up for sale and sold it to  New Englanders. And that is how New Englanders moved into New York; in 1805, for instance, New Englanders incorporated Syracuse as a city.[43] Upstate New York, with a population of 121,000 in 1790, exploded and population increased to nearly 1.4 million by 1830—“at which point Upstate New York had more people than any other single state”. [44] New York State, little more than New York City at the time was minimally involved in the settlement itself—in effect it had contracted it out to out of state land speculators.

 

From the beginning, it was abundantly clear that Yankee migration meant city-building—industrial cities, as well as commercial trade. New Englanders didn’t just settle lands and hack out a homestead: “Entire families would pack their possessions, rendezvous with their neighbors, and journey en masse to their new destination, often led by their minister. On arrival they planted a new town—not just a collection of individual farms—complete with master plot plan, with specific sites set aside for streets, the town green and commons, a … meeting house, and the all-important public school. They also brought their town meeting government with them.[45]Since the resulting settlement was predominately New Englanders, a potential gap between state and municipal government had been created.  New England towns contested with New York cities. To remedy this, New York state empowered county government as almost an equal partner to deliver state services and coordinate municipal government activities. That structural heritage continues, today.

 

The Erie Canal (set up in 1810 with DeWitt Clinton on the board, started construction in 1817, completed in 1825) could be viewed as another effort by New York State to effect its control over its upstate counties. The Canal, in any case, facilitated upstate manufacturing as well as link Midwestern agriculture to New York City. So textiles in Utica, flour milling in Rochester. Buffalo, through its innovation, the grain mill, developed into a great logistics and transshipment center between the Midwest and New York City. That meant that upstate New York was chiefly urban, and the newly developing industrial city at that. Textiles, familiar to New Englanders, and agricultural processing were the first agglomerations that developed. Transportation, the source of raw materials and export of the finished product, was also critical. In many ways, upstate New York was transshipment center on a regional scale. Its export economy was not based on its native raw materials or resources.

 

After Upstate New York, Ohio came next. The Northwest Ordinance, among other features, prohibited slavery and divided land for private sale into 36 square mile townships each sub-divided into 35 sections including one section reserved to build a public school. Believe it or not, the state of Connecticut held title to a strip of Ohio land (the Western Reserve) not included in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. The Western Reserve included present day Youngstown, Akron and Cleveland—and (in theory) extended across several states beyond that. Connecticut (1795) sold much of the Western Reserve to the Connecticut Land Company. With the 1796 Fallen Timbers victory, land speculators and surveyors quickly headed west. In 1796 Moses Cleaveland, lead surveyor for the Connecticut Land Company, platted the Reserve into townships, formally founding Cleveland and Youngstown.[46]

 

Settlers from Connecticut did stake out land there, including Moses Cleaveland …and was settled almost entirely by Yankees and in the years after the Civil War, when New England cities were thronged with Irish Catholic immigrants, the Western Reserve was, with Vermont, the most Yankee dominated part of the country. Yankee domination lasted until the early twentieth century, when Ellis Islanders thronged to work in the new steel, auto and tire factories in Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown.[47]

 

The remainder of Ohio was settled by just about everybody—Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Scotch-Irish and as we shall soon see, Germans. That is why it remains a political swing state to this day. In the north half, Yankees dominated. Following Yankee tradition, settlers founded colleges: Ohio University (first President being William McGuffey), Hiram College (President Garfield’s alma mater), Baldwin-Wallace College, Antioch (Horace Mann first President), Oberlin (1833 by Vermonters), Kenyon (Rutherford B. Hayes) and, Western Reserve College.

 

When the first Great Lakes steamship launched in 1818, Yankee immigrants, (disproportionately Vermonters) left Buffalo and Western New York and moved into Michigan’s Saginaw River Valley to start a lumber industry[48]. The Michigan Territory, governed by General Lewis Cass, a New Hampshire native, became home to quite a few transplanted New Englanders. Solomon Sibley, Massachusetts-born and a Brown University graduate was Detroit’s first mayor (1806) and Elijah Brush, a Vermonter (Dartmouth), it’s second. Northern Indiana, Iowa and Illinois followed in the same pattern after Michigan. Though far less numerous in Indiana than Ohio, Vermonters and Connecticut men established northern Indiana towns such as Montpelier, Wolcottville, and Orland. Among its first Vermont-born settlers was Governor James Whitcomb, who set up the state’s public school system and Caleb Mills, the first President of Wabash College.[49]

 

Yankees laid down the cultural infrastructure of a large part of Ohio, portions of Iowa and Illinois, and almost the entirety of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. They had almost near-total control over the politics in the latter three states for much of the nineteenth century. Five of the first six governors of Michigan were Yankees, and four had been born in New England. In Wisconsin nine of the first twelve governors were Yankees ….(By contrast, in Illinois—where Midlands and Appalachian cultures were in the majority—not one of the first six governors was of Yankee descent—all had been born south of the Mason-Dixon line). A third of Minnesota’s first territorial legislature was New England-born and a great many of the rest were [transplanted New Englanders] from Upstate New York … In all three Upper Great Lake states, Yankees dominated discussions in the constitutional conventions and transplanted their legal, political and religious norms.[50]

 

New England’s “jewel in the crown”, however, was Chicago. Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard (Vermont), immediately following the Black Hawk War’s end (1832), hired William B. Ogden (Delaware County New York) as his lawyer, and along with Grant Goodrich (Chautauqua County New York), formed “Chicago’s first urban elite … made up mostly of young, self-made men from New England and New York State”. As the original city-builders of Chicago, they transformed a wilderness outpost into the great metropolis.[51] We shall discuss Chicago city-building in a future chapter.

 

Chicago, however, was far from the end of the line for Yankee immigration. Vermont born John Deere set up a plow factory on the Mississippi at Moline (Illinois). From the 1830’s onward, Yankees piled into Wisconsin, and after the 1840’s saturated Iowa. Burlington, Iowa, named for another Burlington back east, and Grenville Dodge (from Danvers Massachusetts, later chief surveyor for the transcontinental Union Pacific) founded Grinnell Iowa. Yankees rushed into Kansas and Nebraska to prevent slavery from expanding into those territories (John Brown[52], for example was born in Torrington Connecticut).. Left also to another chapter, is the tale of New Englanders in Oregon and even San Francisco. Yankees liked to travel.

 

Diaspora Structures and Economic Development

More interested in government at the state and national level, Yankees were noticeably less focused on sub-state policy. Yankee local agendas consisted of reverence for the New England township, schools, internal improvements, and people-focused policy areas such as education, caring for the widows, disabled, and economically disadvantaged—who, in this time period, were African-Americans, conveniently located far away in the South.[53] Townships, aside from infrastructure, rarely ranked economic development as a high priority policy area. Even today, townships, compared to other governmental forms (city/village manager, mayor), are the least involved in sub-state economic development—leaving that policy area to higher levels of government thus maintaining their old New England tradition.

 

Unlike, southern plantation-style governance, the New England system was not applied uniformly in states settled by the Yankee Diaspora. The Yankee Diaspora went through lands governed by another state (New York), or shared with settlers from the Midlands and Scotch-Irish. Middle Atlantic states developed their own style of sub-state governance (SSS) reflecting their New Netherlands, Greater Appalachia, and Midlands political cultures. As Mid-West states set up their initial government and state constitution, the structures incorporated into their state constitutions reflect influences from different first settlement cultures, tempered by the nature of constitution-making, a process naturally dominated by elites.

 

Consider the Wisconsin constitution approved in 1848 (still in operation today). In Wisconsin counties, absent a court system, possessed considerable autonomy from the state, and were robustly empowered to assume responsibility for many policy areas (enjoying powers relevant to economic development, for instance). Yet, Wisconsin townships adopted New England town meetings, highly prioritized road and bridge infrastructure, simultaneously providing indigent residents a base line medical care and funeral expenses. Fiscal affairs, however, were a “complicated mix of state-county-township revenue-raising and spending”.[54] From this example, it is evident that development of various state SSS came early in economic development history, thus having ample time to harden into distinct patterns whose subtlety affect, albeit unnoticed, contemporary policy-making.[55]

 

Sector Innovation Causes Migration and a Southern Agricultural Economy

The Virginia colonial charter established a trading company (a private corporation) not dissimilar from the more well-known British East Indies Company. Subsequent Virginia, and later Maryland, colonists stumbled upon tobacco as their principal crop—a crop that required lots of acreage and the cheapest of labor. A plantation economy centered an owner class of  “land entrepreneurs”, who established individual homesteads so large as to be a self-sufficient and self-contained. With direct access to rivers or the Atlantic, plantations directly exported and imported from the plantation’s own piers and harbor. Where the plantation system/economy flourished, urban communities were secondary. Plantation owners felt little need to establish towns or commercial centers.

 

This plantation system, the pillar of the Tidewater culture, spread through the South, reaching as far as the Mississippi River. The South was accordingly characterized by a “dispersed rural population occupied plantations and adjoining small farms [that] relied for community services on crossroad churches, courthouses and markets. These constituted a kind of ‘shredded community’ as scattered focal points for farming, trading, politics and religion”.[56] The shredded community reinforced an inherent Privatist individual self-sufficiency, and what  minimal governance was necessary provided by an almost informal county, courthouse patrician elite. The few municipal governments as existed, or were later created, were treated legally as “counties” rather than a municipality. The heritage of this remains more or less in tact today in Maryland and Virginia, especially—but is still found throughout the South.

 

Times were tough in the late 1700’s for Tidewater (Maryland/Virginia) tobacco growers. Tobacco, hard on the soil, meant its continued use produced decreasing yields, and increasing bankruptcies. Scotch-Irish tobacco-planting immigrants had moved into areas not suitable to tobacco, increasing supply of poor quality tobacco that depressed prices. The Tideland tobacco economy was in irreversible decline. The situation was little better for South Carolina indigo plantations as market demand dissipated after the Revolution and prices “went south”. On top of all this, the newly adopted Constitution required ending import of slaves as early as 1808 (which happened—although it was “phased in” to 1820). The 1787 Northwest Ordinance precluded slavery and a movement to incorporate anti-slavery provisions in state constitutions was gathering momentum.

 

But innovation is a wonderful thing, and at this timely juncture it sprang into action. Nathaniel Greene, a Connecticut Yankee, and Washington’s most consistent Revolutionary War general, stayed in the south after the Revolution. He died in 1786 on his Georgia plantation named Mulberry Grove, leaving his widow, Cary, to carry on as best she could. Cary Greene hired a tutor,, a Massachusetts born, Connecticut-educated young man to teach her kids in 1792. Her Connecticut born, Yale grad plantation manager, Phineas Miller, encouraged the young tutor to fiddle around with the farm machinery to see if the latte could make it work better. The tutor fiddled/innovated machine parts that greatly improved productivity of existing machinery—and the cotton gin was born (1793). Eli Whitney and Phineas Miller formed up a partnership and, the rest, as they say, was history.

 

In 1790 only 3,000 bales of cotton were produced in the entire of the United States. By 1800 cotton had increased to 73,000 bales, increasing again in 1810 to 178,000, 335,000 by 1820, 732,000 in 1830, 1,348,000 in 1840, 2,136,000 in 1850, and 4,491,000 in 1860[57]. Who bought this stuff? The world textile industry, that was chiefly located in Old England and New England. Here was a marriage made in heaven. To accomplish this production feat cotton acreage had expanded greatly, and a new labor force found to plant and harvest the cotton had to be found. Cotton is land and water intensive, an ideal plantation-based crop. The sustained demand for cotton prompted southern entrepreneurs to find suitable locations and start new fields. Suitable locations were found in areas included in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, but the problem was the Creek and Cherokee Indians who lived on these lands were unwilling to move. Enter Andrew Jackson and the Scotch-Irish.

A series of Indian wars started by Jackson after the War of 1812 (Davy Crockett and Sam Houston were in Jackson’s expedition), followed by outright land seizures, expelled the Indians and drove them out on a “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma (1831-1838). Having removed the existing workforce (the first slaves on cotton fields were Native Americans), southern cotton planters who had moved into Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi required another quickly. The “Passage to the Interior” drove over one million former Tidewater tobacco slaves into the nation’s interior by foot, in chains, taking six to eight weeks. “Some 85 percent of the migrant slaves were from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas and some 75 percent of them went to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas”.[58] In 1810, 79% of American slaves lived in sea coast states; in 1860, 33%. In 1810 10% of American slaves lived in cotton producing states—that increased to 55% by 1860[59]. Cotton had its workforce.

 

Indian displacement and slavery beclouds discussion of an economic sector. In function, the plantation was an agricultural factory, and cotton, the raw material of the textile sector, were exported as a national and international commodity. Plantation planters were an economic class and a sector of the economy. Planters, as economic historians have said, were “on the whole, a highly self-conscious class of entrepreneurs (who) …. Strove to become steeped in the scientific agricultural literature of the day”. Planters from South Carolina financed startups in Alabama and Mississippi, and scale being advantageous, larger planters were economically successful. In 1860, Adams County Mississippi was the wealthiest county per capita in the nation. The dynamism commonly associated with present-day emerging industry-technology sectors was not absent in the new cotton industry; considerable turnover in plantation owners occurred as incompetents were replaced by young start up owners.

 

Since, it must not be forgotten that it takes two to tango; someone had to buy the cotton to make this economy successful. Francis Cabot Lowell, a Newburyport (MA) born, Harvard grad, Boston Brahmin (whose dad served in the Continental Congress) established his Boston Manufacturing Company (1814) to operate factories that converted raw cotton from the South into textile products. These factories, pioneer of the American factory, with its famous “mill girls” or “Lowell system”, launched the American industrial revolution. These New England factories set in motion the rise of manufacturing, and the famous textile industry of Massachusetts and New England. Lowell, the namesake founder of Lowell Massachusetts, and the industry sector he founded, was yet another instance of innovation and entrepreneurism.

 

Cotton was king in the pre-Civil War and forged an agricultural-based southern economy based on free trade-export, dependent on a workforce composed of slaves and near subsistence white farmers. Originally founded in what would be labeled the “cotton belt” (Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina), this economy/culture spread into the Mississippi valley, Arkansas, northern Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, eastern Texas and southern Missouri. It was stopped in Nebraska, and most brutally, in Kansas during the 1850’s. The plantation/export-based southern agricultural economic system exacted rather important consequences on the South as a region and defined future southern economic development.

 

Among these consequences was that northern industrial city-building was virtually non-existent in the South. Aside from New Orleans, an old French-Spanish creation with its own distinctive Creole culture, the South developed no real industrial cities before the Civil War. Another important consequence of the plantation economy was the southern internal transportation infrastructure (railroads) was under-invested. Southern transportation was by sea on Massachusetts’ Yankee ships. So as of the early 1800’s, the two regions had developed separate, yet inter-related, economic systems. Each, as if independent of the other, walked down two different paths, destined, we now know, to war.

 

The Deep South Political Culture

Woodard labeled the culture that underlay the southern agricultural plantation-export economy “the Deep South”. The origins of that culture, colonial South Carolina (Charleston), originally had been settled by “Barbados [West Indies-Caribbean] slave lords”. Its defining systemic values included racial supremacy and aristocratic privilege, derived from “a version of classical [i.e. Greek-Roman] Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many”.[60] The overlap with the Royalist Tidewater plantation elites allowed Carolina Deep Southerners to assume the Tidewater patrician image “of being descendants of the aristocratic Normans, lording over their colony’s crass Anglo-Saxon and Celtic underclass[61] or the “Southern Cavalier” personified in “Gone with the Wind”. If so, the Deep South culture does not fit into our Privatist model based on individualism, liberty and free enterprise. This is not Jackson’s or Jefferson’s farmer yeoman. The pre-Civil War Deep South was a feudal culture.

 

From a purely economic development perspective this culture rested upon plantations, each largely autonomous economically and geared to one export crop. Grow and harvest the cotton, and do what is necessary to ship it to the export market were all that were required of sub-state economic development. The price of cotton on the export market did the rest. Port towns and cotton towns were its urban manifestations. Deep South governmental capacity was minimal indeed, and regretfully, often was fixated upon preservation of a political and economic system that ran counter to national democracy as well as industrial development. Policy-making was private, although private in a sense not contemplated by our Privatist model of political culture.

 

The Impact of Foreign Immigration on Regional Political Cultures

New England Yankees and Southern Planters were internal migrations—as were the post-Revolutionary War movements of the Scotch-Irish. Until the 1840’s foreign immigration was minimal (1820 immigration less than 8,400). Immigration picked up after mid-1830, building to an 1846-1855 pre-Civil War peak (nearly 1.3 million).[62] Domestic migrants, those already socialized into an American political culture were our “first settlers” who set in place the initial state constitutions, and acquired the first municipal incorporation charters. These initial documents contained the basic structures and core principles that configured the relationships between levels of government, the nature of public/private interaction, and the forms of government for local communities. The early policy priorities and types of local elites that entered into municipal-level governance defined the goals, policy priorities and political role models that underlie the community’s consensus.

 

The question of whether huge foreign immigration modified, to some degree, the American first settler culture needs more thought.  Did foreign immigration reshape Yankee, Deep South, Midlands or Greater Appalachian cultures? Or did the foreign immigrants adjust their cultures to the core American cultures? Woodard’s answer is unequivocal: “These great immigration waves enriched and empowered … but did not displace their [eleven original] regional nations [political cultures]. The [regional cultures] remained the ‘dominant cultures’ which nineteenth-and early twentieth-century immigrant’s children and grandchildren either assimilated into or reacted against. Immigrant communities might achieve political dominance over a city or state (as the Irish did in Boston or the Italians in New York), but the system they controlled was the product of the regional culture …. Indeed, in many ways, the immigrants of 1830-1924 actually accentuated the differences among [the regional cultures][63].

 

Woodard’s position corresponds closely to the position advanced in this history. It was first come, first served in the case of structure. Both Irish and Germans were ‘Johnny come late”, inheriting state constitutional frameworks already approved and in operation. Foreign immigrants typically did not engage in city-building; they moved into cities/towns already established. The sub-state structural framework set up by the original settlers remained largely unaltered until the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century. New immigrants, whatever their cultural values and predispositions, were politically weak newcomers into an established policy and political system. Worse, from an immigrant perspective, they were economically desperate and isolated from political elites on whom they were dependent for employment.

 

Moreover structural change was not what immigrants had in mind upon arrival. Immigrants were refugees from other political-economic systems and cultures, who, to some degree, wanted to retain old traditions and values in the new world, while somewhat contradictorily make a new start in a political system/culture which offered opportunities and freedoms their home country did not. They did not come to America determined to change its political structures and local policy processes—but rather to take advantage of them. This aspirational predisposition explains consistent research supporting declining effect of ethnicity on second and third generation immigrants. Succeeding generations, aspired to assimilate into the American system and culture. This is the “stuff” behind melting pots and ethnic stews—how, to what degree, and how fast do we assimilate people into a dominant culture.

 

Political culture change is further compounded because, for all practical purposes, the ports of entry for the immigrant flood were in Yankee North (Boston), Yankee San Francisco, Midlands Philadelphia, New Netherlands New York, and Tidewater Baltimore. Chicago captured a goodly number of immigrants as well. Few immigrants ventured into Scotch-Irish, Deep South, or other seven cultures detailed by Woodard. Germans, it must be admitted penetrated into some border cities, (Cincinnati and St. Louis), but immigrants mostly stayed up north. As Woodard observes both the New York City/Netherlands and Pennsylvania Midlands cultures were inherently multi-cultural—a composite of several settler groups living together (heterogeneous from their start)—and emphasized individuality and tolerance of cultural differences. Tidewater Baltimore and Yankee New England, on the other hand, were predicated on homogeneity and demonstrated considerable intolerance toward outsiders—a statement to which the Boston Irish would heartily concur.

 

The Irish

Pre-Civil War foreign immigration was mostly Irish and German. Believe it or not, the potato famine, totally associated with Ireland, also had serious continental European economic repercussions, especially in Southern Germany. European revolutions of 1848 produced substantial uncertainty, insecurity and considerable numbers of refugees as well.  Irish and southern Germans also shared their Catholic faith—they constituted the first sizeable Catholic immigration into America. In 1840 5% of Americans were Catholics; by 1860, 12%. The Irish entered Boston and New York mostly; the Germans New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

 

Irish immigrants often stayed in port cities; the Irish were the first American immigration that was primarily urban in residence[64].Clustered in neighborhoods (ghettoes really, with high crime rates, often disease-ridden, about a quarter spoke Gaelic only), in Eastern cities. The Catholic Church played a major role in Irish identity and American assimilation. The Church wasted little time, establishing its parochial school system and other social organizations in the Irish neighborhoods. A minority of Irish (mostly young males) moved into new geographies– into the army, out west as railroad laborers, and Chicago. Numerically, those that moved out of port cities followed into areas settled by the Yankee Diaspora or Midlands regional cultures. The Irish were not innovative Yankee entrepreneurs. Their work experience more closely mirrored contemporary Hispanic employment: entry-level jobs and women engaged in personal and household services. “The jobs the Irish did find were those considered too hard, too menial, too dirty or too dangerous for others.”[65]

 

Irish Catholics became a major presence in the big cities by the 1850’s—more than one quarter the population in New York, Boston and Philadelphia and in smaller cities in between: Providence, New Haven, Hartford, Jersey City, and Newark”[66]. For the first time, something resembling an ethnic neighborhood of some size sprang into existence. Housing, jobs, consumer spending, and infrastructure including schools The Irish were the first immigrants that settled into already old, beat up housing and deteriorating neighborhoods—commencing the process later described as neighborhood succession and housing reform. Since the city at this time could not build “up”, it had to build “out”. Brooklyn’s 1840 population exceeded Albany’s by only 2,500; by 1860 Brooklyn had 200,000 more residents than Albany. “Journey to work” became an issue as the separation of work from residence revolutionized the physical landscape and infrastructural needs of the greatly expanding northern and Midwestern cities. The need for internal municipal transportation systems and increasing stress on water and sewer raising serious public health concerns became persistent crises. Crime and fires required development of police and fire services. These policy areas became increasingly salient as the decades unfolded.

 

The significant impact pre-Civil War Irish exerted on early American economic development was through a new form of municipal government, the political machine. The political machine, a distinctive urban political system, produced its own forms of economic development policy which shall be discussed in future chapters. New York City Tammany Hall’s Tweed Machine, initially dependent on Irish votes, developed during the 1850’s. Two Boston’s mayors during the 1850’s, on the other hand, hailed from something called the “Native American Party” or Know Nothings—an anti Irish political movement. The response of the New Netherlands regional culture to Irish immigration was noticeably different from that of Yankee Boston in this period. Within ten years Irish immigrants had found a way into New York City politics, by 1870 Tammany Hall, had an Irish boss. Boston elected its first Irish mayor (Hugh O’Brian, 1885) nearly a generation later; Boston never developed a city-wide Irish boss—although in 2015 Boston Mayor Martin Walsh is the twelfth mayor claiming Irish ancestry.

 

And the Germans

Nearly half of German immigrants headed into the nation’s interior–to homestead on farms for the most part. The other half settled in urban areas. Germans, long part of the American fabric, Penn’s Pennsylvania and Midlands regional culture included early German settler influences. But these fine folk were overwhelmed by the 1846-1855 million immigrant German surge.

 

Where did they go? Except for New York City (where they became 15% of its population), Germans left entry seaports and headed inland. Of the Germans that settled on farms, Rhinelanders moved along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers; Cincinnati (27% of its population) and St. Louis (27% also) were the chief urban beneficiaries. Other Germans headed for Chicago or Louisville, each with 20% German population, Cleveland (21%), Detroit (16%) got a share. Things got a bit more complicated in Wisconsin. Pre-Civil War German migration did not extend in large numbers to Wisconsin’s rural areas; not until the 1870’s when the German migration blended with a huge Scandinavian (Norway, Sweden and Denmark)[67] immigration did Wisconsin acquire large numbers of Germans. Post-1870 German/Scandinavian migrations flowed, not only to Wisconsin, but also to adjoining Iowa, Minnesota and the two Dakotas[68].  Because census records collapsed Scandinavian, Danish and Norwegians into the German category, one must be wary of the “German” label. The initial waves of southern Germans proved to be noticeably different from later, more Scandinavian immigrants.

 

The concept of a rationalized, disinterested, apolitical government bureaucracy, operating under credentialed experts rather than at the direction of crass politicians, had considerable appeal to German voters. Government ownership of utilities, railroads, and major industries was not antithetical to this… their aversion to temperance made them suspicious of Republicans … and they were wary as well of the increasingly Irish-dominated patronage politics of the Democrats and attendant corruption, and were sympathetic [to] civil service reform.[69]

 

Germans set up their own schools and volunteer fire/militia companies, gave America the Christmas tree, kindergartens, and pinochle. Germans valued a close family, were associated with low rates of crime, intensely opposed slavery[70], and formed mutual-benefit insurance companies. Germans carried manufacturing (and brewing) entrepreneurship in their genes, but also demonstrated an ability to rise in professions such as finance and law. John Jacob Astor (fur trader and Manhattan real estate—go figure?). German sector innovators included: Henry Steinway and musical instruments; the inevitable breweries: in Milwaukee (Pabst, Schlitz, Miller and Blatz) and in St. Louis (Anheuser-Busch, and Jacob Ruppert’s brewery); Ruppert owned the Yankees; and Walter Lippmann (born in 1889) was American journalism’s penultimate role model.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s the Big Deal?

In this chapter, we fleshed out our two ships of economic development. The message intended is that political culture matters in economic development; that different populations, states, regions and cities have their own history and legacy of values which were developed over time and experience by the people who settled them. Two polar opposite cultures, Pennsylvania Privatism and Yankee Progressivism, functioned effectively at the same time, but each produced a wildly different policy system and defined economic development so differently that economic development priorities of either one almost repudiated the priorities of the other. Divergence of economic development goals among distinctive political cultures is a central theme in this history. There is today, and there never has been, a single, universal, nationwide definition of what economic development should do, who should do it, and how it should serve the community and jurisdiction.

 

This theme is in its infancy, however. The story is vastly more complicated in real life. To some extent we have already made it more complicated by demonstrating how political cultures are transferred into new territories, establish new jurisdictions, and inject cultural values and priorities into structural frameworks essential to governance. The complicating factor, however, is that in most cases new territories must be shared with other political cultures and immigrants. If the competition can assert itself and project its values and priorities into the structural frameworks, then a hybrid structural system can result.

 

In other cases, others, immigrants in particular who are either absent when structures were approved or effectively powerless to participate in decision-making, are shunted off to the margins—waiting for the day and time to assert themselves. In the meantime, such cultures assimilate and make do with somebody else’s political structures and values. In the meantime, their sheer numbers, and their often desperate economic condition (with associated pathologies included), exert serious effects on the jurisdiction’s physical landscape and policy priorities. Their size and potential for disrupting the natural order forces the jurisdiction to respond—if it could. But pre-Civil War Jeffersonian-Jacksonian political structures lack the capacity to respond—and that will become fundamental problem to be tackled in the Gilded Age to follow.

 

Hidden in plain sight is one of our three drivers of economic development policy-making: population migration. When introduced in the last chapter, the obvious way that population mobility affected economic development was that more or less people exerted consequences on the community. Economic development, as all policy areas, would have to respond. Growth would produce certain demands on policy-makers; decline, we hinted, would wreak havoc. That was sufficient for Chapter 1. But this Chapter demonstrated how population mobility is interrelated with political culture—and through political culture—the structural framework of governance, the underlying political and value consensus of the community/jurisdiction, and most importantly, the elites that can play effectively within the structural framework initially constructed. In the pre-Civil War period, those elites were from the private sector. But, we also learned that all private sector elites do not share identical values—they clearly do not, never have, and not likely ever will. This is complicated chain of events, started in motion by population mobility, results in yet additional variation in economic development policy-making and, as we shall discover in later chapters, will lead to very distinct “jurisdictional policy systems” that can compete in any jurisdiction and across jurisdictions.

 

Discussed also in this chapter is yet another reason why economic development is so different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. For more than seventy years, pre-Civil War America was two vastly different “nations”—with an undiscovered and largely unsettled third nation (the West) lurking in the background. The North and South, obviously, were political and economic poles apart. Each chose paths they wanted to follow, each path had consequences, and people at the time grew to think of these paths as more zero sum than not. The South chose a path that in my opinion tried to find a way to make a feudal agricultural and political system work in nineteenth century world.

 

We know, of course, what lies ahead—and that it didn’t work so well for the South. The issue for us as economic developers is that when the dust (smoke of war) cleared, economic developers were front and center participants in dealing with the new world created by the Civil War. Another central theme of this history, to be slowly unraveled in future chapters, is that this regional divergence would interact with political culture and the bifurcated structure of our profession, to create a long-term divergence within American economic development that exerted tremendous influence on our professional evolution. Economic development in “the West” is still another matter entirely.

 

For the moment, we are satisfied with our chapter’s discussion of the contents carried on the decks of our two ships Progressivism and Privatism. It is only preliminary. After all, these political cultures operated in a pre-industrial city, within a nation clearly heading for a tussle. In these pre-Civil War years, city-building and setting up governance frameworks are sufficient tasks unto themselves—and these tasks imperfectly reveal distinctions among the cultures. New cities require infrastructure and people, and an economic base—and in the first half of the nineteenth century there were only a few ways these tasks could be achieved. Those ways will be discussed in the next chapter.

[1] David Hackett Fischer’s, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1989).

[2] Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York, Viking Press, 2011). I add, a twelfth, the Afro-American culture.

[3] William Penn quoted in E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership (New York, the Free Press, 1979), p. 369.

[4] Penn finally abandoned the open strip, scattered land plots in favor of an individual contiguous farm.

[5] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. pp. 16-17.

[6] Yes, this is the famous Talleyrand of Congress of Vienna fame. In 1790 he visited Pennsylvania and entered into a land speculation deal which founded Bellefonte.

[7] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. p. 17.

[8] E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, op. cit., p. 121.

[9] J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia 1609-1884 (Philadelphia, Everts, 1884), Vol. 1, p. 318, adjusted slightly to improve readability.

[10] Pennsylvania voters since 1790 have approved four state constitutions (1790, 1838, 1873, and 1967).

[11] Sam Bass Warner, The Private City, op. cit. p. xii (Introduction). Warner extends his Philadelphia findings to all American cities. I do not agree; I removed “all cities” and substituted [Philadelphia] in the above quote.

[12] Sam Bass Warner, the Private City, op. cit. p. 10; see also, Judith M. Diamondstone, “Philadelphia’s Municipal Corporation, 1701-1776,” Pennsylvania Magazine, XC (April, 1966), pp. 183-201; and Edward P. Allinson and Boise Penrose, “The City Government of Philadelphia“, Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, V, (Baltimore, 1887), pp. 14-33.

[13] Henry Adams, the United States in 1800 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1961), pp. 82-83.

[14] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., pp. 6-7.

[15]A second difference between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts was  the Puritan commonwealth set up by Winthrop rested upon a strong, unified state level government, which, unlike the famous New England town democracy, was composed solely of the Elect. That contrasted sharply with Penn’s decentralized municipal-driven Pennsylvania, suggesting a second variation in Progressivist and Privatist policy systems

[16] Winthrop served twelve terms as Governor of Massachusetts (he was never Mayor of Boston which as a town did not have that office). If Winthrop has an image today, it is as an inflexible, sexless, conservative Puritan. In  his day, however, Winthrop was a moderate authoritarian (tending toward micromanagement), not mean-spirited (he warned Roger Williams secretly and helpfully to get the heck out of Salem, and was also criticized for being too moderate with Anne Hutchinson —each “founded” a new state). He outlived five wives, and I estimate,  was father of eight, maybe nine, children–many sadly dying young –as did his first four wives. Upon landing at Logan Airport, think of Winthrop—he owned the land.

[17] John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity” quoted in Thomas H. O’Connor, The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001), p. 8. Often associated with Ronald Reagan (used to justify American exceptionalism in his Farewell Address). the expression “city on a hill”, it is believed, was originally drawn from the Sermon on the Mount.

[18] Approved by the Massachusetts General Court in March 1636. Cities were latecomers to New England. New Haven was the first in 1784, Boston, 1822, New Hampshire the 1840’s, and Springfield in 1852. Hartford is a city/town consolidation.

[19] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit., pp.49-52 and pp. 7-10. John Winthrop Jr., for example, founded towns in Rhode Island and Connecticut.

[20] See Donald L. Robinson, Town Meeting: Practice of Democracy in Rural New England (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).

[21] E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, op. cit., p. 148.

[22] The Moravians, also religious refugees, sought to construct settlements exclusively for themselves. They carefully planned their towns, the first being Bethlehem in Pennsylvania in 1741 (followed by several other Pennsylvania boroughs) and a second set in North Carolina, the town of Economy in 1753 and Salem in 1766—others followed. See David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit., pp. 10-11.

[23]  E. Digby Baltzell in Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, op. cit—see chapter 18: The Governing of Men: Deference and Defiant Democracy.

[24] Unitarianism first appeared in Lithuania and, of all places, Transylvania,  in the mid-1500’s  Traveling to London, then to New England, it was first preached in Boston’s King Chapel in 1784. Inclined toward Deism (which rejects religion as a source of authority, but asserts that through reason and science the existence of a God can be discovered), Unitarianism, from its earliest days, appealed to the wealthy and intellectual. In 1805 Harvard taught its first course in Unitarian theology. As New England Unitarianism evolved,  it quickly morphed into  “transcendental Unitarianism” (from German liberal theology) associated with Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendental Unitarians stressed the essential goodness of mankind and adopted a more intellectual, semi-secular humanistic approach.

[25] E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, op. cit., p. 199.

[26] E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, op. cit., p. 199.

[27] E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, op. cit., p. 199. Baltzell’s observation was supported by no less than John Adams who wrote in his Defense of the Constitution: “Go into every village in New England, and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most” (Baltzell, p. 170).

[28] Samuel Eliot Morrison described this elite fusion as the marriage between “the wharf and the waterfall“. In an 1861 novel,  Elsie Venner (1861), Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dubbed the new business elite the “Boston Brahmin“. Holmes’s novel characterized this elite as “harmless, inoffensive, and untitled”, with houses by Bulfinch, their monopoly on Beacon Street, humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of their mind, Yankee shrewdness, and New England exclusiveness“. Our description of this evolution from Puritanism is indebted to O’Connor’s, the Hub, “From Town to City“.

[29] O’Connor, The Hub, op. cit. pp. 87-88.

[30] Quincy, a Congressman for many years, a strong Federalist and a stolid Brahmin, was quite the charismatic personae. Related to John and John Quincy Adams (Abigail’s mother was a Quincy). Quincy devoted his life to politics, Quincy subsequently served six terms in office leaving to become President of Harvard serving there for seventeen years.

[31] O’Connor, the Hub, op. cit. p. 93.

[32] Ironically, Boston’s first 1960, Ed Logue-led commercial urban renewal project rebuilt Faneuil Hall,  Josiah Quincy first urban renewal project. Ca plus change!

[33] E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, op. cit. p. 373.

[34] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p. 5.

[35] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p. 60.

[36] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. p. 94.

[37] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit. p. 61.

[38] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p. 8.

[39] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation (New York, Crown Publishing-Random House, 2013), p. 19. We rely on Barone for detailing the path of the various migrations. Barone  describes Scotch-Irish migration as “one of the largest immigrations in proportion to preexisting population in American history, similar in magnitude to the Irish and German immigration of 1847-56 and the Ellis Island immigration of 1900-14”. The number arriving each year approximated the population of Boston, then the third largest city” (p. 27).

[40] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. pp. 17-19.

[41] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p. 102. Each wave resulted from an economic/political disaster in England, Scotland or Ireland.

[42] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 52,

[43] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p.174.

[44] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 66.

[45] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p.176.

[46] The story has it that the “a” was dropped out of Cleveland by a printer who wanted to crowd a sentence into a single line of print.

[47] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 64.

[48] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 69.

[49] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 69.

[50] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p. 177.

[51] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 70. Donald Miller, City of the Century: the Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996) characterizes the three as “versatile, risk-taking businessmen”.

[52] Interesting irony: John Brown’s father Owen, owner of a Connecticut tannery, hired as his apprentice Jesse Grant, the father of Ulysses.

[53] See David J. Russo, American Towns: An Interpretive History (Chicago, Ivan R Dee, 2001)

[54] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. pp. 103-104.

[55] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. pp. 103-104.

[56] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. p. 11.

[57] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit., pp. 61-62.

[58] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit, pp. 75-76.  Statistics are from Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York, Norton, 1989), p. 46; Ira Berlin, The Making of African America (New York, Viking, 2010) coined the title “Passage to the Interior”.

[59] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 77.

[60] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p. 9. With considerable irony, these slave lords hired John Locke to write a colonial constitution for South Carolina that permitted slavery and provided 150 free acres for each slave brought to the colony. Locke’s guarantees of religious toleration encouraged French Huguenot and Sephardic Jew immigration were stricken out in 1700—leaving the state an Anglican theocracy.

[61] See William R. Taylor, Cavalier and the Yankee: the Old South and American National Character (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993). Taylor asserts North and South “had adopted separate images by 1860” and the southern myth of the cavalier “was at odds with the dominant trends of the developing new country”.

[62] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 105.

[63] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., pp. 254-255.

[64] Those that did move into the interior worked on railroads and canal construction or took permanent jobs in mining such as the anthracite coal region of Northeast Pennsylvania. Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 112.

[65] Thomas Sowell, Ethnic American: A History (New York, Basic Books, 1981) p. 1.

[66] Stephen P. Erie, Rainbow’s End: Irish Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840-1985 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988) p. 532; see also Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. pp. 113-114.

[67] Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 137. Scandinavians (1876-85: 475,000)( 598,000 in 1886-95) settled in the Great Lakes Northwest, Cleveland and Buffalo, also in Minnesota, Iowa,  Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado— Houston and Pittsburgh got a share.  Post-Civil War, southern German immigration declined; northern, rural, Protestant Germans (including Volga Germans who settled in the Dakotas) replaced them. Most Scandinavians were Norwegians after1881.

[68] A railroad city founded in 1872 was first named Edwinton. A year later, some marketing whiz renamed the city, Bismarck to attract German immigrants.

[69] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 138.

[70] A German community in the Austin hill country refused to support the Confederacy.