Gilded Age Municipal Policy System Performance and Initial Assessment:

 

Jon C. Teaford observed the Gilded Age city did better than contemporary history admits. The “perfect storm” of dynamic change triggered as difficult a birth of the industrial city as a Hollywood script writer could devise. Create a new industrial order, create a new nation after a Civil War, flood it with tens of millions of impoverished, uneducated, unskilled immigrants most of whom didn’t speak a word of English—and sustain that flood for over a half-century—and build from practically nothing, cities that by the beginning of the twentieth century were among the most modern of world, using advanced transportation, communication and energy systems, housing construction techniques, advanced water and sewer systems, and libraries and schools. He cites Chicago as an example:

 

In 1830 Chicago was a frontier trading post with a few log structures, a few muddy paths, and a few dozen inhabitants. Seventy years later it was a city of 1.5 million people, with a waterworks pumping 500 million gallons of water [daily] … and a drainage system with over 1,500 miles of sewers. More than 1,400 miles of paved streets lighted by 38,000 street lamps … and 925 miles of streetcar lines carried hundreds of millions of passengers each year. A fleet of 129 fire engines … over 2,200 acres of city parkland, and a public library of over 300,000 volumes …. In a single lifetime Chicago residents had transformed a prairie bog into one of the greatest cities of the world. [In the same period] government authorities … had provided migrants to the metropolis with a level of public services rarely equaled in the world of the late nineteenth century. In the 1850’s the city council had ordained that the level of the swampy city be raised ten feet, and it had been done. In later decades the municipal authorities had ordered the flow of the Chicago River be reversed, and so it was reversed. The achievements of governments in Chicago rivaled the feats of the Old Testament God.[1]

 

That was quite a sentence and the Gilded Age city accomplished such feats as to require it. Teaford goes on to say that “the Chicago experience was representative of what was happening throughout the nation”. Yet, the Gilded Age and its city governments  have come down to us in our history texts as a terrible age, of corruption, inefficiency, brutal repression of workers, insensitive government captured by pernicious forces sucking marrow from the public interest, urban squalor and immigrant slums, subsistence farmers, massive racial discrimination/inequality and robber barons. These were real also. That dichotomy exposes the underlying plot for this next series of topics.

 

The Gilded Age produced (among many other outputs) an urban public-private policy system that was the perfect expression of the ugliness of the sausage-making metaphor—and it produced a great sausage. But as that sausage was made, the process was so bad, so uncomfortable, that reform had to follow. That the system succeeded in spite of itself compelled those who lived through it to never repeat it again. Economic development was all wrapped up within this dichotomy—and it was in the Gilded Age that the first institutions of contemporary economic development emerged, and our cornerstone strategies and tools first used to foster urban growth. This Age, dichotomies and all, “midwived” the birth of our profession.

 

The starting point for this section is to review machines and bosses and take them down a notch so that our second theme, the private sector role in the policy process can be interwoven into the Gilded Age policy saga. Finally, to complete the Gilded Age Big City policy system, this section will reveal the rise of bureaucracies and the gradual increase in governmental policy capacity that was forged in the making of the colossal city that emerged from this perfect storm of change and transformation: the industrial Big City.

 

Wrap Up and Segue Way

 

Forming a cohesive machine on top of a chronically changing mélange of neighborhoods and wards proved an increasingly impossible task. No single boss ever emerged from Boston’s[1] (or Buffalo’s) cacophony of ward machines during the Gilded Age—or after.  Boston’s Irish political dominance would be achieved in the twentieth century through charismatic Irish mayors “Honey Fitz”, James Michael Curley, and later Kevin White and Ray Flynn rather than through a city-wide ethnic political machine such as Tammany. The inability to integrate other ethnic groups into a machine put the final nail in the coffin of both very heavily Irish city machines. Tammany’s initial success was based on its ability to harness the Irish vote, and it worked for Croker, but by the turn of the century it needed an Irish Murphy to revolutionize Tammany and transform it into an almost unique (Chicago later would also accomplish this feat) multi-ethnic city-wide formal machine. The other durable machines-type, that of a state political party (example, Pennsylvania) rested more on sheer patronage and city workers supplemented by control of some ethnic wards by a centralized state political party.

 

So the inherent problem confronted by ward-based ethnic machines was that population movements, primarily immigration, dumped a number of diverse nationalities into the neighborhood fabric. With each passing year, more and more non-Irish moved into the neighborhoods. Each ethnic grouping or clusters of ethnics residing in a ward produced its own ward boss. Ethnic ward-based machines relatively quickly became characterized by ”a sizeable band of powerful ward and local leaders who have warred so vigorously and yet survived so stubbornly as to render impossible the single, all-powerful boss”.[2] This occurred in city after city, leaving in its wake neighborhood wards disproportionately controlled by ward machines and bosses, turning the city legislatures into forums for advancing neighborhood interests and autonomy.

 

The overall municipal policy system, however, was left to integrate/contend with this neighborhood-legislative tilt, linking somehow with a variety of other developing institutions such as stronger mayors, independent commissions and the comptroller, and islands of professional competence developing in fledgling municipal bureaucracies. Most Gilded Age Northern and Midwestern Big Cities were not dominated by machines and bosses—rather, no institution or policy actor dominated the process for any sustained period (Chicago’s Carter Harrison being a semi-exception). The crisis of Gilded Age municipal policy systems was that its principal actors and institutions were in continual near anarchistic conflict, with no one compellingly in charge. That policy chaos was probably the reason most commentators and historians held such little respect for the period and its fledgling governance.

 

Corruption alone does not define a municipality’s political/policy system as a machine government (i.e. Doc Ames). Corruption was endemic in Gilded Age municipal systems for a variety of reasons of which the ethnic ward machines were arguably only one. Its fragmented, undeveloped administrative capacity, and bi-polar political control rendered it unable to perform well, honestly, and efficiently. Surprisingly, most Gilded Age Big Cities did not form city-wide, sustained, semi-formal machines that comfortably matched the conventional machine stereotype. For example, during the Gilded Age  Albany, Cleveland[3], Detroit, Chicago,  New Jersey cities, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Portland (Maine), Rochester, San Francisco, Seattle, Springfield Illinois, St. Louis and Minneapolis[4] did not develop a durable, boss-led machine. Tammany and the Pennsylvania state Republican Party were the most durable machines that survived the Gilded Age—and they were two different types of machines. The municipal policy systems they affected or operated within, aside from corruption and patronage, were not similar. The various and conflicting ethnic-based ward machines/bosses also survived the Gilded Age, and continued to impact the policy bias of Big City municipal legislatures for years to come. Reform in the Big Cities would prove to be rather incomplete and uneven.

 

In most of our Big Cities, the default governance, to the extent it existed, fell to the “businessman” (and/or Civil War soldier),“social reform” or “structural reform” mayor—with machines maturing into semi-responsible policy participants. As the Age wore on into the Progressive period, more and more mayors became career politicians and the mayor’s office accumulated, city by city, more power and visibility, while the power of city legislatures diminished. As the cities grew, the city bureaucracy, especially comptrollers and public works departments, grew as well. The victory of early twentieth century structural reformer (see Chapter 5) meant that if machines were to achieve dominance over the city-wide, jurisdictional policy system, they had to do so by controlling the mayor’s office. Post turn of the century city-wide machines would develop, but these machines tempered their reliance on ethnic wards and mixed it with control of patronage and municipal bureaucracies (following McManes Gas Trust model).

 

The post-twentieth century machine policy system, then, would prove to be quite distinctive from whatever  was produced by the Gilded Age’s unstable, incoherent, undeveloped mélange of institutional actors and institutions. In this systemic context, the role and the centrality of chambers of commerce not only stabilized the Gilded Age municipal policy system, but provided a reasonable proxy for what we today consider as governmental action and initiatives. No surprise then, as far as economic development goes, this Gilded Age system institutionalized, for almost seventy-five years, something that Chapter 5 will call “chamber-style economic development”.

[1] If Boston had a chance to develop a boss, it would have been Martin Lomasney, Boston’s” Mahatma”. A first generation Irish, and the subject of Lincoln Steffens commentary, Lomasney constructed a ward-based machine, and acted  as boss, but never was more than first among equals, and not infrequently not even that. He was the personification of the image of what a machine and its boss should be, however—a good boss, with days of honesty and considerable character. But he was a ward boss.  A boss whose Hendricks Club was the epitome of machine as social service agency. Lomasney survived so well and for so long in large measure due to his extending his ward machine benefits/services to all registered residents and all ethnic groups/races. See Leslie G. Ainley, Boston Mahatma  (Boston, Bruce Humphries Publisher). Lomasney never  established anything like a city-wide machine over which he was boss.

[2] Harold Zink, Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1930); see also, Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 105.

[3] Republican Robert McKisson tried to construct a patronage-driven political party in 1895 in opposition to Ohio’s state-Republican machine led by industrialist Mark Hanna. The effort failed by 1899.

[4] In Minneapolis’s case, “Doc Adams”, four term mayor, was a corrupt as they got—but he had no identifiable machine organization. San Francisco did have a machine government in the 1880’s (Christopher Augustine Buckley), but not in the 1870’s and 1890’s. A wonderful, at points entertaining summary of  “bosses” is provided by Harold Zink, City Bosses in the United States: a Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1930).

 

[1] Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 217.