Religious values and beliefs were central to the residents of each colonial jurisdiction and they were infused into politics, political structures, and political administrative/policy/relationships. Religion was important to that Age and population flows into the English colonies were chiefly composed of religious sects, political refugees from those escaping the wraths of the English Revolution/Thirty Years War religious wars. That immigration into the English colonies over the nearly two hundred years of colonial history was anything but uniform and monolithic meant that different religious beliefs and values separated the colonies and even individual settlements within a colony.
Separate (in terms of time periods) and distinct (in terms of values, motivations, and belief systems) population flows into the various colonies made possible a variety of distinct religious-political-based state and local policy systems during the colonial era. These differences, surprisingly perhaps, persist in our present-day State (SSS) economic development policy systems. They do so, our model suggests, because they remain in modern form within our jurisdiction’s political culture, and because they became embedded in the structures and political relationships which form the core of our modern policy systems.
Warner’s pioneering Privatist model reflects Woodard’s Quaker-pietistic German-influenced, “Midlands” culture. I could have chosen other examples. Woodward’s “Tidewater” culture (Virginia, Maryland, parts of Delaware/North Carolina) also can be described as Privatist, but draw from an entirely different set of values dissimilar from the Midlands[1]. Also included in Early Republic Privatism could be Woodard’s New Netherlands (New York City), the Deep South (Charleston) and “Appalachian” cultures[2]. Several Privatisms existed in Early Republic years alongside Warner’s Philadelphia.[3] From Philadelphia and Boston the reader can see key distinctions between Privatist and Progressive municipalities in the Early Republic. That these cultural styles have evolved over the following years should be taken for granted. In 1790, only a handful of cities “of size” existed. New York (33,000), Philadelphia (28,500) and Boston (18,320) were America’s mega cities during Washington’s administration.[4]
Despite his egalitarian beliefs, Penn sold most of his colony to individual buyers (wealthy Quakers mostly). His affluent Quaker settlers when they arrived in America were steadfastly inclined to pursue private industry/farming than government.
Founded originally as centers of trade and commerce … cities and towns came into being as places where people could make money. The aristocrats and businessmen who ran them recognized that in order to ensure their mutual success, they had to take steps to promote their city. This economic imperative became deeply embedded in politics because there was no separation between economic and political leadership-and because the urban population generally believed it too…. Cities could prosper only by gaining a competitive advantage over other cities as trading centers.[5]
Penn’s equalitarian-based Privatism permeated Pennsylvania society and politics, creating opportunity for individual rather than governmental action.
Philadelphia’s colonial experience, with weak and fragmented governance and a largely absent state/ colony government, did not attract strongly religious Quakers into public service—in fact they avoided it like the plague—leaving it to others. I adopt Baltzell’s argument that “religious ideas and convictions of the earliest Bostonians and Philadelphians were of great importance in determining the distinct histories of leaderships [elites] in the two cities from colonial times to the present”.[6] It is from the religious values of early elite first settlers that our core political structures and political/administrative relationships have developed. The nature and the content of that elite culture will subsequently play a large role in the evolution of these political structures and relationships. I believe this is particularly true for the economic development policy area, which, as I shall argue in future chapters tends to being closed in nature and restricted in its active participants. [7]
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“… concentration upon the individual and the individual’s search for wealth. Psychologically, privatism meant that the individual should seek happiness in personal independence and in the search for wealth; socially, privatism meant that the individual should see his first loyalty as his immediate family, and that a community should be a union of such money-making, accumulating families; politically, privatism meant that the community should keep the peace among individual money-makers, and, if possible, help to create an open and thriving setting where each citizen would have some substantial opportunity to prosper.”[8]
This was a society egalitarian in its manners but very far from egalitarian in wealth. Large landholdings were the common pattern, and deference was paid to those who accumulated wealth and demonstrated bravery and competence in battle; social distinctions were vivid but not permanent. As David Hacker Fischer writes, ‘Inequality was greater in the backcountry and southern highlands than in any other rural region in the United States’. But large landholders were expected to treat their neighbors as equals.[9]
Other groups who fundamentally disagreed with New England values avoided the region on account of the Yankee’s reputation for minding other people’s business and pressuring newcomers to conform to their cultural norms. Catholics—whether Irish, south German or Italian—did not appreciate the Yankee educational system, correctly recognizing that the schools were designed to assimilate their children into Yankee culture …. The new comers created their own parallel system of parochial schools precisely to protect the children from the Yankee mold …. Whenever possible, Catholic immigrants chose to live in the more tolerant multicultural Midlands, or the individualistic Appalachia.[11]
[1] Daniel Elazar characterized the Tidewater culture as “traditional” and Midland areas as “individualistic. Daniel Elazar. American Federalism: A View from the States (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966).
[2] The problem, however, is somewhat mitigated by the absence of larger urban centers below the Mason-Dixon Line. Later in the chapter, and in future chapters, other varieties of Privatism (and Progressivism) will be introduced.
[3] Crown-colony charters affected the governance of each colony also. We will not focus on how religious beliefs translated into political structures or how values became embedded in state and local political culture.
[4] We could add 15,000 to Philadelphia from two “cities” enumerated in the 1790 census (Northern Liberties and Southwark) which are today Philadelphia neighborhoods. New York would be adjusted as well to include Brooklyn.
[5] Judd and Kantor, op. cit., p. 62; Judd and Cantor support and develop the notion of inter-jurisdictional competition or competitive advantage as built into early Republic cities through their inclusion of the work by Richard C Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1959). Wade’s Western cities are today’s Midwestern cities as his book examines the time period previous to the 1840’s.
[6] E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, op. cit., p. 5.
[7] The Quaker colony attracted other religious/ethnic groups[7], principally Germans fleeing poverty and destruction caused by the Thirty Years War, and a horde of Scotch-Irish noted for their aggressive, individualist attitudes and behavior. Immigration reduced the Quakers to a minority of Pennsylvania’s citizenry—although wealthiest elites were chiefly Quaker. Immigrant new-comers had little interest in setting up strong government, and for the most part simply ignored what little existed. Unsurprisingly, Penn’s near anarchistic governmental system imploded during the 1755 Lenni Lenape Indian War and subsequent French-Indian War. Pennsylvania governance was so bad, the Lower Counties seceded to form Delaware. The result was “Pennsylvania very soon became a tolerant, secular, plutocratic society, plagued by sectarian politics”, E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, op. cit., p. 370.
[8] Sam Bass Warner, Jr., “The Environment of Private Opportunity” in the Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), p. 3-4. This conception of privatism was drawn exclusively from Philadelphia. He and other commentators extended this Privatist version to all cities in America at this time..I am profoundly skeptical this was the case .
[9] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 35. Barone quotes David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in North America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 749 and pp. 751-753.
[10] Politically, Yankees were Federalists. After the War of 1812 they turned to other parties, often the Whig (Henry Clay). They were not Jacksonian Democrats, however (except Maine and New Hampshire who tended to be disproportionately settled by those protesting Massachusetts governance). The Yankee policy agenda was more national, than local, favoring tariffs which protected their various manufacturing start-up, internal improvements, and national banks. Eventually, the Yankees, thru the Republican Party, were able to carry their agenda once again to the national government and the Morrill Act (1862, land grant colleges), the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railroad (followed by the Credit Moblier scandal), the constitutional abolition of slavery, and the Reconstruction confirmed a persistent Yankee tendency to use the national government, and focus secondarily on the local level..
[11] Colin Woodard, American Nations, op. cit., p. 179.
Ron W. Coan 