Chapter 2

 

As the twig is bent: pre-Civil War migration and political culture

The foundations of American state and sub-state communities/jurisdictions, their governance, and policy-making processes were first poured during the pre-Civil War Early Republic. That might be a surprise to most economic developers. Even more of a surprise is that our history views American economic development (ED) strategies and programs as outputs from such a policy system; and that our ED strategies and programs reflected values and beliefs (often religious in nature) important to the jurisdiction’s first settlers. How can it be those graves in the oldest sections of our local cemeteries contain the secrets of why we do much of what we do today? Our history reveals early settler’s values and beliefs are embedded in many of our present-day “structures, charters, constitutions and processes” that forge our contemporary ED strategies and programs. As the twig was bent, so grew the tree. This chapter describes how the twig was bent.

Upon their first arrival in America, immigrants and religious refugees fashioned our first state and local policy systems, structures, processes and relationships—and then their sons and daughters carried them across America. Today we call it “city-building.” Commonly, new communities were versions of the ones they left—a home away from home. Structures such as state constitutions and municipal charters proved quite “sustainable.” 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 ED jurisdictional policy systems were thus bent. With the structures of policy-making set in place, the keels of our “two ships,” two distinctive approaches to American ED emerged and began their journey. That journey was not only across time, but also place.

A constant in American history has been the movement of people, into America, and within it. That is the dominant theme of this chapter—that and establishing the original government (towns/townships, incorporated cities, or large swathes of unincorporated and/or privately owned land), writing the first territory/state constitutions, and forming the initial policy system. Levels of government informally incorporated key relationships that had earlier evolved in the “mother” community. Two proved especially important: the relationship of the private sector to the policy process, and a tendency to sort out “who does what” policy wise. Distinctive levels of government preferenced 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. Diffusion of cultures, policy systems and structures was neither determinative nor neat. That is why we have 50 noticeably different state systems today.

First a word about economic bases is helpful in our journey through 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, but 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 varied 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, 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. 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 economic development were laid during the colonial period in the coastal cities of America. In colonial period religious beliefs were incorporated into governance structures through royal/municipal charters, compacts and initial colonial constitutions. Values and structures were adjusted to fit our agrarian frontier-wilderness economy (Fisher, 1989). The American Revolution, Articles of Confederation and 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 from colonies to the American Early Republic is that 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 (2011) outlined 11 colonial “rival regional cultures” (nations) that form the basis for the regional cultures of the present-day United States. I would add a twelfth: African-American. Woodard’s model serves as a 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 is to 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 also to briefly outline how they evolved over 200 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

The governments of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia were devised by William Penn himself in his 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 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 proved unwilling to defend itself when attacked by Native Indians (who were being displaced by Scots-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 were 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 20 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). 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-Périgord around a spring and an iron ore mine:¹ “During the course of the eighteenth century Pennsylvania became blanketed with clustered settlements” (Russo, 2001, p. 17). Quakers were followed by German and then Scots-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” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 121). Boone didn’t stop until he reached Kentucky and founded Boonesborough.

Weak and fragmented state/local governments 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” (Scharf and Wescott, 1884, p. 318)—near anarchy prevailed. Pennsylvania went through three state constitutions in 20 years (contrasted with Massachusetts which approved a 1780 state constitution still in effect today).² 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. 82–3)

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 that 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 and their 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 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 … 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)³

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 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’s 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 George Washington’s second term and most of John Adams’s presidency. The National Bank was headquartered in Philadelphia. Canals and railroads constructed by Philadelphia’s business leadership ensured its competitive position in the American hierarchy of cities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 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, distinct from NYC’s Tammany, that lasted to almost 1950. Penn’s weak system of governance reflected a political culture Woodard describes as:the most American of [his 11] 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. Interestingly, all save Illinois, voted for Trump in 2016.

BOSTON AND MASSACHUSETTS

Boston, settled by Puritans who preached an “angry” God, a corrupt humanity, a heaven open to only those predestined (the Elect), but imposed a demanding obligation on the Elect to address needs of the community’s unfortunates. Puritanism lodged the powerful Elect at the state-level, tasked with “guiding” private shareholder-based New England town democracy. In the Puritan system, town democracy and Puritanism were co-existed in the town church—unlike Penn’s Pennsylvania, Puritan church and state were united. Structurally and culturally the two systems of policy and governance were almost polar opposites.

John Winthrop

Boston’s equivalent to Penn was the former English country squire John Winthrop (as founder of the town of Boston in 1629).⁴ 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 divorced/separated the state from private profit and economic growth. Instead Winthrop’s Puritanism believed private profits should benefit the community’s disadvantaged, and business elites be 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 be—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 primary use of government 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. If private sector success is key to community economic growth or if community economic growth is tasked to ameliorate inequality, then Progressive and Privatist cultures pursue different economic development 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 the Elect, was entrusted to infuse municipal governance with moral purpose and lead in local policy-making. The state of Massachusetts assumed responsibility that towns and their 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) but to God and his Elect in the state capital as well.⁵ Accordingly, in 1642 the Massachusetts General Court (state government) instructed each town to “train their children in learning, and labor and other imployments.” In 1647 the General Court required towns of 50 inhabitants to retain someone to teach children to “write and reade,” and a town of 100 to set up a “grammer schoole” supported by public funds. The intention underlying education was that each individual was expected to read the 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.

As intense as their desire to practice their religion, Puritans emigrated to unleash their middle-class entrepreneurial spirit—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 on. 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 most public policy areas. With few exceptions, this tightly controlled unit of sub-state government was not replicated elsewhere in the country.⁶ The town evolved into a pure service delivery unit (Russo, 2001, pp. 10–11).

 

Wealthy families invested in new towns across the whole of southern New England (Connecticut and Rhode Island separated in 1662 and the 1640s respectively) and contested New York’s borders (Russo, 2001, pp. 49–52, 7–10). 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), and 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), and 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 crystallize; 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 and 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 commenced in the late eighteenth century.⁷ 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 whom 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—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,” one 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” (1979, p. 199).⁸

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 Charles Bulfinch-designed mansions in Boston’s high-status neighborhoods and, by the 1830s, not only lived alongside the codfish aristocracy but also increasingly married into it. The Boston Brahmin, the Frankenstein-like fusion of these two elites, resulted.⁹ 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. 87–8)

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 its 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 stepped up to Boston’s infrastructure and service crisis.¹⁰ 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 a 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 on the cleared land the first Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market (ironically Edward Logue’s initial 1960 urban renewal project rebuilt both). The Boston that Quincy left behind in 1828 was rated 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 from 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 through 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 in existence at this time. One might assume that Privatist elites in Charleston behaved and thought differently than Philadelphia because their Privatism has different roots. Progressive elites in Connecticut/Maine blazed their own Progressive path. A perhaps not so obvious lesson to be learned is variation among municipal business elites. There was no 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 Philadelphian 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 for 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, its 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, nationwide set of economic development goals. Two visibly different ways to conduct sub-state economic development 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 its population increased sufficiently to make it competitive with its neighbors and 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 its community. The future evolution of American cities demonstrated “two viable roads existed” and political culture shaped the decision on which to travel.

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 through to the Pacific. In diffusing cultures, it is argued, getting there first is critical. First settlers set up the political and administrative system in their initial state constitutions. Things, of course, get more complicated when two or more sets of first settlers attend 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 were not haphazard 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 Scots-Irish, began early in the eighteenth 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 also other important migrations (Midlanders and African-Americans in particular) which are only minimally discussed. The fourth (starting in the 1840s) were new waves of foreign immigration: Irish and Germans. Finally, the flood gates opened after the 1870s and immigrants from Southern/Eastern Europe as well as Asia poured into our cities, each leaving their mark on our history.

The Scots-Irish¹¹

Fleeing the English-Scottish enclosure movement, Scots-Irish migrants 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 was an exception) before heading into wilderness frontiers. Waiting with open arms (usually holding tomahawk or rifles) were Native Americans. In the eighteenth century Scots-Irish moved into southern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Texas. Others moved through Pennsylvania and then onto western Maryland into today’s West Virginia and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (fairly unsettled). Continuing along the Great Wagon Road, Scots-Irish crossed the Appalachians into the North Carolina Piedmont by 1740, and eventually reached unsettled western South Carolina (1760s). By 1796 they crossed over into Kentucky and Tennessee and stopped at the Mississippi River. By that time (1800) nearly 2 million Scots-Irish had immigrated to the United States (Barone, 2013, p. 19).

Using slash-and-burn agriculture, Scots-Irish homesteads were temporary, loosely tied to small agricultural towns and villages. Scots-Irish did not create or settle cities; the territories they settled still maintain a small city, 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 Scots-Irishman who participated in this trek was the 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 mayoral, non-profession municipal government.

 

Jacksonian-dominated state/sub-state policy systems resulted from the nineteenth century small town Privatist Scots-Irish culture. Building on the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer political systems, Jacksonian Scots-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 Scots-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 the Scots-Irish as “Greater Appalachia”; he devotes particular attention to their bellicose nature, asserting that 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 1750s. 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 Scots-Irish led the secession of West Virginia from Virginia during the Civil War. But in the reconstruction aftermath, the Scots-Irish bitterly resisted Yankee attempts to restructure society and economy through black emancipation.

Highly individualistic, the Scots-Irish mostly opposed income redistribution; they tolerated extremes of wealth within their communities. Scots-Irish sharecroppers worked for Scots-Irish plantation lords. For many, many years the Scots-Irish lived on the economic margins of the southern 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 nineteenth 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 Scots-Irish who innovated something called Balance Agriculture with Industry (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 to the borders of today’s six New England states (except through sea trade), 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 swathes of upstate New York in the earlier days, but his bankruptcy transferred titles 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 did the same for central/southwestern New York (could you guess Binghamton?). Bingham sold the land to New Englanders who came in groups, often extended families from the same town. For example, 30 fishermen from Martha’s Vineyard/Nantucket founded Hudson along the eponymous river in Columbia County 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 6 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 settlements, predominantly New Englanders, created tension between the state and the 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 (proposed 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. This meant that 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 a transshipment center on a regional scale. Its export economy was not based on native raw materials or resources.

Ohio and Michigan to Iowa and Indiana

Ohio came next. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 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 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.¹²

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, Scots-Irish and, as we shall soon see, Germans. That is why it remains a political swing state to this day. In the northern half, Yankees dominated. Following Yankee tradition, settlers founded colleges: Ohio University (first President 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), its 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” (Barone, 2013, p. 70). As the original city-builders of Chicago, they transformed a wilderness outpost into the great metropolis.

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 1830s onward Yankees piled into Wisconsin, and after the 1840s saturated Iowa. Burlington, Iowa (named for another Burlington back east) and Grenville Dodge (from Danvers Massachusetts, later chief surveyor for the transcontinental Union Pacific Railroad) 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 and caring for widows, disabled people and the 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, 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 the Scots-Irish. Middle Atlantic states developed their own style of sub-state governance reflecting their New Netherlands, Greater Appalachia and Midlands political cultures. As Midwest states set up their initial government and state constitutions, 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 (and 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 and 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. 103–4). 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 subtly affect contemporary policy-making. Wisconsin was a typical example of the patchwork blend of administrative cultural experiences.

The South: Sector Innovation, Agricultural Economy and Migration

The Virginia colonial charter established a trading company (a private corporation) not dissimilar to the better-known British East Indies Company. Subsequent colonists from Virginia, and later Maryland, stumbled upon tobacco as their principal crop—one 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 self-sufficient and self-contained. With direct access to rivers or the Atlantic, plantations directly exported and imported from their own piers and harbors. 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 (Maryland/Virginia) 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 municipalities. The heritage of this remains more or less intact today, especially in Maryland and Virginia, but is still found throughout the South.

Times were tough in the late 1700s for Tidewater tobacco growers. Tobacco, hard on the soil, meant its continued use produced decreasing yields, and increasing bankruptcies. Scots-Irish tobacco-planting immigrants had moved into areas not suited to the crop, increasing the 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 the 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. In 1792 Cary Greene hired a tutor—a Massachusetts born, Connecticut-educated young man by the name of Eli Whitney—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). Whitney and Miller formed up a partnership and, the rest, as they say, was history.

In 1790 only 3000 bales of cotton were produced in the entire United States. However by 1800 this had risen 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 bales in 1860 (Barone, 2013, pp. 61–2). To accomplish this production feat cotton acreage had expanded greatly, and a new labor force 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 that the Creek and Cherokee Indians who lived on these lands were unwilling to move. Enter Andrew Jackson and the Scots-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 (1831–38). 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 1 million former Tidewater tobacco slaves into the nation’s interior by foot, in chains, taking six to eight weeks.¹³ “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” (Fogel and Engerman, 1989, p. 46). In 1810, 79 percent of American slaves lived in coastal states; in 1860, 33 percent. In 1810, 10 percent of American slaves lived in cotton-producing states, increasing to 55 percent by 1860 (Barone, 2013, pp. 75–7). 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, was 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—founder of the eponymous city of Lowell in Massachusetts, and the industry sector he established— 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 1850s. The plantation/export-based southern agricultural economic system deeply impacted the South as a region and defined future southern economic development—and 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 that southern internal transportation infrastructure (railroads) was underinvested. Southern transportation was by sea, on Massachusetts’ Yankee ships. So, as of the early 1800s, the two regions had developed separate yet interrelated economic systems. Each, as if independent of the other, walked down two different paths—destined, as we now know, for 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), 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’s Deep Southerners to assume the Tidewater patrician image (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.¹⁴

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 minimal land-based 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.

The 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 Scots-Irish. Until the 1840s foreign immigration was minimal (less than 8400 in 1820). Immigration picked up after mid-1830, building to an 1846–55 pre-Civil War peak of 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 state constitutions and municipal charters east of the Mississippi. 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 frameworks? Deep South and Greater Appalachian cultures encountered remarkably few foreign immigrants. Woodard’s answer is unequivocal:

These great immigration … did not displace their [11 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. 254–5)

Woodard’s position corresponds closely to the position advanced in this history. It was first come, first served in the case of structure. Both the Irish and the 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/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 wanted to retain their old traditions/values in the new world while, contradictorily, making 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-cultural Chicago captured a goodly number of immigrants and is the best example of an exception to our position. Few immigrants ventured into Scots-Irish, Deep South or the other seven Woodard cultures. Germans penetrated into some border cities (Cincinnati and St. Louis), but immigrants generally stayed up north. As Woodard further observed, New York City/New Netherlands and Pennsylvania Midlands cultures were inherently multi-cultural—heterogeneous from their start. All 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 with 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 and insecurity, and considerable numbers of refugees as well. The Irish and the southern Germans shared a Catholic faith—they constituted the first sizeable Catholic immigration into America. In 1840, 5 percent of Americans were Catholics; by 1860, 12 percent. The Irish entered Boston and New York mostly; the Germans New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

The 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 of them spoke Gaelic only. The Catholic Church played a major role in Irish identity and American assimilation, establishing its parochial school system and social organizations in Irish neighborhoods. A minority of Irish migrants (mostly young men) moved into new geographies—into the army, out west as railroad laborers, and to 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 1850s, comprising more than one-quarter of the population in New York, Boston and Philadelphia and in smaller cities in between such as 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 to settle into already old, beat-up housing and deteriorating neighborhoods—commencing the process later described as neighborhood succession and housing reform. Since the city of New York at this time could not build “up,” it had to build “out.” Brooklyn’s 1840 population exceeded Albany’s by only 2,500; but by 1860, however, Brooklyn 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 strain on water supply and sewerage, raising serious public health concerns, became persistent crises. Crime and fires required the 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 the 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 will be discussed in future chapters. New York City’s Tammany Hall (William) Tweed Machine, initially dependent on Irish votes, developed during the 1850s. Two Boston mayors during the 1850s, 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, and by 1870 Tammany Hall had an Irish boss. Boston elected its first Irish mayor, Hugh O’Brian, in 1885—nearly a generation later. Boston never developed a city-wide Irish boss similar to Tammany.

The 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 percent). Of the Germans who settled on farms, Rhinelanders moved along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers; Cincinnati and St. Louis were the chief urban beneficiaries (both with 27 percent). Germans also settled in Chicago and Louisville (each with a 20 percent German population), and Cleveland (21 percent) and Detroit (16 percent) also 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 1870s—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.¹⁵ Because census records collapsed Scandinavians, Danes and Norwegians into the German category, one must be wary of the “German” label.¹⁶ 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; and gave America the Christmas tree, kindergartens and the card game 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); brewery owners in Milwaukee (Pabst, Schlitz, Miller and Blatz) and St. Louis (Anheuser-Busch); and NYC’s Jacob Ruppert Sr. (Ruppert’s son Jake bought the Yankees (1915), plus NYC’s Walter Lippmann.

WHAT’S GOING ON?

In an age of multiculturalism, 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 are 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, what it 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 has played ball in the ED policy-making process. In the pre-Civil War period elites were exclusively from the private sector. Professional politicians like Quincy were rare indeed in those years. But we also learned that private sector elites do not inherently share identical values—they clearly do not, never have and likely never 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 occupies a different “space,” history, population flow and jurisdictional economic base. One size has never fit all. For more than 70 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 the nineteenth century. It didn’t go so well—but it left a heritage that affected the course and direction of American economic development.

NOTES

1. This is the famous Talleyrand of Congress of Vienna fame. Visiting Pennsylvania in 1790, he entered into a land speculation that founded Bellefonte.
2. Pennsylvania voters since 1790 have approved four state constitutions (1790, 1838, 1873 and 1967).
3. 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 (Baltimore: Murray, 1887), pp. 14–33.
4. Winthrop served 12 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, he 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.
5. Approved by the Massachusetts General Court in March 1636. Cities were latecomers to New England. New Haven was the first, in 1784, followed by Boston (1822), New Hampshire (1840s) and Springfield in 1852. Hartford is a city/town consolidation.
6. Moravians, religious refugees, founded settlements exclusively for themselves. They carefully planned their towns, the first being Bethlehem 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.
7. Unitarianism first appeared in Lithuania and, of all places, Transylvania in the mid-1500s. 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), from its earliest days Unitarianism 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.
8. 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, 1979, p. 170). Samuel Eliot Morrison described this elite fusion as the marriage between “the wharf and the waterfall.” In his 1861 novel Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes 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.
9. Quincy—a former Congressman, a strong Federalist and a stolid Brahmin—was quite the charismatic persona. Related to John and John Quincy Adams (Abigail’s mother was a Quincy), Josiah devoted his life to politics, subsequently serving six terms as mayor and leaving to become President of Harvard for 17 years.
10. We rely heavily on Barone for detailing the path of the various migrations. He describes Scots-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” (Barone, 2013, p. 27).
11. 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.
12. Statistics are from Fogel and Engerman (1989, p. 46); Ira Berlin coined the phrase “Passage to the Interior” in The Making of African America (New York: Viking, 2010).
13. 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 eliminated in 1700—making the state an Anglican theocracy.
14. Edwinton North Dakota was a railroad city founded in 1872. A year later, some marketing whiz renamed the city Bismarck to attract German immigrants. Scandinavians (475,000 in 1876–85; 598,000 in 1886–95) settled in the Great Lakes Northwest, Cleveland and Buffalo; and Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Houston and Pittsburgh also 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