the Gilded Age Jurisdictional Policy System:
Jon C. Teaford observed thatthe Gilded Age city did better than contemporary history admits. The “perfect storm” of dynamic change triggered as difficult a birth of the industrial city as a Hollywood script writer could devise. Create a new industrial order, create a new nation after a Civil War, flood it with tens of millions of impoverished, uneducated, unskilled immigrants most of whom didn’t speak a word of English—and sustain that flood for over a half-century—and build from practically nothing, cities that by the beginning of the twentieth century were among the most modern of world, using advanced transportation, communication and energy systems, housing construction techniques, advanced water and sewer systems, and libraries and schools. He cites Chicago as an example”
In 1830 Chicago was a frontier trading post with a few log structures, a few muddy paths, and a few dozen inhabitants. Seventy years later it was a city of 1.5 million people, with a waterworks pumping 500 million gallons of water [daily] … and a drainage system with over 1,500 miles of sewers. More than 1,400 miles of paved streets lighted by 38,000 street lamps … and 925 miles of streetcar lines carried hundreds of millions of passengers each year. A fleet of 129 fire engines … over 2,200 acres of city parkland, and a public library of over 300,000 volumes …. In a single lifetime Chicago residents had transformed a prairie bog into one of the greatest cities of the world. [In the same period] government authorities … had provided migrants to the metropolis with a level of public services rarely equaled in the world of the late nineteenth century. In the 1850’s the city council had ordained that the level of the swampy city be raised ten feet, and it had been done. In later decades the municipal authorities had ordered the flow of the Chicago River be reversed, and so it was reversed. The achievements of governments in Chicago rivaled the feats of the Old Testament God.[1]
That was quite a sentence and the Gilded Age city accomplished such feats as to require it. Teaford goes on to say that “the Chicago experience was representative of what was happening throughout the nation”. Yet, the Gilded Age and its city governments have come down to us in our history texts as a terrible age, of corruption, inefficiency, brutal repression of workers, insensitive government captured by pernicious forces sucking marrow from the public interest, urban squalor and immigrant slums, subsistence farmers, massive racial discrimination/inequality and robber barons. These were real also. That dichotomy exposes the underlying plot for this next series of topics.
The Gilded Age produced (among many other outputs) an urban public-private policy system that was the perfect expression of the ugliness of the sausage-making metaphor—and it produced a great sausage. But as that sausage was made, the process was so bad, so uncomfortable, that reform had to follow. That the system succeeded in spite of itself compelled those who lived through it to never repeat it again. Economic development was all wrapped up within this dichotomy—and it was in the Gilded Age that the first institutions of contemporary economic development emerged, and our cornerstone strategies and tools first used to foster urban growth. This Age, dichotomies and all, “midwived” the birth of our profession.
The starting point for this section is to review machines and bosses and take them down a notch so that our second theme, the private sector role in the policy process can be interwoven into the Gilded Age policy saga. Finally, to complete the Gilded Age Big City policy system, this section will reveal the rise of bureaucracies and the gradual increase in governmental policy capacity that was forged in the making of the colossal city that emerged from this perfect storm of change and transformation: the industrial city.
[1] Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 217.
Ron W. Coan 