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.