[Segue Way from Pennsylvania Privatism and Yankee Cultures to the Third Political Culture, Scots-Irish, from the British Isles]
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.
Ron W. Coan 