City-Building, City-Builders and Business Elites
“Nature does not make cities,” William Angel writes. “People make them.”
The “taming” of the frontier can be viewed … as the process whereby entrepreneurs developed cities by breaking through the barriers erected by the seemingly impenetrable wilderness … [such] innovation may require the combined efforts of several entrepreneurs. Altering a city’s infrastructure to make it more economically attractive may necessitate community entrepreneurial initiatives. (Angel Jr., 1977, p. 109) Colorful, individual city-building entrepreneurs dominate the city-building saga. But there is more to city-building than the urban entrepreneur.
Successful city-building is not foreordained. Kick-starting a community from scratch, carving it out of the wilderness and convincing other fools that this squalid heaven on earth is the place to live requires motivation, determination and a weird, greedy, opportunistic and narcissistic personality. It is a complex process that can support many conceptual models—and ideological diatribes. Individuals involved in city-building, especially in western cities of this period, are an interesting cast of characters; but, equally important, they are somewhat unique to the post-Civil War corporatist/plantation South and the uprooted New England town characteristic of the Yankee Diaspora. Western city-building is individual city-builders, railroad-corporatist, marketing based—and, above all, speculative.
Entrepreneurial city-builders such as Denver’s Latimer and Gilpin connected the city to the railroad, ensuring survival and future growth. Certainly, every new city had a city-builder, even the ghost towns. We read of the successful ones in our history. Interesting examples of entrepreneurial city-builders can be found in Tacoma Washington (Morton McCarver), Portland Oregon (Henry Corbett), Oakland California (F.M. Smith), San Diego (William Heath Davis) and—one the reader would never usually think of as a Privatist city builder-booster—Brigham Young (Salt Lake City). Citybuilders had their day, but the jurisdictional policy system moved on. Railroad influence over jurisdictions changed its character, and it slowly dissipated once the transportation link was made and the community became established. Local businessmen, the boosters, gradually took over. This is where the chamber comes in.
City-builders created coalitions, and oligarchies developed. Oligarchies institutionalized and became more mass-based: boards of trade and chambers followed and even unions might appear. The business community fragmented along sector lines, each sector establishing an autonomous organizational identity. The economic base could change dramatically and radically, setting in motion an enormous burst of growth. By the time these cities reached the threshold of thinking about becoming Big Cities, they had evolved their own heritage and path.
Involvement of a jurisdiction’s business community was essential to successful city-building. The citizenry has not yet arrived, or has not sunk roots sufficiently to participate meaningfully in policy-making. Businesspeople tied to the community by risk and by profit dominate city-building policy systems. City business elites cooperate, contest and eventually overturn the initial power of railroads/harbor interests—and they institutionalize the entrepreneurial city-builders. Once linked to a railroad, the issue quickly turns to railroad rates and service quality; that dialogue tends toward zero-sum. Entrepreneurial city-builders flame out or pass from the scene. Out-of-town corporate branch managers (mining/extraction industries especially) often will fight, or join forces with the railroads as self-interest dictates. City-building develops into a new, distinctive policy system phase in its life cycle:
As new “upstart” cities appeared in the newly colonized agricultural lands, their priorities were to attract people and investment as rapidly as possible. In its early stages, it was a process driven primarily by land speculation though other concerns gradually became more important, involved the boosters of these upstart places trumpeting their advantages, real and imagined, to any who would listen … As communities became more settled a wider range of more local interests became part of the boosterist ethos, selling their towns to potential settlers and investors. Prominent among such interests were the local newspaper editors who used their columns to proclaim and reinforce a spirit of progress and enterprise. Local businessmen of all kinds vigorously promoted their towns, increasingly through collective bodies such as local Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce and Town Councils. (Ward, 1998, p. 9 and Chap. 2)
Unlike their eastern counterparts, western chambers are not one-percenters or industrialists. Western city-building business elites form around newspapers and regional financial institutions. Downtown “merchants” provide spirit and numerical dominance. There are few (Progressive) professional elites (law, architecture) in the early western city. Homesteading and entrepreneurism in these fledgling, sparsely populated urban centers deprived Progressivism of much of its purpose, and most of its constituency. A weakened Progressive business elite made way for “cowboy Privatism.” Cowboy Privatism was characterized by the politics of closed business elite/sparsely populated urban areas. Maybe I’ve been watching too many John Wayne movies, but in the early New England town the town meeting was in the church; in the West it was more likely to be in the saloon.
Described by Blaine Brownell as a “commercial-civic elite,” by David Goldfield as “progress and tradition” or by Richard M. Bernard as “growth without social change,” the early city-building policy system pursued economic development objectives defined by its business community, supported by a weak, business-dominated political class. There was no such thing as a bureaucracy—unless Wyatt Earp and his brothers can be considered a bureaucracy. Boosterism advocated by these small business elites, if successful, brought in considerable numbers of residents. Certainly, this was ED intended to achieve growth; this business coalition can unashamedly be described as a “growth coalition.”
City-Building: Beyond Boosterism
City-building as a concept operates on two levels: it is a phase of a city’s life cycle (assuming such exists); and it is an ED strategy which includes several sub-strategies, such as attraction (both people and business), institution-building, infrastructure and entrepreneurism, and easily includes the lowest levels of the Maslowian needs hierarchy (law and order, for example) and basic quality of life (a theater). One might be wary of mindlessly conflating the two. How the city-building phase can be anything other than about growth is, to me, inescapable. Growth is not just gross national product (GNP); it is more likely to be a growth in population that is most valued. That economic development would be a highly valued policy area in this phase seems also logical.
If both people and economic growth are implied in the city-building stage, then an entirely new dimension to community development is opened up. Tourism is people attraction, but citizen-attraction is more than that; citizen attraction is a Privatist form of community development that directly taps into our driver of ED, population mobility. In any case, the pace of western urban growth was both uneven (some cities proved to be population magnets, others not so) and temporally unpredictable. The population path was also distinctive. Los Angeles did not attract the same ethnic and cultural groups as did San Francisco, for example. The diffusion of political culture continued patterns first evidenced in the Midwest and South Central city-building phase. The Great Plains states to Denver almost became a population transshipment point.
In any case, a great deal of this chapter’s discussion has focused more on the city-building phase than on the strategy. The strategy exists and operates within the context and environment of the city-building phase. It is evident there are many kinds of city-builders. An Ogden or Larimer can also be a Union Pacific Railroad—or even a land speculation company. We have attempted to demonstrate how the economy of the “little” city can develop into a more conventional market economy—and, in so doing, develop the initial jurisdictional economic base. In the case of western cities that meant inviting the firms and capital of the eastern hegemony to “come on in.” Mining/timber companies didn’t waste any time, and neither did some branch manufacturing. But mostly consumer-driven service/finance firms settled in to milk new markets. As the early city matures a business community forms, establishes key vehicles such as chambers and, if large enough, a real estate exchange or local trade association/ exchange. These groups will inherit dominance from the city-builders and, in the railroad’s case, seek to develop economic autonomy to foster growth and profits. That this business ED involvement, cowboy Privatism, has been collapsed into a simple and mindless, local hick, greed-based boosterism is unfortunate.
Western city-building overlapped with “New South” city-building; but, as described in the last chapter, the latter is not identical to western city-building. The South had an existing workforce, raw materials and plenty of new markets to exploit. The railroads gave it first priority, and manufacturing firms of hegemonic Big Cities knew opportunity when they saw it. They would see it in Los Angeles to be sure; but, Pacific cities aside, manufacturing dispersion was markedly less in western cities. Texas, dancing to its own more isolated and autonomous geography, evolved more on its own terms. In the South the divided Redeemer policy system and the distinctive political culture, plus being home to 95 percent of African-Americans, created a distinctly different setting than anything found in the Wild West. If anything, the South lost population—the West was “undividedly” in growth mode.
Ron W. Coan 