The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter

Author:Richard Hofstadter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307809643
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-15T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER V

THE PROGRESSIVE IMPULSE

I . The Urban Scene

From 1860 to 1910, towns and cities sprouted up with miraculous rapidity all over the United States. Large cities grew into great metropolises, small towns grew into large cities, and new towns sprang into existence on vacant land. While the rural population almost doubled during this half century, the urban population multiplied almost seven times. Places with more than 50,000 inhabitants increased in number from 16 to 109.1 The larger cities of the Middle West grew wildly. Chicago more than doubled its population in the single decade from 1880 to 1890, while the Twin Cities trebled theirs, and others like Detroit, Milwaukee, Columbus, and Cleveland increased from sixty to eighty per cent.2

The city, with its immense need for new facilities in transportation, sanitation, policing, light, gas, and public structures, offered a magnificent internal market for American business. And business looked for the sure thing, for privileges, above all for profitable franchises and for opportunities to evade as much as possible of the burden of taxation. The urban boss, a dealer in public privileges who could also command public support, became a more important and more powerful figure. With him came that train of evils which so much preoccupied the liberal muckraking mind: the bartering of franchises, the building of tight urban political machines, the marshaling of hundreds of thousands of ignorant voters, the exacerbation of poverty and slums, the absence or excessive cost of municipal services, the co-operation between politics and “commercialized vice”—in short, the entire system of underground government and open squalor that provided such a rich field for the crusading journalists.

Even with the best traditions of public administration, the complex and constantly changing problems created by city growth would have been enormously difficult. Cities throughout the industrial world grew rapidly, almost as rapidly as those of the United States. But a great many of the European cities had histories stretching back hundreds of years before the founding of the first white village in North America, and therefore had traditions of government and administration that predated the age of unrestricted private enterprise. While they too were disfigured and brutalized by industrialism, they often managed to set examples of local administration and municipal planning that American students of municipal life envied and hoped to copy.3 American cities, springing into life out of mere villages, often organized around nothing but the mill, the factory, or the railroad, peopled by a heterogeneous and mobile population, and drawing upon no settled governing classes for administrative experience, found the pace of their growth far out of proportion to their capacity for management. “The problem in America,” said Seth Low, “has been to make a great city in a few years out of nothing.”4

The combination of underdeveloped traditions of management and mushroom growth put a premium on quick, short-range improvisation and on action without regard for considered rules—a situation ideal for the development of the city boss and informal government. The consequences were in truth dismal. Lord Bryce thought that the government of cities was “the one conspicuous failure of the United States.

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