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The Burdens of Urban History: The Theory of the State in Recent American Social History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Terrence J. Mcdonald
Terrence J. Mcdonald
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Louis Hartz summed up the mission of his historical generation when he wrote, as part of the rationale for The Liberal Tradition in 1955, that “the way to fully refute a man is to ignore him … and the only way you can do this is to substitute new fundamental categories for his own, so that you are simply pursuing a different path.” Hartz was referring to the influence of Charles Beard and what Hartz called the “frustration that the persistence of the Progressive analysis of America has inspired.” He was arguing that his generation had to stop honoring the progressives by contending with them; the key to destroying their interpretation of American history was the reinvention of American history by means of new conceptual tools.

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Forum
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Studies in American Political Development , Volume 3 , Spring 1989 , pp. 3 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

This essay was originally presented at the 1987 meeting of the Social Science History Association. It was greatly improved by detailed comments by the editors of this journal, by professors Margaret Somers and Michael Dawson of the University of Michigan, and by Professor J. Morgan Kousser of the California Institute of Technology. The time for writing the essay was provided by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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3. Ibid., 443.

4. Tyrell, Ian, The Absent Marx: Class Analysis and Liberal History in Twentieth Century America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 101Google Scholar. This is an excellent consideration of some of the same issues raised in this essay that is marred only by its ahistorical assumption that the problems in liberal historiography would have been solved by a dialogue with Marxism.

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13. Useful overviews of the intellectual history of these years include Purcell, Edward A., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Wald, Alan, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Leftfrom the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Fowler, Robert Booth, Believing Skeptics: American Political Intellectuals, 1945–1964 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Pells, Richard, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)Google Scholar.

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17. Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1888), 2:75–76Google Scholar. For useful studies of this generation of political science, see also Crick, BernardThe American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 73–118Google Scholar, and Seidelman, Raymond and Harpham, Edward J., Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 60–158Google Scholar. Hammack, David discusses the thought of this generation of urban analysts in “Problems in the Historical Study of Power in the Cities and Towns of the United States, 1860–1960,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 323–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Herring, E. Pendleton, The Politics of Democracy: American Parties in Action (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940), xGoogle Scholar.

19. Ibid., 136; for brief accounts of the impact of this book see Purcell, Crisis, 190, and Ricci, Tragedy, 110–111. Schattschneider's review is quoted in Purcell.

20. Friedrichs, Robert W., A Sociology of Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1972), 11–56Google Scholar; For another discussion of this change, see Bernstein, Richard J., The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

21. Chapin, F. Stuart, Contemporary American Institutions: A Sociological Analysis (New York: Harper Brothers, 1935), 27–48Google Scholar.

22. In spite of—perhaps because of?—his influence in the construction of recent American social science, Merton's work has been very little evaluated. See Bierstadt, Robert, American Sociological Theory: A Critical History (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 443–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sztompka, Piotr, Robert K. Merton: An Intellectual Profile (London: Macmillan, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. , Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure: Toward the Codification of Theory and Research (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1949)Google Scholar.

23. Merton, Social Theory, 61–81.

24. Ryan, Alan, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1970), 189–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Merton, Social Theory, 73. Merton noted there that he took his understanding of these functions from Chapin. I have discussed Merton's theory of latent functions and its effects on American urban political history in more detail in McDonald, Terrence J., “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History: Liberal Pluralism and the Rise of Functionalism,” Social History 10 (1985): 323–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage, 1955), 14Google Scholar; Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1951)Google Scholar.

27. Handlin, Uprooted, 210–13, 226; Hofstadter, The Age, 183, 9, 316. Cf. McDonald, “The Problem of the Political,” 331–33.

28. Merton, Social Theory, 372n97; Handlin, Uprooted, 226; Hofstadter, Age, 5–22.

29. Lowi, Theodore, At the Pleasure of the Mayor: Patronage and Power in New York City, 1898–1958 (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1964), 179–80Google Scholar; Banfield, Edward C. and Wilson, James Q., City Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 126Google Scholar. The influence of these authors on the conception of urban politics among political scientists has been powerful. One prominent political scientist who has resisted aspects of the machine framework is Paul E. Peterson. See , Peterson, The Politics of School Reform, 1870–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

30. Their programmatic statements—essays written in the period from the late fifties through the sixties, for the most part—are collected in , Benson, Toward the Scientific Study of History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972)Google Scholar, and , Hays, American Political History as Social Analysis (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Benson's social scientific mentor was Paul Lazarsfeld; Hays reports he was most influenced by Merton. Both Lazarsfeld and Merton were at the famous Department of Sociology at Columbia in these years.

31. Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 272–73Google Scholar.

32. Ibid., 276, 281; , Benson, “Marx's General and Middle Range Theories of Social Conflict,” in Merton, Robert K., Coleman, James S., and Rossi, Peter H., eds., Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research: Papers in Honor of Paul F. Lazarsfeld (New York: Free Press, 1979), 189–209Google Scholar. Merton's essays on reference groups were included in the 1957 edition of Social Theory and Social Structure, 225–387.

33. Sztompka, Merton, 230; Bierstadt, Theory, 443–89.

34. Hays's, criticism of Hofstadter is in “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (1964): 157–69Google Scholar.

35. , Hays, “The Social Analysis of American Political History, 1880–1920,” Political Science Quarterly 80 (1965): 373–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Merton's essay on local and cosmopolitan influentials was also included in the 1957 edition of Social Theory and Social Structure. I have considered Hays's use of these categories in more detail in McDonald, “The Problem of the Political,” 339–342.

36. , Hays, “The Changing Political Structure of the City in Industrial America,” Journal of Urban History 1 (1974): 1–32Google Scholar.

37. Jensen, Richard, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888–1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 58Google Scholar; Kleppner, Paul, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New York: Free Press, 1970), 35Google Scholar. Jensen, Richard, “Historiography of American Political History,” in Greene, Jack P., ed., Encyclopedia of American Political History (New York: Scribners, 1984), 1:1–25Google Scholar

38. McCormick, Richard L. has made this point in a thoughtful review of this literature, “Ethnocultural Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century American Voting Behavior,” in , McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29–63Google Scholar.

39. These critiques include Kousser, J. Morgan, “The ‘New Political History’: A Methodological Critique,” Reviews in American History 4 (1976): 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kousser, and Lichtman, Allan J., “‘New Political History’: Some Statistical Questions Answered,” Social Science History 7 (1983): 321–44Google Scholar; , Lichtman, “Political Realignment and ‘Ethnocultural’ Voting in Late Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of Social History 16 (1983): 55–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; , Kousser, “Voters Absent and Present,” Social Science History 9 (1985): 215–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Again, volumes have been written about pluralism but much less on Dahl himself, who was, arguably, the political scientist most read by historians of this generation. Edward Purcell considers him to be “perhaps the most influential and persuasive advocate of a more realistic democratic theory” (Purcell, Crisis, 260.)

41. Dahl, Robert A., A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 132Google Scholar.

42. Dahl, Robert A., Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961)Google Scholar. These arguments are not original with Dahl or restricted to his work. But they were presented in a way that had particular appeal for historians because it was both historical and, apparently, empirical.

43. Ibid., 30, 35.

44. Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964)Google Scholar. This analysis of the political framework of Thernstrom's book helps clarify a point on which there has been much confusion among historians: how a work of avowedly “history from the bottom up” could have such consensual implications.

45. Tyrell, The Absent Marx, 102–03.

46. Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress, 181–82; 271n41.

47. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966)Google Scholar.

48. Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 219Google Scholar. For Dawley's use of Dahl, see 293n6.

49. Walkowitz, Daniel, Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855–84 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 253–55Google Scholar; Hirsch, Susan, Roots of the American Working Class: The Industrialization of Crafts in Newark, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 109–31Google Scholar.

50. Wright, Erik O., “The Status of the Political in the Concept of Class Structure,” Politics and Society 11 (1982), 321–341CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miliband, Ralph, Marxism and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

51. Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

52. For a useful consideration of the problems of such conflation of theories, see Alford, Robert R. and Friedland, Roger, Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State, and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Skocpol has made these points in various places; see “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal,” Politics and Society 10 (1980): 199–200; and Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing, 4–6.

54. McCormick, Party Period, 55–63.

55. For a useful survey of the issues these studies raise for political history, see Richard L. McCormick, “The Social Analysis of American Political History—After Twenty Years,” in McCormick, Party Period, 89–140.

56. For general surveys of these issues, see, among others, Heale, M. J., The Making of American Politics 1750–1850 (London: Longman, 1977)Google Scholar, and Keller, Morton, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. Studies emphasizing party ideology include, among others, Ashworth, John, ‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats’: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

58. For background to these conflicts, see Yearley, C. K., The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, I860–1920 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Thornton, J. Mills, “Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Reconstruction in the Lower South,” in Kousser, J. Morgan and McPherson, James M., eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 349–94Google Scholar; Monkkonen, Eric, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1790–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press), forthcomingGoogle Scholar.

59. I have discussed the issue of urban fiscal politics more extensively in other places, including McDonald, Terrence J. and Ward, Sally K., eds., The Politics of Urban Fiscal Policy (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1984)Google Scholar; , McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860–1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; McDonald “The History of Urban Fiscal Politics in America, 1830–1930: What Was Supposed to Be versus What Was and the Difference It Makes,” International Journal of Public Administration, forthcoming. Cf. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban.

60. For discussions of the rates and implications of homeownership, see Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress; Zunz, Olivier, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar; McDonald. Parameters.

61. Examples of this new work in urban political history would include Teaford, Jon C., The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; , Teaford, “Finis for Tweed and Steffens: Rewriting the History of Urban Rule,” Reviews in American History 10(1982):143–53Google Scholar; M. Craig Brown and Charles N. Halaby, “Bosses, Reform, and the Socioeconomic Bases of Urban Expenditure, 1880–1940,” in Mc-Donald and Ward, eds., The Politics of Urban Fiscal Policy, 69–100; McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy. For another call for a more general restoration of political history, see J. Morgan Kousser, “Toward ‘Total Political History’,” Social Science Working Paper no.581, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology.

62. Hammack, David C., Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982)Google Scholar.