Intellectuals, Cities, and Citizenship in the United States: The 1890s and 1990s

Thomas Bender

Through most of the twentieth century, the nation has been the domain of citizenship, and social politics has been associated with the national welfare state. But such was not always the case. A century ago in the United States, the city provided a vital platform for men and women to think themselves into politics, to make themselves into citizens, to initiate a social politics. In the decade of the 1890s, reformers, journalists, and academic intellectuals (a cluster not so differentiated then as now) thought urban democracy possible, even necessary. They were able to imagine the city, in the words of Frederick C. Howe (1905), a leader of the movement, as "the hope of democracy."

Though my intention is to recall that moment and movement, I do not want to associate myself with those who speak loosely about the dissolution of the nation-state in the contemporary world. It would be a mistake to underestimate the continuing capacity of the national state to sustain citizenship and to nurture social welfare. Yet there has been a realignment of the relations and powers of cities and nations, and that circumstance invites a reconsideration of the city as a site for a politics that addresses the social consequences of the present phase of global capitalism, manifestations of social change dramatically inscribed in the physical form and daily life of cities. How might the city, then, be a site that opens up political possibilities and empowers men and women as citizens?

A century ago such inquiry was the work of the fledgling social science disciplines, particularly political science. Today, political science and the social sciences generally are less attentive to the particularity of time and place or, to be more specific, to the city. Looking backward, however, we discover a generation of academic intellectuals who were engaged with urban questions. That engagement proved fruitful to their professional agenda of disciplinary development, infusing a formal and abstract discipline with both vitality and realism, while it sustained a sense of civic participation that enriched the political culture of the city and extended urban democracy. I am not proposing that the city is permanently available for such political work; my point is simply that a certain mobility of such political sites exists and that historical circumstances may in any given instance favor cities. Such was the case in the 1890s in the United States, and in the 1990s cities may again have a special role in defining a social politics.

After some account of the relation of academic social science, particularly political science, to late-nineteenth-century social reform, I turn to the specific history of the reform movement for urban "home rule," which was a campaign to win political as well as administrative powers for the city. That quest forged an alliance between political scientists and urban reformers. I try to specify the circumstances and chronology of this moment in American political history, ending with some observations on the relevance of that history to our own historical moment.

The emerging social sciences provided a new language for reform, one stressing social connection and interdependence. After experiencing new levels of interdependence during the Civil War and in growing cities, Americans found in the language of the social, on which the new social sciences were being built, a better way to describe and explain the world around them. The idea of social causation weakened the hold of those notions of individual agency that were articles of faith for Americans in the middle third of the nineteenth century. In Europe and America, the social sciences developed in a dialectical relationship to the massive social transformations driven by industrial capitalism: social explanation was both a product of new experience and a way of understanding that new experience. Indeed, to explain and manage that society was the raison d'etre of these new disciplines.

Although one can speak of the social sciences as a single movement of thought in the nineteenth century, there were important distinctions among them, and they approached the task of explanation and management in different ways, with different dialects. Economics was the first of these new social sciences to professionalize in the United States, and in the 1880s economists supplied a method of historical economics that enabled reformers to enter the troubling question of the political economy of labor and capital in a new way. By playing down ideology and shifting the ground from the formal and deductive approach favored by theorists of laissez-faire, the historical economists, relying on empirical and historicist claims, intervened with significant effect, arguing for historically specific and strategic interventions in the economy.

Gradually, however, the focus and language of reform changed. The new society increasingly became identified with the city rather than with the conflict between labor and capital, which generally did not have a geographical referent. Sociologists claimed the city, a novel "social aggregation," as their subject. Sociology and social reform were nearly assimilated the one to the other, especially at Chicago, where Albion Small created the first sociology department in the United States. But with their focus on civil society and voluntary action, the sociologists in the end offered little access to politics, a matter of significance because the social concerns of the era were increasingly being understood in terms of a politics, a new social politics.

During the 1890s and 1900s, in the first years of the intellectual and political movement that assumed the name Progressivim, political scientists, following the lead of Columbia's Frank Goodnow, achieved primacy for the language of politics as a means of addressing the social implications of industrial capitalism as they revealed themselves in the city. In the phrasing of Goodnow ([1904] 1910: 21), "the city must be studied not merely from the sociological point of view, but also from the political point of view: the city is not merely an urban community, a social fact; it is also a political organization."

The challenge for a generation of ambitious political scientists was to bring the city into a general theory of democratic politics. To Frederick C. Howe, "The city [had] grown more rapidly than social science," and it "is what it is because political thought has not kept pace with changing conditions" (1915: 6)....