"Evolution and Transformation: The American Industrial Metropolis, 1840-1940" Sam Bass Warner Editors' Introduction • Perhaps no place and time of urban history has been more exhaustively studied than the cities of the United States during the industrial transformation and after - that is, during the period from the mid-nineteenth century when industrial enterprises, which had originated in Europe, began to secure a foothold in North America to the period in the mid-twentieth century when the United States became a world power and its cities were regarded as the paradigm examples of advanced, "modem" urbanism. It was an extraordinary period of rapid transformation, both socially and technologically, and it is the subject of Sam Bass Warner's "Evolution and Transformation: The American Industrial Metropolis, 1840-1 940," an essay specially prepared for this edition of The City Reader. Warner summarizes the broad range of areas in which the very terms of urban life changed during the century after the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Among these were economic cycles of boom and bust culminating in the Great Depression of the 1930s, new types of power (from the muscle power of men and animals to water, steam, and electricity) and new types of transportation (from walking and horse-drawn wagons to railroads, inter­ urban tramways, and the first appearance of those extraordinary new machines, the truck and the personal automobile). He notes that these new technologies and economic changes led the way toward new urban spatial · arrangements - inner-city neighborhoods, suburbs, specialized industrial districts, and commercial downtowns with their department stores and soaring skyscrapers. He also notes the extraordinary, and often unexpected, social .transformations that accompanied and intertwined with these other developments. Among these were the . cultural accommodation of massive waves of foreign immigration, the growing power of labor unions, voting and employment rights for women, and the beginnings of the more gradual process of full enfranchisement for African Americans that began with emancipation after the Civil War and continued through decades of Jim Crow eegregation, discrimination, and inequality. Born and raised in Boston, Sam Bass Warner graduated from Harvard in 1950, took a master's degree in jovmalism from Boston University, and received his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1959. What followed was a career as a teacher and scholar that would include professorships at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Michigan, Boston University, Brandeis University and, since 1 994, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along the way, he has been awarded fellowships at Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has also served as a member of the Advisory Council of the United States National Amliives, the National Research Council, and the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research and has been • member of the Executive Committee of the Organization of American Historians and President of the Urban liiatOfY Association. Warner's exceptionally distinguished career has been based on his skills as a teacher and mentor and on a · of books that place him in the first rank of historians of the city as a unique social, technological, and SAM BASS WARN ER organizational complex central to the human experience. His first book, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universi ty Press. 1962). broke new ground by radically expanding the common understanding of suburban growth away from a narrow post-W orld W ar II, automobile­ based phenomenon toward a more hi storically accurate view of the role that streetcar systems played, as early as the 1870s, in decentralizing the dense central cities. creating new resi dential options for the urban middle class, and thereby contributing to increased class segregation in American society . Streetcar Suburbs made a strong plea for better, more socially conscious planning in urban America, and Warner's next book was an influential edited volume, Planning for a Nation of Cities (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press. 1966). That book was followed in 1968 by The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsy lvania Press, 1968), a masterful study of both the successes and failures of private enterprise and private philanthropy a6 the primary forces behind nineteenth -century American urban development. Four years later, Warner published The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), a sweeping overview that returned to his heartfelt themes: change as the one constant in the process of urban growth and i !; th e need for socially conscious pl anning. One reviewer called the book "a domestic policy brief," and urban historian Richard C. Wade wrote that The Urban Wilderness "is not a history of American cities, but rather a discussion of the need to transform them." Other books by Sam Bass Warner include The Way We Really Live: S ocial Change in Metropolitan Boston since 1920 (Boston, MA: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston: 1977), To Dwell is to Garden: A History of Boston's Community Gardens, with Hansi Durlach (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1987), Greater Boston: Adapting Regional Traditions to the Present (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001 ), and Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions, with Lawrence J. Vale (New Brunswick, NJ: Cen ter for Urban Research, Policy, 2001 ). Appended to Warner's "Evolution and Transformation: The American Industrial Metropolis, 1840-1940," is an annotated list of the major sources that the author relied on in preparing this essay for The City Reader. Needless to say, the literature on nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban development is vast, and no brief list can do justice to its breadth and depth. For a world perspective, the best place to start is Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1961 ) an d Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (New York: Pantheor;, 1998). Also of interest is Joel Kotkin 's brief but stimulating The City: A Global History (New York: Random House, 2005). For the American perspective, consult Howard Chudacoff, Peter Baldwin, and Thomas Paterson, Major Problems in American Urban and Suburban History, 2nd edn (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004), Raymond Mohl, Th e New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860-1920 (Wheeling, IL: Harl an Davidson, 1985), and David R. Goldfield (ed.), En cyclopedia of American Urb an History (two vols, New York: Sage, 2006). Never before in human history had people built a to an industrial one. so during the 1920s a wholly new society based upon steam-powered machines. urban society began to emerge. Friedrich Engels saw the beginnings of this process A parade of surprises characterize d the century. at its early stages. His was the moment when the Basic changes in the energy available to the city. first gathering of mechanized factori es established large steam and then electri ci ty, transformed the form of cities. He could not have known in l 844 th at as the urban se ttlement and the life within it. How migh t the process unfolded. all of England. and all modern anyone have imagined a city of lights. a downtown nations. would come to be organized by huge industrial and the crowds on its streets. a city of skyscrapers and metropolises of more than a million inhabitants. miles and miles of small houses? Thes e obvious This essay will pick up rhe story of the American surprises merely record the surface of ch ange because industrial metropolis in the years after 1840. It will tech nology. social and cu ltural in vention. politics. and follow its path of development in two stages rhe years historical inh enrances interact in complicated vvays ro l 920 and the years from 1920 ro i 940. Just as Engels A water pipe and a light bulb and a steel building picked up rhe sto1y of the merchant economy turning irarne are but the roois of complex social and cuiwral "THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS, 1840-1940" inventio n. The railroad and the steamship made the manufactures - like steel and pipes and shi pya rds American industrial metropolis into a crossroads fo r fo r iron and steel ships - brought with it an increase in the young people of Europe. This abundance of the proporti on of unskill ed laborers as opposed to youthful hands revived a system of garment manu­ craftsmen. fac ture as old as Shakespeare's ta ilor. Manufacturers Thus from l 840 to about 1920 during th is maj or gave out materials for famili es to sew and assemble surge of industrialization. every newcomer to the city in their own rooms. ln th is way international trans­ represented a gain. a fresh addition of a little biopower po rtation fostered the tenement sweatshop, but the to the human settlem en t. Yet, until the twentieth newcomers· unio ns gave the city new voices and fresh century, the city quite literally consumed young people expectations. These same machines. the railroad and and children. It injured and killed young men and th e steamshi p, connected and interconnected with all women workers with industrial accid ents and pollu­ manner of business institutions ofAnance. manufacture ta nts, malnutrition. overc rowded housing and disease. and marketing to press down upon American society [t kill ed child ren faster than they could be born. No and its ci ties a completely unstable economy th at large nineteenth-century city in the world could sustain alternated booms with dangerous economic collapse.