University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 "Citizens In The Making": Black Philadelphians, The Republican Party And Urban Reform, 1885-1913 Julie Davidow University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Davidow, Julie, ""Citizens In The Making": Black Philadelphians, The Republican Party And Urban Reform, 1885-1913" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2247. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2247 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2247 For more information, please contact [email protected]. "Citizens In The Making": Black Philadelphians, The Republican Party And Urban Reform, 1885-1913 Abstract “Citizens in the Making” broadens the scope of historical treatments of black politics at the end of the nineteenth century by shifting the focus of electoral battles away from the South, where states wrote disfranchisement into their constitutions. Philadelphia offers a municipal-level perspective on the relationship between African Americans, the Republican Party, and political and social reformers, but the implications of this study reach beyond one city to shed light on a nationwide effort to degrade and diminish black citizenship. I argue that black citizenship was constructed as alien and foreign in the urban North in the last decades of the nineteenth century and that this process operated in tension with and undermined the efforts of black Philadelphians to gain traction on their exercise of the franchise. For black Philadelphians at the end of the nineteenth century, the franchise did not seem doomed or secure anywhere in the nation. Black Philadelphians pressed the Republican Party for the rights of citizenship as well as the spoils of partisanship, even as Republican enthusiasm for black rights waned and an energetic political reform movement defined black Philadelphians as unqualified for citizenship. “Citizens in the Making” shows how black participation and activism in municipal politics kept the local, state and, to some extent, the national Republican Party tethered to black constituencies and racial politics long after Reconstruction officially ended in 1877 with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. This study uses published and unpublished sources, including records from political and social reform organizations, the personal papers of white and black reformers, newspapers, court and church records. It reveals a consistent effort on the part of black Philadelphians to bring the rights of national citizenship to bear on the city’s politics. Philadelphia’s disproportionately large and rapidly growing black population makes the city a useful starting point for demonstrating how the priorities of the Republican Party evolved after Reconstruction, rather than taking as a given the party’s disinterest in the fate of black citizens. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group History First Advisor Steve Hahn Keywords African American History, Political History Subject Categories United States History This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2247 “CITIZENS IN THE MAKING”: BLACK PHILADELPHIANS, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND URBAN REFORM, 1885-1913 Julie Rebecca Davidow A DISSERTATION in History Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________________ Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History Emeritus Graduate Group Chairperson _______________________ Peter Holquist, Associate Professor of History Dissertation Committee Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania Stephanie McCurry, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Columbia University Thomas J. Sugrue, Professor of History and Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University “CITIZENS IN THE MAKING”: BLACK PHILADELPHIANS, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AND URBAN REFORM, 1885-1913 COPYRIGHT 2017 Julie Rebecca Davidow This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ To Marcelo iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS By far the greatest joy of finishing my dissertation is the opportunity to thank the people who supported me throughout. I entered graduate school for the first time in 1995 at the University of California, San Diego, intending to focus on the twentieth century. Instead, I encountered the work and teaching of Steve Hahn and Stephanie McCurry. They taught me new ways to think about the past and drew me into the nineteenth century. After an eight-year interlude as a newspaper reporter, I took up my graduate studies again at the University of Pennsylvania, this time to work directly with Steve and Stephanie. Having Steve as my advisor was a great privilege. The big questions he asked never failed to enliven my work and broaden my ambitions. I am grateful for the years he stuck with me and my project despite numerous obstacles along the way. I thank my committee. Stephanie brings fresh questions to well-worn topics and inspires and challenges her students to do the same. She sets the highest standard for discipline and rigor, which always pushed me to do more and aim higher. The research paper I wrote for her seminar evolved into one of my dissertation chapters in large part due to her close reading and incisive comments. My meetings with Tom Sugrue to discuss African American urban political history shaped my understanding of the literature and were crucial for helping me define where and how I wanted to intervene. iv Along the way, I had the pleasure of working with Benjamin Nathans, Kathy Peiss, and Walter Licht, each of whom provided critical feedback in the early days of my project, when my unformed ideas needed it the most. Phoebe Kropp offered reassuring words and loaned me her office while I was studying for exams. As a teacher and scholar, Sheldon Hackney modeled intellectual rigor, generosity and good will. I am beyond grateful for the time I spent in a seminar on the South he co-taught with Steve and for the opportunity to work as his teaching assistant. I am grateful for funding from the Mellon Foundation; the Center for the Study of the History of Nursing; the Hagley Center of Business, Technology and Society; the Doris G. Quinn Foundation; and the University of Pennsylvania. I was also fortunate to participate in several academic conferences, all of which challenged me to think about my project in new ways and greatly improved my dissertation. For these opportunities, I thank the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Pennsylvania State University, the Urban History Association, the American Historical Association, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies of the University of Pennsylvania. I am especially grateful to the archivists, staff, faculty, and students at Penn’s Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, who warmly welcomed me into the fold as a researcher and provided an invaluable forum for presenting my work. Beyond Penn, Roger Lane generously loaned me his personal microfilm copies (and a microfilm reader!) of the William Dorsey scrapbook collection. Lisa G. Materson and Joe William Trotter, Jr.’s careful reading and comments helped transform a conference paper I presented at the AHA into a forthcoming journal article. v In the decade plus since I started at Penn, I moved across the country four times – Seattle to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to Oakland, Oakland to New York and New York back to Seattle. Each move felt at the time a little like a loss, but I realize now that I had to live all over the place to find the most amazing friends. My “team,” Julia Gunn and Merlin Chowkwanyun, provided a priceless mix of friendship, humor and intellectual exchange in the final months of dissertation work when I wondered if I would ever finish. I consider our team text threads the secret sauce of my dissertation. Merlin read drafts and offered detailed, insightful comments. His feedback and practical tips for conquering academic milestones gave me the confidence and tools to power through. Julia’s fierce loyalty and readiness to jump in whenever needed have been a rare and vital source of comfort and support since the day we met during our first year at Penn. For all the ways their friendship supported and delighted me at the University of Pennsylvania, I thank Dan Amsterdam, Heather Bennett, Erin Park Cohn, Jack Dwiggins, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, Richara Heyward, John Kenney, Will Kuby, Jessica Lautin, Andrew Lipman, Jaffa Panken, Yaroslav Prykhodko, and Chase Richards. Special thanks to the nineteenth century reading group, including Mark Brennan, Jo Cohen, Matt Karp, Sarah Manekin, Eric Mathisen, Sarah Rodriguez, and Nicole Myers Turner. Julia Gunn, Reena Vaidya Krishna and Katrin Schreiter were my closest confidants and dearest friends throughout graduate school. We live on different continents and coasts now, but I still hold them close. Beyond Penn’s campus, Lisa, Louis, Layla and Max Miller are family. Spending an evening with Lisa Miller is like taking a master class in warmth, creativity, and strength. Tanalis Padilla and Robert Herr vi offer humor, compassion, devoted friendship, and invaluable perspective from the other side of life in graduate school. I’ve relied on Leah Schmerl’s brilliant and hilarious commentary on everything from pop culture to politics since we met at UC San Diego. In my experience, and contrary to current popular opinion, journalists are the funniest, smartest and most empathetic people around. Watching my son Marcelo become best friends with the kids of my former fellow reporters, mostly from the (now- defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is one of the happiest and most unexpected gifts I’ve received.