University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2013 The Mobocratic City: Race, Space and Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia Andrew Crocco University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, Communication Commons, and the History Commons Recommended Citation Crocco, Andrew, "The Mobocratic City: Race, Space and Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 848. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/848 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/848 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Mobocratic City: Race, Space and Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia Abstract This dissertation focuses on publics and the public sphere to argue that communication theory should investigate connections across discourse, space, and practice in the creation and maintenance of publics. I chose antebellum Philadelphia as my test case for two reasons. First, theorists such as Jurgen Habermas have identified the antebellum period as the time when the public sphere ceased to be maintained through face-to-face relations and became connected by means of the news media. Second, tremendous social and political conflict also characterized this period when categories considered by communications theory to be discursively constructed, such as "race" and "nation," were contested and revised. The majority of archival evidence tells a different story, one in which spatial relations and material conditions defined the public, and the act of being in public was a contested mode of political communication. Antebellum Philadelphians attempted to define, shape, and communicate public opinion through the development of the material city and the spatial practices of its inhabitants. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Communication First Advisor Carolyn Marvin Keywords Cities, Place, Publics, Race, Riots, Space Subject Categories African American Studies | Communication | History This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/848 THE MOBOCRATIC CITY: RACE, SPACE AND CITIZENSHIP IN NINETEENTH CENTURY PHILADELPHIA Andrew Charles Crocco A DISSERTATION in Communication Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Supervisor of Dissertation __________________________ Carolyn Marvin Frances Yates Professor of Communication Graduate Group Chairperson __________________________ Joseph Turow Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication Dissertation Committee Carolyn Marvin, Frances Yates Professor of Communication John Jackson, Richard Perry University Professor of Communication Sharrona Pearl, Assistant Professor of Communication THE MOBOCRATIC CITY: RACE, SPACE AND CITIZENSHIP IN NINETEENTH CENTURY PHILADELPHIA COPYRIGHT 2013 Andrew Charles Crocco This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ny-sa/2.0/ Acknowledgment For their support, wisdom and friendship I’d like to thank Carolyn Marvin, John Jackson, Sharrona Pearl and Michael Delli Carpini; for their tireless work to inspire curiosity in me and give me the confidence to pursue it, my parents; for their love, patience and help keeping everything in perspective, Marisa and Sofia Crocco. iii ABSTRACT THE MOBOCRATIC CITY: RACE, SPACE AND CITIZENSHIP IN NINETEENTH CENTURY PHILADELPHIA Andrew Crocco Carolyn Marvin This dissertation focuses on publics and the public sphere to argue that communication theory should investigate connections across discourse, space, and practice in the creation and maintenance of publics. I chose antebellum Philadelphia as my test case for two reasons. First, theorists such as Jurgen Habermas have identified the antebellum period as the time when the public sphere ceased to be maintained through face-to-face relations and became connected by means of the news media. Second, tremendous social and political conflict also characterized this period when categories considered by communications theory to be discursively constructed, such as “race” and “nation,” were contested and revised. The majority of archival evidence tells a different story, one in which spatial relations and material conditions defined the public, and the act of being in public was a contested mode of political communication. Antebellum Philadelphians attempted to define, shape, and communicate public opinion through the development of the material city and the spatial practices of its inhabitants. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENT.......................................... III INTRODUCTION.............................................. 1 The Problem Structure Method CHAPTER 1: THE IDEAL CITY................................ 18 Penn & Holme’s Philadelphia Immigration, Urbanization and Transformation Ordering The Antebellum White Upper Class Built Environment Strangers’ Guides and the Idealized City Conclusion CHAPTER 2: THE DEGRADED PLACES: PHILADELPHIA’S CEDAR AND MOYAMENSING.............................................. 68 Material Geography of Otherness Theorizing Race in Philadelphia’s Slums Environmental Disorder Stench, Filth, and Contagious Living Conditions Conclusion CHAPTER 3: MOB VIOLENCE ENFORCES SPATIAL ORDER.......... 107 Purification Schemes National Culture of Public Violence Major Antebellum Riots in Philadelphia Academic Theories of Mobs and Riots v Spatial Publics CHAPTER 4: THE SPATIAL ORDER OF CITIZENSHIP............. 178 Black Disfranchisement in Pennsylvania African American Elite’s Response Public Disorderly Practices and the Affront to Philadelphia’s Sense of Self Drunkenness Violence Frank Webb’s The Garies Conclusion CONCLUSION.............................................. 238 The Spatial Republic BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................ 244 vi Introduction The Problem The field of Communication has traditionally understood culture as a set of symbolic practices that construct, maintain and transform the human perception of reality, principally achieved through language.1 This philosophy is called social construction. The bulk of communication research has focused on two modes, transmission and ritual, to conceptualize the manipulation of people, things and information across space, and the manipulation of symbols and signs to bind society together in time. However, social construction too easily reduces all life to language and symbolic systems. It has great difficulty explaining the durability of certain ideas and social relations, and has little to say about practice, materiality, and affect. It posits a world all too conveniently accessible for academic scholars, in which the entirety of experience is contained in thought and discourse. The construction metaphor itself seems ill suited to such immaterial applications. By contrast, environmental determinism overstates the environment’s causal influence on human behavior. Environmental determinists act according to the belief that by constructing cities to accord with certain aesthetic, civic, or economic principles, designers can encourage a desirable set of behaviors and worldviews in inhabitants. The perils of environmental determinism are the denial of human agency in response to environmental conditions and the problematic belief that clear laws explain how one stable variable interacts with another to produce a predictable and identifiable outcome. Despite these shortcomings, the environmental determinists were right about the fact that place does matter. The tensions between these two positions seem ripe for exploration. The potential benefit is a framework that simultaneously accounts for language, biology, 1 Carey, J. (1989) Culture as Communication. Berger & Luckmann. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. 1 and the material world, or people, things, and ideas, to state it slightly differently. Following John Law and Chris Otter, I argue that we cannot understand the social world if we separate the social, perceptual and material. We must consider them woven together into what Law calls a “materially heterogeneous” whole; what George Marcus and Erkan Saka call “a configuration of relationships among diverse sites and things;” and Bruno Latour calls the “entanglement” of things and people.2 This dissertation focuses on publics and the public sphere to argue that communication theory should abandon its narrow focus on discursive constructions and investigate the connections across discourse, space, and practice in the creation and maintenance of publics. I chose antebellum Philadelphia as my test case for two reasons. First, theorists such as Jurgen Habermas have identified the antebellum period as the time when the public sphere ceased to be maintained through face-to- face relations and became connected by means of the news media. Second, tremendous social and political conflict also characterized this period when categories considered by communications theory to be discursively constructed, such as “race” and “nation,” were contested and revised. The majority of archival evidence tells a different story, one in which spatial relations and material conditions defined the public, and