“LIFE WAS DOING SOMETHING NEW”: THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN METROPOLIS, 1870-1920 Graham Wooten Culbertson A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment for the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: John McGowan Jane F. Thrailkill Gregory Flaxman Matthew Taylor Robert Cantwell ABSTRACT GRAHAM CULBERTSON: “Life Was Doing Something New”: The Making of the American Metropolis, 1870-1920 (Under the direction of John McGowan and Jane F. Thrailkill) This dissertation seeks to shed new light on the moment in American history when the U.S. became an urban nation. To that end, it marshals a diverse range of thinkers – including Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Burnham, Edith Wharton, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jacob Riis, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and Jane Addams – all of whom investigated the processes which shaped the cities in this era. The central conflict that emerges is the tension between rational planning and unpredictable evolutionary forces. Many of those who wrote about American cities in the Gilded and Progressive Ages chose to emphasize one isolated extreme – either the controllable nature of cities or the chaotic manner of their growth – while others sought to synthesize them. In each of the three major American cities that I have chosen to survey – Washington, D.C.; New York; and Chicago – this tension exists: the interplay between the unregulated flows of economic, political, and social capital and the various attempts to impose order on them. Expanding upon such historicist work as Walter Benn Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism and Jennifer Fleissner’s Women, Compulsion, Modernity, “Life Was Doing Something New” provides an interdisciplinary account of the birth of the American city, one that reveals the hitherto unrecognized ways realism and naturalism participated in larger debates about the new, industrial America and the forces shaping it. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………...v Chapter I. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….1 Chapter Summaries…………………………………………………………..17 II. WASHINGTON, D.C………………………………………………………..27 L’Enfant’s Plan: Building Unity out of Sectional Diversity…………………33 Henry Adams: In Praise of D.C.’s Southern Culture…………………...……46 Frederick Douglass’s New Black D.C………………………………….……64 The McMillan Commission and the Unity of Disunion……………………..76 III. NEW YORK……………………………………………………………...….90 The Custom of the Country: Multiple Cosmologies of the Visible………....104 “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns”: A Space for Benign Visibility…………………………………………………………....121 How the Other Half Lives: The Visibility of Poverty……………………....136 A Hazard of New Fortunes: The Realist Project of Middle-Class Visibility…………………………………………………………………...147 IV. CHICAGO………………………………………………………………….165 Dreiser’s The Titan: A Story of Capitalist Reform…………………………167 Jane Addams: Cooperative Reform Through a New Ethics………………..198 FIGURES………………………………………………………………………………………..…..228 iii WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………………..235 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1. Detail of L’Enfant’s Plan……………………………………………………....228 1.2. Current Tidal Basin………………………………………………………...….229 1.3. McMillan Plan……………………………………………………………..…..229 1.4. Jefferson’s original survey for D.C……………………………………………230 1.5. Negro Life at the South…………………………………………………….….231 1.6 Plan showing proposed method of laying out public grounds at Washington...231 2.1. 1863 Tenement floorplan………………………………………………………232 2.2. Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement – “five cents a spot.”…………233 3.1 Anti-Cowperwood handbill……………………………………………………234 v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is the product of nature, and particularly of human nature.” - Robert E. Park, 1925 As Theodore Dreiser put it in his 1914 novel The Titan, life was doing something new in the American cities of the Gilded and Progressive Ages. But if there is a single point of agreement shared by every thinker about every city in this work, it’s that the process had gone wrong. Those were transforming America and creating enormous wealth in the process, but they also created enormous suffering. Compared to the agrarian ideal that was embraced in the previous century, industrial cities were seen as filthy, dehumanizing spaces. And crucially, although the last century has seen amazing social and technological developments, the problems that cities faced from 1870 through 1920 remain similar to the problems we are facing today. In fact, the urban problems and solutions of that period are more relevant now than they had been since at least the end of World War II. As Richard White said in his 2011 book Railroaded, “The present seems so nineteenth century” (xxxiv). To put it a different way, nineteenth-century urban innovations, such as streetcars and city parks, are once again at the forefront of American urban planning. I belong to a generation that was not only largely raised in the suburbs and exurbs, but also was raised by a generation brought up in the same way. Three generations now – the Baby Boomers, Generation X, and the Millenials – experienced America as a suburban nation. That particular story – the Great Migration, White Flight, the GI Bill, the Eisenhower Interstates, Drive Till You Qualify, Subprime Mortgage Derivatives, etc – will not be rehashed here. What is interesting about that story, for my purposes, is the ending. For the first time in more than fifty years, the city has become the focus of the American way of life.1 Many of the most important questions of the twenty-first century have become about our cities: How tall should their buildings be? What should be their dominant mode of transportation? How can we integrate pedestrians and cyclists into our car-dominated landscape, and where can we eliminate cars altogether? How much should it cost to live in the city – and is there any way to make rent less damn high? What do we do with the wealth that cities create, and how much of that prosperity can and should be spread throughout the population? Most importantly, who or what – the market, the citizens, technocrats, bureaucrats, politicians, or some combination – will get to make all of these decisions? And lurking behind that last question: will any of these decisions even matter? Or will cities always resist humanity’s attempts to transform them through long-term planning? To distill it into the two most important issues: First, what do we want our cities to do, and how must they be organized to achieve that? Second, what can we do to bring about the cities that we desire? We must both choose the cities we want and find a way to make those cities into reality. These are the challenges facing urban theorists today, but these same challenges arose in the urban spaces of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. To shed new light on these questions, I have assembled a counter-history, or at least an addendum, to the traditional narrative of American urban planning. To that end, I marshal 1 Although it is too early to fully tell, it does seem that, as the demographer William H. Frey puts it, the decrease in exurban growth “raises the prospect that we may be reaching a ‘new normal’ about where people decide to locate.” Whereas the past three generations preferred the suburbs to the city, there is a distinct possibility that economic, environmental, and social forces acting on future generations “will change perceptions of where to find their version of the American Dream.” 2 a diverse range of thinkers – including Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Burnham, Edith Wharton, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jacob Riis, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and Jane Addams – all of whom have something to tell us about the shaping of cities in the Progressive Era. Some of them, like Burnham or Olmsted, are obvious parts of any narrative about American urban planning. Others, like Riis and Addams, are fellow travelers to the urban planning movement, and have garnered plenty of attention in the work done on cities in this era. To these primary and secondary figures in the story of American planning, I have added a number of American writers whose work illuminates or challenges the projects of urban reformers. As journalists, novelists, and memoirists, Adams, Douglass, Wharton, Howells and Dreiser were experiencing the same cities at the same time as the reformers, and they provide invaluable narratives about reform (and the lack thereof) in American cities. With a few exceptions, these men and women of letters tend to be more skeptical of rapid social change and human reason, and more likely to emphasize the organic roles that human nature and customs played in the formation of the city. For that reason, their accounts of these cities (both in their fictional and nonfictional works) are particularly useful for my purposes. My ultimate aim in this project is to show that Progressive Era thinkers theorized a vision of the city that could replace the older, agrarian ideal of America. Such a new ideal was vital because previous social observers had argued that an agrarian society, in which all citizens tilled the land and income inequality was negligible, was necessary for American democracy to work. Since America was becoming an urban and industrial country, multiplicitious in its languages, ethnicities, and religions, either the democratic project had to be given up or a new vision of society had to be articulated. Thomas Jefferson, the most 3 famous proponent of the agrarian ideal, thought it was the former, writing in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781): “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body” (171).