The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900

by Philip J. Ethington

The history of San Francisco from 1850 through 1900 identifies the active participation of citizens in communication, persuasion, and mobilization as the "public city, " the site of American political and social change. Nineteenth-century Americans relied on the Roman and Enlightenment models of the "public sphere" as a forum for debate and self-government. Drawing on speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, and census and electoral data, the book reinterprets the city's turbulent history. Challenging decades of scholarship that treats urban politics as the expression of social-group experience and power, the author develops the opposite thesis that social-group identities of race, class, ethnicity, and gender were politically constructed in the public sphere in the process of mobilization and journalistic discourse. New methods of political mobilization unleashed by the Civil War resulted in the death of republican liberalism and birth of pluralist liberalism, and in the transformation from a political conception of society to a social conception of politics in the years from 1850 to 1900.

480 pages, Hardcover

First published October 28, 1994

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a weird amalgam. On one hand, it is an old-fashioned piece of "cliometric" history, with regressions and p-values analyzing the class and ethnic composition of different political parties. On the other hand, it is a modern "cultural turn" monograph, replete with pseudo-Marxist language and the "close reading" of texts. In neither variation is the book totally satisfying, but in neither is it without insight and merit.

Almost half of the book is about the San Francisco Vigilante Committee of 1856. This committee is often portrayed as a "merchant's revolution," which took unfounded fears of crime and used them as an excuse to hound the poor and and the Irish. Yet by analyzing the membership roles, the author shows that almost half of the committee was blue collar. He also shows that the committee eschewed any ethnic pandering (in diverse San Francisco, even the nativist Know-Nothing Party nominated an Irish Catholic to the top of its ticket). The committee was also not focused on "crime" per say, but on protecting what they called the "purity of the ballot box." The committee was called into existence by the murder of the newspaper editor James King of William by James Casey, a city supervisor, and it was King's portrayal of fraud at the ballot box by the likes of Casey that really raised their ire. By the end of the committee, they held a parade with 6,000 attendees, constituting almost the entirety of the voting citizens of the city, and later their "People's Party" ruled with broad support for almost a decade. The city was not yet clearly divided into distinct "classes" with distinct political interests, and the language of "the public" suffused all rhetoric.

The book also discusses such famous groups as the "Workingmen's Party of California," led by Dennis Kearney and the Reverend, and eventual mayor, Isaac Kalloch. Despite it's title, the party in fact attacked "socialism" and "agrarianism" and placed almost 80% of the state, including merchants and businessmen, in the category of "Workingmen." Instead, the group attacked the Chinese as unmanly and the robber barons for stealing votes and public franchises, but generally hewed to a public interest rhetoric that denied the importance of distinct classes. The author argues that it was only in the 1890s, with the Progressive movement, that the language of distinct interest groups supplanted the language of a unified "republic" that the Vigilante Committee and the Workingmen's Party used.

This book could meander and wander, but there are real valuable insights here, which provide a distinct lens on American cities in their most transformative period.

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Public City examined the transformation of identity and politics in late 19th century San Francisco though a survey of the public sphere created by political rallies in sand lots, speeches on street corners, pamphlets, political campaigns and newspaper articles. Through this study, Ethington sought to find out who participated in urban politics, why they participated, and how the relationship between the people of San Francisco and the municipal government changed. Ethington argued that the essence of the political transformation which occurred in this period was a shift from the conception of a unitary public interest, which politicians sought honor in protecting from corrupting special interests, to a discourse which validated special interests as legitimate political actors to be organized within political coalitions.

The transformation took place gradually through a combination of several long term trends. Following the Civil War the shift toward a universal rights conception of citizenship introduced controversy over who was a citizen. In the fierce competition between the national parties disparate social identities and interests were created by the Democrats and Republicans in successive campaigns, in an attempt to turn out the maximum number of voters. The partisan organizations which mobilized these new groups assumed a closed, inaccessible character in order to maintain control over the policy agenda, rather than ceding control to their new followers. The ballooning financial demands of the intensely competitive campaigns, coupled with the economic opportunities presented to businesses by the expansion of cities, drew corporations and the party operators into an increasingly close relationship predicated on the exchange of political favors for campaign funds.

The growth of a mass consumer market encouraged newspapers to target their news and discourse in an increasingly sophisticated manner toward separate demographic segments of the population. The result was a polity whose members increasingly defined themselves as members of separate interests, but who collectively were disenchanted by the collusion of the main party organizations with business interests. These trends culminated in the assembly of these separate interest groups into a Progressive coalition held together by a program of structural reform and an expanded public sector which promised something to everyone. The transformation is characterized by Ethington as the shift from “a political conception of society” to “a social conception of politics.”