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CHAPTER 2
The Baltimore Metropolitan Region

In its industrial development Baltimore is northern; in its social
customs it is more southern than Virginia, for example. Because of its
geographical location, its industrial dependence on the south, its attachment
to southern customs, a peculiar situation has developed. There are found
strange mixtures of sentiments, methods and customs. This geographic
position it would seem, has tended to exaggerate differences and keep racial
issues more prominently in the foreground. These relations are perhaps,
more tedious than they are either in the north or in the south, because they
are less fixed.

Charles S. Johnson

National Urban League, 1923 1

Urban historian and theorist Manuel Castells has written that the
metropolitan region is "a central form of the organization of space of
advanced capitalism." ^ By the late 1920s, Baltimore had been a part of the process
of urbanization generated by U.S. capitalism for over a century and a half. As the
United States became a predominantly urban country, Baltimore became an
important metropolitan region. As with all metropolitan regions, the character of
the Baltimore region, its social structure, and its position in the national urban
network were fundamentally shaped by its economy. And Baltimore's economy was
determined largely by the growth and interaction of its two principle economic
sectors: commerce based principally in Baltimore's port, and industry.

Economic Structure and the Urban Chain

The U.S. economy had emerged as the leading industrial capitalism in the
world by 1930, and Baltimore's industry was a factor in that emergence. Baltimore
had, in fact, been a integral part of the country's process of industrialization from
the early nineteenth-century. As Charles S. Johnson observed, the contours of this