I. Thesis: that the City provides the focus from within and without with regard to who the people are, what role the people should play in the decision making processes of the Republic, and what responsibilities the Republic should take on with regard to serving the people.

In this regard the action of the Mob, especially after it turns more than marginally political and becomes destructive of human life, has a profound influence on American Society and American political culture.

II. Baltimore as Mobtown- the political and social consequences of the presence of the 'mob' and large concentrations of new immigrants in urban centers.

The argument is that

1) people in cities are more likely to move quickly to collective action on any political or social question

2) people in cities, in acting as a mob or in less than a genteel political way, are apt to push society toward political and administrative reform.  The cycle is one of rapid, but fairly geographically concentrated expansion, widespread exploitation of people and resources, mounting pressure for reform, institutional adjustment, and repeated performances as long as economic conditions foster growth.  Matters are complicated by the industrialization of the city and the rise of a 'working class' which in itself appears as a threat to the non-city dwellers who see this  group as poised to attack the agrarian model of bucolic, self-reliant behavior that  forms the core of the American value system.

III. How then does the mob of the city become in itself, or despite itself, an engine for political and social change?

A) political:

When the city in America does not achieve the protection for its manufactures and trade under the Constitution that its mechanics and merchants thought in 1787 that it would, the city becomes a bastion for the pressure to expand the political power of the urban masses through universal manhood suffrage (qualified of course, by those in power who expect to control that power, even if they do not achieve such a goal).

New York is the first city in which the political consequences of the new urban politics are felt on the National Level with the founding of Tamany and the success of Aaron Burr in the Municipal elections of the 1790s.  Burr uses a loophole in the property qualifications for voting and a bag of tricks to hoodwink his opponents (led by Alexander Hamilton).  He realizes that many people in NYC can vote if they own but a small piece of a single property.  Burr goes on to be linked in an uneasy alliance with Thomas Jefferson that, in Jefferson's opinion, brings Burr perilously close to the Presidency.

Baltimore's mob gains control of the city through its Democratic/Republican leadership and helps push the State toward Universal Manhood Suffrage by 1810.  In turn, the rural elements within the State power structure confine the geographical limits of the City (1816 to 1888) as the population of the State becomes more and more concentrated in the city (by 1920 over half the population of Maryland lives in Baltimore City).

By 1812 the mob turns violent, documenting the worst fears of the non-urban dwellers with regard to the sinister side of city living. [taken from 10_104]

In his chronicles of Baltimore published in 1874, John Thomas Scharf tells us that 'mobtown' originated with the riots of June and July 1812.  War against Britain had just been declared and one newspaper in Baltimore, The FEDERAL REPUBLICAN persisted in its opposition to both President Madison and thewar.  Frist the newspaper offices were destroyed, then, when the paper continued publication out of Georgetown and was distributed in Baltiimore, the mob took matters into its own hands.  On the 28th of July the mood of the mob turned ugly and one prominent citizen of Maryland, General James M. Lingan, was killed.  Once the violence subsided, efforts were made to gloss over theevents and put Baltimore in the best possible light.

Thomas Griffith, in the ANNALS OF BALTIMORE, published in 1824, played down the mob violence, going so far as to suggest that it would nnot have happened if the good people of the town had not been absent on summer holiday and if the jail had had a good wall around it. In the evening an affray took place, but after killing one person and wounding others, one or two mortally, whowere among the assailants, the house surrendered to the city officers, and the editor and his friends to the number of 22 [were] conducted in the morning by the Mayor, General Stricker and a few of the militia to the prison; here they [were] again attacked on teh ensuing night (28th), and Gen. James M. Lingan of Georgetown, [was] killed, and Mr. John Thompson tarred and feathered, carted to the point and otherwise cruelly treated; the rest less hurt, but generally beaten and wounded more or less. Some citizens, devoted at all times to their own peace and private affairs, shunned those scenes of contention and violence, others, as is usual in the summer season, were absent in teh countgry, and the riorters having thus, by help of the night and exercise of some artifice, eluded the efforts which were made to restrain them, conceived themselves masters of the city and proceeded to hunt out and expel such as were obnoxious to them; but, threatening at last to break open the post office where the offensive paper had been sent for distribution again, an imposing force was assembled, they were dispersed and tranquillity restored. The trial of those who defended the house in Baltimore was removed from teh city; all were acquitted.  Efforts to have the jail enclosed were successful. A stone wall was erected, 11 feet high, it might be said, to keep future mobs out!

But as John Thomas Scharf notes, the riots in 1812 could not be dismissed lightly: A general feeling of horror and indignation was aroused throughout the State and the whole country by this atrocious affair.  A political revolution placed the Federal party in power in Maryland, and Mr. Hanson became a member of Congress, and in 1816-19 a United States Senator. Baltimore for many a year felt the consequences of the shameful deed, which fixed upon her an enduring reproach and the opprobrious name of “Mobtown.” Publicists like Bartlett would not allow the new name of 'Mobtown' to be forgotten, ann the riots of 1835, 1839, 11856, 1858, 1861, and 1877, did little to allay public opinion.

Indeed the Bank of Maryland mob riots of 1835 forced the city into a new form of municipal self-control and a sense of public liability for the consequences of mob violence as can be learned from John Thomas Scharf's account: Thus it went on all night, with shouts, alarms, volleys of musketry, fierce combats, rushes and charges to and fro, the crashing of walls and windows, and the lurid glare of bonfires, no one knowing what the end would be.  On Monday the mayor posted a placard saying that the use of firearms had not been by his order.  This was equivalent to the surrender of the city to the mob.  The municipal authorities having proved themselves incapable of restoring order, the citizens saw that the time had come to take the matter into their own hands, before the city was laid in ashes, for the fury of the mob had now cast off all restraint. Their movements were prompt and decisive. At an immense meeting held at the Exchange, old Gen. Samuel Smith [long-time leader of the Jeffersonian Democrat Republicans in the City], then in his 83rd year, but still possessing all the energy and decison of youth, was chosen their leader.  Putting himself at their head, he called upo all who were willing to defend the city to march with him to Howard's Park.  A great concours followed, and their numbers, as well as the determination expressed in their looks, sent a chill to the hearts of the rioters.  At the park they were briefly addressed on the necessity  for vigorous action, and were told to arm themselves and repair to the City Hall.  The mayor resigned, and Gen. Anthony Miltenburger took his place, acting in concert with Gen. Smith. As

B) Social- the mob also reflects the raging social issues of the day, particularly as they relate to incorporation of the massess of newly arrived foreigners into the fabric of American Society.  As foreigners from Ireland and elsewhere flood the cities and spill out into the countryside, Zenophobia reigns rampant and a new political party is formed called the No Nothings who hate foreigners, Catholics, and know nothing about their party when asked by outsiders.  In the 1850s the know nothings take over the city through political skullduggery that represents the worst manifestations of politics in an urban setting.  We will return to this point later in the course.  For now, we are chronologically at the point, the 1830s, where a new city begins to make its presence known on the banks of Lake Michigan, but before we turn to a discussion of our reading, let's look briefly at the nature of the changes within the city of Baltimore that are so clearly evident by this time:

-the character of the city's economy has changed dramatically since the 1770s.  Manufacturing, wage laborers form a sigbnifican porat of the population of whom vast numbers speak english strangely or not at all -the character of the city has changed in that economic development and population growth is accompanied by a growing concern about public health and how to improve it -politics move from occasional riots to organized encounters betwenn political clubs acting on behalf of candidates who can exercise increasing amounts of power at the state level.  \ -Democracy in its crudest form developes in the City first as it had in Greece, hundres of years before;

Baltimore and for that matter cities in the public consciousness would not shake the appellation  'mobtown' easily.  Even the SATURDAY EVENING POST of May 11, 1951, would refer to the fact that “ Baltimore ... in an earlier time when it was only moderately industrialized ... was known, with good reason, as 'mob-town.'  Nor would the disturbances that afflicted many urban centers including B alitmore in the late 1960's dispel modern fears of the lawlessness of the cities.  Yet the negative side of the meaning of the 'mob' must be balanced by the more generaous views of urban poets like Carl Sandburg who in his 1916 poem I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB wrote:

I am the people —- the mob —- the crowd —- the mass. Do you know thall the great work of the world is done through me?

IV. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, possible model for examining the history of Baltimore

begin with Carl Sandburg- wrote another poem in 1914

(From Sanders, Gerald Dewitt & John Herbert Nelson, eds. Chief Modern Poets of England and America. New York: Macmillan Co., 1929.455, Carl Sandburg, 1914, in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, published Chicago)

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
and they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On teh faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunder.
And having answered do I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs whohas never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs thee heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Feright Handler to the Nation.
 

Cronon       Preface: xv not a history of Chicago, but a history of the relationship between Chicago and the West:

xvi “Although this book takes Chicago and the Great West as its immediate focus, its broader ambtiion is to explore century-old economic and ecological transformations that have continued to affect all of North American and the rest of the world besides”

one central belief, city an dcountry have a common history, so theier stories are best told together.

Does not deal with architecture, labor struggles, poliitcal machines, social reformers, cultural instutions, etc.; only merchants appear; understands why Bessie Louise Pierce never finished her history of Chicago

really dealing with the Frontier in American History;

xix deepest intellectual agenda in this book is to suggest that the boundary between human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoundly problematic."

first nature (original prehuman nature) second nature (artificial anture that people erect)

human presence in nature ambiguous

shaped by Michael Conzen's remarkable work on the historical geography of metropolitan dominance [local Chicago Historian]

begins with quote from Frank Norris, the Pit, 1903, interesting use of Titanic (which gains another meaning in 1912- ironically April 14-15) 5: Prologue, William Archer, smoke of Chicago, 1900

7: “Chicago represented all that was most UNnatural about human life.  Crowded and artificial, it was a cancer on an otherwise beautiful landscape.”

9: no other city has grown so large so quickly

9: Cityward journey of Garland, Frank, Sullivan, Herrick; Rose Dutcher, Garland's farm girl, 10,000 tons of burning coal sent soaring skyward on jet black wings; cloud eagle;

15: Herrick- vision of Chicago, dark, sees city liberated from the Natural world;

17: “In Herrick's Chcago, by taking dominion so completely over servile nature, humanity had declared its freedom but lost its birthright: to see human passions as the beginning and end of existence was to blaspheme against creation and humanity itself.  To see one's world as a self-created place opened the doorway to heroic achievement, but finally denied any other Creator, be it Nature or God.”

18 argues that nature and the city need each other? “The urban-rural, human-natural dichotomy blinds us to the deeper unity beneath our own divided perceptions.  must be sure not to miss the ”extent to which the city's inhabitants continue to rely as much on the nonhuman world as they do on each other. cannot escape to wild nature; We are in this together.

19; architect Anne Spirn: “the city is a granite garden, composed of many smaller gardens, set in a garden world. ... The city is part of nature.”

[in effect must see the City as an inextricable part of the whole, essential to the whole?]

I. Dreaming the Metropolis

A: Intro

24: country-side: “Chigagou,  ”the wild-garlic place."

discusses the natural setting

25: an yet none of these patterns matter tohuman history until we ask how the people whose lives they touched understood their significance."

25: indian removal-

27::convflict of concept of  bounded property, not understood by leader of Kickapooo Indians, Black Hawk, 1832 war,

28: unleashed development  of the city;  (importance of the treaty of 1833;   unleashed a wildness— lots at $33 in 1829, going for $100,000 by 1836.

29: “Only wild hopes for the future could lead people to pay so much for vacant lots in a town where the most promising economic activity consisted of nothing more substantial than buying and selling real estate.”

B. 31: Booster dreams  Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis about the Frontier [why does Cronon have to deal with it so early on in his book?— problem of his sequence,  Darwinian sequence... .  'natural progression from indian world to bustling city; advanced his thesis at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 fits poortly with the 1830s world of  Chicago.

32; have to read Turner backwards-  why?  City begins with an urban dream in a wilderness pushed by speculators and boosters who make it happen by sheer willpower, bravado, and suckering peole into investing capital in the most unlikely  of places: the wetlands and the banks of the sluggish Chicgo river-"the wild  garlic place"

33: what is one of the vehicles for promoting Chicago in the minds of Americans?  Niles Register published in Baltimore, early as 1814 calling for a canal to make the city

33: entrepreneur example: Charles Butler- careful to give him too much credit, arrives one month before the treaty is signed and begins to hype the site

35: Jesup W. Scott: “I shall ssume that a city is an organism springiing from natural laws as inevitably as any other organism, and governed, invariably, in its origin and growth by these laws.” boosters imply that human labor less important than nature in spurring city's growth."  Scott boosted Toledo;

41; Nature provides the engine for growth, climate, resources, maps prove it, boosters promote it;

C. Metropolis and Empire

41: Jessup and Scott,  boosters future of the WEST inseparable from that of the Central City.  Turner on his head: the West is created in part by the City.

Empire centered in the city

C. 46: Reading Turner backwards

47: for Turner, cities appear only after a long period of rural agricultural growth.   Cities mark the end of the frontier.  For boosters, they grow in tandem.

47: [what then is the chief difference between the boosters and Frederick Jackson Turner (who, by the way, began his studies of the West here at Hopkins at about the same time his contemporary, Woodrow Wilson was studying the City here.]  “the chief difference between turner and boosters hinges on a seemingly minor point: Turner's chicago rose to power only as the frontier drew to a close, whereas the boosters' Chicago had been an intimate part of  frontier settlement almost from the beginning.”

D: 48: Central Place Theory, arguments of Johann Heinrich von Thunen, Isolated State, 1826.

50: “Von Thunen radically smplified his landscape to demonstrate what the ninenteenth cnetury boosters knew intuitively, and what modern central place theorists have confirmed with formal mathematics.  Where human beings organize their economy around market exchange, trade between city and country will be among the most powerful forces influencing cultural geography and environmental change.  The ways people value the products of the soil, and decide how much it costs to get those  products to market, together shape the landscape we inhabit.”

Thus we have a new way of understanding the history of colonization n the Great West and elsewhere (p. 50).

51: “Turner's frontier, far from being an isolated rural society, was in fact the expanding edge of the boosters' urban empire.  Seen from the midst of the city, grain farmers, intensive truck gardeneers, and urban manufacturers — look like nothing so much as the zones of von Thunen's isolated State.  Frntier and metropolis turnout to be two sides of the same soin.”

two points: city and country are inextricably connected, market relations mediate between them;   Von Thunen fails to include time as a factor;

keys to sucdess-

52: captal and removal of adiffering theory of occupation and use (Indians)

II. Rails and Water.

need to raise the city out of the MUD

create artificial corridors of transporation to make the city viable

first canals (Illinois and Michigan Canal, 1848), expands hinterland southward to the Mississippi just above St. Louis (p.65)

1848- Railroads,

67: “The Railroads centered on Chicago, not becasue nature ordained that they had  to do so, nature made no such pronouncements, but because investors and everyone eles who acted on booster theories proclaimed thathey should do so.”  By 1852 over 1/2 wheat arrives by rail, Galena and Chicago Union

6*: rapid rail exapnsion of the 1850s- see map

70: Caroline Kirkland, 1858: open sesame spoken through the railroad whistle

72: thesis- Railroads represent a second nature, appear natural yet man-made, even appear supernatural;

73: “ It was a human invention at the heart of an equally human economic system. ” Nature," wrote one booster who came closer than most to this perspective, “built chicago througher artificer, Man.”

74: Railroad Time: power of the railroad companies, controlled by Easter Capital, meant they could regularize and control what?  TIME

92: and thus as Marx wrote 9p.92) annihilate space by time".  This new geography meant that the marketing of goods, the products of  nature and human labor could be accelerated and regularized giving “new hope of fulfillling the great 19th-century booster dream of material progress for city and country alike.

Such speed and organization initself raised problems; requried much higher  levels of trade, production, and resource consumption for its own sustenance (ist own inertia?), let alone its impoeratives toward growth.  The city thus drives the  ever accelerating exploitation of the West and “Like von Thunen's isolated city, Chicago was [geographcially] remote from all these events. And yet no place is more central to understanding why they occured.]

Next Chapter:  return to Cronon's model applied to Baltimore