The Middle-Class City. John Henry Hepp, IV

       Preface

      Historians have often viewed the reaction of the American middle class to the sweeping changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization as negative or, at best, ambivalent. The classic interpretation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sees this period as a political “search for order” by the bourgeoisie. My book examines transformations in everyday middle-class life in Philadelphia between 1876 and 1926 to discover the cultural roots of this search for order. By looking at the complex relationships among members of that city’s bourgeoisie and three largely middle-class commercial institutions (newspapers, department stores, and railroads), it finds that the bourgeoisie consistently reordered its world along new, rational lines during the late nineteenth century. At first, these changes were largely internal to the middle class, only affecting institutions that it used and controlled. Later, during the early twentieth century in particular, the bourgeoisie began to expand this new cultural sense of order to encompass politics as well.

      In Philadelphia, these changes in middle-class world view were less inspired by a fear of the future than by a faith in continued progress. Although this confidence was not always unbounded and was occasionally tinged with a sense of nostalgia, the city’s bourgeois men and women saw the region’s transformation as positive. They believed, by and large, that the Philadelphia of tomorrow would be better than that of their day, which in turn was an improvement on the city of twenty years before. This is not surprising, as they were, for the most part, beneficiaries of these changes. Not only could they see tangible economic, scientific, and technological advancement with, at least for many of them, few costs, but their class was largely a product of this new order.