set aside “centres of wretchedness and depravity” as “Special Districts,” for an Executive Committee to investigate “the causes of pauperism and want.” Ward organizations would assess applicants for aid in person, then forward their reports to metropolitan-wide overseers, who would use their synoptic overview to make strategic decisions. By encouraging closer contact between the benevolent rich and the supplicant poor, the plan built on long-established patterns of paternalistic almsgiving, but married traditional practice to a scientific, centralizing ethos.71
Institutions that managed to penetrate suburban “purlieus” awakened residents of the historic center to what lay beyond their boundaries. “The public looked with but little faith upon the facts which it became its province to lay bare,” Mullen’s society said of its early career in 1851, for while the beggars of Philadelphia proper could be ignored as “social outcasts,” it was harder to accept “that within a few minutes walk of the courts of justice there dwelt a community of such.” The North American agreed. When the poor hid in “obscure alleys, courts, lanes, and by-ways,” they were hard to know.72
Juxtapositions of visible wealth and veiled poverty—so common in midcentury writing on “great cities”—stressed social distance and spatial proximity in a manner that blurred metropolitan borders. Sensational journalists and evangelical reformers drew on jarring contrasts to good effect. The Inquirer guided its readers from the “crowds of elegantly dressed people” on Chestnut Street to the “small streets” a few blocks south, where humanity appeared “in forms so degraded that it can hardly be recognized as part of that which proudly displays itself on the fashionable promenade.” Similarly, a postbellum writer, horrified by a “plague-spot in the very heart of our civilization,” pictured “Wealth and Poverty” sitting “down side by side,” staring “one another in the face,” and “each asking his neighbor, What right do you have to be here?”73
When searching for metaphors to make sense of such stark differences, Philadelphians turned to empire. Domestic missionaries compared their work with the “HOME HEATHEN” of the city’s “dark regions” to that of their counterparts among the Hottentots; Bedford Street became a “Citadel” awaiting capture. Others invoked the West to justify their civilizing mission. In gangs of young men, newspapers saw “mighty tribes of Philadelphia Indians.” In riotous Southwark, they mapped “the Coast of California.” Even Mullen’s society, which preferred sentimentalism to sensationalism, depicted Moyamensing as a wilderness.74
Reformers encountered forms of resistance that resembled anticolonial politics. Among the officers of the PSEIP, only the old radical Mullen lived in the southern districts, with the remaining merchants, manufacturers, and professionals residing in the city proper. Their attempts to enclose the suburban frontier rarely went down well. Moyamensing’s Board of Commissioners looked to protect their Catholic constituents from meddling Protestants by trying to block construction of the House of Industry, but if local government could not protect them, citizens took matters into their own hands. Residents overlooking the Bedford Street mission, for instance, reportedly pelted evangelical preachers with “a shower of dead cats and rats,” stones, and brickbats: a replay on a smaller scale of the troubles that had started the Kensington riots in 1844. Such stories should be read with a skeptical eye, but they hint at the limits on consolidators’ power. One newspaper sympathetic to calls for a door-to-door sanitary census in Moyamensing even warned that “such a system of espionage” would probably “excite a violent resistance.”75
Ironically, though, the same imperial metaphors that made the suburbs seem so different could serve as a justification for extending the power of the center outward. Journalists, missionaries, and reformers who ventured off-grid did portray an upside-down world that turned the bourgeois order of the city proper on its head. Almost every report raises the specter of racial amalgamation by showing white women and black men mingling promiscuously. There is no doubt here that the lives of the suburban poor became a prized commodity in the literary marketplace.76 But readers could be titillated and terrified at the same time, as the popularity of works on the French Revolution attests, and accounts of the city’s “plague spots” urged citizens to act before the epidemics that ravaged them consumed the whole city. And if comparisons to Paris and London legitimized an authoritarian response to disorder, frontier metaphors in the heyday of Manifest Destiny held out the possibility of domesticating the foreign. To speak of Philadelphia harboring “savages in civilization,” as the North American did as war raged in Mexico, implied an intolerable contradiction. Subduing the suburbs here mirrored the work of nation-building. “The instinct of self-preservation ought to nerve every muscle of philanthropy to the work of regeneration,” the Evening Bulletin had argued of Henry Mayhew’s London, or else “the Metropolis, and with it the nation, will sink eventually into the vast, yet extending abyss.” That lesson in interdependence applied to Philadelphia too where “portions of Southwark and Moyamensing” harbored “a population so morally and physically diseased,” it was “a miracle the whole county is not infected.”77
Here Fisher’s 1844 prophecy of an insurgent underclass threatened to come true in Philadelphia’s riot districts. All “great cities” were “infested” by revolutionary “barbarians” and “canaille,” the North American declared, and home missionaries and houses of industry could only ameliorate their condition. Until “a combined and powerful effort” incorporated the suburbs, such outcasts “must make the orderly portion of society their prey.”78 But where did the roots of those evils lie? Cartographies of the city proved insufficient as an answer; the rules of the metropolis needed to be explained instead.
Explaining the City
Beyond mapping the suburbs, reformers sought to understand the workings of the “great city.” They strove to comprehend the causes of the epidemics of riot and disease that visited Philadelphia in order for their metropolis to heal and grow. Strikes troubled them, but prior to 1848, wage labor—in combating idleness—appeared more often as a solution than a problem. It was not so much relations within workshops, then, but the relation between people and places that came to characterize midcentury bourgeois thinking on the city.
For many critics, the root of the city’s problems lay in rum. The miseries of one Moyamensing alley, a paper wrote in 1845, were simply “the offspring of the countless groggeries that abound in that purlieu.” Campaigners insisted that the drinker’s lack of self-restraint brought disorder to the streets and disease into the home. Across the nation, the ranks of temperance advocates swelled in the 1840s, and while the movement drew workers as well as bosses, bourgeois Philadelphians broadly agreed on the need for some kind of action against the city’s rum shops. In Irish and German neighborhoods, however, it struggled to win converts. Where persuasion failed, reformers looked for legal remedies, albeit with mixed results. Mullen alone brought sixty private prosecutions against Moyamensing’s unlicensed innkeepers. Consolidators hoped that a stronger municipal government would prove more effective than individual efforts in turning the city dry.79
But grog could be the consequence as well as the cause of disorder. Links between drink, disorder, and disease seemed perfectly clear to the midcentury bourgeoisie. When respectable Philadelphians talked about the “infected districts,” the symptoms they had in mind were often rum, riot, and the cholera, and not infrequently all three. From what though did each spring? Midcentury medical knowledge held that epidemics emanated miasmically from rotting matter. Sanitary reports and mortality statistics seemed to support the hypothesis that foul vapors arose in warrens of courts and alleys. Historians have sometimes seen miasmatic theory as convenient for merchants, for whom the rival, contagionist epidemiology threatened maritime trade.80 But citizens’ readiness to apply it as a way of explaining moral as well as physical well-being indicates its deep roots. The sense that environment molded character had a long history in American thought. Thomas Jefferson justified the Louisiana Purchase by arguing new land would alleviate overcrowding, while the urbanists of the Early Republic equated orderly space
