of marble,” “glittering domes,” “the grandeur and magnificence of the streets”—fail to cover the corruption within.27 The path to peace and prosperity did not run through industry and commerce. As long as the social system remained unreformed, urban growth would multiply misery within, hastening the city’s doom.
Lippard therefore joined boosters in employing Philadelphia’s past, present, and future as political weapons. McMichael and his allies used visions of civic greatness to bring together a bourgeoisie, but the radical novelist warned that unless citizens awoke to the danger, the metropolis would decay into an imperial oligarchy. Seeing glaring inequality all around them, he and his allies aimed to demystify the process of expropriation that enriched the few at the expense of the many, and consolidate producers around a project of social reconstruction to redeem the Quaker City.28
The blood spilled in 1844 made association imperative. After the riots, the lyceums and halls that had flourished before the Panic of 1837 provided meeting places for rebuilding, as radicals tried to turn theory into practice. Working people and their allies formed fraternal clubs, Fourierist sects, cooperative stores, craft unions, Chartist sympathy leagues, and social improvement societies. Historians have sometimes seen the rush to associate in Jacksonian America as part of a search for belonging, as the intimacy of the “walking city” gave way to the anonymity of the industrial metropolis.29 But the community envisaged by radicals pursued social ends as much as it met psychic needs. Organizations varied, with some inviting African Americans, abolitionists, and women to their meetings, and others limiting themselves to white, male producers. They ran the gamut ideologically too from utopian socialism to a brand of producerism that would not have looked out of place in the two major parties. Democrat, Whig, Liberty, and Free Soil partisans all participated. But their fragmentation is easy to overstate. Radicals often moved from one organization to another and shared basic principles: capital, at least in the form it had assumed in industrializing Philadelphia, exploited labor, and the consequences of that process were engrafted into the urban form. Only through union could producers emancipate themselves. “COMBINATION! ASSOCIATION! These are the words of the last Gospel which God has uttered to man,” Lippard declared in 1849.30 By then he had found a model abroad.
The Second American Republic
Radicals’ inspiration in the 1840s came not only in the inheritance from the Jacksonian labor movement, but also along the revolutionary currents of the Atlantic. The tide of immigration from the British Isles and Germany brought an infusion of militancy. From Yorkshire came John Shedden, a radical tailor who later joined the First International, Knights of Labor, and Sovereigns of Industry. The Irish-born handloom weaver John Campbell fought for working-class suffrage in the factory districts of northern England as a leader in the Chartist movement before fleeing to the United States after a failed general strike in 1842. Such figures, having seen firsthand the industrial transformation of the Old World and the New, understood Philadelphia’s development in world historical perspective.31
The European Revolutions of 1848 gave them hope. Initially, Philadelphians, like most Americans, welcomed the fall of France’s July Monarchy as a vindication of the principles of 1776. That consensus was supposed to have found expression at a vast public meeting on Independence Square in late April. Citizens from across the city’s partisan and ethnic divisions gathered to the strains of the Marseillaise to hear eminent speakers proclaim the rights of man. Among them was McMichael, who admired how dynasties that “seemed indestructible” had “melted away or, thrown into the crucible of reform,” had “assumed new forms and new existence.”32
Radicals sang from the same hymn sheet but added an extra verse. For them, the Second French Republic—and especially the National Workshops, which guaranteed employment to the poor—could inspire a Second American Republic. When Francis J. Grund took to the stand, he surveyed the history of Europe from 1789. The revolutionaries who uprooted the Ancien Re´ gime, Grund argued, “had to pull down the social culture of Europe as well as the political one,” but once they had done so, “the Bourgeoisie” rose on the ruins of the nobility, and “the struggle between capital and labor commenced.” Assailing classical political economy, he warned that the law of supply and demand degraded man “to a marketable commodity,” and praised the French government for embracing “associated labor.”33
Grund’s dialectical materialism echoed radical readings of the European Revolutions. Lippard, who devoted column after column of his weekly paper the Quaker City to making sense of 1848 and its aftermath, described the events in France as a reaction to “social” more than “constitutional” evils. The journalist and reformer George G. Foster, who also spoke at Independence Square, coauthored a hastily written account of affairs in Paris with Thomas Dunn English. Foster and English rejected the common assumption that the French had merely emulated the American example. Instead, Parisians had embarked on a glorious new course, for their revolution had social consequences as well as origins. “Capital arrayed itself against labor; and the latter only awaited the proper moment for its emancipation,” they argued, but the Second Republic’s pledge “to guarantee work and existence to the laborer” had addressed “the problem of the Nineteenth Century!”34
The authors joined Grund in blaming the “bourgeoisie” for France’s woes. Bourgeois citizens became a kind of Monk Hall International, who, they hinted, threatened American liberty too. The class’s corrupting influence extended from the throne to the factory. An “oligarchy of the bourgeoisie” made King Louis Philippe its head; their “sordid desires” and “thirst for accumulation” led them to “acquiesce in any state of affairs which gratifies their avarice.” Encompassing all the “capitalists,” “tradesmen,” “bankers,” “monopolists,” “venders,” and “men reposing on their cotton bales,” the bourgeoisie marked a new name for the corrupt elite that Lippard portrayed lording over Philadelphia. But above all Foster and English defined them by their antithesis: productive citizens. Out of this dialectic came the 1848 Revolution: “the working class” in its “final struggle” had “emancipated itself from the chains of the bourgeoisie.”35 They did not just describe a class, but a class struggle.
Class struggle stalked Philadelphia too, for radicals rejected any idea that the United States enjoyed immunity from the social processes ravaging Europe’s great cities: “Labor itself, under the influence of unlimited competition, is forced down and down, until it is compelled to accept gladly of the merest and least possible amount of wages that will prevent absolute starvation. Under this state of things, the laboring classes, forced to pack themselves into filthy garrets and noisome cellars … either become beasts, or learn to pray for death. Such is the condition of the great mass of laborers throughout the world.”36
When he introduced Philadelphia’s “bourgeoisie” to a domestic audience, Foster became more circumspect, but he still mapped French social relations onto an American urban form. In late 1848, he wrote a series on Philadelphia for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, the radical Whig paper, which would soon hire Karl Marx as its European correspondent. Events in Europe, Foster noted, had familiarized citizens with the “bourgeoisie,” though he doubted that many of the writers who used it “know what it means.” Despite the problems of determining the word’s “true signification,” Foster claimed that “the most distinguishing characteristic of Philadelphia is its Bourgeoisie,” for it had “reached a higher state of development” in the city than anywhere else in the Union. The first of his “slices” of Philadelphia life therefore dissected the class, and while he stressed its mercantile character, he did not leave out manufacturers: a bourgeois was “a man who keeps a shop or lives by making a profit from the product of the labor of others.” His sketch of staid respectability in the city proper, though, provided a foil for subsequent forays into turbulent suburbs. Here his interest in social taxonomy faded as he turned to recounting salacious stories of street gangs and dance halls.37
Hints of Foster’s radicalism nevertheless crept in
