in the late 1840s may have lacked the impact of the GTU, but its institutional piquancy and ideological thrust troubled the economic elite. The sense that Lippard, Campbell, and their allies were (as one historian has said, in a related context) “domesticating foreign struggles” proved particularly alarming.49 Bourgeois consolidators began to respond. McMichael’s North American—the paper that fought harder than any other for the economic elite to speak with one voice—attacked the “radical, fiery, Fourierish” tone of Foster’s French Revolution of 1848, and its singling out of the “bourgeoisie” for criticism especially. The daily found the definition of the term Foster arrived at “tolerably just,” but rejected his take on the class’s boundaries and politics, arguing that the word was simply a synonym for what the English called “the middle classes” and Americans called “the business men of our towns and cities—merchants, manufacturers, master mechanics, employers of all kind, but including capitalists, house owners and house holders.” “In America in fact,” it argued, “we all belong to the bourgeoisie,” for “every head of a family, is a bourgeois—a free citizen.” Rather than finding solace in the republic’s exceptionalism, though, the paper cast the class in international terms. “The bourgeoisies of all countries have great respect for the rights of property,” it declared, and “desire and require peace and quiet, and order, for the successful prosecution of trade.” Thus “a civil tumult of any kind” could “offer nothing but severe loss and suffering.” Bourgeois Frenchmen had joined the 1848 Revolution then only at great sacrifice.50
The North American simultaneously defined the bourgeoisie as an international class while denying the existence of class distinctions: a rhetorical strategy it would employ frequently over the following decades in seeking to harmonize social interests across the city. McMichael did all he could to break down barriers between propertied citizens, yet here his paper claimed that class had no meaning. To admit Foster’s point, however, risked legitimizing labor conflict. McMichael saw such battles at firsthand as county sheriff in the 1840s and in his own office in the 1850s, when he confronted (usually without success) well-organized printers. Newspaper publishers, indeed, continually found themselves negotiating with staff, which may help account for their hostility to craft unions more generally: even the Public Ledger—a paper more sympathetic than most to journeymen—dismissed Campbell’s design for “equal exchanges” and toed the liberal line that laws of supply and demand properly regulated the price of labor.51
Workplace militancy, revolutionary turmoil, and radicals’ determination to plot the present and future course of the city drew Philadelphia’s economic elite into confronting the labor question well before the Civil War. Richard Rush, who as U.S. minister to France had recognized the Second Republic in 1848, returned to his home city around midcentury, concerned that North might prove fertile ground for “Communism.” About the same time, the iron manufacturer Stephen Colwell called socialism “one of the greatest events of this age,” and warned that “no man can understand the progress of humanity or its present tendencies who does not … watch its movements.” Rush and Colwell played prominent roles in the battle for metropolitan Consolidation over the following years, but even Sidney George Fisher, who remained aloof from upstart manufacturers and reform politics, exchanged ideas about labor and capital in the mid-1850s with a British factory owner who had written one of the first treatises on industrial relations. Fisher probably never set foot on a factory floor, but he acted as the attorney for the strike-plagued Reading Railroad, and by the postbellum era, read his running battles with household servants as a miniature of the wider struggle between employer and employee: one fought in homes, streets, and polling booths as well as suburban workshops and southern plantations.52
Here, at least, radicals and workers had succeeded in unsettling propertied citizens, as a joke insert in an April 1851 issue of the Ledger—which none too subtly name-checked various radicals—indicated. “Let the mechanics and Workingmen Beware,” it began, “of the POWERS of the DEVIL and the CAMP-BELLS of HELL” that “would make America another Atheistical France” and “under the garb of ‘Reformers,’ establish Brutalism!” Either side in the newspaper stood notices for meetings of a trades’ assembly, two craft unions, and a cooperative store.53 But the vigor of midcentury radicalism, so evident in the advertising columns of the Ledger, masked inner divisions. Those fractures would soon be exposed.
The Midcentury Crisis of Union
The project of consolidating producers ran into many of the same problems as projects for consolidating the economic elite or the city and districts. In each case, the difficulty lay in drawing boundaries, and determining who belonged in or out of the community. For radicals, the civil wars that raged on the city’s streets—Protestants fighting Catholics, whites fighting blacks—made this question unavoidable. Designs for working-class association ultimately foundered on the conundrum, but midcentury radicalism left a critique of urban capitalism that shaped growth politics and its critics.
Radicals, surveying the wreckage of the riots, realized the biggest obstacle they confronted lay in working-class fragmentation. The main beneficiaries of the riots had been the nativist American Republicans, whose candidates swept Democrats from office in most of the suburban districts, including Kensington and Southwark. Their ascendancy did not last long, but like radicals, they established a foothold in working-class neighborhoods. The Order of United American Mechanics, a fraternal association of Protestant masters and journeymen, welcomed employers into the producers’ community but excluded the fast-growing Catholic working class.54
In their religion, radicals ran the gamut from atheist infidelity to evangelical Protestantism, but they agreed that sectarianism threatened association. Lippard provides an instructive example. Critics have picked up on the anti-Catholic tropes in his work: the “monks” who make up The Quaker City’s bourgeoisie meet in a former monastery, after all.55 Yet the novelist who conjured up images of conspiring priests loathed militant Protestantism. In 1846, he began a novel, The Nazarene, that blamed the nativist riots on religious intolerance; when a home missionary tells his audience he had seen Catholic bishops doing good work in the “alleys of Southwark and Moyamensing,” his hateful audience accuse him of blasphemy. A few years earlier, in The Quaker City, he had satirized nativist Pope-baiting with the “Universal Patent Gospel Missionary Society,” who combine “violent appeals to excited mobs” with “insidious endeavours to create those very mobs.” Even in 1849, when in response to the Catholic archbishop of New York’s support for the Pope in his struggle with the Roman Republic, Lippard asked if “the Assassins of the Roman people” have “their paid minions on American soil,” he admitted to speaking “of this subject with great reluctance,” and prefaced the article with a lengthy recapitulation of his hostility to “No-Popery bigots.” The Irish-born Campbell also disdained nativism. In 1850, he asked readers of the Tribune whether “American citizens” could really say to “the flying refugee from the despotism of Europe ‘Back, back again to your stripes and chains, killed dungeons and scaffolds!’”56
Campbell invoked the spirit of solidarity that followed the 1848 Revolutions here to unite producers regardless of creed. Among radicals he was not alone. Within a few days of the Independence Square meeting, German workers raised the cry to “operate in concert with the American Laboring Classes in this city.” The Social Improvement Society (SIS), which drew a mixture of active trade unionists and middle-class reformers, often debated immigration, and while there is no record of their meetings, we can assume from the figures involved that an unreformed social system rather than an influx of foreign labor was said to present a greater danger to native-born workers. “Humanity is of no caste, country, or clime,” began The Almighty Dollar, which has the Killers street gang welcoming natives and naturalized alike. One of the leaders encapsulated the gang’s ecumenical approach: “We’re all brothers when oppressed.”57
In practice, though, the Killers proved rather less tolerant. After a summer of endemic
