James Bryce, William T. Stead, and the Trans-Atlantic Meaning of the American City

ABSTRACT

By the late 1800s, elaborate concepts – the vocabulary of “bosses” and “machines” – had emerged in the United States for arguing over the systematised corruption that industrial urbanisation and mass political mobilisation seemed to generate. This essay focuses on two British writers whose Anglo-American sympathies and prominence within trans-Atlantic intellectual and journalism networks enabled them to shape U.S. debates over urban governance, while introducing Europeans to the tumultuous atmosphere of U.S. cities. In The American Commonwealth (1888), the Liberal scholar-politician James Bryce drew upon experiences in numerous U.S. cities to build a case for professionalised municipal governance and the acculturation of immigrants as ways of ensuring civic standards in democratising cities. In his sensational expose, If Christ Came to Chicago (1894), the social Christian journalist William T. Stead introduced Europeans to the sense among a segment of U.S. reformers that bossism resulted from capitalist injustice and that reform required social solidarity.

KEYWORDS:

• James Bryce
• William T. Stead
• machine politics
• Tammany Hall
• Chicago
• social Darwinism
• Christian socialism
• trans-Atlantic

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alan Lessoff is University Professor of History at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. An expert in U.S. and comparative urban history, he is author, co-author, or editor of six books, most recently Where Texas Meets the Sea: Corpus Christi and Its History (2015). A two-time Fulbright lecturer, he has held visiting positions at the universities of Kassel, Bielefeld, and Mainz in Germany and at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. From 2004 to 2014, he served as editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Portions of this research will appear in French in ‘“Their Morality is that of Their Surroundings”: American Bossism and the Transatlantic Understanding of Modern Urban Corruption’, in Dénoncer les villes maudites, eds. Cesare Mattina and Nicolas Maisetti (Lille: Septentrion, forthcoming).

2 James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1894), 2:390. Bryce was alluding to the King James Bible, Psalm 37:35: “I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading like a green bay tree”. Edmund Ions, James Bryce and American Democracy (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 69–71.

3 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:105.

4 William T. Stead, ‘My First Visit to America’, Review of Reviews (April 1894): 410, 417. Also quoted in Robert Frankel, Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 23; Joseph O. Baylen, ‘A Victorian’s “Crusade” in Chicago, 1893–94’, Journal of American History 51 (1964): 418–34; Warren T. Francke, ‘W.T. Stead: The First New Journalist’, Journalism History 1 (1974): 36, 63–5.

5 Stead, ‘My First Visit to America’, 410, 116. Arnold Lewis, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago’s Loop, and the World’s Columbian Exposition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 75.

6 Graham Taylor, Pioneering on Social Frontiers (1930; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1976), 29–30; Gary Scott Smith, The Search for Social Salvation: Social Christianity and America, 1880–1925 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 71 (2nd quotation); Donald Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 536, 538 (3rd quotation).

7 Frankel, Observing America, 33.

8 Murney Gerlach, British Liberalism and the United States: Political and Social Thought in the Late Victorian Age (New York: Palgrave, 2001), esp. 128–30, 188–93; Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Ions, James Bryce and American Democracy, ch. 4–8.

9 Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. ch. 6; Alexander Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne: Der Amerika-Diskurs des Deutschen Bürgertums vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg im Europaïschen Vergleich (Berlin: Akadamie Verlag, 1997), esp. ch. 6–7; Alan Lessoff, ‘Progress before Modernization: Foreign Interpretations of American Development in James Bryce’s Generation’, American Nineteenth Century History 1 (2000): 69–96.

10 Jacques Portes, Fascination and Misgivings: The United States in French Opinion, 1870–1914, trans. Elborg Forster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 198–9.

11 James Bryce, preface to Mosei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, vol. 2: The United States, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (1902: Chicago Quadrangle Books, 1964), lxxiii–vii. Peter Jones, ‘Boss Men, Grafters and Parvenus: Images of Corruption in Liverpool, Glasgow, and Newcastle c. 1890–2000’, in Stadt—Macht—Korruption, eds. Jens Ivo Engels, et al. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017), esp. 157–8.

12 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:757–60, 861–3. Hugh Tulloch, James Bryce’s American Commonwealth: The Anglo-American Background (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1988), ch. 2–3; William R. Brock, ‘The American Commonwealth and the Dilemmas of Democracy’, American Nineteenth Century History 2 (2001): 75–104.

13 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 1:637.

14 Ibid.

15 James Bryce to Frank J. Goodnow, November 5, 1888, folder “Bryce, James, letters, 1888–89”, box 24, Frank J. Goodnow papers, Special Collections, Johns Hopkins University.

16 Compare Frank J. Goodnow, ‘The Tweed Ring in New York City’, in The American Commonwealth, 1st ed., ed. James Bryce (New York: Macmillan, 1888), ch. 38, with Bryce’s ch. 38 in the 3rd ed., ‘The Tammany Ring in New York City’.

17 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:377.

18 Ibid., 2:382.

19 Goodnow, ‘The Tweed Ring in New York City’, 3:173–4; Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:377–9. On the connection between Bryce’s views on Irish Americans and Home Rule, Tulloch, James Bryce’s American Commonwealth, ch. 3 (quotation 76). Goodnow elaborated on his structural reform arguments in numerous later works, such as City Government in the United States (New York: Century Co., 1904). On Goodnow’s analysis of urban governance and its contemporary influence, Michael H. Frisch, ‘Urban Theorists, Urban Reform, and American Political Culture in the Progressive Era’, Political Science Quarterly 97 (1982): 295–315; Alan Lessoff and James J. Connolly, ‘From Political Insult to Political Theory: The Boss, the Machine, and the Pluralist City’, Journal of Policy History 25 (2013): 151–3.

20 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:379–80.

21 Ibid., 2:35, 99; Stephen P. Erie, Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 28–32. James R. Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (New York: Penguin, 2012), ch. 5.

22 Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Tyler Anbinder, Five Points (New York: Free Press, 2001), esp. ch. 5.

23 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:380–2. James J. Connolly, An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 12–20; Oliver Allen, The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall (New York: Addison Wesley, 1993), ch. 3.

24 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:383. Also quoted in Allen, The Tiger, 94.

25 Ibid., 2:402. Daniel Czitrom, New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

26 Bryce to Goodnow, November 5, 1888, box 24, Goodnow papers. James Bryce to Henry C. Lea, December 10, 1887, James Bryce’s American Correspondence, 1871–1922, reel 6. Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:377, 420–2.

27 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:120.

28 Ibid., 2:99, 120–1, 126–9.

29 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:861–3. David Quigley, Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy (New York; Hill and Wang, 2004), 162–3.

30 Goodnow, ‘The Tweed Ring in New York City’, 173.

31 Gerald Kurland, Seth Low: The Reformer in an Urban and Instrial Age (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971), esp. ch. 4; Martin Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 78–81.

32 Seth Low, ‘An American View of Municipal Government in the United States’, in Bryce, American Commonwealth, 1:666.

33 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 1:652. Low’s perspective is similar to the standard historical analysis of U.S. urban governance in the late 1800s; cf. Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

34 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 1:647, 2:173.

35 Stewart J. Brown, ‘W.T. Stead and the Civic Church, 1886–1895: The Vision behind “If Christ Came to Chicago”’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66 (2015): 320–39 (quotations 326–8).

36 William T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago (1894; repr. New York: Living Books, 1964), 416–7.

37 Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago, 21, 26, 29–30. Gary Scott Smith, ‘When Stead Came to Chicago: The “Social Gospel Novel” and the Chicago Civic Federation’, American Presbyterians 68 (1990): 193–205; Smith, The Search for Social Salvation, ch. 1.

38 Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago, 24–5.

39 Ibid., 106–10. John Franch, Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 164–7.

40 Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago, 71–86, 103.

41 Ibid., 88–90. Ely quoted in Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 102–03.

42 Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago, ch. 16. W.T. Stead, Chicago To-Day; or the Labour War in America (1894, repr. New York: Arno Press, 1969), 5–7. Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 370n47.

43 Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago, 357, 404. Jane Addams, ‘Why the Ward Boss Rules’, Outlook, April 2, 1898, 879–82. Lessoff and Connolly, ‘From Political Insult to Political Theory’, 149–51; Franch, Robber Baron, 263.

44 Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago, 141.

45 William T. Stead, Satan’s Invisible World Displayed, Or Despairing Democracy: A Study of Greater New York (London: Review of Reviews, 1898), 58–9; Stead, ‘Mr. Croker and Greater New York’, Review of Reviews 16 (1897): 345–6. Connolly, Elusive Unity, 157.

46 Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:808, 810.

47 Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago, 357.

48 William T. Stead, The Americanization of the World (New York: H. Markley, 1902), 381–2; Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago, 403–4.

49 Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago, 411–28.