The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

When I first moved to New York I went with a friend to the Steinway showroom. He was studying piano at Julliard and wanted to try out a couple of pianos to see how different they were from his old 1923 grand. I don't know where my friend is these days, but Steinway is still there, just as it has been from the 1840s (if not before -- I don't have the book, so I can't check). But what I do know is that Steinway and the manufacture of pianos through the period covered in this great book, is just one of the many stories that Beckert tells to illustrate his main idea: from small manufactories, great industrial fortunes grew up, from a small mercantile elite great financiers were born, from the Civil War the New York merchants and especially the new manufacturing class profited mightily.

The eariler merchants, who had kept the manufacturers out of their exclusive society, had to let them inside the charmed circle. (After all the manufacturers wealth often outstripped that of the earlier merchant class. The money made from the exportation of cotton and the importation had been good, but it didn't compare to the vast wealth born out industry). In the process, the old merchant class taught the new manufacturing class (many of whom were fair and equitable in their dealings with workers, who saw them often as co-workers, as honest hard-working Americans who were deserving of their wages, as free man in the spirit of the American Revolution), that their employees were of a lower racial and societal order. Peter Cooper (Cooper Union) never bought into this lie, but many others did.

And so the great consolidation of wealthy New Yorkers was accomplshed as the newly wealthy were taught about perquisites of power. In the process, the new manufacturing elite grew increasingly distant from their employees. And later, as newly efficient industrial processes robbed craftsmen of their importance in the creation of goods, and immigrants were brought in to work for pennies a day and set against each other so that labor costs could be cut, tensions and misunderstandings flourished. The monied class looked for and found ideologies to support their views of themselves of an elite -- Spencer's social darwinism, for example. In addition to ideologies, they used their vast fortunes to build armories the length of Manhattan to protect themselves from the rabble (who only a generation before had been freeborn Americans worthy of respect.) Steinway, for instance, had done his best in earlier days to pay decent wages. But when they unionized and sought better wages, he and his fellow piano manufacturers conspired to lock out any piano union employees who supported a strike against any other piano manufacturer. From a belief in the goodness of men, and the perfectability of the American system through the agency of freeborn men, the discourse changed to the adoption of a bogus science that justified their weath and power. The same the story was eventually told everywhere in America.

A short review can't hope to do this book justice. It tells a vast, complex story with admirable clarity and continuity. I may just get it out of the library again and read it for a third time!

The story that Beckert then relates is one of how manufacturers increased their importance within the New York bourgeoisie. In this they were joined by more powerful financiers and lawyers. As time went on corporations became more complex and vertically integrated, investments became more sophisticated and diverse and businesses became more national and international. Beckert tells the story of how the New York City upper class found itself in a position of unrivalled influence after the Civil War decimated its main rival in the American ruling class, the Southern slaveholders. At the same time the New York bourgeoisie became more exclusive. As the century ended it was geographically more segregated from the rest of the city. Its influence in the world of culture helped to separate it from the common people (the new Metropolitan Museum of Art wasn't even open on Sundays until 1891, the day most New Yorkers were able to see it). At the same time the New York bourgeoisie became more anti-Semitic. It was also a ruling class that more openly displayed its wealth, such as the famous 1897 Martin ball where the hostess wore a necklace that had belonged to Marie-Antoinette, while Caroline Astor had gems worth $250,000 sown into her dress.

At the same time the old republican ideology which emphasized economic independence for all slowly dissolved as it became clear that proletarianization was to be a fact of life. Where once the upper class embraced social mobility they now viewed the world through the lens of Social Darwinism. The New York bourgeoisie took a hard line on strikes and in what the most original part of Beckert's account, in 1877 tried their to eviscerate universal suffrage. The Chamber of Commerce, the Stock Exchange, the Union League Club, the New York Board of Trade and other powerful upper-class institutions all endorsed a proposal that would have imposed on the city council a board of finance with all power regarding taxation and expenditures elected under a suffrage that would have disenfranchised up to two-thirds of the New York electorate. This was unsuccessful, but their hard line on strikes helped to explain why the rate of injured strikers was more than forty times that for France in the nineties. In the 1870s the American trade union movement was one of the strongest in the world. By the 1920s it was one of the weakest. (Theodore Roosevelt suggested that one take a dozen Populists against the wall and shoot them dead). Their power benefited from the weaknesses of the state, where both bureaucracies and the federal government were weak and reactionary courts existed to fill the vacuum. Politics was a sphere where the wealthy could manipulate their power and influence to gain special favors and to crush radical strikers, while the claims of other classes could be peremptorily dismissed. Yet at the same time the laissez-faire state could not provide the more sophistical protection that a more sophisticated economy needed. So as the book concludes we are on the verge of encountering progressivism.

Although well detailed, Beckert's style is not the most involving and many of the footnotes are somewhat repetitive. A bibliography listing archival sources would also have helped. One problem with Beckert is that it does fully not explain the political success of the New York bourgeoisie. True, over time the New York upper class had to accept the more ethnic and more free spending Tammany. The New York bourgeoisie played a decreasing role in city government. Yet they still made up most if not all of the mayors and they were able to cut taxation levels by a third from 1879 to 1896. It strikes me as a bit odd to say that the New York bourgeoisie was having problems attracting the more conventional middle class. In the Gilded Age they seemed to have little trouble getting the population to vote for nearly indistinguishable pro-business politicians. Some of these explanations for its power are reasonable (it no longer had to share power with slaveholders or aristocrats), while others are weaker (running political parties, argues Beckert, was expensive and the wealthy were those who could most easily pay. But was there ever a time when European socialist parties outspent their rivals?) At the end something is missing in this account.

Our Revolution, and afterwards, put an end to any aristocracy of large landowners. DeTocqueville noted how the "law of partition" replaced entailment and did away with large estates by forcing their dissolution thru the inheritance laws. The author notes that few historical studies were written to document this "upper class" of that time, given its importance then, and now. He tells how a "class culture" was expressed in shared habits and manners (such as a dining room), interior design, gender roles, and the concept of "society"" clubs, debutante balls, voluntary associations, etc. These habits all required wealth that excluded the majority of the people. The goal of this book is to explain the role of the "upper class" in the history of New York and the nation.

The author says that workers can only be powerful when they act collectively in trade unions or politics, while the "upper class" exert power through their wealth (p.13).

New York's preeminence in European trade gave its impetus to manufacturing that supplied much of the growing nation. Upper class New Yorkers represented the largest and most diverse of the economic elite, surpassing other cities. New York was most involved in the cotton trade then. Banking, extending credit for future crops, grew out of commerce; it became more profitable than merchandising. European capital was used.

Page 31 tells the reason why merchant houses could no then be incorporated for limited liability: they lacked a public purpose. Page 33 tells of the importance of proper marriages to merchant companies. Marrying the boss' daughter was not just Horatio Alger fiction. Most wealth then was due to inheritance (p.36). A display of luxury began to replace democratic simplicity (p.42). Funerals developed as a public ritual.

One feature of the expansion of the 1850s was the creation of socially exclusive neighborhoods (p.55). It continued the separation of workplace and home: commuting was invented! Political clubs, like the Chamber of Commerce, were formed to support the policies of the merchants and bankers. New social clubs, like the Union Club, were formed to unite the merchants and financial elite. Churches also became exclusive to the elites and shifted locations to follow the wealthy.

Page 78 tells how the merchants and bankers interests were allied with the Southern planters, while manufacturers were not. The increasing political power of ordinary people led to public works that benefitted ordinary people. He tells how the wealthy learned to influence a party by funding the organization in the 1850s. Page 81 tells of the effects of political decisions on commerce. The elites needed votes to get their agenda across; but since their agenda was against the interests of the voters it failed to win. So they resorted to lobbying and corruption to further their agenda (p.83). The merchants and financiers involved in the cotton trade supported the Democratic Party and its attempts to reconcile sectional differences. Manufacturers supported the new Republican Party.

New Yorks's banks were an enormous source of money for the federal government. In effect, they were the only source for bonds and loans. The federal government raised money with an excise tax and an income tax (p.118). The Civil War and high tariffs turned the US towards the West and away from cotton exports and European imports. It helped manufacturing, and not just for the war effort.

While the book's 330 pages of text seem aimed at a general audience, the 130 pages of notes is too long.