A Skewed View of City Culture City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America by Gunther Barth

Review by: William R. Leach Reviews in American History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Jun., 1981), pp. 213-217 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2701989 . Accessed: 02/12/2011 03:53
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A SKEWED VIEW OF CITY CULTURE

William R. Leach

Gunther Barth. City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. ix + 289 pp. Illustrations, notes, sources, and index. $19.95. In a book that strikes out into new historical terrain, Gunther Barth argues that nineteenth-century American urban society created new forms of culture in response to the democratic life of the modern city. Unlike the traditional culture of Europe with its emphasis on "time-honored artifacts" and high cultural values, this unique culture grew organically from the heterogeneous elements of a new competitive, free, and altogether egalitarian setting. It both mirrored this setting and helped to educate and adjust "all sorts of people"-immigrants, uprooted country folk, middle class men and women -to their identities as city people. Barth focuses on five institutional forms that he claims constituted the central basis for city culture and that perfectly fitted the requirements of city people. First, Barth examines how city people slowly came to adopt the apartment house as tthe most suitable unit of private space. Conforming to the demands of cities constructed according to the gridiron plan, which served commercial interests by dividing property into individual parcels of real estate, the apartment house came by mid-century to satisfy the needs of people unhappy with boarding or unable to build family homes in the city. By 1900 it was the principal and most successful means of organizing private space, corresponding to the city parks and playgrounds, which successfully utilized public space for leisure purposes. The apartment house adjusted people to the vertical character of the city. It freed people-above all, women-to interact more effectively with complex and diverse urban demands. Moreover, with the introduction of such new public transport as trolleys and railroads, the integration of apartment house dwellers as well as suburbanites into the life of the city was made even more complete. As Barth says, "public transport unified a divided urban space" (p. 57). Barth also deals with the metropolitan press and the department store as major features of city culture. With technological advances and managerial innovations, a new form of journalism developed from the 1830s onward
0048-7511/81/0092-0213 $01.00 Copyright " 1981 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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that reduced the anxiety and solitude of urban people by underlining their common humanity. It identified the pursuit of wealth and of commodities for most people as the egalitarian route to success. The metropolitan press, pioneering in the creation of news reporting and human interest stories, satisfied the desire of masses of people for information and made them aware of one another. Above all, the American press differed from its European urban variants by identifying for men and women the heterogeneity of city life. It made articulate the "basic democratic tenets of American society by recognizing the differencesamong people." It "recognized people as individuals" (p. 109). The department store acted similarly in shaping and clarifying the behavior of urban people, especially of women. Unlike the French and English stores of the same period, such American stores as Stewart's, Wanamaker's, Macy's, and Marshall Field's "made the feminine public possible." Freeing women from domestic constraints, department store shopping fostered a new sense of female community, "stimulating identification across social classes." The stores modernized women by bringing their "civilizing influence" into the heart of the city and by exposing them to urban egalitarianism and heterogeneity. Department store practices and shopping placed all women on a footing of equality. The fashion cycle, with its emphasis on change and variety, educated women to the "freedom of modern life." The stores offered both female clerks and customers the promise of a better economic life. Shoppers learned that commodities could be had by all, while saleswomen, who, according to Barth, fitted better than men into service jobs and "meshed smoothly" with their clientele, earned wages, got their "economic start," and glimpsed the "better life." In his concluding chapters Barth discusses the ball park and the vaudeville house, both indigenous American creations, along the same lines developed in the previous chapters. Appearing in the period 1840-70, baseball educated both "self-made men who set their own leisure hours" and "laborers who benefitted from flexible working hours ... to the inner workings of a new pattern of urban life" (p. 153). Baseball not only adjusted immigrants and natives alike to urban life by keeping them in touch with nature and giving them outlets for play, it also made comprehensible new urban emphases on competition, efficiency, economy of motion, and organization. It exposed different groups of men to one another, forging communal bonds, bridging "some of the conflicts inherent in the modern city" (p. 191). It conditioned immigrants accustomed to older forms of authority and order to the democratic maxims that "protected the humanity of many people" and "that increasingly guided behavior in the marketplace and the job market" (p. 187).

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The vaudeville house completes Barth's gallery of urban cultural institutions. "Distinctly urban" and utterly faithful to the egalitarian creed, the "censored variety" of the vaudeville show of the 1890s displaced in popularity all other forms of urban entertainments. It brought together the "entire range of city people." It fit the needs of everyone, and by everyone Barth means "people on the make." Like the department store, ball park, and metropolitan press, the nine-act bill and continuous shows of vaudeville supposedly institutionalized and mirrored the "free and ambitious air of the modern city." It taught people to deal with urban life and how to be urban. By poking fun at ethnic stereotypes, it taught immigrants how to laugh at and accept themselves. Female patrons learned, while watching the performances of other women, that "glamor" was "woman's avenue into modern city life" (p. 222). Most important, vaudeville "linked heterogeneous groups of spectators" into a harmonious community. It made them aware of their common humanity and interests, and "enabled them to cope with the complexities of modern life." City People offers an informative and remarkably affirmative assessment of nineteenth-century American life. Throughout the book Barth emphasizes the social, economic, and political democracy of the American city and how major institutions reflected this democracy, fostered community, unified diverse groups, and prepared them to face urban demands successfully. The book accurately depicts one side of American city life, although one could essentially make many of the same claims about all urban experience, democracy or no democracy. American cities did generate community. They did force different peoples to acknowledge their common humanity, as all large urban communities do. It is almost a cliche to say that cities, unlike small towns, fostered considerable freedom of movement and behavior. Antebellum southern planters, who lived in a very undemocratic society, realized this fact when they tried to control the activity of free blacks in such cities as Charleston and Mobile. By focusing only on this side of American city life, by following the modernization model, which allows only for "fit," continuity, and smooth and successful adjustment, Barth, however, ignores the class conflicts and structural inequities that so clearly marked American cities in the late nineteenth century. He does a serious injustice to the "complexities" of his subject. He is wrong when he claims that everyone, "all sorts of people," interacted daily in the city and participated equally in urban cultural life. In the period he describes, affluent classes had begun to insulate themselves from the challenging density of the city; many middle class people had begun their

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exodus to the suburbs, commuting to work by day and leaving the city by night; and ethnic and racial groups had found sanctuary in ghettoes, where they created their own cultural institutions. Class stratification, as much as democracy, marked the life of the American city. This is a well-known fact, so one wonders why Barth neglects to deal with it. Using only impressionistic evidence, Barth contends that in areas of play and consumption nearly all American city dwellers, male and female, took part equally in American life and glimpsed the egalitarian character of their society. He even suggests, in his discussion of department store saleswomen, that Americans experienced the same things in work and production. This picture, although right in places, is seriously skewed. It can be easily argued that Barth's mass cultural institutions veiled and even made explicit the underlying inequities and struggles for power that characterized urban life at this time. Barth writes that vaudeville was "censored as no other amusement field in America" and, at the same time, faithfully mirrored "urban sophistication" and "diversity"(p. 202). He pays no attention to this obvious contradiction. Nor does he examine the significance of the imposed censorship, which suggests that vaudeville mirrored the imposition of bourgeois standards of behavior, not the "free air of the modern city." We also learn little in his book about ethnic theaters and newspapers, which served very different needs and flourished side by side with vaudeville and the metropolitan press. In his discussion of department stores, Barth claims, on the basis of limited evidence, that the stores "educated"and smoothly adjusted all classes of women, clerks and customers alike, to urban diversity, community, equality, opportunity. Barth accepts the common-sensical view that because the stores offered free access and fixed prices, permitted browsing and provided customer service, they must have transmitted the spirit of harmonious democracy. This perspective ignores the conflicts between workers and patrons and between different classes of shopping women that Emile Zola so brilliantly depicted in Au bonheur des dames, a book that could have easily been written about American stores. It also ignores the'differences between stores. Contrary to Barth, Stewart's catered to the ultra-fashionables, while Macy's had a more broad-based clientele. In Barth's view the "fashion cycle received impetus from the freedom of modern city life," but it also transformed the fashionable female civilities Barth admires into social savagery. Barthe's perspective on the stores gives little attention to the deepening isolation inflicted on middle class women by their new consuming roles. It says nothing of the constraints imposed on working class consumption by chronic low wages and exploitation. The greater availability of commodities,

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in fact, may have made many women angrily aware of the undemocratic, not the democratic, character of American city life. For a cogent understanding of these matters, we must look elsewhere. When "individualism becomes the recognized order of the day," writes the anthropologist Mary Douglas, "the disruptive energies of envy may be a dangerous threat to safety of life and property, the more so because a free market in individual transactions always seems to result in an uneven distribution of influence and wealth" (The World of Goods [1979]), p. 40). City People suffers from other problems as well. Barth never explains to my satisfaction why department stores, vaudeville, baseball, and the metropolitan press (to say nothing of apartment houses) were the most important cultural institutions in the American city. Surely urban charities, the growing number of hospitals, the museums, the youth organizations such as the YMCA, and, above all, the public schools - all indigenous to the city- played, at the very least, equally profound roles in shaping the character of American city culture. The problem hinges on what Barth means by culture. In an introduction distinguished by too many abstractions and cliches ("In the unending rush for the new, older people were pushed aside"), Barth sets American city culture, which "drew deeply and widely on the experience of city people," against European culture, "epitomized in painting and sculpture, literature and music, and other artifacts of seemingly absolute value" (p. 24). Barth's point is that European "culture" was irrelevant to and unable to compete with those indigenous democratic institutions that more effectively "answered to the needs" of city people. Barth's point is debatable. I would argue that European "culture" competed very nicely with popular forms of culture, because it answered the needs of the urban rich, who built theaters, opera houses, and symphony orchestras. The rich used European "culture" to establish the impenetrable contours of their own class. More important, Barth's distinctions between European "culture" and American city culture makes little historical sense. Surely, vigorous culture everywhere draws widely and deeply on the experience of the people. Furthermore, the distinction does an injustice to immigrant experience. It suggests that Europeans brought nothing with them but "high culture." It suggests, in the manner of modernization theory, that immigrants offered little or no resistance to those urban institutions that so smoothly assimilated them into American society. Professor Leach, Department of History, New York University, is the author of True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980).