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Britain & The USA – A Comparative History

By Steve Newman

Part Two: The Images of Urbanization

As the late American historian Eric Monkkonen has pointed out: “...both in England and the United States the city has turned out to be far more fluid residentially, more rigid occupationally, and in the US more complex ethnically than probably anyone imagined.” Monkkonen was the great historian of urban and social change – not least in the world of crime – and gives convincing and beautifully written accounts of life, and the conflicting images of British and US cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries that have emerged over the last twenty or so decades. And if we investigate these images we see that one is of order and conformity, of stability and longevity of employment, of a community spirit that can be seen as something of a left over from small town and village life: an image that can be seen in artistic representations of both Britain and the US, and an ideal that became an integral part of a some late 19th and early 20th century literature. One only has to read the novels of Booth Tarkington and Arnold Bennett to get a sense of what I mean.

  

The other image is that of the 'teeming masses' – of immigrants in an overcrowded insanitary London or New York, with a multitude of ragged kids laughing and waving at early film cameras. Of moustachioed policemen directing horse drawn carriages and omnibuses; of handcarts, or perhaps a harbour crammed with tall-masted ships, and locomotives, oh, and inevitably smoke and steam, lots of smoke and steam. Here one must read Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair to get the idea.

Neither image is wrong, or right, but as Monkkonen suggests our inbuilt images of the 19th century urban experience should exclude the picture of a stable community much more and instead focus on some of those handcarts piled high with household goods as a family sought somewhere new to live after perhaps being evicted by some money-grabbing landlord...

Monkkonen, Eric

Monkkonen, Eric
My Old Man said follow the van

And don't dilly-dally on the way

Add to this image that of a disparate group of people often living in large run-down boarding houses - especially during periods of little or no house building – with shift-workers even sharing beds. We should not forget either the hundreds of itinerants roving from one urban area to another looking for hand-outs, food, and work, itinerants who were invariably old soldiers crippled mentally and physically by war. This was most notable in the US after the Civil War, and in Britain after the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars, and later after World War 1. Consequently we should think less about the large comfortable home on the edge of the city, and more about the over-crowded tenement. We should think less about those neighbourhoods where shop-keepers knew their customers by name and to whom they readily gave credit, and more about the orphaned child who steels from those shops in order to eat. And as a soundtrack to all of this – as in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara – imagine you can hear, often in the snow, a Salvation Army band; in other words think less about stability and more about instability, which is of course a Marxist point of view: in other words always be aware who's writing the history.

The reality was that both images existed side by side creating both dread for the one and aspiration for the other. It is therefore important to try and understand how urban societies in both the US and Britain came about in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the first instance the replacing of a rural identity with an urban one came about for many through, in the first instance, association with religion and church, then, for some, by creating and joining fledgling political parties and trades unions, for many more through association with certain schools, academies, drama groups and musical organisations such as choral societies, and by employment itself, most especially in department stores and factories, plus, for many at the lower end of the wage scale, by joining sickness benefit organisations such as the Odd Fellows, and, for those toward the upper end, by joining the Freemasons; all of which created a vibrant mix of ideas.

By the last third of the 19th century local and national government (entwined with the ever lengthening tentacles of civil service bureaucracy – which included ten yearly census returns - the increase in tax revenues and the expanding voting franchise) began to influence more and more how people thought of themselves, which was, gradually, that of being either British or American, rather than an unknown member of a grimy urban landscape, or an isolated member of a family of immigrant farmers trying to plough a living from the foothills of the Rockies or the mountains of North Wales. People were now becoming part of the nation state, helped at every stage by the burgeoning newspaper industry, which attracted a readership that was transforming itself through better education (whether state, church, or privately funded), increasingly better housing, higher wages, which, through an association with some, or all, of the organisations listed in the previous paragraph, created aspirational values that led to the creation of a new middle-class ( it has been argued that all American's started off as members of a genuine middle class), a phenomenon that was, and is, peculiarly British, with most urban based Brits still craving, but not achieving, that big house in the country. By comparison the ever increasing number US citizens, especially after WWII, did find a dream of sorts in the semi-rural sprawl of the city's edge, or in small town living, with an equal number happy to remain living within the heart of the cities. They were the two most prominent images of the US in the 1950s.

What we also see, in the late 19th century, as the cities grew, and surface and underground railway systems extended, is an inevitable increase in the mobility of people within and between cities, with at least 30% of a city's population – using figures measured over the two decades between 1880 – 1900 – continually on the move and re-settling, which meant that cities and large towns were continually renewing and revitalising themselves, yet seemingly full of strangers. This phenomenon – which is no different today - was common to both the US and Britain.

As mentioned earlier, the 19th century small town and village experience, in both the US and Britain, was very different to that of the city, and an experience from which comes the comforting thought of the stable community used by the novelists, but which, in reality, were communities that were full of young people determined to find a new and more adventurous life in those big cities, either at home or abroad. Thomas Wolfe's novels of the 1930s are seldom about anything else.

Consequently, with a large part of the urban population constantly on the move, both in the US and Britain, with others establishing ethnic and religious ghettos based upon the old European patterns, the instances of crime began to grow. For many crime – petty crime – was simply a means of survival; for others organised crime was way of life, which, in the period from 1870 until the First World War grew as detection rates fell. Only with the creation of more efficient criminal investigation departments, most famously Scotland Yard in Britain (a central government funded police department based in London), and the Pinkerton Agency (a private organisation) in the US, was this wave of serious crime brought under control.

We mustn't of course think of crime as an invention of the urban experience. No, it came out of an already existing pattern of rural crime that included poaching, sheep and cattle stealing, highway robbery, tool theft, and hold-ups of small town banks in Britain's green and pleasant land, which was matched in the US by the crimes of stagecoach, bank and train robberies, plus cattle rustling. These patterns of crime, and the crooks themselves, simply moved into the cities where they were quickly employed by certain crime families.

Consequently the cities of Britain and the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries can be seen as a kind of theme park that would attract more and more of the rural population into its rich and adventurous cultural, business, religious, criminal and political life.


To Be Continued...