If this new bourgeois wordview was as commonplace as I argue, why have historians failed to link it with the broader changes in turn-of-the-century society? Quite simply, because until recently taxonomy remained a familiar and effective (though not “scientific”) way of organizing knowledge. The Library of Congress cataloging system, for example, is little more than an even more detailed version of the one Dewey developed. It was not until the proliferation of powerful personal computers that classification and hierarchy ceased to be the primary ways to access large amounts of data. Mid-twentieth-century intellectuals were trapped in the same mental world as their grandparents and great-grandparents because modern society continued to use the same system of organization. With new ways of managing information, the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century middle class has created new metaphors for everyday life based upon popular understandings of how computers work and with them new ways of visualizing themselves and their world. This shift in mental paradigms exposes the bases of the old ways of thinking.21
The goal of this work is quite simple: to take middle-class women and men seriously when they claimed to be employing science to remake their world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rewards for doing so are ample: the culture of the turn-of-the-last-century bourgeoisie makes far more sense as a whole and the politics of the Progressive Era become much more connected with broader trends in society.
To recapture fin-de-siècle middle-class Philadelphia, I employ a variety of sources and techniques drawn from both social and cultural history. Initially, I tried to view this now-vanished world through the eyes of its inhabitants: the men and women of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban bourgeoisie. Only after assimilating their understanding of their city could I do what they could not: step back and analyze their metaphors for space and time and interpret how these mental images affected their physical environment. By applying this broader understanding of culture to relationships among the members of the middle class and the three commercial enterprises that are the focus of this study, we should be able to discover bourgeois culture in the rhythms of everyday life. The power of this study, then, comes from looking at three separate institutions, finding the many similarities among them, and seeing that these businesses were more than simply the creations of their owners and managers; their cultural meaning derived from their roles as shared symbols of a society.22
Take, for example, the case of the Victorian department store. In 1877, when John Wanamaker converted his men’s clothing store to Philadelphia’s first department store, he was neither terribly rich nor powerful. It is difficult to argue that he or his store could impose anything upon its customers. In a city with hundreds of retail establishments, shoppers could easily go elsewhere if they did not like what Wanamaker was doing and how he was doing it. Instead we can see the fantastic success of the Wanamaker store and its counterparts as reflecting the shopping rituals and values of their customers. As Wanamaker and his competitors served a largely middle-class market, it is the values of the bourgeoisie that we can find in those early department stores.23
My starting points for recreating this shared culture are the diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and letters left by the middle-class women and men of the region. I use dozens of these sources to follow bourgeois Philadelphians as they rode trains and trolleys, read newspapers, and shopped at department stores. These first-hand accounts serve as individualized guidebooks to the metropolis: highlighting for each person activities that were typical and unique, everyday and extraordinary. I analyze this information both quantitatively (how often people used particular facilities) and qualitatively (how people perceived the institutions). To place these men and women in broader context, I turn to census data and city directories. The manuscript census and the directories create a better understanding of the precise settings in which the historical actors lived while the published census figures establish the societal framework.24
After determining when and how middle-class Philadelphians used the three commercial institutions, I shift the focus of my study to these establishments. By examining the surviving business records, I develop an understanding of the changing nature of space and time within and around the firms. I use photographs, floor plans, maps, newspaper articles, printed ephemera, and surviving objects to help reconstruct the physical settings of these enterprises. It is the combination of these corporate records and artifacts with the human accounts that make the following recreations of everyday bourgeois life possible.25
Before we can explore this world made by the Philadelphia middle class, we must define whom we mean when we use that always slippery term. According to the historian Karen Lystra, “ ‘middle class’ refers not only to economic and occupational levels but also to cultural characteristics: concepts of privacy, the self, and standards of social behavior.… These men and women used such concepts to separate themselves from those they considered inferior, to build social hierarchies, and to measure their own ‘class’ performance.”26
Essentially “class” is an economic notion that has important cultural overlays. Defining any social class begins with its position in the economic system, and traditionally, American scholars have used two approaches to do this. One looks at the relationship between members of the class and the means of production. The other focuses (somewhat more prosaically) on issues of income and wealth. The first approach, derived from Karl Marx, recognizes the existence of (but usually dismisses the long term importance of) the bourgeoisie (as that term is used in this work). For Marx and many Marxist scholars, the middle class was and is an intermediate group that simply is not a key part of the capitalist mode of production and will disappear over time. In the other approach, class conflict does not exist and the seemingly permeable barriers of earned income and accumulated wealth are all that (largely statistically) divide one social stratum from another. But both approaches deal inadequately with the specifics of the historical experience. The concept of “false consciousness” may aid the social scientist Marx in explaining why a worker at the Baldwin Locomotive Works viewed himself as a member of the bourgeoisie, but it does not help the historian understand that person’s worldview. Equally troubling for scholars wedded to the income/wealth approach are those people who exhibited working-class beliefs and attitudes but earned more than some members of the middle class.27
What a cultural view adds to either of these economic definitions of class is a way to deal with the seeming aberrations and (hopefully) to treat them within the historical framework. It allows historians to focus upon what might be called (with apologies to Marx) the “class consciousness” of the group. This would consist of the activities, beliefs, and institutions that members shared and often used to differentiate themselves from others in a society. Thus a poorly paid clerk would be lower-middle class because he adopted bourgeois norms. The danger of a purely cultural approach would be the ease of creating a tautology; one could declare something a middle-class standard and then use it to delimit the bourgeoisie. That is why it is important to use economics as a starting point and then apply culture to refine the definition.28
Another advantage of this cultural analysis (particularly for the bourgeoisie of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) is that it helps to integrate women more fully into the story. Because many middle-class women did not work for pay outside the home during this period, studies that focus on employment often undervalue female contributions to society. Not only did women constitute half the bourgeoisie but, as other cultural studies have shown, they played extremely important roles in shaping the Victorian middle-class world.29
Finally, maintaining a sensitivity to the multitude of divisions that existed within the turn-of-the-century bourgeoisie is important. In addition to the commonly used dichotomy of “new” versus “old,” there existed various economic layers: upper, middle, and lower. Because this is a broad-based look at middle-class culture, throughout most of this work, such differences are ignored. What this study focuses upon is the shared bourgeois culture. This should not be seen as a rejection of the many important fissures within the middle class. The bourgeois experience in the city would vary greatly depending