The resulting working definition of the middle class for this study focuses on employment (or an individual’s relationship to the means of production), annual income, accumulated wealth, self-description, and lifestyle. Philadelphia’s bourgeoisie at the end of the nineteenth century consisted of hundreds of thousands of people located throughout the region. The men often worked in white-collar clerical, managerial, or professional jobs. Others owned shops (or small businesses) or were skilled craftsmen. A majority of the married women did not work for pay outside the home but often had important volunteer positions. Some women were college educated and some (mostly single but a few married) had entered the professions. Although annual incomes varied greatly (throughout most of the period they could range from less than $500 for junior clerks to more than $5,000 for professionals), most middle-class males earned a regular income (often termed a “salary”) that was sufficient to buy or to rent a home located away from the work site, to commute by mass transit, to engage in the culture of consumption, and to put a small amount in the bank. Accumulated wealth also ranged widely: some members of the bourgeoisie barely made ends meet on their salary whereas others had investments (particularly in the cases of small business owners) worth tens of thousands of dollars. For the purposes of this study, if a person acquired significant property, he or she was no longer considered middle class. Most had some formal education, and as the period progressed, more attended high school and went on to college. Many were Protestant: mainly Baptist, Episcopalian, Friend, Lutheran, Methodist, or Presbyterian. Some were Roman Catholic or Jewish. A vast majority were white, but there was a small African-American middle class in the city. Most (regardless of race or religion, and, by 1920, sex) were registered Republican. Many employed servants, although this declined toward the end of the period. Though some lived in heterogenous neighborhoods, others were helping to form the first middle-class enclaves both inside and outside the city limits. In Philadelphia proper, members of the bourgeoisie lived around (but not on) Rittenhouse Square and in West Philadelphia, Germantown, and North Philadelphia. In the Pennsylvania hinterland they lived in Montgomery and Delaware Counties: Cynwyd, Jenkintown, and Lansdowne. In New Jersey, they lived in the little towns strung along the railroad and trolley lines in Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties: Collingswood, Glendora, and Haddonfield.
These middle-class Philadelphians shared activities; these were the rituals that helped to define bourgeois culture. They read the “breezy” Philadelphia Inquirer or the more serious Public Ledger in the morning and The Evening Bulletin at night. They shopped at the major Center City department stores: John Wanamaker, Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbel Brothers, N. Snellenburg, and Lit Brothers. If they lived in North or West Philadelphia they rode the streetcars. If they lived farther from downtown, they used the frequent trains of the Atlantic City Railroad, Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad, Philadelphia & Reading Railway, or West Jersey & Seashore Railroad to and from work, shopping, and entertainment.
Applying this definition to the women and men who are at the heart of this work proved, for the most part, not to cause many problems. In the course of this study, no person was excluded because I felt he or she was likely working class; in fact, only three of the historical actors even raised this possibility (highlighting what social historians have long known: how few working-class diaries survive in archives). In two of these cases, evidence within the diaries points to a largely middle-class lifestyle; in the other, little is evident about the writer but his uncle was a successful lawyer. Much more common was to exclude men and women because they were elite and not upper-middle class. Wealth, income, and Social Register status eliminated dozens of possible guides. There were a few difficult cases here but two specific examples should help illustrate how I drew this line. Eugenia Barnitz was clearly from a very wealthy family. Although her memoirs do not mention income or property, she was raised in large homes on the fringes of aristocratic sections of the city. Her father was a “factory manager” (according to the manuscript census) and she shopped at some of the elite stores in Center City (along with their more pedestrian counterparts). In the end, based largely on the totality of her activities, she seemed to be at the very upper end of the middle class and she was included in the survey. A nineteenth-century Philadelphia lawyer, Josiah Granville Leach, was excluded from the survey because, although in many ways he seemed to conform to bourgeois norms, his wife made regular trips to Europe and eventually he was listed in the Social Register. Leach might have been an example of a middle-class person who, in the polite terms of the Victorian bourgeoisie, “married well,” but excluding him seemed safer.31
By the centennial year of 1876, middle-class Philadelphians were, by and large, confident, content, and complacent. Their city had expanded in wealth and population throughout the nineteenth century, and although steadily losing its long competition with New York City, it remained a national center of finance, publishing, and manufacture. As they prepared for their world’s fair, middle-class Philadelphians also began to reinvent their metropolis. To understand the rhythms of this city, we can follow John L. Smith, a Philadelphia mapmaker, as he rode a horse-drawn streetcar to the Centennial grounds. After that prelude, our study of how bourgeois Philadelphians scientifically reconstructed their society can begin in earnest.
Part I examines the evolution of late nineteenth-century middle-class culture in Philadelphia. During the last few decades of that century, the vast economic changes associated with industrialization created a large and powerful bourgeoisie throughout the Europeanized world. In Philadelphia, the women and men of the middle class used their newfound wealth and influence to create a new image of the city along rational, scientific lines. They did this by traveling throughout the region by streetcar and train, shopping at the new department stores, and reading their daily newspapers. As developed in Part II, starting about the turn of the century, the expansion of the market to include more members of the working classes caused these once almost exclusively middle-class institutions to become increasingly multi-classed. Ironically, this transformation from the Victorian bourgeois market to the early twentieth-century mass market was in part made possible by the very rational, ordered commercial structures that had so reflected the values of the Victorian middle class. Within the bourgeoisie’s reactions to these changes can be found the roots of the Progressive Era’s search for political order.
PART I
Late Nineteenth-Century
Philadelphia
Prelude: I Went Out to the Centennial
Wednesday, June 14, 1876:I went out to Centennial in afternoon & I looked around in Machinery Hall—Art Gallery & Main B. & went home. 1
This was not John L. Smith’s first visit to the Centennial. He, like thousands of other Philadelphians, had toured the grounds regularly even before the fair had opened. Smith also was one of the lucky people who had jammed themselves inside the main building a month earlier when President Ulysses S. Grant (a hero to Smith, a thirty-year-old mapmaker whose life had been largely defined by his service in the Union Army) started the great Corliss steam engine to inaugurate the exposition. But that day had been very busy and crowded, unlike most days since at the Centennial. To help better understand the rhythms of everyday middle-class life in Philadelphia in 1876, we can follow John Smith on a more typical day as he takes a horse-drawn streetcar from his shop downtown out to the exhibition grounds in Fairmount Park.
That morning Smith left the house he shared with his mother in middle-class North Philadelphia and went to his store at 27 South Sixth Street (located a block from the old State House in the commercial center of Philadelphia). He spent the morning at work but business had been, in his words, “dull” even though he found the city “full of strangers.” That afternoon, the combination of slow sales and near-perfect weather drew Smith to Fairmount Park for another visit to the Centennial. Like many other middle-class Philadelphians, Smith made multiple trips to the fair that summer.