Ironically, though, the same imperial metaphors that made the suburbs seem so different could serve as a justification for extending the power of the center outward. Journalists, missionaries, and reformers who ventured off-grid did portray an upside-down world that turned the bourgeois order of the city proper on its head. Almost every report raises the specter of racial amalgamation by showing white women and black men mingling promiscuously. There is no doubt here that the lives of the suburban poor became a prized commodity in the literary marketplace.76 But readers could be titillated and terrified at the same time, as the popularity of works on the French Revolution attests, and accounts of the city’s “plague spots” urged citizens to act before the epidemics that ravaged them consumed the whole city. And if comparisons to Paris and London legitimized an authoritarian response to disorder, frontier metaphors in the heyday of Manifest Destiny held out the possibility of domesticating the foreign. To speak of Philadelphia harboring “savages in civilization,” as the North American did as war raged in Mexico, implied an intolerable contradiction. Subduing the suburbs here mirrored the work of nation-building. “The instinct of self-preservation ought to nerve every muscle of philanthropy to the work of regeneration,” the Evening Bulletin had argued of Henry Mayhew’s London, or else “the Metropolis, and with it the nation, will sink eventually into the vast, yet extending abyss.” That lesson in interdependence applied to Philadelphia too where “portions of Southwark and Moyamensing” harbored “a population so morally and physically diseased,” it was “a miracle the whole county is not infected.”77
Here Fisher’s 1844 prophecy of an insurgent underclass threatened to come true in Philadelphia’s riot districts. All “great cities” were “infested” by revolutionary “barbarians” and “canaille,” the North American declared, and home missionaries and houses of industry could only ameliorate their condition. Until “a combined and powerful effort” incorporated the suburbs, such outcasts “must make the orderly portion of society their prey.”78 But where did the roots of those evils lie? Cartographies of the city proved insufficient as an answer; the rules of the metropolis needed to be explained instead.
Explaining the City
Beyond mapping the suburbs, reformers sought to understand the workings of the “great city.” They strove to comprehend the causes of the epidemics of riot and disease that visited Philadelphia in order for their metropolis to heal and grow. Strikes troubled them, but prior to 1848, wage labor—in combating idleness—appeared more often as a solution than a problem. It was not so much relations within workshops, then, but the relation between people and places that came to characterize midcentury bourgeois thinking on the city.
For many critics, the root of the city’s problems lay in rum. The miseries of one Moyamensing alley, a paper wrote in 1845, were simply “the offspring of the countless groggeries that abound in that purlieu.” Campaigners insisted that the drinker’s lack of self-restraint brought disorder to the streets and disease into the home. Across the nation, the ranks of temperance advocates swelled in the 1840s, and while the movement drew workers as well as bosses, bourgeois Philadelphians broadly agreed on the need for some kind of action against the city’s rum shops. In Irish and German neighborhoods, however, it struggled to win converts. Where persuasion failed, reformers looked for legal remedies, albeit with mixed results. Mullen alone brought sixty private prosecutions against Moyamensing’s unlicensed innkeepers. Consolidators hoped that a stronger municipal government would prove more effective than individual efforts in turning the city dry.79
But grog could be the consequence as well as the cause of disorder. Links between drink, disorder, and disease seemed perfectly clear to the midcentury bourgeoisie. When respectable Philadelphians talked about the “infected districts,” the symptoms they had in mind were often rum, riot, and the cholera, and not infrequently all three. From what though did each spring? Midcentury medical knowledge held that epidemics emanated miasmically from rotting matter. Sanitary reports and mortality statistics seemed to support the hypothesis that foul vapors arose in warrens of courts and alleys. Historians have sometimes seen miasmatic theory as convenient for merchants, for whom the rival, contagionist epidemiology threatened maritime trade.80 But citizens’ readiness to apply it as a way of explaining moral as well as physical well-being indicates its deep roots. The sense that environment molded character had a long history in American thought. Thomas Jefferson justified the Louisiana Purchase by arguing new land would alleviate overcrowding, while the urbanists of the Early Republic equated orderly space with orderly citizens. The conviction that corrupt institutions would eat away at the health of the republic, indeed, transposed easily onto urban space, where physical decay threatened a similar malaise. Even evangelicals eager to close down taverns conceded that sound family life was all but impossible in “pent-up courts and alleys.” Filth caused more than fever: it corroded the moral fiber of the metropolis.81
The link between urban disorder, disease, and degradation made the physical condition of Philadelphia’s suburbs a matter of concern for prosperous residents of the city proper. Some went so far as to embrace a rigid environmental determinism. A prize-winning essay submitted to the House of Refuge in 1855 argued that a child “from the most luxurious palace and most refined family,” if forced to work in a filthy factory and “retire to a dirty, offensive court,” would struggle to “resist the demoralizing influences” surrounding him. “All these abide together,” the author said of poverty, intemperance, brutality, and crime, and “vice is produced, directly, by impure air.” Those who wanted to purge the city of sin would have to reconstruct space as well as save souls.82
Such moral environmentalism focused minds on metropolitan interdependence. Neighborhoods were harder to quarantine than ships. Pestilence spawned in filthy “cellars and garrets,” one paper warned in the 1850s, threatened to “decimate alike the high and low.” With city life “a singular sodality,” a reformer had observed a few years earlier, the citizen should not “flatter himself that he is segregated” from evil influences “in person or property.” Moral and physical epidemics paid no more heed than rioters to district boundaries.83
Institutions that mapped the suburban frontier helped to popularize these ideas about environment, health, and moral order. Mullen’s society saw its workhouse as a refuge from the street. “The comparative comfort which its inmates found themselves to enjoy while leading lives of order, cleanliness and temperance,” the managers argued in their 1848 report, disposed “their minds to receive moral instruction.” The practice of isolating people from corrupting influences had a long history in Philadelphia. Eastern State Penitentiary, which received its first inmate in 1829, cut convicts off from the world beyond their cells, and calls for returning apprentices to the homes of master craftsmen in the aftermath of the riots amounted to a milder dose of the same medicine. Even the humane judge and future Radical Republican William D. Kelley admitted in 1849 that the city’s House of Refuge shared with prisons the ethos of secluding “inmates from society.” Philadelphia’s institutional landscape at midcentury reflected assumptions about the corrupting nature of the urban environment. Penitentiaries, schools, and workhouses each removed citizens from the immoral streets beyond.84
The limitations of this policy, though, were self-evident: to quarantine the entire population would bring the city to a standstill, halting the flow of people and goods through the streets. By the early 1850s, new plans circulated, championed first and foremost by McMichael’s North American, and closely tied to the project of Consolidation. These envisaged reconstructing Philadelphia’s savage suburbs as cathartic spaces, capable of nurturing peaceful, productive, and healthy citizens, rather than riotous, idle, and sickly ones.