Grund’s dialectical materialism echoed radical readings of the European Revolutions. Lippard, who devoted column after column of his weekly paper the Quaker City to making sense of 1848 and its aftermath, described the events in France as a reaction to “social” more than “constitutional” evils. The journalist and reformer George G. Foster, who also spoke at Independence Square, coauthored a hastily written account of affairs in Paris with Thomas Dunn English. Foster and English rejected the common assumption that the French had merely emulated the American example. Instead, Parisians had embarked on a glorious new course, for their revolution had social consequences as well as origins. “Capital arrayed itself against labor; and the latter only awaited the proper moment for its emancipation,” they argued, but the Second Republic’s pledge “to guarantee work and existence to the laborer” had addressed “the problem of the Nineteenth Century!”34
The authors joined Grund in blaming the “bourgeoisie” for France’s woes. Bourgeois citizens became a kind of Monk Hall International, who, they hinted, threatened American liberty too. The class’s corrupting influence extended from the throne to the factory. An “oligarchy of the bourgeoisie” made King Louis Philippe its head; their “sordid desires” and “thirst for accumulation” led them to “acquiesce in any state of affairs which gratifies their avarice.” Encompassing all the “capitalists,” “tradesmen,” “bankers,” “monopolists,” “venders,” and “men reposing on their cotton bales,” the bourgeoisie marked a new name for the corrupt elite that Lippard portrayed lording over Philadelphia. But above all Foster and English defined them by their antithesis: productive citizens. Out of this dialectic came the 1848 Revolution: “the working class” in its “final struggle” had “emancipated itself from the chains of the bourgeoisie.”35 They did not just describe a class, but a class struggle.
Class struggle stalked Philadelphia too, for radicals rejected any idea that the United States enjoyed immunity from the social processes ravaging Europe’s great cities: “Labor itself, under the influence of unlimited competition, is forced down and down, until it is compelled to accept gladly of the merest and least possible amount of wages that will prevent absolute starvation. Under this state of things, the laboring classes, forced to pack themselves into filthy garrets and noisome cellars … either become beasts, or learn to pray for death. Such is the condition of the great mass of laborers throughout the world.”36
When he introduced Philadelphia’s “bourgeoisie” to a domestic audience, Foster became more circumspect, but he still mapped French social relations onto an American urban form. In late 1848, he wrote a series on Philadelphia for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, the radical Whig paper, which would soon hire Karl Marx as its European correspondent. Events in Europe, Foster noted, had familiarized citizens with the “bourgeoisie,” though he doubted that many of the writers who used it “know what it means.” Despite the problems of determining the word’s “true signification,” Foster claimed that “the most distinguishing characteristic of Philadelphia is its Bourgeoisie,” for it had “reached a higher state of development” in the city than anywhere else in the Union. The first of his “slices” of Philadelphia life therefore dissected the class, and while he stressed its mercantile character, he did not leave out manufacturers: a bourgeois was “a man who keeps a shop or lives by making a profit from the product of the labor of others.” His sketch of staid respectability in the city proper, though, provided a foil for subsequent forays into turbulent suburbs. Here his interest in social taxonomy faded as he turned to recounting salacious stories of street gangs and dance halls.37
Hints of Foster’s radicalism nevertheless crept in as he mapped Philadelphia’s people and progress. In taking a similar path to Southwark as Lippard’s “monks of Monk Hall,” he pointed out “the immense army of proletaires which exist in every city, who live hardby in poor cabins and shanties, and whose labour supplies the profits upon which the merchantprinces and their aristocratic families subsist in luxury.” Here, he made the city look rather like Paris, with its prosperous center surrounded by an oppressed suburban poor. Later, in visiting Independence Hall, Foster asked whether Americans had “suffered Europe to overtake and pass us.” Had citizens, he wondered, “secured to Strength Employment” and “to Employment Reward” by “developing all the benignant powers of the elements for the benefit of the whole people”? Or were Americans now “enviers of the progress of others”? He left readers to ponder the matter themselves.38
Among Philadelphia’s radicals, affinity for European revolutions ran deep. The year before the 1848 Revolutions, an anonymous novel, The Almighty Dollar, portrayed Moyamensing’s Killers as primitive rebels who promise to liberate the land “from the iron sway of the rich.” Although the gang take the Jacobin club as their model, it soon becomes clear that they owe as much to George Washington as to the Committee of Public Safety, but the links the novel draws between the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and antebellum urban violence are striking. In reality, an Irish American gang made up mostly of apprentices and laborers hardly amounted to “proletarian heroes,” but its reinvention in the hands of an anonymous author hints at the way radicals challenged the widespread anti-Jacobinism of the antebellum republic. Campbell and one of his collaborators, indeed, heaped praise on Robespierre, Marat, and St. Just for attempting “to secure to the producers all that they produced.”39
But it was 1848 rather than 1789 (or 1793, for that matter) that focused minds in Philadelphia by raising the possibility of millennial social transformation. Campbell, who had been putting the finishing touches to his Theory of Equality—a pamphlet that ranged across continents and centuries by weaving Rousseauian inequality, Paineite republicanism, and Democratic antimonopoly into a project for social reconstruction—hastily added a fawning dedication to the new French government, lauding its efforts to “elevate the proletarians.” And Lippard hoped the 1848 Revolutions would reverberate in the United States. “Shall the world look for the redemption of the workers from the chains of social wrong,” he asked, “and our Union be left hopeless and desolate?” The land reformer William Elder, who had shared the stage with McMichael and Foster at the Independence Square meeting, renounced the cry of “bread or blood,” but warned that conservative wealth “must expect at last to meet its victims at the barricades.” “Gradual reform or violent revolution,” he counseled, “is the necessity of our condition.”40
Rival interpretations of what the 1848 Revolutions were—and what they might mean for Philadelphia—shattered the consensus of the Independence Square meeting. In one corner, free blacks had assembled to welcome the abolition of slavery in French colonies, and when a policeman tried to end the gathering by stopping one of the speakers, whites intervened and “bade him go on.” African Americans’ readiness to claim 1848 as their own illustrated that the economic elite enjoyed no monopoly in making sense of the upheaval. Yet when Elder, in words dripping with socialist and abolitionist sentiment, persuaded the main meeting to resolve that the Second Republic’s destruction of slavery; its organization of industry; and its proclamation of liberty, equality, and fraternity revealed the principles “of our own Revolution,” the resolutions were left off the published proceedings. A few weeks later, radicals and abolitionists returned to the spot to protest the “mutilation” of the record.41
The 1848 Revolutions divided the meeting but bound radicals together. European turmoil gave them a vocabulary to name what was happening in Philadelphia, an understanding of how their republican ideal differed from that of the bourgeoisie, and a spirit of solidarity that brought rival factions together. By the summer, the elation that had greeted the revolutions had given way in much of the Union to skepticism about their permanence and doubts about their character, especially among conservatives in the North and South. But when the North American backed the Second Republic’s bloody suppression of labor unrest in the June Days, and began to worry about “red republicanism” in American cities, radicals continued to praise Parisian workers.42 In Philadelphia, the three years that followed