Anti-urbanism and the fear of the (black) city underbelly
To elucidate the full meaning and mechanisms of the invention of the “underclass” in the late twentieth century, it is essential to historicize them, in this case to set them against two staggered backdrops that reveal analogues and precursors of the category. The first and deeper backdrop is a centuries-long strand of abiding anti-urbanism in American culture and politics, with roots in the country’s origin as an agrarian settler colony and the steadfast desire to distinguish itself from Europe and its great cities – which Thomas Jefferson famously viewed as “pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” For this national tradition, the metropolis is an engine of class conflict, ethnic promiscuity, social disintegration, and moral perdition, as exemplified by the shrill denunciations of the “wicked city” that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century.23
The second backdrop is a more recent historical vision that recentered urban fear and fulmination onto the dark “inner city” during the postwar decades, making race as blackness the paramount prism of public perception and policy in the metropolis. This inflection of anti-urbanism, provoked by the ghetto uprising of the 1960s, portrayed poor blacks as agents of violence, disorder, and immorality, and the city itself as an ungovernable sociospatial form doomed to crisis, breakdown, and irreversible decline.24 Both backstories suggest that the impulse to sociomoral control in the metropolis has a long and recurrent history; and that this impulse drives the symbolic delineation of the target populations viewed as desecrating the values of the Anglo middle and upper classes – and not the other way around.
In the collective imaginary of the United States, and especially among its educated elite, the emergence of the first urban centers in the 1830s was experienced as a mortal threat to the young nation and its exceptional character, as it undermined the mythic pioneer virtues of independence and self-sufficiency. The city was considered the dissolute redoubt of the “three Ms,” mongrels, mobs, and money, a dumping ground for the dregs of European society, a foul and sinful place that made a dignified life impossible.25 The flourishing of urban-reform societies rooted in Evangelical Christianity at mid-century, with their missionary visitors, tract associations distributing bibles, and Sunday schools aiming to revive the moral order of the village, was no match for the surging urban masses at once “vicious, abandoned, debased.” Tidal waves of migration and working-class formation soon triggered trepidation over the “replication of European conditions” and alarm at the spread of “popery” and “pauperism.”26
“The refuse of Europe”
“The refuse of Europe . . . congregate in our great cities and send forth wretched progeny, degraded in the deep degradation of their parents – to be the scavengers, physical and moral, of our streets. Mingled with these are also the offcast children of American debauchery, drunkennesss, and vice. A class more dangerous to the community . . . can scarcely be imagined.”
American Bible Society, Annual Report, 1857
By the 1870s, the idiom of wilderness was transferred from the Western frontier to the urban frontier, and the inner ring of cities portrayed as an abyss of anonymity, depravity, and artificiality, whose “semi-barbarous” residents threatened to capsize the societal edifice in toto. Theories of hereditary degeneracy and moral delinquency were combined to develop the doctrine and practice of “scientific philanthropy” based on the partitioning of the urban poor into worthy and vicious.27 Of particular concern was the size, growth, and menace of a submerged stratum of the urban proletariat known as the residuum – a notion borrowed from Charles Booth’s mammoth survey of the London poor28 – nested in the most squalid tenements of the metropolis. Criminality, casual work, moral dissolution, and family disintegration were the defining features of this fearsome and unreformable population, which makes it a close ancestor to the “underclass.”
During the Gilded Age, the anxiety of the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie took on hysterical proportions in the face of “the triple menace of class warfare, alien radicalism, and urban mass violence.”29 Colossal demographic changes turned the old urban centers into the province of foreign migrants splintered by language and religion, spawned the squalor of the slums, and fueled the growth of patronage politics. Religious groups, such as the Salvation Army and its “slum brigades,” and the charity organization movement sprang into action, based on “the assumption that the urban poor had degenerated morally because the circumstances of city life had cut them off from the elevating influence of their moral betters” – shades of the lament that the “underclass” lacks proper “mainstream role models” a century later.
To battle indolence and ameliorate the character of the poor required investigation, visitation, and the compiling of dossiers made available to prospective landlords, employers, banks, and even the police.30 Imported from London, the settlement house movement led by Jane Addams favored environmental remedies over individual solutions and made the neighborhood the focus of inquiry and remediation, anticipating its adoption by the Chicago school of sociology two decades later. The urban reform of the 1890s thus followed two tracks: a coercive approach seeking to rein in the immoral behavior of the poor through surveillance and supervision in their own best interest (Jacob Riis summed up this perspective with the formula, “Those who would fight for the poor must fight the poor to do it”), and an environmentalist approach aiming to ameliorate the tenements with bathhouses, parks, and playgrounds suited to restoring the moral health of the proletariat.31
Faced with the pestilence and violence of the teeming immigrant working class, the bourgeoisie fled to the emerging suburbs, also imported from England and consciously crafted as the sociomoral opposite of the city. Inspired by Puritanism, the ideal of urbane living among the American bourgeoisie has always been suburban, that is, socially homogeneous, ethnically exclusive, spatially separate, and bucolic.32 The suburb promoted and protected middle-class ideals of property, familial privacy, and moral propriety; it allowed the gracious single-family home, set in its large green lawn and drained of profane concerns, to function as the cradle of domesticity and religiosity. It expressed, not just the desire for self-seclusion, but also the fear of the class and ethnic other as well as trepidation at the rapid social changes wrought by the market.33 The suburb thus defined itself through a series of homological oppositions that systematically devalued the first term: city/suburb, industry/family, poor/rich, ethnic promiscuity/ethnic purity, paganism/religiosity, artificial/natural, and depravity/morality. It is a key “asymmetric counter-concept” of America’s urban imagination.34
During the Progressive Era, the taming of the city, viewed as a continued menace to the state and the nation, took two forms. The first strand extended the coercive and moralistic approach to stimulate crusades against such ills of urban life as sexual deviancy (the brothel) and intemperance (the saloon). The second, with Jane Addams as its figurehead, drew on a more sanguine view of the metropolis; it embraced positive environmentalism to remake the urban setting in ways believed to nourish sound habits and good conduct among the laboring class. The development of tenement reform, parks and playgrounds, civic pageants, and municipal art, not to forget “temperance saloons” offering masculine camaraderie with no alcohol, partook of this approach. So did the teaching of English, ethnic crafts, and occupational