Abstract
When in 1831 a Frenchman, a count, took upon himself the burden of crossing the Atlantic to inquire into the inner workings of the strange new society that was taking shape on the North American continent, he stumbled across a vast universe of voluntary associations.1 “I confess I had no previous notion,” he admitted to his readers, that Americans “of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations… of a thousand … kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.” Indeed, he asserted, in “no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America.”2 While the objects of such associations might often be trivial, he said, the result of this busy organizing was highly significant, since it formed nothing less than the foundation of “the most democratic country on the face of the earth.”3 A vibrant civil society begot modern democracy. For this reason, the count concluded, “Nothing in my opinion is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of America.”4
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Notes
Thank you to Thimo de Nijs, Julia Rosenbaum, and Boudien de Vries for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. A version of this essay was first published in Graeme Morton, Boudien De Vries, and R. J. Morris, eds., Civil Society, Associations And Urban Places: Class, Nation And Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, VT; Ashgate, 2006). It is reprinted here with permission from Ashgate.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, edited by Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 198.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, edited by Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 114.
For a discussion about defining the bourgeoisie, see Sven Beckert, “Propertied of a Different Kind: Bourgeoisie and Lower Middle Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in Burt Bledstein and Robert Johnston, eds., Middling Sorts: Essays in the History of the American Middle Class (London: Routledge, 2001), 285–295.
Sven Beckert, “Democracy and Its Discontents: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York,”, Past & Present (February 2002): 114–155.
Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 255.
Edward F. DeLancey, Memoir of James William Beekman: Prepared at the Request of the St. Nicholas Society of the City of New York (New York: Published by the Society, 1877), 16.
Francis Gerry Fairfield, The Clubs of New York (New York: H. L. Hinton, 1873), 59.
See also Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 135.
Allan Nevins and Milton H. Thomas, eds., Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3 (New York: Octagon Books, 1952), 52.
Alexander D. Bache, Anniversary Address Before the American Institute, Of the City of New-York, at the Tabernacle, October 28th, 1856, During the Twenty-Eighth Annual Fair (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1857), 32. Both institutions were clearly dominated by manufacturers, as demonstrated by an analysis of the officers of the Mechanics’ Institute. For the names of members, see Catalog of the Library of the Mechanics’ Institute, of the City of New-York; Regulations of the Reading Room and Library; and Circular to the Public (New York: A. Baptist, Jr., Printer, 1844).
Catalogue of the Library of the Mechanics’ Institute of the City of New York, 63. For the composition of the leadership of the Mechanics’ Institute, see James J. Mapes, Inaugural Address Delivered Tuesday Evening, January 7, 1845, Before the Mechanic’s Institute of the City of New York (New York: Institute Rooms, 1845), 2, and Catalogue of the Library of the Mechanics’ Institute of the City of New York, 64. Most of the institute’s activists were in one way or another engaged in manufacturing, with the remainder working as professionals or in white-collar occupations. No merchants served in the leadership of the Institute.
Oakey A. Hall, Anniversary Address before the American Institute, at Palace Garden, October 29, 1859 (New York: n.p., 1859), 22. For the list of trustees and committee members of the American Institute, see Transactions of the American Institute of the City of New-York for the Year 1855 (Albany: C. van Benthuysen, 1856).
Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1960), xi.
Amy Bridges, “Another Look at Plutocracy in Antebellum New York City”, Political Science Quarterly 97 (1982), 64.
The category of “public sphere” comes from Jürgen Habermas. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1995), especially 31–43.
New York Herald, 15 July 1850, as quoted in Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 28.
Douglas T. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 162.
Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 22, 27. The modest gallery had grown out of the private collection of wholesale grocery merchant Luman Reed’s, which he had consolidated on the third floor of his home on Greenwich Street and made accessible one day a week.
New York Historical Society, Proceedings at the Dedication of the Library (New York: Printed for the Society, 1857), 6.
The theater, accommodating 4,600 spectators, opened with a performance of Bellini’s Norma, but the real spectacle, according to historian John Warren Frick, Jr. was to be found in the private boxes that “provided their inhabitants [with an opportunity] for being seen.” John Warren Frick, Jr., “The Rialto: A Study of Union Square, The Center of New York’s First Theatre District, 1870–1900” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1983), 28, 29, 32, 37.
Peter George Buckley, “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 18201860” (Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY Stony Brook, 1984), 9. For an excellent analysis, see Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base of High Culture in America,”, Media, Culture and Society (982): 33–50.
Andrew Stulman Dennett, Weird & Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 18, 26.
Ibid., 30. Rossiter Raymond, Peter Cooper (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), 69.
For the general point, see also Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 38.
Robert T. Davis, “Pauperism in the City of New York,” Journal of Social Science 6 (1874): 74.
Allen Churchill, The Upper Crust: An Informal History of New York’s Highest Society (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 157.
Social Register Association, Social Register, New York, 1886–1900 (New York: Social Register Association, 1886–1900).
Forty-three percent of all industrialists who were members of the Chamber of Commerce in 1886 had joined after 1881. In contrast, only 32 percent of all merchants had joined during the same time period. For the members of the Chamber of Commerce, see Chamber of Commerce, Annual Report (1886).
See Henry Hall, ed., America’s Successful Men of Affairs: An Encyclopedia of Contemporaneous Biography, vol. 2 (New York: The New York Tribune, 1895).
Jack W. Rudolph, “Launching the Met,”, American History Illustrated 18 (1983): 21.
Frick, “The Rialto: A Study of Union Square, The Center of New York’s First Theatre District, 870–1900” (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1983), 57;Rudolph, Launching the Met, 21; Steinway also acquired a box. See Steinway Diary, entry of October 12, 1883, NYHS.
Lloyd R. Morris, Incredible New York (New York: Random House, 1951), 192.
Quoted in John Frederick Cone, First Rival of the Metropolitan Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 21. See also note by J. Astor, October 11, 1886, Letterbook, 18841890, John Jacob Astor Papers, NYHS.
Cone, First Rival of the Metropolitan Opera, 185. Irving Kolodin, The Metropolitan Opera, 1883–1966 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).
In a European context, it has been argued that the ‘aristocratization’ of the bourgeoisie was a sign of its weakness. See for example, Hans Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), esp. 129–31;The United States, however, shows that the appropriation of cultural norms of another elite is first and foremost a sign of the strength and historical confidence of the bourgeoisie. See also Brandon, The Dollar Princess, 44.
Churchill, The Upper Crust, 196;Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace, To Marry an English Lord (New York: Workman Publishing, 1989), 31. In 1871, the publisher of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., together with General Phil Sheridan, Leonard Jerome, John G. Hecksher, Carrol Livingston, and J. Schuyler Crosby, ventured on one of these expeditions. Churchill, The Upper Crust, 167.
Ruth Brandon, The Dollar Princesses: Sagas of Upward Nobility, 1870–1914 (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1980), 1.
Henry Bellows, Historical Sketch of the Union League Club of New York: Its Origin, Organization, and Work, 1863–1879 (New York: Club House, 1879), 130.
Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th-Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 5, 198.
For a similar argument see also Nicola Beisel, “Upper Class Formation and the Politics of Censorship in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 1872–1892” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1990).
J. K. Paulding, “Democracy and Charity,”, The Charities Review 4 (April, 1895): 287. Organizations such as the AICP or the Charity Organization Society, “evinced a far more pessimistic and insulated perspective about human nature and the limits of reform,” than they had two decades earlier. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 200. “Class standing,” writes Lori Ginzberg, “was now understood explicitly by the benevolent as something to protect.” The quote is from Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 198.
John Bleecker Miller, Trade, Professional, and Property-Owners’ Organizations in Public Affairs (New York: H. Cherouny, 1884), 5, 45. See also Iron Age (December 28, 1882), 14.
Patricia Evelyn Malon, “The Growth of Manufacturing in Manhattan, 1860–1900: An Analysis of Factoral Changes and Urban Structure,” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1981), 370.
M. J. Heale, American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 36.
Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 140.
New York Genealogical Society, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary, February 27, 1864 (New York: T.A. Wright, 1895), 10, 23.
For details on this conflict, see Sven Beckert, “Democracy and Its Discontents: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York,”, Past & Present (February 2002), 114–155.
For a brilliant analysis of Boston’s cultural history and its relationship to bourgeois class formation, see Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base of High Culture in America,”, Media, Culture and Society (1982), 33–50.
For a discussion of the emergence of stratified cultural spheres in the course of the nineteenth century, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), especially 17, 208, 231.
This argument, in reference to Boston, has also been made by Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base of High Culture in America,”, Media, Culture and Society (1982), 33–50. The middle class, according to DiMaggio, was attracted to such museums because they wanted to differentiate themselves culturally from the working class.
Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston,” in Paul DiMaggio, ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 49.
Quoted in Calvin Tompkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 75. See also Tompkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 17, 30, 47, 68, 73, 78. Defining and appropriating high culture, the Metropolitan Museum was an institution that brought different segments of New York’s bourgeoisie together, transcending earlier divisions. Among the Metropolitan’s trustees was a whole range of bourgeois New Yorkers, some of whom represented old mercantile capital, and others the newly made industrial fortunes. Old-time merchants such as William H. Aspinwall, William H. Astor, and Theodore Roosevelt joined with newcomers such as printing press manufacturer Robert Hoe Jr., banker John Pierpont Morgan, and railroad entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt.
For a list of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum, see Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rev. and updated ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989), 395–399.
Henry Edward Krehbiel, The Philharmonic Society of New York (New York and London: Novello, Ewer, 1892), 7.
For Switzerland, see Albert Tanner, Arbeitsame Patrioten—Wohlanständige Damen: Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit in the Schweiz, 1830–1914 (Zürich: Orell Fuessli Verlag, 1995).
For the Netherlands, see Boudien de Vries, Electoraat en Elite: Sociale Structuur en Sociale Mobiliteit in Amsterdam, 1850–1895 (Amsterdam: Bataafsche Leeuw, 1986).
A notion shared by such diverse thinkers as Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, and Seymour Martin Lipset. See Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (London: Routledge, 1990), 25.
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Beckert, S. (2010). Bourgeois Institution Builders: New York in the Nineteenth Century. In: The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_7
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