Alan Lessoff

From Political Insult to Political Theory: The Boss, the Machine, and the Pluralist City

Among fictional characters largely lost to history is Michael Mulhooly, protagonist of Rufus Shapley’s 1880 political satire, Solid for Mulhooly . Th e book began as a campaign tract, a thinly veiled attack upon Philadelphia Republican leader James McManes launched by a party rival. But reformers latched onto its caricature of a brutish, disreputable boss. Th eir enthusiasm led to republication as an antimachine novel in 1889. Th e plot traced the rise of an unlettered, corrupt Irish tough to the head of a party machine. Shapley’s tale was a warning: unless responsible citizens took action, such men would rule American cities. Th e reprint included sketches by Th omas Nast, who depicted Mulhooly as a short-haired, heavy-browed thug with a gaudy diamond on his shirt front. In case readers missed the reference, one image included a portrait of archetypal boss William Tweed with the infamous challenge, “What are you going to do about it,” hanging in the background. 1 By tying Mulhooly to Tweed, the reprint turned Mulhooly from a stand-in for

Public Sculpture in Corpus Christi A Tangled Struggle to Define the Character and Shape the Agenda of One Texas City

They come from all over to sit beneath it, to touch it, to have pictures taken with it. For a year, they scrawled graffiti on wooden slats next to it, until the parks depar tment, tired of cleaning writing that flowed beyond the designated spot, removed the slats. Upon its unveiling in May 1997, the newest public sculpture along the Corpus Christi Bayfront, Buddy Tatum’s rendering of the slain Tejano singer, Selena, became a popular tourist destination as well a source of recrimin ation in this port, industrial, and military city of 260,000 (see Figure 1). 3

Progress before modernization: Foreign interpretations of American development in James Bryce's generation

This essay considers how observers from various national backgrounds explained the late nineteenth‐century United States as a developing nation. Outsiders often portrayed American industrialization, urbanization, corporate capitalism, and similar modernizing trends as manifestations of transnational forces that would eventually reshape their own countries, but they also stressed ways that American development diverged from what was taking place at home. The evolutionary mindset that infused many of these writers ‐ law professor and politician James Bryce being a noteworthy example ‐ encouraged them to view the ‘progress’ of the United States as a product of Darwinian adaptation and variation. The enormous territory and resources held by the United States supposedly rewarded and reinforced the aggressive, enterprising qualities of Anglo‐American culture, which facilitated emergence of a distinctive American civilization. Racial thinking thus pervades these accounts. Nevertheless, they draw attention to ways that environment, resources, and regional dynamics ‐ factors often overlooked in the modernization framework normally applied by historians to this so‐called Gilded Age ‐ drove and molded American development.

Corpus Christi, 1965-2005 A Secondary City's Search for a New Direction

This article recounts four decades of efforts to reenergize the economy of Corpus Christi, a regional city and ocean resort along the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Between 1920 and 1970, the advent in quick succession of a deep-water port, petrochemicals and related industries, and large military bases caused Corpus Christi to burgeon from 10,000 to 285,000 people, a pattern indicative of factors driving urbanization and economic development across Texas and the Southwest. Starting in the 1960s, planning and economic studies expressed anxiety that Corpus Christi was stagnating and that its customary economic pillars held limited future promise. Civic and commercial leaders sought new fields of activity, including, tentatively, a reorientation towards Mexico and Latin America, hitherto regarded as a source of cheap labor rather than of commercial opportunity. Through the early 2000s, such efforts yielded frustrating results. The lackluster growth that Corpus Christi did experience resulted mainly from the spillover effects of the Sunbelt-style prosperity of Texass metropolitan cities and from the slow, but steady, expansion of customary activities, especially the port, tourism, and retail and professional services to the South Texas hinterland. The essay suggests that secondary cities such as Corpus Christi have only limited ability to free themselves from dependence on their existing urban networks and to redirect large patterns of commerce and finance to their benefit.

The war on slums in the Southwest: public housing and slum clearance in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, 1935--1965

linked to the neo-liberal forces that have invigorated tertiary institutions in Asia encouraging a more robust internationally competitive research culture. Both Singapore and Hong Kong are major players in that push and have actively sought Western institutional alliances. Global hierarchies are internalized. Inserting under-valued local knowledge into a political and institutional environment transitioning from the national to the global is a difficult task. Given these constrictions, we might applaud the consistently critical lens maintained by every one of the chapters in their exposition of the ‘Asian city’ inside-out and ground-up. The problems of democratization in urban contexts caught up in global hierarchies with governments complicit in or competing within this world order are exposed. It is suggested that local actors do not necessarily recognize or subscribe to this structure and are able to circumvent or resist it; however, the unevenness of political economies in transition equally facilitate the agency of the state and its representatives, silencing public participation. Studies of Asia in this transformative phase uncover valuable lessons for urbanization that maybe obscured in post-industrial and secular Western societies. In summary, the examples in the volume explore how alternative creative ways of inhabiting urban spaces have the power to inform ways of knowing them. Lefebvre’s spatial categorization of ‘lived space’ comes to mind. In the argument of the authors, the accretion of this knowledge across Asian cities constitute a corpus of work that is sufficiently demonstrative of their case. Their authorization of these local practices and knowledge implants them within urban planning discourse as valid embarkation points for theorizing the Asian city. Can categorizations such as these offer a viable post-structuralist view on cities in Asia or will they continue to be haunted by the structures against which the local is defined? Might their intellectual reterritorialization instead produce new urban imperialisms based on ‘other’ ways of knowing? Any effort at researching cities in the Asian geographical region is plagued by these uncertainties. Perhaps these are questions for the authors’ next book.

Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America

particular moments of significance in Port Townsend’s history, nudges the reader gently toward an overall impression of a community in which Americans from across the entire social spectrum made efforts to boost their town’s reputation and prosperity. This widespread activism within the community did not translate into long-term economic success, however. The lack of diversification within the local economy, dependence on national markets to buy Port Townsend lumber, and the inability of leading figures in the community to secure a railroad connection for the town, meant that by the end of the nineteenth century, Port Townsend had been surpassed by a number of its local rivals, Seattle in particular, and quickly faded from prominence. One of the most striking aspects of this book is that it emphasizes western settlers as actors within the economic history of western development, whilst simultaneously demonstrating that the scales were not equally balanced between all parties. For all of the effort undertaken by Port Townsendites, they found it impossible to insulate themselves from national economic and political decisions which, although seriously damaging to the long-term future of their town, were out of their control. For all of the agency that Naylor restores to the residents of Port Townsend, they befell the same tragic outcomes that plagued so many other nineteenth-century Western settlements. Frontier Boosters is a perfect example of the value that can be gained from the case-study approach. The choice of a fledgling port town which ultimately failed to achieve the destiny envisioned for it is a shrewd choice by the author, as it highlights to readers the ways in which the language of hope related toWestern settlement often clashedwith the realities of surviving competitionwithin the American economy. Naylor has provided a valuable addition to histories concerned with settlement and speculation in the American West, and has shed light on themes of optimism, dependency and precariousness which will resonate all too clearly with Western historians.

Review Essay: The American Patrician City and Its Legacy

These books underscore the usefulness of architectural history for provoking reflection on past urban forms and, to follow Michael Bednar’s title, the legacy of past urbanisms for later eras. Bernard Herman combines architectural and social history with the analysis of material culture to produce a persuasive account of life in and around the townhouses of the Atlantic seaboard in the fifty years after the American Revolution. Bednar traces central Washington’s dozens of squares and circles from their original reservation by Pierre Charles L’Enfant through to the present, along the way offering arguments about the practical and symbolic influence that this characteristic feature of early modern urban design exerted on the American federal capital. Based on a huge project to create an electronic catalog of tens of thousands of architectural prints, drawings, and photographs in the Library of Congress, the beautifully produced Capital Drawings offers the reflections of six architectural historians on the ways that Washington’s architects wrestled with urban change as Washington itself evolved from L’Enfant’s baroque plan into the current, diffused metropolis. Taken together, these books suggest that the merchant/artisan city of the late 1700s and early 1800s, arguably the least understood phase in American urban history, has had a durable effect on American expectations of how cities should look and function, even though this early urban form disappeared with industrialization and the rise of the railroad after the mid-1800s. The merchant/artisan city’s legacy is most obvious on the East Coast in the places studied by Herman: from Charleston and Savannah to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and inland to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But eastern cities of townhouses and squares offered an archetype for an urbane city not just in the East but across the continent, even in the mid-twentieth century when city dwellers in the American West most explicitly exhibited what John M. Findlay calls “the pervasive belief that western urban environs should not resemble those back East.” In the present period of nostalgia for lost cities, promoters, planners, and preservationists refer to a mix—at times a mishmash—of industrial/ railroad and merchant/artisan forms in their efforts to infuse present-day cities with the urbanity imputed to the past.