The Public City

Philip J. Ethington challenges the assumptions of several decades of urban history that treat American urban politics as the expression of social-group community experience. Instead, he maintains inThe Public City,social-group identities of race, class, ethnicity, and gender were politically constructed in the public sphere in the process of political mobilization and journalistic discourse.

Philip J. Ethington is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California

List of illustrations and tables

xi

Preface

xiii

Introduction: The public city: American political culture in Nineteenth-century San Francisco

1

(1)

From republican liberalism to pluralist liberalism

2

(12)

The public city

14

(10)

The public city and urban political history

24

(5)

The political community

29

(6)

Subject matter and methods

35

(3)

Outline of the analytical narrative

38

(5)

The agony of authority: People, public, party, and power, 1849-1859

43

(43)

The people of San Francisco in the 1850s

47

(3)

Social class: Some preliminary observations

50

(8)

The antebellum public sphere

58

(7)

The agony of organization and participation

65

(12)

The agony of authority

77

(6)

Preliminary conclusions

83

(3)

Republican terror: The origins of Vigilante movements of 1851 and 1856

86

(42)

A brief outline of the San Francisco Vigilance committees

88

(2)

Interpretations

90

(2)

Composition of the two committees

92

(5)

``Down in front!'': Crime and the popularity of executions

97

(8)

The popular origins of the Committee of 1851

105

(7)

The case of the nonnativist Know-Nothings

112

(5)

Violating the ballot box; or, ``A crime of the darkest dye''

117

(7)

Conclusion

124

(4)

Through the heavens fall: The Vigilante movement culture of 1856

128

(42)

Patterns of the committee: Ninety-nine days

130

(7)

Disgrace of the elected officials

137

(6)

Disciplinary authority

143

(2)

Symbols and sword rituals

145

(4)

Scenes of political-cultural change

149

(6)

Mutualism for San Francisco

155

(2)

The uses of cultural authority

157

(4)

``A people's party for local purposes''

161

(6)

Conclusion

167

(3)

Race and reaction: Civil War political mobilization

170

(38)

Outline of party conflicts

171

(2)

David C. Broderick in defense of white freedom

173

(4)

A funeral oration and partisan realignment

177

(7)

Race and freedom: The Republicans and civil rights

184

(4)

Race and reaction: The conversion of Henry Haight

188

(6)

Emancipation and the reversal of party fortunes

194

(6)

The political origins of racial mobilization

200

(6)

Conclusion

206

(2)

The postwar reconstruction of the urban public sphere

208

(34)

Women as orators, lawyers, politicians: Natural rights versus the masculine public sphere

209

(9)

Election law: The partisan struggle to reshape the political community

218

(12)

The shape of the urban electorate during the third party system

230

(6)

The origins of mass communication at the dawn of an interest-group discourse

236

(6)

A language of politics in a politics of class: The Workingmen's Party of California

242

(45)

Party competition and the origins of a politics of class

248

(12)

Estimating class mobilization

260

(5)

A language of politics

265

(11)

The self-destruction of the Republican paradigm

276

(6)

Conclusion: On the survival of the ``mainstream parties''

282

(5)

The institutional preconditions of progressivism

287

(58)

``A species of force'': The contradictions of organizational party politics in the 1880s

288

(11)

Origins of interest-group lobbies

299

(9)

From communications business to political-culture industry

308

(12)

The reorganization of group identities

320

(7)

The politicization of women

327

(9)

Political entrepreneurs and the Reform Ballot Act of 1891

336

(9)

Progressivism as the politics of needs: The mobilization of group identities

345

(63)

Intellectuals and the city

347

(8)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the political mobilization of women

355

(8)

The home and the state

363

(7)

Progressives and silurians: The reform matrix of 1891-1896

370

(7)

The mind of an urban progressive reformer: James Duval Phelan

377

(10)

The politics of municipal charter reform

387

(11)

The woman suffrage amendment

398

(3)

Conclusions

401

(7)

Conclusion: A new public sphere and a new government

408

(11)

Appendix: Statistical sources, methods, and supplementary tables

419

(8)

Bibliography

427

(27)

Index

454

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Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials