Abstract
In the period between 1880 and 1920, when mass migration and industrialization transformed urban life and created the imperative for reform, working people in industrialized cities around the world built movements in support of city infrastructure and the well-being of working people. They called on their cities to fund sewage treatment plants, public water systems, public transit systems, electric grids, city farmer’s markets, public housing and provisions for the unemployed, school milk programs, and an array of city services ranging from libraries, fire departments and public baths to public education, public music, public healthcare, and public art. They demanded that cities set an example in high pay and limited hours for public works, raising the standards for employment in private industry. Perhaps most of all, working people demanded that wealthy landowners shoulder a proportionately greater tax burden while acquiring no more votes within city government. U.S. labor historian Shelton Stromquist’s Claiming the City illuminates how, in dozens of cities ranging from Auckland, New Zealand, to Stuttgart, Germany, to Cleveland, Ohio, working people built the coalitions that make cities much better places to live.
In so many respects, this 819-page book is a masterpiece of comparative labor and working-class history. Stromquist offers detailed, comparative analysis of the disparate methods through which working people made their demands for municipal reform known in different national contexts. In England, for example, where working men had voting rights, demands for municipal reform grew out of the Independent Labour Party, which demanded the abolition of child labor, the establishment of an eight-hour day, unemployment relief, and nonsectarian education. The party grew from local strength into a significant player in Parliament, which saw itself as a herald of working-class leadership through both unions and parliamentary legislation. In Germany, on the other hand, where there were multiple working-class parties competing for political power, the Social Democratic Party held about a third of the seats in the national Parliament. Through the Erfurt Program of 1891, German Social Democrats demanded a list of reforms, including public schools, free medical care, and free legal assistance. However, the German Social Democratic Party’s national strength came ahead of significant municipal reform. Because late nineteenth century German workers still did not vote or occupy power in cities on par with the wealthy, the struggle for social democratic cities proceeded with less national attention, and often only through coalition with middle-class reform parties. In the United States, trade unionists and more revolutionary syndicalists competed for the right to speak for “labor” and the largest working-class political coalitions, epitomized by the American Federation of Labor, were conservative until the Great War. With either de facto or de jure voting rights largely restricted to white men, only a comparatively privileged fraction of wage earners, white men in the North, had much influence over local politics. A few cities, especially those with high German-American populations, were exceptional. Stromquist places the expansive public services of “socialist cities” like Cleveland and Milwaukee in their international context, with the Socialist Party carrying on an international agenda for labor-led municipal reform.
The book is a magnum opus of Stromquist’s long and distinguished career as a specialist in Gilded Age and Progressive Era worker coalitions in urban space. Indeed, to study the politics of so many cities in detail while also maintaining the 30,000-foot perspective to think broadly about city, state, national, and international working-class power is an achievement that few of us will accomplish in our short lifetimes. While the book could have concluded at the end of a rather well-written and fast-moving 477-page analysis of municipal reform before the Great War, it proceeds with another 300 pages of analysis about how the Great War shaped the reconstruction of urban life. This third part, “The Crisis of War, Nationalism and the Social Reconstruction of Cities,” may well have been a second book. Yet this masterpiece, which synthesizes secondary scholarship within each national context with direct analysis of the work of municipal reformers and their organizations, comes together as a new classic starting point for students of comparative labor and working-class history.
A book of this breadth and depth, which so beautifully crystallizes how early twentieth-century social democrats thought about themselves and how municipal reform fit into the larger socialist transformation underway, also provides an opportunity to reflect on what we want our field of comparative labor and working-class history to accomplish. As a classic historian of the New Left, Stromquist makes every effort to describe historical figures as they saw themselves. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social democrats in Europe saw their work informed by a canon of theorists and political leaders, including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Edward Bernstein, Rosa Luxembourg, and Karl Kautsky, and the many debates among them. The pages of socialist publications in Europe and the Western world were filled with discussions on a few common themes, including how to define revolution and what demands to include in working class programs for social change. One major common reference point for European socialists was the Paris Commune of 1871, a fantastic moment where working-class Parisians took back leadership of the city. Stromquist’s narrative follows the story of socialism in Europe as European radicals told it; he highlights the debates which European socialists demanded be kept at the forefront of public discussions on social change.
That said, the book also reflects the many silences in the story of social democracy as it was written and preserved by its victors. Stromquist notes the range of intra-socialist debates which seemed worth preserving within historical collections. He acknowledges those instances where socialists debated the extent to which they should combine with bourgeois parties in municipal reform, or the extent to which they should work with bourgeois women’s suffrage activists or revolutionary syndicalists. He does much less probing to access those instances where socialists united in silent complicity with national campaigns to secure colonial possessions and trade agreements with Indigenous peoples in colonized Southeast Asia or Africa. These were, after all, also key moments that gave rise to white working class “formation” and social mobility in Europe. Stromquist’s narrative portrays socialists as they saw themselves and as they wanted the world to see them. The book begins with the Paris Commune and moves from the core of Europe to the periphery of Australasia and the Americas, perpetuating the myth that Europeans were the ringleaders of global municipal reform and socialists around the world looked to Europe for guidance.
Second, and related, the construction of social democratic cities in the United States and Europe is as much the product of the rhetoric of democracy as it was the product of the Marxist rhetoric of socialism. It is true, as Stromquist notes, that German-American socialists took the lead in reforming the cities of the American Midwest in the 1910s and often looked to European social democrats for guidance. Stromquist is right to place American socialists in international context. However, German-American municipal reformers of the early twentieth century were still playing catch-up on the work of other global cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, which had more well-developed municipal services by the 1840s. Early nineteenth-century Workingmen’s Parties, animated by the principles of both democracy and social democracy, heralded the growth of property tax–funded public schools, public infirmaries, public charity, public schools for the disabled, regulations on wages and working conditions, and extensive systems of public works. Europeans, still largely governed by the gentry classes, took inspiration from these “democratic cities” as they reimagined their cities benefiting anew from the commons. Surely, even “democratic” American cities were still governed by the bourgeois and in need of reform by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but to suggest that global municipal reform is the product of a European movement for social democracy that began with the Paris Commune is to repeat a false claim about who was leading and who was following in the global discussion about democracy.
Again, the socialists on the peripheries probably played a larger role in the triumph of municipal socialism than Stromquist’s sources allow. It was the peoples of the socialist and democratic experiments in the European colonies and former colonies, communities that dotted the North American and Australasian landscapes, who inspired socialists on the European mainland to reimagine the possibilities of working-class power and municipal reform. To take one example, the work of British expat Robert Owen and his experimental community in Indiana directly informed the potential for labor in nineteenth-century England. The Social Democratic ethos that developed in Germany and England in the late nineteenth century grew from a rejection of Medieval and Early Modern systems of religious paternalism, bourgeois paternalism, and “virtual representation” in Parliament, the very domains of power that members of new democracies in the Americas had already jettisoned.
It may be time we break down this Eurocentric myth of social democratic triumph for the colonial project that it was. The suggestion that the global struggle for municipal socialism arose from the Paris Commune is a myth created by early twentieth-century European labor parties as they created a backstory for their modern welfare states. Demands for public goods erupted in almost every national context in the 1870s; it is unclear which led to the other. In the U.S. context, it was Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and Henry George who became primary interlocutors of the idea of a “cooperative commonwealth.” In England, it was Robert Blatchford. What all these demands for “commonwealth” had in common was the prospect of new “public lands” made available through both the enclosure of the European commons and colonial conquest of Indigenous peoples’ resources. It is impossible to disentangle the origins of “social democracy” from international discussions about the possibility of the “public domain” in the 1870s.
Third, one wonders if “working class” is the best term for the groups of white men who were democratically elected to city governments around the world in the late nineteenth century. Undoubtedly, those who voted with Social Democrats were predominantly workers, people whose labor was sold to the land-owning classes to extract value. On the whole, this new class of people had a much smaller amount of land, if any, compared with the gentry classes. However, those workers who gained power and representation within their cities also freely extracted the value in their white skin and their association with the trappings of “civilization.” To what extent was their “working class consciousness” constructed by their racial privilege? These white European workers looked the other way when non-white peoples resisted expeditions in the name of their nation because they believed they represented only the exploited laborers on the mainland. If class is a set of social relationships, it is worth noting that social democrats defined their political parties as originating in “class” in a moment when definitions of class were profoundly in flux. Moreover, social democrats demanded public goods like education and healthcare to build a more democratic republic, but perhaps also to distance themselves as a nation from their colonial subjects in Africa and South Asia, whose skills were less valued within the global economy. Once we recognize that social democrats were the victors who won the right to tell their own story, one wonders if their distinctions between “middle class” and “working class,” distinctions which Stromquist often takes as fact, were any more economic than they were ideological.
Hence, the book revives hard questions that the field of comparative labor and working-class history has been reckoning with for some years now. Was social democracy, as it triumphed in early twentieth-century Europe, Australasia, and the United States, another experiment in Herrenvolk democracy? Lorenzo Costaguta’s new book, Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism, reminds us that European social democrats carried on Darwinist discourses about racial difference and civilization and thus excused their paltry efforts to build solidarity with Indigenous peoples or people of color. To what extent was the broader European movement for social democracy an effort of working-class white folks on the European and American mainlands to preserve and protect their voting rights, “habits of civilization,” and buying power over and against people of color, both Black and colonized?
In the end, even if the genesis of urban municipal services is less European-in-origin, less perfectly aligned with the interests of “labor,” and less salutary-in-motive than early twentieth-century socialists wanted us to believe, the story remains important and worth understanding. Stromquist’s masterpiece of comparative labor and working-class history will undoubtedly become a classic in the field and a starting point for another generation of histories of municipal reform.
