I just finished Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. It was originally published in 1984 but reissued on its 20th anniversary with a new introduction by Wilentz. I read it right after Kessner’s Capital City, and the too make an interesting pair. While Kessner studies the way in which New York transformed itself into a center of finance, Wilentz considers the transformations in the manufacturing sector in the period right before Kessner’s. Kessner looks at bankers and financiers, while Wilentz focuses on artisands and factory workers. In both books consolidation is the trend. While Kessner’s narrative climaxes with the establishment of the well known monopolies (US Steel, General Electric, and so on), Wilentz looks at the gradual transformation from small workshop to large factory, and its impact on labor.
Wilentz goes a long way toward answering a question that seems to me to be even more relevant today than when Sombert asked it more than a hundred years ago: “Why is there no socialism in the US?” The reason I find this such a relevant question, is that socialism seems to be quickly disappearing altogether. I wonder if anybody has compared Sombert’s analysis to current conditions in places that once proudly called themselves socialist republics.
International divisions seem to be the main reason why the early labor and radical movements failed in New York. The different groups which Wilentz describes had slightly (and sometimes significantly) different agendas, ranging from xenophobic nativism to abolition of slavery, and from prohibition to land reform. The latter seems to have been decisive.
Abundance of land, even if badly distributed, is part of Sombert’s explanation as well. The pastoral ideal of landed independence essentially killed activism targeted at labor reform. Ok, that worked well as long as there was still land to be distributed (and as long as one could make a living as an independent farmer), but what happens then? German communists refused to support the Russian revolution because they believed Russia was not industrialized enough to be prepared for the leap. Well, the US wasn’t, either. New York might have been, but not the US. Alas, revolutions happen in cities, not in countries.
Some modern city-staters might find this familiar: “For millions of Americans, New York was becoming an alien, menacing, almost un-American place…” Wilentz was talking about 1865.
