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Introduction: A Revised and EnlargedPhiladelphia

When this book was first issued, in 1883, it gave a faithful presentation of the Philadelphia of that day.… But we would not ignore the fact that there is a revised and enlarged Philadelphia.… Perhaps no American city, within sixteen years, has undergone a greater change.… The concentration of trade has made the high building a necessity. Where once twenty buildings stood side by side, now they are constructed one upon the other.... The railway engine no longer halts on the outskirts of the city, but is driven close to our very doors.... The old cobble-stone is fast becoming a recollection, and, with two hundred and fifty miles of asphalt, it is, perhaps, the best-paved city in the world. In addition to this, there is an electric railway system which is unexcelled by any other city. The suburbs have been beautified beyond description, and localities once inaccessible now contain some of the most attractive homes.¹

Philadelphia underwent an impressive physical reconstruction in the five decades from 1876 to 1926, doubling in population, extending farther north, south, and west from the original urban core, and reaching ever farther skyward. Never again would Philadelphia go through a period of such sustained growth. Equally important, but much less obvious than these physical changes to the region during this period, was the creation of new visions of the city by Philadelphians. In his tribute to civic progress, J. Loughran Scott hints at these new images by his use of the term “revised” to describe the metropolis, as this word implies thoughts in addition to deeds. Not only did the Victorian city grow in size and its buildings in height but its residents changed how they viewed it. These new urban images—broadly shared along class lines—resulted in multiple Philadelphias occupying the same physical space. The city of the elite, who lived on Rittenhouse Square or the Main Line, summered in Maine or Europe, and lunched at the Philadelphia Club, was a far different urban vision from that of the working classes, in which life often revolved around a single neighborhood or town. Philadelphia’s aristocracy could afford to use every transportation and technological innovation to remake and to expand their world. By the turn of the century, elite Philadelphians were a part of a national upper class. Their city not only included exclusive shops, all the latest gadgets, and servant-filled homes, but was part of a national—and increasingly international—network of wealth and privilege. For working-class Philadelphians, home, work, and shopping, indeed much of everyday life, often was bounded by a few blocks. Throughout the nineteenth century, high transport fares made the streetcars and trains luxuries for most workers and their families and the traditions of the walking city remained strong well into the twentieth century in largely working-class sections like Kensington and Manayunk. Yet these different Philadelphias coexisted within one region, often overlapping in areas like Center City (the map in figure 1 identifies some of these locations).²

But the Victorian Philadelphia story was more than a tale of just two cities. Between these two Philadelphias lay the subject of this study: the metropolis of the middle class. Members of the bourgeoisie could afford to ride the trains and trolleys daily, so they had more freedom to construct their city than did their working-class counterparts (although not, of course, as much as the elite). The middle class used this latitude to make their version of Philadelphia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The bourgeois city was logical and rational and well-cataloged: everything and everyone had its place in this Philadelphia. What inspired this search for order was the application of science—as the Victorian middle class understood the term—to everyday life. Following the leads of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, the bourgeoisie carefully arranged and classified their world.³

This scientific worldview pervaded late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century middle-class society. Behind it was a faith in continued progress that drove the bourgeoisie throughout western Europe, the United States, and many European colonies worldwide to embrace change. This search for order by the middle class was more than a simple reaction to the effects of industrialization and urbanization, and it was more than a fearful drive for paternalistic control. Science allowed the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century bourgeoisie to revisualize and to remake their environment.⁴

What follows is a case study in the use of science to reconstruct—both mentally and physically—the urban environment by one city’s middle class. The women and men of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Philadelphia were no more rational or better educated than their counterparts in New York or Baltimore or Glasgow or Berlin or Melbourne. What happened in the Quaker City took place throughout Westernized society at about the same time. Bourgeois Philadelphia’s search for order was not unique. In many ways, the city’s true value to the scholar lay in its typicality. But the study of a large yet second-tier city like Philadelphia also has significant advantages. Unlike in a national capital, where the structures and plans often reflect national ambitions and pretensions, those of an industrial and commercial center like Philadelphia tend to mirror more local—and often middle-class—considerations. In addition, cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Glasgow underwent some of their greatest growth during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the culture of that period can be more easily seen in them, than in cities that developed earlier (like London or Rome) or later (like Detroit or Los Angeles). Finally, Philadelphia has the added advantage that topography did not restrict or channel its growth in any significant way, unlike New York. Philadelphia was not only typical, in many ways it was also exemplary, of Victorian bourgeois culture.⁵

Figure 1. Map of Philadelphia. Base map courtesy of the Philadelphia City Archives.

To find dramatic evidence of this new middle-class vision of Philadelphia, one only needs to look a few blocks from the bourgeois row homes of West and North Philadelphia to Fairmount Park. For six months in 1876, the city held a massive fair in its park to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. The Centennial Exposition drew more than eight million visitors who paid the expensive fifty-cent admission to see the carefully classified exhibits of science, commerce, technology, art, and agriculture from around the globe. Formally commemorating history, the fair also focused on the entry of the United States into the modern industrial world. Although Americans compared their show with prior international fairs in Paris, London, and Vienna, and found the native version superior in many regards, it was not a perfect vision. The Centennial—like the city and the nation in 1876—was a confusing melange of substance and glitter, commerce and science, public and private, enlightenment and deception. In all, the exhibition set the stage for the next five decades of Philadelphia’s and America’s development.⁶

The Centennial was an ideal prelude to the remainder of the nineteenth century. This period, usually known today as the Gilded Age (from the title of a Mark Twain satire), was a time of great economic and political adjustment for Americans. Many of these same tensions could be found at the exhibition in Fairmount Park. During this period, the nation came to terms, often violently, with the political effects of industrial capitalism. As wealth and economic power became more concentrated, visions of a classless republic faded for many. At the Centennial, the egalitarian rhetoric of a fair for all Americans was betrayed by the high entrance fee and the decision to close on Sundays, both measures effectively denying easy access to most working-class Philadelphians. The sectional differences that continued to plague the country also affected the exhibition; western states limited the federal government’s financial involvement and many southern states refused to participate at all. Many displays at the fair celebrated the growing middle-class culture of consumption with a panoply of goods and gadgets for the respectable home or office. The grand buildings and avenues of the grounds hinted at the coming planned reconstruction of parts of many major cities into ceremonial public spaces (see figure 2 for a view of one of the exhibition’s grand avenues) while the shoddy, unchecked development of restaurants, hotels, and amusements just outside the gates perhaps more accurately mirrored the consequences of unfettered growth for the urban fabric. But even within the fence, most of the Centennial’s buildings nicely extended Mark Twain’s Gilded Age metaphor because they were inexpensive, temporary construction made to look—from a distance—far more imposing and permanent than they were in fact.⁷

The Centennial presaged not only the Gilded Age but also the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. A period viewed by political historians as a reaction to the excesses of the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era was a time of middle-class reform. A faith in science and progress allowed many people to believe that rational planning and governmental regulation coupled with private initiatives could channel the dynamic forces of capitalism into less threatening forms and head off class warfare. Not only did the carefully designed grounds and monumental structures of the Centennial hint at the City Beautiful movement but, more importantly, the entire arrangement of exhibits extended the realm of science into everyday life. By the Progressive Era, many middle-class Americans believed that the application of scientific methods could solve most of society’s problems.⁸

At the heart of the Centennial was its careful, hierarchical classification of exhibits. The system was designed by a geologist (trained in a discipline that employed “scientific classification” or taxonomy), and initially the fair was to be divided into ten departments, with each department further subdivided into ten groups and one hundred classes. This elaborate decimal system would have allowed almost all human achievement to be placed in one of ten thousand classes. What was finally adopted for use at the fair was a modified version of this plan, with seven departments, each with differing numbers of groups and classes. This still impressive arrangement allowed each item exhibited to be assigned a three-digit number that immediately identified class, group, and department. For example, the water color entitled “Interior of the Sistine Chapel” by H. M. Knowles shown by Britain was placed in class 411 (“water color pictures”), which was under group 41 (“painting”) and department IV (“art”).⁹

Figure 2. The well-organized grounds of the Centennial Exhibition. Courtesy of the Print and Picture Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.

The Centennial’s system of classification did not work as well in practice as it did in theory, highlighting the difficulty of developing an effective taxonomy. The Chief of the Bureau of Awards (the man in charge of the judging process) afterwards protested: “The classification of articles … omitted some of the most important groups of products in the Exhibition, including tea, coffee, tobacco, spices, and the whole line of cereals, rendering it necessary to assign … the omitted products to groups which were already overburdened.” He also complained that “the obscurity of some of the lines of classification adopted … increased the liability … of articles falling through between contiguous but not always conterminous groups.” Although this application of science to everyday life was far from an unmitigated success, the numeric classification of exhibits at the fair represented an important trend in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century middle-class America: the search for new ways to order the world on a more rational basis. The taxonomy adopted at the Centennial was an early example of the application of science to the problems of society.¹⁰

Often historians have viewed the reaction of the American middle class to the sweeping changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization during this period as negative or, at best, ambivalent. Some scholars have found strong strains of anti-modernism throughout Victorian bourgeois culture. Others have concluded that the middle-class home was an insulated, yet ineffective, haven against the turbulent city. Still others have highlighted the escape to the suburbs of some bourgeois men and women. The classic political interpretation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sees this period as a “search for order” by the middle class. Overly simplified, this argument finds that by the 1870s the United States was a distended society in which modern social and economic forces brutally undermined the autonomy of small towns and neighborhoods. In reaction to these changes, the bourgeoisie created a bureaucratic state with the intent to curb (what they perceived as) the growing disorder. Although this interpretation does an admirable job of explaining the broad structural changes in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America, its focus on politics leaves out many similar cultural transformations. When these shifts in everyday life are added to the mix, they do more than complicate it; they call into question the driving forces behind this middle-class search for order.¹¹

This work examines the changes in everyday middle-class life between 1876 and 1926 to discover the roots of this broader cultural search for order. What this case study of Philadelphia shows is that the women and men of that city’s bourgeoisie consistently reshaped their world and thrived in a society that was transformed along rational lines starting in the late nineteenth century. At first, these changes were largely internal to the bourgeoisie, affecting only institutions that they used and controlled. Later, during the early twentieth century, the middle class began to expand this new cultural sense of order to encompass politics as well. This study suggests that it was primarily a middle-class faith in progress and the future, not a fear of contemporary society, that drove these changes.¹²

To uncover these cultural transformations, I look at three quintessentially bourgeois commercial enterprises: department stores, newspapers, and urban transit (streetcars and commuter railroads). These three areas touch on much of the broad panoply of everyday life: consumption, communication, and movement. Because of relatively high prices and low working-class wages, all three developed a largely middle-class clientele in the late nineteenth century. My examination of these institutions has uncovered a consistent reorganization of space and time in all three, beginning in the late nineteenth century. To put it simply, space and time became more precisely organized and increasingly subject to human definition and control. These changes took place not only within the organizations I study but on the streets of the city and throughout bourgeois life in general. Historians have found a desire for exacting classification and organization nearly everywhere in Victorian bourgeois society, both in not-for-profit enterprises like public libraries, museums, and universities and in businesses. These changes took place in public spaces (office and factory buildings) and in private ones (the middle-class home). Scholars have noted this new bourgeois world-view in education (in the creation of universities and new disciplines—the social sciences—and in methodology), in architecture (in both the layout of middle-class homes and more complex commercial structures), in business (careful classification was the “science” in scientific management), in knowledge (library cataloging), and in the presentation of time (timepieces and timetables).¹³

Within the three specific middle-class commercial enterprises that I have examined in Philadelphia, this increased specialization of space and new dominion over time are abundantly clear. The department store was more than just an expanded dry goods emporium; it was an entirely new way of organizing and presenting merchandise for sale. The arrangement of the store, in both management structure and interior layout, manifested the classification of people and things. Its very name highlights the importance of departmentalization to the process. Retail managers also extended control over time. It was during this period that they invented the retail calendar, with its “White Sales” and similarly created events. The complex interiors of the urban railroad stations likewise reflected this specialization in space, while the railways’ schedules placed in printed form the modernization of time. Victorian newspaper editors carefully defined the layout of their journals; they created sports and business pages, women’s columns, and dedicated spaces for international, national, and local news.

By actively using all three of these commercial institutions, the women and men of Philadelphia’s middle class not only mentally reconstructed their metropolis but also helped to physically reshape the city between 1876 and 1926. Commuter trains and streetcars had the most dramatic—and direct—effects on the landscape as they allowed the bourgeoisie to define specialized areas in the region. Middle-class men and women took these vehicles to the Jersey shore and Willow Grove Park for amusement; to Center City for work, shopping, and entertainment; to the ballparks on the industrial fringe for sports; to Fairmount Park for recreation; and to the neighborhoods and the suburbs for home and rest. The steel rails of these “bourgeois corridors” allowed the middle class to categorize space in the metropolis and to reconstruct their vision of the region. The department stores served as middle-class havens of order in the heart of the city. Drawing bourgeois women and men to downtown from places like West Philadelphia, Germantown, and Haddonfield, the stores helped define a shared culture—based on consumption—throughout the region. Newspapers not only brought well-organized news and entertainment to middle-class homes and offices throughout the metropolis, but they also carried the retail advertisements and theatrical announcements that helped entice middle-class men and women to Center City via train and streetcar.¹⁴

Throughout late nineteenth-century bourgeois life in Philadelphia, space became better classified and time more precise and increasingly divorced from nature. By the early twentieth century the bourgeois world was well ordered and middle-class Philadelphians were willing to use their political power to force their vision of the city on recalcitrant others. At the same time, the economic forces that had helped create middle-class Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century started to undermine it. Ironically, the classifications developed by the Victorian bourgeoisie allowed many of the once exclusively middle-class commercial institutions (like department stores and newspapers) to reach broader markets as the culture of consumption expanded. Areas that had been almost solely bourgeois in the late nineteenth century became increasingly multi-classed in the early twentieth.

By the late nineteenth century, every problem in the middle-class world seemed ripe for a scientific solution. The Victorian bourgeoisie used the term “science” so often that many historians today no longer take the term seriously and treat the word as little more than a synonym for “good” or “new.” Nevertheless, middle-class women and men were being scientific—at least as far as they defined the term—in their reconstruction of society. To understand what they meant by science and what they thought they were doing, we have to go back to the early nineteenth century and look at what constituted science then. It was this conceptualization of science that the bourgeoisie learned in school and then applied to their world in the late nineteenth century.¹⁵

Today, educated men and women are reasonably confident of what they mean when they use the term “science.” It is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “in modern use, often treated as synonymous with ‘Natural and Physical Science’, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws.… This is now the dominant sense in ordinary use.” What the early twenty-first-century middle class recognizes as science is almost exclusively experimental: physics, chemistry, and biology. ¹⁶

In the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie was equally sure of what they meant by the term “science” and it incorporated more methodologies than just experimentation. Much of what we now call “technology” was then considered science, so engineering marvels like the steam locomotive, the massive iron and glass buildings of the Centennial, and the Brooklyn Bridge were all examples of scientific progress to Victorians. In addition, many nineteenth-century sciences, in particular the life sciences, had not adopted the experimental process that we today associate with science but had retained the rational models developed by Bacon and Newton during the Scientific Revolution. Perhaps the most significant scientific advancement of the nineteenth century, at least in popular culture, was made by Charles Darwin using one of these alternative methodologies. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which so sparked the bourgeois imagination, was based on taxonomy. One historian of science has written that “[t]he search for systematic schemes of classification [had] dominated the life sciences during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” and that same search for order captured the Victorian bourgeoisie in the nineteenth. ¹⁷

The Darwinian revolution in popular middle-class thought was two-fold. What has been well studied is how the theory of evolution became part of the bourgeois world view, along with a related concept known as Social Darwinism. But what has largely been missed is that besides offering a general theory, Darwin also offered an example of a scientific methodology to an increasingly well-educated middle class. This methodology—taxonomy—was reinforced by science courses offered in Victorian high schools and colleges. In addition, new disciplines, like the “social sciences,” and existing ones, such as the law, borrowed this methodology from the sciences and created detailed classifications of human behavior during this period. By the start of the twentieth century, taxonomy was commonplace throughout middle-class society.¹⁸

Because our conception of science has changed and because members of the middle class used the term so often during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is easy to overlook this metaphor as the basis of the bourgeoisie’s reconstruction of their world. Just as the middle class began to apply taxonomy throughout everyday life, the scientific community shifted away from classification to experimentation as its paradigm. Historians of other fields, well versed in their generations’ understandings of science, often seem unaware of the earlier traditions. As but one example, a legal historian recently claimed that “Langdell’s [a leading late-nineteenth-century law professor and the inventor of the casebook method of legal study] proudest boast was that the law was a science, and his method was scientific. But his model of science was not experimental, or experiential; his model was Euclid’s geometry, not physics or biology.” That analysis misses the point; the model Langdell used was scientific at the time he used it. But we do not have to take Langdell at his word; we can look at what he created with his “scientific” approach to legal education: a detailed, hierarchical outline of the law. Langdell is but one example of this broad Victorian obsession with classification. ¹⁹

Another example should help make this scientific metaphor as it relates to middle-class culture somewhat less esoteric. As Chapter 7 will develop in more detail, historians have viewed Philadelphia’s late nineteenth-century hinterland as a classic statement of the American railroad suburb. Historians claim that a variety of motives both pushed and pulled the Victorian bourgeoisie from the city to the country: a long-standing American distrust of cities; an equally durable rural ideal; the availability of cheap land and transport; the development of inexpensive construction techniques (the balloon-frame house); and racial and ethnic prejudice. My work indicates that Philadelphia—at the time the nation’s third-largest city—did not suburbanize in conformity with this model until well into the twentieth century. What the city’s nineteenth-century middle class did do, however, was to develop a greater specialization in the use of land throughout the Victorian metropolis. In other words, they created a taxonomy of space. Changing bourgeois residential patterns—both within the city and without—were simply one manifestation of this larger redefinition of urban geography. When we look in detail at what happened, suburbanization ceases to be a discrete phenomenon and becomes part of a larger cultural matrix.²⁰

If this new bourgeois wordview was as commonplace as I argue, why have historians failed to link it with the broader changes in turn-of-the-century society? Quite simply, because until recently taxonomy remained a familiar and effective (though not “scientific”) way of organizing knowledge. The Library of Congress cataloging system, for example, is little more than an even more detailed version of the one Dewey developed. It was not until the proliferation of powerful personal computers that classification and hierarchy ceased to be the primary ways to access large amounts of data. Mid-twentieth-century intellectuals were trapped in the same mental world as their grandparents and great-grandparents because modern society continued to use the same system of organization. With new ways of managing information, the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century middle class has created new metaphors for everyday life based upon popular understandings of how computers work and with them new ways of visualizing themselves and their world. This shift in mental paradigms exposes the bases of the old ways of thinking.²¹

The goal of this work is quite simple: to take middle-class women and men seriously when they claimed to be employing science to remake their world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rewards for doing so are ample: the culture of the turn-of-the-last-century bourgeoisie makes far more sense as a whole and the politics of the Progressive Era become much more connected with broader trends in society.

To recapture fin-de-siècle middle-class Philadelphia, I employ a variety of sources and techniques drawn from both social and cultural history. Initially, I tried to view this now-vanished world through the eyes of its inhabitants: the men and women of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban bourgeoisie. Only after assimilating their understanding of their city could I do what they could not: step back and analyze their metaphors for space and time and interpret how these mental images affected their physical environment. By applying this broader understanding of culture to relationships among the members of the middle class and the three commercial enterprises that are the focus of this study, we should be able to discover bourgeois culture in the rhythms of everyday life. The power of this study, then, comes from looking at three separate institutions, finding the many similarities among them, and seeing that these businesses were more than simply the creations of their owners and managers; their cultural meaning derived from their roles as shared symbols of a society.²²

Take, for example, the case of the Victorian department store. In 1877, when John Wanamaker converted his men’s clothing store to Philadelphia’s first department store, he was neither terribly rich nor powerful. It is difficult to argue that he or his store could impose anything upon its customers. In a city with hundreds of retail establishments, shoppers could easily go elsewhere if they did not like what Wanamaker was doing and how he was doing it. Instead we can see the fantastic success of the Wanamaker store and its counterparts as reflecting the shopping rituals and values of their customers. As Wanamaker and his competitors served a largely middle-class market, it is the values of the bourgeoisie that we can find in those early department stores.²³

My starting points for recreating this shared culture are the diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and letters left by the middle-class women and men of the region. I use dozens of these sources to follow bourgeois Philadelphians as they rode trains and trolleys, read newspapers, and shopped at department stores. These first-hand accounts serve as individualized guidebooks to the metropolis: highlighting for each person activities that were typical and unique, everyday and extraordinary. I analyze this information both quantitatively (how often people used particular facilities) and qualitatively (how people perceived the institutions). To place these men and women in broader context, I turn to census data and city directories. The manuscript census and the directories create a better understanding of the precise settings in which the historical actors lived while the published census figures establish the societal framework.²⁴

After determining when and how middle-class Philadelphians used the three commercial institutions, I shift the focus of my study to these establishments. By examining the surviving business records, I develop an understanding of the changing nature of space and time within and around the firms. I use photographs, floor plans, maps, newspaper articles, printed ephemera, and surviving objects to help reconstruct the physical settings of these enterprises. It is the combination of these corporate records and artifacts with the human accounts that make the following recreations of everyday bourgeois life possible.²⁵

Before we can explore this world made by the Philadelphia middle class, we must define whom we mean when we use that always slippery term. According to the historian Karen Lystra, “ ‘middle class’ refers not only to economic and occupational levels but also to cultural characteristics: concepts of privacy, the self, and standards of social behavior.… These men and women used such concepts to separate themselves from those they considered inferior, to build social hierarchies, and to measure their own ‘class’ performance.”²⁶

Essentially “class” is an economic notion that has important cultural overlays. Defining any social class begins with its position in the economic system, and traditionally, American scholars have used two approaches to do this. One looks at the relationship between members of the class and the means of production. The other focuses (somewhat more prosaically) on issues of income and wealth. The first approach, derived from Karl Marx, recognizes the existence of (but usually dismisses the long term importance of) the bourgeoisie (as that term is used in this work). For Marx and many Marxist scholars, the middle class was and is an intermediate group that simply is not a key part of the capitalist mode of production and will disappear over time. In the other approach, class conflict does not exist and the seemingly permeable barriers of earned income and accumulated wealth are all that (largely statistically) divide one social stratum from another. But both approaches deal inadequately with the specifics of the historical experience. The concept of “false consciousness” may aid the social scientist Marx in explaining why a worker at the Baldwin Locomotive Works viewed himself as a member of the bourgeoisie, but it does not help the historian understand that person’s worldview. Equally troubling for scholars wedded to the income/wealth approach are those people who exhibited working-class beliefs and attitudes but earned more than some members of the middle class.²⁷

What a cultural view adds to either of these economic definitions of class is a way to deal with the seeming aberrations and (hopefully) to treat them within the historical framework. It allows historians to focus upon what might be called (with apologies to Marx) the “class consciousness” of the group. This would consist of the activities, beliefs, and institutions that members shared and often used to differentiate themselves from others in a society. Thus a poorly paid clerk would be lower-middle class because he adopted bourgeois norms. The danger of a purely cultural approach would be the ease of creating a tautology; one could declare something a middle-class standard and then use it to delimit the bourgeoisie. That is why it is important to use economics as a starting point and then apply culture to refine the definition.²⁸

Another advantage of this cultural analysis (particularly for the bourgeoisie of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) is that it helps to integrate women more fully into the story. Because many middle-class women did not work for pay outside the home during this period, studies that focus on employment often undervalue female contributions to society. Not only did women constitute half the bourgeoisie but, as other cultural studies have shown, they played extremely important roles in shaping the Victorian middle-class world.²⁹

Finally, maintaining a sensitivity to the multitude of divisions that existed within the turn-of-the-century bourgeoisie is important. In addition to the commonly used dichotomy of “new” versus “old,” there existed various economic layers: upper, middle, and lower. Because this is a broad-based look at middle-class culture, throughout most of this work, such differences are ignored. What this study focuses upon is the shared bourgeois culture. This should not be seen as a rejection of the many important fissures within the middle class. The bourgeois experience in the city would vary greatly depending upon whether one was male or female, white or black, Protestant or Roman Catholic or Jewish, native-born or immigrant, but there was also a common culture and it is this shared world that is at the center of this study.³⁰

The resulting working definition of the middle class for this study focuses on employment (or an individual’s relationship to the means of production), annual income, accumulated wealth, self-description, and lifestyle. Philadelphia’s bourgeoisie at the end of the nineteenth century consisted of hundreds of thousands of people located throughout the region. The men often worked in white-collar clerical, managerial, or professional jobs. Others owned shops (or small businesses) or were skilled craftsmen. A majority of the married women did not work for pay outside the home but often had important volunteer positions. Some women were college educated and some (mostly single but a few married) had entered the professions. Although annual incomes varied greatly (throughout most of the period they could range from less than $500 for junior clerks to more than $5,000 for professionals), most middle-class males earned a regular income (often termed a “salary”) that was sufficient to buy or to rent a home located away from the work site, to commute by mass transit, to engage in the culture of consumption, and to put a small amount in the bank. Accumulated wealth also ranged widely: some members of the bourgeoisie barely made ends meet on their salary whereas others had investments (particularly in the cases of small business owners) worth tens of thousands of dollars. For the purposes of this study, if a person acquired significant property, he or she was no longer considered middle class. Most had some formal education, and as the period progressed, more attended high school and went on to college. Many were Protestant: mainly Baptist, Episcopalian, Friend, Lutheran, Methodist, or Presbyterian. Some were Roman Catholic or Jewish. A vast majority were white, but there was a small African-American middle class in the city. Most (regardless of race or religion, and, by 1920, sex) were registered Republican. Many employed servants, although this declined toward the end of the period. Though some lived in heterogenous neighborhoods, others were helping to form the first middle-class enclaves both inside and outside the city limits. In Philadelphia proper, members of the bourgeoisie lived around (but not on) Rittenhouse Square and in West Philadelphia, Germantown, and North Philadelphia. In the Pennsylvania hinterland they lived in Montgomery and Delaware Counties: Cynwyd, Jenkintown, and Lansdowne. In New Jersey, they lived in the little towns strung along the railroad and trolley lines in Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties: Collingswood, Glendora, and Haddonfield.

These middle-class Philadelphians shared activities; these were the rituals that helped to define bourgeois culture. They read the “breezy” Philadelphia Inquirer or the more serious Public Ledger in the morning and The Evening Bulletin at night. They shopped at the major Center City department stores: John Wanamaker, Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbel Brothers, N. Snellenburg, and Lit Brothers. If they lived in North or West Philadelphia they rode the streetcars. If they lived farther from downtown, they used the frequent trains of the Atlantic City Railroad, Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad, Philadelphia & Reading Railway, or West Jersey & Seashore Railroad to and from work, shopping, and entertainment.

Applying this definition to the women and men who are at the heart of this work proved, for the most part, not to cause many problems. In the course of this study, no person was excluded because I felt he or she was likely working class; in fact, only three of the historical actors even raised this possibility (highlighting what social historians have long known: how few working-class diaries survive in archives). In two of these cases, evidence within the diaries points to a largely middle-class lifestyle; in the other, little is evident about the writer but his uncle was a successful lawyer. Much more common was to exclude men and women because they were elite and not upper-middle class. Wealth, income, and Social Register status eliminated dozens of possible guides. There were a few difficult cases here but two specific examples should help illustrate how I drew this line. Eugenia Barnitz was clearly from a very wealthy family. Although her memoirs do not mention income or property, she was raised in large homes on the fringes of aristocratic sections of the city. Her father was a “factory manager” (according to the manuscript census) and she shopped at some of the elite stores in Center City (along with their more pedestrian counterparts). In the end, based largely on the totality of her activities, she seemed to be at the very upper end of the middle class and she was included in the survey. A nineteenth-century Philadelphia lawyer, Josiah Granville Leach, was excluded from the survey because, although in many ways he seemed to conform to bourgeois norms, his wife made regular trips to Europe and eventually he was listed in the Social Register. Leach might have been an example of a middle-class person who, in the polite terms of the Victorian bourgeoisie, “married well,” but excluding him seemed safer.³¹

By the centennial year of 1876, middle-class Philadelphians were, by and large, confident, content, and complacent. Their city had expanded in wealth and population throughout the nineteenth century, and although steadily losing its long competition with New York City, it remained a national center of finance, publishing, and manufacture. As they prepared for their world’s fair, middle-class Philadelphians also began to reinvent their metropolis. To understand the rhythms of this city, we can follow John L. Smith, a Philadelphia mapmaker, as he rode a horse-drawn streetcar to the Centennial grounds. After that prelude, our study of how bourgeois Philadelphians scientifically reconstructed their society can begin in earnest.

Part I examines the evolution of late nineteenth-century middle-class culture in Philadelphia. During the last few decades of that century, the vast economic changes associated with industrialization created a large and powerful bourgeoisie throughout the Europeanized world. In Philadelphia, the women and men of the middle class used their newfound wealth and influence to create a new image of the city along rational, scientific lines. They did this by traveling throughout the region by streetcar and train, shopping at the new department stores, and reading their daily newspapers. As developed in Part II, starting about the turn of the century, the expansion of the market to include more members of the working classes caused these once almost exclusively middle-class institutions to become increasingly multi-classed. Ironically, this transformation from the Victorian bourgeois market to the early twentieth-century mass market was in part made possible by the very rational, ordered commercial structures that had so reflected the values of the Victorian middle class. Within the bourgeoisie’s reactions to these changes can be found the roots of the Progressive Era’s search for political order.