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Part I SOLIDARITIES The introduction set a low threshold for“class formation”: an alignment between collective action or cultural practices, on one side, and economic hierarchies on the other. Sociologists and historians routinely make some broad distinctions between more and less privileged groups in a given era’s economic structure— recognizing that the analytically useful dividing lines will vary from one time and place to another. In late-nineteenth-century American cities, a key distinction is between those who worked for wages, mostly in manual employment, and those who earned a living through self-employment or the control of property. These broad categories encompass a wide array of occupations, whose occupants might disagree on all sorts of issues.And the distinction between these categories might turn out to be largely irrelevant to social life. But it is also possible that individuals on one side of this economic divide came to differ from those on the other side, and to be more closely tied to one another, in their collective action or cultural preferences. That dual movement of increasing separation between economically defined groups and extended ties within them are what I mean by class formation. The questions posed regarding the late-nineteenth-century American bourgeoisie concern whether class formation in this sense “happened”: If so, how? And in what ways did this process resemble or differ from working-class formation? The chapters of part 1 focus on one aspect of this story: how collective action and organization aligned with class divisions. Part 2 takes up the cultural thread in the story of bourgeois class formation. Even the low threshold that the introduction set for class formation is a tall order. Solidarity among capitalists was no more securely anchored in their economic positions than it was among wage earners.All sorts of conflicting interests undercut joint organization and action among businessmen. Some pitted one city’s business against another’s, including competition for regional supremacy. Others divided firms in the same industry. Efforts to curb price competition, for 28 PART I. SOLIDARITIES example, regularly fell victim to free riders.1 And while capitalists are sometimes thought to unify more readily against the common enemy of unions than against the threat of competition, a common complaint before World War I was that “some employers have reaped considerable profit by yielding to the demands of labor during a strike in which their competitors, by refusing to surrender, were unable to transact any business.”2 These are all examples of tensions between shared long-term interests and individual short-term advantage. In other areas, however, businessmen simply lacked common rallying points. The tariff concerns of many manufacturers, for example, left railroad men indifferent; transportation costs were not of equal concern to manufacturers producing for local as against national markets. The labor process could also fragment employers to an even greater degree than it did workers. Uneven development within an industry or disparate workforce requirements created very different challenges and opportunities for manufacturers, as both Cincinnati and San Francisco show. And in contrast to its effects on workers, the labor process neither brought businessmen together in one place nor, in the event of conflict, did it pit them as a group against employees. These obstacles to common organization and action mainly involved economic relationships. Businessmen, like workers, also had other social bases for affiliation that ran counter to class unity.3 Old money often had disdain for new, Republicans for the occasional Democrat, Protestants for Jews, whites for racial minorities. Even if businessmen shared important economic interests, there is no reason to assume that these would trump the identities that divided them. In San Francisco, as we will see, “whiteness” often outweighed class, aligning small proprietors and skilled labor against the Chinese and their employers. In general, however, compared to workers, business owners were more homogeneous in ethnicity and religion (being predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants).4 In late-nineteenth-century industrial communities, accordingly, status closure and business unity could coincide: when Cincinnati businessmen drew boundaries on the basis of taste or good citizenship, they reinforced rather than cut across class solidarity. Still, bourgeois unity faced formidable obstacles. How can we tell when these hurdles have been overcome? The key for capital, as for labor, is a realignment of solidarities, in which vertical ties between classes weaken and horizontal ties within classes broaden. This dual movement may be visible in organization, in action, and in ideology, and shifts in these areas may reinforce one another...

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