The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City by John D. Fairfield (review)

“American cities,” asserts John Fairfield, “have been the crucial arena for the cultivation of an active citizenry attentive to the public good and suspicious of those who put self-interest above the welfare of the whole” (4). Surveying the past 250 years of American history, he finds that urban society has kept alive a commitment to civic life in a nation devoted to private wealth.

An ambitious work of scholarly synthesis, The Public and its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City braids together descriptions of socioeconomic trends, cultural conflicts and political philosophy from the late colonial era to the present. The story gets underway with the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, when political mobilization arose from the taverns, wharfs and streets of the major seaports. Drawing the participation of merchants and laborers alike, the colonial crisis and ensuing Revolution produced a faith in “civic republicanism” that continued to animate public debate for much of the nineteenth century. Throughout this narrative, those who speak out for a greater public good find themselves opposed by defenders of private property rights. Fairfield traces this tension through the creation of the Constitution, the conflicts between Federalists and Republicans, and workingmen’s activism in 1830s New York. He notes the complexity of the conflicts in the Jacksonian era, when the advocates of participatory democracy seemed to be at odds with elitists who nonetheless advocated public improvements. He admires the early Republican Party for its promotion of rational public discourse and its “defense of civic equality over ethnic, racial or religious prejudices” (96).

The New York Draft Riot of 1863, unfortunately, discredited the rationality of the public in the eyes of Republican leaders. Thereafter, controversies in the cities seemed more clear-cut. Business elites espoused laissez faire economic theories, while Henry George and various labor activists struggled to keep alive the ideal of the public good. Jane Addams, John Dewey and other urban-based activists sought to build social consciousness and participatory democracy, but the hopes of the Progressive Era were squelched by government repression during and after World War I, and by the rampant consumerism that followed. Even the labor movement adopted a narrow, consumerist mentality in giving up its hope for “industrial democracy” in the mid-twentieth century. Mass suburbanization after World War II further encouraged a retreat into the private world of the home, as well as contributing to the relative decline of cities in American politics and culture.

Resting on vast historical scholarship, The Public and its Possibilities would provide a useful interpretive spine for an undergraduate history course, comparable in some ways to Eric Foner’s The Story of American Freedom. As an effort to “re-kindle our political imagination” (xii), though, the book undermines its purpose by demonstrating, again and again, the discouraging limits of citizenship in America. Past efforts to invigorate public engagement, as described here, seem too fruitless and evanescent to provide much inspiration. The book concludes on a hopeful note, with a consideration of modern environmentalism as a surviving expression of interest in the public good. The Occupy movement, which emerged after the book’s publication, might have been a more relevant and promising model of the urban, participatory democracy that Fairfield holds dear.