Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (review)

The availability of public space for political activity has long been a source of interest for those attempting to write a history of civic freedom. From E. P. Thompson to the new generation of historians influenced by Jürgen Habermas, the issue of public space has been seen as a key element of popular political struggle. Lisa Keller's contribution to this debate is interesting both for its careful historical reconstruction of the political management of public space in London and New York and for the possible implications of this issue today. This is a book about the history of liberalization and the history of order. Keller's key thesis is that political culture, rather than the framework of law, is the best guide to understanding the process by which political space was managed. Although citizens of New York had inalienable constitutional rights, guaranteed by statutory legal protection, these were often not sufficient to hold back the regulatory power of the local state. By 1900 the number of customary spaces devoted to free speech had declined, and the legal protection afforded to demonstrators was, in practice, limited. In contrast, Britain's common law and the liberal traditions associated with the Anglo-Saxon constitution proved better protection for the citizen and encouraged greater accountability on the part of the police and civil authorities.

The value of this book lies in its excellent detailed case studies of the management of particular public events. These accounts afford much valuable information about the attitudes of demonstrators, authorities, and the perceptions of individual rights. Yet the detail of some of the case studies raises doubts about the validity of the author's overall conclusion. New York may have gradually adopted a more repressive regulatory framework for demonstrations, but how much was this due to political culture and how much due to the fact that the New York authorities faced more substantial and more violent threats to civic order? The anarchy of New York's draft riots of 1863, which left 119 dead and forced a substantial part of the city's black population to leave, had no direct parallel in London. Similarly, New York's community violence between Catholics and Orangemen was on a much more significant scale than nineteenth-century ethnic tensions in Britain's first city. The horrors of the 1871 Orange Riot clearly remained in the memory of legislators and demonstrators for many years to come. Comparing different types of civil disorder is very difficult, but London's Bloody Sunday of 1887 mercifully saw just three fatalities. Perhaps the nature of disorder and the extent of the perceived threat do more to explain the level of repression in New York than the author gives credit.

The different types of public space available for democratic activity also demand more detailed attention. Several authors have reminded us that the nature of public space and its political uses changed significantly during the nineteenth century. James Vernon, in his comparison of British industrial towns in Politics and the People (1993), illustrated the process by which the spread of the franchise was often matched by the closing of the public sphere. Open access meetings were replaced by ticketed meetings; open air gatherings were replaced by regulated rallies in public halls. One only has to look back to Moisey Ostrogorsky's classic Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (1902) to see that this trend was also evident to contemporaries. Rather than seeing a tension between democracy and order it may be more helpful to see order as the consequence of conferring new political rights on new groups and the inherent problem of trying to incorporate these groups peacefully into a rapidly expanding urban society.

One also needs to reconstruct the cultural meanings of specific public spaces, as it is clear that public authorities viewed such spaces differently, depending on their location...