Order and Its Discontents

Order andItsDiscontents John M.Allswang.Bosses, Machines and Urban Voters: AnAmerican Symbiosis. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977.157+ ix pp. Paul Boyer.Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, ]8]0-1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. 387+ xvipp. William A. Bullough. The Blind Boss and His City CJuistopherAugustine Buckley and Nineteenth-Centw:v San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.347 + xvipp. Lvle W.Dorsett. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Citv Bosses. PortWashington,N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977.134+x pp. Keith Cassidy The city has attracted attention from a variety of new perspectives, but two older themes continue to manifest considerable vitality: bossism and reform. Both of these phenomena deal, in their very different ways, with the same problem: organization, control and order in a new, bewildering and rapidly changing urban environment. There is, of course, more to both topics than just this, but the need to bring order to what has often appeared a dangerouslyundisciplined society has been a recurring theme in American history, one which acquired a new urgency in the city. The contradictions and tensions which, since the nation's earliest days, have characterized the American approach to the question of authority, have rendered quite taxing the task of those who would order and control those about them, and have shaped the way they approached it. The same tensions may be seen in the works of recent historians dealing with the reformer and the boss, predisposing them to a negative view of the former and a more positive one of the latter. Paul Boyer's Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920is notable principally because, while it breaks some new ground, it sums up and carries to fulfillment a line of historical inquiry going back several decades, and thus permits us to see the limitations as well as the achievements of the theme. The book's argument is readily stated. During the century after 1820the United States became an urban nation, a transformation which Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 1983,97-106 98 Keith Cassidy provoked deep fears of moral decay and social disruption. These in turn ledto successive waves of reform, aimed at creating a moral and harmonious city which would "replicate the moral order of the village" (p. viii). In discussing this drive "to impose moral conformity" Boyer focuses not on the use ofthe state to impose order, but rather on those voluntary groups who engagedin organized attempts to regulate public conduct. While there was a dazzling variety to these movements, and though remarkable changes of emphasis over time could be found, he perceives a strong element of continuity. Boyer divides his movements, somewhat arbitrarily, into four phases. The first, the Jacksonian Era, saw the rise of the first reform efforts, most notably the tract societies and the Sunday School movement. The tracts, he argues, with their frequent use of an idealized village setting, attempted to exercise social control by giving "emotional immediacy to a set of values and moral constraints associated with the village order" (p. 33). The Sunday School movement, though motivated by the same fears and hopes, adopted a far different approach. As Boyer stresses, it was not so much the content of the lessons as the structure of the school which instilled the moral control desired by its creators. The ordered, hierarchical, rigidly timed nature of their operations was designed "to inculcate ... habits of deference, restraint and selfcontrol " (p. 49). At the end of this section Boyer turns to an issue which has long been central in the discussion of moral reform groups: were their efforts an attempt by an undermocratic elite to impose its will on the masses? His discussion of the meaning of "social control" and his recognition of the problems involved in using it as an interpretive theme is one of the most notable features of this work. Going beyond Lois Banner's and William Muraskin's critiques of the thesis, he argues that while a desire to control what contemporary reformers called the '·depraved and uneducated part of the community" was certainly part of their motivation, the situation was in fact more complicated .1...