In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation by Andrew Heath (review)

Nineteenth-century Philadelphia's reputation as a "city of homes" or "workingman's paradise" lent credence to historian Sam Bass Warner's long-held assertion that it was America's "private city," where private enterprise and individualism trumped class conflict. Andrew Heath turns many of these claims on their head in his incisive and original examination of the mid-nineteenth-century city, In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Consolidation. Using the politics surrounding Philadelphia's Consolidation Act of 1854—which combined all of the townships, boroughs, and districts in Philadelphia County into its modern borders—Heath highlights broader developments in urban, working-class, and nineteenth-century US history with clarity and precision. He also treats consolidation broadly, not merely limiting it to the specific case of Philadelphia's municipal unification but to a larger shift toward associational politics in midcentury urban America. Deeply researched and persuasively argued, Heath finds Philadelphia reformers largely united in their desire for local consolidation, but divided over the reasons and ramifications of urban municipal growth and associationism.

Heath places the divide between bourgeois reformers and radical critics of capitalism at the center of his argument. He explains how contradictory impulses led to Philadelphia's consolidation. Using notable Philadelphians Morton McMichael and George Lippard as representative examples, Heath shows how upper-class consolidators like McMichael "looked to unite a bourgeoisie around the promise of an imperial metropolis" while radical reformers like Lippard "urged producers to combine in pursuit of social regeneration" (6). Heath insists that historians have overlooked midcentury Philadelphians like McMichael, Lippard, and reformers who offered alternatives to the era's urban political economy. Rather than viewing consolidation as a simple response to rapid growth, Heath traces the debates over Philadelphia's consolidation to show how competing visions of urban expansion and questions over unfettered capitalism complicate our understanding of midcentury urban America. Though they imbued their imperative for consolidation with their own political and economic concerns, the men who debated consolidation shared a belief in urban interdependence that confounded laissez-faire logics. Instead, Heath argues, "they sought an alternative to both insular, individualist privatism, and the late nineteenth-century bourgeois reform movement historians have termed 'liberalism'" (7).

One of the more valuable aspects of Heath's work is its attention to radical and working-class contributions to urban consolidation. Their critiques forced bourgeois elites to adjust and reformulate their arguments for urban expansion and consolidation. While Heath admits that the aims of consolidation and use of similar political language often obscured deeper conflicts over the city's political economy, he convincingly shows that radical and bourgeois mid-nineteenth-century reformers offered a different path between the urban elitism of the early national period and corporate dominance of the Gilded Age. Enmeshed in this history of the mid-nineteenth-century urban growth, Heath explains how the larger processes of consolidation and the concentration of municipal power affected Philadelphia's working classes and, in turn, how the city's workers shaped those developments.

Heath is at his best when placing Philadelphia in the broader context of nineteenth-century American and global history. Consolidation made Philadelphia's "metropolitan empire" the nation's largest territorial municipality in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than seeing city building and nation building as separate processes, however, Heath argues that they were closely connected. Indeed, it is in these connections that Heath locates further challenges to Philadelphia's supposed privatism. Advocates of urban consolidation saw a corollary in the nation's concurrent westward expansion, even referring to it as Philadelphia's Manifest Destiny (72). More than rhetorical flourish, Heath links Philadelphia's expansion to territorial expansion in the American West to show how the demands of capital transformed urban space to accommodate western trade. Heath finds the kinds of associational politics that drew consolidators' eyes west also shaped their belief that Philadelphia belonged among, and should...