Public Life, 1865-1900
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This period is marked by institutional closing
of public life
Growth of Organization
This period is a time of growth of organization as an expression of
community. Places where participation in public life had marked an
earlier liveliness were transformed into institutional organizations with:
- Designated roles. Voluntary participation and the adaptation
of role in the negotiation of participation were replaced by organizational
"charts" of role.
- Controls on participation. Tight integration of control meant
that participation was determined by the hierarchy of the organization.
Often, there were formal procedures to add members.
- Hierarchies of Power. Typically, these organizations were heavily
verticalized with leaders giving orders to those in organization.
- Public life as arbiter of values replaced by rules, ethics, and
laws generated by organization. Values became regularized into organizational
codes. As this happened, the need for ongoing patterns of discourse to
reproduce community life diminished.
This pattern occurred in many fields
- Politics. Political power was concentrated. In national government,
it is a period of great corruption. Railroads owned the United States Senate.
National governmental policy created huge machines for wealth including
the railroads and other monopolies. In the cities, political machines organized
life from the boss down. Block captains sat at the bottom of the machine
hierarchy, linking citizens with the machine in a vote for services quid
pro quo. Thus, local government as a public space was privatized into a
relationship with a block captain. White Southerners, initially disenfranchised
by occupation governments, recaptured control and replaced the economic
control of blacks through slavery with governmentally enforced "Jim
Crow" laws.
- Economically. Economic life was controlled by the factory. Factories
concentrated work into specific roles (particularly with the development
of mass production late in this period) dictated by organizational needs.
In agrarian America, belief had been that land was the key to freedom.
With land made easily available to everyone, economic viability was more
widely spread. But in an industrial economy where capital took the place
of land, and economic viability required that one work for another, there
was no such wide distribution of economic power. Instead, economic power
was concentrated in the wealthy.
- Socially. This was the time of the second great wave of American
immigration. These immigrants came from non-English countries, thus creating
the first multi-lingual crisis for public life. Immigrants tended to gather
in ethnic enclaves. The assimilation of individuals became difficult; assimilation
of whole cultures became necessary.
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Arenas for public life were significantly narrowed
in this time
- The pulpit. This was not a particularly exciting time in the
pulpit. Institutionalized churches grew. Organizational skills replaced
preaching skills as the central needs for the ministry. Religion became
more regularized into identifiable, institutionalized churches. The fastest
growing churches were those that were hierarchically organized and institutionalized,
especially the Catholic Church swelled by new immigrants.
- The business club. De Toqueville had marveled at Americans penchant
for joining voluntary organizations. During the latter half of the century,
voluntarism turned into social organization. These social organizations,
the business club primary among them, became a way for the powerful to
restrict access to their public sphere and therefore to maintain the concentration
of their wealth. The business club became an organization that maintained
class distinctions and carefully controlled access.
- The Lyceum/Chatauqua. This became an arena of speakers making
a living from the platform. Typically, they would give the same speech
thousands of times (Russell Conwell delivered "Acres of Diamonds"
several thousand times.) The Lyceum became ever more commercialized, moving
indoors and selling tickets. The community aspects of the camp meeting
fell away. The Chautauqua was founded to revive some of the flavor of the
old Lyceum, but soon went the same direction.
- Social Movements. As such public spaces closed and the class
distinctions became evident, those excluded from the power began to band
together to create social movements. Even these movements often developed
into organizations that could serve as power centers rather than created
a public space. There were many examples including the women's movement,
labor, agrarian populists, and socialists.
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Pressures were building, however, that led to the reemergence
of Public Life
- Reconstructing Southern Society. The South was destroyed by
the war. The Cavalier power structure was supplanted by the Occupation
governments which often placed former slaves into control of political
institutions. When Southern whites, the former Cavaliers, retook control,
they did so through violence and brute political force. They could not
maintain peace under such circumstances. The Southern white class needed
to develop a replacement for the Cavalier public space to maintain their
power, or a new public space, less attuned to race, had to substitute.
- Renewed power of <people> as an ideograph. The Civil War
intensified democracy. The war was fought by a citizen army, and the war
was seen as a soldier's war. The Gettysburg address had pictured a government
"of the people, by the people, and for the people." As a war
against slavery the war was fought to broaden the democratic base. In addition,
the reform movements viewed the war as the success of abolition and expected
that other reforms would be adopted as well. But organizational life had
closed the public spaces in which this democratization could occur. The
pressures for reform had to invent spaces for their expression.
- Economic problems. Civil War had transformed the North into
an industrial economy. Economic life had become capital intensive, but
without institutions to provide democratic capital. The result was huge
disparities of wealth: great squalor next to great opulence. Either
a rhetoric to motivate the huge disparity of wealth, or a rhetoric that
motivated changing that system needed to develop.
- Multi-cultural problem. In 1860, America was largely a homogeneous
society. The wave of immigration after the war changed all of that. Enclaves
developed with language barriers between them. A public place within
these communities was needed, and a public life that bridged these groups
was equally crucial.
The problem of the last part of the century was developing new public
spaces to satisfy these needs. We will study the efforts to create public
life in the midst of the forces of organizational hierarchy.
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