| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul. By Mary Lethert Wingerd. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. xvi, 326 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8014-3936-1.)

If any question remained as to whether Minneapolis and St. Paul were fraternal rather than identical twins, that matter is settled in Mary Lethert Wingerd's enjoyable presentation of the latter's evolution beginning in 1838. Claiming the City traces the distinctiveness of St. Paul in terms of both its neighbor across the Mississippi River and its intricate sense of community. The author carefully reconstructs the steps taken by St. Paul's institutional giants—its commercial (in contrast to Minneapolis's industrial) elite, the Catholic (in contrast to Protestant) Church, its Irish and German (rather than Scandinavian) residents, and its conservative-minded (rather than militant) labor leadership—to develop a popularly embraced civic compact. In this system, employers paid decent wages with the expectation that workers would shop in town and avoid excessive wage demands, religious denominations could dominate neighborhood life without competition or conflict, and nativism was frowned upon even by American-born Yankees. This distinctive social order quickly settled into a contentment with the status quo, and thus St. Paul, in contrast to every other American city early in the last century, was not looking to grow because boosterism attracted strangers and new business competition.

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