Book Review

Walter Stix Glazer asserts, in his analysis of the emergence of the social organization and leadership structure of Cincinnati in 1840, that all residents lived within a harmonious, happy, unified community and shared a "strong sense of social order and civic responsibility." At the core of this organic community, a group of old settlers solidified corporate identity by imposing a unified social vision and enforcing "moral order." Glazer traces their ascent inward toward, and upward through, the core of the "cone"-like structure of local society. By persisting, acquiring property, and "interlocking" themselves in various associations, they achieved social mobility and acquired political leadership as a "directorate" or "power elite" at the "decisional" and "positional" nexus of Cincinnati society. However, as that small elite reached the center of the social vortex, many other Cincinnatians in the lower levels of the society felt the countervailing effects of economic concentration and were pulled or pushed by the centrifugal and downward currents of a "magnetic field" further and further away from the peak of the cone. As more middle- and working-class residents, many of them transients, newcomers, and German immigrants, experienced social downward mobility or geographic out-migration, they became increasingly isolated and segmented from the power elite. Inevitably, different political groups emerged, acting out of self-interest and exploiting "conflicts" to pursue their own agendas and thwarting elite efforts to impose order on a more pluralist society.

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