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Book Reviews
The Bourgeoisie's Bourg
| HEPP, JOHN HENRY IV. The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876-1926. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. ix + 278 pp. Introduction, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $36.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-8122-3723-4.
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John Hepp offers his entertaining and enlightening study of the Philadelphia middle class partially as a response to Robert Wiebe's classic synthesis of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, The Search for Order.1 Hepp, associate professor of history at Wilkes University, accepts that the "search for order" is a useful metaphor for the social transformations wrought by the bourgeoisie in the years around the turn of the twentieth century. But, asks Hepp, what were the cultural roots of this search? Why, in other words, did the middle class come to perceive cities, the economy, and countless other aspects of American society as chaotic, and why did it feel the need to restructure them in a particular way? Hepp's answer is that middle-class Americans were influenced by a scientific worldview in which taxonomy played a central role. Just as science sorted rocks, animal species, and countless other items into carefully arranged categories, middle-class people attempted to bring structure to everything from library books (the Dewey Decimal system originated in 1876) to work processes (through, for instance, Frederick Taylor's 1911 Principles of Scientific Management). |
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Hepp and Wiebe agree that the middle class was a dynamic, optimistic force that fundamentally reshaped American society. Both authors' works may be understood as responses to an earlier synthesis: Richard Hofstadter's Age of Reform, which saw the middle class as fearful of status decline.2 That anxious middle class has reappeared in countless works since then, cowering not necessarily from decreasing status, but more frequently from the massive immigration and urbanization that marked turn-of-the-century America. In this view, the social reforms wrought by middle-class Progressives were essentially efforts at exercising social control over the restive working classes. |
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Hepp takes a much more sympathetic view of the bourgeoisie, finding them neither fearful nor controlling, but hopeful and confident; to use a Philadelphia image, they were not "corrupt" but largely "contented." He reconstructs their daily life through analysis of the diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and letters left by 63 middle-class Philadelphians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His sample leans toward white, Protestant males but includes women, Jews, Catholics, and African Americans. Hepp also makes creative use of business records, census materials, and artifacts such as maps, railroad timetables, and architectural drawings to supplement his analysis. |
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Hepp's reading of these documents shows that middle-class Philadelphians re-ordered their world along "scientific" lines in the late nineteenth century. In the process, he argues, the bourgeoisie restructured urban space and time. Hepp focuses on three major urban institutions to make this point: the transit system (railroads and street railways), department stores, and newspapers. |
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Hepp's use of first-person sources allows a refreshing, bottom-up view of these institutions. He provides a close-up view of how middle-class Philadelphians shopped, read, and traveled on a daily basis. The book's title suggests one of Hepp's most significant findings: that bourgeois Philadelphians lived in a partially imagined, partially real "middle-class city" of homes, businesses, shops, and recreation spots. These nodes were tied together by a network of trains and trolleys, making a coherent world distinct from, yet coexisting and overlapping with, the cities of the elite and of the working class. |
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