James Bryce, William T. Stead, and the Trans-Atlantic Meaning of the American City

Abstract

ABSTRACT By the late 1800s, elaborate concepts – the vocabulary of “bosses” and “machines” – had emerged in the United States for arguing over the systematised corruption that industrial urbanisation and mass political mobilisation seemed to generate. This essay focuses on two British writers whose Anglo-American sympathies and prominence within trans-Atlantic intellectual and journalism networks enabled them to shape U.S. debates over urban governance, while introducing Europeans to the tumultuous atmosphere of U.S. cities. In The American Commonwealth (1888), the Liberal scholar-politician James Bryce drew upon experiences in numerous U.S. cities to build a case for professionalised municipal governance and the acculturation of immigrants as ways of ensuring civic standards in democratising cities. In his sensational expose, If Christ Came to Chicago (1894), the social Christian journalist William T. Stead introduced Europeans to the sense among a segment of U.S. reformers that bossism resulted from capitalist injustice and that reform required social solidarity.