The Manifest Destiny of Philadelphia: Imperialism

Philadelphia's capitalist transformation over the middle decades of the nineteenth century engendered a peculiar mixture of optimism and anxiety. On the one hand, the city's economic elite imagined their metropolis would supplant New York as the nation's metropolitan center. On the other, they feared the epidemics, riots, and strikes that plagued their hometown in the 1830s and 1840s would only increase in frequency unless a way could be found to manage the social and spatial patterns of rapid growth. This dissertation argues empire became the crucial frame of reference for making sense of the city's development. Situating Philadelphia's external relationships and internal space in America's continental domain, attorneys, merchants, and manufacturers strove to transform their metropolis into a city that embodied the dynamism of mid-Victorian London and the grandeur of Haussmann's Paris. This pushed them in the direction of new forms of corporate organization as boosters created the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1846 then dramatically extended the boundaries of the municipality eight years later. By 1860, Philadelphia boasted the largest private and public corporations in the world, and a broad segment of the metropolitan bourgeoisie had coalesced around an ambitious empire-building program. Their design, however, did not go unchallenged. Drawing on a republican idiom that privileged modesty over luxury many Philadelphians attacked the grandiose schemes of boosters and upheld a very different idea of how the city should look and function. Out of the conflict between these rival visions a compromise can be discerned that celebrated outward growth over upward embellishment and located the city's imperial destiny not only in its grand center but its expansive periphery. Relentless growth fuelled by easy access to the independence of homeownership became the "manifest destiny" of Philadelphia, and what I term here the imperial republican model of urban development promised to keep social tension at bay. Although debt, partisan rule, and class conflict in the Gilded Age undermined taxpayers' commitment to the fiscal and political infrastructure needed to support it, it helped create the distinct geography of the modern city while paving the way for Philadelphia to drift westwards like the nation itself.