The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896

Clean conception of historic changes shaping nyc social classes. Insightful

Very nice quality book!

Outstanding and necessary content. A must read.

This comprehensive investigation of late Nineteenth capitalists in New York gives great insight into how America developed into the society it is today. This book goes well beyond just New York and really captures the philosophy of American elite in this pivotal period. This is a well researched treatise. Anyone hoping to understand American history should read this book.

A great book for learning about New York's history, the role money had, and the history of social movements in the United States.

An interesting, well written, and analytically strong book describing the emergence of the Gilded Age plutocracy as a self-conscious class. Beckert describes this group as bourgeoisie, using the term in a restricted way to denote individuals possessing a significant amount of capital, and focuses on the epicenter of Gilded Age capitalism, New York City (NYC). By the 1850s, NYC was the dominant American commercial center and contained a substantial bourgeoisie. This group, however, was politically and socially divided. Most important were the more traditional mercantile interests thriving on NYC's great success as an entrepot driven by booming American cotton exports. These individuals were economically and politically aligned with southern slaveholders, and supported the Democratic party. The smaller group of emerging manufacturers tended to support the Republican Party, its Free Soil-Free Labor ideology, and containment of slavery. The outbreak of the Civil War transformed the NYC bourgeoisie, which became rapidly committed to the survival of the Union and crucial partners for the Federal government. With the huge burst of Federal expenditures driven by the war effort and the Republican commitment to tariff protection and economic development, manufacturing boomed. The manufacturers became increasingly important though the more traditional mercantile interests also found ways, particularly in finance, to benefit from the new political economy. But increasing manufacturing brought increased proletarianization and class conflict, staring with the 1863 Draft Riots, contributing significantly to the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. Many of these trends continued after the war. With the booming American economy and expanding industry, NYC became even more economically powerful, more populous, and socially stratified. Beckert shows the ways in which the NYC bourgeoisie essentially co-opted the Federal government to become the dominant group in the US. The account of bourgeoisie political and economic dominance is accompanied by interesting discussions of the other ways in which the NYC (and increasingly national) bourgeoisie developed as a self-conscious class, including local politics and cultural activities. A good deal of the analysis is quite interesting. Beckert makes the interesting point that in the absence of a native aristocracy, the American bourgeoisie has little competition in their efforts to dominate the central government. Implicit in some of his discussions is the idea that the American bourgeoisie were particularly successful in suppressing the American labor movement and this may account for the failure of a strong socialist movement in the USA.

Sven Beckert's history seeks to describe the consolidation of the American bourgeoisie from 1850 to 1896. The key term here is "bourgeoisie", whom Beckert equates with "upper class" and "economic elite" and not simply with "middle class" which too many people equate with "most Americans." The story starts with an upper class dominated by merchants and bankers, many of them with economic ties to the South and to slavery. At the time industrialists were a relatively weak section of the upper class, with many of them from artisan origins and ruling over relatively small factories. In the 1850s the upper class would be divided over its response to slavery and to what extent it should compromise with the South. At the same time much of what we might consider upper class culture (museums, orchestras, theatres) were relatively inclusive, while the upper class was dispersed over the city. Ethnicity was relatively unimportant (it helped that there were few Catholics in the upper class) and easily transcended in daily life. Much of the upper class embraced a somber, diligent hard-working life.The story that Beckert then relates is one of how manufacturers increased their importance within the New York bourgeoisie. In this they were joined by more powerful financiers and lawyers. As time went on corporations became more complex and vertically integrated, investments became more sophisticated and diverse and businesses became more national and international. Beckert tells the story of how the New York City upper class found itself in a position of unrivalled influence after the Civil War decimated its main rival in the American ruling class, the Southern slaveholders. At the same time the New York bourgeoisie became more exclusive. As the century ended it was geographically more segregated from the rest of the city. Its influence in the world of culture helped to separate it from the common people (the new Metropolitan Museum of Art wasn't even open on Sundays until 1891, the day most New Yorkers were able to see it). At the same time the New York bourgeoisie became more anti-Semitic. It was also a ruling class that more openly displayed its wealth, such as the famous 1897 Martin ball where the hostess wore a necklace that had belonged to Marie-Antoinette, while Caroline Astor had gems worth $250,000 sown into her dress.At the same time the old republican ideology which emphasized economic independence for all slowly dissolved as it became clear that proletarianization was to be a fact of life. Where once the upper class embraced social mobility they now viewed the world through the lens of Social Darwinism. The New York bourgeoisie took a hard line on strikes and in what the most original part of Beckert's account, in 1877 tried their to eviscerate universal suffrage. The Chamber of Commerce, the Stock Exchange, the Union League Club, the New York Board of Trade and other powerful upper-class institutions all endorsed a proposal that would have imposed on the city council a board of finance with all power regarding taxation and expenditures elected under a suffrage that would have disenfranchised up to two-thirds of the New York electorate. This was unsuccessful, but their hard line on strikes helped to explain why the rate of injured strikers was more than forty times that for France in the nineties. In the 1870s the American trade union movement was one of the strongest in the world. By the 1920s it was one of the weakest. (Theodore Roosevelt suggested that one take a dozen Populists against the wall and shoot them dead). Their power benefited from the weaknesses of the state, where both bureaucracies and the federal government were weak and reactionary courts existed to fill the vacuum. Politics was a sphere where the wealthy could manipulate their power and influence to gain special favors and to crush radical strikers, while the claims of other classes could be peremptorily dismissed. Yet at the same time the laissez-faire state could not provide the more sophistical protection that a more sophisticated economy needed. So as the book concludes we are on the verge of encountering progressivism.Although well detailed, Beckert's style is not the most involving and many of the footnotes are somewhat repetitive. A bibliography listing archival sources would also have helped. One problem with Beckert is that it does fully not explain the political success of the New York bourgeoisie. True, over time the New York upper class had to accept the more ethnic and more free spending Tammany. The New York bourgeoisie played a decreasing role in city government. Yet they still made up most if not all of the mayors and they were able to cut taxation levels by a third from 1879 to 1896. It strikes me as a bit odd to say that the New York bourgeoisie was having problems attracting the more conventional middle class. In the Gilded Age they seemed to have little trouble getting the population to vote for nearly indistinguishable pro-business politicians. Some of these explanations for its power are reasonable (it no longer had to share power with slaveholders or aristocrats), while others are weaker (running political parties, argues Beckert, was expensive and the wealthy were those who could most easily pay. But was there ever a time when European socialist parties outspent their rivals?) At the end something is missing in this account.