Cincinnati in 1840: The Social and Functional Organization of an Urban Community during the Pre-Civil War Period

Abstract

Cincinnati in 1840: The Social and Functional Organization ofan Urban Community during the Pre-Civil War Period. By Walter Stix Glazer. Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Pp. xxii, 184. Illustrations, tables. Cloth, $40.00; paper, $18.95.) Of the twenty-four books now in the Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series, Walter Glazer's is the eighth on urban Ohio. Given also that this short, concise monograph is a revised dissertation originally written in 1974, one might wonder, what about this study of the Queen City makes it worthy of publication? As it turns out, Glazer's ambitious methodology and exhaustive quantitative research offer valuable insights into the social organization of a dynamic antebellum city. His overall thesis, however, rests on a selective interpretation of evidence and ultimately is untenable. As one might expect, reading Cincinnati in 1840 is to revisit the glory days of urban history, when cities were very much in the public's attention and quantitative methods were utilized cheerfully to pick them apart. Thankfully, Glazer avoids the worst excesses of cliometrics. Although he sometimes lapses into cold social scientific language, he never lets the numbers overwhelm his narrative. He neatly supplements his numbercrunching with biographical snippets and interesting stories, such as that of the suicide of a reformist minister. His main objective is to analyze the social organization of the city. He focuses on four aspects: ideology, demography, social structure, and leadership. In his first chapter on ideology, Glazer argues that Cincinnati was unified by a community ideology of optimism, confidence, and progress. Although this booster vision was promulgated by the city's leadership, it was nevertheless a shared image that all with some sense of a unique corporate identity (42). It is in his second chapter concerning demography that Glazer first puts into service his quantitative methodology. At its heart is a correlation between census data and information from the city directory. The result is a field of society, which organizes the population in terms of how long they had lived there. Glazer argues that the old settlers, who had resided in Cincinnati for over a decade, were a coherent group, which provided much of the leadership for the community. On the outskirts of the magnetic field, German immigrants and transients had little stake in society, and their association with crime and riots put strains on the vision of an organic social order. Applying a tax list to his model, Glazer next analyzes the social structure of Cincinnati. As the city matured, a wealthy elite emerged, the existence of which challenged the prevailing assumption that social status rested on the natural foundation of morality and virtue. Glazer comes up with a cone-shaped socioeconomic model correlating socioeconomic class and demographic composition. From this research he concludes that upward mobility was possible for only a select few householders, and the majority of businessmen and mechanics moved away within ten years. Glazer notes, however, that this very mobility lent support to the spirit of optimism about the future of the community. The year 1840 marked a transition at which time this booster ideology gave way to divisiveness and disorder. …