Public markets and civic culture in nineteenth-century America

Abstract

Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. By Helen Tangires. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xx, 265. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00.)The buying and selling of food was an inherently political process in nineteenth-century urban America. Who was entitled to which merchandise, from whom, at what price, at what location, and at what level of profit? As we learn from Helen Tangires's social history of municipal planning and privatism, the answers to these questions rarely went uncontested.Tangires begins her book in the 18.'3Os with the public market house as an expression of the idea of moral economy. Revolutionary ideology, supported by longstanding European traditions, supported the belief that individuals could not be permitted to manipulate basic food supplies for their own profit; only transparent and communally sanctioned transactions would foster republican institutions. Municipal authorities sought to assure reliable flow of pure food and fair price by issuing slew of regulations and by mandating that all market activity take place in an easily monitored central space. Residents volunteered their own funds and energies in popular subscriptions to build the covered sheds, located in the middle of the main street and acknowledged to be a town's most precious asset (47). Indeed, Tangires suggests that the markets assumed the status of multifaceted civic centers and sites of democratic interaction in the dense fabric of antebellum New York and Philadelphia.Within generation, however, the idea of the public market house came under attack. Many influential politicians, subscribing to laissezfaire ideology and devoted to party building, regarded the public market system more as source of patronage tban as an institution to be nurtured. Merchants and middlemen (formerly distrusted) stepped enthusiastically and effectively into the power vacuum. As cities such as New York and Philadelphia grew rapidly in population and physical extent, those living on the outskirts sought opportunities to shop closer to home. At the same time, individual trades and vendors began to insist on individual proprietorship of key locations and exemption from market rules; New York City recognized the right of its butchers to set up independent shops in the 184Os. But for the resistance of market advocates, the city might have dismantled its market houses altogether in the 185Os, as Philadelphia did. This scenario was repeated in number of smaller towns, where deregulation advocates portrayed municipal markets as obsolete and even corrupt.Public market houses were marginalized and neglected by the 187Os, Tangires concludes, but they survived by adapting to the changed political terrain and by accommodating more wholesalers and individual proprietors. By the 188Os, the tide had turned slightly: cities that had deregulated began to regret their inability to assure the safety both of the food supply and of the municipal revenue stream; others decided to keep full municipal control. …