Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore by David Schley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore by David Schley Albert J. Churella (bio) Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore By David Schley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 318. Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore By David Schley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 318. In Steam City, David Schley draws on the work of scholars such as William G. Roy (Socializing Capital, 1997), Pauline Maier ("The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation," 1993), Sean Patrick Adams (Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth, 2004), and John Lauritz Larson (The Market Revolution in America, 2010) who have explored the evolution of the American corporation from the early republic to the Civil War. The closest parallel to Schley's book is Andrew Schocket's 2007 Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia—a fitting comparison, given the intense rivalry between Baltimore and Philadelphia, another port city in decline, relative to New York. The broad outlines of the story are clear. Elite residents of cities (also corporations) promoted the incorporation of banks and charitable institutions that fostered the public good. Internal improvements promised similar benefits, particularly as cities contested for economic access to the western hinterland. Following the Panic of 1837, critics of public ownership in the United States increasingly adopted the rhetoric of free-market capitalism, asserting that only private corporations could provide the public good of improved mobility. Following the Civil War, that perspective underpinned the concept of corporate personhood, with businesses of all types largely exempt from governmental oversight. Schley adopts a fresh and innovative approach to these developments in the United States. Steam City reflects his assertion "that corporate power, as we understand it today, rests on a spatial order that took shape in city streets during the first half century of the railroad age" (p. 220). Technology shaped that process, but this is no story of technological determinism. Human agency is everywhere in Schley's account. To the extent that railroad development in nineteenth-century Baltimore reflected the theoretical approach provided by the social construction of technology, however, a remarkably small group was doing the constructing. Business elites methodically transformed the business corporation—and the physical and rhetorical landscape in which it operated—from a servant of the community to an exploiter of the city. More than any other eastern American metropolis, Baltimore invested heavily in public-works projects that would promote the common good. It was nonetheless evident that some sectors of the public mattered more than others. The railroad was particularly burdensome to neighborhoods occupied by the working class and People of Color. At a time when hard currency was scarce, and paper currency unreliable, the quasi-public [End Page 960] nature of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) facilitated an expansion of Baltimore's money supply. Schley describes the rise and rapid fall of B&O notes during the early 1840s. Printed in small denominations, they facilitated commercial exchange and economic growth. Another effect was to shift the speculative risk associated with railroad financing from wealthy Baltimoreans to the city's working class. By the 1850s, the railroad controlled Baltimore, rather than the other way around. New lines that skirted or tunneled under the city reflected the potential of railroad technology to reorder channels of commerce. B&O executives argued that the inevitable forces of competitive free-market capitalism impelled them to minimize costs, maximize revenues, and direct traffic to its most profitable destination, even if that meant away from Baltimore. Beginning in 1854, the railroad's private investors engaged in a "public, political, and deliberate" campaign to wrest control from the municipal government (p. 133). They succeeded only after they won the battle for the railroad "to define itself as a private corporation acting independent of urban public interest" (p. 162). Steam City ends with the cataclysmic strikes of 1877, events precipitated by managerial determination to put the welfare of the private corporation ahead of the public good of Baltimore and its residents. When B&O managers laid off workers, implemented wage reductions, and relocated the principal facilities used to build and repair...