Students of nineteenth-century Philadelphia will be well aware of at least one dimension of the “consolidation” at the heart of Andrew Heath's book, In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation. The city had been laid out in its famous grid pattern in the seventeenth century by its founder, William Penn, who intended it to be a “Greene Country Towne,” an antidote to the crowded and haphazard cities of Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Philadelphia had become something else altogether. Not only had developers jammed as many dwellings as possible into the portion of Penn's grid that abutted the Delaware waterfront, but this development had spilled over the borders of the original city (which roughly encompassed the extent of today's Center City Philadelphia) into bustling industrial suburbs. By 1850, Spring Garden, Kensington, Northern Liberties, Southwark, and Moyamensing—all independent municipalities adjacent (more or less) to the city of Philadelphia—each ranked among the most populous cities in the United States.

The patchwork quilt of governance that resulted from this arrangement could often be irritating, but it became downright dangerous when the city was wracked by one of its frequent outbreaks of mob violence—violence that quite often straddled jurisdictions and made law enforcement difficult. The most dramatic and destructive of these, the anti-Catholic riots of 1844, finally spurred Philadelphians to address this problem and led to a decade-long campaign for consolidating the various municipalities of Philadelphia into one city, a feat that was finally accomplished in 1854 when the city took on its present-day dimensions. A significant portion of the book comprises this campaign for consolidation, which Heath refers to as “capital ‘C’” consolidation.

What Heath's book is more interested in, however, and what it devotes far more attention to, is what he terms “small ‘c’” consolidation, a much broader phenomenon. “Citizens at the time,” he tells us, “saw consolidation as the tightening of affective or associational ties: as any process that brought individuals or communities into closer communion” (5). Nineteenth-century Philadelphians were convinced that their city was being torn apart, and the 1854 Consolidation Act was only one means of addressing this larger problem. Heath's book is an account of the larger struggle to consolidate the city of Philadelphia. Contrary to the influential argument made by Sam Bass Warner in The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth, Heath sees a cohort of metropolitan leaders committed to a vision of cosmopolitan, public-spirited “growth politics” extending into the late nineteenth century.

While this is about a specific place, Heath persuasively argues that this story of consolidation in Philadelphia is very much a part of the national story. “The boundaries we tend to draw between metropolis and nation,” Heath argues, “are themselves permeable” (234). While the United States was aggressively expanding its boundaries in the Mexican War, for example, Philadelphia capitalists were engaged in their own sort of Manifest Destiny. On one hand, they saw the expansion of access to western markets (especially via the growth of the Pennsylvania Railroad) as essential to the “growth politics” that would make Philadelphia a great metropolis. On the other hand, these same leaders were obsessed with subjugating the unruly portions of their own city, by bringing them under the civilized elite's control. It is no accident that the working-class sections of the city that had been most riot-prone in the antebellum years were seen as “dark regions” of the city, home to “mighty tribes of Philadelphia Indians” (39). Similarly, as the national conflict over slavery escalated into the Civil War, many Philadelphians saw parallels between their efforts to tie their city more closely together and the struggle against disunion.

Readers of this journal may be particularly interested in the portion of the book that deals with events that occurred after the Civil War. The “growth politics,” which had been such an important means of tying the city together in the antebellum years, continued to be an important tool for postbellum Philadelphians who believed that the city's economic and geographic expansion would bind the metropolis more tightly together to “reconstruct” Philadelphia, as it were. Whereas antebellum Philadelphians had already begun to look admiringly upon Georges-Eugène Haussmann's reimagined Paris, postbellum leaders began in earnest their efforts to put this inspiration to work to remake their own city. Boosters pushed for the transformation of the city's central avenue, Broad Street, into a Parisian boulevard, and for the construction of a grand new city hall, unsurprisingly in the style of the French Second Empire. Any number of civic organizations pushed for improvement of Philadelphia's housing stock and beautification of its public spaces as a sort of “practical consolidation,” helping to create a city of home-owning bourgeois citizens and in the process helping to harmonize potentially divisive class interests.

Eventually, however, Philadelphians stepped back from this type of ambitious, civic-minded “growth politics.” Heath sees this development as parallel to the national withdrawal from Reconstruction. Over the course of the 1870s, many of Philadelphia's leaders became less confident in the ambitious, debt-funded projects of earlier years. Rising taxes spurred calls for efficiency in city government. In a municipal echo of a familiar national development, a backlash against organized labor helped shift the ground of Philadelphia politics—in this case the Railroad Strike of 1877, which targeted pay cuts imposed by railroads. For several days, police and militia battled striking workers. In the aftermath, Heath argues, Philadelphians saw a new “geography of disorder” (227). Whereas in the wake of the 1844 riots reformers had seen growth politics as the solution to disorder, strengthening the associational ties that bound would-be rioters to the bourgeois order, after 1877, the solution to disorder seemed to be increased policing and, perhaps most alarmingly, proposed disfranchisement.

Of course, this story of the “redemption” of Philadelphia and the retreat from Reconstruction in the wake of labor radicalism is in some ways a familiar one, but Heath's contribution in bringing together the national and international connections to this local story is a significant one. This is a complex and persuasive book, well-researched and readable.