Access Type

Open Access Dissertation

Date of Award

January 2023

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

History

First Advisor

Liette Gidlow

Abstract

During the last half of the nineteenth century, the State of Michigan experienced huge growth in population and economic activity. A significant portion of this growth centered on Detroit, Michigan’s largest city. There, by 1850, an early wave of native-born settlers from New England and New York found themselves joined and increasingly outnumbered by an even larger wave of foreign-born working-class settlers from Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Great Britain. Over time, the city’s social structure and geography became fragmented by class, ethnicity and religious affiliation. At the same time, the city developed highly skewed personal wealth patterns. Census, tax, land, and probate records for the last half of the nineteenth-century show that the top one percent of Detroit families controlled over forty percent of total community wealth, and the top ten percent controlled over eighty percent, while the bottom fifty percent owned next to nothing.Detroit’s wealthiest residents did not just dominate the economic scene, they also worked to control all of city life. Contemporary biographies, obituaries, city directories, newspaper accounts and cemetery records, in combination, allow for the creation of a group biography of these wealthy nineteenth century Detroit residents. This biography reveals a small and cohesive group of mostly Yankee Protestants, who had similar emigration stories and similar routes to wealth. These men and women forged an “upper class” identity by adopting a common ideology of bourgeois superiority, by investing together, by socializing and worshipping as a group, by adopting similar modes of class distinction (food, dress, manners, leisure activities, etc.), and by defending their upper-class prerogatives within the city. Led by a group of enterprising millionaires – men like James McMillan, John S. Newberry, Russell A. Alger, James F. Joy, Christian Buhl and Dexter M. Ferry – Detroit’s bourgeoisie engaged in an ongoing and active campaign to hoard wealth, power and status within the city. They promoted bourgeois ideology through church, school and newspaper. They displayed class distinction through conspicuous consumption (by building mansions, traveling in expensive carriages, private railcars and yachts, employing servants, etc.). They advertised their civic-mindedness through leadership (money and time) in a wide range of social service activities. To ensure favorable municipal treatment for their business and social interests, they aggressively sought political power in order to control the city’s governmental administration. And, to protect their economic, social and political status, Detroit’s elite residents maintained tight control over the city’s coercive force – the police, courts and militia. Detroit’s working class population normally deferred to upper-class interests, but at times revolted. For example, major strikes that took place in May 1886, and Labor party ambitions in late 1886 and 1887 showed a willingness to challenge bourgeois dominance. Nevertheless, these challenges failed. On the economic front, the city’s employers, with an army of reserve workers, overcame the workers’ challenge. Employers used the police, and the mention of the militia, to keep the strikers orderly. Overall, the working class lacked the resources and organization needed to overcome elite power. The dissertation presents two main arguments. First, it describes the bourgeoisie that dominated the economic, civic and political spheres within late nineteenth-century Detroit. Second, it illustrates the methods used by the bourgeoisie to persuade, coerce and exploit the rest of the city’s residents to accept, as natural and fair, inequality of wealth, power and status within the community -- in short, to accept bourgeois hegemony.

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