Transcript

Burgeoning cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore faced enormous challenges in dealing with the rapid influx of people into cities. Living conditions became crowded and congested. Disease was rampant. Fires were commonplace. So cities faced the challenge of creating the services, the infrastructure, to deal with rapid growth at the same time that the cities were becoming increasingly powerful magnets for more and more people moving from farms to the city and from Europe to America.

Cities were popular in part because they offered jobs, opportunity, and cultural life. Cities were the centers for intellectual life and the arts. Cities were the center of vibrant new entertainments—theaters, saloons, etc. Cities were magnets for American life.

Thomas Jefferson would have been concerned about that development. Had he lived into the mid-19th century, he would have grown very concerned because he believed that the fate of the American republic depended upon the United States remaining an agricultural nation. He believed that a decentralized republic like the United States sprawling across a whole continent depended upon the people retaining ownership of land. He very much feared that masses of people living in cities, such as in Europe during his lifetime, would breed not only disease but also violence and civic indifference. A republic dependent upon the civic virtue of the people—the civic virtue, according to Jefferson, depended upon people owning the land rather than being wage laborers dependent upon others—required just such ownership.

And yet, Americans found ways over time to convert their cities from corrupt centers of violence and disease into dynamic centers of prosperity and ultimately civic virtue itself.

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