Urbanization

Manhood in Pre-Urban America

In the small, rural, farm-based communities of colonial America, face-to-face relations, patterns of deference, strict communal controls, and sanctions on individual conduct regulated social life. Seaport cities, such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, were only a fraction of the size of their European counterparts. In this social and demographic context, manliness was defined largely within an agrarian frame of reference. Commentators and politicians such as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson praised the ideal of the yeoman farmer—the independent, self-sufficient farmer and domestic patriarch—as the basis of civic society and the highest ideal to which a man could aspire. Mistrusting the city as a threat to manly virtue, they hoped America would remain an agrarian society of independent producers.

Still, urban-bound definitions of manliness began to appear in the late eighteenth century. Jefferson himself praised the artisan as the farmer's urban counterpart, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, written between 1771 and 1789, presented the reader with an urban, rational ideal of manhood propelled by disciplines of time, capitalist accumulation, and credit. Urban-centered articulations of manliness became much more salient in the nineteenth century.

Urban Masculinity in Antebellum America

After 1815, urbanization drew increasing numbers of young men from the countryside into the nation's burgeoning cities. This migration, abetted by surging immigration after 1840, eroded previous forms of social control through family, community, and church. This process had an ambivalent impact on the men inhabiting these new urban environments. Among the emerging middle class, growing cities, as sites of commerce and manufacture, promoted codes of manliness rooted in individual autonomy, self-control, entrepreneurial activity, and economic performance.

At the same time, urbanization encouraged the emergence of less genteel, more hedonistic, and sometimes violent definitions and practices of manliness by offering an expanding range of leisure activities, fostering the growth of an industrial working class, and providing spaces for self-expression. Urban entrepreneurship itself produced the frighteningly hedonistic masculine type of the confidence man. The confidence man took advantage of other, often transient, young men, gaining their trust and luring them into the [Page 469]emerging urban subculture of theaters, brothels, and gambling dens. Meanwhile, urban working-class men seeking to compensate for economic marginalization and other alienating aspects of industrial work formed subcultures consisting largely of single white men working in urban factories or as clerks in expanding merchant businesses. These men were fiercely egalitarian in their politics, belligerent in defending the equality of white men, and openly scornful of urban middle-class gentility. They also asserted their masculinity by claiming the right to control and coerce women, invading African-American neighborhoods, and reveling in their assaults on prostitutes and blacks. Many young white men articulated such codes of manliness by forming and joining youth gangs, such as New York's Bowery B'hoys. These codes of masculinity have remained an intricate part of urbanization and city life into the early twenty-first century.

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