American State Capitals

A state capital is at once a capitol (both words are pronounced identically), a municipality, and a symbol of the state. This refers to Americans' relationship to their cities as well as to the links between capital cities and other cities in their states.

In the American federal system, urban primacy and politics follow a different logic. State capitals are highly heterogeneous and form a parallel urban network, disconnected from the classical American urban network, largely based on economic dynamics and linkages. The population of state capitals ranged from 8,035 (in Montpelier) to 5,819,000 (in Boston) in 2000, and capitals' share of the state's population ranged from 7 percent (Frankfort, Annapolis, and Jefferson City) to 113 percent (in Providence, Rhode Island, where the metropolitan area exceeds the limits of the state).

Capitals are singular in the American urban fabric, from physical and social points of view. It could be contended that capitals are the “most American” of the nation's cities because, owing to their diversity, they are symbols of the United States of America.

Their platting stages and translates the polity in the physical pattern of the capital city. Carefully planned under public initiative and investment, they mostly depart from the supposed uniformity of American cities through the erection of monuments on symbolic locations, the most impressive of which are the capitols. Once symbols of the reality of statehood, they have become symbols of permanence, linking the states with their history. Capitals host and stage the most important public spaces and places in their states, capitol grounds being the most visible ones. However, unanimity was never reached, since these “public” places were mainly built by white men for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, thus excluding numerous minorities, including Native Americans, African Americans, and women.

The absence of unanimity was very visible during the processes of capital choice, and the aftermath of these selection processes continues even today. Indeed, a common factor in the history of American state capitals is their instability: American states (including during the colonial and territorial periods in some cases) had an average of 3.8 successive capitals. No clear geographical pattern emerges from the capital migrations that all but eight states have experienced.

To find an explanatory model, several factors have to be intertwined. Most of the current state capitals were selected during the 19th century, 35 of them before 1861, an era of pioneer and idealized territorial vision. Their story thus connects them with the Jeffersonian ideal—a democracy based upon small but educated farmers. The search for centrality in the location of capitals was indeed not merely a geographical wish. It was linked to the representation regime and expressed the principle of equality in geographical terms. But today, only 13 capitals (26 percent) are geographically central in their states. The ideals of Puritanism and the small town were mostly a marginal rhetoric during the selection process. Distrust of the “big” cities was rarely present, Baton Rouge being the most explicit case. Better suited were the booster and the gateway models. Capitals fully participated in the construction of urban America (one fourth were built from scratch) in a framework of intense competition between communities: becoming a capital brought the hope that the town would survive and thrive. The naming of the capital was often considered in this perspective, as it was for Augusta, Olympia, and Lincoln, but some cities changed their names after being selected as capitals, such as Pumpkinville, which became Phoenix. Very often, the choice of a capital illustrated the balance of powers inside a state. Capitals' locations shifted as political factions grabbed control and railway companies fought over new territories, as in South Dakota. The selection process was firmly in the hands of white men and linked to eastern capital. Locating the capital was indeed not a way to translate the democratic wish of the citizens, because they, the people, seldom chose directly. Most of the time, Congress, governors, or the state legislature made the choice—with the helping hand of lobbyists and town boosters and sometimes despite legislative requirements that called for popular referenda on the matter. The overall process might be abbreviated under the “BBC theme”: Boosterism, Bribery, and Compromise.

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