Boosterism

Boosterism, or the practice of urban selfpromotion, has been part of the American scene for two centuries. Boosterism has been both a tool and an ideology of urban rivalry. Boosters write for nonresidents, trying to persuade outsiders to settle and invest in their particular cities. They also write for a local audience, in arguing that the same expanding economy that directly benefits local real estate and business indirectly helps everyone in the community. In so doing, they may try to divert attention from internal conflicts, mobilize residents around the common cause of growth, and generate enthusiasm for public investment in public facilities and transportation improvements.

There is direct continuity between the oftenflorid rhetoric of 19th-century newspaper editors and the slick brochures produced by the economic development arms of 21stcentury city governments. In the early 19th century, boosters were usually individual journalists, land speculators, or commercial entrepreneurs. By the second half of the 20th century, they were increasingly professionals within public and private economic development organizations. Pure boosterism can be defined as the publication and dissemination of positive comments and evaluations of a city's economic position and prospects. Applied boosterism shades imperceptibly into targeted business recruitment, an activity that benefits from a community's positive reputation but which also involves specific inducements and subsidies (whether free land for [Page 88]early railroads or tax abatements for modem manufacturing concerns).

Boosterism in the 19th century was especially prevalent on the urban frontiers of the Midwest and Far West. When Englishspeaking settlers reached these frontiers, they faced the necessity and opportunity to construct an urban system from scratch. As a result, nearly any river junction, lakeshore harbor, or road crossing might be the seed for an important city. The early annals of nearly every state are filled with fierce battles between rival settlements, fought in part as battles of words between rival editors and publicists. Was Toledo to be the major city on the lower Maumee River, or would the prize go to any of half a dozen rival townsites? Which of the rival townsites, separated only by a sluggish river, promised to become the core of Milwaukee? Would Seattle, Tacoma, Everett, or Bellingham emerge as the principle railroad terminus and port on Puget Sound?

Visitors from the East Coast and Europe remarked on the eagerness of Americans to expound on the virtues of their new communities and on the optimism and grandiloquence of their language. James Fennimore Cooper satirized the tendency through the character of land speculator Aristabulus Bragg in Home as Found (1835). In Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), Charles Dickens sharply observed boosterism by telling the story of Eden, a town far grander in word than in fact. Traveler John White, on a junket sponsored by the Union Pacific Railroad, found that Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1867 did not quite live up to its billing and commented accordingly in Sketches From America in 1870.

Frontier boosters made energetic use of the local and national Press. One of the primary functions of frontier newspapers was to talk up the advantages of their town and point out the disadvantages of rivals. Sometimes a newspaper began boosting a new town before anyone actually lived there. Editor William Byers first labored on behalf of Omaha, but packed up his printing press in 1859 and followed the Pike's Peak gold rushers to Denver, where his Rocky Mountain News helped to make that city the preeminent city of Colorado. Boosters also found a new outlet with the emergence of national business periodicals before the Civil War, especially Hunt's Merchants Magazine and DeBow's Review. Intended audiences for antebellum boosters included potential settlers, investors, and railroad builders.

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