Civic Renewal: The City on a Hill Revisited

Abstract

The current shift from public to private, and from national to state-local initiative, is the latest in several such swings of the pendulum that can be traced through 350 years of American civic history. Those fluctuations have been sustainable in part because they were guided by important civic values, including a widely shared faith in progress and sense of responsibility. The dilution of those common values and the failure to replace them or to give them contemporary meaning have created a brittleness in the modern texture of community. A potential source of civic renewal lies in the experimentation by states and local communities seeking to improve public services, build consensus, and strengthen regional and local economies. Those efforts are likely to be most successful that supplement the rational techniques of conventional civic reform with a recognition of the importance of personal character and the spiritual dimension in civic life.

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References

1. Alexis de Tocqueville , Democracy in America, Henry Reeve text, rev. Francis Bowen, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Knopf, 1963), 1:290.

2. John Winthrop , “A Modell of Christian Charity, 1630,” ed. Lawrence W. Towner , in An American Primer, by Daniel J. Boorstin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 1:8-25.

3. The reference was taken by Winthrop from the Book of Matthew, 5:14 “You are like light for the whole world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid.”

citing Sidney E. Ahlstrom , A Religious History of the American People (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 1:169.

as cited in Robert H. Wieble , The Opening of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 4.

6. Wieble , Opening of American Society, p. 256.

7. Ibid., p. 264.

8. Daniel J. Boorstin , The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 258-259.

9. Delos F. Wilcox , The American City: A Problem in Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1904).

10.

10. Many observers felt that corruption and administrative incompetence was a consequence of retaining early nineteenth-century governmental machinery that was ill-suited to the large and complex industrial cities that had developed by the late nineteenth century. William Bennett Munroe , The Government of American Cities (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 13.

11.

11. The initiative for the creation of the National Municipal League came in part from the American Academy of Political and Social Science—publisher of The Annals—which was established in Philadelphia in 1889 for the purpose of bringing the knowledge of scholars to bear on the problems of society.

12.

12. Toward 1994 Resurgence of Civic Dynamics, Executive Director's Report to the Citizens Forum on Self Government (New York: National Municipal League, 1984), p. 1.

13.

13. Ibid., p. 4.

14.

14. Ibid., pp. 2-4.

15.

15. Theodore Roosevelt , “The New Nationalism” (Speech delivered in Osawatomie, KS, 1910).

16.

16. Kingsley Davis , “The Urbanization of the Human Population,” in Cities (New York: Knopf, 1967), p. 4.

17.

17. John W. Gardner , The Tasks of Leadership (Washington, DC: Independent Sector, 1986), p. 16.

18.

18. James Q. Wilson , “The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Interest,” The Public Interest, no. 81, pp. 3-16 (Fall 1985).

19.

19. Robert Nesbit , History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 353.

20.

20. Ibid., pp. 352-53.