During the 1920—1929 period, the Civic Club of Allegheny County supported political consolidation of the county’s municipalities and townships. Civic Club leaders sought boundary reform to tackle perceived social problems and political inefficiencies in the Pittsburgh region. This policy was aligned with a national network of Progressive urban reformers, some of whom guided the Civic Club’s plans. These reform efforts culminated in the 1929 Metropolitan Charter, which was rejected by Allegheny County voters. Traditional explanations of this failed vote emphasize the high threshold for success of the charter. However, such accounts ignore the apparent disjunction between the national perception of regional problems and the local reception of recommended solutions. Reform advocates were unable to adapt national Progressive theories to the local context of Allegheny County. This article first describes the national network of Progressive Era research that prescribed metropolitan solutions for urban problems in cities such as Pittsburgh. The article then examines attempts by the Civic Club of Allegheny County to introduce these theories to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The failure of the 1929 Metropolitan Charter is reevaluated, and the implications of these events for current proponents of metropolitanism and political reform are discussed.
Adams’s presentation, "Planning Metropolitan Regions," was given at the Pittsburgh meeting of the National Municipal League (NML) on November 18, 1925.
2.
See Richard Walker and Robert D. Lewis, "The Crabgrass Frontier: Industry and the Spread of North American Cities, 1850-1950," Journal of Historical Geography 27 (2001): 3-19, for an evaluation of the expanding range of land uses in the American city.
3.
Jon Teaford, City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850-1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); and Roy Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business, and Environmental Change (New York: John Wiley, 1969).
4.
See Eric Swyngedouw, "Neither Global nor Local: ‘Glocalization’ and the Politics of Scale," in Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, ed. Kevin Cox (New York: Guilford, 1997), 137-66; and Neil Smith, "Spaces of Vulnerability: The Space of Flows and the Politics of Scale," Critique of Anthropology 16 (1996): 63-77.
5.
Scale is an essential concept in geography, traditionally defined in descriptive terms such as local, regional, and global. Scale has been problematized in recent scholarship that considers the "rescaling" of economic and political relationships, the construction of new relationships within and across scales, and the persisting influence of localism in an increasingly globalizing world. For examples of the practice and debates of this field, see Adam Moore, "Rethinking Scale as a Geographical Category: From Analysis to Practice," Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 203-25.
6.
For a recent example, see Hårvard Haarstad and Arnt Fløysand, "Globalization and the Power of Rescaled Narratives: A Case of Opposition to Mining in Tambogrande, Peru," Political Geography 26 (2007): 289-308.
7.
See David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The political machines that had temporarily integrated increasingly disparate urban communities succumbed to charges of inefficiencies and corruption and were unable to respond to the changing urban landscape-see Kenneth Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz, eds., Cities in American History (New York: Knopf, 1972); and Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency-Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
8.
See Jon Peterson, "The Birth of Organized City Planning in the United States, 1909-1910," Journal of the American Planning Association 75 (2009): 123-33.
9.
See Kenneth Finegold, Experts and Politicians (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Joseph Heathcott, "The Whole City Is Our Laboratory: Harlan Bartholomew and the Production of Urban Knowledge," Journal of Planning History 4 (2005): 322-55.
10.
John Bauman and Edward Muller, Before Renaissance (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
11.
Ibid., 67-78.
12.
Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 1998).
13.
Royston Greenwood , Roy Suddaby, and C.R. Hinings, "Theorizing Change: The Role of Professional Organizations in the Transformation of Instituted Fields," Academy of Management Journal45 ( 2002): 58-80.
14.
See Camilla Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women: Constructing Public Administration in the Progressive Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000). Peterson, "Birth of Organized City Planning," records the insistence of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. that the first National Conference on City Planning and the Congestion Problem should include representation from several membership organizations, including the American Institute of Architects and the League of American Municipalities.
15.
Heathcott, "Whole City,"327.
16.
Greg Hise and W. Deverell, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Frederick Law Olmsted, "Pittsburgh Main Thoroughfares and the Down Town District: Improvements Necessary to Meet the City’s Present and Future Needs: A Report" (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Civic Commission, 1910).
17.
Schiesl, Politics of Efficiency.
18.
Norman Gill, "Municipal Research Bureaus: A Study of the Nation’s Leading Citizen-Supported Agencies" (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1944). Bureau of Municipal Research researchers traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, to learn new tools for urban management-see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 67.
19.
Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women.
20.
David Ward , "Presidential Address : Social Reform, Social Surveys, and the Discovery of the Modern City," Annals, Association of American Geographers 80 (1990): 491-503.
21.
The Pittsburgh Survey was published in six volumes by the Russell Sage Foundation between 1909 and 1914 and detailed aspects of life in the industrial city including working conditions, life in mill towns, and gender relations. See Maurine Greenwald and Margo Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996) for accounts of the survey’s content and significance.
22.
For an overview of the history and research of the NML, see Frank Stewart, A Half-Century of Municipal Reform: The History of the National Municipal League (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950); and Paul Studenski, The Government of Metropolitan Areas in the United States (New York: National Municipal League, 1930).
23.
Debates over the merits of regional versus local governance were not new; arguments over land ownership and control had occurred since the early European colonization of America-see Sam Warner, The Urban Wilderness-A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
24.
J.D. Fairfield , "The Scientific Management of Urban Space: Professional City Planning and the Legacy of Progressive Reform," Journal of Urban History20 (1994 ): 179-204.
25.
Progressive Era reform principles infiltrated Los Angeles and New York, supporting metropolitan solutions in response to perceived inefficiencies in local governance-see Robert Fishman, "The Regional Plan and the Transformation of the Industrial Metropolis," in The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900-1940, ed. David Ward and Olivier Zunz (New York: Russell Sage, 1992), 106-25; and Richard Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City-The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Based on the fifty-mile perimeter surrounding New York City Hall, New York’s Regional Plan would include an area of some 5,528 square miles and create a metropolitan area with a population of 8,979,055-see F. Delano, W. D. Forest, et al., The Graphic Regional Plan-Atlas and Description (New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1929), 21. In comparison, the metropolitan charter for Allegheny County captured an area of 724 square miles and 1,600,000 people.
26.
Casting urban fragmentation as a problem presumed the superiority of metropolitan governance, although this remains a contentious and unclear premise-see Sally Sleeper, Henry Willis, et al., Measuring and Understanding Economic Interdependence in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh: RAND, 2004).
27.
See Studenski, Government of Metropolitan Areas.
28.
See Kenneth Fox, Better City Government-Innovation in American Urban Politics, 1850-1937 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977). Consolidation attempts had some success during the Progressive Era as land annexed to central cities increased steadily between 1890 and 1930. In the twenty-year interval between 1890 and 1910, central cities increased their land area through annexation by 59 percent. In the next twenty years, central cities expanded their land area by 36 percent. However, these increases were not sufficient to keep pace with the centrifugal population shifts causing the expansion of metropolitan areas surrounding the central cities.
29.
Reed was a member of the NML Committee on Metropolitan Government that had assisted with Studenski’s capstone report. Also present on this committee was Morris Knowles, a Pittsburgh-based engineer and leader in the Civic Club of Allegheny County effort to bring metropolitan government to Allegheny County.
30.
Political consolidation of Allegheny County’s municipalities had been favored by Pittsburgh’s political leaders since the 1890s as a means to enable more efficient planning-see Bauman and Muller, Before Renaissance.
31.
Paul Kellogg, editor of the Pittsburgh Survey, favored municipal consolidation to bring Pittsburgh’s commuters into the city’s political jurisdiction. See Edward Muller, "The Pittsburgh Survey and ‘Greater Pittsburgh’-A Muddled Metropolitan Geography," in Pittsburgh Surveyed, ed. Maurine Greenwald and Margo Anderson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 69-87.
32.
See Michael R. Glass, "Changing Spaces-Communities, Governance, and the <aut@>Politics of Growth" (PhD diss., <aut@>Pennsylvania State University, 2007).
33.
Maureen Flanagan , "Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Women’s City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era,"American Historical Review95 ( 1990): 1032-50.
34.
See John Bauman and M. Spratt, "Civic Leaders and Environmental Reform: The Pittsburgh Survey and Urban Planning," in Pittsburgh Surveyed, ed. Maurine Greenwald and Margo Anderson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 153-69.
35.
Franklin Toker , Pittsburgh-An Urban Portrait ( Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986).
36.
See Georgina Feldberg, Disease and Class-Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), for the broader reform context of the Civic Club’s fight against expectoration in Pittsburgh.
37.
The Twentieth Century Club divested itself of direct involvement in philanthropic enterprises, as they feared it would take away from their core mission to create "an organized centre for women’s work, thought and action: advancing her interests, promoting science, literature and art; and for providing a quiet place of meeting for its members" (Twentieth Century Club Archives, Pittsburgh). Independence from the Twentieth Century Club enabled men to join the Civic Club.
38.
Schiesl, Politics of Efficiency; Fairfield, "Scientific Management."
39.
Julie A.Reuben discusses the citizenship curriculum of the National Education Association in "Beyond Politics: Community Civics in the Redefinition of Citizenship in the Progressive Era."History of Education Quarterly37 (1997): 399-420.
40.
Board of Directors Minutes, Civic Club of Allegheny County, January 29, 1909, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
41.
J. Horace McFarland, president of the American Civic Association, corresponded with the Civic Club during the first three decades of the twentieth century on several matters, including billboard control, urban planning, and public relations. Civic Club secretary H. Marie Dermitt considered McFarland a mentor and the American Civic Association an important organization for shaping opinions on reform, writing "The more I think of the American Civic Association as a propaganda organization, the more I believe it will be doing a great service and there are a number of matters which now are coming up that they could promote" (Personal Correspondence, PA Archives-Harrrisburg, Dermitt to McFarland, 4/23/1918).
42.
Bauman and Spratt, "Civic Leaders,"157.
43.
Board of Directors Minutes, Civic Club of Allegheny County, February 4, 1907, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
44.
PittsburghDispatch, November 18, 1908, 5.
45.
Special Taxation Study Committee Report ( Civic Club of Allegheny County, 1917), Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
46.
V. Brownscombe, Directory of Directors and Trade Index of the Pittsburgh District ( Pittsburgh: Bankers Service Corporation of America , 1924).
47.
Letter from Alex Dunbar to Miss H. M. Dermitt, Civic Club of Allegheny County Correspondence, August 6, 1920, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
48.
Knowles was a member of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce and several other local commissions. Trained as a civil engineer, he moved to Pittsburgh in 1897 to lead the construction of the Pittsburgh Filtration Plant. After this project was completed he focused on his consulting practice and lectured on the history and prospect of regional planning.
49.
Greater Pittsburgh Committee Minutes, Civic Club of Allegheny County, 1920, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
50.
Alex Dunbar , Civic Club of Allegheny County, October 12, 1920, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
51.
Letter from Alex Dunbar to Morris Knowles, Civic Club of Allegheny County Correspondence, October 14, 1920, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
52.
Civic Club of Allegheny County Survey Cover Letter, January 1921, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
53.
Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh, 97.
54.
Joseph T. Miller, who was also the leader of the League of Boroughs and Townships of Allegheny County (LBT). Miller’s chairmanship of the metropolitan commission was in stark contrast to his earlier opposition to anything that diluted local municipal control. His participation on the commission may have been intended to safeguard the autonomy of Allegheny County’s municipalities.
55.
Board of Directors Minutes, Civic Club of Allegheny County, February 26, 1926, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
56.
Municipal Consolidation Commission Report ( Harrisburg, 1925), 11.
57.
The four cities were Pittsburgh, McKeesport, Wilkinsburg, and Duquesne.
58.
Board of Directors Minutes, Civic Club of Allegheny County, March 22, 1929, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
59.
Municipal Consolidation Commission minutes , February 28, 1925, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
60.
Minutes, 34th Annual General Meeting of the Civic Club of Allegheny County, 1929, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
61.
Greater Pittsburgh Committee Minutes, Civic Club of Allegheny County, November 2, 1926, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
62.
Board of Directors Minutes, Civic Club of Allegheny County, February 1, 1927, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
63.
In 1929 Allegheny County had four cities, seventy-four boroughs, twenty-seven first-class townships and seventeen second-class townships.
64.
Teaford, City and Suburb, 127.
65.
Ibid.; Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh, 100. Their assertions are based on H. Marie Dermitt’s retrospective analysis, "Metropolitan Growing Pains in Allegheny County," National Municipal Review 29 (September 1940): 580-81.
66.
Presentation on the Metropolitan Plan made to the Civic Club of Wilkinsburg, June 13, 1929, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 14, 1929, 17.
67.
See Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), for the broader context of germ theory and the heightened awareness of hygiene during the Progressive Era. Harold Platt analyzes the place specific policy treatment of sanitation issues in "‘Clever Microbes’: Bacteriology and Sanitary Technology in Manchester and Boston during the Progressive Era," Osiris, 2nd Series 19 (2004): 149-66.
68.
Michael Storper, Regional Worlds (New York: Guilford , 1997).
69.
Teaford, City and Suburb, 167-69.
70.
See Bauman and Muller, Before Renaissance, 169-80, for a discussion of the ill-fated plans for a comprehensive subway system in downtown Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania voters had rejected the proposed benefits assessment plan in November 1928 that would have funded construction of the subway.
71.
Daily News, June 14, 1929, 6.
72.
Letter to the editor of the Daily News, May 9, 1929, 6. See Philip Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts-The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925-1950 (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Jenkins notes that thirty-three Klaverns were located in Allegheny County. Klan antipathy toward metropolitan plans may have been rooted in a Protestant nativism, which rejected the social changes being promoted by nonlocal elites.
73.
Letter to the editor of the Daily News, June 19, 1929, 6.
74.
Brian Jensen , "Masters of Their Own Destiny: Allegheny County Reform Efforts, 1929-1998" (PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2004).
75.
Glass, "Changing Spaces."
76.
Jensen, "Masters of Their Own Destiny."
77.
Letter from H. Marie Dermitt to Herman Kehrli, Civic Club of Allegheny County Correspondence, June 28, 1929, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh. Dermitt was a leading member of the Civic Club of Allegheny County and of other urban reform organizations. She served on President Hoover’s 1931 Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership and was later to become director of the American Planning and Civic Association and served as secretary for the National Association of Civic Secretaries.
78.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 14, 1929, 17.
79.
David L.Lawrence was Democratic county chairman and future mayor of Pittsburgh . Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 12, 1929 , 8.
80.
The next thirty years would not allow for the resurrection of serious consolidation discussions in Allegheny County because of the Great Depression, World War, and decline in the local steel industry. As noted in the introduction, consolidation is back on the agenda in twenty-first-century Allegheny County.
81.
John McCarthy , "The Reluctant City: Milwaukee’s Fragmented Metropolis, 1920-1960" (PhD diss., Marquette University , 2005).
82.
Miller continued to serve as chairman of the LBT and advocated for a greater Pittsburgh until his death in 1935. Morris Knowles would later serve on the NML Committee on Metropolitan Government and as chairman for the City Planning Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Dermitt also remained nationally active, serving as director of the American Planning and Civic Association and secretary of the National Association of Civic Secretaries.
83.
The urban reformer’s dream of metropolitan government for southwestern Pennsylvania would languish after 1929. Future cohorts of urban reformers would periodically consider city-county consolidation, but these efforts were derailed by the Great Depression, the Second World War, regional industrial decline, and entrenched parochialism. Advocates of efficient and regional government eventually eliminated duplicative elected offices and successfully lobbied for the functional consolidation of urban services, but by 2008 Allegheny County consisted of 130 independent municipalities with varying degrees of socioeconomic health.
