ABSTRACT
The nostalgia for a rural past expressed in much of the writing of the Progressive era blinded few observers of the United States in 1911 to the overriding importance of the city. Nor could intelligent people fail to note that cities no longer possessed the economic
autonomy they had commanded in colonial times and for a century thereafter. Railroad networks and spreading industrial empires had brought ‘geographic solar systems’ into being within a national urban constellation. Wage rates varied somewhat from region to region, notably between the North and the Deep South, where the supply of poor-white labour was still abundant, and wherever inadequate transportation left pockets of local monopoly, commodity prices might run higher than elsewhere. But a national pattern prevailed in most of the economy, and the metropolitan suns set the orbital pattern. City bankers and investment houses, Wall Street’s above all, still dominated the money market. Urban reformers intent on eradicating social ills look upon this concentration of economic power as the root of all evil; most of them believed any successful attack upon it would have to have national political support. The battlefield would be the city. Probably few Americans at that time realised that during the preceding fifty years the United States had been undergoing a revolution more profound than that of the 1770S.
