ABSTRACT
Visiting the United States in 1796, Francis Baily wrote in fulsome praise of the 'perfect regularity' and geometric order of the new American cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore whose straight lines happily expressed the straight dealing of the American character and the destiny of the new nation. The new American city was felt to be an embodiment of scientific rationality, and a sign in one of its senses, of modernity. The growth of American cities between the 1790s and 1900s had been determined above all by commerce, to the point of an undisguised indifference to urban planning. Melville's fiction and Randolph Bourne's arguments offer an alternative at once to Whitman's 'attested sympathy', to Henry James's lack of confidence and to Fisher's identical units of a production-line America. Bourne's belief that 'Americanness' might be recomposed along 'transnational' lines, runs in the opposite direction to James's haunted shudder at the proximity of 'alienness'.
