打印

作者

Steven H. Jaffe

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

If we needed any reminding, recent events demonstrate just how important battles over space are to understanding the life of cities. Black Lives Matter protests, confrontations over statues, and friction over COVID-related “appropriate social distancing” and mask-wearing have unfolded in places large and small. They have been most starkly consequential, however, in cities trying to cope with the long legacies of income inequality, deindustrialization and globalization, disinvestment, racial segregation, redlining, and gentrification. In recent decades, academic geographers (along with other social scientists and historians) have interrogated how physical spaces and built environments serve as provocations, incubators, and byproducts of political and social insurgency. In different ways, Mike Rapport’s The Unruly City and Neil Smith’s and Don Mitchell’s edited volume Revolting New York draw on this literature’s controlling assumptions, revealing what is at stake in battles fought in some of the modern world’s most important cities. Writing for a popular audience and drawing extensively on secondary literature, Mike Rapport narrates the events of the American and French revolutions and English political radicalism as they unfolded in late eighteenth-century New York, Paris, and London. He juggles his three cities adroitly in alternating chapters that follow the experiences of New Yorkers, Parisians, and Londoners from the 1760s through the early 1790s. Given the complexities of each of these places—let alone all three—his narrative unrolls with impressive clarity and fluidity. His central argument is that the revolutionary experience of each city is worth comprehending as a succession of dramas played out in specific streets, neighborhoods, markets, prisons, public buildings, recreational venues, and sometimes private homes—places that incited and shaped the activism of the people who used or occupied them. Concurrently, revolutionary action altered urban political geography, recasting the uses and meanings of city terrains. “[T]he eighteenth-century battle for political emancipation hinged on control of these spaces,” he argues, “. . . because it determined whose ideas, whose messages, whose authority was disseminated among the people of the metropolis” (xiii). These spatial dramas played out in cities unsettled by the late eighteenth-century repercussions of empire-building and consolidation. In New York and London, the British crown’s efforts to recoup some of the costs of fighting the Seven Years’ War, and to limit political challenges both in and out of Parliament, provoked dissent. In Paris, the humiliating loss of that same war, the ideological forces confirmed and unleashed by French participation in the American Revolution, and the outsize costs and claims of an absolutist monarchy ignited a powder keg. In each, “a critical, independent public” (xxvi) of propertied readers and voters joined by unenfranchised working people filled city spaces with demands (albeit often divergent or conflicting ones) for political, economic, and social democratization. In New York, Rapport plots the cityscape of dissent, revolution, and counterrevolution as it evolved from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 through the upheaval of the American Revolution to the early 1790s. For Rapport, the trajectory of New York’s revolutionary crisis can be traced in its geography. Agitation commencing in City Hall’s legislative chambers and in coffeehouses dominated by elite merchants, lawyers, and landholders spilled out into streets, fields, taverns, and homes where a broader constituency of artisans, laborers, small shopkeepers, and their families added nascent class resentments to the shared agenda of repealing London’s imperial policies. Increasingly, symbolically charged locations—the Commons where New Yorkers could assemble en masse, the Liberty Pole defended by artisan patriots against redcoat insults—became public stages for political self-assertion by craftsmen and workmen, even as the self-appointed Sons of Liberty sought to mediate between “high” and “low” patriots. With the coming of the Revolutionary War and the seven-year occupation of New York City by the British (1776-1783), all of this ended abruptly. Rapport then turns to what he calls a landscape of trauma, one scarred by devastating fires, abuse of patriot prisoners of war, economic hardship, and the uprooting of refugee populations. Following New York’s brief moment as national capital (1785-1790), newly divisive symbols deployed in public spaces helped inflame local conflicts spawned by the French Revolutionary Wars: pro-French Jeffersonians outraged pro-British Federalists in 1793 by adorning the rooftop of Wall Street’s Tontine Coffee House with the Phrygian liberty cap of Parisian radicals, and shattered the plinth at Bowling Green that once held a statue of George III. Revolutionary Paris’s spatial history is the most complex and richly layered of Rapport’s subjects. He contends that the French Revolution’s critical episodes can be mapped in a succession of politically charged points of reference on a map of eighteenth-century Paris: from the Palais de Justice, where the traditional court, the Parlement, became a bulwark and popular symbol of legal limits on Louis XVI’s absolutist demands, and the Palais-Royal, an open-air pleasure ground where orators, conversationalists, clandestine journalists, and their eager middle-class and elite audiences created a vibrant “politics alfresco” (135), to the shifting locales of the National Assembly and Convention. Along the way, though, Rapport presents a more intricate social history of Paris (acknowledging the scholarship of David Garrioch and others), one in which the distinctive social experience of specific neigborhoods helps to explain unfolding events. In the assault on the Bastille on July 14, 1789, for example, the residents of the adjacent Faubourg Saint-Antoine played the decisive role. A neighborhood of artisans and small retailers who shared a tradition of communal sociability grounded in their district’s street life and a militant identity rooted in resistance to efforts by Paris’s guilds to regulate their work, the faubourg was home to 425 of the 602 known Parisians who stormed the Bastille. In a different way, the Cordeliers district—by sheer accident the shared home of the militants Marat, Danton, the husband-and-wife Desmoulins, their printing presses, and their political club, along with middle-class and working-class Parisians dwelling in close proximity to each other—influenced the direction of revolutionary radicalism throughout the city (and thus the nation). After mid-1790, the city’s forty-eight electoral wards or sections—many affiliated with radical political clubs, and headquartered in former churches and monasteries confiscated by the revolutionary government—became hotbeds of a fiery republicanism fueled by neighborhood intellectuals and local working men and women, often guided or influenced by Cordeliers radicals. Rapport makes the case that Paris’s revolution was nothing if not an upheaval unfolding in specific courtrooms, palaces, faubourgs, markets, and boulevards, settings that catalyzed and strongly shaped the events taking place there. “The makeup of distinct neighbourhoods made Paris a truly revolutionary city, with a popular militancy that kept politics on the boil with each new crisis,” he notes (202). Rapport’s consideration of London reminds us how jurisdictionally segmented that metropolis was, a reality symbolized by Temple Bar, the gated entryway into the City of London through which the King or his agents could pass from Westminster only if the City’s elected officials permitted it. Largely a ceremonial passageway, from the 1760s, Temple Bar became a real point of conflict as the City’s merchants, financiers, and artisans—long proud of their corporate identity and the economic power of their guilds and businesses—sided with insurgents challenging the Crown’s efforts to control parliamentary elections and the political press. Here the central figure was the House of Commons candidate John Wilkes, a hero whose political defiance was firmly grounded in specific places: the City with its traditional mercantile and artisanal suspicions of royal excess, and the County of Middlesex on London’s northern periphery, where middling artisans and shopkeepers enjoyed an unusually broad and democratic access to suffrage. Saint George’s Fields outside King’s Bench Prison, where Wilkes was jailed for seditious libel, became a convergence point for Wilkes’s City and Middlesex admirers alongside working-class Londoners weary of economic hardship. It also became a site of martyrdom when redcoats fired on protesters there in 1768, an event remembered on both sides of the Atlantic in 1770 when New Yorkers brawled with British soldiers at Manhattan’s Golden Hill and five men died in the Boston Massacre. The movement to free Wilkes and secure his seat in Parliament inspired the next generation of London radicals and liberals, founders of the Westminster Association and the Society for Constitutional Information (both 1780) who espoused universal manhood suffrage, annual elections, and equal electoral districts. Yet the era’s tensions—inflamed by enthusiasm for and backlash against the American and French Revolutions—kept London’s middle-class reformers and self-educated artisan intellectuals from reaching a mass working-class constituency. This, too, had specific spatial and geographical dimensions. The leaders of the London Corresponding Society (1792) managed to overcome urban sprawl by creating a network of tavern meeting places across the metropolis, envisioning them as schools of political education and engagement for ordinary artisans. But their impact was thwarted as a fierce Crown onslaught shut down the society’s clubs, and many working-class Londoners manifested their conservatism (foreshadowed by the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780) in demonstrations of loyalty to the monarchy and resistance to reforms tainted by association with the French Revolution. While advocates of an expanded electorate and democratized elections drew crowds to open-air rallies, such one-off events could not “offer the scope for political debate, for artisans to hone their ideas and join in participatory democratic forms of politics or to make new, close political associations and friendships with like-minded people on a weekly basis” (280). “In these pivotal years,” Rapport concludes, “the spaces and places of Paris were the contentious sites of a people in revolution; those of London, of a people rallying against revolution; and those of New York, of a people debating their revolutionary origins and their post-revolutionary future” (305). Indeed, by redirecting my gaze to the ways in which specific landmarks and types of urban space channeled, mingled, and brought into collision people who might otherwise have acted and thought differently, Rapport has sharpened my sense of how cities function to shape momentous political events. For those of us focused on the urban history of one nation, Rapport’s transnational framework also offers a healthy dose of comparative data and interpretation. As an Americanist, for example, I found his exploration of London’s eighteenth-century political geography highly suggestive for further thinking about the ways in which urban colonists understood themselves and their agendas. The Unruly City raises as well as answers questions. There is an inevitable imbalance here, since London, the Western world’s largest city, and Paris, its second largest, were the capitals of Europe’s two most powerful nation-states, while New York was a relatively small and peripheral participant in transatlantic affairs. And despite New York’s brief tenure as national capital, eighteenth-century Americans and Europeans would have acknowledged Philadelphia as the dominant urban center. New York’s rise to primacy as the nation’s most important metropolis and one of the world’s most influential places is properly a nineteenth-century story. The differences in scale, social experience, and physical differentiation between New York and the other two cities raise caveats about comparing apples and oranges. By the eighteenth century, the metropolitan sprawl of London and Paris meant that urban social divisions were often “legibly” inscribed in geographical boundaries, whether as perceived in the class identities of distinct neighborhoods or even in rent differentials on successive floors of a single Parisian dwelling. (A related question, the extent to which contemporary sightseers, journalists, and guides exaggerated and oversimplified such markers in order to make the urban kaleidoscope more comprehensible, is not addressed here.) Meanwhile, New York remained a much smaller town perched at Manhattan’s tip, traversable in one stroll by a healthy pedestrian. The Unruly City invokes Gary Nash’s idea of a “dual revolution” (2) in which colonial street demonstrations expressed consciously plebeian resentments as well as broadly shared anti-imperial grievances. Rapport points to such events as an anti-Stamp Act march by working seamen and laborers from their “seamy docklands” along the East River to the elegant townhouses of Queen Street, a zone of wealthy merchant families only a block or two distant “but a world away” (12). Rapport argues that this geography embodied and defined class distinctions that working-class patriots implicitly challenged when they invaded public spaces dominated by local patricians. But what to make of an urban social geography where there was hardly room enough for such distinctions to be articulated? Were the “seamy docklands” really so distinct from the merchants’ zone in the social imaginations of New Yorkers, in the same ways that Londoners and Parisians were able to construct (literally and figuratively) spatial boundaries between poor, middling, aristocratic, and royal city dwellers? To be sure, vocational identity, shared folk wisdom, the threat of poverty, and resentment of upper-class prerogatives and luxuries inflected the radical ardor of many ordinary New Yorkers, and their anger surfaced when they attacked wealthy Tories, intimidated hesitant merchants, or pressured affluent revolutionary leaders. But rather than confirming an unambiguously class-conscious interpretation of New York’s Revolution, the very porousness and indistinctness of social spaces—with employers, laborers, and others jumbled together without strong spatial or cultural boundaries between them—may instead help to explain why a clear class-conscious political movement never fully emerged in revolutionary New York. Gotham’s revolution, in other words, may have had less in common with Paris’s and London’s than The Unruly City maintains. Even so, Rapport’s intimations about the connections between varieties of urban space, social identity, and politics remain stimulating and thought-provoking. Revolting New York is a more challenging book to summarize, containing as it does forty-four short essays written and edited by twenty geographers, social scientists, historians, and activists. Intended both as a scholarly volume and a handbook for the interested general reader or student, Revolting New York seeks to interpret and map several dozen key episodes of social and political insurgency over the course of New York City’s history, starting with the Munsee Native revolt against seventeenth-century Dutch colonists and concluding with Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to 2012 (a short Afterword reviews more recent episodes up to early 2017). Along the way, readers encounter moments that illustrate recurring strands of conflict, including struggles over slavery and racism (including the abortive Manhattan slave uprising of 1712, the anti-abolitionist riots of 1834, and the 1863 Draft Riots), battles over public education (resistance to Mayor John Purroy Mitchel’s Gary Plan in 1917, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike of 1968, and the CUNY open admissions strike of 1969), the rise of labor militancy (late nineteenth-century transit strikes and the garment workers’ “Uprising” of 1909-1911), immigrant activism (the “Bread Riot” of 1917 and immigrant rights protests in 2006), and more. The book’s argument—presented in Don Mitchell’s introduction—is that “the lightning bolt of revolt illuminates the structure and exercise of power, even as, by producing new spaces and spatial relationships, it reworks the geography of that power—though not necessarily in the ways intended” (16). Viewed this way, moments of urban “revolt”—riots, protests, strikes, and other often violent confrontations—are critical for understanding how social space is produced and reconfigured to embody “relations of power among its users, owners, designers, and managers . . .” (15). Inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre and the leftist geographers who followed his lead, including Revolting New York’s general editors Don Mitchell and the late Neil Smith, the volume offers its chapters as case studies in how the city’s underlying contests over class, race, gender, sexuality, education, and policing have repeatedly reshaped the use and meaning of spaces. This process, Mitchell argues, is “dialectical or recursive: a moment of unrest or upheaval rearranges social relations . . . and new spatial relationships . . . In turn, these new spaces and spatial relationships both solidify a social order and transform it, setting the stage for the next moment of upheaval” (14). Thus insurgencies (and reactions to them) shape city spaces, even as city spaces shape insurgencies. To their credit, Mitchell and Smith avoid what could have been an excessively triumphalist presentation of popular protest. Nor do the editors shy away from including moments of conservative militancy in their list of “revolts,” including the so-called “police pogrom” against a Jewish funeral procession in 1902, the hard hat riots against antiwar protesters in 1970, and the violent “police riot” against squatters and community activists in Tompkins Square Park in 1988. Contrary to the popular protest chant, the fact is that “the people, united or not, will sometimes be defeated,” and Revolting New York shows that urban spaces matter in part because the ways in which they are used shape progressive defeats as well as victories. Relying heavily on secondary works such as Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s magisterial Gotham (1998), Revolting New York offers capsule summaries of early events in the city’s history that will be familiar to specialists but eye-opening for those encountering them for the first time. Not surprisingly, the spatial dimension of conflict was especially salient in moments of great social stress when contested urban sites embodied or symbolized underlying grievances, as in the attacks by furious racists on Black homes and institutions during the Civil War Draft Riots, or in the recurrent battleground of Tompkins Square, where labor activists and unemployed workers assembled for a protest march in 1874, only to be clubbed by police and then lose the park as a gathering place when the city relandscaped it to thwart radical rallies there. For me personally, Revolting New York’s most compelling chapters are those covering the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The inclusion of the city’s more recent “revolts” gathered between two covers is especially useful because many of these entries reflect emerging scholarship from the various authors, some of them movement participants. For example, it is illuminating (though depressing) to have the Harlem riots of 1935, 1943, and 1964—usually treated in isolation from each other—presented by Nicole Watson in a single chapter that assesses their particularities and continuities, including the pressures of racial segregation, unemployment, and overcrowding, and the trigger of recurrent police brutality. Concise but trenchant entries cover confrontations that have unfolded on Gotham’s turf over the past half century—from ordinary Brooklynites defying municipal budget cuts at “People’s Firehouse #1” during the 1970s, to racially charged violence in the 1980s and 1990s and battles over community gardens in the Giuliani years, to Global Justice Movement demonstrations at the turn of the new century (the latter documented by Malav Kanuga and Mcnair Scott). Anger over neoliberal displacement of the poor and resistance to omnipresent “aggressive policing” helped spawn new “horizontal” and “consensual” (read anarchist) tactics and strategies among a younger generation of activists by the 2000s, helping to pave the way for Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, antifa, and other movements. Revolting New York does not pretend to be encyclopedic, but the texts, pictures, maps, and endnotes provide a fine entrypoint for further reading and exploration. Almost inevitably in a book of this type and range, some factual inaccuracies creep in. So do debatable interpretive arguments. The notion that Samuel Gompers’s conservative “business unionism” was full-blown and monolithic by 1882 overstates the clarity of left-right divisions in that era’s New York labor movement; Gompers actually spent years having to negotiate with or work around socialists and other radicals in his cigar makers’ union and, later, the American Federation of Labor. The name East Village was not merely a “real estate moniker that gained currency only in the late 1970s” (230) but a label marking the neighborhood’s burgeoning counterculture during the 1960s. More consequential for Revolting New York’s main thrust are assertions that overstate the impact of specific “revolts” in transforming the disposition and politics of real estate. The statement that “elites moved north [in Manhattan] in reaction” to the violent Astor Place Opera House Riot of 1849 oversimplifies a long-term residential trend that had more to do with elite families defining upper class enclaves and distancing their homes from the hubbub and class mixing of the downtown business and retail districts. For the twentieth century, Mitchell cites fellow geographer Jacob Shell’s questionable assertion that fears about anarchist bombings prompted the elite Regional Plan Association to start orchestrating Manhattan’s deindustrialization during the 1920s. By comparison, Revolting New York underplays the more important impact of industrial flight between the mid-1950s and 1970s, when firms and factories automated or left for cheaper (politically conservative) labor markets, with pivotal consequences for New York’s economy, demography, and activism. Ultimately, Revolting New York and The Unruly City demonstrate how a spatial analysis can enrich our understanding of urban events, even as they also reveal the limitations of this approach. The unfolding of events in social spaces cannot fully explain or predict why and how political uprisings happen or the forms they take. In fairness, neither volume makes excessive claims for geography’s explanatory power. Rapport, in an observation applicable to all three of his cities, concedes that the Paris upheaval of 1789 was not “caused by the urban geography and the cityscape, but they did play a part in shaping its course” (145). Revolting New York’s coeditor Don Mitchell contends that “if the story told in these pages is a distortion, it is a helpful distortion” (2). But this contention also raises a question specific to its subject city: What is lost, if anything, by focusing on discrete moments of revolt rather than on the connective tissue of organization-building and activism that often underpinned those revolts or shaped their legacies? After all, a defining trait of New York as a great city has been its role as a generator of multilayered, intersectional movements whose struggles transcend isolated episodes of open conflict. And by focusing so exclusively on street clashes, Revolting New York neglects to explore how Gotham’s role as a laboratory of complex accommodations made it a place where coalitions of leftists, liberals, unions, minorities, politicians, and even some businesspeople forged progressive reforms that defined an urban social democracy (albeit one marred by racism) for the American twentieth century. Such a narrative need not minimize New York’s revolts; indeed, it can “connect the dots” in ways that enrich the knowledge gleaned from Revolting New York. Spatial history can never fully explain how and why events unfold, in the ways that political, economic, social, intellectual, or cultural history aspire (hubristically) to do. Yet the spatial vantagepoint is rewarding, as both books amply show. The Unruly City and Revolting New York vividly demonstrate that people have always experienced conflict and politics in and through physical space. By focusing on the alchemy that happens when angry people fill urban places, these books remind us that thoroughfares, parks, coffeehouses, courtrooms, and real estate developments are alive with multiple meanings that are far from neutral.