THE PRINCIPAL SOURCES FOR THIS TEXT lie in the Baltimore City Archives, which contain a rich collection of town and municipal records. For political historians and political scientists, the most useful sections of the archives are the papers of the city council (Record Group 16) and the records of the city’s mayors (Record Group 9).
Baltimore has given birth to dozens of newspapers, most of which lived only briefly. Some of the more durable are searchable online. The Baltimore Sun is especially useful because of its continuous publication from 1837 to the present. The Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, later the Afro-American, reports on the city’s black community from 1892 to the present. William Goddard’s Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser (1773–1797) provides coverage of the revolutionary era, though plainly partisan. Niles’ Weekly Register (1812–1837) was a national news magazine, published in Baltimore, that devoted particular attention to the city. The Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser (1795–1825) covers the era of the early Republic, and the Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser (1826–1838) is useful for the age of the Jacksonians. Under varying titles, the Baltimore Patriot persisted from 1813 to 1859.
A variety of books and articles offer general treatments of Baltimore’s political history; some of these proved essential for this book. J. Thomas Scharf’s Chronicles of Baltimore (1874) and Thomas Griffith’s Annals of Baltimore (1833) are obviously outdated, but they provide useful year-by-year summaries of local events in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scharf’s History of Baltimore City and County (1881) is thematically organized and includes brief biographies of locally prominent persons, all of them white men. Wilbur Coyle’s First Records of Baltimore Town and Jones Town (1905) preserves documents from earliest Baltimore, some of which are no longer preserved in the city’s archives.
Sherry Olson’s Baltimore: The Building of an American City (2nd ed., 1997) is a comprehensive account of the city’s physical development, written by an urban geographer. Clayton Coleman Hall was the editor of Baltimore: Its History and Its People (1912), a collection of essays organized chronologically, dealing with successive periods in the city’s history.
Several histories of Maryland devote considerable attention to developments in Baltimore. In Maryland: A History, 1632–1974 (1974), Richard Walsh and William Lloyd Fox brought together almost a dozen knowledgeable authors who contributed long, detailed essays on different periods and topics in the state’s history. By far the most comprehensive history of Maryland is Robert J. Brugger’s Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (1988), which devotes considerable attention to developments in Baltimore.
Books and dissertations provide extensive coverage of the run-up to the Revolution and the war itself. Though published 75 years ago, Charles Barker’s The Background of the Revolution in Maryland (1940) remains essential. Ronald Hoffman’s A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (1973) offers a perspective on revolutionary ferment in Maryland and Baltimore that takes account of both economic and ideological impulses toward independence. The most valuable study of the Revolution in Baltimore is Paul Kent Walker’s “The Baltimore Community and the American Revolution” (PhD diss., University of North Caro-lina, 1973). In The Mechanics of Baltimore (1983), Charles Steffen presents an analysis of the Revolution as an episode of class politics. Philip Crowl’s “Baltimore During and After the Revolution” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1943) is helpful for understanding the Revolution’s consequences for the city. The papers of the Purviance family, whose members played a significant role in orchestrating Baltimore’s role in the Revolution, are in the library of the Maryland Historical Society.
On the early economic development of Baltimore Town, Pearle Blood’s journal article “Factors in the Economic Development of Baltimore, Maryland” (Economic Geography, 1937) provides an overview. Jack Usher Mowll’s “The Economic Development of Eighteenth Century Baltimore” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1954) is a more extensive consideration of the subject, and David W. Livingood’s The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 1780–1860 (1947) traces the city’s competition with its northern neighbor. Dennis Rankin Clark’s “Baltimore, 1729–1829: The Genesis of a Community” (PhD diss., Catholic University, 1976) offers a more extensive overview of the period.
The contributions in Aubrey Land, Lois Green, and Edward Papenfuse’s Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland (1977) include several valuable essays about Baltimore. Frank Cassell’s “The Structure of Baltimore Politics in the Age of Jefferson, 1795–1812” is especially useful for its discussion of the city’s affairs during the early Republic. Cassell’s biography of Samuel Smith, Merchant Congressman in the Young Republic (1971), is a good treatment not only of Smith but of the city that produced him. Gary Lawrence Browne’s Baltimore in the Nation, 1789–1861 (1980) is an essential source that examines the intertwining of the city’s politics and economy during the early Republic and up to the Civil War. Though it concentrates on the state, L. Marx Renzulli’s Maryland: The Federalist Years (1972) also provides much useful material about Baltimore during the period.
The War of 1812 is a focal point for Baltimore history and its historians. The popular best-seller is The Dawn’s Early Light (1972), by native Baltimorean Walter Lord. Cassell’s biography of Samuel Smith devotes much of its attention to the war. The Battle for Baltimore (1997), by Joseph A. Whitehorn, provides a detailed account of the British attack and Baltimore’s defense. Though published more than 100 years ago, William M. Marine’s The British Invasion of Maryland, 1812–1815 (1913) remains useful. The authoritative source on Baltimore’s role as a port for privateers is Jerome R. Garitee’s The Republic’s Private Navy (1977). A perceptive analysis of the riot that followed the Madison administration’s declaration of war is Paul Gilje’s “The Baltimore Riots of 1812 and the Breakdown of the Anglo-American Riot Tradition” (Journal of Social History, 1980). The papers of Samuel Smith and his family are at the Library of Congress and available on microfilm through interlibrary loan. The bulk of the collection concerns family affairs, but a few pieces of correspondence deal with Smith’s military role in the War of 1812.
By 1810, Baltimore was home to the largest population of free African Americans in the United States. Race and slavery, though seldom discussed in public, have been abiding concerns of the city’s historians. Christopher Phillips’s Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (1997) is a basic source on both free and enslaved black Baltimoreans. Ralph Clayton’s Slavery, Slaveholding, and the Free Black Population of Antebellum Baltimore (1993) recognizes the different degrees of slavery in Baltimore, some of which verged on freedom. Leroy Graham’s Baltimore: The Nineteenth Century Black Capital (1982) offers a fascinating account of the city’s distinctive black community and the responses of white Baltimoreans to black aspirations. T. Stephen Whitman’s The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (1997) details the processes by which the city and the state reduced their dependence on the peculiar institution. Barbara Jeanne Fields traces the evolution and disappearance of slavery in Maryland, and the aftermath for the state’s free blacks, in Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (1985). T. Steven Whitman’s Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (2007) covers a long time and lots of territory—Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware.
Several of these studies of slavery and race also discuss the influential African Colonization Society based in Baltimore. Other works deal more exclusively with the movement. Robert Goodloe Harper’s letter to Elias B. Caldwell, secretary of the American Colonization Society, printed as a pamphlet in 1818 by Baltimore publisher R. J. Matchett, served as the movement’s guiding manifesto. The Maryland Historical Society holds the records of the Maryland State Colonization Society and the John H. B. Latrobe Family Papers, which include many items related to Latrobe’s efforts on behalf of colonization. Eugene S. Van Sickle’s “A Transnational Vision: John H. B. Latrobe and Maryland’s Colonization Movement” (PhD diss., University of West Virginia, 2005) examines in detail Latrobe’s labors in promoting colonization. Richard Hall’s On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834–1857 (2003) is a massive and detailed account of the experience of the colonists and organizers of Maryland’s African outpost. Penelope Campbell offers a more compact treatment of the same subject in Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831–1837 (1971). For the colonization movement beyond Maryland, see Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution (2005), and P. J. Staudenreis, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (1961).
Most antebellum Baltimoreans were convinced that the city’s economic prospects rode on the B&O. James Dilts has written an authoritative and readable account of the B&O’s beginnings, which ended more than a quarter century after their start. The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Nation’s First Railroad, 1828–1853 (1993) covers the obstacles—physical, financial, and political—that the railroad had to overcome to span the territory from Pratt Street to the Ohio River. Edward Hungerford’s two-volume history, The Story of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (1928), carries the story forward from triumph to bankruptcy and beyond, but tends to play down the rough patches such as the railroad’s use of overvalued “railroad notes” to finance its construction and its increasingly predatory relationship with Baltimore. John F. Stover’s History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (1987) brings the story to a close with the B&O’s absorption into CSX.
While the B&O was still struggling toward Harper’s Ferry, Baltimore was solidifying its reputation as Mobtown. The Bank Riot of 1835 was just one of many upheavals of the Jacksonian era, but Robert E. Shalhope’s The Baltimore Bank Riot (2009) emphasizes its ideological distinctiveness. In American Mobbing, 1828–1861 (1998), David Grimsted discusses the riot’s place in the civil disorders of the era and the succession of outbreaks that followed, including many precipitated by the followers of local fire companies and one by a nun who had escaped her convent. During the 1850s, the Know-Nothings’ party would make collective violence a routine feature of local politics. William Evitts recounts its riotous rule in A Matter of Allegiances: Maryland from 1854 to 1861 (1974). Jean Baker adds to his retelling in Ambivalent Americans: The Know-Nothing Party in Maryland (1977). But perhaps the most vivid close-up of Know-Nothing Baltimore is Tracy Matthew Melton’s Hanging Henry Gambrill: The Violent Career of Baltimore’s Plug Uglies, 1854–1860 (2005). Frank Towers’s The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (2004) situates Baltimore’s Know-Nothings among others in the region.
When the Civil War came, Baltimore was where the killing began. Mayor George William Brown offered his version of what happened in Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861 (1881), when a Massachusetts regiment headed for the defense of Washington was attacked on Pratt Street by a Baltimore mob. John Pendleton Kennedy’s pamphlet The Border States: Their Power and Their Duty in the Current Disordered Condition of the Country (1861) is a notable expression of Baltimoreans’ desperate effort to talk their way around the irrepressible conflict tearing apart their country and their city. Frank Towers’s “Secession in an Urban Context: Municipal Reform and the Coming of the Civil War in Baltimore” is a politically astute analysis of local politics on the eve of the conflict; it appears in From Mobtown to Charm City: New Perspectives on Baltimore’s Past (2002), edited by Jessica Elfenbein, John Breihan, and Thomas Hollowak.
Scott Sumpter Sheads and Daniel Carroll Toomey recount the city’s experience of the war in Baltimore during the Civil War (1997). Jean Baker’s The Politics of Continuity: Maryland Political Parties from 1858 to 1870 (1973) is essential for understanding the transition from the era of the Know-Nothings and ethnics to the era of unionists and secessionists, and then to the politics of Republicans and Democrats. In a book and a series of essays published between 1941 and 1971, Charles Branch Clark devoted himself to the study of Baltimore politics during the war. One of his later efforts was “The Civil War,” in The Old Line State: A History of Maryland (1971), edited by Morris Radoff. Richard R. Duncan’s “The Era of the Civil War” is a helpful contribution to Walsh and Fox’s Maryland (1974).
In addition to Baker’s Politics of Continuity, several studies address the political recovery of Maryland and Baltimore after the Civil War. William Starr Myers’s The Maryland Constitution of 1864 (1901), published in the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science series, explores the state’s short-lived fundamental law that restricted and reshaped the electorate. Myers’s The Self-Reconstruction of Maryland, 1864–1867 (1909), published in the same series, covers the overthrow of wartime political restrictions and replacement of the 1864 constitution by the 1867 edition. Another important study of the postwar period is Charles L. Wagandt’s “Redemption or Reaction? Maryland in the Post Civil War Years,” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment (1969), edited by Richard O. Curry.
The political status of African Americans after emancipation was a fraught subject in postbellum Baltimore. William Paul Fuke traces these tensions in Imperfect Equality: African Americans and the Confines of White Racial Attitudes in Post-Emancipation Maryland (1999). Margaret Law Callcott covers some of the same ground in The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870–1912 (1969). William George Paul’s “The Shadow of Equality: The Negro in Baltimore, 1864–1911” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972) is one of a handful of studies to focus on postwar race relations in the city rather than the state. Bettye Collier Thomas discusses the emergence and political struggles of Maryland’s first civil rights organization in “Harvey Johnson and the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty, 1885–1919,” in Black Communities and Urban Development in America (1991), edited by Kenneth Kusmer.
Eleanor Bruchey offers a valuable account of an important phase in Baltimore’s economic development during the Gilded Age in “The Industrialization of Maryland, 1860–1914,” in Walsh and Fox’s Maryland (1974). Jacob Hollander’s The Financial History of Baltimore (1899) surveys municipal taxation, finance, and expenditure for the entire nineteenth century. Industrialization contributed to the emergence of an urban proletariat, which became violently visible in the railroad strike of 1877. Baltimore kicked off the strife with yet another riot. Philip Foner covers the national disorder in The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (1977). Robert V. Bruce has more to say about Baltimore’s role in 1877: Year of Violence (1959).
On nineteenth-century politics, Sun columnist Frank Kent provided an insider’s perspective in The Story of Maryland Politics (1911). On the rise and decline of Baltimore’s Democratic boss, Mary Anne Dunn presented a rare overview in “The Life of Isaac Freeman Rasin” (MA thesis, Catholic University of America, 1948). M. Rosewin Sweeney did the same for Rasin’s chief lieutenant in “ ‘Sonny’ Mahon and Baltimore’s Irish Machine” (MA thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 1979). In John R. Lambert’s biography Arthur Pue Gorman (1953), readers meet Rasin’s partner in “the Ring.” S. Z. Ammen’s “History of Baltimore, 1875–1895,” in Hall’s Baltimore (1912), is an overview of the period by a Confederate veteran who lived through all of it.
James B. Crooks presents a comprehensive account of Baltimore’s reformers and their efforts to oust the bosses in Politics and Progress: The Rise of Urban Progressivism in Baltimore, 1895 to 1911 (1968), and Eric Goldman offers a profile of one of the leading reformers in Charles J. Bonaparte, Patrician Reformer: His Earlier Career (1943). John M. Powell’s “History of Baltimore, 1870–1912,” in Hall’s Baltimore (1912), recounts the reformers’ struggles for electoral reform, their new city charter, and the early campaign for female suffrage and a nonpartisan civil service, along with the Republican electoral sweep of 1895 that seemed to bring all of these objectives within reach.
The fire that destroyed much of downtown Baltimore in 1904 opened the way for progressive reform and business-backed economic development. The conflagration itself receives thorough treatment in Peter B. Peterson’s The Great Baltimore Fire (2004). Its exploitation by progressives and boosters is the chief concern in Christine Meisner Rosen’s “Business, Democracy, and Progressive Reform in the Redevelopment of Baltimore after the Great Fire of 1904” (Business History Review, 1989). James B. Crooks concentrates on similar developments in “The Baltimore Fire and Baltimore Reform” (Maryland Historical Magazine, 2005). Alan D. Anderson sees the fire as one episode that paved the way for upgrading the city’s aging infrastructure, in The Origin and Resolution of an Urban Crisis: Baltimore, 1890–1930 (1977).
Another dimension of progressive reform—the battle against urban vice—is treated in Jayme Rae Hill’s “From the Brothel to the Block: Politics and Prostitution in Baltimore during the Progressive Era” (MA thesis, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2008). A more lengthy treatment of the subject is Lauren Silberman’s Wicked Baltimore: Charm City Sin and Scandal (2011). Pamela Haag focuses on the vulnerability of the female labor force in “Commerce in Souls: Vice, Virtue, and Women’s Wage Work in Baltimore, 1900–1915” (Maryland Historical Magazine, 1991).
The campaign against vice raged alongside an even fiercer assault on intemperance. Evan Andrew Rea documents Baltimore’s lukewarm reception of Prohibition in “The Prohibition Era In Baltimore” (MA thesis, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2005). Michael Thomas Walsh extends the scope of inquiry beyond Baltimore to Maryland in “Wet and Dry in the ‘Land of Pleasant Living’: Baltimore, Maryland, and the Policy of National Prohibition, 1913–1933” (PhD diss., University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2012). Thomas R. Pegram sets Maryland’s temperance movement against the background of the American South in “Temperance Politics and Regional Political Culture: The Anti-Saloon League in Maryland and the South, 1907–1915” (Journal of Southern History, 1997).
In Baltimore, progressivism was yoked to racism. The city’s most overtly racist policy was a residential segregation law first passed in 1910. Garrett Power deals with the impetus, evolution, and enactment of the segregationist policy in “Apartheid Baltimore Style: The Residential Segregation Ordinances of 1910–1913” (Maryland Law Review, 1983). Gretchen Boger examines the social context that lay behind the law in “The Meaning of Neighborhood in the Modern City: Baltimore’s Residential Segregation Ordinances, 1911–1913” (Journal of Urban History, 2009). Antero Pietela, in his book Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (2010), places the ordinance near the root of modern segregation in Baltimore.
A bleak assessment of the city’s domination by Annapolis is given by Horace Edgar Flack in “The Government of the City of Baltimore and Its Relationship to the State Government,” in The Government of a Great American City (1935), edited by Frederick P. Stieff. State government was notably obstructive in Baltimore’s last successful annexation of suburban territory in 1918. Joseph L. Arnold examined this change in the city boundaries and all the previous expansions in “Suburban Growth and Municipal Annexation in Baltimore, 1745–1918” (Maryland Historical Magazine, 1978). Arnold also wrote a superb summary of city politics in the years that followed: “The Last of the Good Old Days: Politics in Baltimore, 1920- 1950” (Maryland Historical Magazine, 1976).
The interwar years are covered in Dorothy Brown’s essay “Baltimore between the Wars,” in Walsh and Fox’s Maryland (1974). Edwin Rothman follows the career of a key political actor and the organization he helped to disrupt in “Factional Machine-Politics: William Curran and the Baltimore City Democratic Party Organization, 1929–1946” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1949). Shannon Lee Parsley discusses the reorientation of the party in “Presidential Politics and the Building of the Roosevelt Coalition in Baltimore City, 1924–1936” (MA thesis, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2001), and Jo Ann Argersinger’s Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: People and Government in the Great Depression (1988) is an unrivaled account of economic crisis and recovery in the city.
In Baltimore, the Depression produced racial protest as well as support for the New Deal. Genna Rae McNeil writes about the crucial role played by the NAACP’s Youth Forum in “Youth Initiative in the African American Struggle for Racial Justice and Constitutional Rights: The City-Wide Young People’s Forum of Baltimore, 1931–1941.” She and John Hope Franklin edited African Americans and the Living Constitution (1995), in which her essay appears. Andor Skotnes links black activism to the local labor movement in “The Black Freedom Movement and the Workers Movement in Baltimore, 1930–1939” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1991). Larry Gibson’s Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice (2012) is a well-told story of the young attorney’s participation in the “Buy Where You Can Work” campaign and his subsequent program of litigation to achieve equal rights for Maryland’s African Americans. David Taft Terry extends the narrative of racial injustice and protest through World War II and up to the Brown decision in “ ‘Tramping for Justice’: Dismantling Jim Crow in Baltimore, 1942–1954” (PhD diss., Howard University, 2002).
George H. Callcott’s Maryland and America, 1940–1980 (1985) is not just a summary of what happened during those 40 years but an analysis of the state’s “four cultures,” one of which inhabits Baltimore. Baltimore’s racial struggles, population loss, economic decline, and urban renewal account for well over one-fourth of this wide-ranging study. Other writers concentrate on just one of these topics. Martin Millspaugh’s edited collection Baltimore’s Charles Center: A Case Study of Downtown Renewal (1964) deals with the centerpiece of the city’s campaign to rejuvenate its central business district. David A. Wallace focuses on Baltimore’s signature project to renew its waterfront in “An Insider’s Story of the Inner Harbor” (Planning, 1979). Renewal of the city’s housing stock is the subject of W. Theodore Durr’s “The Conscience of a City: A History of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association and Efforts to Improve Housing for the Poor in Baltimore, Maryland, 1937–1954” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1972).
Though the city’s school board acted promptly to comply with court-mandated school integration, it did not succeed in resolving the issue. Howell Baum’s Brown in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism (2010) is an insightful treatment of the city’s largely unsuccessful efforts to achieve racial balance in the schools and to fend off federal sanctions. In The Politics of School Desegregation (1969), Robert L. Crain includes a chapter on Baltimore that demonstrates how sharply the city’s response to the Brown decision differed from the reactions of the other cities in Crain’s study. Marion Orr reviews Mayor Kurt Schmoke’s school improvement initiatives in Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986–1998 (1999).
Racial tensions were not confined to schools. C. Fraser Smith documents other eruptions of the race issue in Here Lies Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Maryland (2008). Baltimore’s poverty program is the chief subject of Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (1970), by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, but the book also addresses the city’s attempts to subdue the issue of race. Louis C. Goldberg recounts similar efforts in “CORE in Trouble: A Social History of the Organizational Dilemmas of the Congress of Racial Equality Target City Project in Baltimore, 1965–1967” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1970). Kenneth Durr executes a rare (and successful) portrayal of Baltimore whites who were confronted with black demands in Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940–1980 (2003).
Along with most other cities, Baltimore finally had a race riot in 1968. Peter B. Levy follows its course in “The Dream Deferred: The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Holy Week Uprisings of 1968.” Emily Lieb traces the intrusion of the race issue into Baltimore’s highway projects in “White Man’s Lane: Hollowing out the Highway Ghetto in Baltimore.” Both essays appear in Baltimore ’68: Riot and Rebirth in an American City (2011), edited by Jessica Elfinbein, Thomas Hollowak, and Betsy Nix.
Baltimore’s expressway program was controversial quite apart from its impact on African American residents. One of the most thorough accounts of the road war is Andrew Giguere’s “And Never the Twain Shall Meet” (MA thesis, Ohio University, 2008). Battles between architects and highway engineers figure prominently in James Bailey’s “How S.O.M. Took on the Baltimore Road Gang” (Architectural Forum, 1969) and Sidney Wong’s “Architects and Planners in the Middle of a Road War: The Urban Design Concept Team in Baltimore, 1966–71” (Journal of Planning History, 2012). Raymond Mohl situates Baltimore’s highway fight in the national uprising against urban expressways in “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities” (Journal of Urban History, 2004).
William Donald Schaefer: A Political Biography (1999), by C. Fraser Smith, is essential for understanding Baltimore’s “renaissance.” The reality of the renaissance has been a subject of debate. Marc Levine and Bernard L. Berkowitz, Schaefer’s development coordinator, debate its success in Levine’s “Downtown Redevelopment as an Urban Growth Strategy” (Journal of Urban Affairs, 1987). Two city foundations have sponsored critical assessments of the city’s status. Peter L. Szanton’s “Baltimore 2000” (report for the Morris Goldseker Foundation, 1988) introduced a phrase that entered local discourse—“the rot beneath the glitter,” a suggestion that Mayor Schaefer’s triumphs of urban redevelopment were only skin-deep. David Rusk’s Baltimore Unbound: A Strategy for Regional Renewal (sponsored by the Abell Foundation, 1995), raised the possibility that the city might be too far gone to recover and might drag its suburbs down as it collapsed.