FIN DE SIèCLE
IN 1888, A RESOLUTION introduced in the second branch of the Baltimore City Council urged Maryland’s General Assembly to take action against Chinese laundries. It charged that the “Mongolian aliens” who operated these establishments did “a serious injury to the industry of the citizens of this City and State” and contributed nothing “towards the support of the government that tolerates them and affords them protection.” Moreover, the laundries were simply covers “for the introduction and encouragement of acts injurious to our civilization and detrimental to good morals and government.” The resolution recommended a $25 annual licensing fee for each Chinese laundryman. The measure seems to have been stillborn. But the laundrymen had already aroused opposition elsewhere in the city. In 1885, at a meeting of the local Federation of Labor, the president of the Women’s National Industrial Labor League distributed leaflets demanding that “Chinese laundries must go. They deprive the widows of the workingmen of their daily bread.” At the same gathering, an African American member of the federation declared that he might have “a black skin, but [had] a white man’s heart. If he had the power he said that he would drive the Chinaman out of this country in 24 hours.”1
By 1889, animosity toward Chinese immigrants seems to have grown more general and vehement. A proposed council resolution lamented the “inroad upon our City” of the “Chinese Race,” whose members were “practicing here the vile and abominable customs of their own land.” They had “nothing in common with our refined civilization,” and it was a “well known fact that their ‘laundries’ so-called” were “dingy opium smoking dens where infamous and un-American practices are resorted to . . . Where the vilest Mongolian practices have full sway.” The courts could not deal adequately with the crimes of these aliens because it was so difficult “for a witness to distinguish one Chinaman from another.” The resolution proposed that the council form a committee to ascertain “the best means, in accordance with United States laws, of relieving us of this evil . . . an incubus upon our fair fame as a model city.” The council’s second branch approved the measure, the first branch referred it to a committee, and there it died.2
The 1890 Census counted 178 Chinese residents—men, women, and children—in Baltimore’s population of more than 434,000.3 They were the minority that everyone could afford to hate, even those who were themselves borne down by prejudice of race or gender—an outlet, perhaps, for other animosities whose expression would be politically inconvenient or socially dangerous because they targeted larger, more powerful groups. As the century drew to a close, Chinese bashing may have created a moment of political unity in a town long accustomed to an underdeveloped and fragmentary public life, inhibited by the authorities in Annapolis and military occupation, and starved by misguided investments in “public improvements.”
ETHNICITY AND CHARITY
German immigrants seemed less alien to Baltimoreans than did the Chinese, but they, too, were rather insular. They preserved their language, culture, and separateness long after their arrival in Baltimore, and passed them on to their children. Assimilation had held no appeal for the German revolutionary émigrés of 1848 because they regarded Baltimore as a temporary haven until political reformation would enable them to return home. They had little interest in learning English or adopting American ways. Their inclination to keep to themselves was soon reinforced by the assaults of the Know-Nothings. In response to persecution, the Germans “cut themselves off, founded their own societies, churches, schools, newspapers and built a wall around their German-American individualism that was to hinder acclimatization even to the next generation.” Once the Know-Nothings faded, Baltimore’s political authorities accommodated the separateness of the Germans. The General Assembly, for example, required that the text of every public law be published in at least two Baltimore newspapers, and one of them had to be a German-language paper.4
By 1900, Baltimore supported seven public schools that offered instruction in both English and German, and there were more than 30 German-language churches. The associational life of the German community extended to German Jews. They were among the founders of the German Society in 1817,5 and their inclusion was one sign of the internal diversity that flourished behind the wall that separated German-speakers from other Baltimoreans. As in the city’s African American community, the energetic construction of subcultural institutions in the German community led to subcultural disaggregation. There were competing choral societies and shooting clubs, separate organizations for immigrants from different regions of Germany, and religious divisions. A particular point of contention was observance of the Sabbath. Some German sects, such as the United Brethren, demanded strict observance of the day of rest and worship. The Turnverein favored Sunday concerts and lager fests. Denominational boundaries also figured in political affiliations. German Catholics leaned Democratic; the Protestants, Republican. Within each party, some Germans gravitated toward the reform wing, others to the regulars. But in their political diversity, they became no less German. In 1888, for example, the German-American Democratic Central Association claimed the “right to petition the Authorities for the purpose of soliciting positions for such of its members who make application therefor and are duly qualified.” Non-German office-seekers usually applied individually to the mayor. Some Germans applied collectively. In 1900, the various German labor unions, choral groups, Turnverein, and business associations united behind the Independent Citizens Union in an attempt to blend the multiple strains of German Americanism into a single voice.6
At the end of the nineteenth century, Germans accounted for almost two-thirds of Baltimore’s foreign-born residents. They would not stand for the rough treatment dealt out to the city’s minuscule population of Chinese laundrymen. The Germans may even have inspired imitation. They made up the core membership of early labor organizations. German associations of all sects and parties were notable for their charitable and social welfare programs. They founded orphanages, a home for the aged, and hospitals. German Jews supported the Hebrew Benevolent Society, which sponsored the Hebrew Hospital, where indigent Jews could adhere to the kosher diet they could not get at other charity hospitals. After the hospital came the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Both hospital and orphanage were open to non-Jews “on an emergency basis.”7
Other groups followed the German example, and city government added its own resources to the support of private and sectarian charities. Baltimore made contracts with a host of institutions, especially health care facilities, to provide services and sustenance to the indigent. In 1884, for example, the city granted subsidies to 17 private charitable institutions and reformatories, including seven medical dispensaries, three orphanages, the House of Reformation for Colored Boys, and St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys (where the young Babe Ruth would later serve time). By 1899, the number of city-supported charities had increased to 30, and city government had representatives on some of their boards.8
The city also maintained an asylum of its own—Bay View, a combined insane asylum, poorhouse, home for the aged, and hospital for the indigent, located just east of the city limits. By one account, it was a “magnificent edifice” named for “the expansive view it affords of the Chesapeake Bay and the surrounding country . . . its inner comforts, and the adoption of all modern improvements more suggestive of the ample means of some nabob . . . than of the home of the forlorn and helpless vagabonds which the seething cauldron of city life casts to the surface.”9 In 1898, the nabobs of the asylum were sustained on an average annual expenditure of $90 each—less than $2,500 in current dollars—and some observers thought the institution’s design essentially flawed. An unsigned document in the city archives declares it “a mistake to have an asylum for the insane connected with one for the indigent and the sick. They should not only be separate buildings, but not in the same locality.” The writer argued that the state, not the city, should “take charge of the indigent insane.” If the state failed to assume its responsibility, then Baltimore must provide for the insane, even though the “Department of the Insane” at Bay View seems to have been chronically overcrowded.10
The handwriting in the document is Mayor Latrobe’s, and the fragment seems to have been a discarded passage for his annual message of 1893. His views may have been influenced by a report on Bay View prepared, at the mayor’s request, by Dr. Edward Brush, superintendent of the Sheppard Asylum, a private institution for the mentally ill. According to Brush, “the combination of institutions for paupers and the insane is wrong . . . experience has taught that such association results in the care of the insane sinking to the level of the care of the pauper.” At Bay View he saw “children who were both mentally and physically crippled . . . in the corridors devoted to the insane contracting habits and tendencies of the most unfortunate and degrading character . . . presenting an appearance at once depressing and repulsive.” The state did maintain an asylum at Spring Grove, four miles west of the city, which accepted some mentally ill patients. They were supported more generously than the inmates at Bay View—$150 rather than $90 a year for each person. The additional expense was probably due to the cost of therapy. Spring Grove was reserved for “hopeful cases,” patients deemed curable if given appropriate treatment. The hopeless cases filled up the crowded corridors at Bay View, where they received only custodial care.11
The Bay View Asylum, a city-supported poorhouse, a hospital for the indigent and disabled, and an institution for the mentally ill
While the municipality struggled to provide care for Baltimoreans with mental and physical illnesses, its public officials also sought a new equilibrium for the city’s troubled and unbalanced economy. It was heavily tilted toward commerce—moving things rather than making them. In 1877, the Baltimore City Council had appointed a commission to consider how to encourage the growth of local manufacturing. After a lengthy inquiry that extended to European as well as American cities, the commission recommended that all machinery, tools, and “implements of manufacture” be exempt from municipal taxation. Though it took more than five years, the recommendation eventually became an ordinance, and by 1887, the manufacturing exemption excluded almost $3.1 million in industrial equipment from local taxation, reducing the city’s revenues by about $53,000.12
Baltimore industry needed encouragement. The city’s economic life was sustained primarily by ships and railroads, not factories. The Civil War had seriously disrupted the city’s commerce and temporarily stimulated manufacturing, but Baltimore’s shipping sector resumed its rapid expansion after the South was restored to the Union. The value of the city’s foreign trade grew from $33 million in 1870 to $130 million by 1900, enough to lift Baltimore from fifth to third place among American cities engaged in international commerce. In its seaborne trade with domestic ports, the city was outranked only by New York, and Baltimore’s trade, in dollars and tonnage, outstripped all of its urban competitors in the South.13
The same railroads and steamship lines that carried goods through Baltimore could just as easily be carrying goods made in Baltimore, enabling the city to add the profits of manufacture to those of transport. To Ferdinand C. Latrobe, the city’s perennial postbellum mayor, the opportunities seemed obvious. By 1887, he sensed that his fellow citizens had come to share his view and “generally conceded that the future wealth and prosperity of the city is dependent on manufacturing industries.”14
The city’s few manufacturing enterprises were frequently by-products of its commerce. When Baltimore ships unloaded their cargoes of flour in the Caribbean, they could refill their holds with sugar, providing the raw material for several Baltimore sugar refineries. Coffee grown in Latin America could be roasted in Baltimore. The coffee business would generate the capital for one of the country’s first investment banks, Alex Brown and Sons. Baltimore ships sailed past guano-encrusted islands in the Caribbean and off the west coast of Latin America. Gangs of black laborers from Baltimore were sent to these desolate places, where, under hot sun and white overseers, they mined the bird manure for shipment to the city’s fertilizer plants, to be processed and shipped out to enrich soil depleted by cotton and tobacco crops. Baltimore imported more guano than any other place in the world. The business would eventually expand from natural to chemical fertilizers. Just outside the city limits, in Canton, smelters refined Cuban copper ore. By the close of the nineteenth century, Cuban iron ore and Pennsylvania coal would converge on a massive mill in Sparrows Point to produce steel. In some cases, the Chesapeake itself provided the raw materials for industrial enterprise: Bay oysters were packaged at Baltimore canneries to be consumed far from salt water. The canning business later extended to local vegetables and fruits. The Pennsylvania oilfields filled B&O tank cars with petroleum, which sustained half a dozen locally owned refineries in Baltimore. Manufacturers of men’s clothing, the city’s largest employers, had turned out military uniforms during the war, and this helped them to develop standard sizes for men’s suits, shirts, and trousers. The system paid off in peacetime.15
Warfare also boosted the production of sheet iron and shipbuilding. A foundry in Canton produced the armor plating for the USS Monitor and other ironclads. Textile plants just outside the city limits increased their output of sailcloth. By the 1880s, Baltimore and its environs accounted for about 80 percent of all the sailcloth produced in the United States.16
Growth prospects for the sailcloth industry were, of course, limited. In fact, most Baltimore industries—even the most expansive—lagged behind competitors in other cities. Some historians blame the stresses and upheavals of the Civil War as experienced in a border town. They argue that the war had traumatized the city’s business community and “sapped the vitality of a generation.” Baltimore had been the financial capital of the South, and the Confederacy’s destruction made local bankers and investors more conservative, more easily satisfied with the meager returns generated by low-risk investments.17
There were also more tangible signs of the city’s economic conservatism. In Baltimore, for example, manufacturing firms were less likely to be incorporated or to issue stock than in other East Coast cities. It was an “old-fashioned town” where factories were privately held and family-owned. Although the city’s industrial output was growing, it was not growing as rapidly as in other cities. After 1880, in fact, its rank as a manufacturing center began to decline. On average, Baltimore manufacturers employed fewer workers than firms in other cities, and the amount of capital invested in local industries was below average when compared with the 10 largest cities in the United States. Perhaps most tellingly, Baltimore factories invested less money in machinery than factories elsewhere. This shortfall suggests not just technological backwardness but an impaired capacity to compete. Machinery usually meant lower prices.18
BRANCH-OFFICE TOWN
Baltimore industries were relatively undeveloped because the city came late to manufacturing. The town paid for its backwardness. Its manufacturing sector was immature and vulnerable at a time when monopolistic trusts were gobbling up weaker competitors around the country. In 1870, John D. Rockefeller was the first predator to strike the city’s industrial base. He bought up or drove out of business all six of the independently owned oil refineries in Baltimore and eliminated them as competitors with Standard Oil. Rockefeller and Jay Gould joined forces to purchase the B&O Railroad’s telegraph subsidiary and added it to Western Union. The town’s two largest manufacturers of cigarettes and cigars were taken over by the American Tobacco Company. The capital stock of the Baltimore Sugar Refining Company was acquired by the American Sugar Refining Company, now known as Domino. The Baltimore Biscuit Company, the largest cracker factory south of New York, was bought out by the company later to become Nabisco. Eight local fertilizer factories were taken over by the American Agricultural Chemical Company, and the American Can Company acquired most of the locally owned canneries.19
Perhaps the most jarring shock to Baltimore’s economy was the failure of the B&O Railroad, the city’s signature enterprise. The company could not cover the bonds issued to pay for its construction costs. It stopped paying dividends in 1888. In his annual report for that year, the mayor listed the city’s stock in the railroad as an “unproductive investment,” but expressed hope that “this great corporation, which for so many years paid a large annual revenue into our treasury . . . may again take its place in the list of the City’s income producing securities.”20 Instead, the railroad went into receivership. When it emerged from bankruptcy in 1899, its owners were the New York and Chicago investors who had been the railroad’s creditors. Less than two years later, the Pennsylvania Railroad bought a controlling interest in what was left of the B&O; its president, John K. Cowen, was dismissed and replaced by a Pennsylvania Railroad executive.21 Baltimore had become a branch-office town. It kept most of its factory and railroad jobs, but corporate control lay out of town, and profits flowed to the same destinations.
Local workers suffered a loss of status, along with their city. Industrial consolidation and mechanization undermined their bargaining power. For a time, trade unions had multiplied along with the factories. The Knights of Labor began to organize Baltimore workers in 1878; by 1886, the Knights numbered about 16,000 in Maryland at large. The year was the high watermark for organized labor. In 1886 alone, Baltimore workers formed 16 new unions, and the Maryland Bureau of Industrial Statistics and Information counted a total of 96 unions in the city, with a combined membership of about 25,000. Three overlapping labor federations consolidated the unions into citywide coalitions. On May Day 1886, 11,000 union members marched through Baltimore demanding an eight-hour day. Three days after the parade came the Haymarket bombing in Chicago. Public support for labor activism diminished. Baltimore labor organizations also operated under a distinctive handicap. As workers in a branch-office town, local unions were bargaining with multisite companies prepared to shift production to other locations if their Baltimore employees became too demanding. By 1890, the Knights of Labor had virtually disappeared from the city. Some craft unions fared better, but only 10 of the unions formed in the 1880s survived into the ’90s. A brief resurgence in the labor movement in 1892 was cut short by the Panic of 1893, which thinned the ranks of almost all Baltimore unions, some of which simply disappeared.22
DERAILMENT
Baltimore was far from dead, but was developmentally inhibited. The city had bet heavily on railroads. The return on this investment had been disappointing, and the heavy commitment to railroads probably restricted investments in manufactures. The railroad men themselves did little to encourage factory production. When he ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1894, the B&O’s John Cowen responded to the charges of his “Republican friends” that he was “inimical to American industries and labor” and was “a free trader, and this I do not deny.” The alternative, he argued, was restricted trade, which would certainly handicap the local economy.23 Free trade, of course, was just the thing for a city devoted to commerce, but not for a manufacturing town.
The city had already given up on railroads as “public improvements”—government-supported ventures devoted to municipal prosperity. In 1886, Mayor James Hodges vetoed a council ordinance to pledge the city’s credit in support of a new railroad, the Baltimore and Eastern Shore. Railroads, he explained, had become decidedly private enterprises whose relentless pursuit of profit drew the investments of “the largest and most intelligent and enterprising capitalists.” “Hence, when a new railroad is needed by the expansion of trade, railroad men are generally ready to build it.” They did not have to rely on public investment, and by implication, any venture needing public support was financially suspect—unable to attract the “most intelligent and enterprising capitalists.” Hodges added that “the general sentiment of the community is now and has been for many years strongly opposed to the policy of lending the credit of the city to railroad enterprises. I believe it safe to say that the public mind, which has passed through a costly experience, is now thoroughly educated up to that point.”24
However averse to new railroad investments, Baltimoreans could not simply brush off their old investments. Though the city had lost heavily on its railroad stock, it still held B&O shares worth almost $2.5 million. (The city pledged $3.5 million for them more than half a century earlier.) The city’s stock holdings also made it the virtual proprietor of another railroad—the Western Maryland. Apart from the stocks, there were unpaid loans. The B&O still owed the city $5 million that it had borrowed in 1853. The loan was not completely unproductive; the railroad had been paying interest at the annual rate of 6 percent.25
In 1888, B&O president Samuel Spencer wrote to Mayor Latrobe requesting an extension of the loan—for 50 years, at only 4 percent. The railroad’s lawyers had helpfully drafted an ordinance that would authorize the extension. One of the conditions of the original loan required that $500,000 of the amount borrowed be deposited with the city register as security—a sum that could be used to pay off part of the loan when it came due in 1890. A succession of city registers had managed to grow the half million dollars into $2.4 million. Since the requested extension meant that the loan would not be paid off in 1890, the “sinking fund” would not be used as originally intended, and B&O president Spencer therefore reasoned that the city should give his railroad the $2.4 million along with the extension and the interest rate reduction.26
Spencer explained how Baltimore would profit under his proposition. The city had issued $5 million in “city stock” to make the original loan. It could now exchange those certificates for a new issue of $5 million carrying 3.5 percent interest. Since the city would be receiving 4 percent interest from the railroad, it would come out 0.5 percent ahead—$25,000 a year. In case this inducement failed to persuade city officials, Spencer pointed out that the municipality was the B&O’s largest stockholder, with about one-fourth of its common stock, and “as such . . . will derive nearly one-fourth of the benefit coming from such extension” of the loan. “Other reasons, of course,” he added, “will readily occur to you why this fair arrangement should be made between the City and the Company.”27 In other words, it went without saying that if the city refused the loan extension and demanded repayment in 1890, it risked losing much of the value that remained in its B&O stock.
The railroad’s request for a loan extension produced both controversy and confusion. Enoch Pratt, one of the city’s finance commissioners, was decidedly opposed: “Good Heavens! Extend the loan for fifty years? Why should Baltimore be burdened with the debts of the Baltimore and Ohio for the next half century? . . . I do not see why the city should be run in the interest of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.” Mayor Latrobe seemed inclined to grant the company’s request. If it were rejected, the railroad might have to borrow money elsewhere to pay off the loan, and the lender’s demands might compromise the city’s stake in the company.28 (Latrobe was, of course, a B&O lawyer.)
In the city council, the Joint Standing Committee on Ways and Means was cautious, then confused. Its members worried that by extending the B&O loan, the city might lose its place in line among the railroad’s creditors. After getting its $5 million loan from Baltimore in 1853, the B&O had piled up another $23 million in debt to other lenders. The committee asked for expert legal advice. City solicitor Bernard Carter (once a Pennsylvania Railroad lawyer) advised the ways and means committee that if the city surrendered the $2.4 million sinking fund to the railroad, it would lose its position among the B&O’s creditors with respect to that portion of the debt. The committee reported that it was “unable to agree upon the subject” and sent the B&O’s loan extension ordinance back to the full council without a recommendation.29
The city’s leaders finally decided against the extension, and on December 31, 1889, municipal officials gathered in the mayor’s office to receive repayment of the loan from B&O officials. Spencer sent an assistant.30 Baltimore managed to recover its $5 million from the B&O before the company went into receivership in 1896. It also sold its stock in the railroad and reduced its own indebtedness in the process.31
The Western Maryland Railroad, though a much smaller enterprise than the B&O, consumed almost as much of the city’s investment capital. As early as 1891, some Baltimoreans suggested that the city should rid itself of this burden by selling the railroad, and in 1892, the mayor and city council appointed a special commission to look into the condition of the Western Maryland. Mayor Latrobe, a member of the commission, was clearly concerned that the branch lines leased or built by the city-owned railroad would drain business from Baltimore. William Keyser, a B&O board member and owner of a local copper smelter, had also served as one of the Western Maryland’s directors. He testified that the railroad had made a “disastrous financial showing” and that its management “was arrayed in hostile relations to its owner, the City.” Keyser supported the sale of the Western Maryland.32
The commission did not embrace his recommendation, but its report seems to support his charges concerning the railroad’s financial drag on the city. The commission concluded that the Western Maryland had cost Baltimore’s taxpayers almost $8.5 million (more than $200 million in current dollars). Its report attributed almost $3.5 million of this sum to the railroad’s failure to meet interest payments on city loans. The city’s financial relationship with the Western Maryland had begun in 1868 with a bribery scandal that resulted in expulsion of three city council members—an early portent, perhaps, of a bad bargain.33