Not quite 50 years ago, the American Enterprise Institute hosted a series of lectures in honor of the American Bicentennial that were given by top thinkers, including Irving Kristol, Martin Diamond, Gordon Wood, Seymor Martin Lipset, and, appropriately, Edward C. Banfield.

Banfield delivered a speech on The City and the Revolutionary Tradition at Franklin Hall, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The video of the speech is above, and AEI published Banfield’s remarks here.

He begins in his typically blunt manner:

“It would be very pleasant on such an occasion as this to say that the American city has been and is a unique and unqualified success-and to be able to show that its successes all derive from adherence to principles established and given institutional form in the American Revolution, whose bicentennial we are here to commemorate. Unfortunately, it is all too evident that even if this were the Fourth of July I would not have license for that-sort of oratory.”

America’s cities, he explains,

“were built by that often ludicrous and sometimes contemptible fellow-the Worshipper of the Almighty Dollar, the Go-Getter, the Businessman-Booster-Speculator-an upstart, a nobody, but shrewd, his eye on the main chance, always ready to risk his own and (preferably) someone else’s money.”

They were a distinctly bottom up enterprise, and their governance system and politics were not quite what the Founders sought. Governing authority in cities is severely fragmented, and getting things done necessitated the rise of power-broker politicians, who operated through bribery and appeals to individuals’ and factions’ self-interest.

The fragmentation of authority has not only permitted but also encouraged its informal centralization by means-notably the machine and the boss-that were corrupt. If, as [Lincoln] Steffens said, businessmen gave bribes because they had to-because it was impossible
to operate a street railroad without doing so-it is also true that politicians took them because they had to-because, to centralize enough power to get things done, they had in one way or another to ‘purchase’ pieces of authority from voters and others. Without this easy access to power on the local scene, the Go-Getter would not have had the opportunity to ‘go get.’ As it was, he could extend the grids of nonexistent cities into the hinterland confident that he could induce some public body to build the canal, railroad, highway, arsenal, or whatever that would send land values up. Even the new immigrant’s ethnic ties had a political value that
could be converted into the small amount of capital he needed to get started.

Dispersed governing power in cities also produced a consequence for federal governance: governing nationally demands federal leaders cultivate local support. Achieving that made political parties indispensable. But these parties could not be ideological or uniform: “[R]ather they are shifting coalitions of those who, by winning elections or otherwise, have assembled enough pieces of local authority to count.”

Hence, on this bicentennial, Banfield impishly told his audience:

“One of the great ironies of history is to be found in these developments, for it was a centralized system like the Canadian, not a fragmented one like the American, that the principal figures among the Founding Fathers thought they were creating.”

The Founders wanted a governance system that was informed by the public but capable of resisting it and societies various factions. Leaders were to be trustees for voters. Instead, America by 1830 had something else—a system whose leaders were wheeler-dealers whose primary duty was to “accommodate competing and more or less parochial interests, not to deliberate about (much less enforce) an idea of the common good.”

So, Banfield concludes, hurrah for the 200th anniversary of our Founding, but let us remember the cities and nation we got veered from the revolutionary tradition. And let us not overlook that a system so firmly directed by majoritarian impulses tends to prefer expediency to justice.