Transforming a Region
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
Transforming a Region Urban Capitalists: Entrepreneurs and City Growth in Pennsylvania's Lackawanna and Lehigh Valleys, 1800-1920 By Burton W. Folsom Jr. Johns Hopkins. 191 pp. $16.50. Reviewed...
...The region under study is the Middle Atlantic...
...He has shown, as others have before him, the prominent roles played by able urban capitalists...
...A less flattering interpretation of the leaders' motives is put forward by Thomas P. Vadasz, the son of a union official at Bethlehem Steel, in his PhD dissertation written at the College of William and Mary in 1975, "The History of an Industrial Community: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1741-1920...
...those tasks were left to upwardly mobile immigrants...
...Political openness also distinguished Scranton...
...Other relatives also pitched in...
...In the late 1830s, geologist William Henry wrongly concluded that the Lackawanna Valley was ripe for ironmaking...
...Lacking a loyal local elite and burdened with an industrial environment beset by fires, floods and mine cave-ins, Carbondale was subsequently eclipsed by Scranton...
...On the strength of this, and "with the full confidence of New York investors," the Scrantons in 1853 incorporated the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company...
...Part of his difficulty is failing to recognize the logic of his own evidence...
...Still, the city forged ahead...
...Concerted efforts were made to stem the loss of managerial autonomy...
...Mauch Chunk did have the crippling disadvantage of being located at the narrow head of the Lehigh Valley, where there was insufficient flat real estate...
...Folsom's story is informative, despite its unconcern with such crucial entrepreneurial matters as methods of competition, labor relations, or international markets...
...When Scranton becametheseat of newly-formed Lackawanna County, it added administrative to economic activity...
...This was a not wholly unacceptable slant on the heroes of my youth, who hadn't been much help to me in breaking through the upper crust anyway, but I noticed that historians writing after America survived the Great Depression often called these leaders Industrial Statesmen...
...Thus Dundaff, wedded to farming and the turnpikes, had by 1840 lost out in the competition against nearby Carbon-dale, tied to the more lucrative coal and canals...
...Having recently visited both cities, I was struck by how similarly grim and depressed they appear...
...To add to the town's woes, the attractions of oil and gas in the national fuel market during the 1920s crippled the anthracite coal industry, and the advent of synthetic clothing after World War I, resisted by Scranton businessmen, almost closed the city's textile mills...
...Yet the past Folsom studies suggests that economic problems rarely have simple solutions —a thought that might well have occurred to my father the urban capitalist as he renovated those faded mansions...
...And business leaders raised $1.25 million for an Industrial Development Corporation that would attract new industries...
...Although he put together his modest fortune(enough to send me and my three brothers to college in the space of a decade) by building private residences after World War II, he started in the construction business by remodeling some of the great, by then run-down homes of Bethlehem's former economic titans: the abodes of Skeer, Linderman, Wilbur and, biggest of all, Schwab...
...focuses his book on the Lackawanna Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania, with an emphasis on Scranton...
...Somehow"—Fol-som, alas, does not give us any details?they fulfilled their agreement to supply 12,000 tons of T-rails in 18 months...
...Consequently, he tacks on a chapter about the Lehigh Valley that is too short to be definitive, yet long enough to be suggestive...
...the Center is at the border of Pennsylvania and Delaware...
...The new social history?preached by young professors, nurtured by the civil rights movement and informed by the social sciences—brushed aside biography for more comprehensive explanations of past behavior, ignoring heads of state and commanders of companies in favor of the common people...
...After highlighting the differences between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Folsom remembers that he is intent on comparing regions as well as cities...
...But he has not presented convincing proof that his subjects were responsible for America's transformation into an industrial economy...
...Scranton, on the other hand, did not exist until the 1840s, but by the end of the century it was the third largest city in the state (102,000) and 37th in the nation...
...He thus confuses the issues, instead of clearly acknowledging the complex interaction of external factors with individual will...
...Then Charles Schwab, a spiritual child of the Scrantons and Packer, rejuvenated the company by absorbing it into the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1905...
...In these declining days it would be comforting to believe that heroic businessmen can save us, which is the official line from Washington...
...In 1846, the New York and Erie Railroad could not get English rails for its route from Port Jervis to Binghampton...
...This was the fateof both the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company and the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad...
...Scranton's most formidable rival was Wilkes-Barre, well-situated in the adjacent Wyoming Valley on the Susquehanna River...
...Folsom suggests that they would have looked alike in the boom times of the late 19th century, too, but that the resemblance would have been deceptive...
...His son-in-law, Selden Scranton, and Selden's brother George, who together operated the Oxford (New Jersey) Iron Works, helped raise the capital needed to build a blast furnace on 500acres that are part of present-day Scranton...
...But they could not prevent the New York owners of the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company from moving their plant to Buffalo—a Great Lakes seaport that had access to Lake Superior ores...
...He brought in new technology (there was little obsolete equipment to protect), developed structural steel in the form of the single-section I-beam, and recruited talented managers while ousting the inbred Packer group...
...Folsom attributes its industrial expansion to the "splendid entrepreneur-ship" of the "visionary Scrantons...
...In addition to help from family, friends and New Yorkers, they raised capital in and near the Lackawanna Valley, where not everyone was pleased with their projects...
...Unfortunately for Carbondale, the Delaware and Hudson Canal was controlled by interests in New York that channeled profits elsewhere...
...Nevertheless, their initial venture of making nails failed miserably due to the product's poor quality and the absence of transportation to markets...
...The Yankees who then acquired private ownership of the land composed the leading families of Wilkes-Barre when it became a borough (1806) and the seat of Luzerne County, and their elevated status remained intact during the change from agriculture to coal in the first half of the 19th century...
...A policy of openness that contrasted sharply with Wilkes-Barre's protectiveness and unwillingness to diversify attracted other entrepreneurs from the Lackawanna Valley, from farther away in the Middle Atlantic district, and from Canada and northeast Europe...
...Coal-related industries such as engine manufacturing and gunpowder production were quickly established...
...The Lehigh Valley, we learn, became "a potpourri of cultural groups" once its original English Quaker settlers were overwhelmed by waves of church Germans (the Lutheran and Reformed groups who settled Allentown), sect Germans (the Moravians of Bethlehem), and Scotch-Irish (the Easton Presbyterians...
...Faced with bankruptcy, the Scran-tons conceived the idea of a rolling mill for railroad track...
...As Scranton's coal, iron and rail industries grew, however, control began to shift to the corporate investors in New York...
...When the limitations of Mauch Chunk as a commercial center became apparent, the caution of Allentown's and Easton's leaders became discouraging...
...There was plenty of opposition from Wilkes-Barre: Its bankers would not secure their loans, and its politicians were temporarily able to block the Scrantons' application for railroad charters on lines to upstate New York and New York City, as well as to prevent the city of Scranton from becoming a county seat...
...The emergence of the coal trade in the 1820s changed county seats into places of bustling business activity, a process intensified by development of the turnpikes, canals and later railroads that brought the towns into contention with one another...
...He was the force behind the Lehigh Valley Railroad, a major regional line that traveled from Mauch Chunk to Easton at the juncture of the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers, and he was the founder of tuition-free Lehigh University in South Bethlehem...
...When Henry's credibility waned, the Scranton brothers turned to their cousins, Joseph and Erastus Scranton, for more money...
...The leaders of South Bethlehem and Bethlehem subsequently united the two municipalities and streamlined urban services...
...In demonstrating the critical importance of geography and the timing of a city's emergence onto the industrial scene, he shows that these factors are at the very least as significant as any individual's ingenuity—yet goes on to fault such explanations for ignoring the personal element in history...
...I warmed up for Princeton on Charlie Schwab's old billiards table out in what had been the garage before Dad hit the big time, and it wasn't until I went to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania that I first heard the term "Robber Baron...
...A similar expansion of Wilkes-Barre was opposed by its elite...
...Philadelphia business interests fostered the industrial growth of the area in the 1820s through the creation of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company...
...By 1880 it was the largest city in northeastern Pennsylvania and was referred to as "The Anthracite Capital of the World...
...But this endogamous group of entrepreneurs, unlike the Scrantons, never encouraged like-minded businessmen to join them, nor were their sons able to carry on the work...
...Or, more concretely, the widening of city limits in 1866 had assured the victory of the Irish in urban politics...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Mick Professor of History, San Francisco State University After finding the teaching of mathematics was too confining, and working in the drafting room at Bethlehem Steel too boring, my father joined the ranks of the urban capitalists—entrepreneurs who got lucky...
...Wilkes-Barre has a history going back to the 17th century, when Charles II conferred the area on both Connecticut and Pennsylvania...
...This is a very important piece of work that has been overlooked here...
...In the20th century, too, there were problems with labor unions (a matter mentioned but not discussed by Folsom —workers are virtually invisible in this book...
...SincePacker's kinsman, Charles Brodhead, had initiated the Bethlehem Iron Company in South Bethlehem, Packer shifted his own talents and that of his Yankee associates (Sayre, Wilbur, Skeer, Linderman) to the new industrial community across the river from the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem...
...The firm's aim was to float anthracite down the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers to Philadelphia from Mauch Chunk, an industrial town close to the source of coal and unburdened by the religious and ethnic fragmentation of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton...
...Technological invention and the growth of manufacturing companies soon justified this approach...
...But it boasted two business elites, German and Yankee, the latter led by a man whose energy and imagination rivaled the Scrantons'—Asa Packer...
...New industries were created, such as an international correspondence school that later combined with a publishing house to form a corporation specializing in courses and textbooks on coal mining and other subjects...
...By the 1890s the Lehigh Valley Railroad was almost bankrupt, and the Bethlehem Iron Company lagged way behind its competitors...
...The Scrantons took the contract...
...They had an even stronger hold on local politics through domination of both parties, allowing them to keep the community closed and conservative, its future staked on coal...
...The two states actually warred over its possession until the end of the 18th century...
...By the 1960s such contradictory perspectives on the economic elite seemed irrelevant...
...Labor history, black history, urban history, women's history, local history, and oral history today have all become a part of the university curriculum . It is in this context, now constrained by the more conservative environment of the '80s, that we should read Urban Capitalists, the first publication of the Regional Economic History Research Center...
...Few of its business leaders held office in 1880...
...They were men with academic degrees, often in the service of professions and almost always in the legislative halls of Harris-burg...
Vol. 64 • October 1981 • No. 16
