While Waiting for Rain While Waiting for Rain Community, Economy, and Law in a Time of Change • John Henry Schlegel University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Copyright © 2022 by John Henry Schlegel Some rights reserved This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Note to Users: A Creative Commons license is only valid when it is applied by the person or entity that holds rights to the licensed work. Works may contain components (e.g., photographs, illustrations, or quotations) to which the rightsholder in the work cannot apply the license. It is ultimately your responsibility to independently evaluate the copyright status of any work or component part of a work you use, in light of your intended use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected] Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper Open access e-book first published August 2022; Additional formats first published November 2022 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for. ISBN 978-0-472-07561-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-05561-6 (paper : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-90297-2 (open access ebook) DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12158309 Funding is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. 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Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 PART I Law and Economic Change in America 9 Before 1865: An Archipelago of Island Agricultural/Trading Economies 11 The Eighteen Seventies and Eighties: Competition and Its Avoidance 16 The Eighteen Nineties and Teens: Trying to Tame Competition in the Real Economy 24 The Twenties and Thirties: An Associationist Ideal 34 The Forties and Fifties: Associationalism at Work 41 The Sixties and Seventies: A Troubled Economy 53 The Eighties and Nineties: Trying to Build an Economy 63 The Twenty-First Century: And Then It All Collapsed 75 Understanding Economic Change 87 Part II Community and Economic Change in America: Buffalo, Queen City of the Great Lakes 95 Buffalo’s Geographic Setting 96 The Local Geography 98 Buffalo’s Community Structure 101 Before 1865: A Small, but Growing Place on the Niagara Frontier 105 The Eighteen Seventies and Eighties: No Longer a Small Town 108 The Eighteen Nineties and Teens: A Big City 115 The Twenties and Thirties: Moving Ahead While Lagging Behind 129 The Forties and Fifties: “These Precious Days” 139 The Sixties and Seventies: The Centre Did Not Hold 152 The Eighties and Nineties: Bottoming Out 158 The Twenty-First Century: Maybe, . . . Hard to Tell 163 Recap: Of Buffalo’s Economic Decline 167 Understanding Economic Change in Buffalo: A Coda 181 vii viii Contents Part III Thinking about Economic Development 187 Cities and the Wealth of Nations Recounted 189 Of Nature 196 Of Grace 199 Of the Invisible Hand 201 Of Drift 211 Saving Pieces 214 Part IV Consider Buffalo 221 Some Perspectives 221 Strengths, Problems and Political Context 236 The Difficulty of Avoiding Transactions of Decline 243 Making Buffalo Attractive to the Middle Classes 259 And Well Schooled 265 Et Cetera 266 Part V What Then about America? 271 Some Perspectives 271 Strengths, Problems, and Political Context 281 Transactions of Decline 289 Making America Attractive to the Middle Classes 292 And Well Schooled 318 Et Cetera 320 Is Conclusion Even Possible? 325 A Note for Historians 331 Notes 335 Acknowledgments 361 Suggested Readings 365 Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12158309 Preface This book has been a long time coming. I once thought that it started back in the early nineties when I tripped over a review in the Wall Street Journal of Verlyn Klinkengborg’s book, The Last Fine Time, about Polish Buffalo, New York in the fifties. Intrigued, I bought a copy. The book taught me about a world I had never experienced in almost twenty years of living here. I began to wonder how and why the physical, economic, and social devastation that I saw all around me had happened. Research followed and eventually this manuscript came together. Except that this sequence of events is just not right. This manuscript started way earlier, in the summer of 1949 when I was seven and my parents took me to the grand, expansive, exciting “Railroad Fair” held on Chicago’s waterfront. I was knocked out by all of the steam engines and various types of freight cars on display. A few years later, my father gave me a silver dollar. He explained that on a business trip his train to New York City, the Twentieth Century Limited, had been one minute late getting into Grand Central Station and passengers on this train always received a silver dollar for every minute the train was late, though it had never happened to him before. Right there and then I was hooked on trains. I looked forward to the times when a train blocked a road and stopped our car, or when driving along tracks a train came the other way. In either case, I watched the passing engines and freight cars for the names of the railroads emblazoned on the side, always hoping to find one from a line I had never heard of. A few years later my family attended a Christmas party for the families of the employees of the spring company that my father worked for. It was held at the firm’s factory and included several manufacturing demonstrations. One of the company’s products was the suspension springs for railroad car trucks, the part under the car that contains the wheels. These enormous springs had to be coiled out of hot steel rod. I can still see the two men who used huge tongs to catch the heated rods as they came out of a furnace and then fed them into the coiler. But most of all I remember the man on the other side of the coiler who caught the still hot spring with tongs and threw it over his head into a tank of oil where it landed with an impressive splash and an appropriate shower of sparks. I was ix