Work, Leisure, and Reform in Pittsburgh: the Transformation of an Urban Culture, 1860-1920.

Abstract

This dissertation describes the repertoire of popular recreations and rituals in Pittsburgh in the years 1860-1920 and traces changes in that repertoire in relation to changes in work, social relations, and politics. The social basis of the city's early "plebeian" culture is the well-paid and dynamic cohort of highly skilled iron and glass craftsmen who held the center of gravity in labor organization, politics, and leisure. In the "walking city" of the 1870s they were the link between workers and the middle class as well as spokesmen for anti-monopoly Labor Reform politics. Technological revolution in the steel industry and the ethnic and spatial transformation of the city destroyed the Craftsman's Empire. Machine politicians and middle-class reformers competed for political control of the city and its inhabitants, seeking either to patronize or to reform their leisure. With the proletarianization of labor and the evolution of a more segregated urban structure, the world of leisure, like that of work, became more organized and more fully integrated with nationwide networks of production and distribution. Mass culture offered excitement and consolation to an immigrant working class unfamiliar with plebeian conventions and determined to be amused. Thus, while the new middle class strove both to create a life of suburban leisure and to uplift the lower classes in the city, the leisure entrepreneurs embraced all those escaping from regimentation or reform.