Table Of ContentWhile 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
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Open access e-book first published August 2022;
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12158309
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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
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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
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