Broken Heart of America runs down the usual warrens of St. Louis history, for the most part, and it does so with aplomb: there’s the French colonial city, the German industrial city, and the black city, ruled by whites, which engages in ritual excoriation and bloodletting. What Walter Johnson does do incredibly well here is placing the violence front and center: throughout are grim reports of Native massacres (one of his favorite devices, it seems, is to introduce a new “hero” figure by flashing back to a particularly brutal episode of wanton, “pedagogical” murder of surrendering Natives in the wars to the west), along with more “domestic” lynchings, beatings, duels, burnings, expropriations, and shootings. This attention paid to violence already peels Johnson’s account away from even the more radically-comported histories, and his retellings of the Black Hawk War, Funsten Nut strike, and Archgrounds slum clearance appear here bathed in the blood they are elsewhere represented scrubbed and clean. He also reports on events I have elsewhere seen either not told, or if so, only in passing – foremost of which are the pre-Civil War march on Confederate sympathizers at Fort Jackson by German militias, and most arrestingly, the brutal genociding of black East St. Louis workers in 1917, as reported on by Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. DuBois.
Johnson’s attention to the razor’s edge of historical recounting aside, there is a larger conceptualization of St. Louis’ economic role that rises from the pages of the book. It is more than commonplace to harp on St. Louis’ esteemed position near the Mississippi-Missouri confluence of Portage des Sioux; likewise for its existence of a combination East-West or South-North fulcrum. What Johnson highlights is an overwhelmingly Western bearing for the city, firstly in the voyages upriver administered by William Clark (first as Governor and then Superintendent of Indian Affairs). Johnson’s St. Louis, in the early 19th century, is not just a city but a locus of Western expansion, if for no other reason than Clark having his offices there, and possessing his famed map of the West, first compiled on the voyage which won him his fame and which was continuously updated to his death. This document enabled the slow subsumption and expropriation of Native lands during a crucial period in which American military might assembled under the Grand Army of the Republic was poor and needed for Native actions in the Indiana Territory and Great Lakes; as such, Clark played Benign Conciliator, though with the final consequence being, of course, the wholesale theft of vast swathes of the country (usually 160 acres at a time). After Clark’s commercial empire gave way to the West of rail and rifle, St. Louis became the seat of the federal Department of the West, and from Jefferson Barracks in Corondolet cavalry and regiments like the US Dragoons issued forth to construct forts along the Rockies, secure settler claims in ancestral lands, and finally to enact a continental pogrom all the way to the Pacific. These histories placed alongside ideological statements from Thomas Hart Benton et al. proclaiming St. Louis as the imperium of the interior, linked by a great national road from New York City to San Francisco, Reavis-style boosterism is fully turned inside out – no longer is the notion of St. Louis as the nation’s capital a whimsical curio of 19th century exuberance, but a grim reminder that, as one observer put it, “St. Louis is the center of the Mississippi Valley—that this Valley is the center of the United States—and the United States the center of the whole world”.
Concomitantly, Johnson also highlights the tensions between white and black workers in St. Louis as a war about labor, running back before the Civil War. If his account of the war is almost triumphalist in its depictions of Frémont, Weydemeyer, and Sigel (with starry-eyed (and appropriate!) attention given to their exploits in outflanking Lincoln from the left at Rolla), the distaste for “black replacement” or diminishment is palpable. The pairing between black fortunes rising in the short period of Reconstruction with new campaigns against the Native west puts the lie even to this briefly optimistic period of American history. At all points, it becomes clear that anti-black rhetoric, when outright cultural hatred was not enough, was preached along the lines of paternalist labor sentiments. For example, when Lincoln offered the stunted admission that “labor was superior to capital” in an address, this was solely a sonata for white labor – which goes without saying – and an assurance that in no uncertain terms that white labor would be protected from an explosion of suddenly freed black labor onto the market, or at least into the reserve army.
Finally, where the book really shines is its depiction of late 19th and early 20th civic life, of St. Louis as the “sporting city” of the boodle and prostitution and other vices – the “Babylon of the New World” or the “Greenwich Village of the West”, whichever yo prefer. Using Dreiser’s Newspaper Days, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and sex worker Nell Kimball’s autobiography, Johnson illuminates a St. Louis, or at least a vice district therein, centered on Morgan Avenue, ringed round by tenement hovels and “no-go zones”, controlled by political machines and black capital, and finally, turned over by Harland Bartholomew. The 1907 master plan, the first of its kind, excised these areas first of all, ushering in an era of blight-driven renewal and removal; but don’t mourn for what was truly squalid – Ernest Calloway made slum clearance a central plank of his Communist organizing in the 1930s. Rather mourn that St. Louis has once and always will be a city of capital, wherever it may come from. As Neil Smith notes, the frontier just turned inward.
A final note: compared especially to Primm, Broken Heart is perhaps an example of “negative boosterism” – everything happened here, and all of it bad. While there may be truth to some of the more empirical observations, ultimately Johnson betrays his own premise; there may be no St. Louis without American Empire, but there would definitely be an American Empire without St. Louis.