On March 2, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released its report card evaluating U.S. infrastructure, grading it a C-, a slight improvement from the D+ it earned in 2017. The minimal increase offers little cause for celebration. During the Trump administration, “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke rather than a signature accomplishment.
Now the New York Times reports that the threat of unanimous Republican opposition may sink the Biden administration’s infrastructure plans before they begin. In response, politicians may be tempted to seek out “apolitical” infrastructure plans. But the history of early American infrastructure suggests there is no such thing. Infrastructure projects have long helped define the boundaries of political belonging and aggravated tensions between private profits and public well-being.
Like other colonial enterprises, Dutch Manhattan began as an outpost for a private trading company: the West India Company. But as New Amsterdam (as it was then called) grew from a trading station to a small village, differences emerged between the colony’s directors who represented the company’s interests, and burghers who styled themselves as citizens in the mold of the Dutch Republic.
These residents demanded the creation of a municipal government more responsive to the welfare of the community, with infrastructure a top priority. The lawyer, Adriaen Van der Donck, emerged as the group’s foremost spokesman, and in 1649 he accused Manhattan’s two most recent directors, Willem Kieft and Petrus Stuyvesant, of having served the company at the expense of the community.
Kieft, Van der Donck argued, had built the public church inside of the Fort, a location as suitable as a “fifth wheel to a coach,” and had never delivered on his promises to build a common school, hospital or asylum for orphans and older people. Stuyvesant, on the other hand, had built plenty. But apart from repairing the church and constructing a wooden wharf, hardly any of his projects could be called “public works.” Instead, they had all benefited the company. In other words, Manhattan’s infrastructure needed to reflect the needs of its own citizenry rather than the prosperity of a private trading company.
The creation of a municipal government in 1653 did little to ease tensions. Stuyvesant and community leaders still clashed over which infrastructure projects to pursue and how best to finance them. Stuyvesant prioritized the repair of Fort Amsterdam, but local politicians pushed the construction of walls, which offered a more obvious benefit to the broader community. Negotiations also stumbled over who should be responsible for funding construction and who held the right to levy new taxes.
But for all their disagreement, Manhattan’s leaders argued little over who would perform the manual labor. When Stuyvesant tried again in 1658 to push through his infrastructure proposals, he urged the government to use the West India Company’s enslaved Africans to rebuild the Fort. One of Stuyvesant’s councilors, Johan de Deckere, agreed and warned Stuyvesant that it would aggrieve Manhattan’s residents if they saw that “the Negroes are spared, and [they are] burdened” with the work. Similarly, when Stuyvesant determined to establish a new village in March 1658 on the northern part of Manhattan Island, he promised that enslaved Africans would build the road that connected Manhattan to present-day Harlem.
Enslaved Africans thus built much of the infrastructure for a political community that denied them access to municipal citizenship. Furthermore, the expansion of Dutch colonial infrastructure placed increasing pressure on Indigenous peoples to move further away from their ancestral homelands. Even as Manhattan’s residents forced Stuyvesant to accede to their demands for public-minded infrastructure, their definition of the public remained restrictive and exclusionary.
More than a century later, after a revolution in which the descendants of European colonists in North America asserted their desire to govern in their own interests, infrastructure projects became an opportunity to define the political community in the new United States. In 1799, Benjamin Latrobe, who would later design portions of the U.S. Capitol made a public proposal to supply Philadelphia with “wholesome water for culinary purposes.” Not just a discussion of pumps and pipes, it reflected Latrobe’s broader vision for the country.
Philadelphia, he argued, was defined by extremes. The frigid winters would freeze canals, and spring thaws would smash water mills. The scalding summers threatened public health. Investing in a steam-powered system, he argued, would ensure reliability during freezes; allow the city to construct public baths to provide necessary cooling in the summers and (most ambitiously) enable the construction of wooden fountains that could cool the air.
Latrobe’s plan to fund this proposal sought to differentiate the United States from Britain. He proposed a municipally-controlled system funded through progressive taxation that guaranteed universal access to “wholesome” water. In doing so, he deliberately departed from the pattern of privatized distribution in London, the dominant model at the time. Property owners would be assessed a tax based on the frontage of their homes to fund the system’s construction, ensuring that poor renters would be spared the burden since “the expense in fact would fall upon the landlord.” Those wishing for a direct supply to their homes would pay for it. Those unable to pay would be guaranteed access to water free of charge via public pumps on every street.
Rather than Latrobe’s progressive property tax, the city instead adopted an early version of a municipal bond system by selling shares in the waterworks to raise capital. Nonetheless, municipal politicians maintained that water should “at the conduits emptying into the streets, be for the free use of all persons.”
But even Latrobe’s progressive proposal reflected an exclusionary vision for the United States. For Latrobe, artificial cooling and public baths were so important because citizens of the new nation retained “the habits of our Northern ancestors,” a reference to the belief that racial differences included different tolerances to heat, cold and the diseases associated with them. Making North America’s climate safe for fragile European bodies was part of a larger program to transform the environment to enable further settlement and expansion at the expense of Native peoples.
In Philadelphia just a few years earlier, this focus on European bodily health had already had disastrous effects. As Yellow Fever ravaged the city, the founders of the Free African Society Revs. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen wrote, this belief that “our colour was not so liable to the sickness as the whites” drove a push for Black Philadelphians to act as nurses and to transport and bury the deceased, even though “as many coloured people died in proportion as others.” Jones and Allen demanded that White citizens acknowledge Black Philadelphians’ work and sacrifices, rather than dismiss them on account of demonstrably false beliefs about race and health. But less than a decade later those erroneous beliefs underpinned Latrobe’s desire to alter the climate.
Infrastructure is and has long been political. Not only does it reflect the relationship between private profits and the public good within a political community, but its realization hinges upon definitions of the public that, historically, have excluded more than they have included. At the same time, there is a long tradition of planning for infrastructure that benefits public well-being rather than economic growth or corporate profits. Since the founding of the United States, public-minded thinkers have proposed infrastructure to tackle environmental issues and public health.
As the Biden administration prepares to roll out its own infrastructure program, some politicians may demand that the bill remain neutral, nonpartisan and disentangled from programs to benefit health, the environment or public well-being. Rather than attempting to escape infrastructure politics, embracing them and chasing proposals that are ambitious, inclusive and richly democratic would live up to the best hopes for American infrastructure while avoiding the mistakes of the past.