This article includes excerpts from A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and
the Dream of Affordable Housing by Betty Boyd Caroli and published by Oxford
University Press in the US © Caroli 2/2/26. Used by permission. All rights
reserved. Footnotes have been removed to ease reading.

Lectures formed the centerpiece of Mary’s days, and she planned carefully to take advantage of the most valuable offerings. Adolph Wagner, a renowned professor of economics, was deemed “so especially good in his course on socialism” that sometimes one thousand students showed up to hear him lecture. In such a large gathering, it is remarkable that Mary managed to meet the man she wanted as her partner in life.

Professor Wagner’s class also provided the basis for what became her life’s work. She arrived in Germany just as intense debate over laissez-faire capitalism was peaking, and although she did not identify as a socialist, Wagner’s brand of socialism, calling for the extension of government into transportation, housing, and recreation facilities, made sense. She disliked what seemed like excessive state intervention (such as obvious police surveillance at political meetings), but she appreciated the range of services available in Germany to all, including the lowest-paid urban worker. Wagner called it “state socialism,” without the craziness and occasional criminality of revolutionary socialism.

Branded later as “municipalization,” this segment of Wagner’s agenda grew out of his observation that what sufficed in rural and sparsely populated areas was neither feasible nor adequate in crowded urban areas. He was not unique in recognizing the change and advising remediation. In England, Birmingham’s mayor, Joseph Chamberlain, had reaped his own share of attention in the 1870s, when he spearheaded new government services for his city. Deeming gas and water supplies, parks, and recreation spaces a responsibility of government, he came to stand for what some called “municipal socialism.”

Mary, who grew up among people who put the highest value on individualism and self-reliance, began readjusting her priorities to fit Wagner’s thesis. Times had changed. In farmhouses and small towns, waste removal could be left to individuals, but in crowded city housing, with residents stacked on multiple floors, it required supervision and regulation. Not surprisingly, Wagner’s critics dubbed him father of “sewer socialism.”

Wagner’s focus on cities is understandable, given that his adult years witnessed the same rapid urbanization in his native Germany that altered the United States between 1871 and 1900. The number of Germans living in cities of 100,000 or more quadrupled, and the resulting congestion caused misery and health hazards not previously known. Germany stood at the forefront of European efforts to assign cities responsibility for providing and regulating essential services, and when Mary toured publicly financed housing projects and rode city-operated transport, she found the “municipal socialism of Berlin . . . visionary, exhilarating, imaginative and well worth copying.”

The Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 was still in its early planning stage when Mary, in Berlin, began a long examination of how Americans differed from Europeans. The exposition highlighted those differences in stunning detail. Fifty-six countries participated, and besides their individual pavilions, thematic displays (on industrial, commercial, scientific, and cultural developments) demonstrated how the new upstart North America had its own ideas about what to show off. One historian notes that the British exhibited maps illustrating extensive poverty in their midst, the Belgians touted low-cost housing they had provided, the Germans (although sounding imperialistic) touted a social vision emphasizing learning and art and proudly pointing to the social insurance available to German workers for the previous sixteen years. While the French pavilion showed the benefits of mutual insurance and savings societies, the US counterpart, “behind its classical false front, was about business” and the rosy future of capitalism. That was exactly the mindset Mary Kingsbury took to Europe in 1895. It is not the one she came home with in the fall of 1896.