Industrialization fuels massive immigration and urbanization, changing the nature of life

and the cultural landscape of the nation

Chapter 25 –America Moves to the City (1865-

1900)

The Urban Frontier

From 1870 to 1900, the American population doubled, and the population in the cities tripled.

Skyscrapers first appear in Chicago in 1885Brooklyn Bridge (1883)Department stores (Macy’s) and mail-order

stores (Sears) herald era of consumerismCities encounter problems

Waste disposal Crime Slums: aka tenements

The Brooklyn Bridge

William M. “Boss” Tweed, the infamously corrupt head of New York City’s Tammany Hall political machine, latched on to the Brooklyn Bridge project from the very beginning. According to sworn testimony he gave later, he facilitated up to $65,000 in bribes to New York’s aldermen in order to win their backing for a $1.5 million bond issue. He then became a major holder of bridge stock and joined a committee charged with managing the project’s finances. Tweed allegedly hoped to skim money from the city’s bridge contracts, much as he had done with other large public works. But he was arrested in 1871 before he could fully realize his plan. It has since been estimated that Tweed and his cronies stole at least $45 million, and perhaps as much as $200 million, from the public coffers during their time in power.

The Gilded Age Slums of NYC

Wealth flowed during the 1880s and 90s, but only to the upper echelons of society. A vast gulf opened between rich and poor, earning this era the nickname "the Gilded Age." One immigrant photographer captured what it was like for New York's poor during this time, and his images remain arresting today.

The Danish-born carpenter Jacob Riis (1849-1914) migrated to the US in 1870. He started his career as a journalist in 1873 as a police reporter, only three years after he arrived in New York. Later he became the city editor of the New York Tribune.

When flash photography was born in 1887, he and three photographer friends began to photograph the slums of New York City and three years later he published How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York with more than a hundred photographs.

The New Immigration

Old Immigration: western European, literate (Brits, Germans, Irish)

New Immigration: southern/eastern European (Italians, Jews, Slavs, Greek, Poles) Most illiterate, poor Cluster together in big cities

Many of these first generation immigrants retained their native culture; their children would become Americanized or assimilated

Reactions to the New Immigration

Immigrants often controlled by political bossesThe plight of slums led to the Social Gospel: the

idea that churches should tackle these social illsJane Addams

founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889 to teach immigrants skills and knowledge to survive and succeed in America

Other women open these settlement housesThe settlement houses become a center for

women’s activism and social reformThe new cities gave single women opportunities

to earn money and support themselves better

Resurgence of Nativism

1840’s-50’s nativism reappearsOld immigrants look down on new immigrantsFear a mixing of “inferior” southern Euro bloodBlamed new immigrants for corrupt urban politicsUnions also anti-new immigrants because:

They work for low-wages They brought socialism and communism to the US They were used as strikebreakers

American Protective Association (APA) urged voting against Catholics

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) bars ChineseIronically, the Statue of Liberty arrived from France in

1886

Religion in the Age of Urbanization

Liberal Protestants adapt religious ideas to modern culture Reject biblical literalism Ally themselves with the reform-oriented social gospel

movementSalvation Army, YMCA’s, YWCA’s helps the

needyCharles Darwin’s evolutionary theory (1859) Evolution vs. CreationismReligion begins to be relegated to personal

life, and away from social

Booker T. Washington vs. WEB Du Bois

Public schools rise in popularityThe South lags behind in education; especially for BlacksBooker T. Washington a champions black education

Taught black students trades at Tuskegee Institute Self-help approach criticized for not attacking white supremacy Believed economic uplift would lead to political and civil rights

W.E.B. Du Bois called Washington an Uncle Tom! first Black to get a Ph.D. from Harvard University demanded complete equality for Blacks and action now Founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People (NAACP) in 1910These differences reflected the contrasting life

experiences of southern and northern Blacks.

Rise of Higher Education

Growth of colleges and universities after Civil WarColleges for women (Vassar College) gaining groundBlack colleges: Howard U.The Morrill Act (1862) and the Hatch Act (1887)

granted public lands to the states for support of education (aka: land grant colleges)

Philanthropy supplemented gov’t grants to higher ed Rockefeller’s funds used to build the University of Chicago

Johns Hopkins U the first high-grade grad school

The Press

Libraries, aided by Carnegie’s donations (ie: Library of Congress) opened across America

Sensationalism captures the public taste Yellow journalism: wild and fantastic stories that often were false or

quite exaggerated: sex, scandal, and other human-interest storiesTwo new journalistic tycoons emerged: Joseph Pulitzer

(New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (San Francisco Examiner)

Horatio Alger’s “rags-to-riches” books told that virtue, honesty, and industry were rewarded by success, wealth, and honor

Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Jack London

Yellow Journalism

The Kid first appeared in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1895. He soon became better known as the “Yellow Dugan Kid” for the over-sized yellow nightshirt which bore his dialogue: quippy observations in a broad New York dialect.

Pulitzer and Hearst fought to give their competing Yellow Kids more and more page space. To many critics, this represented a trend in the decline of journalistic integrity, of which both newspapers had been guilty for years. One vocal critic, New York Press editor Ervin Wardman, had tried many times to pin a name on the papers’ sensationalistic, exaggerated, ill-researched, and often untrue reporting, first calling it “new journalism” and “nude journalism.” When the competing papers finally sunk so low as to replace news content with comic strips, he had his name: “Yellow-Kid Journalism,” which was eventually shortened to “Yellow Journalism.” The Kid’s symbolism fits the term still today: slap-dash journalism aimed at the kid in all of us.

Women and the City

Urban life was stressful on familiesCharlotte Perkins Gilman published Women and

Economics, a classic of feminist literature called for women to abandon their dependent status contribute to involvement in the economy

Feminists rallied toward suffrage National American Woman Suffrage Association (1890) led by

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Carrie Chapman Catt links voting rights to traditional role of

womenNAWSA limits membership to whitesBlack woman activist Ida B. Wells mounted a

nationwide campaign against lynching

Without Sanctuary

Strange Fruit

Temperance and Promoting Reform

National Prohibition Party (1869)Women’s Christian Temperance Union: called

for national prohibition of alcohol Leaders included Frances E. Willard and Carrie A. Nation

who literally wielded a hatchet and hacked up barsThe Anti-Saloon League (1893) helped create

“dry” statesAmerican Society for the Prevention of Cruelty

to Animals (ASPCA) formed in 1866American Red Cross, formed by Clara Barton, a

Civil War nurse, was formed in 1881

Carrie Nation

The most celebrated and most controversial temperance champion of her time, Carry Nation’s life was filled with tragedy. Her mother died in an insane asylum, convinced she was Queen Victoria. Her first husband drank himself to death. A second unhappy marriage ended in divorce. Convinced that God was on her side, Nation smashed up saloons all over the state of Kansas. Her favored tool was a hatchet. Hundreds of women and a smaller number of men rallied to her, bringing their own stones and bricks, sticks and hatchets, and calling themselves the "Home Defenders." Nation hoped her movement would spread across the country and sweep away all of the nation’s saloons but, like the Woman’s Crusade, it died almost as quickly as it had arisen. "Every movement needs some people to call attention to itself by bold action. She knew that you had to draw attention and you needed the press following you. You had to make the right enemies. I don’t think she’s at all representative of the movement. She’s simply the one who called attention to it. And then patient, hardworking people followed through."

Art and Amusement

Music reached new heights with the erection of opera houses and the emergence of jazz

Edison’s phonographThe Columbian Exposition in 1893, in Chicago, displayed

many architectural triumphsPhineas T. Barnum (who quipped, “There’s a sucker born

every minute”) and James A. Bailey teamed up in 1881 to stage the “Greatest Show on Earth” (now the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus)

“Wild West” shows, like those of “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the markswoman Annie Oakley

Baseball emerged as America’s national pastime1891, James Naismith invented basketball