HIST 121 - CH 19

HIST 121 – Chapter 19 – Growing Pains of Urbanization 1870-1900 19.1 Urbanization and challenges  1876 - professional baseball begins with the founding of the National League  1885 - Chicago builds its first ten story skyscraper  1887 –frank Prague invents the electric trolley  1889 - Jane Adams opens Hull house in Chicago  1890 - Jacob Riis publishes ‘how the other half lives’ and Carnegie Hall opens in New York  1893 – ‘City Beautiful’ movement begins  1895 - Coney Island amusement park opens  New technologies lead to a massive leap in industrialization requiring a large number of workers. Electric lights, powerful machinery all allowed factories to run 24 hours a day seven days a week. Workers had long 12 hour shifts and require them to live close to the factories  problems ranging from starvation to religious persecution LED a new wave of immigrants to arrive from central eastern and southern Europe. Cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York sprang up and had a lot of urban population growth.  The development of the steam engine allowed for factories to be in urban cities not necessarily on the river.  Pittsburgh was about steel, Chicago was about meatpacking, New York was the center of clothing and financial industries, Detroit was defined by the automobile industry.  With rapid expansion there were issues with housing and living conditions, transportation, and communications. The issues were always worse for the poor working classes and the inequalities were shaped by race and religious differences.  Keys to successful urbanization: electric lighting, communications improvements, intra city transportation, skyscrapers. o With the invention of the light bulb in 1880 by Thomas Edison. This transformed factories and homes for even lower and middle class Americans. Nikola Tesla developed the AC system for Westinghouse Electric and manufacturing company to power supplies for lights and other factory equipment and it could extend for miles from the power source. o The telephone patented in 1876 greatly transformed communication both regionally and nationally. By 1900 / 1.5 million telephones were in use and middle and upper class Americans had “party lines”. Now communications and orders came constantly by telephone instead of mail order. This required more workers. o As cities grew a major challenge was efficient travel within the city from homes to factories or shops. Initially transportation was by rail or canal. Sometimes in the inner cities by an omnibus and a horse car. In 1887 frank Sprague invented the electric trolley which worked similar to a horse car without a wagon but on tracks and it was powered by electricity rather than horses. It could run day or night getting workers to factories and back home. In 1873 San Francisco engineers adopted a pulley technology from the mining industry to introduce cable cars and turned to the cities steep hills into elegant middle class communities. In larger cities like Chicago and New York trolley systems were not efficient so city planners elevated trolley lines above the streets creating elevated trains or L trains and this quickly spread to Boston and Chicago in 1887 and 1892. o The last limitation large cities had to overcome was the increasing need for space and that is how skyscrapers came to be. Workers needed to be close to urban centers to conveniently access work and shops. In 1885 the first skyscraper was built in Chicago it

was 10 stories called the home insurance building. In 1889 the Otis elevator company installed the first electric elevator and this began the skyscraper craze umm. o Jacob Riis – Danish immigrant. Was a police reporter. Good storyteller. Her was a reformer. Used photos to help tell his stories. he spent much of his time in the slums and tenements of New York’s working poor. Appalled by what he found there, Riis began documenting these scenes of squalor and sharing them through lectures and ultimately through the publication of his book, How the Other Half Lives , in 1890  Challenges of urban life: Congestion, pollution, crime, and disease were prevalent problems o Living conditions were terrible for workers. They lived in crowded tenement houses and cramped apartments with terrible ventilation and substandard plumbing and sanitation. As a result, disease ran rampant , with typhoid and cholera common. o Memphis, Tennessee, experienced waves of cholera (1873) followed by yellow fever (1878 and 1879) that resulted in the loss of over 10,000 lives. By the late 1880s, New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, and New Orleans had all introduced sewage pumping systems to provide efficient waste management. o Churches and civic organizations provided some relief to the challenges of working-class city life. Churches were moved to intervene through their belief in the concept of the social gospel . This philosophy stated that all Christians, whether they were church leaders or social reformers, should be as concerned about the conditions of life in the secular world as the afterlife, and the Reverend Washington Gladden was a major advocate. His sermons included the message to “love thy neighbor” and held that all Americans had to work together to help the masses. Other religious organizations like the Salvation Army and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) expanded their reach in American cities o the settlement house movement of the 1890s provided additional relief. Pioneering women such as Jane Addams in Chicago and Lillian Wald in New York led this early progressive reform movement. Created settlement houses in urban centers where they could help working-class women , find aid. Their help included child daycare, evening classes, libraries, gym facilities, and free health care. Addams opened her now-famous Hull House in Chicago in 1889, and Wald’s Henry Street Settlement opened in New York six years later. o Florence Kelley joined Wald’s efforts in New York; together, they created the National Child Labor Committee and advocated for the subsequent creation of the Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor in 1912. Julia Lathrop became the first woman to head a federal government agency , when President William Howard Taft appointed her to run the bureau. Settlement house workers also became influential leaders in the women’s suffrage movement . 19.2 – African American ”Great Migration” and new European immigration  Most newcomers were made up of two groups that had not previously been factors in the urbanization movement: African Americans fleeing the racism of the farms and former plantations in the South, and southern and eastern European immigrants.  “ Great Migration” o nearly 2 million African Americans fled the rural South to seek new opportunities. The vast majority traveled to the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The following cities were the primary destinations for these African Americans: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia,

o These newer immigrants looked and acted differently . They had darker skin tone, spoke languages with which most Americans were unfamiliar, and practiced unfamiliar religions, specifically Judaism and Catholicism. Even the foods they sought out at butchers and grocery stores set immigrants apart. Because of these easily identifiable differences , new immigrants became easy targets for hatred and discrimination . o The Reverend Josiah Strong fueled the hatred and discrimination in his bestselling book, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis , published in 1885. In a revised edition that reflected the 1890 census records, he clearly identified undesirable immigrants—those from southern and eastern European countries—as a key threat to the moral fiber of the country. o Forming the American Protective Association , the chief political activist group to promote legislation curbing immigration. Lobbied Congress to adopt both a literacy test for most immigrants , which eventually passed in 1917, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. 19.3 – relief from chaos of urban life  Machine Politics – This phrase referred to the process by which every citizen of the city , no matter their ethnicity or race, was a ward resident with an alderman who spoke on their behalf at city hall . When everyday challenges arose, whether sanitation problems or the need for a sidewalk along a muddy road, citizens would approach their alderman to find a solution. The aldermen knew that, rather than work through the long bureaucratic process associated with city hall, they could work within the “machine” of local politics to find a speedy, mutually beneficial solution. In machine politics, favors were exchanged for votes, votes were given in exchange for fast solutions, and the price of the solutions included a kickback to the boss. o One example of a machine political system was the Democratic political machine Tammany Hall in New York, run by machine boss William Tweed with assistance from George Washington Plunkitt. o For example, if in Little Italy there was a desperate need for sidewalks in order to improve traffic to the stores on a particular street, the request would likely get bogged down in the bureaucratic red tape at city hall. Instead, store owners would approach the machine. A district captain would approach the “boss” and make him aware of the problem. The boss would contact city politicians and strongly urge them to appropriate the needed funds for the sidewalk in exchange for the promise that the boss would direct votes in their favor in the upcoming election . The boss then used the funds to pay one of his friends for the sidewalk construction, typically at an exorbitant cost, with a financial kickback to the boss , which was known as graf . The sidewalk was built more quickly than anyone hoped, in exchange for the citizens’ promises to vote for machine- supported candidates in the next elections. o Tammany Hall essentially ran New York politics from the 1850s until the 1930s. Other large cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Kansas City, made use of political machines as well.  Popular Culture and Entertainment – Working-class residents also found relief in the diverse and omnipresent offerings of popular culture and entertainment in and around cities. o For example, Coney Island on the Brooklyn shoreline consisted of several different amusement parks

o Another common form of popular entertainment was vaudeville —large stage variety shows that included everything from singing, dancing, and comedy acts to live animals and magic. o Harry Houdini , who began his career in these variety shows o nickelodeon , a forerunner to the movie theater. 1 min film clips. o One other major form of entertainment for the working class was professional baseball . Baseball games provided an inexpensive form of entertainment, where for less than a dollar, a person could enjoy a double-header, two hot dogs, and a beer. But more importantly, the teams became a way for newly relocated Americans and immigrants of diverse backgrounds to develop a unified civic identity, all cheering for one team. Fenway Park in Boston (1912), Forbes Field in Pittsburgh (1909), and the Polo Grounds in New York (1890) all became touch points where working-class Americans came together to support a common cause.  Upper class in cities – o In New York, Andrew Carnegie built Carnegie Hall in 1891, which quickly became the center of classical music performances in the country. Nearby, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors in 1872 and still remains one of the largest collections of fine art in the world. o Planned more expensive excursions, such as vacations in Newport, Rhode Island, winter relocation to sunny Florida, and frequent trips aboard steamships to Europe. o For those who were not of the highly respected “old money,” but only recently obtained their riches through business ventures, the relief they sought came in the form of one book—the annual Social Register . First published in 1886 by Louis Keller in New York City, the register became a directory of the wealthy socialites who populated the city. Keller updated it annually, and people would watch with varying degrees of anxiety or complacency to see their names appear in print. Also called the Blue Book , the register was instrumental in the planning of society dinners, balls, and other social events . o  T he new middle class – This group included the managers, salesmen, engineers, doctors, accountants, and other salaried professionals who still worked for a living, but were significantly better educated and compensated than the working-class poor. o the middle class embraced a new type of community—the suburbs . o The ability to travel from home to work on a relatively quick and cheap mode of transportation encouraged more Americans of modest means to consider living away from the chaos of the city. Eventually, Henry Ford’s popularization of the automobile, specifically in terms of a lower price, permitted more families to own cars and thus consider suburban life. o New Roles for Middle-Class Women - Social norms of the day encouraged middle-class women to take great pride in creating a positive home environment for their working husbands and school-age children. o magazines Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping began distribution, to tremendous popularity. o some women were finding paths to college . A small number of men’s colleges began to open their doors to women in the mid-1800s, and co-education became an option. Some of the most elite universities created affiliated women’s colleges, such as Radcliffe

o Political philosopher Herbert Spencer took Darwin’s theory of evolution further , coining the actual phrase “survival of the fittest,” and later helping to popularize the phrase social Darwinism. This model allowed that a collection of traits and skills, which could include intelligence, inherited wealth, and so on, mixed with the ability to adapt, would let all Americans rise or fall of their own accord, so long as the road to success was accessible to all. William Graham Sumner , a sociologist at Yale, became the most vocal proponent of social Darwinism. o Realism o Philosopher William James was one of the key proponents of the closely related concept of pragmatism , which held that Americans needed to experiment with different ideas and perspectives to find the truth about American society o John Dewey built on the idea of pragmatism to create a theory of instrumentalism , which advocated the use of education in the search for truth. Dewey believed that education , specifically observation and change through the scientific method, was the best tool by which to reform and improve American society. o Photography was popularized by Riis . Visual artists such as George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Robert Henri, among others, formed the Ashcan School of Art. o Authors such as Stephen Crane, who wrote stark stories about life in the slums or during the Civil War, and Rebecca Harding Davis, who in 1861 published Life in the Iron Mills , embodied this popular style. Mark Twain also sought realism in his books, whether it was the reality of the pioneer spirit, seen in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , published in 1884, or the issue of corruption in The Gilded Age , co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873. o Some authors, such as Jack London , who wrote The Call of the Wild , embraced a school of thought called naturalism , which concluded that the laws of nature and the natural world were the only truly relevant laws governing humanity . o Kate Chopin , widely regarded as the foremost woman short story writer and novelist of her day, sought to portray a realistic view of women’s lives. A Feminist. She also was among the first authors to openly address the race issue of miscegenation , a term referring to interracial relations , which usually has negative associations. Desiree’s Baby . o African American poet, playwright, and novelist of the realist period, Paul Laurence Dunbar dealt with issues of race at a time when most reform-minded Americans preferred to focus on other issues. combination of writing in both standard English and Black dialect. o Critics of modern America – o In the 1888 novel Looking Backward , 2000-1887 , Edward Bellamy portrays a utopian America in the year 2000, with the country living in peace and harmony after abandoning the capitalist model and moving to a socialist state. In the book, Bellamy predicts the future advent of credit cards, cable entertainment, and “super-store” cooperatives that resemble a modern day Wal-Mart. Looking Backward proved to be a popular bestseller. o Another author whose work illustrated the criticisms of the day was nonfiction writer Henry George , an economist best known for his 1879 work Progress and Poverty , which criticized the inequality found in an industrial economy. He suggested that, while people should own that which they create, all land and natural resources should belong to all equally , and should be taxed through a “single land tax” in order to disincentivize private land ownership. His thoughts influenced many economic progressive reformers, as well as led directly to the creation of the now-popular board game, Monopoly . o Thorstein Veblen , who lamented in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), that capitalism created a middle class more preoccupied with its own comfort and

consumption than with maximizing production. In coining the phrase “ conspicuous consumption ,” Veblen identified the means by which one class of nonproducers exploited the working class that produced the goods for their consumption. KEY TERMS City Beautiful - a movement begun by Daniel Burnham and Fredrick Law Olmsted, who believed that cities should be built with three core tenets in mind: the inclusion of parks within city limits, the creation of wide boulevards, and the expansion of more suburbs graf - the financial kickback provided to city bosses in exchange for political favors Great Migration - the name for the large wave of African Americans who left the South after the Civil War, mostly moving to cities in the Northeast and Upper Midwest instrumentalism - a theory promoted by John Dewey, who believed that education was key to the search for the truth about ideals and institutions machine politics - the process by which citizens of a city used their local ward alderman to work the “machine” of local politics to meet local needs within a neighborhood naturalism - a theory of realism that states that the laws of nature and the natural world were the only relevant laws governing humanity pragmatism - a doctrine supported by philosopher William James, which held that Americans needed to experiment and find the truth behind underlying institutions, religions, and ideas in American life, rather than accepting them on faith realism - a collection of theories and ideas that sought to understand the underlying changes in the United States during the late nineteenth century settlement house movement - an early progressive reform movement, largely spearheaded by women, which sought to offer services such as childcare and free healthcare to help the working poor social gospel - the belief that the church should be as concerned about the conditions of people in the secular world as it was with their afterlife Social Register - a de facto directory of the wealthy socialites in each city, first published by Louis Keller in 1886 Tammany Hall - a political machine in New York, run by machine boss William Tweed with assistance from George Washington Plunkitt