America Moves to the City

1. Chapter 25 America Moves to the City

2. Themes • In the late nineteenth century, American society was increasingly dominated by large urban centers • Explosive urban growth was accompanied by often disturbing changes, including the new immigration, crowded slums, new religious outlooks, and conflicts over culture and values • While many Americans were disturbed by the new urban problems, cities also offered opportunities to women and expanded cultural horizons

3. Themes • African Americans suffered the most as the south lagged behind other regions of the country with regard to educational improvements and opportunities • Two schools of thought emerged as to the best way to handle this problem • Booker T. Washington • Blacks should pull themselves up from their own bootstraps to get respect • Achieve this over time • W.E.B. Dubois • Demanded equality both socially and economically • Demanded change now

4. Vocabulary Terms People • Settlement Houses • Liberal Protestants • Land-Grant Colleges • Yellow Journalism • Tuskegee Institute • NAWSA • World’s Columbian Exposition • Jane Addams • Charles Darwin • Booker T. Washington • W.E.B. Dubois • Joseph Pulitzer • William Randolph Hearst • John Dewey • Mark Twain • Oliver Wendell Holmes

5. The Urban Frontier • The growth of American metropolises was spectacular • In 1860 no city in the US had a million inhabitants • By 1890, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had passed the million mark • By 1900 New York had 3.5 million people (2nd largest city in the world)

6. Cities Grow Vertically • The skyscraper allowed more people and workplaces to be packed onto a parcel of land • Appearing first as a ten-story building in Chicago in 1885, the skyscraper was made usable by the perfecting of the electric elevator up and down the building

7. A Little Help to the Top

8. Brooklyn Bridge • Engineering marvels like the skyscraper and New York’s awesome Brooklyn Bridge, a harplike suspension span dedicated in 1883, added to the seductive glamour of cities

9. Brooklyn Bridge Today

10. Transit System • Americans were becoming commuters, carted daily between home and job on the mass-transit lines that radiated out from central cities to surrounding suburbs • Electric trolleys, powered by overhead wires, propelled city limits explosively outward; rural America could not compete with the siren song of the city • Industrial jobs drew country folks off the farms and into factory centers; electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones all made life in the big city more alluring

11. Consumerism • The move to the city introduced Americans to new ways of living • Country dwellers produced little household waste • However, in the city, goods came in throwaway bottles, boxes, bags, and cans—waste disposal was an issue new to the urban age • The Mountains of waste that urbanites generated testified to a cultural shift away from the virtues of thrift to the conveniences of consumerism

12. Slums • Worst of all were the human pigsties known as slums; they grew more crowded, more filthy, and more rat-infested, especially after the perfection of “dumbbell” tenement • Named because of the outline of its floor plan, the dumbbell was usually seven or eight stories high, with shallow, sunless, air shafts providing minimal ventilation

13. The New Immigration • In each of the three decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, more than 2 million migrants had stepped onto America’s shores • By the 1880s the stream had swelled to 5 million

14. The New Immigration • Until the 1880s most immigrants had come from the British Isles and western Europe, chiefly Germany and Scandinavia—they were typically Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic types, and they were usually Protestant, except for Catholic Irish and Germans • Many of them boasted of a high rate of literacy and were accustomed to some kind of representative government (many of them took up farming like back at home)

15. Southern and Eastern Europe • But in the 1880s, the character of the immigrant stream changed drastically; the so-called New Immigrants came from southern and eastern Europeans (Italians, Croats, Slovaks, Greeks, and Poles—many of them worshiped in orthodox churches or synagogues)

16. Southern and Eastern Europe • About 60 million Europeans left the Old World in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; more than half of them moved to United States • They made their way to the seaboard cites of the Atlantic Coast, notably New York

17. Southern and Eastern Europe • They came from countries with little history of democratic government; people had grown accustomed to following despotism and where opportunities for advancement were few—largely illiterate and impoverished, many sought industrial jobs • These new peoples totaled only 19 percent of the in pouring immigrants in the 1880s, but by the first decade of the twentieth century, they constitute 66 percent of the total • They hived together in cities like New York and Chicago and soon claimed more inhabitants than many of the largest cities of the same nationality in the Old World

18. Reactions to the New Immigration • The federal government did virtually nothing to ease the assimilation of immigrants into American society • State governments, usually dominated by rural representatives, did even less • Needs fell to the unofficial “governments” of the urban political machines, led by “bosses” of the city

19. Nativists • Viewed eastern and southern Europeans as culturally and religiously exotic hordes and often gave them rude reception • Their high birthrate, common among people with a low standard of living and sufficient, raised worries that the original Anglo-Saxon stock would soon be out-bred and outvoted • New immigrants were willing to work for less and hard to unionize

20. Hull House • The nation’s social conscience gradually awakened to the plight of the cities • Jane Addams acquired the decaying Hull mansion in Chicago and established Hull House, the most prominent, American settlement house • The settlement houses became centers of women’s activism and of social reform • A new profession of social work was created

21. Darwin Disrupts the Churches • Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species • Humans had slowly evolved from lower forms of life—a theory soon to be known as “the survival of the fittest” • The “Modernists” parted company with the “Fundamentalists”

22. Booker T. Washington • Taught black students useful trades for gaining self-respect and economic security • Guided the curriculum at the Tuskegee Institute that was an ideal institute form many black Americans including George Washington Carver

23. W.E.B. Dubois • Assailed Booker T. Washington as an “Uncle Tom” • First black American to receive a degree from Harvard • Demanded complete equality for blacks • Founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910

24. Land Grants • The Morrill Act of 1862 had provided a generous grant of the public lands to the states for support of education • the Hatch Act of 1887, which provided federal funds for the establishment of agricultural experiment stations in connection with the land-grant colleges. • Private donations also went toward the establishment of colleges, including Cornell, Leland Stanford Junior, and the University of Chicago, which was funded by John D. Rockefeller. • Johns Hopkins University maintained the nation’s first high-grade graduate school

25. The Appeal of the Press • Yellow journalism was created in which newspapers reported on wild and fantastic stories that often were false or quite exaggerated: sex, scandal, and other human-interest stories • Two new journalistic tycoons emerged: Joseph Pulitzer (New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (San Francisco Examiner)

26. The Business of Amusement • Baseball emerged as America’s national pastime • In 1891, James Naismith invented basketball • Wild West” shows, like those of “Buffalo Bill” Cody were ever-popular • The Columbian Exposition in 1893, in Chicago, attracted 27 million

27. Feminist Movement • Feminists also rallied toward suffrage, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890, an organization led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who’d organized the first women’s rights convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, NY) and Susan B. Anthony