Meeting the Challenges of the New Age Immigration, Urbanization, Social Reform 1820s-1850s

1. 13 Meeting the Challenges of the New Age Immigration, Urbanization, Social Reform 1820s-1850s

2. Meeting the Challenges of the New AgeImmigration, Urbanization, Social Reform1820s-1850s • Immigration and the City • Urban Problems • Social Reform Movements • Antislavery and Abolitionism • The Women’s Rights Movement • Conclusion

3. Chapter Focus Questions • What caused the immigration of the 1840s and 1850s, and what were responses to it? • Why were cities so unable to cope with rapid urbanization? • What motivated reform movements? • What were the origins and political effects of the abolitionist movement?

4. Chapter Focus Questions (cont’d) • How were women involved in reform efforts?

5. North America and Seneca Falls

6. Women Reformers of Seneca Falls Respond to the Market Revolution • 1848: 300 reformers at Seneca Falls women’s rights convention • Resolutions calling for a wide range of rights for women, including the right to vote • Just one of many reform movements of the time • Many issues of the time raised but few problems solved

7. Immigration and the City

8. The Bay and Harbor of New York

9. FIGURE 13.1 Urban Growth, 1820–60

10. The Growth of Cities • The market revolution dramatically increased the size of the cities. • “Instant” cities sprung up around critical points in the transportation network. • Chicago, San Francisco and St. Louis grew from towns of 5,000 to cities of 100,000. • By 1860, 20% of Americans lived in cities.

11. MAP 13.1 Distribution of Foreign-Born Residents of the United States in 1860

12. Patterns of Immigration • Immigration was a key part of urban growth. • Beginning in 1830 immigration soared, particularly in the North. • Immigrants came largely from Ireland and Germany.

13. Patterns of Immigration (cont'd) • Life for immigrants was seldom easy, as cities were unprepared for rapid growth and social challenges of immigrant populations.

14. 1858 engraving of an Irish bar in the Five Points area

15. Irish Immigration • First major immigrant wave to American cities • 1845-49: Potato Famine • poor Irish to America • Most lived in cities under miserable conditions

16. Irish Immigration (cont'd) • Most to New York, but Boston, being smaller in size and more homogenous, was overwhelmed by the influx • Catholic Irish faced major religious persecution.

17. Cartoon encounter between a newly arrived Irishman and an African American

18. German Immigration • William Penn in the late 18th century invited German immigration • impressed by German industriousness • 19th century started German influx, by 1854 Germans surpassed Irish immigration • Not as poor as Irish and more likely to become farmers

19. German Immigration (cont'd) • Dispersed settlements (except northeastern cities and the South) • One Southern exception was Texas, where 1830s Mexican land grants attracted Germans.

20. The Chinese in California • The Gold Rush and railroad construction brought Chinese immigrants to California. • San Francisco’s Chinatown is the oldest Chinese ethnic enclave in America and a center of community life.

21. Ethnic Neighborhoods • Almost all new immigrants lived in urban ethnic enclaves. • Ethnic communities provided support for new immigrants as they learned how to survive in new surroundings. • While ethnic communities preserved immigrants’ culture, native-born Americans often viewed ethnic communities with suspicion.

22. P.T. Barnum’s Famous “Curiosity:” General Tom Thumb

23. Urban Problems

24. The Five Points neighborhood in lower Manhattan

25. New Living Patterns in the Cities • Pre-industrial cities—small, compact “walking cities” • Immigration transformed urban life • The gap increased between rich and poor in cities • Cities struggled • services such as water, sewerage, garbage collection

26. New Living Patterns in the Cities (cont'd) • Residential segregation—ethnic neighborhoods and middle class suburbs—increasingly marked cities.

27. FIGURE 13.2 Participation of Irish and German Immigrants in the New York City Workforce for Selected Occupations, 1855

28. Ethnicity in Urban Popular Culture • Irish immigrants faced both job discrimination and cultural denigration. • Gang warfare and urban riots reinforced middle class attitudes toward the Irish. • Minstrel shows and racist characters like Jim Crow reinforced native white prejudices.

29. The Labor Movement and Urban Politics • Worker associations became increasingly angry regarding their declining social and economic status. • Workers’ associations became increasingly class-conscious turning to fellow laborers for support, forming trades unions and workers’ associations.

30. The Labor Movement and Urban Politics (cont'd) • Initially, urban worker protest against change focused on party politics, including the short-lived Workingmen’s Party. • Both major parties tried to woo the votes of organized workers. • By the 1850s, New York City’s Tammany Democratic organization controlled city politics with immigrant support.

31. Civic Order • The popular press and writers like Whitman and Poe responded to new urban communities with penny papers, poetry and murder mystery tales. • Cities began to organize police forces to deal with urban crime.

32. Civic Order (cont'd) • Urban riots in Boston, Philadelphia and New York in the 1840s and 1850s showed that immigrants assimilated slowly and faced nativist resentment.

33. Free African Americans in the Cities • More than half of the nation’s free African Americans lived in the North, mainly in cities, where they encountered: • residential segregation • job discrimination • segregated public schools • limits on their civil rights

34. Free African Americans in the Cities (cont.) • Free African Americans formed community support networks, newspapers, and churches. • The economic prospects of African-American men deteriorated. • Free African Americans engaged in antislavery activities, but were frequent targets of urban violence.

35. The Bone Player

36. Social Reform Movements

37. The Country School (1871)

38. Religion, Reform and Social Control • Middle-class Americans responded to the dislocations of the market revolution by promoting various reform campaigns. • Evangelical religion drove the reform spirit forward. • Reformers recognized that: • traditional small-scale methods of reform no longer worked • the need was for larger-scale institutions

39. Religion, Reform and Social Control (cont’d) • The doctrine of perfectionism combined with a basic belief in the goodness of people and moralistic dogmatism characterized reform. • Regional and national reform organizations emerged from local projects to deal with various social problems.

40. Religion, Reform and Social Control (cont’d) • Reformers mixed political and social activities and tended to seek to use the power of the state to promote their ends.

41. Education and Women Teachers • Educational reformers changed the traditional ways of educating children by: • children no longer sinners with wills to be broken • innocents needing gentle nurturing • The work of Horace Mann and others led to tax-supported compulsory public schools.

42. Education and Women Teachers (cont'd) • Women were seen as more nurturing and were encouraged to become teachers, creating the first real career opportunity for women.

43. The Drunkard’s Progress

44. Temperance • Middle-class reformers sought to change Americans’ drinking of alcohol habits. • Temperance was seen as a panacea for all social problems. • Prompted by the Panic of 1837, the working class joined the temperance crusade. • By the mid-1840s alcohol consumption had been cut in half.

45. FIGURE 13.3 Per Capita Consumption of Alcohol, 1800–60

46. Moral Reform, Asylums, and Prisons • Reformers also attacked prostitution by organizing charity for poor women and through tougher criminal penalties but had little success. • Another dramatic example of reform was the asylum movement spearheaded by Dorothea Dix.

47. Moral Reform, Asylums, and Prisons (cont'd) • Model penitentiaries such as Sing Sing (Ossining, New York) aimed at reform rather than punishment with limited success.

48. MAP 13.2 Reform Movements in the Burned-Over District

49. Utopianism and Mormonism The region of New York most changed by the Erie Canal was a fertile ground for religious and reform movements, earning the name Burned-Over District.

50. Utopianism • Religious utopians like the Millerites and Shakers saw an apocalyptic end of history. The Shakers also practiced celibacy amid a fellowship of equality. • Conversely, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community practiced “complex marriage.”