Chapter 24

New Immigrants

Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who formed a recognizable wave of immigration from the 1880s until 1924, in contrast to the immigrants from western Europe who had come before them. These new immigrants congregated in ethnic urban neighborhoods, where they worried many native-born Americans, some of whom responded with nativist anti-immigrant campaigns and others of whom introduced urban reforms to help the immigrants assimilate.political machinesA term used to describe political organizations that flourished in urban centers—such as Tammany Hall in New York—that captured the immigrant vote by promising them municipal jobs, housing, and rudimentary social services. Though they were criticized for breeding corruption, their supporters thought they were rendering valuable social services.

political machines

A term used to describe political organizations that flourished in urban centers—such as Tammany Hall in New York—that captured the immigrant vote by promising them municipal jobs, housing, and rudimentary social services. Though they were criticized for breeding corruption, their supporters thought they were rendering valuable social services.

settlement house

Mostly run by middle-class native-born women, settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods provided housing, food, education, child care, cultural activities, and social connections for new arrivals to the United States. Many women, both native-born and immigrant, developed lifelong passions for social activism in the settlement houses. Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago and Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in New York City were two of the most prominent.

liberal Protestants

Members of a branch of Protestantism that flourished from 1875 to 1925 and encouraged followers to use the Bible as a moral compass rather than to believe that the Bible represented scientific or historical truth. Many liberal Protestants became active in the “social gospel” and other reform movements of the era.

Tuskegee Institute

A normal and industrial school led by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama. It focused on training young black students in agriculture and the trades to help them achieve economic independence. Washington justified segregated vocational training as a necessary first step on the road to racial equality, although critics accused him of being too “accommodationist.”

land-grant colleges

Colleges and universities created from allocations of public land through the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887. These grants helped fuel the boom in higher education in the late nineteenth century, and many of today’s public universities derive from them.

pragmatism

A distinctive American philosophy that emerged in the late nineteenth century around the theory that the true value of an idea lay in its ability to solve problems. They thus embraced the provisional, uncertain nature of experimental knowledge. Among the most well-known purveyors of the philosophy were John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and William James.

yellow journalism

A scandal-mongering practice of journalism that emerged in New York during the Gilded Age out of the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The expression has remained a pejorative term referring to sensationalist journalism practiced with unethical, unprofessional standards.

National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

An organization founded in 1890 to demand the vote for women. They argued that women should be allowed to vote because their responsibilities in the home and family made them indispensable in the public decision-making process. During World War I, they supported the war effort and lauded women’s role in the Allied victory, which helped to finally achieve nationwide woman suffrage in the Nineteenth Amendment (1920).

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

Founded in Ohio in the 1870s to combat the evils of excessive alcohol consumption, they went on to embrace a broad reform agenda, including campaigns to abolish prostitution and gain the right to vote for women.

realism

Mid-nineteenth-century movement in European and American literature and the arts that sought to depict contemporary life and society as it actually was, in all its unvarnished detail. Adherents eschewed the idealism and nostalgia of the earlier romantic sensibility.

naturalism

An offshoot of mainstream realism, this late-nineteenth-century literary movement purported to apply detached scientific objectivity to the study of human characters shaped by degenerate heredity and extreme or sordid social environments.

regionalism

A recurring artistic movement that, in the context of the late nineteenth century, aspired to capture the peculiarities, or “local color,” of America’s various regions in the face of modernization and national standardization.

City Beautiful movement

A turn-of-the-century movement among progressive architects and city planners, who aimed to promote order, harmony, and virtue while beautifying the nation’s new urban spaces with grand boulevards, welcoming parks, and monumental public buildings.

World’s Columbian Exposition

Americans saw this world’s fair, held in Chicago, as their opportunity to claim a place among the world’s most “civilized” societies, by which they meant the countries of western Europe. The fair honored art, architecture, and science, and its promoters built a mini-city in which to host the fair that reflected all the ideals of city planning popular at the time. For many, this was the high point of the City Beautiful movement.

Jane Addams

(1860-1935) founded Hull House, America’s first settlement house, to help immigrants assimilate through education, counseling, and municipal reform efforts. She also advocated pacifism throughout her life, including during World War I, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Charles Darwin

(1809-1882) A British naturalist whose 1859 book On the Origin of Species outlined a theory of evolution based on natural selection, whereby the strongest individuals of a particular species survived and reproduced while weaker individuals died out. This theory had an enormous impact not just on science but on religion and society too, as people wrestled with the challenge evolutionary theory posed to biblical notions of divine creation and applied the ideas of natural selection to human society.

Booker T. Washington

(1856-1915) As head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he advocated for vocational education for African Americans so that they could gain economic security. Believing that southern whites were not yet ready for social equality, he instead concentrated on gaining economic power for blacks without directly challenging the southern racial order.

W. E. B. Du Bois

(1868-1963) A Harvard-educated leader in the fight for racial equality, he believed that liberal arts education would provide the "talented tenth" of African Americans with the ability to lift their race into full participation in society. From New York, where he was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he relentlessly brought attention to racism in America and demanded legal and cultural change. During his long life he published many important books of history, sociology, and poetry and provided intellectual leadership to those advocating civil rights. One of his deepest convictions was that American blacks needed to connect their freedom struggle with African independence, and he died as a resident of the new nation of Ghana.

Joseph Pulitzer

(1847-1911) A publisher whose newspapers, including the New York World, became a symbol of the sensationalist journalism of the late nineteenth century.

William Randolph Hearst

(1863-1951) A newspaper magnate who started by inheriting his father’s San Francisco Examiner and ultimately owned newspapers and magazines published in cities across the United States. He was largely responsible for the spread of sensationalist journalism. The Hearst Corporation still owns dozens of newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets in the United States and around the world.

John Dewey

(1859-1952) A leader of the pragmatist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he applied its philosophy to education and social reform, advocating "learning by doing" as well as the application of knowledge to solving real-life problems. He became an outspoken promoter of social and political reforms that broadened American democracy.

Carrie Chapman Catt

(1859-1947) A leader of the revived women’s suffrage movement, she served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 to 1920. She was also active internationally, helping women in other countries gain suffrage and advocating for international peace.

Horatio Alger

(1832-1899) The writer of dozens of novels for children, he popularized the notion of "rags to riches," that by hard work and a bit of a luck, even a poor boy could pull himself up into the middle class.

Mark Twain

(1835-1910) A satirist and writer, he is best known for his books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). His work critiqued American politics and society, especially the racial and economic injustice that he saw in the South and West. Twain traveled abroad extensively, and his work was read and loved around the world.

Henry James

(1843-1916) Expatriate novelist and brother of philosopher William. A master of "psychological realism," he experimented in novels like The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove with point of view and interior monologue.

Winslow Homer

(1836–1910) Boston-born artist who excelled in portraying New England’s pastoral farms and swelling seas in the native realist style.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

(1848-1907) Irish-born sculptor who immigrated to America and produced some of the nation’s finest beaux arts sculptures, including the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common.

Frederick Law Olmsted

(1822-1903) Journalist and leading American landscape architect. His landmark designs include New York’s Central Park, Boston’s "Emerald Necklace," and the campuses of Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

Karl May

A prolific German author who wrote adventure novels and stories, particularly famous for his works set in the American West.