APUSH I Final Exam Chapter18

“Tenement”

• This word used to describe any multi-family rental building, but by this time it was only used to describe crowded slum dwellings inside cities

• In New York City, more than a million people lived in a tenement, and while they were first built as an improvement to house the poor, they quickly became known as “miserable abodes”

• Landlords tried to squeeze rent payers into as little room as possible, leaving people to survive in windowless rooms with little or no plumbing

These structures were so dangerously packed that a New York law was passed to add windows in every bedroom to help fix the extreme crowding

Jacob Riis

• A Danish immigrant and New York newspaper reporter and photographer who became a leading urban reformer

• He shocked Americans with his descriptions and photos of tenement life by exposing exactly how poor families lived in the city slums

• In his public advocacy, he suggested getting rid of these dwellings entirely, though he and other reformers notably offered no other alternatives for where the displaced poor people should live

How the Other Half Lives

• A powerful, groundbreaking book written and published by the reporter and reformer Jacob Riis

• Inside its pages, he used vivid descriptions and photos of tenement life to expose the brutal realities of urban poverty to the public

• He famously wrote that these slum dwellings were almost universally sunless, airless, and poisoned by summer smell, which deeply shocked middle-class readers and sparked demands for housing reform

“Bosses”

• These were powerful political leaders who emerged to run the urban political machines, and they were mainly foreign-born or parentage Irish men

• Their main function was to win votes for their organization by winning the loyalty of constituents, which they did by doing favors like buying gifts for local families

• They became incredibly rich through corruption and held massive power because they could easily mobilize the large voting blocs of immigrant communities

‘Machines’

• These were highly organized, distinctive political institutions in cities that owed their existence to the rapid growth of cities and the voting power of large immigrant communities

• They functioned as vehicles for making money, and any politician who could mobilize their power gained immense political influence

• While they were heavily hated by the middle class for their deep corruption, these organizations actively helped immigrants adjust to new communities and assisted with many city advancements like modernizing infrastructures

Tammany Hall

• This was the most famous and powerful urban political machine, located in New York City

• Tweed was their most infamous leader

• It was notorious for its political corruption, though its leaders defended their actions as normal business, calling it an “honest graft” because it was done pretty openly

The machine faced heavy competition over the years, and its candidates for mayor or other high city offices lost almost as often as they won because critics constantly fought to change the city government

William. M. Tweed

• He was the most famously corrupt city boss in American history, serving as the head of New York City's Tammany Hall machine

• Through his massive rings of fraud, kickbacks, and dishonesty, he stole millions of dollars from the city before his crimes caught up with him, and he ultimately landed in jail

Vaudeville

• This was a highly popular form of theater adapted from French models that became the most popular form of urban entertainment in late-19th-century cities

• It consisted of a variety of acts like musicians, comedians, and magicians, and it was famously inexpensive at first, allowing working-class families to easily afford it

It became so popular that even saloons began hosting vaudeville performances, and it stood out as one of the few entertainment media open to African performers, bringing in some traditional elements of minstrel shows

Thomas Edison

• He was a world-famous American inventor who, along with other scientists, created the technology of the motion picture in the late 1800s

• His early technological breakthroughs made it possible to project moving images onto screens, laying the groundwork for the modern movie industry

• This technology quickly turned movies into the most important and affordable form of mass entertainment for millions of city residents

Birth of a Nation

• This was a historic and highly controversial silent movie created and directed by D.W. Griffith

• It marked a new era in cinema because it introduced long, serious plots and huge, expensive productions to filmmaking, but it was also overall very racist

The film openly celebrated the KKK and gave demeaning portraits of Africans, which clearly showed that early Hollywood movies were predominantly white and served to spread prejudice

William Randolph Hearst

• He was an incredibly powerful media businessman who built the most important newspaper chain in the United States

• At the peak of his power, he personally controlled 9 newspapers and 2 magazines, giving him massive control over what information reached the public

• Along with his main business rival, he used bold graphics and shocking stories to capture readers, helping to create and popularize the term “yellow journalism”

Joseph Pulitzer

• He was a highly successful newspaper publisher who served as the main business rival to William Randolph Hearst

• To outsell his competitor, he used eye-catching headlines, bold graphics, and dramatic story descriptions to attract massive crowds of city readers

• His fierce battle for public attention helped popularize the style known as “yellow journalism”, changing how news was reported in America

“Yellow journalism”

• This was a sensational, lurid style of reporting presented in bold graphics designed to reach a mass audience

• The term was popularized by rival newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer as they fought for control of the news market

• Instead of sticking to plain facts, this style focused on shocking, dramatic stories to hook everyday readers and sell as many daily papers as possible

Upton Sinclair

• He was a passionate socialist writer who published a novel designed to reveal the depravity of capitalism

• In his book, he completely exposed abuses in the American meatpacking industry, describing the filthy, unsafe conditions where the nation's food was made

While his main goal was to help factory workers, his shocking book helped produce legislative action to deal with the problem as angry citizens demanded safer food

Charles Darwin

• He was a world-famous English naturalist who revolutionized scientific thought in the late 19th century

• He is historically important because his groundbreaking theory of evolution became the most profound intellectual development in the late 19th century

His scientific writings completely challenged the biblical story of creation and religious faith stories, which split American thought between progressive cities and traditional rural regions

“Natural selection”

• This was the core scientific process associated with the English naturalist Charles Darwin

• It argued that the human species evolved from earlier forms of life (most recently from creatures similar to apes) through a random survival process

• Under this idea, history was not the working out of a divine plan, but was instead a random process dominated by the fiercest/luckiest competitors

• While this theory received a lot of resistance at first, evolutionists and even Protestants later accepted it, and it was quickly placed into schools and universities

Social Darwinism

• This was a conservative social philosophy that grew out of the widespread acceptance of the theory of evolution

• It took Darwin's ideas about nature and applied them to human society, arguing that wealthy people were rich because they were naturally superior

Wealthy industrialists used this to justify their favored position in American life, claiming that corporate success was simply a result of the "survival of the fittest"