Chapter 18: The Age of the City

Cities & propriety

Women has less social restrictions in cities than in small communities.

Gay men and lesbian women had a space to build their culture and community with a partly insulated hostile gaze from others.

Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe

Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Slovaks, Russian Jews, Armenians, and etc.

Immigrant ghettos

Close-knit ethnic communities within cities: Italian, Polish, Jewish, Slavic, Chinese, French-Canadian, Mexican, and etc.

These communities attempted to establish themselves while preserving feature of the “Old World.”

Henry Bowers

Self-educated lawyer who hated Catholics and foreigners. He founded the American Protective Association, which wanted to stop the immigrants tide.

Immigration Restriction League

Founded in 1894 by 5 Harvard alumni in Boston. It was dedicated to the idea that immigrants entering the country needed to be screen.

They advocated using literacy tests and other standards designed to separate the desirable from the undesirable.

Tax on undesirables

All convicts, paupers, and mentally incompetent were denied entry, and any person that was admitted had a 50 cent tax.

President Grover Cleveland’s veto

In 1897, Congress passed a literacy requirement for immigrants, but it was vetoed.

Cities where Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were recruited to design parks

New York, Brooklynn, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago

A world’s fair in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to America.

Helped to kick of the “City Beautiful” movement.

Daniel Burnham

Architect of the Great White City at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The Great White City was a groups of neoclassical buildings that inspired a movement to create cities with symmetry.

Back Bay

Landfill project in Boston that took 40 years to complete; at that point it was one of the largest public works in American history.

Fashionable districts

Fifth Avenue in New York City, Back Bay and Beacon Hill in Boston, Society Hill in Philadelphia, Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, Nob Hill in San Francisco, etc.

Streetcar suburbs

Dorchester, Brookline, and other cities that catered to a mixture of the wealthy and middle class.

Triple Deckers

Cheap three-story wooden houses in Boston; they were a fire hazard.

Tenement

Multi-family rental building, which eventually started to be used only for slum dwellings

Miserable abodes

Tenements

Jacob Riis

Danish immigrant and New York newspaper reporter and photographer that exposed the conditions of tenement life in his book How the Other Half Lives

Mass Transit

Cable Cars in New York, Chicago, San Francisco

First electric trolley line Richmond, Virginia

John A. Roebling

Designed the Brooklyn Bridge

The Equitable Building

First building (7 ½ stories) in the nation to be built with an elevator

Places with big fires

Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and San Francisco

Perpetual fogs of London

Smoke that covered London due to the debris from burning soft coal

Alice Hamilton

Physician who became and investigator for the U.S> Bureau of Labor, was a pioneer in the identification of pollution in the workplace.

One of the first physicians to identify lead poisoning.

Public Health Service

Organization charged with preventing occupational diseases like tuberculosis, anemia, and carbon dioxide poisoning.

Occupational Health and Safety Administration

Gave the government the authority to require employers to create safe and healthy workplaces, was the legacy of the Public Health Service’s early work.

“Deserving” poor

Those who, according to philanthropic organizations, truly could not help themselves

Street arabs

Poor children in cities, some of them orphans or runaways, living alone or in small groups looking for food.

Honest Graft

Coined by George Washington Plunkitt of New York City’s Tammany Hall.

Pursuing interests of one's party, state, and person.

Gail Borden

Inventor and politician who in the 1850’s developed the method of condensing milk..

The Great Atlantic Pacific Company ( A & P )

Early chain store from the Civil war.

F.W. Woolworth

Opened the Five and Ten Cent Store in Utica, New York

Montgomery Ward

Chicago-based Traveling salesman that distributed a catalog of consumer goods in association with the farmer’s organization, the Grange.

Sears Roebuck

Established by richard Sears in Chicago

Marshall Field

Created one of America’s first department stores

Department stores

Macy’s in New York, Abraham and Straus in brooklyn, Jordan Marsh and Filene’s in Boston, and Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia

National Consumers Leauge

Formed under Florence Kelley, a prominent social reformers; attempted to mobilize the power of women as consumers to force retailers and manufacturers to improve wages and working conditions for women workers.

New Concept of Leisure

Eight hours of work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will

Simon Patten

One of the first intellectual to articulate the new view of leisure in his book, The Theory of Prosperity & The New Basis of Civilization

Abner Doubleday

Supposed inventor baseball, but most of the rules and feature of the game were established by Alexander Cartwright

Albert Spalding

Created the National League, which would rival the American Association

(Baseball)

ringers

non-student athletes used to get an advantage in collegiate games

Amos Alonzo Stagg

Athletic director and coach at the University of Chicago, who led in the formation of the Big Ten

NCAA

National College Athletic Association

Dr. James A . Naismith

invented basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts

George M. Cohan

Irish vaudeville entertainer who became the first great creator of musical comedies in the early twentieth century.

Wrote Yankee Doodle Dandy, Over There, and You’re a Grand Old Flag

Irving Berlin

Veteran of the Yiddish theater, wrote more than 1000 songs for the musical theater during his career.

Wrote Alexander’s Ragtime Band and God Bless America

Vaudeville

Form of theater adapted from French models

Famous promoter was Florenz Ziegfeld of New York

D.W. Griffith

Created The Birth of A Nation, Intolerance, and, others.

His silent epics / filmmaking were very notable.

Anti-Saloon League

Temperance movements attacked saloons, which they blamed for being the reason political machines were so powerful.

John L. Sullivan and “ Gentleman Jim” Corbett

Popular boxing heroes

Ancient Order of Hibernians

Irish Organization that sponsored Fourth of July picnics for the Irish working class of the city.

William Randolph Hearst

Newspaper giant, who established and popularized yellow journalism

Yellow Journalism

Deliberately sensational, often lurid style of reporting presented in bold graphics, designed to reach a mass audience

Edward W. Bok

journalist that took over the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1899, and made it super popular by targeting a mass female audience

Stephen Crane

Known for the The Red Badge of Courage during the Civil War.

Also wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which depicted the grim nature of the urban life.

Theodore Dreiser

influential writer that encouraged other writers to abandon the genteel traditions and write about the social injustices of the present

Frank Norris

Published The Octopus which was an account of a struggle between oppressed wheat farmers and powerful railroad interests in California

William Dean Howells

Wrote The rise of Silas Lapham and other works that described what the considered the shallowness and corruption in search of wealth.

Henry Adams

Historian who published an autobiography, where he portrayed himself as a man disillusioned and unable to relate to his society, even though he lived in it.

Henry James

produced a series of coldly realistic novels: The American, Portrait of a Lady, the Ambassadors, and others.

John Singer Sargent

Great example traditional academic style

Ashcan school

Painters who portrayed the social realities of this era: John Sloan, George, Bellows, Edward Hopper, among others.

Pragmatism

Philosophy developed by William James, a Harvard psychologist.

It was the idea that society should rely for guidance not on inherited ideal and moral principles, but on test of scientific theory

Pragmatic Economists

Richard T. Ely and Simon Patten

Pragmatic Sociologists

Edward A. Ross and Lester Frank Ward

Pragmatic Historians

Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard

Richard Henry Pratt

Organized the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

Women’s Colleges

Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Wells, and Goucher.