The Growth of Industrial Prosperity

The Second Industrial Revolution

• Westerners in the late 1800s worshiped progress.

• At the heart of this belief in progress was the stunning material growth produced by what is called the Second Industrial Revolution.

  • The first major change in industry between 1870 and 1914 was the substitution of steel for iron.

• Electricity was a major new form of energy that proved to be of great value.

  • Electricity gave birth to a series of inventions.

  • The creation of the light bulb by Thomas Edison in the United States and Joseph Swan in Great Britain opened homes and cities to electric lights.

  • A revolution in communications began when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876 and Guglielmo Marconi sent the first radio waves across the Atlantic in 1901.

• By the 1880s, streetcars and subways powered by electricity had appeared in major European cities.

• The development of the internal-combustion engine, fired by oil and gasoline, provided a new source of power in transportation.

• Industrial production grew at a rapid pace because of greatly increased sales of man- ufactured goods.

  • In the cities, the first department stores began to sell a new range of consumer goods made possible by the development of the steel and electrical industries.

• Not all nations benefited from the Second Industrial Revolution.

• By 1900, Europe was divided into two economic zones. Great Britain, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, the western part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and northern Italy made up an advanced industrialized core.

• These nations had a high standard of living and decent systems of transportation.

• Another part of Europe was still largely agricultural.

• This was the little-industrialized area to the south and east, consisting of southern Italy, most of Austria-Hungary, Spain, Portugal, the Balkan kingdoms, and Russia.

  • The Second Industrial Revolution, combined with the growth of transportation by steamship and railroad, fostered a true world economy.

  • European capital was also invested abroad to develop railways, mines, electrical power plants, and banks.

Organizing the Working Classes

• The desire to improve their working and living conditions led many industrial workers to form socialist political parties and socialist trade unions.

• In 1848, The Communist Manifesto was published.

  • It was written by two Germans, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were appalled at the horrible conditions in factories.

• Marx believed that all of world history was a “history of class struggles.”

  • According to Marx, oppressor and oppressed have “stood in constant opposition to one another” throughout history.

  • One group of people—the oppressors—owned the means of production (land, raw materials, money, and so forth) and thus had the power to control gov- ernment and society.

• In the industrialized societies of Marx’s day, the class struggle continued.

  • The bourgeoisie —the middle class — were the oppressors.

  • The proletariat—the working class—were the oppressed.

• Marx predicted that the struggle between the two groups would finally lead to an open revolution where the proletariat would violently overthrow the bourgeoisie.

• After their victory, the proletariat would form a dictatorship (government in which a person or group has absolute power) to organize the means of production.

• In time, working-class leaders formed socialist parties based on Marx’s ideas.

• Most important was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which emerged in 1875.

• Despite government efforts to destroy it, the Ger- man Social Democratic Party grew.

  • Socialist parties also emerged in other European states.

  • Marxist parties were divided over their goals.

  • Pure Marxists thought that capitalism would be overthrown in a violent revolution.

• Other Marxists, called revisionists, rejected the revolutionary approach and argued that workers must continue to organize in mass political parties and even work with other parties to gain reforms.

• Anotherforceworkingforevolution- ary rather than revolutionary socialism was the trade union. In Great Britain, unions won the right to strike in the 1870s.

• By 1900, there were two million workers in British trade unions

The Emergence of Mass Society

The New Urban Environment

• By the end of the nineteenth century, the new industrial world had led to the emergence of a mass society in which the concerns of the majority of the population—the lower classes—were central.

  • Between 1800 and 1900, the population in London grew from 960,000 to 6,500,000.

  • Urban populations grew quickly because of the vast migration to cities from rural areas.

• Cities also grew faster in the second half of the nineteenth century because living conditions improved so much that more people could survive there longer.

• Following the advice of reformers, city governments created boards of health to improve the quality of housing.

• Essential to the public health of the modern European city was the ability to bring in clean water and to expel sewage.

• The treatment of sewage was improved by building mammoth underground pipes that carried raw sewage far from the city for disposal.

• The city of Frankfurt, Germany, began its program for sewers with a lengthy public campaign featuring the slogan “from the toilet to the river in half an hour.

Social Structure of Mass Society

• After 1871, most people enjoyed an improved standard of living.

• At the top of European society stood a wealthy elite.

• Marriage also served to unite the two groups.

  • Daughters of business tycoons gained aristocratic titles and aristocratic heirs gained new sources of cash

• The middle classes consisted of a variety of groups.

  • Below the upper middle class, which formed part of the new elite, was a middle group that included lawyers, doctors, members of the civil service, business managers, engineers, architects, accountants, and chemists.

• The Second Industrial Revolution produced a new group of white-collar workers between the lower middle class and the lower classes.

• The middle classes shared a certain lifestyle with values that tended to dominate much of nineteenth- century society.

  • The European middle classes believed in hard work, which was open to everyone and guaranteed to have positive results.

• Below the middle classes on the social scale were the working classes, which made up almost 80 percent of the European population

• The urban working class consisted of many different groups, including skilled artisans and semi-skilled laborers.

• Urban workers experienced an improvement in the material conditions of their lives after 1870.

The Experiences of Women

• During much of the nineteenth century, working-class groups maintained the belief that women should remain at home to bear and nurture children and should not be allowed in the industrial workforce.

• The Second Industrial Revolution, however, opened the door to new jobs for women.

• The expansion of government services created opportunities for women to be secretaries and telephone operators, and to take jobs in the fields of education, health, and social services.

• Throughout the 1800s, marriage remained the only honorable and available career for most women. There was also one important change.

  • The number of children born to the average woman began to decline — the most significant development in the modern family.

  • The family was the central institution of middle- class life.

  • The middle-class family fostered an ideal of togetherness.

  • The lives of working-class women were different from those of their middle-class counterparts.

• Between 1890 and 1914, however, family patterns among the working class began to change.

  • By the early twentieth century, some working- class mothers could afford to stay at home, following the pattern of middle-class women

• Modern feminism, or the movement for women’s rights, had its beginnings during the Enlightenment, when some women advocated equality for women based on the doctrine of natural rights.

  • The fight for property rights was only the beginning of the women’s movement.

  • Though training to become doctors was largely closed to women, some entered the medical field by becoming nurses.

• In Germany, Amalie Sieveking was a nursing pioneer who founded the Female Association for the Care of the Poor and Sick in Hamburg.

• More famous is the British nurse Florence Nightingale.

• Her efforts during the Crimean War (1853–1856), combined with those of Clara Barton in the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), transformed nursing into a profession of trained, middle-class “women in white.”

• By the 1840s and 1850s, the movement for women’s rights expanded as women called for equal political rights.

• The British women’s movement was the most active in Europe.

  • The Women’s Social and Political Union, founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, used unusual publicity stunts to call attention to its demands.

• Before World War I, demands for women’s rights were being heard throughout Europe and the United States.

Universal Education

• Universal education was a product of the mass society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• In the first Industrial Revolution, unskilled labor (workers without training or experience) was able to meet factory needs.

• The new firms of the Second Industrial Revolution, however, needed trained, skilled labor.

• The chief motive for public education, however, was political.

• Compulsory elementary education created a demand for teachers, and most of them were women.

• The most immediate result of public education was an increase in literacy, or the ability to read.

  • With the increase in literacy after 1870 came the rise of mass newspapers, such as the Evening News (1881) and the Daily Mail (1896) in London.

New Forms of Leisure

• The Second Industrial Revolution allowed people to pursue new forms of leisure.

• Amusement parks introduced people to exciting new experiences and technology

• The new mass leisure was quite different from ear- lier forms of popular culture.

The National State and Democracy

Western Europe and Political Democracy

• By the late nineteenth century, progress had been made toward establishing constitutions, parliaments, and individual liberties in the major European states.

• By 1871, Great Britain had long had a working two-party parliamentary system.

• The Liberals and Conservatives competed with each other in passing laws that expanded the right to vote.

  • At the end of the nineteenth century, then, political democracy was becoming well established in Britain.

• The Liberals held the government from 1906 to 1914.

• To retain the support of the workers, they voted for a series of social reforms.

• In France, the collapse of Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire left the country in confusion.

• The powers of the president were not well defined in the constitution.

• A premier (or prime minister) actually led the government.

  • The premier and his ministers were responsible to the Chamber of Deputies, not to the president.

• This principle of ministerial responsibility—the idea that the prime minister is responsible to the popularly elected leg- islative body and not to the executive officer—is crucial for democracy.

• France failed to develop a strong parliamentary system.

• Italy had emerged by 1870 as a united national state.

Central and Eastern Europe: The Old Order

• The constitution of the new imperial Germany begun by Otto von Bismarck in 1871 provided for a two-house legislature

• Ministers of government, however, were responsi- ble not to the parliament, but to the emperor.

• By the reign of William II, emperor from 1888 to 1918, Germany had become the strongest military and industrial power in Europe.

  • Conservative forces—especially the landowning nobility and big industrialists, two powerful ruling groups in imperial Germany — tried to block the movement for democracy by supporting a strong foreign policy.

• After the creation of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867, Austria enacted a constitution that, in theory, set up a parliamentary system with ministerial responsibility.

• In reality, the emperor, Francis Joseph, largely ignored this system.

  • He appointed and dismissed his own ministers and issued decrees, or laws, when the parliament was not in session.

• Austria remained troubled by conflicts between the various nationalities in the state.

• Unlike Austria, Hungary had a parliament that worked. It was controlled by Magyar landowners who dominated the peasants and ethnic groups.

• In Russia, Nicholas II began his rule in 1894 believing that the absolute power of the czars should be preserved

• Industrialization began late in Russia but progressed rapidly after 1890.

• On January 22, 1905, a mas- sive procession of workers went to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a petition of grievances to the czar.

• Nicholas II was eventually forced to grant civil liberties and create a legislative assembly, called the Duma.

The United States and Canada

• Between 1870 and 1914, the United States became an industrial power with a foreign empire.

• Canada faced problems of national unity during this period.

• Four years of bloody civil war had preserved American national unity, but the old South had been destroyed.

  • In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed, abolishing slavery.

• Between 1860 and 1914, the United States shifted from an agrarian to an industrial nation.

• Migration patterns were an important factor. Europeans migrated to both North and South America, but they migrated to the United States in massive numbers—almost 11 million did so between 1870 and 1900.

• In 1900, the United States was the world’s richest nation, but the richest 9 percent of Americans owned 71 percent of the wealth.

  • At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States began to expand abroad.

  • The Samoan Islands in the Pacific became the first important United States colony

  • As more Americans settled in Hawaii, they sought to gain political power.

• When Queen Liliuokalani tried to strengthen the power of the monarchy to keep the islands under her peoples’ control, the United States government sent military forces to the islands.

• In 1898, the United States also defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War.

• The Filipino people hoped for independence, but the United States refused to grant it.

• At the beginning of 1870, the Dominion of Canada had four provinces: Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.

• Real unity was difficult to achieve, however, because of distrust between the English-speaking and French-speaking peoples of Canada.

International Rivalries

• Otto von Bismarck realized that Germany’s emer- gence in 1871 as the most powerful state in continental Europe had upset the balance of power established at Vienna in 1815.

• The Triple Alliance of 1882 united the powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy in a defensive alliance against France

• In 1890, Emperor William II fired Bismarck and took control of Germany’s foreign policy.

• One of the changes he made in Bismarck’s foreign policy was to drop the treaty with Russia.

• Over the next 10 years, German policies abroad caused the British to draw closer to France

• Europe was now dangerously divided into two opposing camps that became more and more unwilling to compromise.

Crises in the Balkans

• Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire had gradually gained their freedom, although regional rivalries between Austria-Hungary and Russia had complicated the process.

• By 1878, Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro had become independent states.

• Bulgaria did not become totally independent, but was allowed to operate under Russian protection.

• The Balkan territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina were placed under the protection of Austria-Hungary.

  • In 1908, Austria-Hungary took the drastic step of annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina.

• The Russians, as protectors of their fellow Slavs, supported the Serbs and opposed the annexation.

• Weakened from their defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Russians backed down but vowed revenge.

• The Serbians blamed Austria-Hungary for their failure to create a large Serbian kingdom.

Toward the Modern Consciousness

A New Physics

• Before 1914, many people in the Western world continued to believe in the values and ideals that had been put forth by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

  • Reason, science, and progress were still important words to Europeans.

• Science was one of the chief pillars supporting the optimistic view of the world that many Westerners shared in the nineteenth century.

• Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Westerners believed in a mechanical conception of the universe that was based on the ideas of Isaac Newton.

  • These views were seriously questioned at the end of the nineteenth century.

• The French scientist Marie Curie discovered that an element called radium gave off energy, or radiation, that apparently came from within the atom itself.

• At the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein, a German-born scientist working in Switzerland, provided a new view of the universe.

• According to this theory, neither space nor time has an existence independent of human experience

• Moreover, matter and energy reflect the relativity of time and space.

Freud and Psychoanalysis

• At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud, a doctor from Vienna, proposed a series of theories that raised questions about the nature of the human mind.

  • According to Freud, human behavior was strongly determined by past experiences and internal forces of which people were largely unaware.

  • According to Freud, repression of such experi- ences began in childhood, so he devised a method—known as psychoanalysis—by which a therapist and patient could probe deeply into the patient’s memory.

• The full importance of Sigmund Freud’s thought was not felt until after World War I

Social Darwinism and Racism

• In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientific theories were sometimes applied inappropriately to achieve desired results.

• The most popular exponent of Social Darwinism was the British philosopher Herbert Spencer.

• In their pursuit of national greatness, extreme nationalists often insisted that nations, too, were engaged in a “struggle for existence” in which only the fittest (the strongest) survived.

• Perhaps nowhere was the combination of extreme nationalism and racism more evident than in Germany.

Anti-Semitism and Zionism

• Anti-Semitism—hostility toward and discrimination against Jews — was not new to European civilization.

• In the nineteenth century, Jews were increasingly granted legal equality in many European countries.

  • Many Jews now left the ghettos and became assimilated into the cultures around them.

  • These achievements were only one side of the picture, however, as is evident from the Dreyfus affair in France.

• Soon after the trial, however, evidence emerged that pointed to Dreyfus’s innocence

• In Germany and Austria-Hungary during the 1880s and 1890s, new parties arose that used anti- Semitism to win the votes of people who felt threat- ened by the changing economic forces of the times.

• Persecutions and pogroms (organized mas- sacres) were widespread.

• Hundreds of thousands of Jews decided to emi- grate to escape the persecution.

• For many Jews, Palestine, the land of ancient Israel, had long been the land of their dreams.

• Settlement in Palestine was difficult, however, because it was then part of the Ottoman Empire, which was opposed to Jewish immigration.

The Culture of Modernity

• Between 1870 and 1914, many writers and artists rebelled against the traditional literary and artistic styles that had dominated European cultural life since the Renaissance.

• The changes that they produced have since been called modernism.

• Throughout much of the late nineteenth century, literature was dominated by naturalism.

  • At the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of writers known as the symbolists caused a literary revolution

• The period from 1870 to 1914 was one of the most productive in the history of art.

• Impressionism was a movement that began in France in the 1870s, when a group of artists rejected the studios where artists had traditionally worked and went out into the countryside to paint nature directly.

  • One important Impressionist is Claude Monet, who painted pictures in which he sought to capture the interplay of light, water, and sky.

• In the 1880s, a new movement, known as Postimpressionism, arose in France and soon spread to other European countries

• By the beginning of the twentieth century, the belief that the goal of art was to represent reality had lost much of its meaning

• Artists came to realize that their strength was not in mirroring reality, which the camera could do, but in creating reality.

• By 1905, one of the most important figures in modern art was beginning his career.

• Pablo Picasso was from Spain but settled in Paris in 1904.

• In 1910, abstract painting began.

• Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian who worked in Germany, was one of the founders of abstract expressionism

• Modernism in the arts revolutionized architecture and gave rise to a new principle known as functionalism.

• The United States was a leader in the new architecture.

• One of Sullivan’s most successful pupils was Frank Lloyd Wright.

• At the beginning of the twentieth century, developments in music paralleled those in painting.

  • The music of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was the first to reflect expressionist theories.

  • Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring revolutionized music.