Chapter 18 "Civilizations Inferno" The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities 1800-1917

The New Metropolis

The Industrial City

  • Travel in the larger American city was difficult 

    • Congestion in the cities led to mass transportation

    • Manhattan’s subway 

  • Suburbs for the wealthy 

    • Developed partly due to mass transportation like railroads

    • Can we think of any of these suburbs?

The Modern City

  • The skyscraper

    • New technology 

    • Increased profits

    • Symbols of business prowess

  • Chicago School

    • Chicago soon pioneered skyscraper construction, though New York later took the lead 

  • The Electric City

    • Electric street lights began to replace dim gaslights to brighten streets and public spaces

Newcomers and Neighborhoods

  • Young men and women from rural areas looking for work move to cities

  • Cities also became homes for millions of immigrants from overseas

  • Arriving in the metropolis, immigrants confronted many difficulties, and most relied on relatives and friends to get oriented and find employment

Ethnic Urban Communities

  • Patterns of settlement varied by ethnic group

  • Newspapers and mutual Benefit Societies, sprang up to serve the social and economic needs of ethnic urban communities

    • Sharply defined ethnic neighborhoods grew in every major city

      • Growth driven by discrimination, immigrants’ desire to stick together, and class divisions

The Great Migration

  • A great African American migration from the rural South to southern and northern cities began at the turn of the century

  • Urban blacks could not escape discrimination and mistreatment

  • Job opportunities were few and usually limited to the service sector

  • Race riots periodically plagued the black urban community in both northern and southern cities, often targeting black business districts

Tenements

  • Working-class city residents needed cheap housing near their jobs

  • Middle-class families moving to the suburbs

  • Tenements were built in their place

    • 5 or 6 story buildings that housed twenty or more families in cramped, airless apartments

  • Housing codes were eventually established requiring indoor toilets and fire safeguards 

  • These laws did not apply to the thousands of tenements already in existence

Urban Amusements

  • By the the twentieth century, new entertainments had emerged among the working classes

  • Intellectual institutions, like museums and opera houses were established

  • Vaudeville theater

    • Customers could walk in any time and watch a continuous sequence of musical acts, skits, and other entertainment

  • Movie theaters 

  • Amusement parks 

    • Most famously at New York’s Coney Island

Ragtime and City Blues

  • Popular music also became a booming business in the industrial city

  • By the 1890s, Tin Pan Alley, the nickname for New York City’s song-publishing district, produced dozens of such national hit tunes as “A Bicycle Built for Two” and “My Wild Irish Rose.”

  • Black performers soon became stars in their own right with the rise of ragtime. 

    • The exciting “ragged rhythm” became wildly popular across class and race lines, as it differed from Victorian hymns and parlor songs

  • Scott Joplin, a master of the genre, hoped to elevate African American music and secure a broad national audience

  • Ragtime ushered in an urban dance craze 

    • Bunny Hug and Grizzly Bear

  • Blues music appealed to young urbanites, who were far from home experiencing loneliness, dislocation, and disappointment along with the thrills of city life

  • Ragtime and blues profoundly influenced American culture 

  • Youth brazenly appropriated black musical styles

New Sexual Freedoms

  • The new custom of dating started among the working class

    • Became more acceptable for a young man to escort a young woman out on the town 

  • Dating and casual sex were hallmarks of an urban world in which large numbers of residents were young and single

  • In addition many industrial cities developed robust gay subcultures

High Culture

  • For elites, the rise of great cities offered an opportunity to build museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions that could flourish only in major metropolitan centers

  • Millionaires patronized the arts partly to advance themselves socially but also out of a sense of civic duty and national pride

  • Art museums, history museums, and public libraries grew into major urban institutions

Urban Journalism

  • Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst established newspaper empires 

    • Printed sensational scandals and injustices to attract readers

    • “Yellow journalism,” a derogatory term used for these papers

    • Will have major implications later on

    • Is it still happening now?

  • By 1900, magazines introduced middle-class readers to investigative journalism

Muckraking

  • Reporters worked to expose corporate and political corruption 

  • Ida Tarbell exposed the machinations of John D. Rockefeller, and 

  • David Graham Phillips, “Treason of the Senate,” documented the deference of U.S. senators—especially Republicans—to wealthy corporate interests

  • President Roosevelt dismissed exposé journalists as muckrakers who focused too much on the negative side of American life

    • However, thousands of readers were inspired to get involved in reform movements and tackle the problems caused by industrialization

Governing the Great City

Urban Political Machines

  • City growing so fast, government can’t keep up

  • “Private City”

    • Shaped by individuals and profit-seeking businesses

  • Political machines

    • Served as a social services

    • Provided jobs, lending help, and help against the city bureaucracy

  • Acted as middlemen  

  • Exacted a price in return for its favors

    • Tenement dwellers gave votes and businesses wrote a check

  • Boss Tweed made Tammany Hall synonyms with corruption

    • Eventually arrested

    • Decline in the more blatant forms of machine corruption

  • Only public service available to immigrants

  • Machines had some successes

    • Built sewage systems, bridges, parks

  • Ultimately machines could not keep up with growth of cities 

    • Corruption

    • Could only help individuals on a local level, in limited ways

The Panic of 1893

  • Exacerbated already existing problems 

    • Working-class unemployment 25% in some cities 

    • Homelessness and hunger were rampant

  • Worse depression until the 1930’s

    • Radicalized many urban voters 

    • Turned away from machines when better alternatives arose

The Limits of Machine Government

  • Middle-class reformers slowly defeated machine supported candidates 

    • Promised reduction in crime, affordable housing, and more schools

    • Experimented with new ways of organizing municipal government

  • National Municipal League

    • Advised cities to elect small councils and hire city managers to direct operations like a corporate executive

Fighting Dirt and Vice

  • Progressivism

    • Overlapping movements by working-class radicals and middle-class reformers to 

    • Wanted to combat the ills of industrialization

  • Jacob Riis 

    • Used photography to expose the problems of poverty, disease, and crime in the tenements

Cleaning Up Urban Environments

  • Public health movement became one of the era’s most visible and influential reforms

  • In cities, the impact of pollution was more obvious than in rural areas

    • Children played on piles of garbage, breathed toxic air, and consumed poisoned food and water

    • Infant mortality rates were shocking

“City Beautiful” Movement

  • Aimed to make industrial cities healthier and nicer places

    • Outraged, urban reformers mobilized to demand safe water and better garbage collection

    • Hygiene reformers taught hand-washing and other techniques to fight the spread of tuberculosis

Social Settlements

  • Community welfare centers 

    • Investigated the plight of urban poor and advocated for change

    • The most famous of these was Hull House on Chicago’s West Side

    • Founded in 1889 by Jane Addams 

  • Addams envisioned Hull House as a link between the middle and working classes 

    • A place where both learned about each other and shared what each could offer

Margaret Sanger

  • Horrified by women’s suffering from constant pregnancies and launched a national birth control movement

  • Started Planned Parenthood

    • Also supported Eugenics 

  • Rejected the older model of private Christian charity

    • Settlement work served as a springboard for social work

Upton Sinclair

  • Wrote The Jungle

    • Exposé of labor exploitation in Chicago meat-packing plants

    • Descriptions of rotten meat and filthy conditions caught the nation’s attention

  • Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) 

  • Food and Drug Administration

Cities Rise and National Politics

  • Urban reformers began to realize they could affect national politics 

  • The National Consumers’ League, encouraged shoppers to patronize only stores where wages and working conditions were fair

  • Many labor organizations, such as the Women’s Trade Union League, grew to national stature 

    • Trade union women and their wealthy allies also joined together in the broader struggle for women’s rights

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  • Fire in 1911 that led to the deaths of 146 garment workers

    • Mostly young immigrant women

    • Shock, anger, and grief crossed ethnic, class, and religious boundaries 

    • Showed the need for state and national action 

  • Problems of the industrial city had outgrown power of political machines

Aftermath

  • Showed problems of the industrial city had outgrown the power of the political machines 

    • Only stronger state and national laws could affect serious change

    • Helped build reform movements 

  • By 1900 America was a global industrial power 

    • Far more ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse