AMERICA MOVES TO THE CITY: 1865-1900Urban FrontierNew ImmigrationSocial Reforms

The Urban FrontierL.A. 1850: 1, 6101900: 107,000New York 1850: 682,0001900: 4.2 millChicago 1850: 29,9631900: 1.7 mill

Forging the City• Streetcars and autos

would replace horse and buggy

• Compact “walking cities” gave way to megacities

• Specialized districts were created to separate businesses, industry and residencies

• Industrial jobs drew people by the thousands

• Electric elevator made skyscrapers possible

• Engineering ingenuity made cities more glamorous and enticing

Lower Broadway, 1875

Department Stores (Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Macy’s in NYC):• Attracted middle-class shoppers; provided

jobs; ushered in new era of Consumerism• Created a culture of waste, boxes, bags,

bottles needed to be tossed• Clothing became trendy w/ new styles

outdating previous clothes worn• The Urban Age had dawned…

Problems Associated with Urbanization:• Crime flourished• Safety standards were non-existent • Sanitation couldn’t keep up• Impure water, uncollected garbage, unwashed

bodies led to city stench• Poor beggars contradicted shiny new styles and

wealth• Slums grew more crowded with the poor and

unemployed• Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives

Assimilation tough for immigrants• Federal Gov’t did almost nothing to

help immigrants assimilate into American society

• City gov’ts overwhelmed by the size and scope of growth didn’t do much

• Unofficial ‘governments’ of urban machines helped with assimilation

• Big Bosses traded jobs and services for votes

• Big Bosses provided homes, jobs and food for the votes

• Bosses helped get hospitals and schools built in poor neighborhoods

Nations’ conscience did finally take note:• Jane Addams, prosperous Illinois

family and college-educated founded the Hull House in Chicago

• Offered instruction in English, counseling for new immigrants, child-care services and cultural activities

• Settlement Houses founded in other cities in US became centers of social activism

Looking Backward, 1893

The South lagged behind the North in education:• 44% of non-

whites were illiterate (1990)

• Jim Crow Laws still made it difficult to partake equally in society

• Booker T. Washington (ex-slave) founded the Black Normal and Industrial School at Tuskegee, Alabama

• Black students were taught useful trades; self-respect and economic security

• Criticized for not demanding equality• He accepted segregation and worked diligently to

provide his students with a sense of economic independence and self-worth w/in the situation they found themselves in

W. E. B. du Bois• Criticized Booker T. Washington for rolling

over on social equality• Earned a Ph.D. from Harvard• Demanded social equality and economic

equality for blacks • Help found the NAACP in 1909• Rejected ‘Gradualism’ • He argued that blacks should be given full

equality in the mainstream of society

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… One ever feels his two-ness- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”

- W.E.B. du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk