Ch

apter 25

America Moves to the City1865-1900

City Living

• Population in cities tripled after war• 1900: NYC= 2nd largest city in world• Skyscrapers and Louis Sullivan• Mass transit= commute all over the city and

suburbs• City life comforts and culture of consumerism

draw many from rural areas– City life= wasteful sanitation issues

• Slums and tenement housing vs. wealthy in the bedroom communities

New Immigrants• Starting 1880’s, immigration going up with 5

million people/year– Old Immigrants: easier to assimilate– New Immigrants (after 1880) from southern and

eastern Europe– Ethnic ghettoes, harder to assimilate

• Europe’s population exploding (foodstuff)– European industrialization= draw for farmers- kept

going to US with cheap travel– Letters home, no religious persecution (pogroms)– Jewish immigrants= skilled urban workers (nativists

resented)– Focused on keeping Old Country traditions

Dumbbell TenementThis was the standard architectural plan for the human warehouses on New York’s Lower East Side. Despite the innovation of an air shaft to bring light and ventilation to the middle of the building, only one room in each of the apartments was directly exposed to sunlight and open air. All families on a floor shared the toilet (“W.C.”) in the hallway.

Assimilation

• No one to help assimilate but the political machines

• Washington Gladden; Christian socialists• Jane Addams and Hull House= settlement

house in Chicago– Ease transition into US

– Prompted new settlement houses elsewhere

– Settlement houses= women’s social reform social work as a profession

• Women’s work segregated by race, class, ethnicity and marital status

Old and New Immigration (by decadeIn the 1880s the sources of immigration to the United States shifted from the British Isles and western Europe to southern and eastern Europe. A century later the old “mother continent” of Europe would account for only 10 percent of immigrants to America (see Figure 42.4 on p. 1094).

Mulberry Street on New York City’s Lower East Side, ca. 1900

Nativism

• Nativist resentment toward New Immigrants (American Protective Association)– High birth rate, low standard of living

– Cheap unskilled labor, radical ideas

– Often acted as scabs and were difficult to unionize

• Immigration restrictions in 1882• Literacy tests proposed but not adopted until

1917 (keep out New Immigrants)• 1886: Statue of Liberty

Urban Religion

• How to adapt to urban life?• Churches= wealthy patrons- focus on

materialism and $• New era of revivalists (Dwight Lyman Moody)• Catholicism= #1 denomination in 1900• 2 new denominations formed- Salvation Army

and Christian Scientists• YMCA and YWCA

Morning Service at Moody’s Church, 1908

Public Education

• Tax supported elementary schools (patriotism, literate voters)– By 1870: most states required elementary

– 1880’s and 1890’s: tax supported high schools

– Normal schools

– Parochial schools

• Chautauqua Movement 1874

Booker T. Washington vs. WEB Dubois

• Booker T. Washington head of Tuskegee Institute 1881– Focused on trade- didn’t challenge white

supremacy

– Economic advancement= key

– George Washington Carver- student

• WEB Dubois- Washington= Uncle Tom!– Focus on equality

– Helped start NAACP 1910

– “Talented Tenth”

Libraries and Newspapers• Libraries forming, including Library of

Congress 1897• $60 million from Carnegie all around US• 9,000 libraries by 1900• Newspapers and linotype• Sensational journalism- scandals, sex etc.

– Yellow journalism– Joseph Pulitzer: New York World– William Randolph Hearst: New York Journal– Circulation wars

• Associated Press 1840’s

Morality Issues

• Victoria Woodhull- Woodhull and Claflin’s• Anthony Comstock• Comstock Laws 1873• Battle in society over sexuality and morality

Women and Families in the City• Family structure in danger at end of century

in the city• Divorce rate increasing, delayed marriage,

smaller families• Charlotte Perkins Gilman- Women and

Politics• National Women Suffrage Association 1890• Taken over by Carrie Chapman Catt in 1900• Women granted right to vote in Wyoming

Territory 1869• Black women denied from suffrage movement

Woman Suffrage Before the Nineteenth Amendment

Temperance and Social Reform

• Temperance= middle class assault on working class?

• National Prohibition Party 1869• Anti Saloon League 1893 18th amendment• American Red Cross 1881- Clara Barton