Urban America
1865-1900
Urban Growth
 The old agrarian dream
 Thomas Jefferson wanted America
to become a nation of independent
farmers. The Louisiana Purchase
seemed to fulfill Jefferson’s vision of
enabling America to become an
agrarian republic. During the Civil
War period the sturdy settler
building a log cabin embodied the
agrarian dream.
 The closing of the frontier in 1890
symbolized the end of a historic era
in American history. As the western
frontier experience drew to an end,
a new urban frontier began to
emerge.
Urban Growth
 The new urban reality
 Between 1870 and 1900 urban centers
assumed a dominant role in American life
and culture. Just after the Civil War only
one in six Americans lived in a city. By
1900 one in three Americans made their
homes in cities. By 1920 a majority of the
population lived in urban areas.
 A large number of the new urban dwellers
came from small towns and rural areas.
New mechanical farm equipment pushed
many workers off the land. Still others
wanted to exchange the drudgery of farm
life for the excitement of living in cities.
Electricity, indoor plumbing, telephones,
and department stores all combined to
make cities an irresistible magnet that
promised an exciting new life.
Urban Growth
 Industry and urban growth
 Before the Civil War, factories were
dependent upon water for their power. As
a result, they were usually built in towns
near swift rivers and waterfalls. However,
in the late nineteenth century, factories
increasingly used steam and then electrical
power. Factory owners could now build
their plants near growing centers of
population.
 During the post-Civil War period
transportation centers became booming
industrial cities. Meat-packing plants in
Chicago, flour mills in Minneapolis, and oil
refiners in Cleveland all offered jobs for
unskilled workers.
Urban Growth
 The impact of the electric
trolley car
 New forms of transportation had a profound effect on urban life. In
1888 Richmond, Virginia successfully tested the first electric trolley
system. Within two years 200 other cities opened trolley lines. By
1900, 30,000 cars carried passengers on 15,000 miles of track.
 The new electric street cars encouraged the growth of the central
business district. They also promoted the physical expansion of
cities. For the first time, employees could commute to work from a
new ring of streetcar suburbs. It is important to note that these
suburbs marked the beginning of a process of segregating urban
residents by class, race, and ethnicity.
The New Immigrants
 A new wave of immigration
 Before the 1880s most immigrants to the United
States came from countries in northern and
western Europe. However, the last two decades
of the nineteenth century witnessed a massive
wave of immigrants from southern and eastern
Europe. The overwhelming majority of these
“new” immigrants came from Italy, Poland,
Austro-Hungary, and Russia.
 Europe’s new industrial economy replaced the
older agricultural way of life uprooting millions of
people. Most of the immigrants from Italy and
southern Europe were pushed out by
unemployment and crushing poverty. Jewish
immigrants from Poland and Russia also wanted
to escape from widespread persecution. Almost
all of these uprooted people viewed America as a
land of freedom and opportunity.
The New Immigrants
 A hard new life
 The overwhelming majority of the new immigrants settled in large cities in the northeast
and midwest. They quickly faced a grim reality that tested their optimistic faith in
America and the “land of opportunity.” Many immigrants lived in crowded tenements
and worked 12-hour days in grimy factories, dangerous coal mines, and dreary garmentmaking sweatshops. One Italian saying expressed the sense of disillusionment felt by
many immigrants: “I came to America
because I heard the streets were
paved with gold. When I got here,
I found out three things: First, the
street weren’t paved with gold; second,
they weren’t paved at all; and third, I
was expected to pave them.”
 The bewildered immigrants often
congregated into urban enclaves. The
“Little Italys,” “Little Hungarys” and
other ethnic neighborhoods provided
close-knit communities where the new
immigrants could speak their native
language and practice their religious
faith.
The New Immigrants
 Immigrants and political machines
 Most immigrants were politically inexperienced. America’s
federal system with its local, state, and national
governments seemed complex and overwhelming. As a
result, many immigrants became clients of big city political
machines. The boss and his ward leaders provided poor
immigrants with some welfare in exchange for their votes.
“If a family is burned out,” explained one candid machine
boss, “I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or
Democrats. I just get quarters for them, bring clothes for
them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up till
they get things runnin’ again. Who can tell how many votes
these fires bring me?”
 The political machines provided the new immigrants with a
rudimentary (early stage) form of welfare. At the same
time, venal (corrupt) bosses often engaged in illegal
schemes that cost their cities millions of dollars. New York
City, for example, fell under the control of a group of
corrupt politicians known as the “Tweed Ring” after their
leader “Boss” William Marcy Tweed. Boss Tweed and his
cronies stole as much as $200 million from the public
treasury.
The New Immigrants
 Immigrants and political machines
 Tweed’s reign of unbridled greed and theft
finally came to an end from an unlikely source.
Thomas Nast exposed Tweed’s fraudulent
practices in a series of political cartoons that
mercilessly portrayed the boss as the leader of a
group of thieves and scoundrels. When asked
why he considered Nast such a threat, Tweed
replied that while immigrant voters did not
know how to read, they could “look at the
damn pictures.”
The New Immigrants
 Nativist reaction
 The wave of Irish and German immigrants in the 1840s
sparked a nativist or anti-foreign reaction among native-born
Protestants. The wave of new immigrants at the end of the
nineteenth century provoked a similar nativist response.
 The new immigrants spoke different languages, practiced
different religions, and worked for low wages. Alarmed
nativists accused the new immigrants of being a threat to
their jobs and way of life. Francis A. Walker, president of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, summarized nativist
resentment when he pronounced the newcomers “beaten
men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the
struggle for existence.”
The New Immigrants
 The Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882
 Nativist resentment of immigrants was not limited to
eastern and Midwestern cities. Chinese immigrants were
the largest non-European group in California. Most of
California’s 75,000 Chinese residents lived in sections of
cities called “Chinatowns.” Working class Californians
bitterly complained that Chinese laborers provided unfair
competition because they worked for low wages.
 Proponents of immigration restriction demanded that
Congress enact a law restricting Chinese immigration.
Congress responded to this intense pressure by passing the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law suspended
immigration of all Chinese laborers for ten years. Congress
renewed the law in 1892 and then made it permanent in
1902. The Chinese Exclusion Act marked the first law
enacted to exclude a specific ethnic or racial group from
immigrating to the United States.
Urban Reformers and the Social
Gospel
 Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives
 Immigrant families packed into rows of squalid (filthy and
wretched) tenement buildings. Landlords often
squeezed a family into one airless room. A single square
mile in New York City’s Lower East Side contained
334,000 people, making it the most densely populated
place in the world.
 Jacob Riis was a journalist and photographer who
exposed the poverty and despair of the Lower East Side.
His book How the Other Half Lives (1890) included
particularly poignant (moving) photographs of destitute
families struggling to survive against overwhelming odds.
Riis was not content to simply document the wretched
conditions in New York’s disease ridden tenements. He
hoped that his photographs would shock a complacent
public into calling for reforms. Riis’s concern for the
plight of the poor was not in vain. New York City tore
down some of the worst slums and replaced them with
new parks and playgrounds.
Urban Reformers and the
Social Gospel
 Jane Addams and the settlement house movement
 Jane Addams, like Jacob Riis, chose to devote her life to bettering the conditions
of the urban poor. In 1889 Addams rented Hull House, an old mansion in one of
Chicago’s poorest immigrant neighborhoods. Addams began by providing day
nurseries for working mothers and offering adult-education classes for
immigrants who wanted to learn English.
As Hull House became more successful,
Addams opened a reading room and
installed showers in the basement. At its
peak, Hull House expanded to a dozen
buildings that served 2,000 people a
week.
 Hull House served as a model for other
settlement houses. Idealistic middleclass women took the lead in founding
over 400 settlement houses in cities
across America.
Urban Reformers and the Social
Gospel
 Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel
 Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist theologian, was
deeply stirred by the plight of his parishioners in the
“Hell’s Kitchen” section of New York City. Convinced
that something had to be done, he advocated that
the Christian principles of love and justice should be
applied to the nation’s pressing urban problems.
 Rauschenbusch’s religious philosophy became known
as the Social Gospel. Supporters of the Social Gospel
believed that America’s churches had a moral
responsibility to take the lead in actively confronting
social problems and helping the poor.
Popular Culture
 New forms of popular culture
 The last two decades of the nineteenth
century witnessed the birth and growing
popularity of a number of new forms of
popular culture. While many of these
activities were short-lived, sports generated
major businesses that have endured to the
present day.
 Professional team sports first became
popular during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. Baseball began its
reign as the national pastime when eight
teams formed the National League in 1876.
The American League followed in 1901, the
two rival leagues held the first World Series
in 1903.
1896 Baltimore Orioles
Popular Culture
 Horatio Alger and the self-made man
 Horatio Alger was America’s most popular author of juvenile
fiction. Alger was a prolific (very productive) writer who
published over 100 novels which together sold more than 20
million copies. Each novel tells a formulaic (standard) story of
how an impoverished young boy became successful through
hard work, honesty, perseverance, and luck.
 Alger’s name soon became synonymous with finding fame and
fortune through “luck and pluck.” Indeed, Alger believed that
his novels owed their success to stories that brought to life
“inspiring examples of what energy, ambition, and honest
purpose may achieve.”
 Historians believe that Alger’s books are more than just didactic
(instructive) adventure stories for young readers. His novels
were written as America made the difficult transition from an
agrarian to an industrial society. Alger’s stories reassured
Americans that the poor but determined “self-made man” could
still achieve success in an economy increasingly dominated by
huge corporations.
Popular Culture
 D. W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation
 In late 1903, American audiences shrieked with shock and
delight as they watched a movie called The Great Train
Robbery. The popularity of The Great Train Robbery helped
launched a new American industry that played a significant
role in shaping popular culture. By 1916, some 25 million
people a day spent anywhere from a nickel to a quarter to
laugh at the zany antics of Charlie Chaplin and to fall in love
with the charms of “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford. By
1915 movies had become America’s fifth largest industry, and
Hollywood had become the center of movie production.
 D.W. Griffith quickly established himself as Hollywood’s most
innovative and controversial director. Griffith’s epic movie The
Birth of a Nation was Hollywood’s first blockbuster film and the
highest grossing movie of the silent film era. Although The
Birth of a Nation was a triumph of cinematic art, it is best
remembered for its glorified depiction of the rise of the Ku
Klux Klan after the Civil War. Griffith’s movie helped inspire
the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
Realistic Art and Literature
 A new realism
 Romanticism dominated American art and literature during
most of the nineteenth century. However, the twin forces of
industrialization and urbanization created harsh new social
realities that conflicted with Romanticism’s emphasis upon
nature. A talented group of American artists and authors
rejected Romanticism turning instead to Realism’s hardedged portraits of urban life.
 Realism’s artists and authors focused on the facets of the
modern world they could personally experience. Idealized
landscapes and sentimental love stories seemed out of touch
with America’s raw and raucous (loud and jarring) cities.
Realistic Art and Literature
 The Ashcan School of Art
 Ashcan artists wanted above all to connect with the
crowds and congestion in New York City. They
relished bring part of the city’s vibrant and unruly life.
Ashcan artists typically portrayed working class
taverns, bleak tenements, and dark alleys. For a
famous example of Ashcan art see Cliff Dwellers by
George Bellows.
 Ashcan artists prided themselves on being young and
urban. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City
exposed American artists for the first time to Europe’s
revolutionary Cubist and Modern artists. After touring
the exhibit, Stuart Davis, a leading Ashcan artist, called
the show “the greatest single experience…in all my
work.” The Armory Show marked a watershed
(pivotal) event that had a lasting impact upon
American art.
Realistic Art and Literature
 Realism in literature
 Talented authors also rejected Romanticism. They
strived to create a more authentic and realistic
portrayal of American life by using regional dialects
and describing “true” relationships between people.
 Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser were two of
America’s foremost Realist authors. Crane captured
the impact of poverty in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893). Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) described
the story of a young Wisconsin farm girl who moved
to Chicago to pursue a new life.
The Gulf Stream – Winslow Homer
The Gross Clinic
– Thomas
Eakins
New York City – George Bellows
Stag at Sharkey’s – George Bellows
Tennis at Newport – George Bellows
McSorley’s Bar – John Sloan
Nighthawks – Edward Hopper