I. Introduction
Industrialization increased significantly between 1877 and 1920 in the United States. This development had momentous effects on standards of living and on the nature of everyday life.
II. Technology and the Triumph of Industrialism
A. Birth of the Electrical Industry
Thomas Edison founded the Edison Electric Light Company, perfected the incandescent bulb, and devised a power generation and distribution system.
George Westinghouse’s use of alternating current made transmission of electric power over long distances cheaper than Edison’s direct current method.
B. Henry Ford and the Automobile Industry
Henry Ford’s use of assembly-line methods in the automobile industry made cars more readily available.
C. Carnegie and Steel, DuPont and Chemicals
Andrew Carnegie invested heavily in the best steel-producing technologies. He built his first steel plant near Pittsburgh but soon purchased other mills. He quickly became a primary supplier to the railroads, barbed wire makers, tubing manufacturers, and other end users.
DuPont broadened its production to include a number of chemical products. The company also used innovative management, accounting, and investment procedures.
D. Technology and Southern Industry
Invention of a machine to roll cigarettes combined with the marketing techniques of James B.
Duke made the American Tobacco Company a large nationwide business by 1900.
Electric looms contributed to the growth of southern textile industry and led to the emergence of mill towns in the South.
Northern and European capitalists financed the emergence of the lumber industry and the development of iron and steel manufacturing in the South.
E. Technology and Everyday Life
New machines introduced in the late nineteenth century altered the economy and everyday life, from “ready to wear” clothing and breakfast cereals to perforated toilet paper.
III. Big Business and its Critics
A. Trust and Holding Companies
Consolidation swept the United States. Congress outlawed pools, one popular device, in 1887.
Rockefeller used a “trust” to achieve horizontal integration of the petroleum industry.
The emergence of holding companies led to vertical integration within some industries.
B. Social Darwinism
Business leaders involved in the creation of large corporations often justified their actions by citing the theories of British sociologist Herbert Spencer. Spencer described “Social
Darwinism” as a means of explaining why the rich stayed rich and poor stayed poor: a
Darwinian survival of the fittest applied to human beings.
C. Dissenting Voices

Critics said that trusts and other devices interfered with the American tradition of independence and opportunity.
Some critics, such as Henry George and Edward Bellamy, offered economic ideas aimed at the creation of a utopian society.
D. Antitrust Legislation
A few state governments moved to limit monopolies, and in 1890, Congress passed the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The law was vague and had little immediate effect on trusts since the courts rendered pro-business decisions.
IV. Mechanization and the Changing Status of Labor
A. Frederick W. Taylor
With industrialization, efficient production became crucial to profits. Frederick W. Taylor’s methods of scientific management greatly influenced American thinking.
B. Workers Become Employees
Technological innovation and assembly-line production increased the productivity of workers.
As mass production transformed workers into employees rather than producers, manufacturing was subdivided into small, repetitive, specialized operations.
Now regulated by the clock and production experts, employees resisted their loss of independence in various ways.
C. Women and Children in the Work Force
Employers cut labor costs by hiring more women, particularly for clerical and sales positions.
Consequently, the number of women in domestic-service jobs decreased sharply while the number of women who were typists, bookkeepers, and sales clerks increased dramatically.
A larger number of children began working in nonagricultural jobs, performing light tasks at low wages.
A. Freedom of Contract
Many employers believed in the principle of “freedom of contract,” which allowed them to pay their workers as little as possible.
The Supreme Court overturned most hour laws, but in Muller v. Oregon , it allowed limiting women to ten-hour days, citing their health as a matter of public interest.
E. Railroad Strikes of 1877
The year 1877 witnessed a violent series of strikes aimed at the railroads. Hard times precipitated the incidents, and the strikers enjoyed the sympathy of other workers.
F. Knights of Labor
The Knights of Labor accepted all workers and advocated a harmony of interests among its members. Because the union opposed strikes, it had little bargaining power.
In 1886, a demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago erupted into a riot that revived middle-class fears of unions.
G. American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor emerged as the major union. A craft union, the AFL pressed for shorter hours and the right to bargain collectively.
H. Homestead and Pullman Strikes
In 1892, workers at the Homestead plant of the Carnegie Steel Company went on strike. After guards of the Pinkerton Detective Agency were attacked and routed by striking workers,
Pennsylvania state troops intervened and ultimately crushed the strike.

In 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike. Grover Cleveland, to ensure mail deliveries, sent troops to put down the strike.
I. Labor Violence in the West
Especially violent strikes erupted in the mining industry. Private armies, state militias, and federal troops were necessary to stem the violence, but property damage and injuries were common. Occasionally, there were deaths as well.
Like the Knights of Labor, the IWW welcomed all workers, but it also advocated socialism and espoused the use of violence and sabotage.
J. Women Unionists
Many unions denied the inclusion of women workers, leading female employees to organize their own unions.
K. The Nonunionized Workforce
Only a small percentage of American wage workers belonged to unions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Unions excluded most immigrant and black workers.
In an attempt to cope with the pressures of the machine age, nonunionized workers increasingly turned to fraternal societies.
V. Growth of the Modern American City
A. Mechanization of Mass Transportation
Commuter railroads, cable cars, and street cars allowed for greater mobility in urban America.
B. Population Growth
Between 1870 and 1920, the number of Americans living in cities increased from 10 million to
54 million.
During these years cities grew primarily as a result of annexation and net migration rather than from natural increase.
C. New Foreign Immigration
Most urban newcomers were immigrants from Europe.
A new wave of immigrants, from eastern and southern Europe, frightened Americans because of the emigrants’ customs, different faiths, illiteracy, and poverty.
D. Geographic and Social Mobility
In addition to movement from rural to urban areas, large numbers of people not only moved from city to city but within cities as well.
Migration and occupational change were two paths to improved opportunity. Advance up the social scale through occupational mobility to new jobs was mostly available to white males.
Rates of upward occupational mobility were slow but steady between 1870 and 1920.
A person could also achieve social mobility by acquiring property.
E. Cultural Retention
Immigrants’ cultures helped sustain them in their new home, and Old World institutions also helped them adapt.
F. Urban Borderlands
Immigrants in large cities lived in multi-ethnic neighborhoods.
G. Racial Segregation and Violence

By the late nineteenth century, institutionalized racism forced African Americans to live in highly segregated ghettos. Within these neighborhoods, African Americans nurtured cultural institutions that helped them cope with urban life.
The movement of African Americans to urban areas led to white violence in northern and southern cities. A series of race riots spread across the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Asians faced discrimination and an isolated residential experience similar to that of African Americans.
H. Mexican Barrios
In southwestern and western cities, Mexicans found themselves confined in barrios.
I. Religious Diversity
Immigrants adapted their Old World cultures to the realities of life in America.
The influx of immigrants from 1870 to 1920 changed the United States from a mostly
Protestant nation into one of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Many Catholics and Jews supported liberalizing trends within their religions to accommodate their faiths to their new
American environment.
J. Housing
Urban growth meant masses of people jammed into the inner cities, which led to housing shortages and unsanitary living conditions.
Reform campaigns led to some improvements in housing conditions.
K. Poverty and Crime
The uncertainties of the business cycle meant that many families lived in poverty. Private relief agencies often acted out of the belief that poverty was caused by personal defects.
However, some humanitarians began to advance the more progressive belief that people’s environments caused poverty.
Many people feared urban crime. In all likelihood, cities did not have increased crime, but urban problems proved more conspicuous and sensational than rural crime.
L. Water Supply and Sewage Disposal
Acceptance of the germ theory of disease led many cities to take steps to reduce chances that human waste and other pollutants would endanger water supplies.
Disposal of waste was a major problem in urban areas.
M. Political Machines
Urban growth strained city governments and led to the rise of political machines, which in turn created bosses.
Bosses held their power because they knew the people’s needs, and they solved the problems of everyday life by exchanging favors for votes or money.
N. Civic and Social Reform
Business-minded reformers wanted to elect officials who would control expenses and prevent corruption.
Civic reformers often supported structural changes such as the city-manager and commission forms of government and the nonpartisan, citywide election of officials.
Social reform occurred at all levels of the urban society. Settlement houses fought for school nurses, building codes, public playgrounds, and labor unions.

Many architects and city planners worked to beautify the urban environment with civic centers, parks, and boulevards.
IV. Family Life and Individual Life
A. Family as a Resource
The vast majority of households consisted of nuclear families, although some extended families existed.
Families served as the primary social institution, but some kinship obligations, such as caring for the aged, proved stifling for young immigrants.
B. The Unmarried
A subculture of unmarried young people living separate from their parents emerged in urban areas. Some of the unmarried were homosexuals who formed their own gay subculture.
B. Stages of Life
Distinct social changes occurred: Decreasing birthrates shortened the period of parental responsibility, and formal education made childhood more unique. New institutions assumed tasks once performed by the family.
As infant mortality rates fell, couples had fewer children. Smaller families also improved standards of living.
Holidays and birthdays became a special time for family reunions and child-centered activities.
V. The New Leisure and Mass Culture
A. Increase in Leisure Time
A shorter work week allowed more Americans to enjoy a variety of leisure-time diversions. As a result, a segment of the economy began providing entertainment.
B. Baseball
Baseball gained great popularity. The National League of Professional Baseball Clubs was founded in 1876, and the American League emerged in 1901. In 1903, the first World Series enshrined baseball as the national pastime.
C. Croquet and Cycling
Both men and women played croquet, and the game swept the nation. The popularity of bicycling grew, especially after the invention of the safety bicycle with pneumatic wheels of identical size. The bicycle was influential in freeing women from the constraints of Victorian fashions.
D. Football
College football caused a scandal in 1905 when eighteen players died from game-related injuries. This, in turn, led to the founding of the organization that came to be known as the
National College Athletic Association.
E. Show Business
Dramas with simple plots and settings captured the imaginations of the urban population.
Musical comedies raised audiences’ spirits with song, humor, and dance.
Vaudeville shows gained mass appeal. Shows like the Ziegfeld Follies gave the nation a new model of femininity, but some producers exploited females.
F. Opportunities for Women and Minorities
African Americans, immigrant performers, and women found new opportunities in show business, but it also encouraged stereotyping.
G. Movies

Shortly after 1900, moving pictures started to grow in popularity, and by 1910 motion pictures had become a distinct art form used to tell a story.
H. Yellow Journalism
Yellow journalism, pioneered by people such as Joseph Pulitzer, made the news a consumer product because of growing interest in the bizarre and the sensational.
In this era, mass-circulation magazines appeared, telephone ownership increased, and
Americans sent more mail through the United States Post Office.
The new ways in which Americans entertained themselves in their leisure time often had a homogenizing influence by bringing different ethnic and social groups together.