Urbanization Group Worksheet
Directions: Read the documents provided to you. Answer the questions provided and define the terms, and
write your own questions at the bottom.
Terms
Jacob Riis:
"muckrakers":
"germ theory":
Filtration:
Chlorination:
Great Chicago Fire of 1871:
Tenements:
Settlement houses:
Mass transportation:
Street cars:
Social Gospel Movement:
Jane Addams:
Hull House:
Washington Gladden:
William Dwight Porter Bliss:
Walter Rauschenbusch:
Frederick Nymeyer:
Explain how each of the following affected urban life
1. Crime
2. Sanitation
3. Water
4. Fire
5. Housing
6. Transportation
Questions
1. What factors contributed to the rise of the modern city?
2. What is Jacob Riis important for?
3. Name some challenges that modern cities had to deal with?
4. How did the city governments attempts to alleviate the problems of urbanization?
5. How and why did water treatment become important to cities?
6. How did mass transportation change the size and importance of cities?
7. How does the ideological position of Social Gospel Movement compare to Andrew Carnegie's position in his
"Gospel of Wealth" essay?
8. What did the critics of the Social Gospel Movement say against the movement?
9. What are tenements? Why were the conditions so bad?
10. What was the purpose of the Hull House?
Use this space to write your own questions to ask at the end of the lesson
1.
2.
3.
AH12“Immigration
Internal Migration
and Urbanization
transformed
American life”
The Rise of the Modern City
In the 40 years after the Civil War, over 24 million people flocked to American cities. They came from
rural areas in the United States but also across oceans from farming areas and industrial cities in Europe. While
the United States' rural population doubled during these years, the urban population increased more than sevenfold. In 1860, 16 cities had a population over 50,000 and only nine had a population over 100,000. By 1900, 38
cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants.
The modern American city was not simply a larger version of older towns. In the late 19th century,
American cities changed dramatically in physical size and spatial layout. In Boston in 1873, the outer boundary of
settlement stood just two-and-a-half miles from City Hall. In the 1890s, after the establishment of the electric
street railway, the outer border of settlement was six miles away. By annexing surrounding lands and filling in
bays, cities grew larger, allowing for greater differentiation in the use of space.
Manufacturing and commerce crowded into city centers. Meanwhile, the development of steam railroad
lines in the 1860s, electric-powered streetcars and elevated railways in the 1880s, and electric trolleys in the
1890s allowed the wealthy and the middle class to move along newly constructed trolley and rail lines to the
country's first suburbs. At the same time the urban poor were concentrated in newly constructed tenements, few
of which had outside windows. Less than 10 percent had indoor plumbing or running water.
Pasted from <http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=208>
Jacob Riis
Through a pioneering blend of investigative reporting and documentary photojournalism, Jacob Riis
helped to expose the horrible conditions of the slums in which the lower classes of New York City lived.
Riis emigrated to the United States from Denmark in 1870 at the age of 21, and he knew what it was like
to be desperately poor and live in substandard tenement housing. In 1877, Riis became a police reporter for the
New York Tribune, before becoming a reporter for the New York Evening Sun in 1888. Working as a police
reporter enabled Riis to write stories about the New York City slums and to learn more about the immigrant
neighborhoods that would later serve as the focus of his calls for social reform.
Riis's use of flashlight powder allowed him to take pictures of the interiors of shoddy tenement housing images of extreme poverty that shocked the New York middle and upper classes. In 1890, Riis published his most
famous work, How the Other Half Lives, a book that used revealing photojournalism and detailed analysis of the
housing problems afflicting poor immigrants to argue in favor of reforming New York's tenements.
This groundbreaking book launched Riis on a career of social reform, and he devoted the rest of his life to
raising awareness about the grim realities facing poor immigrants inside New York City's slums. Riis's work
brought him to the attention of one particularly important New Yorker, Theodore Roosevelt, who served as
president of the New York Board of Police Commissioners from 1895 to 1897. Roosevelt and Riis became fast
friends, and Roosevelt reportedly went with Riis on some of his late-night adventures into the New York slums to
investigate living conditions.
Riis and other Progressive-era reformers, often called "muckrackers," contended that poverty was the
product of imperfect social and economic systems, and that it could therefore be reduced through increased
government regulation of the economy. The idea that poverty can be eliminated through government-sponsored
reforms, which Riis helped to promote, has had long-term effects on American politics through the present day.
Riis was far from the only reformer who espoused this opinion in the late 19th century, but he was one of the
earliest and most influential advocates of modern social reform. Riis died on March 26, 1914.
Pasted from <http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/people_riis.html>
Directions: Analyze each picture by Jacob Riis. What message about the urban poor is Riis trying to get
across?
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871
Legend has it that on the evening of October 7, 1871, Mrs. Catherine O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern,
touching off the Great Chicago Fire. On the drought-stricken evening that the fire started, a 30-mile-per-hour
wind was blowing from the southwest. Fanned to ferocity the blazed scorched its way north and east. Curiously,
Mrs. O'Leary's house was almost untouched. Even the barn where the fire started had only a corner burned out.
Today, the Chicago Fire Academy occupies their place.
The fire raged for 30 hours. The blaze, leaping from house to house, ultimately destroyed four-and-a-half
square miles of Chicago--some 17,500 buildings. By the time the fire burned itself out on October 10, the entire
business district was destroyed. Six railroad depots and Marshall Field's department store had gone up in flames.
At times, temperatures reached 1,500 to 1,800 degrees. People were incinerated; limestone disintegrated into
powder. Some 250 people were known dead and another 200 were listed as missing and 100,000 people were left
homeless.
It seems doubtful that Mrs. O'Leary's cow actually started the fire. It seems likely that this myth, which
was popularized by a 1938 movie "In Old Chicago," was the product of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic prejudice. Lyrics
about Mrs. O'Leary were written to the tune of "Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." Chicago had thousands of
wooden buildings and miles of wood-paved streets and sidewalks to burn. There was a months-long drought that
year. In 1997, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution officially exonerating Mrs. O'Leary of blame.
Firefighters were exhausted from battling a 16-hour fire the previous days. That blaze had injured 30 firefighters.
To fight the new fire, Civil War General Philip Sheridan mobilized private citizens. When the fire was finally
extinguished, he declared martial law and used guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to prevent looting.
The Great Fire overshadowed another huge blaze at the same time. On October 8, 1871, the most devastating
forest fire in American history swept through northeast Wisconsin. Apparently, railroad workers clearing land for
tracks started a brush fire that soon became an inferno. Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a lumber town not far from Green
Bay, was devastated along with 16 other towns and 1.25 million acres of surrounding forest. Nearly 1,200 people
died.
Pasted from <http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=207>
Tenements
The immigrant poor lived in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe housing. Many lived in tenements,
dumbbell-shaped brick apartment buildings, four to six stories in height. In 1900, two-thirds of Manhattan's
residents lived in tenements.
In one New York tenement, up to 18 people lived in each apartment. Each apartment had a wood-burning
stove and a concrete bathtub in the kitchen, which, when covered with planks, served as a dining table. Before
1901, residents used rear-yard outhouses. Afterward, two common toilets were installed on each floor. In the
summer, children sometimes slept on the fire escape. Tenants typically paid $10 a month rent.
In tenements, many apartments were dark and airless because interior windows faced narrow light shafts,
if there were interior windows at all. With a series of newspaper articles and then a book, entitled How the Other
Half Lives, published in 1889, Jacob Riis turned tenement reform into a crusade.
Pasted from <http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=210>
History of the Social Gospel Movement
Observing America in the late 19th century, British writer G.K. Chesterton called the United States "a
nation with the soul of a church." At that time, the Protestant church began tackling social reform in what has
become known as "social Christianity," or sometimes "Christian socialism," which was later adapted into the
more moderate "Social Gospel."
The movement was a response to the rapid urbanization, industrialization, and mass immigration of the
late 1800s. Protestant clergymen became interested in securing social justice for the poor, partly as an attempt to
expand the appeal of the Protestant church in cities, where the Roman Catholic church was especially popular
among the large immigrant population. Traditionally, the Social Gospel has focused on issues as varied as
poverty, unemployment, civil rights, pollution, drug addiction, political corruption, and gun control.
The READER'S COMPANION TO AMERICAN HISTORY mentions three leaders of the Social Gospel
movement: Washington Gladden, who "sympathized with workers and urged them to seek unity in Christianity,"
William Dwight Porter Bliss, who worked with the Knights of Labor and Socialist party, and Walter
Rauschenbusch, a New York City Baptist minister who "called for a democratic cooperative society to be
achieved by nonviolent means."
In his book CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS, Rauschenbusch wrote of the Social Gospel:
Will the twentieth century mark for the future historian the real adolescence of humanity, the great emancipation
from barbarism and from the paralysis of injustice, and the beginning of a progress in the intellectual, social, and
moral life of mankind to which all past history has no parallel?
It will depend almost wholly on the moral forces which the Christian nations can bring to the fighting line
against wrong, and the fighting energy of those moral forces will again depend on the degree to which they are
inspired by religious faith and enthusiasm.
The Social Gospel rejected the conservative individualistic social ethic, instead developing a distinctively
optimistic rationale as a result of "the theological liberalism that emerged out of attempts to reconcile the
Christian faith with evolutionary thought, historical-critical analysis of the Bible, philosophical idealism, and the
study of other world religions."
The core of Christian progressivism was "work in this world to establish a Kingdom of God with social
justice for all." The results of the movement were mixed. Although it helped liberalize organized religion and
inspired many political and social reformers to look at reform in moral terms, the Social Gospel failed to win over
many urban immigrants, and offered few long-term solutions to urban problems.
However, the work of the progressive social reformers was not in vain. Organized social concern and
many of the reforms it inspired have remained intact through the twentieth century and continue today, evident
both in current social welfare programs. The spirit and mission of the Riverside Church can be linked to the
tradition of the Social Gospel, often said to be one of the most powerful religious movements in American history.
Critics of the Social Gospel, such as Frederick Nymeyer, publisher and principal author of
PROGRESSIVE CALVINISM, point to the fact that it has never yet been successful at effecting social change.
Writing in 1971, Nymeyer expressed his opinion in SOCIAL ACTION, HUNDRED NINETEEN:
The Social Gospel may be the most crucial of all problems besetting Christian churches at this time, for
when a Christian's ethical certitudes are revealed to be defective, as it always turns out to be in the Social
Gospel, then he ends up abandoning confidence in valid, Biblical faith. In practice what happens is that
when Social Gospel action fails to produce valid results, the person promoting such programs does not
abandon the Social Gospel and return to the true Gospel, but plunges deeper into further Social Gospel
actions with progressively more frustrating results.
Despite unfavorable evaluation, the movement by religious organizations and churches toward social
reform has not diminished. In fact, in the past few decades, powerful groups have sprung up expressly for the
purpose of influencing public policy.
Pasted from <http://www.pbs.org/now/society/socialgospel.html>
Jane Addams
Born in Cedarville, Illinois, on September 6, 1860, and graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in
1881, Jane Addams founded, with Ellen Gates Starr, the world famous social settlement Hull-House on Chicago's
Near West Side in 1889. From Hull-House, where she lived and worked until her death in 1935, Jane Addams
built her reputation as the country's most prominent woman through her writing, settlement work, and
international efforts for peace.
Social settlements began in the 1880s in London in response to problems created by urbanization,
industrialization, and immigration. The idea spread to other industrialized countries. Settlement houses typically
attracted educated, native born, middle-class and upper-middle class women and men, known as “residents,” to
live (settle) in poor urban neighborhoods. Some social settlements were linked to religious institutions. Others,
like Hull-House, were secular. By 1900, the U.S. had over 100 settlement houses. By 1911, Chicago had 35.
In the 1890s, Hull-House was located in the midst of a densely populated urban neighborhood peopled by Italian,
Irish, German, Greek, Bohemian, and Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. During the 1920s, African
Americans and Mexicans began to put down roots in the neighborhood and joined the clubs and activities at HullHouse. Jane Addams and the Hull-House residents provided kindergarten and day care facilities for the children
of working mothers; an employment bureau; an art gallery; libraries; English and citizenship classes; and theater,
music and art classes. As the complex expanded to include thirteen buildings, Hull-House supported more clubs
and activities such as a Labor Museum, the Jane Club for single working girls, meeting places for trade union
groups, and a wide array of cultural events.
The residents of Hull-House formed an impressive group, including Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr,
Florence Kelley, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and Grace and Edith Abbott. From
their experiences in the Hull-House neighborhood, the Hull-House residents and their supporters forged a
powerful reform movement. Among the projects that they helped launch were the Immigrants' Protective League,
the Juvenile Protective Association, the first juvenile court in the nation, and a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic (later
called the Institute for Juvenile Research). Through their efforts, the Illinois Legislature enacted protective
legislation for women and children in 1893. With the creation of the Federal Children's Bureau in 1912 and the
passage of a federal child labor law in 1916, the Hull-House reformers saw their efforts expanded to the national
level.
Jane Addams wrote prolifically on topics related to Hull-House activities, producing eleven books and
numerous articles as well as maintaining an active speaking schedule nationwide and throughout the world. She
played an important role in many local and national organizations. A founder of the Chicago Federation of
Settlements in 1894, she also helped to establish the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood
Centers in 1911. She was a leader in the Consumers League and served as the first woman president of the
National Conference of Charities and Corrections (later the National Conference of Social Work). She was chair
of the Labor Committee of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, vice-president of the Campfire Girls, and a
member of the executive boards of the National Playground Association and the National Child Labor Committee.
In addition, she actively supported the campaign for woman suffrage and the founding of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920).
In the early years of the twentieth century Jane Addams became involved in the peace movement. During
the First World War, she and other women from belligerent and neutral nations met at the International Congress
of Women at the Hague in 1915, attempting to stop the war. She maintained her pacifist stance after the United
States entered the war in 1917, working to found the Women's Peace Party (WILPF), which became the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919. She was the WILPF's first president. As a result of her work,
she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
Jane Addams died in Chicago on May 21, 1935. She was buried in Cedarville, her childhood home town.
Pasted from http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/newdesign/ja.html