U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Murrin et al., Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People 5/e (Thomson, 2008)
Ch. 20 “An Industrial Society, 1900-1920”
Chapter Outline. The following is a basic outline for the chapter, based on section headings in/of the chapter.
Your task is to expand upon/amend/add to/enhance this basic foundation with details, examples and supporting
evidence for each component of the outline. That is, flesh out the outline in a way that communicates your
understanding of the substantive material in the chapter. In the class notes section of your notebook, write out
your expanded outline at the beginning of each new respective unit or section so that it serves as the
organizational concept map for subsequent class (lecture/discussion) notes on related material.
I. Sources of Economic Growth
A. Technology
B. Corporate Growth
C. Mass Production and Distribution
D. Corporate Consolidation
E. Revolution in Management
F. Scientific Management on the Factory Floor
II. “Robber Barons” No More
III. Obsession With Physical and Racial Fitness
IV. Immigration
A. European Immigration
B. Chinese and Japanese Immigration
C. Immigration Labor
D. Living Conditions
V. Building Ethnic Communities
A. A Network of Institutions
B. The Emergence of an Ethnic Middle Class
C. Political Machines and Organized Crime
VI. African American Labor and Community
VII. Workers and Unions
A. Samuel F. Gompers and the AFL
B. “Big Bill” Haywood and the IWW
VIII. The Joys of the City
IX. The New Sexuality and the Rise of Feminism
A. Feminism
X. Conclusion
IDs and Sigs. For the following key terms—people, events, concepts, places, titles—first, identify and place
each in historical time and place and context by answering the “Who? What? When? Where?” questions, and
second, analyze the “Why-is-this-important-and/or-significant?” question. Each component—identifying the
term and analyzing its significance—is an essential aspect for understanding.
Social Darwinism
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
separate spheres
sweat shop
industrial union
feminism
craft union
continuous assembly line
Gospel of Wealth
strenuous life
graft
Victorianism
FRQs/Short Essay /Review Questions. This final component of the study guide is designed to get you to
think critically and collectively about the material in the chapter. You have outlined the chapter for use as an
organizational map; you have identified and given the significance of some (very few) people and events of the
period; now you will write a number of short (3-4 paragraph) essays that put the material together. For each of
the following questions, rewrite (and underline) each question in the form of a thesis statement, and make sure
that each paragraph itself begins with a topic sentence, contains appropriate supporting details and examples,
and has an effective conclusion that brings everything together.
1. Examine changes in management and production during the early 20th century.
2. Describe the living and working conditions of immigrant laborers.
3. Explore the theory of Social Darwinism. Why was it so popular among native-born Americans at the turn of
the century.
4. Describe the developing urban African-American community at the turn of the century.
5. Examine the changes in amusements and in commercial entertainment at the turn of the century.
6. Examine the changing sexual mores and attitudes toward women in the period from 1890 to 1920.
7. Describe the rise of corrupt party machines and organized crime in urban America.
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“The Great Fear”
Questions to consider:
1. Based on the cartoon "The Great Fear," why were so many Americans concerned about immigration?
2. Why were fears of the effects of immigration so prevalent in the late nineteenth century?
Political Cartoon-The Great Fear
1. Based on the cartoon "The Great Fear," why were so many Americans concerned about immigration?
Your answer should include the following:
• Emergence of new cultures
• New peoples overwhelming ""Old Stock"" Americans
• economic competition
• Swelling ranks of poor: Irish immigrant's carpetbag suggests poverty
• Immigrants portrayed as grotesque--fear of racial ""contamination""
2. Why were fears of the effects of immigration so prevalent in the late nineteenth century?
Your answer should include the following:
• "New" immigrants from regions that had not previously provided large numbers of immigrants
• Foreignness of new arrivals: racial and cultural differences
• Large numbers of immigrants
• Sense that foreigners would overtake country, not assimilate into nation
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“Dumbbell Tenement”
Questions to consider:
1. In what ways did the "dumbbell" design depicted in this schemata represent an improvement on previous
tenements? What specific problems was the layout intended to address and how did it address them? What
problems did the layout unintentionally create? Despite the improvements, did the design still place profit over
health and comfort?
2. What did the spread of "dumbbell" tenements such as the one pictured here suggest about living conditions
in cities of the time? What do these tenements reveal about attitudes toward the urban poor? Were the problems
that came to be associated with these tenements the fault of their designers or the fault of their residents?
Diagram-Dumbbell Tenement
1. In what ways did the "dumbbell" design depicted in this schemata represent an improvement on previous
tenements? What specific problems was the layout intended to address and how did it address them? What
problems did the layout unintentionally create? Despite the improvements, did the design still place profit over
health and comfort?
Your answer should include the following:
• Ventilation and windows to help with disease
• Only two toilets per floor (up to 16 families)
• Every inch of space used
• Tenements built close together
• Ventilation shafts used as garbage dumps
2. What did the spread of "dumbbell" tenements such as the one pictured here suggest about living conditions
in cities of the time? What do these tenements reveal about attitudes toward the urban poor? Were the problems
that came to be associated with these tenements the fault of their designers or the fault of their residents?
Your answer should include the following:
• Widespread poverty
• Need for cheap housing
• Attempt to improve conditions for the poor
• tenants used ventilation shafts as garbage dumps
• insufficient toilets
• cramped space
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“City Life: Edith Wharton and Frank Norris”
City life fascinated novelists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of them lived in cities and observed the
cityscape as it shifted shape under the impact of industrialization and immigration. Edith Wharton, the child of wealthy New Yorkers,
saw New York's upper crust—of old-money, self-styled aristocrats with colonial pedigrees—crumble as a new generation of wealthy
industrialists and financiers breeched its barriers in the 1870s and 1880s. Her Age of Innocence (1921), describes the effect on the
patrons of New York's old opera house, the Academy of Music. The second document, Frank Norris's portrait of turn-of-the-century
San Francisco from his novel McTeague (1899), presents an entirely different slice of city life.
DOCUMENT 1
Edith Wharton describes the Opera Scene
Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances “above the Forties,” of a new
Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendor with those of the great European capitals, the
world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable
old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new
people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its
historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built
for the hearing of music.
… what the daily press had already learned to describe as “an exceptionally brilliant audience” had gathered …
transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the
humbler, more convenient “Brown coupé.”*
*
Broughams, landaus, and coupés are horse-drawn carriages with drivers.
To come to the Opera in a Brown coupé was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one's own carriage;
and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to
democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the coldand-gin congested nose of one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy. It was one of the
great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from
amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.
Source: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York, 1920), pp. 1–2.
DOCUMENT 2
Frank Norris Describes a Working Class Scene
[Polk Street in San Francisco] never failed to interest him. It was one of those cross streets peculiar to Western
cities, situated in the heart of the residence quarter, but occupied by small tradespeople who lived in the rooms
above their shops. There were corner drug stores with huge jars of red, yellow, and green liquids in their
windows, very brave and gay; stationers' stores where illustrated weeklies were tacked upon bulletin boards;
barber shops with cigar stands in their vestibules; sad-looking plumbers' offices; cheap restaurants, in whose
windows one saw piles of unopened oysters weighted down by cubes of ice, and china pigs knee deep in layers
of white beans….
On week days the street was very lively. It woke to its work about seven o'clock, at the time when the newsboys
made their appearance together with the day laborers. The laborers went trudging past in a straggling file—
plumbers' apprentices, their pockets stuffed with sections of lead pipe, tweezers, and pliers; carpenters, carrying
nothing but their little pasteboard lunch baskets painted to imitate leather; gangs of street workers, their overalls
soiled with yellow clay, their picks and long-handled shovels over their shoulders; plasters, spotted with lime
from head to foot. This little army of workers, tramping steadily in one direction, met and mingled with other
toilers of a different description—conductors and “swing men” of the cable company going on duty; heavyeyed night clerks from the drug stores on their way home to sleep; roundsmen returning to the precinct police
station to make their night report, and Chinese market gardeners teetering past under their heavy baskets. The
cable cars began to fill up; all along the street could be seen the shop keepers taking down their shutters.
Source: Frank Norris, McTeague (New York, 1899), pp. 5–6.
Questions to consider:
1. What values are associated with the lower and upper classes in the works of Edith Wharton and Frank
Norris? Of what do the lives of the two classes seem to consist? How are members of the two classes defined?
2. Based on the excerpts by Frank Norris and Edith Wharton, which group was more cosmopolitan, the city's
upper or lower classes? Which group was more sociable? Is there any suggestion in either account that the
upper and lower classes ever came into contact?
3. Who populated Wharton's “world of fashion,” and who were the “new people”? Why did New York's selfstyled aristocrats prefer the small Academy to larger, newer buildings? How does Norris's San Francisco street
scene compare with Wharton's description of New York's Academy of Music? What can the excerpts from
these novels tell us about city life at the turn of the twentieth century? About the interests of these two
novelists?
Literary Excerpt-City Life-Wharton and Norris
1. What values are associated with the lower and upper classes in the works of Edith Wharton and Frank
Norris? Of what do the lives of the two classes seem to consist? How are members of the two classes defined?
Your answer should include the following:
• Upper class associated with refinement, exclusion
• Lower class associated with labor
• Life of upper class consisted of amusement
• Life of lower class consisted of work
• Upper class defined as conservative, musical, sentimental
• Lower class defined by occupation
2. Based on the excerpts by Frank Norris and Edith Wharton, which group was more cosmopolitan, the city's
upper or lower classes? Which group was more sociable? Is there any suggestion in either account that the
upper and lower classes ever came into contact?
Your answer should include the following:
• Upper class more attuned with European fashions
• Lower class more diversified, multicultural
• Upper class fled from amusement when it ended
• Lower class moved in a more crowded world
• Norris makes no mention of upper class
• Lower class appears in Wharton as servants
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“Daily Lives: The Vaudeville Show”
It looked like a palace or some high-toned concert hall. Patrons walked through a richly ornamented arched
gateway to gold-domed, marble ticket booths. Ushers guided them through a stately lobby cushioned with
velvet carpets. The house seats were thick and comfortable and positioned well back from the stage. Thousands
of electrical fixtures set the place aglow.
Benjamin Franklin Keith, who had worked in circuses, tent shows, and dime museums, opened the New Theatre
in Boston in 1894. Seeing housewives with children as a source of new profits, resourceful theater owners such
as Keith had cleaned up the bawdy variety acts of saloons and music halls, borrowed the animal and acrobat
acts from circuses and Wild West shows and the comedy acts of minstrel shows, and moved them to plusher
surroundings. They called the new shows “vaudeville,” after the French “pièces de vaudeville” developed at
eighteenth-century street fairs.
For anywhere from a dime to two dollars, a customer could see up to nine acts—singers, jugglers, acrobats,
magicians, trained animals, and comics. The mix of performers reflected the urban tempo and new urban tastes.
Skits often drew on the experience of immigrants, and early comedy teams had such names as “The Sport and
the Jew” and “Two Funny Sauerkrauts.” “Continuous shows” ran one after another, from early morning until
late at night.
Saloon music halls had catered to a rowdy all-male, working-class clientele. Vaudeville was aimed at middleclass and wealthier working-class families. Keith worked diligently to make each of his theaters “homelike.”
Backstage signs warned performers not to say “slob” or “son-of-a-gun” or “‘hully-gee’ ….” Within a few years
Keith was producing the kind of show, as one comedian put it, “to which any child could bring his parents.”
The audience, too, was instructed on proper behavior. No liquor was served. No cigars or cigarettes were
permitted. Printed notices directed patrons to “kindly avoid the stamping of feet and pounding of canes on the
floor. Please don't talk during acts, ….”
Enjoying its heyday from 1890 to 1920 vaudeville became big business. Nearly one in five city dwellers went to
a show once every seven days. Headliners earned $1,000 a week, theaters $20,000. Owners such as Keith and
Edward Albee merged their operations into gigantic circuits. By the time of Keith's death in 1914 the KeithAlbee circuit had built an empire of 29 theaters in more than seven cities.
Vaudeville became middle-class mass entertainment. Moderate and moral, it furnished cheap recreation that
also reinforced genteel values. Skits encouraged audiences to pursue success through hard work. An emerging
star system made American heroes out of performers like Will Rogers and George M. Cohan and American
models out of Fanny Brice and Mae West. Ethnic comics defused tensions among immigrants with spoofs that
exaggerated stereotypes and stressed the common foibles of all humanity. And theatergoers learned how to
behave. Order and decorum replaced the boisterous atmosphere of saloons and music halls. Vaudeville
audiences adopted the middle-class ideal of behavior—passive and polite.
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“Global Migrations”
The large waves of immigration that transformed American society in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were not unique to the United States. They were part of a worldwide movement of peoples that
affected every continent. These epic migrations were the product of two related forces: population growth and
industrialization.
The population of Europe grew faster in the second half of the nineteenth century than it had ever grown
before—almost doubling between 1850 and the beginning of World War I. The population growth was a result
of growing economies able to support more people and of more efficient and productive agriculture that helped
end debilitating famines. But the rapid growth nevertheless strained the resources of many parts of Europe and
affected, in particular, rural people, who were now too numerous to live off the available land. Many decided to
move to other parts of the world, where land was more plentiful or jobs were more available.
At the same time, industrialization drew millions of people from rural areas into cities—sometimes cities in
their own countries, but often industrial cities in other, more economically advanced nations. Historians of
migration speak of “push” factors (pressures on people to leave their homes) and “pull” factors (the lure of new
lands) in explaining population movements. The “push” for many nineteenth-century migrants was poverty and
inadequate land at home; for others, it was political and religious oppression. The “pull” was the availability of
land or industrial jobs in other regions or lands—and for some, the prospect of greater freedom abroad. Faster,
cheaper, and easier transportation—railroads and steamships, in particular—also aided large-scale immigration.
From 1800 to the start of World War I, 50 million Europeans migrated to new lands overseas—people from
almost all areas of Europe, but, in the later years of the century (when migration reached its peak), mostly from
poor rural areas in southern and eastern Europe. Italy, Russia, and Poland were among the biggest sources of
late-nineteenth-century migrants. Almost two-thirds of these immigrants came to the United States. But nearly
20 million Europeans migrated to other lands, to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and
other parts of South America. Many of these migrants moved to vast areas of open land in these countries and
established themselves as farmers. Many others settled in the industrial cities that were growing up in all these
regions.
It was not only Europeans who were transplanting themselves in these years. Vast numbers of migrants—
usually poor, desperate people—left Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands in search of better lives. Most of them
could not afford the journey abroad on their own. They moved instead as indentured servants, agreeing to a term
of servitude in their new land in exchange for food, shelter, and transportation. Recruiters of indentured servants
fanned out across China, Japan, areas of Africa and the Pacific Islands, and, above all, India. French and British
recruiters brought hundreds of thousands of Indian migrants to work in plantations in their own Asian and
African colonies. Chinese laborers were recruited to work on plantations in Cuba and Hawaii; mines in Malaya,
Peru, South Africa, and Australia; and railroad projects in Canada, Peru, and the United States. African
indentured servants moved in large numbers to the Caribbean, and Pacific Islanders tended to move to other
islands or to Australia.
The migration of European peoples to new lands was largely voluntary. Most migrants moved to the United
States, where indentured servitude was illegal. Non-European migration brought relatively small numbers of
people to the United States, but together, these various forms of migration produced one of the greatest
population movements in the history of the world and transformed not just the United States, but much of the
globe as well
Questions to consider:
1. What were some of the “push” and “pull” factors that motivated the migration of both Europeans and nonEuropeans?
2. Why did European empires encourage and facilitate the migration of Europeans and non-Europeans to new
lands?
3. Why did more Europeans than non-Europeans migrate to the United States?
Global Migrations
1. What were some of the “push” and “pull” factors that motivated the migration of both Europeans and nonEuropeans?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include:
• Rapid increases in population, particularly in European rural areas and also in east and south Asia, made it
harder for rural people to live off the land.
• Rapid industrialization and urbanization, particularly along the eastern seaboard of North America,
attracted migrants as job opportunities multiplied.
• Development and growth of new settler societies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,
Argentina, and parts of South America provided some of the comforts of home for those considering
emigrating.
2. Why did European empires encourage and facilitate the migration of Europeans and non-Europeans to new
lands?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include:
• European empires such as Britain and France sought to create new industrial and resource-intensive
enterprises as part of their imperialist initiatives.
• These enterprises required vast labor forces in areas where the need often could not be met by local
peoples.
• As a result, recruiters enticed or coerced hundreds of thousands of indentured servants from China and
India into migrating to these new regions to fulfill their labor needs.
3. Why did more Europeans than non-Europeans migrate to the United States?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include:
• Indentured servitude was illegal in the United States, preventing the large-scale entry of many nonEuropean groups, who were typically less able to afford the cost of the journey.
• Additionally, racist legislation aimed at limiting non-European migration to the United States appeared in
the 1880s
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“Coney Island ”
People who lived in the crowded cities of early-twentieth-century America yearned at times for ways to escape
the noise and smells and heat and stress of the urban world. Wealthy families could travel to resorts or country
houses. But most city dwellers could not afford to venture far, and for them ambitious entrepreneurs tried to
provide dazzling escapes close to home. The most celebrated such escape was Coney Island in Brooklyn, New
York—which became for a time the most famous and popular urban resort in America
With its broad oceanfront beach, Coney Island, located in Brooklyn, had been an attractive destination for
visitors since the early nineteenth century. In the 1870s and 1880s, investors built railroad lines from the city to
the beach and began to create spectacular amusements to induce New Yorkers to visit. But the real success of
Coney Island began in the 1890s, when the amusements and spectacles reached a new level. Sea Lion Park,
which opened in 1895, showcased trained sea lions and exotic water rides. Steeplechase Park opened two years
later, attracting visitors with a mechanical steeplechase ride in which visitors could pretend to be jockeys, and
stunt rooms with moving floors and powerful blasts of compressed air.
By then, Coney Island was a popular site for real horse racing, boxing matches, and other sports. It was also
attracting gambling casinos, saloons, and brothels. From the beginning, among affluent middle-class people at
least, Coney Island had a reputation as a rough and unsavory place. But to the working-class immigrants and
lower-middle-class people who were always its most numerous visitors, it was a place of wonder, excitement,
and escape.
The greatest of the Coney Island attractions, Luna Park, opened in 1903. It provided not just rides and stunts,
but lavish reproductions of exotic places and spectacular adventures: Japanese gardens, Venetian canals with
gondoliers, a Chinese theater, a simulated trip to the moon, and reenactments of such disasters as burning
buildings, earthquakes, and even the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii. A year later, a competing
company opened Dreamland, which tried to outdo even Luna Park with a 375-foot tower, a three-ring circus,
chariot races, and a Lilliputian village inspired by Gulliver's Travels. (A fire destroyed Dreamland in 1911.)
The popularity of Coney Island in these years was phenomenal. Thousands of people flocked to the large resort
hotels that lined the beaches. Many thousands more made day trips out from the city by train and (after 1920)
subway. In 1904, the average daily attendance at Luna Park alone was 90,000 people. On weekends; the Coney
Island post office handled over 250,000 postcards, through which visitors helped spread the reputation of the
resort across the nation.
Coney Island's popularity reflected a number of powerful impulses among urban Americans at the turn of the
century. It provided visitors with an escape from the heat and crowding of the vast metropolis around it. It gave
people who had few opportunities for travel a simulated glimpse of exotic places and events that they would
never be able to experience in reality. For immigrants, many of whom lived in insular ethnic communities,
Coney Island provided a way of experiencing American mass culture on an equal footing with people of
backgrounds different from their own. Almost everyone who found Coney Island appealing did so in part
because it provided an escape from the genteel standards of behavior that governed so much of American life at
the time. In the amusement parks of Coney Island, people delighted in finding themselves in situations that in
any other setting would have seemed embarrassing or improper: women's skirts blown above their heads with
hot air; people pummeled with water and rubber paddles by clowns; hints of sexual freedom as strangers were
forced to come into physical contact with one another on rides and amusements and as men and women
revealed themselves to each other wearing bathing suits on the beach.
Coney Island remained popular throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and it continues to attract
visitors today (although in much smaller numbers). But its heyday was in the years before World War I, when
the exotic sights and thrilling adventures it offered had almost no counterparts elsewhere in American culture.
When radio, movies, and eventually television began to offer their own kind of mass escapism, Coney Island
gradually ceased to be the dazzling, unmatchable marvel it had seemed to earlier generations.
Questions to consider:
1. How did Coney Island reflect the new culture of mass consumption?
2. What new ideas about leisure help account for the popularity of Coney Island in the early twentieth century?
3. What forms of popular culture today continue the Coney Island tradition of offering escapism, adventure,
and excitement to a mass audience?
Coney Island
1. How did Coney Island reflect the new culture of mass consumption?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include: Through its close proximity to New
York City and its relatively cheap and diverse offerings, which were available to all, Coney Island represented
an ideal version of the mass-consumption society that twentieth-century America had become.
2. What new ideas about leisure help account for the popularity of Coney Island in the early twentieth century?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include: By the early twentieth century, leisure
had become an activity and expectation of all Americans, from many different backgrounds, who wished to
experience the atmosphere of escapism and adventure formerly only available to wealthy elites in far-off exotic
locales. Coney Island provided a reflection of those leisure experiences at a fraction of the cost and was much
closer to the city in which most now lived and worked.
3. What forms of popular culture today continue the Coney Island tradition of offering escapism, adventure,
and excitement to a mass audience?
Your answers will vary based on your analysis, but you should include: These traditions continue in theme
parks such as Disney World, Sea World, Universal Studios, and Busch Gardens and other theme parks across
the country. Additionally, online adventure and video games such as World of Warcraft or Call of Duty offer a
mass audience a virtual experience characterized by escapism, adventure, and excitement.
U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
Source Analysis
“The Diverse American City”
ETHNIC AND CLASS SEGREGATION IN MILWAUKEE, 1850–1890 This map illustrates the complex
pattern of settlement in Milwaukee, a pattern that was in many ways typical of many industrial cities, in the late
nineteenth century. Two related phenomena—industrialization and massive immigration from abroad—shaped
the landscape of the city in these years. By 1890, first- and second-generation immigrants made up 84 percent
of the city's population. Note the complicated distribution of ethnic groups in distinctive neighborhoods
throughout the city, and note too the way in which middle-class people (especially “native-born” middle-class
people, which included many people of German descent whose families had been in the United States for
generations) isolated themselves from the areas in which the working class lived.
• What were some of the advantages and disadvantages of this ethnic clustering to the immigrants who lived in
these communities?