Chapter 25 –America Moves to
the City (1865-1900)
Industrialization fuels massive immigration
and urbanization, changing the nature of life
and the cultural landscape of the nation
The Urban Frontier
 From 1870 to 1900, the American population
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doubled, and the population in the cities tripled.
Skyscrapers first appear in Chicago in 1885
Brooklyn Bridge (1883)
Department stores (Macy’s) and mail-order stores
(Sears) herald era of consumerism
Cities encounter problems
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Waste disposal
Crime
Slums: aka tenements
William M. “Boss” Tweed,
the infamously corrupt head
of New York City’s
Tammany Hall political
machine, latched on to the
Brooklyn Bridge project
from the very beginning.
According to sworn
testimony he gave later, he
facilitated up to $65,000 in
bribes to New York’s
aldermen in order to win
their backing for a $1.5
million bond issue. He then
became a major holder of
bridge stock and joined a
committee charged with
managing the project’s
finances. Tweed allegedly
hoped to skim money from
the city’s bridge contracts,
much as he had done with
other large public works.
But he was arrested in 1871
before he could fully realize
his plan. It has since been
estimated that Tweed and
his cronies stole at least $45
million, and perhaps as
much as $200 million, from
the public coffers during
their time in power.
The Brooklyn Bridge
The
Gilded
Age
Slums
of
NYC
Wealth flowed during the 1880s and 90s, but only to the
upper echelons of society. A vast gulf opened between rich
and poor, earning this era the nickname "the Gilded Age."
One immigrant photographer captured what it was like for
New York's poor during this time, and his images remain
arresting today.
The Danish-born carpenter Jacob Riis (1849-1914)
migrated to the US in 1870. He started his career as a
journalist in 1873 as a police reporter, only three years after
he arrived in New York. Later he became the city editor of
the New York Tribune.
When flash photography was born in 1887, he and three
photographer friends began to photograph the slums of
New York City and three years later he published How the
Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New
York with more than a hundred photographs.
The New Immigration
 Old Immigration: western European, literate (Brits,
Germans, Irish)
 New Immigration: southern/eastern European
(Italians, Jews, Slavs, Greek, Poles)
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Most illiterate, poor
Cluster together in big cities
 Many of these first generation immigrants retained
their native culture; their children would become
Americanized or assimilated
Reactions to the New Immigration
 Immigrants often controlled by political bosses
 The plight of slums led to the Social Gospel: the idea
that churches should tackle these social ills
 Jane Addams
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founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889 to teach immigrants
skills and knowledge to survive and succeed in America
 Other women open these settlement houses
 The settlement houses become a center for women’s
activism and social reform
 The new cities gave single women opportunities to
earn money and support themselves better
Resurgence of Nativism
 1840’s-50’s nativism reappears
 Old immigrants look down on new immigrants
 Fear a mixing of “inferior” southern Euro blood
 Blamed new immigrants for corrupt urban politics
 Unions also anti-new immigrants because:
 They work for low-wages
 They brought socialism and communism to the US
 They were used as strikebreakers
 American Protective Association (APA) urged voting against
Catholics
 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) bars Chinese
 Ironically, the Statue of Liberty arrived from France in 1886
Religion in the Age of Urbanization
 Liberal Protestants adapt religious ideas to modern
culture
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Reject biblical literalism
Ally themselves with the reform-oriented social gospel
movement
 Salvation Army, YMCA’s, YWCA’s helps the needy
 Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory (1859)
 Evolution vs. Creationism
 Religion begins to be relegated to personal life, and
away from social
Booker T. Washington vs. WEB Du Bois
 Public schools rise in popularity
 The South lags behind in education; especially for Blacks
 Booker T. Washington a champions black education
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Taught black students trades at Tuskegee Institute
Self-help approach criticized for not attacking white supremacy
Believed economic uplift would lead to political and civil rights
 W.E.B. Du Bois called Washington an Uncle Tom!
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first Black to get a Ph.D. from Harvard University
demanded complete equality for Blacks and action now
Founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) in 1910
 These differences reflected the contrasting life
experiences of southern and northern Blacks.
Rise of Higher Education
 Growth of colleges and universities after Civil War
 Colleges for women (Vassar College) gaining ground
 Black colleges: Howard U.
 The Morrill Act (1862) and the Hatch Act (1887)
granted public lands to the states for support of
education (aka: land grant colleges)
 Philanthropy supplemented gov’t grants to higher ed
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Rockefeller’s funds used to build the University of Chicago
 Johns Hopkins U the first high-grade grad school
The Press
 Libraries, aided by Carnegie’s donations (ie: Library of
Congress) opened across America
 Sensationalism captures the public taste
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Yellow journalism: wild and fantastic stories that often were false or
quite exaggerated: sex, scandal, and other human-interest stories
 Two new journalistic tycoons emerged: Joseph Pulitzer
(New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (San
Francisco Examiner)
 Horatio Alger’s “rags-to-riches” books told that virtue,
honesty, and industry were rewarded by success, wealth,
and honor
 Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Jack
London
The Kid first appeared in Joseph
Pulitzer’s New York World in 1895.
He soon became better known as
the “Yellow Dugan Kid” for the
over-sized yellow nightshirt which
bore his dialogue: quippy
observations in a broad New York
dialect.
Pulitzer and Hearst fought to give
their competing Yellow Kids more
and more page space. To many
critics, this represented a trend in
the decline of journalistic integrity,
of which both newspapers had been
guilty for years. One vocal critic,
New York Press editor Ervin
Wardman, had tried many times to
pin a name on the papers’
sensationalistic, exaggerated, illresearched, and often untrue
reporting, first calling it “new
journalism” and “nude journalism.”
When the competing papers finally
sunk so low as to replace news
content with comic strips, he had
his name: “Yellow-Kid Journalism,”
which was eventually shortened to
“Yellow Journalism.” The Kid’s
symbolism fits the term still today:
slap-dash journalism aimed at the
kid in all of us.
Yellow Journalism
Women and the City
 Urban life was stressful on families
 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published Women and
Economics, a classic of feminist literature
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called for women to abandon their dependent status
contribute to involvement in the economy
 Feminists rallied toward suffrage
 National American Woman Suffrage Association (1890) led by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
 Carrie Chapman Catt links voting rights to traditional role of
women
 NAWSA limits membership to whites
 Black woman activist Ida B. Wells mounted a
nationwide campaign against lynching
Without
Sanctuary
Strange
Fruit
Temperance and Promoting Reform
 National Prohibition Party (1869)
 Women’s Christian Temperance Union: called for
national prohibition of alcohol
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Leaders included Frances E. Willard and Carrie A. Nation who
literally wielded a hatchet and hacked up bars
 The Anti-Saloon League (1893) helped create “dry”
states
 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals (ASPCA) formed in 1866
 American Red Cross, formed by Clara Barton, a Civil
War nurse, was formed in 1881
The most celebrated and most
controversial temperance champion
of her time, Carry Nation’s life was
filled with tragedy. Her mother died
in an insane asylum, convinced she
was Queen Victoria. Her first
husband drank himself to death. A
second unhappy marriage ended in
divorce. Convinced that God was on
her side, Nation smashed up saloons
all over the state of Kansas. Her
favored tool was a hatchet. Hundreds
of women and a smaller number of
men rallied to her, bringing their
own stones and bricks, sticks and
hatchets, and calling themselves the
"Home Defenders." Nation hoped
her movement would spread across
the country and sweep away all of the
nation’s saloons but, like the
Woman’s Crusade, it died almost as
quickly as it had arisen. "Every
movement needs some people to call
attention to itself by bold action. She
knew that you had to draw attention
and you needed the press following
you. You had to make the right
enemies. I don’t think she’s at all
representative of the movement.
She’s simply the one who called
attention to it. And then patient,
hardworking people followed
through."
Carrie Nation
Art and Amusement
 Music reached new heights with the erection of opera houses
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and the emergence of jazz
Edison’s phonograph
The Columbian Exposition in 1893, in Chicago, displayed
many architectural triumphs
Phineas T. Barnum (who quipped, “There’s a sucker born
every minute”) and James A. Bailey teamed up in 1881 to
stage the “Greatest Show on Earth” (now the Ringling Bros.
and Barnum and Bailey Circus)
“Wild West” shows, like those of “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the
markswoman Annie Oakley
Baseball emerged as America’s national pastime
1891, James Naismith invented basketball