Unit VI – A
Growing America
Chapter 20
Section 3 – City LIfe
City Life
The Big Idea
The rapid growth of cities in the late 1800s created both
challenges and opportunities.
Main Ideas
• Crowded urban areas faced a variety of social problems.
• People worked to improve the quality of life in U.S. cities.
Main Idea 1:
Crowded urban areas faces a variety
of social problems.
 Urban problems rose as populations grew.

Shortages of affordable housing

Sanitation problems

Water pollution

Overcrowding

Disease and health problems

Air pollution
Tenement Life
 Journalist and photographer Jacob Riis exposed the
horrible conditions in New York tenements in his book
How the Other Half Lives.
 Shortages of affordable housing forced families to
squeeze into tiny tenement apartments.

Many people were forced to live in small spaces.

Few or no windows to let in fresh air and sunshine

Indoor plumbing scarce

Diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, and influenza
spread quickly in these crowded neighborhoods.
Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair
 In 1877 Riis became a police
reporter for the New York Tribune.
In the 1880s his work gravitated
towards reform and he worked
with other New York reformers
then crusading for better living
conditions for the thousands of
immigrants flocking to New York
in search of new opportunities. He
constantly argued that the "poor
were the victims rather than the
makers of their fate".
As a writer Sinclair gained fame
in 1906 with the novel The
Jungle, a report on the dirty
conditions in the Chicago
meatpacking industry. The book
won Sinclair fame and fortune,
and led to the implementation of
the Pure Food and Drug Act in
1906.
Upton Sinclair- The Jungle – 3:11 min.
Urban Problems
 Name four diseases caused by poor
sanitation?
 If a family living in Chicago had six
babies during the 1870’s, how many of
them could they expect to live past age
5?
 What kinds of problems did growing city
governments in the late 1800’s face, and
which problem they try to fix first?
Main Idea 2:
People worked to improve the quality
of life in U.S. cities.
 Many private organizations stepped in to help the poor.
 Reformer Lawrence Veiller led an effort to improve tenement
conditions through the Charity Organization Society.

Helped to get the 1901 New York State Tenement House Act
passed
 Some individuals set up settlement houses, or neighborhood
centers in poor areas that offered education, recreation, and
social activities.
Settlement House Movement
 Settlement House- volunteers offer immigrants
services- language instruction, job training,
social activities, clubs and sports.
 Over 400 settlement house in America by 1910
 Social Gospel- faith is expressed through good
works. Churches had moral duty to help solve
social problems.
Settlement Houses
 One of the most famous settlement houses was Hull House

Founded in Chicago in 1889 by reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates
Starr
 Florence Kelley, a reformer at Hull House, visited sweatshops and wrote
about the problems there.

Convinced lawmakers to take action and in 1893, Illinois passed a law to
limit working hours for women and to prevent child-labor

Became Illinois’s chief factory inspector and helped to enforce the law
 Settlement houses continued to provide programs and services
through the 1900s.
Jane Addams
There is an old saying
that says, “Behind
every good man
there stands a good
woman.” But
throughout history,
was that man just
standing in the way
of the woman?
Jane Addams

Birth: 1860, Cedarville, Illinois

Death: 1935, Chicago, Illinois

Founder of the Settlement House
Movement.

She and her friend Ellen Starr founded
Hull House in the slums of Chicago in
1889.

She wrote 11 books, numerous articles
and headed various organizations.

She participated in the International
Congress of Women at the Hague in
1915

First American Woman to receive the
Nobel Peace Prize
Hull House, founded 1889
By 1893, Hull-House had
become a center for a wide variety
of clubs, functions, classes and
activities for the neighborhood.
Addams and her associates
championed the protection of
immigrants, child labor laws and
recreation facilities for children,
industrial safety, juvenile courts,
recognition of labor unions, woman
suffrage, and world peace.
Addams never drew a salary
from Hull-House, but instead used
her inheritance and the proceeds
from her many books and articles
to live on as well as to underwrite
these causes.
Hull House- National Historic Landmark
Around Hull-House, immigrants to
Chicago crowded into a residential and
industrial neighborhood. Italians, Russian
and Polish Jews, Irish, Germans, Greeks
and Bohemians predominated. Hull House
provided services for the neighborhood,
such as kindergarten and daycare
facilities for children of working mothers,
an employment bureau, an art gallery,
libraries, and music and art classes. By
1900 the Jane Club (a cooperative
residence for working women), the first
Little Theater in America, a Labor Museum
and a meeting place for trade union
groups.
The original Hull mansion remains, a
national historic landmark in June of 1967
Improving City Life
What was the purpose of How
the Other Half Lives?
How did Florence Kelly help
reform working conditions?
How might the 1893 Illinois
labor law have changed the
lives of children?