Chapter 25
America Moves to the City
1865-1900
City Living
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Population in cities tripled after war
1900: NYC= 2nd largest city in world
Skyscrapers and Louis Sullivan
Mass transit= commute all over the city and
suburbs
• City life comforts and culture of consumerism
draw many from rural areas
– City life= wasteful sanitation issues
• Slums and tenement housing vs. wealthy in the
bedroom communities
New Immigrants
• Starting 1880’s, immigration going up with 5
million people/year
– Old Immigrants: easier to assimilate
– New Immigrants (after 1880) from southern and
eastern Europe
– Ethnic ghettoes, harder to assimilate
• Europe’s population exploding (foodstuff)
– European industrialization= draw for farmers- kept
going to US with cheap travel
– Letters home, no religious persecution (pogroms)
– Jewish immigrants= skilled urban workers (nativists
resented)
– Focused on keeping Old Country traditions
Dumbbell Tenement
This was the standard architectural plan for the human warehouses on New York’s Lower East Side.
Despite the innovation of an air shaft to bring light and ventilation to the middle of the building, only
one room in each of the apartments was directly exposed to sunlight and open air. All families on a
floor shared the toilet (“W.C.”) in the hallway.
Assimilation
• No one to help assimilate but the political
machines
• Washington Gladden; Christian socialists
• Jane Addams and Hull House= settlement
house in Chicago
– Ease transition into US
– Prompted new settlement houses elsewhere
– Settlement houses= women’s social reform
social work as a profession
• Women’s work segregated by race, class,
ethnicity and marital status
Old and New Immigration (by decade
In the 1880s the sources of immigration to the United States shifted from the British Isles and western
Europe to southern and eastern Europe. A century later the old “mother continent” of Europe would
account for only 10 percent of immigrants to America (see Figure 42.4 on p. 1094).
Mulberry Street on New York City’s Lower East Side, ca. 1900
Nativism
• Nativist resentment toward New Immigrants
(American Protective Association)
– High birth rate, low standard of living
– Cheap unskilled labor, radical ideas
– Often acted as scabs and were difficult to unionize
• Immigration restrictions in 1882
• Literacy tests proposed but not adopted until
1917 (keep out New Immigrants)
• 1886: Statue of Liberty
Urban Religion
• How to adapt to urban life?
• Churches= wealthy patrons- focus on
materialism and $
• New era of revivalists (Dwight Lyman Moody)
• Catholicism= #1 denomination in 1900
• 2 new denominations formed- Salvation Army
and Christian Scientists
• YMCA and YWCA
Morning Service at Moody’s Church, 1908
Public Education
• Tax supported elementary schools (patriotism,
literate voters)
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By 1870: most states required elementary
1880’s and 1890’s: tax supported high schools
Normal schools
Parochial schools
• Chautauqua Movement 1874
Booker T. Washington vs. WEB Dubois
• Booker T. Washington head of Tuskegee
Institute 1881
– Focused on trade- didn’t challenge white
supremacy
– Economic advancement= key
– George Washington Carver- student
• WEB Dubois- Washington= Uncle Tom!
– Focus on equality
– Helped start NAACP 1910
– “Talented Tenth”
Libraries and Newspapers
• Libraries forming, including Library of
Congress 1897
• $60 million from Carnegie all around US
• 9,000 libraries by 1900
• Newspapers and linotype
• Sensational journalism- scandals, sex etc.
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Yellow journalism
Joseph Pulitzer: New York World
William Randolph Hearst: New York Journal
Circulation wars
• Associated Press 1840’s
Morality Issues
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Victoria Woodhull- Woodhull and Claflin’s
Anthony Comstock
Comstock Laws 1873
Battle in society over sexuality and morality
Women and Families in the City
• Family structure in danger at end of century
in the city
• Divorce rate increasing, delayed marriage,
smaller families
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman- Women and
Politics
• National Women Suffrage Association 1890
• Taken over by Carrie Chapman Catt in 1900
• Women granted right to vote in Wyoming
Territory 1869
• Black women denied from suffrage movement
Woman Suffrage Before the Nineteenth
Amendment
Temperance and Social Reform
• Temperance= middle class assault on working
class?
• National Prohibition Party 1869
• Anti Saloon League 1893 18th amendment
• American Red Cross 1881- Clara Barton