Chapter 20: The Emergence of Urban America

• Population growth in the cities

• Between 1860-1910 the population mushroomed from 6 million to 44 million

• By 1920 more than 50% of the population lived in cities

America’s move to town

• What brought people to cities: prospect of good jobs and social excitement

• Frederick Jackson Turner

• “Frontier was a societal safety valve”

• He was wrong because more flowed to cities than the west

• Inventions

• (1870s) steam circulating through radiators → bigger apartments

• (1889) Otis Elevator Company and the elevator → taller buildings

• (1880s) cast-iron and steel-frame construction → skyscrapers

• (1873) San Francisco and cable cars → wider cities

• Subways in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia

• Negatives of suburbs: expensive commuting

• Tenements

• Shared building with multiple housing units

• 6-8 stories tall

• Lacked elevators

• Jammed

• 24-32 families per building

• Sanitary conditions in cities

• Infectious diseases and noxious odors were rampant

• High mortality rate

• Filthy, disease-ridden, noisy, and smelly

• Unclean water → cholera, typhoid fever, and yellow fever

• Animal waste (manure and carcasses)

• “Sanitary Reformers”

• Public health and municipal engineers

• Banished hogs and cattle within city limits

• Clean up campaigns

• Built water and sewage systems

• Instituted trash collections, replaced horses and electric streetcars

• Sewer systems

• Often untreated

• Separated waste that farmers could use into the waterways

• Refrigerator cars: massive meatpacking plants separated people from food sources

• Waste dump into rivers

• People thought water purified itself

• Tons of waste dumped into rivers and bays

• High phosphorus content lead to algae blooms which sucked O₂ out of water and killed fish

The New Immigration

• Immigrant settlement patterns

• More numerous in cities

• Provided much-needed labor

• New York has 2x Irish as Dublin, as many Germans as Hamburg, and ½ as many Italians as Naples

• Why they came

• Flight from famine and lack of opportunity

• Fled racial, religious, and political persecution

• Fled compulsory military service

• America’s promise of work/jobs

• Contract Labor Act of 1864

• Federal government helped pay an immigrants passage

• They were directly hired to come work for an employer

• Repealed in 1868

• Government forbid this in 1885 because it tied laborers to their employers

• Change of immigration patterns

• (1870s) under 3 million

• (1880s) 5+ million

• (1890s) 3.5+ million

• (1900) 9 million

• (1910s) 6 million

• (1920s) 4 million

• (1870s) Slavs and Jews ↑

• Italians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Russians, Romanians, and Greeks

• Judaism, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholics

• Ellis Island

• (1892) A tiny island off New Jersey near the Statue of Liberty

• 1907 busiest year

• Refugees who could afford 1st and 2nd class skip Ellis Island

• Nativists

• Many native-born Americans saw immigrants as threats

• Feared immigrants threatened American Culture

• Chinese Exclusion Act

• 1st federal law to restrict immigration on the basis of race and class

• Shut the doors for Chinese to immigrate for 10 years

• Received overwhelming support

• Periodically renewed in 1902

• (1943) barriers removed

• Immigration Restriction League

• Henry Lodge (Massachusetts) and other New Englanders organized this

• Dedicated to saving the Anglo-Saxon “race” in America from being “contaminated” by alien immigrants

• Angel Island

• (1910) West Coast counterpart of Ellis Island 6 miles off San Francisco

• Asian entry port

• 30% of Chinese rejected due to powerful prejudice

Popular Culture

• Growth of the middle class

• Urban whites who had money to be mobile

• Nuclear families

• Leisure time: singing around a piano, reading novels, playing cards. Dominoes, backgammon, chess, and checkers

• Political Party:

• Akin to belong to a social club

• Public entertainment to hear visiting candidates

• Unions

• Labor unions provided social activities

• Discuss working conditions

• Newspapers

• Primary means of communication

• Often with a political party

• Saloons

• Most popular destination for the working class

• Poor-man’s social club

• Men went for multiple reasons

• Heated and public restrooms

• Included gymnasiums → handball, chess, billiards, darts, cards, or dice

• Males enclaves

• “Snugs” for women

• Political activity

• Women’s Christian Temperance Union & Anti-Saloon League

• Charged saloons contributed to alcoholism, divorce, crime, and absenteeism from work

• Carrie Nation → saloons should close down

• Central Park:

• (1858) New York City

• Croquet and tennis courts

• Lawn tennis (1873)

• 30 courts in the park by 1883

• Frederick Law Olmstead

• Planner of Central Park

• Went on to design parks for many other cities

• Growth in Public Parks

• Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and more

• More vigorous forms of exercise

• Outdoor sports: croquet, tennis, lawn tennis, and cycling or “wheeling”

• Working poor meeting spot(s)

• Street corners and front stoops of their apartment buildings

• Formed male singing, drinking, or gymnastics clubs

• Bare-knuckle boxing matches

• Baseball games

• Picnics

• Brooklyn’s Coney Island

• Women

• Public streets → washing clothes, supervising children, or shopping at the local market

• Single women → dance halls, theatres, amusement parks, picnic grounds, public benches, and movie theatres

• Authorities try to restrict freedom of young women to “cheap amusements”

• Spectator Sports

• College football and baseball

• Professional baseball

• Football → modification of soccer and rugby, College of New Jersey (Princeton) and Rutgers (1869)

• Basketball → Dr. James Naismith (YMCA) nailed 2 peach baskets to the walls, an indoor winter game

• Baseball

• America’s national pastime

• Alexander Cartwright, a New York bank clerk and sportsman, is the father of organized baseball

• Knickerbocker baseball club of NEw York

• 1st pro team → Cincinnati Red Stockings (1869)

• (1900) American League

• 1902 1st world series

• Gave people loyalty and sense of belonging

• African-Americans played in “minor leagues”

• (1887) Cuban Giants, a team of blacks, toured the country (1888)

• Cuban Giants defeat New York 4 games out of 5

Education and Social Thought

• Charles Darwin

• On the Origin of Species (1859)

• Natural selection

• No providential God

• Life was a result of blind natural process and selection

• Social Darwinism

• Herbert Spencer, English social philosopher

• A cluster of ideas that said humans evolved like DArwin’s natural selection

• Survival of the fittest

• Greatest perfection = complete happiness

• Implied hand-off government

• Popular Science Monthly (1972)

• Herbert Spencer

• Social philosopher

• Frail

• “Fostering the good-for-nothing [people] at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty”

• Reform Darwinism

• Lester Frank Ward

• Dynamic Sociology (1883) human brain

• Show compassion

• Man controls process

• Influence of knowledge

Chapter 21