The spirit of rural America, its idealism and dreams

Visiting his fiances Missouri home-stead in 1894, Theodore Dreiser was struck by the spirit of rural America, its idealism, its dreams. But this was an American tradition in which I, alas, could not share, Dreiser wrote. I had seen Pittsburgh. I had seen Lithua- nians and Hungarians in their [alleys] and hovels. I had seen the girls of the city walking the streets at night. Only twenty-three years old at the time, Dreiser would go on to write one of the great American urban novels, Sister Carrie (1900), about one young woman in the army of small-town Americans fl ocking to the Big City. But Dreiser, part of that army, already knew that between rural America and Pittsburgh, an unbridgeable chasm had opened up.
In 1820, after two hundred years of settlement, the vast majority of Americans lived in rural areas. After that, decade by decade, the urban population swelled until, by 1900, one of every fi ve Americans was a city dweller. Nearly 6.5 million people in- habited just three great cities: New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia (Table 18.1).

The spirit of rural America, its idealism and dreams
Just from $10/Page
Order Essay
The city was where the factories went up and where the new immigrants settled, constituting one-third of all big-city residents in 1900. Here, too, lived the million- aires, and a growing white-collar class. For all these people, the city was more than a place to make a living. It provided the setting for an urban culture unlike anything seen before in the United States. City people, although differing vastly among them- selves, became distinctively and recognizably urban.
These vast aggregations
of humanity, where he
who seeks isolation may
find it more truly than
in a desert; where wealth
and poverty touch and
jostle; where one revels
and another starves
within a few feet of each
other they are the
centers and types of our
civilization. Henry George, 1883
The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It18
C H A P T E R
523
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 523 8/30/08 4:15:38 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 523 8/30/08 4:15:38 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
524 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
Urbanization The greater part of our population must live in cities, declared the Congregational minister Josiah Strong. And from another writer, There was no resisting the trend. Why this sense of inevitability? Because of another inevitability of American life: industrialism.
Until the Civil War, cities were the places where goods were bought and sold for distribution into the interior or out to world markets. Early industry, by contrast, sprang up mostly in the countryside, where factories had access to water power, nearby fuel and raw materials, and workers recruited from farms and villages.
As industrialization proceeded, city and factory began to merge. Once steam en- gines came along, mill operators no longer depended on water-driven power. Rail- roads enabled factory builders to locate at the places best situated in relation to sup- pliers and markets. Iron makers gravitated to Pittsburgh because of its superior access to coal and ore fi elds. Chicago, midway between western livestock suppliers and east- ern markets, became a great meatpacking center. Geographic concentration of indus- try meant urban growth. So did the rising scale of production. A plant that employed thousands of workers instantly created a small city in its vicinity, sometimes in the form of a company town like Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, which became, body and soul, the property of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Other fi rms built big plants at the edges of large cities, close to an ample labor force and transportation facilities. The boundaries between industrial towns sometimes blurred, and, as in northern New Jersey or along Lake Michigan south of Chicago, extended urban-industrial areas emerged.
Older commercial cities meanwhile industrialized. Warehouse districts could readily be converted to small-scale manufacturing; a distribution network was right at hand. In addition, as gateways for immigrants, port cities offered abundant cheap la- bor. Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and San Francisco became hives of small-scale,
TABLE 18.1 Ten Largest Cities by Population, 1870 and 1900
1870 1900
City Population City Population
1. New York 942,292 New York 3,437,202 2. Philadelphia 674,022 Chicago 1,698,575 3. Brooklyn* 419,921 Philadelphia 1,293,697 4. St. Louis 310,864 St. Louis 575,238 5. Chicago 298,977 Boston 560,892 6. Baltimore 267,354 Baltimore 508,957 7. Boston 250,526 Cleveland 381,768 8. Cincinnati 216,239 Buff alo 352,387 9. New Orleans 191,418 San Francisco 342,782 10. San Francisco 149,473 Cincinnati 325,902
*Brooklyn was consolidated with New York in 1898. SOURCE: U.S. Census data.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 524 10/20/08 10:57:59 AM user-s131 /Volumes/MHSF/MH-SANFRAN/MHSF027/MHS…Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 524 10/20/08 10:57:59 AM user-s131 /Volumes/MHSF/MH-SANFRAN/MHSF027/MHS…
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 525
labor-intensive industry. New York, with its enormous pool of immigrant workers, became a magnet for the garment trades, cigar making, and diversifi ed light industry. Preeminent as a city of trade and fi nance, New York also ranked as the nations largest manufacturing center.
City Innovation As cities expanded, so did their growing problems. How would so many people move around, communicate, and have their physical needs met? No less than industry, the city demanded innovation and, in the end, compiled just as impressive a record of technological achievement.
The older commercial cities had been compact, densely settled around harbors or riverfronts. As late as 1850, when it had 565,000 people, Philadelphia covered only ten square miles. From the foot of Chestnut Street on the Delaware River, a person could walk almost anywhere in the city within forty-fi ve minutes. Thereafter, as it developed, Philadelphia spilled out and, like American cities everywhere, engulfed the surround- ing countryside.
The only trouble about this town, wrote Mark Twain on arriving in New York in 1867, is that it is too large. You cannot accomplish anything in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call without devoting a whole day to it. . . . [The] distances are too great. Moving nearly a million New Yorkers around was not as hope- less as Twain thought, but it did challenge the ingenuity of city builders.
The fi rst innovation, dating back to the 1820s, was the omnibus, an elongated version of the horse-drawn carriage. Putting the car on iron tracks then enabled the horses to pull more passengers at a faster clip through crowded city streets. The pro- truding rails, the chief objection to the horsecar, were overcome by a modest but crucial refi nement in 1852: a grooved rail that was fl ush with the pavement. Next came the electric trolley car, the brainchild primarily of Frank J. Sprague, an engi- neer once employed by the great inventor Thomas A. Edison. In 1887, Sprague de- signed an electricity-driven system for Richmond, Virginia: A trolley carriage run- ning along an overhead power line was attached by cable to streetcars equipped with an electric motor hence the name trolley car. After Spragues success, the trolley swiftly displaced the horsecar.
In Americas great metropolises, however, the streetcar itself was no solution. Con- gestion led to demands that transit lines be moved off the streets. In 1879, the fi rst ele- vated railroads went into operation on Sixth and Ninth Avenues in New York City. Pow- ered at fi rst by steam engines, the els were converted to electricity following Spragues success with the trolley. Chicago developed elevated transit most fully. Other cities looked below ground. Boston opened a short underground line in 1897, but it was the comple- tion in 1904 of a subway running the length of Manhattan that demonstrated the full potential of the high-speed underground train. Mass transit had become rapid transit.
Equally remarkable was the architectural revolution sweeping metropolitan centers. With steel girders, durable plate glass, and the passenger elevator available by the 1880s, a wholly new way of construction opened up. A steel skeleton supported the building, while the walls, previously weight bearing, served as curtains enclosing the structure. The sky, so to speak, became the limit.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 525 8/30/08 4:15:39 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 525 8/30/08 4:15:39 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
526 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
The fi rst skyscraper to be built on this principle was William Le Baron Jenneys ten-story Home Insurance Building (1885) in Chicago. Although unremarkable in appearance it looked just like the other downtown buildings Jenneys steel-girdered structure liberated American architecture. A Chicago school arose, dedicated to the de- sign of buildings whose form expressed, rather than masked, their structure and func- tion. The presiding genius was the architect Louis Sullivan, who developed a vertical aesthetic of set-back windows and strong columns that gave skyscrapers a proud and soaring presence. Chicago pioneered skyscraper construction, but New York, with its unrelenting demand for prime downtown space, took the lead after the mid-1890s. The fi fty-fi ve-story Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, marked the beginning of the modern Manhattan skyline.
For ordinary citizens, the electric light was the best evidence that times had changed. Gaslight illuminated gas produced from coal had been in use since the early nineteenth century, but at 12 candlepower, the lamps were too dim to brighten the citys downtown streets and public spaces. The fi rst use of electricity, once generat- ing technology made it commercially feasible in the 1870s, was for better city lighting. Charles F. Brushs electric arc lamps, installed in Wanamakers department store in Philadelphia in 1878, threw a brilliant light and soon replaced gaslight on city streets.
The Chicago Elevated, 1900 This is Wabash Avenue, looking north from Adams Street. For Americans from farms and small towns, this photograph by William Henry Jackson captured something of the peculiarity of the urban scene. What could be stranger than a railroad suspended above the streets in the midst of peoples lives? KEA Publishing Services, Ltd.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 526 8/30/08 8:57:07 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 526 8/30/08 8:57:07 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 527
Electric lighting then entered the American home, thanks to Thomas Edisons inven- tion of a serviceable incandescent bulb in 1879. Edisons motto Let there be light! truly described modern city life.
Before it had any signifi cant effect on industry, electricity gave the city its quickening tempo, lifting elevators, powering streetcars and subway trains, turning night into day. Meanwhile, Alexander Graham Bells telephone (1876) sped communication beyond any- thing imagined previously. Twains complaint of 1867, that it was impossible to carry on business in New York, had been answered: All he needed to do was pick up the phone.
Private City, Public City City building was mostly an exercise in private enterprise. The profi t motive spurred the great innovations the trolley car, electric lighting, the skyscraper, the elevator, the telephone and drove urban real estate development. The investment opportuni- ties looked so tempting that new cities sprang up almost overnight from the ruins of the Chicago fi re of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Real estate inter- ests, eager to develop subdivisions, lobbied for streetcar lines pushing outward from the central districts. The subway, predicted the New York Times, would open the outer suburbs to a population of ten millions . . . housed comfortably, healthfully and relatively cheaply a gold mine for developers.
America gave birth to what one urban historian has called the private city, shaped primarily by many individuals, all pursuing their own goals and bent on mak- ing money. The prevailing belief was that the sum of such private activity would far exceed what the community might accomplish through public effort.
Yet constitutionally, it was up to municipal governments to draw the line between public and private. New York City was legally entitled to operate a municipally owned subway, the State Supreme Court ruled in 1897. Even private property was subject to whatever regulations the city might impose. Moreover, city governance improved impres- sively in the late nineteenth century. Though by no means corruption-free, municipal agencies became more professionalized and more expansive in the functions they under- took. Nowhere in the world were there bigger public projects: aqueducts, sewage systems, bridges, and spacious parks.
In the space between public and private, however, was an environmental no-mans land. City streets were often fi lthy and poorly maintained. Three or four days of warm spring weather, remarked a New York journalist, would turn Manhattans garbage- strewn, snow-clogged streets into veritable mud rivers. Air quality likewise suffered. A visitor to Pittsburgh noted the heavy pall of smoke which constantly overhangs her . . . until the very sun looks coppery through the sooty haze. As for the lovely hills rising from the rivers, They have been leveled down, cut into, sliced off, and ruth- lessly marred and mutilated.
In earlier times, the urban poor had lived mainly in makeshift wooden structures in alleys and back streets and then, as more prosperous families moved away, in the subdivided homes left behind. As land values climbed after the Civil War, speculators began to erect buildings specifi cally designed for the urban masses. In New York City, the dreadful result was fi ve- or six-story tenements, structures housing twenty or more families in cramped, airless apartments.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 527 8/30/08 4:15:40 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 527 8/30/08 4:15:40 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
528 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
Reformers recognized the problem but seemed unable to solve it. Some favored model tenements fi nanced by public-spirited citizens. But private philanthropy was no answer to escalating land values in downtown areas. The landlords of the poor ex- pected a return on their investment, and that meant high-density, cheaply built hous- ing. This economic fact defi ed nineteenth-century solutions.
It was not that America lacked an urban vision. On the contrary, an abiding rural ideal exerted a powerful infl uence on city planners. Frederick Law Olmsted, who de- signed New York Citys Central Park, wanted cities that exposed people to the beauties of nature. One of Olmsteds projects, the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, gave rise to the City Beautiful movement, which fostered larger park systems, broad bou- levards and parkways, and, after the turn of the century, zoning laws and planned suburbs.
But usually it was too little and too late. Fifteen or twenty years ago a plan might have been adopted that would have made this one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Kansas Citys park commissioners reported in 1893. At that time, however, such a policy could not be fully appreciated. Nor, even if Kansas City had foreseen its future, would it have shouldered the heavy burden of trying to shape its develop- ment. The American city had placed its faith in the dynamics of the marketplace, not the restraints of a planned future. The pluses and minuses are perhaps best revealed by the following comparison.
Chicago, Illinois, and Berlin, Germany, had virtually equal populations in 1900. But they had very different histories. Seventy years earlier, when Chicago had been a muddy frontier outpost, Berlin was already a city of 250,000 and the royal seat of the Hohenzollerns of Prussia.
With German unifi cation in 1871, the imperial authorities rebuilt Berlin on a grander scale. A capital city is essential for the state, to act as a pivot for its culture, proclaimed the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke. Berlin served that na- tional purpose a center where Germanys political, intellectual, and material life is concentrated, and its people can feel united. Chicago had no such pretensions. It was strictly a place of business, made great by virtue of its strategic grip on the commerce of Americas heartland. Nothing in Chicago approached the grandeur of Berlins monumental palaces and public buildings, nor were Chicagoans witness to the pomp and ceremony of the imperial parades up Berlins Unter den Linden to the national cathedral.
Yet as a functioning city, Chicago was in many ways superior to Berlin. Chicagos waterworks pumped 500 million gallons of water a day, or 139 gallons of water per person, while Berliners had to make do with 18 gallons. Flush toilets, a rarity in Berlin in 1900, could be found in 60 percent of Chicagos homes. Chicagos streets were lit by electricity, while Berlin still relied mostly on gaslight. Chicago had a much bigger streetcar system, more spacious parks, and a public library that contained many more volumes. And Chicago had just completed an amazing sanitation project that reversed the course of the Chicago River so that its waters and the citys sewage would fl ow away from Lake Michigan.
Giant sanitation projects were one thing; an inspiring urban environment was something else. For well-traveled Americans admiring of things European, the sense of inferiority was palpable. We are enormously rich, admitted the journalist Edwin
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 528 8/30/08 4:15:41 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 528 8/30/08 4:15:41 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 529
L. Godkin, but . . . what have we got to show? Almost nothing. Ugliness from an artistic point of view is the mark of all our cities. Thus, the urban balance sheet: a utilitarian infrastructure that was superb by nineteenth-century standards but no municipal splendors of any description, nothing but population and hotels.
Upper Class/Middle Class In the early republic, class distinctions had been embedded in the way men and women dressed and demonstrated by the deference they demanded from or granted others. As the industrial city grew, these marks of class weakened. In the anonymity of a big city, recognition and deference no longer served as mechanisms for conferring status. Instead, people began to rely on conspicuous display of wealth, membership in exclusive clubs, and, above all, residence in exclusive neighborhoods.
The Urban Elite As early as the 1840s, Boston merchants had taken advantage of the new railway ser- vice to escape the congested city. Fine rural estates appeared in Milton, Newton, and other outlying towns. By 1848, roughly 20 percent of Bostons businessmen were mak- ing the trip downtown by train. Ferries that plied the harbor between Manhattan and Brooklyn served the same purpose for well-to-do New Yorkers.
As commercial development engulfed the downtown, the exodus by the elite quickened. In Cincinnati, wealthy families settled on the scenic hills rimming the crowded, humid tableland that ran down to the Ohio River. On those hillsides, a trav- eler noted in 1883, The homes of Cincinnatis merchant princes and millionaires are found . . . elegant cottages, tasteful villas, and substantial mansions, surrounded by a paradise of grass, gardens, lawns, and tree-shaded roads. Residents of the area, called Hilltop, founded country clubs, downtown gentlemens clubs, and a round of social activities for the pleasure of Cincinnatis elite.
Despite the attractions of country life, many of the very richest people preferred the heart of the city. Chicago boasted its Gold Coast; San Francisco, Nob Hill; and Denver, Quality Hill. New York novelist Edith Wharton recalled how the comfortable midcentury brownstones gave way to the new millionaire houses, which spread northward on Fifth Avenue along Central Park. Great mansions, emulating the aristo- cratic houses of Europe, lined Fifth Avenue at the turn of the century.
But great wealth did not automatically confer social standing. An established elite dominated the social heights, even in such relatively raw cities as San Francisco and Denver. It had taken only a generation sometimes less for money made in com- merce or real estate to shed its tarnish and become old and genteel. In long-settled
Why can we say that techno- logical innovation was just as signifi cant in building Ameri- can cities as it was in driving American industrialization?
Why was the American city not capable of doing a better job of protecting the environment and providing adequate hous- ing for the poor?
If we count the degraded en- vironment and poor housing as failures, why does Chicago come off so well in comparison to Berlin?
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 529 10/20/08 10:58:16 AM user-s131 /Volumes/MHSF/MH-SANFRAN/MHSF027/MHS…Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 529 10/20/08 10:58:16 AM user-s131 /Volumes/MHSF/MH-SANFRAN/MHSF027/MHS…
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
530 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
Boston, wealth passed intact through several generations, creating a closely knit tribe of Brahmin families that kept moneyed newcomers at bay. Elsewhere, urban elites tended to be more open, but only to the socially ambitious who were prepared to make visible and energetic use of their money.
In Theodore Dreisers novel The Titan (1914), the tycoon Frank Cowperwood reassures his unhappy wife that if Chicago society will not accept them, there are other cities. Money will arrange matters in New York that I know. We can build a real place there, and go in on equal terms, if we have money enough. New York thus came to be a magnet for millionaires. The city attracted them not only as the nations preeminent fi nancial center but also for the opportunities it offered for display and social recognition.
This infusion of wealth shattered New Yorks older social elite. Seeking to be as- similated into the upper class, the fl ood of moneyed newcomers simply overwhelmed it. There followed a curious process of reconstruction, a deliberate effort to defi ne the rules of conduct and identify those who properly belonged in New York society.
The key fi gure was Ward McAllister, a southern-born lawyer who had made a quick fortune in gold-rush San Francisco and then taken up a second career as the arbiter of New York society. In 1888, McAllister compiled the fi rst Social Register, comprising an accurate and careful list of all those deemed eligible for New York society. McAllister instructed the socially ambitious on how to select guests, set a proper table, arrange a party, and launch a young lady into society. He presided over a round of assemblies, balls, and dinners that defi ned the boundaries of an elite society. At the apex stood The Four Hundred the cream of New York society. McAllisters list corresponded to those invited to Mrs. William Astors gala ball of February 1, 1892.
From Manhattan, an extravagant life radiated out to such favored resorts as Saratoga Springs, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida. In Rhode Island, Newport featured a grand array of summer cottages, crowned by the Vanderbilts Marble House and The Breakers. Visitors arrived via private railway car or aboard yachts and amused them- selves at the races and gambling casinos. In New York City, the rich dined extravagantly at Delmonicos, on one famous occasion while mounted on horseback. The underside to this excess scandalous affairs, rowdy feasts that ended in police court, the notori- ously opulent costume ball thrown at the Waldorf-Astoria by the Bradley Martins at the peak of economic depression in 1897 was avidly followed in the press and awarded the celebrity we now accord to rock musicians and Hollywood stars.
Americans were adept at making money, complained the journalist Edwin L. Godkin in 1896, but they lacked the European aristocratic traditions for spending it: Great wealth has not yet entered our manners. In their struggle to fi nd the way, the moneyed elite made an indelible mark on urban life. If there was magnifi cence in the American city, that was mainly their handiwork. And if there was conspicuous waste and display, that too was their doing.
The Suburban World The middle class left a smaller imprint on the city. Many of its members, unlike the rich, preferred privacy, retreating into a suburban world that insulated them from the hurly-burly of urban life.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 530 8/30/08 4:15:41 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 530 8/30/08 4:15:41 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 531
Since colonial times, self-employed lawyers, doctors, merchants, and proprietors had been the backbone of a robust American middle class. While independent careers remained important, industrialism spawned a new middle class of salaried employees. Corporate organizations required managers, accountants, and clerks. Industrial tech- nology called for engineers, chemists, and designers, while the distribution system needed salesmen, advertising executives, and store managers. These salaried ranks in- creased sevenfold between 1870 and 1910 much faster than any other occupational group. Nearly nine million people held white-collar jobs in 1910, more than one- fourth of all employed Americans.
Some members of this white-collar class lived in the row houses of Baltimore and Boston or the comfortable apartment buildings of New York City. More preferred to escape the clamor and congestion of the city. They were attracted by a persisting rural ideal, agreeing with the landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing that nature and domestic life are better than the society and manners of town. As trolley service pushed out from the city center, middle-class Americans followed the wealthy into the countryside. All sought what one Chicago developer promised for his North Shore subdivision in 1875: qualities of which the city is in a large degree bereft, namely, its pure air, peacefulness, quietude, and natural scenery.
The geography of the suburbs was truly a map of class structure; where a family lived told where it ranked socially. As one proceeded out from the city center, the houses became fi ner, the lots larger, the inhabitants wealthier. Affl uent businessmen and professionals had the time for a long commute into town. Closer in, lower-income households generally had more than one wage earner, less secure employment, and jobs requiring movement around the city. It was better for them to be closer to the city center because cross-town transportation lines afforded the commuting fl exibility they needed.
Suburban boundaries shifted constantly as working-class city residents who wanted better lives moved to the cheapest suburbs, prompting an exodus of older residents, who in turn pushed the next higher group farther out in search of space and greenery. Suburbanization was the sum of countless individual decisions. Each fami- lys move represented an advance in living standards not only more light, air, and quiet but also better accommodation than the city afforded. Suburban houses were typically larger for the same money and equipped with fl ush toilets, hot water, central heating, and, by the turn of the century, electricity.
The suburbs also restored an opportunity that city-bound Americans thought they had lost. In the suburbs, home ownership again became the norm. A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home, propounded the Reverend Russell H. Conwell in Acres of Diamonds, his famous sermon on the virtues of moneymaking.
Rural America had fostered community life. Not so the suburbs. The grid street pattern, while effi cient for laying out lots, offered no natural focus for community; nor did the shops and services that lay scattered along the trolley-car streets. Suburban development conformed to the economics of real estate and transportation, and so did the thinking of middle-class home seekers entering the suburbs. They wanted a house that gave them good value and convenience to the trolley line.
The need for community had lost some of its force for middle-class Americans. Two other attachments assumed greater importance: work and family.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 531 8/30/08 4:15:41 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 531 8/30/08 4:15:41 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
532 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
Middle-Class Families In the pre-industrial economy, work and family life were intertwined. Farmers, mer- chants, and artisans generally worked at home. The household encompassed not just blood relatives, but everyone living and working there. As industrialism progressed, family life and economic activity parted company. The father departed every morning for the offi ce, and children spent more years in school. Clothing was bought ready- made; increasingly, food came in cans and packages. Middle-class families became smaller, excluding all but nuclear members, and consisting typically by 1900 of hus- band, wife, and three children.
Within this family circle, relationships became intense and affectionate. Home was the most expressive experience in life, recalled the literary critic Henry Seidel Canby of his growing up in the 1890s. Though the family might quarrel and nag, the home held them all, protecting them against the outside world. For such middle-class families, the quiet, tree-lined streets created a domestic space insulated from the harsh- ness of commerce and enterprise.
The burdens of domesticity fell on the wife. It was nearly unheard of for her to seek an outside career that was her husbands role. Her job was to manage the household. The woman who could not make a home, like the man who could not support one,
Middle-Class Domesticity For middle-class Americans, the home was a place of nurture, a refuge from the world of competitive commerce. Perhaps that explains why their residences were so heavily draped and cluttered with bric-a-brac. All of it emphasized privacy and pride of possession. Culver Pictures.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 532 8/30/08 4:15:41 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 532 8/30/08 4:15:41 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 533
was condemned, Canby remembered. As the physical burdens of household work eased, higher-quality homemaking became the new ideal a message propagated by Catherine Beechers best-selling book The American Womans Home (1869) and by such magazines as the Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, which fi rst appeared during the 1880s. This advice literature instructed wives that, in addition to their do- mestic duties, they had the responsibility for bringing sensibility, beauty, and love to the household. We owe to women the charm and beauty of life, wrote one educator. For the love that rests, strengthens and inspires, we look to women.
Womanly virtue, even if much glorifi ed, by no means put wives on equal terms with their husbands. Although the legal status of married women their right to own property, control separate earnings, make contracts, and get a divorce improved markedly during the nineteenth century, law and custom still dictated that a wife be submissive to her husband. She relied on his ability as the breadwinner, and despite her superior virtues and graces, she was thought to be below him in vigor and intellect. Her mind could be employed but little and in trivial matters, wrote one prominent physician, and her proper place was as the companion or ornamental appendage to man. Middle-class women faced a painful family dilemma. They wanted fewer chil- dren but, other than abstinence, were often at a loss about what to do about it. Con- traceptive devices, although heavily marketed, were either unreliable or, as in the case of condoms, stigmatized by association with prostitution. Many doctors disapproved of contraception, fearing that uncoupling sex from procreation would release the sex- ual appetites of men, to the detriment of their health.
On top of that, advocates of birth control had to contend with Anthony Comstock, secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. In that capacity, he campaigned relentlessly to uplift the nations morals. The vehicle that he chose was a federal law passed at his behest in 1873 prohibiting the sending of obscene materials through the U.S. mails. Comstocks defi nition of obscenity included any information about birth control or, for that matter, any open discussion of sex. So powerful was Comstocks infl uence that the suppression of vice became a national obsession during the 1870s.
It is this offi cial writing that has given us the notion of a Victorian age of sexual repression. Letters and diaries suggest that in the privacy of their homes, husbands and wives acted otherwise. Yet they must have done so in constant fear of unwanted preg- nancies. A fulfi lling sexual relationship was not easily squared with birth control.
Not surprisingly, many bright, independent-minded women rebelled against marriage. More than 10 percent of women of marriageable age remained single, and the rate was much higher among college graduates and professionals. Only half the Mount Holyoke College class of 1902 married. I know that something perhaps, hu- manly speaking, supremely precious has passed me by, remarked the writer Vida Scudder. But how much it would have excluded! Married life looks to me often as I watch it terribly impoverished, for women.
If fewer women married, so, of course, did fewer men. We can, thanks to the census, trace the tardy progression into marriage of the male cohort born just after the Civil War: In 1890, when they were in their early thirties, two-fi fths were unmarried; a de- cade later, in their early forties, a quarter still had not married; ultimately, a hard-core, over 10 percent, never married. One historian has labeled the late nineteenth century
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 533 10/20/08 10:58:34 AM user-s131 /Volumes/MHSF/MH-SANFRAN/MHSF027/MHS…Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 533 10/20/08 10:58:34 AM user-s131 /Volumes/MHSF/MH-SANFRAN/MHSF027/MHS…
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
534 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
the Age of the Bachelor, a time when being an unattached male lost its social stigma. A bachelors counterpart to Vida Scudders dim view of marriage was this ditty that made the rounds in the early 1880s:
No wife to scold me
No children to squall
God bless the happy man
Who keeps bachelors hall.
With its residential hotels, restaurants, and abundant personal services, the urban scene afforded bachelors all the comforts of home and, on top of that, a happy array of mens clubs, saloons, and sporting events.
The appeal of the manly life was not confi ned to confi rmed bachelors. American males were supposed to be independent, which meant being ones own boss. But the salaried jobs they increasingly held left them distinctly not their own bosses. Nor, once employment was no longer centered in the household, could they exert the patriarchal hold over family life that had empowered their fathers and grandfathers. A palpable anxiety arose that the American male was becoming, as one magazine editor warned, weak, effeminate, decaying. There was a telling shift in language. While people had once spoken of manhood, which meant leaving childhood behind, they now spoke of masculinity, the opposite of femininity: Being a man meant surmounting the feminiz- ing infl uences of modern life.
How was this to be accomplished? By engaging in competitive sports such as foot- ball, which became hugely popular in this era. By working out and becoming fi t be- cause, as the psychologist G. Stanley Hall put it, you cant have a fi rm will without fi rm muscles. By resorting to the great outdoors, engaging in Theodore Roosevelts strenu- ous life. Or vicariously, by reading books such as Owen Wisters best-selling cowboy novel, The Virginian (1902). The surging popularity of westerns and adventure novels was surely a marker of urban dwellers fear that theirs was not a life for real men.
Women perhaps had it easier. Around 1890, the glimmerings of a sexual revolu- tion appeared in the middle-class family. Experts abandoned the notion, put forth by one popular text, that the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind. In succeeding editions of his book Plain Home Talk on Love, Marriage, and Parentage, the physician Edward Bliss Foote began to favor a healthy sexuality that gave pleasure to women as well as men.
During the 1890s, the artist Charles Dana Gibson created the image of the new woman. In his drawings, the Gibson girl was tall, spirited, athletic, and chastely sexual. She rejected bustles, hoop skirts, and tightly laced corsets, preferring natural styles that did not disguise her female form. In the city, womens sphere began to take on a more public character. Among the new urban institutions that catered to women, the most important was the department store, which became a temple for womens emerging role as consumers.
The offspring of the middle class experienced their own revolution. In the past, children had been regarded as an economic asset added hands for the family farm, shop, or countinghouse. For the urban middle class, this no longer held true. Parents stopped expecting their children to be productive members of the family. In the old days, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked in 1880, Children had been repressed and kept
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 534 8/30/08 4:15:42 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 534 8/30/08 4:15:42 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 535
in the background; now they are considered, cosseted, and pampered. There was such a thing as the juvenile mind, lectured Jacob Abbott in his book Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young (1871). The family was responsible for provid- ing a nurturing environment in which the young personality could grow and mature.
Preparation for adulthood became increasingly linked to formal education. School enrollment went up 150 percent between 1870 and 1900. As the years before adult- hood began to stretch out, a new stage of life adolescence emerged. While rooted in longer years of family dependency, adolescence shifted much of the socializing role from parents to peer group.
Most affected were the daughters of the mid- dle class, who, freed from the chores of house- work, now devoted themselves to self-develop- ment, including going to high school for many. The liberating consequences surely went beyond their parents expectations. In a revealing shift in terminology, young lady gave way to school girl, and the daughterly submissiveness of earlier times gave way to self-expressive independence. On achieving adulthood, it was not so big a step for the daughters of the middle class to become Gibsons new women.
City Life With its soaring skyscrapers, jostling traffi c, and hum of business, the city symbolized energy and enterprise. When the budding writer Hamlin Garland and his brother arrived in Chicago from Iowa in 1881, they knew immediately that they had entered a new world: Everything interested us. . . . Nothing was commonplace, nothing was ugly. In one way or another, every city-bound migrant, whether fresh from the American countryside or an arrival from a foreign land, experienced something of this sense of wonder.
The city was utterly unlike the countryside, where every person had been known to his or her neighbors. Mark Twain found New York a splendid desert, where a stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race. . . . Every man rushes, rushes, rushes, and never has time to be companionable [or] to fool away on matters which do not involve dollars and duty and business.
Migrants could never recreate in the city what they had left behind. But they found ways of belonging, they built new institutions, and they learned how to function in an impersonal, heterogeneous environment. An urban culture emerged, and through it, there developed a new breed of American entirely at home in the modern city.
Newcomers The explosive growth of Americas big-city population a jump from about six mil- lion in 1880 to fourteen million in 1900 meant that cities were very much a world of newcomers. Many came from the nations countryside; half of rural families on the
Why is Ward McAllister so signifi cant a fi gure in the annals of the rich?
Why did the suburbs become so prominent a feature of the late-nineteenth-century city?
In the middle-class family of this era, how might the wifes position have been more stressful than that of her husband? Why?
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 535 8/30/08 4:15:42 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 535 8/30/08 4:15:42 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
536 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
move in these years were city bound. But it was migrants marked off by ethnicity who found city life most daunting. At the turn of the century, upwards of 30 percent of the residents of most big cities were foreign-born. The biggest ethnic group in Boston was Irish; in Minneapolis, Swedish; in most other northern cities, German. But by 1910, southern and eastern Europeans fl ooded in. Poles took the lead in Chicago; in New York, it was eastern European Jews; in San Francisco, Italians.
The immigrants had little choice about where they lived; they needed to fi nd cheap housing near their jobs. Some gravitated to the outlying factory districts; others settled in the congested downtown ghettos. In New York, Italians crowded into the Irish neigh- borhoods west of Broadway, while Russian and Polish Jews pushed the Germans out of the Lower East Side (Map 18.1). A colony of Hungarians lived around Houston Street, and Bohemians occupied the poorer stretches between Fiftieth and Seventy-sixth Streets. Every city with a large immigrant population experienced this kind of ethnic
Mulberry Street, New York City, c. 1900 The infl ux of southern and eastern Europeans created teeming ghettos in the heart of New York City and other major American cities. The view is of Mulberry Street, with its pushcarts, street peddlers, and bustling traffi c. The inhabitants are mostly Italians, and some of them, noticing the photographer preparing his camera, have gathered to be in the picture. Library of Congress. For more help analyzing this photo, see the Online Study Guide at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
!”# $%
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 537
Hungarian
Romanian
0 0.25 mile
Galician (Polish)
Mixed Middle Eastern and Romanian
Russian
Jewish Ethnic Concentrations
N
S
EW
East River
Houston St. Ferry
Williamsb urg
Grand St.
Ferry
Manhattan Bridge
Bridge
Brooklyn
Union Square Park
Tompkins Square Park
City Hall Park
.tShtroW
.tS lana
C
ya wdaor
B
.tSnotsuoH.W
yr e
wo B
.tSnoisiviD eornoM
.tS
.t S
no tn
il C
.tSdnarG
.tSyecnaleD
.tSnotsuoH.E
tsri F
.ev A
E. 21st St.
A eunev
A
B eunev
A Ceunev A
E. 34th St.
.ev A
dri h T
E. 14th St.
.tS.dr3.E
.e v
A ht
ru o
F
.t S
re tx
a B
.t S
ne ll
A Bridge
dnoce S
.ev A
Beth Israel HospitalIsrael Elchanan Yeshiva
Educational Alliance
Yiddish Rialto
Thalia Theater
Peoples Bath
Public School 63
Hebrew Technical School for Boys
Music School Settlement
Henry Street Settlement
Machzike Talmud Torah
Hebrew Sheltering House
Hebrew Technical School for Girls
Home for the Aged
Jewish Maternity Hospital
Beth Hamedrash Hagadol
N.J.
The Bronx
Queens
Brooklyn
M an
ha tt
an I.
MAP 18.1 The Lower East Side, New York City, 1900 As this map shows, the Jewish immigrants dominating Manhattans Lower East Side preferred living in neigh- borhoods populated by those from their home regions of eastern Europe. Their sense of a common identity made for a remarkable fl owering of educational, cultural, and social institutions on the Jewish East Side. For more help analyzing this map, see the Online Study Guide at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
! ”# $
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
538 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
sorting out, as did San Francisco, for example, with its Chinatown, Italian North Beach, and Jewish Hayes Valley.
Capitalizing on fellow feeling, immigrant institutions of many kinds sprang up. In 1911, the 20,000 Poles in Buffalo supported two Polish-language daily papers. Immigrants throughout the country avidly read Il Progresso Italo-Americano and the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward, both published in New York City. Companionship could always be found on street corners, in barbershops and club rooms, and in saloons. Italians marched in saints day parades, Bohemians gathered in singing societies, and New York Jews patronized a lively Yiddish theater. To provide help in times of sickness and death, the immigrants organized mutual-aid societies. The Italians of Chicago had sixty-six of these organizations in 1903, mostly composed of people from particular provinces or towns. Immigrants built a rich and functional institutional life to an extent unimagined in their native places (see American Voices, p. 539).
The African American migration from the rural South was just beginning at the turn of the century. The black population of New York increased by 30,000 between 1900 and 1910, making New York second only to Washington, D.C., as a black urban center, but the 91,000 African Americans in New York in 1910 represented fewer than 2 percent of the population, and that was also true of Chicago and Cleveland.
The Cherry Family Tree, 1906 Wiley and Fannie Cherry migrated in 1893 from North Carolina to Chicago, settling in the small African American community on the West Side. The Cherrys apparently prospered and by 1906, when this family portrait was taken, had entered the black middle class. When migration intensifi ed after 1900, longer-settled urban blacks such as the Cherrys became uncomfortable with it, and relations with the needy rural newcomers were often tense. Courtesy, Lorraine Hefl in/Chicago Historical Society.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 538 8/30/08 4:15:44 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 538 8/30/08 4:15:44 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
A M E R I C A N V O I C E S
S O U R C E : Isaac Metzker, ed., A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side (New York: Schocken, 1971), 8586, 110112.
Deserted Wives, Wayward Husbands A N O N Y M O U S New Yorks leading Yiddish-language paper, the Jewish Daily Forward, carried a famous
advice page entitled Bintel Brief, which in Yiddish means bundle of letters. None were
more heart-rending than those from abandoned wives, although, as the second letter shows,
the husbands could be heard from as well. Nearly unknown in the Old Country, desertion
became such a serious problem among Jewish immigrants that the Daily Forward ran a
regular feature seeking information about wayward husbands.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 539 8/30/08 4:15:45 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 539 8/30/08 4:15:45 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
This selection has been omitted intentionally from your CourseSmart eBook due to electronic permissions issues. Regrettably, we cannot make this piece available to you in a digital format.
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
arthurjohnson
Rectangle
540 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
Urban blacks retreated from the scattered neighborhoods of older times into concentrated ghettos Chicagos Black Belt on the South Side, for example, or the early outlines of New Yorks Harlem. Race prejudice cut down on job opportunities. Twenty-six percent of Clevelands blacks had been skilled workers in 1870; only 12 percent were skilled by 1890. Entire occupations such as barbering (except for a black clientele) became exclusively white. Clevelands blacks in 1910 worked mainly as do- mestics and day laborers, with little hope of moving up the job ladder.
In the face of pervasive discrimination, urban blacks built their own communities. They created a fl ourishing press; fraternal orders; a vast array of womens organizations; and a middle class of doctors, lawyers, and small entrepreneurs. Above all, there were the black churches twenty-fi ve in Chicago in 1905, mainly Methodist and Baptist. More than any other institution, remarked one scholar in 1913, it was the church which the Negro may call his own. . . . A new church may be built . . . and . . . all the ma- chinery set in motion without ever consulting any white person. . . . [Religion] more than anything else represents the real life of the race. As in the southern countryside, the church was the central institution for city blacks, and the preacher was the most impor- tant local citizen. Manhattans Union Baptist Church, housed like many others in a store- front, attracted the very recent residents of this new, disturbing city and, ringing with spirituals and prayer, made Christianity come alive Sunday mornings.
Ward Politics Race and ethnicity divided newcomers. Politics, by contrast, integrated them into the wider urban society. Migrants to American cities automatically became ward resi- dents and acquired a spokesman at city hall. Their alderman got streets paved, water mains extended, or permits granted so that, for example, in 1888, Vito Fortounescere could place and keep a stand for the sale of fruit, inside the stoop-line, in front of the northeast corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Fourth Avenue in Manhattan, or the parishioners of Saint Maria of Mount Carmel could set off fi reworks at their Fourth of July picnic.
These favors came via a system of boss control that, although present at every level of party politics, fl ourished most luxuriantly in the big cities. Political machines such as Tammany Hall in New York depended on a grassroots constituency, so they recruited layers of functionaries precinct captains, ward bosses, aldermen whose main job was to be accessible and, as best they could, serve the needs of the party faithful.
The machine acted as a rough-and-ready social service agency, providing jobs for the jobless, a helping hand for a bereaved family, and intercession with an unfeeling city bureaucracy. The Tammany ward boss George Washington Plunkitt had a regular system when fi res broke out in his district. He arranged for housing for burned-out families, fi x[ing] them up till they get things runnin again. Its philanthropy, but its politics, too mighty good politics.
The business community was similarly served. Contractors sought city business, gas companies and streetcar lines wanted licenses, manufacturers needed services and not-too-nosy inspectors, and the liquor trade and numbers rackets relied on a tolerant police force. All of them turned to the machine boss and his lieutenants.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 540 8/30/08 4:15:45 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 540 8/30/08 4:15:45 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 541
Of course, the machine exacted a price for these services. The tenement dweller gave his vote. The businessman wrote a check. Naturally, some of the money that changed hands leaked into the pockets of machine politicians. This boodle could be blatantly corrupt kickbacks by contractors; protection money from gamblers, sa- loonkeepers, and prostitutes; payoffs from gas and trolley companies. Boss William Marcy Tweed made Tammany a byword for corruption until he was brought down in 1871 by his extravagant graft in the building of a lavish city courthouse. Thereafter, machine corruption became less blatant. The turn-of-the-century Tammanyite George Plunkitt declared that he had no need for kickbacks and bribes. He favored what he called honest graft, the easy profi ts that came to savvy insiders. Plunkitt made most of his money building wharves on Manhattans waterfront. One way or another, le- gally or otherwise, machine politics rewarded its supporters.
Plunkitt was an Irishman, and so were most of the politicians who controlled Tammany Hall. But by the 1890s, Plunkitts Fifteenth District was fi lling up with Italians and Russian Jews. In general, the Irish had no love for these newer immigrants, but Plunkitt played no favorites. On any given day (as recorded in his diary), he might attend an Italian funeral in the afternoon and a Jewish wedding in the evening, and at each, he probably paid his respects with a few Italian words or a choice bit of Yiddish.
In an era when so many forces acted to isolate ghetto communities, politics served an integrating function, cutting across ethnic lines and giving immigrants and blacks a stake in the larger urban order.
Religion in the City For urban blacks, as we have seen, the church was a mainstay of their lives. So it was for many other city dwellers. But cities were hard on religious practice. All the great faiths Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism had to scramble to reconcile reli- gious belief with the secular urban world.
About 250,000 Jews, mostly of German origin, already inhabited America when the eastern European Jews began arriving in the 1880s. Well-established and prosperous, the German Jews embraced Reform Judaism, abandoning religious practices from keeping a kosher kitchen to conducting services in Hebrew that were not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization. This was not the way of the Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe. Eager to preserve their traditions, they founded their own Orthodox synagogues, often in vacant stores, and practiced Judaism as they had at home.
Insular though it might be, ghetto life in the American city could not recreate the closed village environment on which strict religious observance depended. The very clothes I wore and the very food I ate had a fatal effect on my religious habits, con- fessed the hero of Abraham Cahans novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). If you . . . attempt to bend your religion to the spirit of your surroundings, it breaks. It falls to pieces. Levinsky shaved off his beard and plunged into the Manhattan cloth- ing business. Orthodox Judaism survived this shattering of faith but only by reducing its claims on the lives of the faithful.
Catholics faced much the same problem, defi ned as Americanism by the church. To what degree should congregants adapt to American society? Should children attend
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 541 8/30/08 4:15:45 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 541 8/30/08 4:15:45 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
542 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
parochial or public schools? Should they marry non-Catholics? Should the education of clergy be changed? Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, felt that the prin- ciples of the Church are in harmony with the interests of the Republic. But tradition- alists, led by Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan of New York, denied the possibility of such harmony and argued for insulating the church from the pluralistic American environment.
Immigrant Catholics, anxious to preserve what they had known in Europe, gener- ally supported the churchs conservative wing. But they also wanted church life to ex- press their ethnic identities. Newly arrived Catholics wanted their own parishes, where they could celebrate their customs, speak their languages, and establish their own pa- rochial schools. When they became numerous enough, they also demanded their own bishops. The Catholic hierarchy, which was dominated by Irish Catholics, felt that the integrity of the church itself was at stake. The demand for ethnic parishes implied local control of church property. And if there were bishops for specifi c ethnic groups, what would be the effect on the hierarchical structure that unifi ed the church?
With some strain, the Catholic Church managed to satisfy the immigrant faithful. It met the demand for representation by appointing immigrant priests as auxiliary bishops within existing dioceses. Ethnic parishes also fl ourished. By World War I, there were more than 2,000 foreign-language churches.
For Protestants, the city posed different but not easier challenges. Every major city retained great downtown churches where wealthy Protestants worshipped. Some of these churches, richly endowed, took pride in nationally prominent pastors, such as Henry Ward Beecher of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn or Phillips Brooks of Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. But the eminence of these churches, with their fashionable congregations and imposing edifi ces, could not disguise the growing remoteness of traditional Protestantism from its urban constituency. Where is the city in which the Sabbath day is not losing ground? lamented a minister in 1887. The families of businessmen, lawyers, and doctors could be seen in any church on Sunday morning, he noted, but the workingmen and their families are not there.
The Protestant churches responded by evangelizing among the unchurched and the indifferent. They also began providing reading rooms, day nurseries, clubhouses, vocational classes, and other services. The Salvation Army, which arrived from Great Britain in 1879, spread the gospel of repentance among the urban poor, offering an assistance program that ranged from soup kitchens to shelters for former prostitutes. When all else failed, the down-and-outers of American cities knew they could count on the Salvation Army.
For single people, there were the Young Mens and Womens Christian Associa- tions, which had arrived from Britain before the Civil War. Housing for single women was an especially important mission of the YWCAs. The gymnasiums that made the YMCAs synonymous with muscular Christianity were equally important for young men. No other organization so effectively combined activities for young people with an evangelizing appeal through Bible classes, nondenominational worship, and a reli- gious atmosphere.
The social meaning that people sought in religion accounts for the enormous popularity of a book called In His Steps (1896). The author, a Congregational minister named Charles M. Sheldon, told the story of a congregation that resolved to live by
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 542 8/30/08 4:15:45 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 542 8/30/08 4:15:45 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 543
Christs precepts for one year. If the church members were all doing as Jesus would do, Sheldon asked, could it remain true that armies of men would walk the streets for jobs, and hundreds of them curse the church, and thousands of them fi nd in the sa- loon their best friend?
The most potent form of urban evangelism revivalism said little about social uplift. From their eighteenth-century origins, revival movements had steadfastly fo- cused on individual redemption. Earthly problems, revivalists believed, would be solved by converting to Christ. Beginning in the mid-1870s, revival meetings swept through the cities.
The pioneering fi gure was Dwight L. Moody, a former Chicago shoe salesman and YMCA offi cial. After preaching in Britain for two years, Moody returned to America in 1875 and began staging revival meetings that drew thousands. He preached an op- timistic, uncomplicated, nondenominational message. Eternal life could be had for the asking, Moody shouted as he held up his Bible. His listeners needed only to come forward and take, take!
Many other preachers followed in Moodys path. The most colorful was Billy Sunday, a once hard-drinking former outfi elder for the Chicago White Stockings baseball team who mended his ways and found religion. Like Moody and other city revivalists, Sunday was a farm boy. His ripsnorting attacks on fashionable ministers and the booze traffi c carried the ring of rustic America. By realizing that many people remained villagers at heart, revivalists found a key for bringing city dwellers back to the church.
City Amusements City people compartmentalized lifes activities, setting the workplace apart from home and working time apart from free time. Going out became a necessity, demanded not only as solace for a hard days work but also as proof that life was better in the New World than in the Old. He who can enjoy and does not enjoy commits a sin, a Yiddish-language paper told its readers. And enjoyment now meant buying a ticket and being entertained (see Voices from Abroad, p. 544).
Music halls attracted huge audiences. Chicago had six vaudeville houses in 1896, twenty-two in 1910. Evolving from tawdry variety and minstrel shows, vaudeville cleaned up its routines, making them suitable for the entire family, and turned into professional entertainment handled by national booking agencies. With its standard program of nine musical, dancing, and comedy acts, vaudeville attained enormous popularity just as the movies arrived. The fi rst primitive fi lms, a minute or so of hu- mor or glimpses of famous people, appeared in 1896 in penny arcades and as fi ller in vaudeville shows. Within a decade, millions of city people were watching fi lms of in- creasing length and artistry at nickelodeons (named after the fi ve-cent admission charge) across the country.
For young unmarried workers, the cheap amusements of the city created a new social space. I want a good time, a New York clothing operator told an investigator. And there is no . . . way a girl can get it on $8 a week. I guess if anyone wants to take me to a dance he wont have to ask me twice hence the widespread ritual among the urban working class of treating. The girls spent what money they had dressing up;
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 543 8/30/08 4:15:46 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 543 8/30/08 4:15:46 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
From all parts of the United States, legions of intrepid ladies and Sunday-best farmers arrive to admire the splendid sights, the unexampled wealth, the dizzying variety, the herculean surge, the striking appearance of Coney Island, the now famous island, four years ago an abandoned sand bank, that today is a spacious amusement area providing relaxation and recreation for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who throng to its pleasant beaches every day. . . .
Other nations ourselves among them live devoured by a sublime demon within that drives us to the tireless pursuit of an ideal of love or glory. . . . Not so with these tranquil souls, stimulated only by a desire for gain. One scans those shimmer- ing beaches . . . one views the throngs seated in comfortable chairs along the seashore, fi lling their lungs with the fresh, invigorating air. But it is said that those from our lands who remain here long are overcome with melancholy . . . because this great nation is void of spirit.
But what coming and going! What torrents of money! What facilities for every pleasure! What absolute absence of any outward sadness or poverty! Everything in
the open air: the animated groups, the immense dining rooms, the peculiar courtship of North Americans, which is virtually devoid of the elements that compose the shy, tender, elevated love in our lands, the theatre, the photographers booth, the bathhouses! Some weigh themselves, for North Americans are greatly elated, or really concerned, if they fi nd they have gained or lost a pound. . . .
This spending, this uproar, these crowds, the activity of this amazing ant hill never slackens from June to October, from morning til night. . . . Then, like a monster that vomits its contents into the hungry maw of another monster, that colossal crowd, that straining, crushing mass, forces its way onto the trains, which speed across wastes, groaning under their burden, until they surrender it to the tremendous steamers, enlivened by the sound of harps and violins, convey it to the piers, and debouch the weary merrymakers into the thousand trolleys that pursue the thousand tracks that spread through slumbering New York like veins of steel.
S O U R C E : Juan de Ons, trans., The America of Jos Mart: Selected Writings (New York: Noonday Press, 1954), 103110.
Coney Island, 1881 J O S M A R T Jos Mart, a Cuban patriot and revolutionary (see p. 616), was a journalist by profession. In
exile from 1880 to 1895, he spent most of his time in New York City, reporting to his Latin
American readers on the customs of the Yankees. Mart took special one might say
perverse pleasure in observing Americans at play.
V O I C E S F R O M A B R O A D
their boyfriends paid for the fun. Parental control over courtship broke down, and amid the bright lights and lively music of the dance hall and amusement park, working- class youths forged a more easygoing culture of pleasure-seeking.
The geography of the big city carved out ample space for commercialized sex. Prostitution was not new to urban life, but in the late nineteenth century, it became
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 544 8/30/08 4:15:46 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 544 8/30/08 4:15:46 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 545
more open and more intermingled with other forms of public entertainment. Opium and cocaine were widely available and not yet illegal. In New York, the red-light district was the Tenderloin, running northward from Twenty-third Street between Fifth and Eighth Avenues.
The Tenderloin and the Bowery, farther downtown, were also the sites of a robust gay subculture. The long-held notion that homosexual life was covert, in the closet, in late-nineteenth-century America appears not to be true, at least not in the countrys premier city. In certain corners of the city, a gay world fl ourished, with a full array of saloons, meeting places, and drag balls, which were widely known and patronized by uptown slummers.
Of all forms of (mostly) male diversion, none was more specifi c to the city, or so spectacularly successful, as professional baseball. The games promoters decreed that baseball had been created in 1839 by Abner Doubleday in the village of Cooperstown, New York. Actually, baseball was neither of American origin stick-and-ball games go far back into the Middle Ages nor particularly a product of rural life. Under a variety of names, team sports resembling baseball proliferated in early-nineteenth-century America. In an effort to regularize the game, the New Yorker Alexander Cartwright codifi ed the rules in 1845, only to see his Knickerbockers defeated the next year at
The Bowery at Night, 1895 The Bowery (a name dating back to the original Dutch settlement) was a major thoroughfare in downtown Manhattan. This painting by W. Louis Sonntag, Jr. shows the street in all its glory, crowded with shoppers and pleasure seekers. It was during this time that the Bowery gained its raffi sh reputation. Museum of the City of New York.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 545 8/30/08 8:57:17 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 545 8/30/08 8:57:17 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
546 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
Hoboken by the New York Baseball Club in what is regarded as the fi rst modern base- ball game. Over the next twenty years, baseball clubs appeared across the country, and intercity competition developed on a scheduled basis. In 1868, the sport became openly professional, following the lead of the Cincinnati Red Stockings in signing players to contracts for the season.
Big-time baseball came into its own with the launching of the National League in 1876. The team owners were profit-minded businessmen who shaped the sport to please the fans. Wooden grandstands gave way to the concrete and steel stadi- ums of the early twentieth century, such as Fenway Park in Boston, Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. For the urban multitudes, baseball grew into something more than an afternoon at the ballpark. By rooting for the home team, fans found a way of identifying with their city. Amid the diversity and anonymity of urban life, the common experience and language of baseball acted as a bridge among strangers.
Most effi cient at this task, however, was the newspaper. James Gordon Bennett, founder of the New York Herald in 1835, wanted to record the facts . . . for the great masses of the community. The news was whatever interested city readers, starting with crime, scandal, and sensational events. After the Civil War, the New York Sun added the human-interest story, which made news of ordinary happenings. Newspa- pers also targeted specifi c audiences. A womens page offered recipes and fashion news, separate sections covered sports and high society, and the Sunday supplement helped fi ll the weekend hours. In the competition for readers, the champion newsman was Joseph Pulitzer, the owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and, after 1883, the New York World (Table 18.2).
Pulitzer was in turn challenged by William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was an unlikely press magnate, the pampered son of a California silver king who, while at Harvard (on the way to being expelled), got interested in Pulitzers newspaper game. He took over his fa- thers dull San Francisco Examiner and rebuilt it into a highly profi table, sensationalist paper. For example, were any grizzly bears left in California? Hearst dispatched a news- man to the Tehachapi Mountains, where, after three months of arduous trapping, he caught a grizzly. The Examiner reported all this in exhaustive detail, ending triumphantly with the carnival display of the unfortunate beast. There was much more of the same: rescues, murders, scandals, sob stories, anything that might arouse in readers what an editor called the gee-whiz emotion. Hearsts brand of sensationalism was dubbed yellow journalism, after The Yellow Kid (1895), the fi rst comic strip to appear in color.
TABLE 18.2 Newspaper Circulation
Year Total Circulation
1870 2,602,000 1880 3,566,000 1890 8,387,000 1900 15,102,000 1909 24,212,000
SOURCE: Historical Statistics of the United States, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), 2: 810.
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 546 8/30/08 4:15:47 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 546 8/30/08 4:15:47 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 547
He who is without a newspaper, said the great showman P. T. Barnum, is cut off from his species. Barnum was speaking of city people and their hunger for informa- tion. Hearst understood this. Thats why he made barrels of money.
The Higher Culture In the midst of this popular ferment, new institutions of higher culture were taking shape in Americas cities. A desire for the cultivated life was not, of course, specifi cally urban. Before the Civil War, the lyceum movement had sent lecturers to the remotest towns, bearing messages of culture and learning. Chautauqua, founded in upstate New York in 1874, carried on this work of cultural dissemination. However, great museums, public libraries, opera companies, and symphony orchestras could fl ourish only in metropolitan centers.
The nations fi rst major art museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, opened in Washington, D.C., in 1869. New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art started in rented quarters two years later, then moved in 1880 to its permanent site in Central Park and launched an ambitious program of art acquisition. When fi nancier J. Pierpont Morgan became chairman of the board in 1905, the Metropolitans preeminence was assured. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1876 and Chicagos Art Institute in 1879.
Symphony orchestras also appeared, fi rst in New York under the conductors Theodore Thomas and Leopold Damrosch in the 1870s and then in Boston and Chicago during the next decade. National tours by these leading orchestras planted the seeds for orchestral societies in many other cities. Public libraries grew from modest collections (in 1870, only seven had as many as 50,000 books) into major urban institutions. The greatest library benefactor was Andrew Carnegie, who announced in 1881 that he would build a library in any town or city that was prepared to maintain it. By 1907, Carnegie had spent more than $32.7 million to establish about 1,000 libraries throughout the country.
The late nineteenth century was the great age not only of money making, but also of money giving. Generous with their surplus wealth, new millionaires patronized the arts partly as a civic duty, partly to promote themselves socially, but also out of a sense of national pride.
In America there is no culture, pronounced the English critic G. Lowes Dickinson in 1909. Science and the practical arts, yes every possible application of life to pur- poses and ends but no life for lifes sake. Such condescending remarks received a respectful American hearing out of a sense of cultural inferiority to the Old World. In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published a novel, The Gilded Age, that satirized America as a land of money-grubbers and speculators. This enormously popu- lar book touched a nerve in the American psyche. Its title has since been appropriated by historians to characterize the late nineteenth century Americas Gilded Age as an era of materialism and cultural shallowness.
Some members of the upper class, such as the novelist Henry James, moved to Europe. But the more common response was to try to raise the nations cultural level. The newly rich had a hard time of it. They did not have much opportunity to culti- vate a taste for art, but they were quick learners. George W. Vanderbilt, grandson of
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 547 8/30/08 4:15:47 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 547 8/30/08 4:15:47 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
548 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
the rough-hewn Cornelius Vanderbilt, championed French Impressionism, and the coal and steel baron Henry Clay Frick built a brilliant art collection that is still housed as a public museum in his mansion in New York City. The enthusiasm of moneyed Americans largely fueled the great cultural institutions that sprang up during the Gilded Age.
A deeply conservative idea of culture sustained this generous patronage. The aim was to embellish life, not to probe or reveal its meaning. Art, says the hero of the Reverend Henry Ward Beechers sentimental novel Norwood (1867), attempts to work out its end solely by the use of the beautiful, and the artist is to select out only such things as are beautiful. The idea of culture also took on an elitist cast: Shakespeare, once a staple of popular entertainment (in various bowdlerized versions), was appro- priated into the domain of serious theater. Simultaneously, the world of culture be- came feminized. Husbands or sons rarely share those interests, noted one observer. In American life, remarked the clergyman Horace Bushnell, men represented the force principle, women the beauty principle.
The depiction of life, the eminent editor and novelist William Dean Howells wrote, must be tinged with suffi cient idealism to make it all of a truly uplifting character. . . . The fi ner side of things the idealistic is the answer for us. The genteel tradition, as this literary school came to be known, dominated the nations purveyors of elite culture its journals, publishers, and college professors from the 1860s onward.
But the urban world could not fi nally be kept at bay. Howells himself resigned in 1881 from the Atlantic Monthly, a stronghold of the genteel tradition, and called for a
literature that sought to picture the daily life in the most exact terms possible. In a series of realis- tic novels A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard of New For- tunes (1890) Howells captured the urban mid- dle class. Stephen Cranes Maggie: Girl of the Streets (1893), privately printed because no publisher would touch it, unfl inchingly described the de- struction of a slum girl.
The city had entered the American imagination and become, by the early 1900s, a main theme of American art and literature. And because it chal- lenged so many assumptions of an older, republican America, the city also became an overriding concern of reformers and, after the turn of the century, the main theater in the drama of the Progressive era.
S U M M A RY In this chapter, we explored the emergence of a distinctively urban American society. The chapter was concerned, fi rst of all, with how the great nineteenth-century cities came to be built. Urban growth was driven by industrialization by the geographic
In both politics and religion, established institutions had to fi nd ways of incorporating a fl ood of newcomers to the city. But the politicians seemed to have an easier time of it. Why?
American cities housed a great many people struggling to get by. Yet they always seemed ready to dig into their pockets for a newspaper or a ticket to the ball game. Why?
Why do we date the arrival of institutions of higher culture with the rise of the industrial city?
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 548 8/30/08 4:15:47 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 548 8/30/08 4:15:47 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
C H A P T E R 18 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in It 549
concentration of industries, by the increasing scale of production, and by industrys need for city-based fi nancial and administrative services. A burst of innovation brought forth mass transit, skyscrapers, electricity, and much else that made the big city livable. Although not constrained constitutionally, the public sector left city building as much as possible to private initiative and private capital. The result was dramatic growth, with an infrastructure superior to Europes, but at the price of a degraded environ- ment and squalid living conditions for the poor.
The second concern of this chapter was with an urban class structure defi ned most visibly by geography. The poor inhabited the inner cities and factory districts, the middle class spread out into the suburbs, and the rich lived insulated in fancy neighborhoods or beyond the suburbs. For the wealthy, an elite society emerged, with an opulent lifestyle and exclusive social organizations. The middle class withdrew into the private world of the family. Intersecting with family were issues of gender identity, with white-collar husbands embracing a cult of masculinity and wives emboldened by the liberating prospects of the new woman.
Finally, this chapter described the components of a distinctive urban culture. City life was strongly fl avored by the ways in which newcomers European immigrants, southern blacks, small-town whites adapted to an alien urban environment. In poli- tics and religion, we saw most vividly how American institutions adapted to the new- comers. City life was also distinguished by an explosion of leisure activities, ranging from vaudeville to the yellow press and, at a more elevated level, by the institutions of art, music, and literature that sustain a nations higher culture.
Connections: Society Cities always played a disproportionate part in the nations economic, political, and cultural life. But only in the late nineteenth century, as the United States became an industrial power, did the rural/urban balance shift and the cities develop a distinctly urban culture. The consequences of that development loom large in the battle for reform during the Progressive era (Chapter 20) and in the cultural confl ict in the 1920s (Chapter 23). In succeeding decades, we can still distinguish what is distinctively urban in American development, but in truth, urban history and American history in- creasingly merge as the United States becomes in our own time a nation of urban and suburban dwellers, with farmers the merest fraction of Americas population.
F O R F U R T H E R E X P LO R AT I O N The starting points for modern urban historiography are Sam Bass Warners pioneer- ing book on Boston, Streetcar Suburbs, 18701900 (1962), and a subsequent work, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods (1968), that shows how private decision making shaped the American city. Innovations in urban construction are treated in Carl Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 18651913 (1996), and Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 18801930 (1991). As- pects of middle-class life are revealed in Howard B. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bach- elor (1999); Jane Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (2003); Michael Ebner, Chicagos North Shore: A Suburban His- tory (1988); and John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century America (1990). On urban life, see especially Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of
Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 549 8/30/08 4:15:47 PM user-s147Henretta_ch18_523-550.indd Page 549 8/30/08 4:15:47 PM user-s147 /Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18/Volumes/204/BSM009/ch18
APUS/AMU – Property of Bedford St Martin’s – 0-312-62422-0 / 0-312-62423-9 – Copyright 2009
550 PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society, 18771914
Modern City Culture (1982); David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It (2004); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1978); and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986). The best introduction to Gilded Age intellectual currents is Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society, 18651893 (1983). On the Columbian Exposition of 1893, an excellent Web site is The Worlds Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath at xroads.virginia.edu/~ma96/WCE/title.html, including detailed guides to every site at the fair and analysis of its lasting impact.
T E S T YO U R K N O W L E D G E To assess your mastery of the material in this chapter and for Web sites, images, and documents related to this chapter, visit bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
1869 Corcoran Gallery of Art, nations fi rst major art museum, opens in Washington, D.C.
1871 Chicago fi re 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley
Warner publish The Gilded Age 1875 Dwight L. Moody launches urban
revivalist movement 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patents
telephone National Baseball League founded 1879 Thomas Edison creates practical
incandescent light bulb Salvation Army, originally formed
in Britain, is established in the United States
1881 Andrew Carnegie off ers to build a library for every American city
1883 New York Citys Metropolitan Opera founded
Joseph Pulitzer purchases New York World
1885 William Jenney builds fi rst steel-framed structure, Chicagos Home Insurance Building
1887 First electric trolley line constructed in Richmond, Virginia
1893 Chicago Worlds Fair City Beautiful movement 1895 William Randolph Hearst enters
New York journalism 1897 Boston builds fi rst American
subway 1900 Theodore Dreiser publishes
Sister Carrie 1901 New York Tenement House Law 1904 New York subway system opens 1906 San Francisco earthquake 1913 Fifty-fi ve-story Woolworth
Building opens in New York City