Nation of Nations 3/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff
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THE CHAPTER IN PERSPECTIVE

his chapter tells the story of the rise of modern industrial cities and their effect on American life in the late nineteenth century. Cities became the indispensable nodes of the new industrial order. They provided capital, labor, and markets, as they grew and profited from the industries they attracted. They attracted not only industry but people, some from the hinterlands of America, others from abroad. The city-bred mix of cultures soon dominated America life. As you will read in Chapter 23 on the Progressive Era, the problems bred by cities just as quickly came to dominate American reform.

OVERVIEW

The chapter begins in the heart of an industrial city--at a bootblack stand in New York. Here politics intersects grimy city life. Ward boss George Washington Plunkitt sits atop the stand, dispensing favors in return for votes. Born of immigrant parents, Plunkitt is emblematic of the new breed of urban politicians. They are drawn from the common folk and regard politics as a profession like any other, with opportunities to make money. For many Americans, as we will see, the golden door of opportunity opened onto the city.

A New Urban Age

The modern city was the product of industrialization. The vast systems of communication and transportation, of manufacturing, marketing, and finance, of labor and management came together in the industrial city. Cities acted as magnets, pulling people from the American countryside and from overseas.

Cities began to assume their modern shape of ringed residential patterns around central business districts--slum cores, zones of emergence, and suburban fringes. New forms of urban transportation, including horse-drawn railways, cable cars, elevated railroads, and electrified trolleys and subways, helped these segmented cities hold together even as they sprawled outward into growing suburbs. Bridges also helped to join the city. New skyscrapers soared high into the air, revealing the value of urban space. Tenements, smaller and squatter, carried the same message. They crammed hundreds into what soon became overcrowded, disease-ridden dwellings. Even such innovations as the dumbbell tenement, introduced in early 1880s, failed to improve matters.

Running and Reforming the City

Industries and people presented cities with a host of demands for services. But cities were hamstrung by political problems: outdated charters, a cumbersome system of checks and balances, the hostility of state legislatures, and a lack of middle- and upper-class leadership. In part, boss-dominated political machines developed to resolve those problems. Like the corporation, the urban machine centralized control and imposed order on the world around it. It furnished needed goods and services, whether coal for heat, jobs for the unemployed, or building projects that modernized the urban landscape. In the process, poor immigrants sometimes found a way out of poverty and into the mainstream of American life. The price was considerable--graft and corruption, inflated taxes, and election fraud. Ultimately city politics was transformed into a petty business.

Urban blight and corruption, together with the flood of new immigrants, inspired social as well as political action, especially within churches. Some Protestant ministers continued to look on poverty as the result of individual failure, while others, allied with new nativist organizations, called for the restriction of immigration to reduce the menace of cities. Still others embarked on urban religious revivals to bridge the gap between the poor and the middle class. A tiny minority began preaching a "Social Gospel," which advocated the betterment of society through boys clubs, gymnasiums, libraries, and training programs as a way to save individual souls. Settlement houses, like Jane Addams' Hull-House in Chicago (1889), served as community centers to help the working class and immigrant poor.

City Life

Immigrants affected city life as much as their native-born counterparts. They clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods and assimilated slowly. Their mix of old- and new-world ways added diversity and vitality to American cities that sometimes produced tensions between natives and newcomers.

Urban middle-class life blossomed. By the turn of the century over a third of the middle class owned their homes. More and more middle-class urbanites lived in single-family dwellings in suburban fringes, with husbands away at the office during the day, wives at home, and children in school. Victorian morality governed personal conduct and stressed sobriety, industriousness, self-control, and modesty, all designed to protect against the turbulent life of the industrial city. The middle-class creed of discipline and social control extended beyond the home to society at large in a host of social reforms that included the temperance and anti-obscenity movements. Some women bridled against such rigidity and moved toward liberalization by advocating greater sexual freedom and female suffrage.

City Culture

Cities also served as centers of culture and education. Enrollment in public schools doubled between 1870 and 1890 under the impact of greater demands for literate and well-trained workers. Education became a powerful tool for social control and assimilation. Colleges and universities increasingly met the needs of an urban industrial society by furnishing a corps of educated leaders and managers. Women's enrollment increased both in coeducational schools and in new all-women's schools, many of which added home economics courses to a more conventional curriculum. By the turn of the century, when only about 5 percent of college-aged Americans pursued it, higher learning extended more and more beyond college to graduate and professional education.

In cities, middle- and working-class urbanites gained access to a new material culture and new forms of mass entertainment that were leveling and homogenizing American society. Ready-made clothing, mass-produced furniture, department stores and chain stores, and a growing mail-order business made consumption a national endeavor and bound up the nation as never before. City people increasingly turned leisure into a consumable commodity. Sports--from the mannered games of tennis and croquet to more "democratic" ones like bicycling, baseball, football, and basketball--grew in popularity. Higher culture, too, was made available in stage plays, symphony concerts, museums, and a growing record industry. Cities, radiating their influence outward, were transforming America, as the political system struggled to find within the traditions of a democratic republic some way to bring order out of the seeming chaos of urban life.

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