Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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The story begins in the heart of an industrial city-at a bootblack stand in New York. Here politics intersected grimy city life. Ward boss George Washington Plunkitt sat atop the stand, dispensing favors in return for votes. Born of immigrant parents, Plunkitt was emblematic of the new breed of urban politicians. Drawn from the common folk, they regarded 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, and as nuclei, the hubs of regional networks.

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 probed 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 the early 1880s, contributed to the problem instead of the solution.

Running and Reforming the City

Industries and people presented cities with a host of demands for services. But cities were hamstrung by outdated and cumbersome political structures. Boss-dominated political machines developed in part to resolve the problems. Somewhat 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. But 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 minority began preaching a "Social Gospel," which advocated the betterment of society as a way to save individual souls. Another experiment, settlement houses, like Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago, served as community centers to help the working class and immigrant poor.

City Life

The various social and economic classes in America were vivdly evident in the city. The immigrant underclass 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. Here-in a protective haven-the mother exercised household leadership, though outside institutions were increasingly affecting family life. 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. This middle-class creed of social discipline extended beyond the home to society at large in a host of social reforms that included the temperance and anti-obscenity movements, though some chafed and even openly challenged conventional middle class virtue.

City Culture

Cities also served as centers of culture, education and leisure. 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 the curriculum. By the turn of the century, when only about 5 per cent 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 of consumption, and enjoyed new forms of mass entertainment. 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 and baseball-grew in popularity. The popular arts became more widely available in stage plays, symphony concerts, museums, and a growing popular music industry. Cities, radiating their influence outward, were transforming America.

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