Introduction Symbolized by the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the United States emerged as a major industrial power by the end of the nineteenth century. Large‐scale immigration, urbanization, and technological innovation held out great promise for the future, even as these dramatic changes led to social dislocation, urban squalor, labor strife, and death. Constructed between 1869 and 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge stood as a testament to the wonders and horrors of America at the close of the nineteenth and opening of the twentieth century. Its construction cost the lives of twenty men and it was considered both a work of art and an engineering marvel upon completion. The Rise of the City, pp. 670‐682 By the end of the nineteenth century, the emergence of the modern city represented the most dramatic demographic development in the United States. From New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, cities exploded in size, fed in part by the rapid pace of global migrations, especially from southern and eastern Europe. The Urban Explosion, a Global Migration After the Civil War, industrial growth in the United States caused a large‐scale redistribution of the population, as the rural population moved to the cities to join the industrial labor force. Increasingly, agricultural workers from all over the world joined the migration to American cities and became part of the ʺhuman machine.ʺ During the 1870s, the industrialists drew on a population of cheap labor from the rural areas of the United States as well as from Canada, Europe, northern Mexico, Canton, China, and Japan. The peoples of the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa, India, and most of Asia became tied to the industrial core of the late nineteenth century indirectly, working on plantations and in mines in their own countries. A revolution in transportation made it easier than ever before for workers to reach the factories. Over fourteen million immigrants came to America in two waves in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Before 1880, most came from northern and western Europe. After 1880, immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe. The magnet drawing the immigrants almost always was Americaʹs industrialization process. It created low‐paying jobs for unskilled workers and gave them a home in the cities. By 1900, two‐thirds of Americaʹs immigrant population resided in the cities. Many immigrants intended to stay in the United States only as long as it took to make money; they had little interest in improved working conditions or labor unions. Others, like the Jews who were persecuted in eastern Europe, intended to remain permanently. Racism and the Cry for Immigration Restriction The ethnic diversity of the American labor force hampered the development of working‐class consciousness and made organization difficult. Workers often found themselves pitted against one another, with ethnic rivalry playing a role in dividing the skilled northern European workers and the unskilled southern and eastern European workers. Even among educated people of the nineteenth century, the ethnic and religious differences of immigrants were perceived as racial characteristics. The racial notions of social Darwinism, of course, supported ʺwhiteʺ societyʹs claim to racial superiority. At the other end of the scale were the African Americans and Asians who experienced racism in its most blatant form. African Americans began their migration north in search of equality. In an effort to leave behind the segregation and Jim Crow laws of the South, they found jobs on the bottom rung of the occupational ladder but still had to contend with racial discrimination in the North. On the West Coast, following the California gold rush, Asian immigrants soon became the scapegoats of the changing economy. Passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 slowed immigration from China to a trickle. Many Americans saw newcomers as impossible to assimilate. Criticism of the immense numbers of immigrants came from unions and old‐stock aristocrats. A literacy test for new European immigrants passed through Congress but was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland. Supporters of immigration restrictions would continue to press for greater reductions until their final success in the 1920s. The Social Geography of the City Cities of the United States were transformed in the late nineteenth century. They evolved from cities in which people lived near their workplaces and walked to work into cities where rich and middle‐class people lived in concentric circles fanning out from the city center. In the outer circles, people had more money, lived in single‐family homes, and commuted to work on streetcars. Slums developed near the factories, allowing the impoverished to walk to work. Cities also boasted an array of races and ethnicities, with distinctive neighborhoods that maintained immigrantsʹ home cultures. With industrialization and urbanization came both great poverty and great wealth within the cities. Jacob Riisʹs How the Other Half Lives (1890) graphically showed the poverty of the ghettos. The nouveaux riches (new rich) provided the grandeur and splendor of the age with their magnificent mansions and ostentatious costume parties. With 1 percent of the population owning more than half of the property in America, there were fears among some that the country was becoming a plutocracy. At Work in the City, pp. 682‐687 Workers in American industry in the late nineteenth century worked in a variety of settings, ranging from skilled occupations in factories to piecework that was contracted within the home to construction to white‐collar office work. This diversity of workers is illustrative of an industrial nation. Americaʹs Diverse Workers Common laborers formed the backbone of the American labor force. These ʺhuman machinesʺ stood at the bottom of the countryʹs economic ladder and generally came from the most recent immigrant groups. At the opposite end of the laborʹs hierarchy from common workers stood skilled craftsmen like iron puddler James J. Davis, a Welsh immigrant and skilled ironworker. His skill required using long poles to form 200‐pound pig‐iron balls of uniform size. For this, Davis made $7 a day, when he could get work. Although he earned a good daily wage, he could never rely on year‐round work at any one factory. Depressions made finding work harder. By the end of the century, employers created yet other problems. They attempted to end the control that skilled workers like Davis had over their work by breaking up jobs into smaller parts and replacing the skilled workers with the unskilled. Although such efficiencies meant that a greater variety of goods at lower prices became available to American consumers, workers lost out in the bargain. For instance, a young weaver named Mary went to work in a textile mill at the age of twelve as a machine tender. By the time she was fourteen, mechanization had changed her job to watching the power looms. She worked six days a week, twelve hours a day, and made $1 a day. Even after she had worked in the mills for twenty years, her family was still unable to save enough money for a house. Sadie Frowne was a sixteen‐year‐old Polish Jew who worked in a Brooklyn sweatshop. She was a typical young and single wage earner of the late nineteenth century, working long hours for low wages. Discriminated against, women typically earned less money than their male counterparts. Many young working women sought pleasure in dance halls, social clubs, and amusement parks after exhausting workdays. The Family Economy: Women and Children With the average working‐class family living at or near the poverty level, it became necessary for children and women to work. Children tended machines as efficiently as adults and for less pay. Consequently, child labor increased decade after decade until after World War I. Boys who lived in the cities, some as young as six years old, plied their trades as bootblacks and newsboys. Many of the boys were homeless, orphaned or cast off by their families. In New York City, the Childrenʹs Aid Society tried to better the situation of these, the cityʹs youngest workers, by establishing lodging houses. The most common occupation for unmarried women shifted slowly from domestic service to factory worker to office worker by the end of the century. White married women, while seldom working outside the home, supplemented the family income by taking in boarders or performing piecework. Many African American married women worked outside the home as domestics in the homes of white families. Income from both wives and children proved essential to family survival. Managers and White Collars When corporate development separated management from ownership at the end of the nineteenth century, a new class of managers took over the job of directing firms. These managers tended to be white men with high school diplomas or college degrees; they earned salaries significantly higher than the average laborer. Not all managers came from the middle class. Some managers worked their way up from the ranks of skilled workers. Captain William ʺBillyʺ Jones, plant superintendent of Carnegie Steel Works, began his career on the shop floor as an apprentice on blast furnaces, eventually earning a tremendous $25,000 per year. As an advocate of his laborersʹ well‐being, he succeeded in shortening the shift from twelve to eight hours a day by convincing Carnegie that shorter hours would reduce absenteeism and accidents. ʺTypewritersʺ and Salesclerks The advent of mechanization brought the adding machine, the cash register, and the typewriter to the office by the 1880s. Employers seeking literate employees turned to women because they worked for lower wages than men and had few other ways to use their educations. White middle‐class women came to dominate clerical work, which they appreciated not only because it was more genteel than factory work but because they could make more money in fewer working hours. Emerging in the late nineteenth century, department stores became the symbol of a new consumer culture in the United States. Women who worked in department stores earned wages ranging from $3 a week for cash girls and stock clerks to an impressive $25 a week for buyers. Nonetheless, gender segregation meant that womenʹs wages were kept low; saleswomen were subject to harsh discipline. Still, employees of department stores considered themselves a cut above factory workers, even though their pay was often less. Workers Organize, pp. 687‐692 The mechanization of the workplace made skilled jobs increasingly scarce and unskilled jobs most common. Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie liked to invest in new machines that replaced skilled workers because they saved the company money. Consequently, wages fell, and workers found that they exerted less and less control over the workplace. Workers associated this with a loss of individualism and were spurred on to collective action. For instance, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 involved nearly 100,000 railroad workers coast to coast and brought railroad traffic to a halt throughout the nation. Workers learned what the power of collective action could do and would use it again in the future. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 As the panic of 1873 turned to economic depression and millions of Americans lost their jobs, workers for the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad walked out on strike to protest the railroadʹs announcement of a wage reduction. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began in West Virginia, quickly spread across the nation, and was joined by other sympathetic workers and their families. In short order, the nation lay paralyzed by the strike. Although the strike was spontaneous, it struck fear into the minds of the nationʹs political and business leaders. Clashes between workers and authorities not only halted business but also turned violent and cost the lives of twenty strike supporters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ultimately, President Rutherford B. Hayes called in federal troops, and the strike came to an end. The conflict contributed both to an increase in anti‐
union sentiment among industrialists and a heightened sense of urgency among workers to organize and join labor unions. The Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor One of the unions to benefit from the Railroad Strike of 1877 was the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 by Uriah Stephens and revitalized after the 1877 strikes. Under the direction of Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly, the union was opened to all workers regardless of skill, sex, race, or nationality. It grew from 50,000 to 700,000 members by 1885 because of its broad appeal and its interest in a wide spectrum of general reforms. The Knights opposed strikes in theory but gained much of their popularity from an 1885 strike against three of Jay Gouldʹs railroads. There were other rival unions, however. Samuel Gompersʹs American Federation of Labor (AFL), a skilled craftsworker‐based federation of unions, advocated a ʺpure and simpleʺ unionism. Unhappy with the Knightsʹ broad reform goals and appeal to unskilled workers, the smaller AFL concentrated on ʺbread and butterʺ issues like better pay and working conditions. In 1886, certain events caused the downfall of the Knights and gave the AFL control of the organized labor movement. Haymarket and the Specter of Labor Radicalism Radical socialists and anarchists wanted social revolution but tried to gain popular support by championing the eight‐hour day. They called for a general strike in support of it on May 1, 1886. In Chicago, radicals worked with the Knights of Labor (despite Powderlyʹs disapproval) and the AFL (although Gompers did not want members to participate in a strike). On May Day, 45,000 workers paraded peacefully, but two days later, strikers at the McCormick reaper works attacked scabs and were then shot at by police. Radicals called for a rally in Haymarket Square. Turnout was low, and the crowd was dispersing, but the police chief brought in a force of men and demanded that the meeting break up. Somebody threw a bomb, and shooting broke out. Hysteria erupted nationwide as people spoke of the riot at Haymarket, the anarchism of unions and strikers, and the general fear of labor revolution. All eight of the defendants in the Haymarket trial were convicted, although witnesses could vouch that none of them had thrown the bomb: They were tried for their radical ideas, not their actions. Out of the Haymarket riot came the demise of the Knights of Labor and the dominance of the AFL, which avoided a direct connection. Organized labor under Gompers faced an uphill battle against the violence and radicalism associated with their movement. At Home and at Play, pp. 692‐694 The industrialization process dramatically changed the workplace, with men increasingly working away from home and women staying home. As a result, a new ideology developed about the home and womenʹs role in it. Domesticity and ʺDomesticsʺ The separation of the workplace and the home led to a cultural ideology that dictated womenʹs role called the ʺcult of domesticity.ʺ This phrase came to describe the idea that the home constituted a refuge from the harshness of the outside world and that the womanʹs place was in the home, helping to make it a comfortable haven. More and more material possessions began to appear in the middle‐class home in the decades following the Civil War. Possession of a house marked the gulf between the middle class and the working class. In middle‐ or upper‐class homes, women relied more and more on domestic labor to carry the main burden of the housework. Domestics often were immigrants, usually from Ireland. They worked long hours with little privacy, and many preferred a job in a factory. Cheap Amusements The poor and working class found their leisure in the growing number of dance halls, music houses, ballparks, and amusement arcades. The saloon became the political, union, and social headquarters of the working classes. For couples, dance halls were most popular, although reformers feared that dance halls lured working girls into prostitution. Baseball became the national pastime for all classes of people by the 1870s. The popularity of amusement parks like Coney Island in New York signaled the rise of mass entertainment. City Growth and City Government, pp. 694‐703 American cities were built without the help of comprehensive city planning. Instead, local politics and private enterprise built Americaʹs cities. Building Cities of Stone and Steel Technology—particularly that of structural steel—transformed the urban landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modern stone and steel bridges, like the Brooklyn Bridge, spanned Americaʹs rivers. Skyscrapers, modern sewerage systems, cable car systems, and expansive city parks, schools, and public libraries developed as the greatest achievements within the cities, just as the system of municipal government came to be viewed as one of the citiesʹ main failings. Yet the fruits of urban improvement were never enjoyed by the poor to the same extent as by the rich. Sewer systems and public transit were more useful to the wealthy; parks often were too far away from poor neighborhoods to be accessible; and libraries were closed on Sunday, the one day of the week working‐class people could visit them. City Government and the ʺBossesʺ A major factor in the development of the city was the big‐city boss. Because of the citiesʹ expanding needs, a class of professional politicians emerged to oversee the social services of the city. Always creating a political organization to rule the unruly city, the bosses provided services for their constituents. Bosses like William Marcy Tweed of New York were corrupt and often criminal, but their urban political machines provided jobs, shelter, and legal aid for immigrants to their cities. In return, the machine got the immigrantsʹ votes. Replacing bosses in some cities were reform‐minded and honest mayors, but many of them could not maintain their hold on office. Those who did, like Hazen S. Pingree of Detroit, championed working‐class causes. Business elites benefited from boss rule as well, getting tax breaks and lucrative franchises. Ultimately, bosses served not as autocratic rulers but as power brokers between competing groups. White City or City of Sin? The 1893 worldʹs fair was held in Chicago, Illinois, on fairgrounds called the White City. Constructed from plaster of paris, the White Cityʹs paradise of lagoons, fountains, wooded islands, gardens, and white‐painted buildings represented the emergent industrial might of the United States with its inventions, manufactured goods, and growing consumer culture. But just like the Brooklyn Bridge, whose construction preceded it, the White City not only represented American triumph, it also came to represent the flipside of late‐nineteenth‐century developments. Decried by architectural critics as a ʺvirus,ʺ whose design set back modern architecture a generation, the White City stood in stark contrast to the poverty and hunger that was then ravaging its host city of Chicago. Indeed, the White City burned to the ground a year after its opening as federal troops and striking railway workers clashed on the fairgrounds that the cityʹs unemployed and homeless occupied during the winter of 1894. Conclusion: Who Built the Cities? The new American cities teemed with life in the late nineteenth century. With the creation of mass transportation, new technology, immigration, corporate consolidation, and most importantly, the labor of millions of workers, cities witnessed architectural marvels and urban blight, the clash of political machine party bosses and reformers, and conflict between workers and industrialists. For decades, the promise of America had been dominated by agrarian ideals. As economic turmoil gripped the nation in the mid‐1890s, the question of whether or not the new cities could fulfill the American promise loomed large and unresolved.