Lesson 3

The Industrial City: Building It, Living It

Glance at table 18.1 in your textbook, which lists the population of the nations ten
largest cities in 1870 and in 1900. Note the meteoric growth that occurred in these three
decades. By 1900, one in ten Americans lived in large cities with over one million
inhabitants. If we were to pinpoint those cities on a map, though, we would find that
there were few major cities in the South and even fewer in the West. While cities were
definitely on the rise in this era, the majority of Americans still lived in small towns and
villages or on farms in 1900.

Cosmopolitan cities with their ethnic and religious heterogeneity challenged the
insularity of Americans. Many feared that the anonymity of city life would undermine
morality, and that the concentration of the poor and immigrants in inner-city
neighborhoods would promote labor strife, crime, disease, and corrupt politics. At the
Chicago Democratic Convention in 1896, presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan
brilliantly articulated the resentment of many rural and small-town Americans against
the ascendant urban order. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities
will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the
streets of every city in the country (Bryan 1896). Bryan was right. The cities could not
long survive without the support of their rural hinterlands, but by 1900 farmers also
relied heavily upon urban markets, manufacturers, and creditors.

In this lesson we will explore the process of urbanization, along with the lifestyles and
experiences of the wealthy, the middle class, newly arrived immigrants, and blacks in
the nations largest cities. We will also investigate the possibilities and challenges that
big cities posed for political, religious, recreational, and cultural institutions.

Learning Outcomes
1. Identify and discuss key characteristics of American cities in the latter decades of the
nineteenth century.
2. Trace the emergence of the "family values" and norms that came to characterize the
lives of middle class suburbanites between 1870 and 1900.
3. Evaluate the aptness of the labels "the uprooted" and "the transplanted" for immigrants
who settled in America's cities around the turn of the century.
4. Describe the adaptations and innovations that large cities called forth in the realms of
political organization, religion, entertainment, and high culture.

Reading Assignment
Read chapter 18 in your textbook, "The Industrial City: Building It, Living It," along with
the discussion material in this manual.

3.1: Urban Growth

Your textbook discusses key innovations associated with urban growth in the realms of
mass transit, architecture, and technology. It also describes the lifestyles of the urban
elite and the urban/suburban middle class. Many of the characteristics that we today
associate with the traditional family actually arose and flourished as a result of
urbanization and prosperity in this era. Pay particular attention to your texts discussion
of the political machines that flourished in cities, and to the creative adjustments made
by Judaism, the Catholic Church, and Protestant denominations to altered
circumstances in the cities.

A key development of this era, only briefly surveyed in this chapter, is the immigration
and settlement of millions of foreigners in American cities between the 1880s and the
First World War. Until the 1890s, most immigrants to the United States hailed from
northern and western Europe. As the maps on p. 567 of your text show, the number of
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe swelled around 1900. Most immigrants
from these areas came from peasant backgrounds and possessed little education.
Close to 47 percent of the Italians, 26 percent of the Jews, 35 percent of the Poles, and
47 percent of the Slovaks ages fourteen and older who entered the country between
1899 and 1909 could not read. This contrasted to 5 percent of the Germans, 0.4 percent
of the Scandinavians, 1 percent of the English, and close to 3 percent of the Irish who
arrived illiterate during that same decade. Many of these new immigrants were
Catholics or Jews. In a nation dominated by Protestants, the religious background of the
newcomers instantly made them suspect. Most had been farmers in Europe, but nearly
all of them settled in urban areas in the United States, seeking work in the nations
factories. The influx of immigrants created a large labor pool and helped to depress
wages, to the benefit of factory owners; economic historians have calculated that
industrial wages would have been 11 percent higher in the absence of this substantial
pool of immigrants.

After the Civil War, nearly all immigrants from Europe came to the United States in
steamships, which generally crossed in the ocean in one to two weeks, much more
quickly than the one to three months spent traveling on the old sailing ships. Until the
turn of the century, most immigrants traveled in the steerage, eating and sleeping in
crowded, below-deck compartments partitioned into mens and womens quarters. On
the largest ships, as many as two thousand passengers were crammed into the
steerage. Passengers slept on straw mattresses and cooked their own food. Sanitary
facilities were limited; some ships had one toilet for every fifty passengers. After 1900,
most shipping lines replaced the steerage accommodations with more comfortable third
class accommodations with 2, 4, or 6-berth cabins to sleep in and more sanitary
facilities (Kraut 1982).

In the minds of most immigrants, the discomfort of the ocean voyage paled in
comparison to the stresses and anxiety associated with their processing through
customs. Immigrants waiting processing ate in a huge dining hall and slept in
dormitories on the island. Beginning in 1892, most passed through Ellis Island in New
York harbor. All told, twelve million immigrants passed through Ellis Island. In fact, close
to 40 percent of Americas current citizens have ancestors among those who entered
the country through Ellis Island.

On some days as many as five thousand immigrants were processed through customs
at Ellis Island. Despite the fact that 80 percent of the immigrants passed through
customs without any complications, and that only 12 percent were deported, the
experience produced intense anxiety, fed by rumors and half-truths. Historian Thomas
Archdeacon has written, Worries only increased when a doctor chalk marked an
immigrants coat with a coded reference to a suspected ailment or when a newcomer
stumblingly tried to explain how he was neither a contract laborer nor an unemployable
person likely to become a public charge (Archdeacon 1983). Close to three thousand
people who were detained committed suicide at Ellis Island.

Under the Immigration Act of 1891, the federal government assumed responsibility for
screening immigrants. Immigrants had to demonstrate that they had sufficient money,
so that they would not become a public charge, and they had to pass a forty-five minute
medical examination. Doctors were especially wary of leprosy, ringworm, trachoma,
tuberculosis, and venereal disease. Those who had serious contagious diseases were
quarantined in an isolation unit until they recovered. Working through interpreters the
immigrants had to answer questions about their background. Literacy tests were not
administered until 1917.

Journey to America
Learn more about immigrants experiences at Ellis Island
here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4wzVuXPznk.

After they passed through customs, most of the new immigrants settled in urban areas.
Pay close attention to your textbooks discussion of immigrant housing, including the
diagram of the floor plan for a dumbbell tenement on p. 556, as well as your texts
description of the crowded immigrant ghettos on p. 566. Moses Rischin, who grew upon
in a Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side of New York, recalled that the crowding was
so great that the architecture seemed to sweat humanity (Rischin 1982). Several
families commonly crowded into a single apartment, sharing the cost of the rent. Labor
commissioners in New York reported that entire families would cook, eat and sleep in
the same room, men, women and children together (Smith 1984). Health conditions in
some inner city neighborhoods were deplorable; the proximity of inner city
neighborhoods to factories made them noisy and dirty, and the crowded, unsanitary
conditions bred contagious disease.

The stresses of immigrant life were real. Historian Oscar Handlin entitled his history of
Irish immigrant experiences early in the nineteenth century,The Uprooted. He
contended that immigrants suffered from loneliness and felt cut off from their community
and culture. Suicide rates were 24 percent higher for immigrants than native-born
Americans at the turn of the century. This suggests that the stresses of immigrant life
did not diminish over the course of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, historian John
Bodnar has argued that the metaphor of transplanting captures the immigrant
experience better than that of uprooting, particularly for immigrants who settled in ethnic
neighborhoods (Bodnar 1985). By concentrating in districts where their neighbors
shared the same language and culture, immigrants gained political clout in local
elections and the critical mass necessary to support their own churches, benevolent
associations, newspapers, parochial schools, and businesses specializing in ethnic
foods. Language was preserved in these ethnic neighborhoods, and connections with
Europe were continually renewed in locales where new immigrants regularly arrived.
In her impressive study of Sicilian immigration to Buffalo, New York, Virginia Yans-
McLaughlin concluded that immigrant cultures were flexible enough to accommodate
New World exigencies without collapsing. For example, in Sicily the father was the
primary economic provider. Fathers commonly found seasonal work in distant factories
and were absent from home for months at a time. Mothers were largely responsible for
the daily supervision and training of the children. Few married women worked outside
the home, except at harvest time when families often traveled through the countryside
working together in fields (Yans-McLaughlin 1974).

In Buffalo, Sicilian men found factory work but their wages were often insufficient to
support their families. Their wives could have found work as domestic servants but this
option was unattractive because Sicilians deemed it dishonorable for a married woman
to work in the home of another man. Work was also available in the summer and fall in
Upstate New Yorks canneries. Mothers and their children bridged the income gap by
leaving their homes for weeks at a time in the summer and fall to work in canneries.
Cannery work was family work where mothers could directly supervise their children.
Yans-McLaughlins key point is that Sicilian culture was sufficiently flexible to permit
adaptation to an American setting without compromising essential habits. In America as
in Sicily, mothers and children found seasonal work; mothers preserved their role as the
primary supervisors and disciplinarians for their children; and husbands and wives lived
apart from each other for several months out of the year in order to support the family
(Yans-McLaughlin 1974).

Although immigrant cultures were sufficiently flexible to permit adaptation, the children
of immigrants were often eager to shed the most distinctive aspects of their parents
lifestyles. Assimilation was fostered by public education, military service, generational
gaps, and prosperity (which enabled people to move to more heterogeneous
neighborhoods). We can sense the impact of some of these forces in the reminiscences
of two Americans, Irving Howe and Mary Antin, who immigrated with their Jewish
parents to New York. Antin recalled the impact of her American history class in public
school:
I could not pronounce the name of George Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed,
never had I chanted the songs of David, never had I called upon the Most Holy, in such utter
reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child[hood]s story of the patriot.
I gazed with adoration at the portraits of George and Martha Washington until I could see them
with my eyes shut. . . . I strove to conduct myself as befitted a Fellow Citizen. . . . As I read how
the patriots planned the Revolution, and the women gave their sons to die in battle, and the heroes
led to victory, and the rejoicing people set up the Republic, it dawned on me gradually what was
 meant by my country. . . . For the Country was for all the Citizens, and I was a Citizen. And when
we stood up to sing America I shouted the words with all my might (Smith 1984).

Antins reminiscences emphasize the allure of America. Irving Howes recollections

emphasize the repulsiveness of the old world for the younger generation.

In this tangle of relationships, the young could rarely avoid feeling embarrassment.
Ones mother spoke English, if she spoke it at all, with a grating accent; ones father
shuffled about in slippers and suspenders when company came, hardly as gallant in
manner or as nicely groomed as he ought to be; and both mother and father knew little
about the wonders of the classroomShakespeare, the Monroe doctrine, quadratic
equations. The sense of embarrassment derived from a half-acknowledged shame
before the perceived failings of ones parents (Howe 1983).

Lesson 3 Self Check

As you prepare for the exam be sure that you are able to identify each of the following
terms and describe each terms historical significance, furnishing as much relevant
detail as possible within a maximum of four sentences.

Key Terms
Skyscraper
Dumbbell tenement
Social Register
Suburbanization
Masculinity
Gibson girl
Political machines
Coney Island
Baseball
Yellow journalism
The Gilded Age
New immigrants
Ellis Island