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America Moves to the City, 1865-1900. The Urban Frontier. From 1870 to 1900, the American population doubled and the population in the cities tripled.
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The Urban Frontier • From 1870 to 1900, the American population doubled and the population in the cities tripled. • Department stores like Macy’s (New York) and Marshall Field’s (Chicago) provided urban working class jobs and also attracted urban middle-class shoppers. • To escape the city, the Wealthy city dwellers fled to the suburbs.
The New Immigration • Until the 1880’s, most of the immigrants had come from the British Isles and Western Europe. Most were quite literate. • While the southeastern Europeans accounted for only 19 percent of immigrants to the U.S. in 1880. By the early 1900s, they were over 60 percent.
Continued • Those immigrants who came after 1880 were culturally different from previous immigrants. • Poland and Italy were two of the countries where the “new immigrants” came from. • Among the factors driving millions of European peasants from their homeland to America were American food imports and religious persecution.
Continued • Dumbbell tenement were high-rise urban buildings that provided barracks-like housing for urban slum dwellers. • The “new immigrant” is referred to those who arrived after 1880 and came primarily from southern and eastern Europe. • “Birds of Passage” were immigrants who came to America to earn money for a time and then return to their native land.
The Italians • Most Italian immigrants to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920 came to escape the poverty and slow modernization of southern Italy.
Southern Europe Uprooted • Many immigrants tried very hard to retain their own culture and customs. • However, the children of the immigrants sometimes rejected this Old World culture and plunged completely into American life.
Reactions to the New Immigration • Most new immigrants tried to preserve their Old Country culture in America. • Two religious groups that grew because of new immigration were the Jews and Roman Catholics.
continued • According to the social gospel, the lessons of Christianity should be applied to solve the problems of manifest in slums and factories. • It is applying their religious beliefs to new social problems.
continued • Jane Addams founded the Hull House (Chicago) in 1889 to teach children and adults the skills and knowledge that they would need to survive and succeed in America. • Settlement houses demonstrated that the cities offered new challenges and opportunities for women.
continued • The early settlement house workers, such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, helped to blaze the professional trail for social workers. • Settlement houses offered services such as child care, instruction in English, and cultural activities.
continued • The city offered the greatest opportunities for women in the period 1865-1900. • In the 1890s, positions as secretaries, department store clerks, and telephone operators were largely reserved for native-born women.
Narrowing the Welcome Mat • Nativists were U.S. citizens that opposed immigration. • Trade unionists hated immigrants for their willingness to work for super low wages and for bringing in dangerous doctrines like socialism and communism to the U.S. • Labor unions favored immigration restriction because most immigrants were used as strikebreakers, willing to work for low wages, or difficult to unionize.
continued • The American Protective Association was a nativist organization that attacked “New Immigrants” and Roman Catholicism in the 1880s and 1890s. • The APA supported immigration restrictions.
continued • In 1882, Congress passed the first restrictive law against immigration. • The one immigrant group that was totally banned from America after 1882 nativist restrictions was the Chinese. • Literacy tests for immigrants were proposed, but resisted until they finally passed in 1917. • In 1886, the Statue of Liberty arrived from France.
Churches Confront the Urban Challenge • Roman Catholicism was the religious denomination that responded most favorably to the New Immigration. • The Roman Catholic Church became the largest American religious group because of immigration. • The YMCA and YWCA which was created before the Civil War grew by leaps and bounds.
Darwin Disrupts the Churches • Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution cast serious doubt on a literal interpretation of the Bible. • Darwin’s biological ideas caused turmoil in the traditional American Protestant Religion. • Religious Modernists found ways to reconcile Christianity and Darwinism.
The Lust for Learning • Americans began to support a free public education system because they accepted the idea that a free government cannot function without educated citizens. • The post-Civil War era witnessed an increase in compulsory school-attendance laws.
Booker T. Washington and Education for Black People • Booker T. Washington believed that the key to political and civil rights for African Americans was economic independence. • The Tuskegee Institute was a black educational institution that was founded by Washington to provide training in agriculture and crafts.
continued • Unlike Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois advocated integration and social equality for blacks. • He believed that a “talented tenth” of American blacks should lead the race to full social and political equality with whites. • He demanded complete equality for African Americans.
Continued • Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). • Many of Du Bois’s differences with Washington reflect the contrasting life experiences of southern and northern blacks.
The Hallowed Halls of Ivy • The Morrill Act of 1862 granted public lands to states to support higher education. • Many American colleges and universities benefited from federal “land-grant” assistance and private philanthropy. • The following schools were academic institutions for African Americans at the turn of the century: Howard University, Hampton University, and Atlanta University.
The March of the Mind • Medical school and medical science prospered after the Civil War. • The philosophy of pragmatism maintains that the practical application of an idea is important.
The Appeal of the Press • David Copperfield and Ivanhoe were bestsellers in the 1880s. • The Linotype was invented in 1885. • The country was hungry for news and American newspapers became sensationalist.
continued • Joseph Pulitzer was a leader in the techniques of sensationalism in St. Louis and especially with the New York World. • Pulitzer used a colored comic strip featuring the “Yellow Kid.” • Randolph Hearst was a competitor that began the San Francisco Examiner in 1887.
Apostles of Reform • Henry George was a controversial reformer whose book Progress and Poverty advocated solving problems of economic inequality by a tax on land. • He found the root of social inequalities in the behavior of landowners who provided the space for the production of goods. • Edward Bellamy was another journalist reformer who wrote Looking Backward.
Postwar Writing • General Lewis Wallace’s book Ben Hur defended Christianity against Darwinism. • Lewis supported the Holy Scriptures and was against the beliefs of Charles Darwin.
Continued • Horatio Alger was a popular writer who wrote about success and honor as the products of honesty and hard work. • Walt Whitman was a poet who wrote two moving poems after the Civil War. “O Captain! O Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Literary Landmarks • Mark Twain was a Midwestern-born writer and lecturer who created a new style of American literature based on social realism and humor. • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) are two American masterpieces.
continued • William Dean Howells wrote about contemporary social problems like divorce, labor-strikes, and socialism. • Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage about a Civil War recruit. • Jack London wrote The Call of the Wild in 1903.
continued • Two black writers, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt, brought another kind of realism to late-nineteenth-century literature.
The New Morality • Anthony Comstock waged a lifelong war on the “immoral.” • The Comstock Law was intended to advance the cause of sexual purity. • The “new morality” was reflected in soaring divorce rates, the spreading practice of birth control, and increasingly frank discussion of sexual topics.
Families and Women in the City • In the late nineteenth century, family size gradually declined. • One of the most important factors leading to an increased divorce rate was the stresses of urban life. • Late nineteenth century feminists advocated an early version of day care centers.
Continued • National American Woman Suffrage Association was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1890. • The association limited its membership to whites only. members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, photographed in 1913 (Source: Library of Congress)
Continued • Carrie Chapman Catt was a leader of the new generation of women activists. • Wyoming Territory was the first to offer women the right to vote in 1869. • Ida B. Wells rallied toward better treatment of Blacks as well as formed the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.
Prohibition of Alcohol and Social Progress • National Prohibition Party formed in 1869 because they were concerned over the popularity and dangers of alcohol. • Women’s Christian Temperance Union rallied against alcohol. • 18th Amendment – deals with prohibition.
continued • The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was formed in 1866 to discourage the mistreatment of livestock. • The American Red Cross was formed by Clara Barton in 1881.
Artistic Triumphs • Art was suppressed during the early and mid 1800s, so many artist had to study in Europe. • Henry H. Richardson popularized a distinctive, ornamental style of design called Richardsonian (buildings). • The Marshall Field Building in Chicago was his most famous building.
The Business of Amusement • Phineas T. Barnum and James A. Bailey teamed in 1881 to stage the “Greatest Show on Earth” (now called the Ringling Bros. And Barnum and Bailey Circus).
continued • Wild West shows like those of “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Annie Oakley became popular.
continued • Many Americans spent their leisure playing organized sports. • The first professional baseball team, which began playing ball in 1869, was the Cincinnati Red Stockings.
Continued • Football which is similar to soccer and the British game of rugby, developed during the late 1800s on the college campuses of upper class New England schools.
continued • James Naismith invented the game of basketball in 1891. • Basketball was the one of the few sports during the late 1800s in which women’s participation was encouraged.
continued • Wrestling also became popular and gained respect. • The various racial and ethnic groups in large cities, through living in different neighborhoods, shared the following activities: shopping, reading and playing.
