America Moves to the City, 1865-1900

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America Moves to the City, 1865-1900
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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 Macys (New York) and
  Marshall Fields (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.

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The New Immigration

• Until the 1880s, 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.

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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.

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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.

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The Italians

• Most Italian immigrants to the U.S. between 1880
  and 1920 came to escape the poverty and slow
  modernization of southern Italy.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Darwin Disrupts the Churches

• Charles Darwins theory of evolution cast serious
  doubt on a literal interpretation of the Bible.
• Darwins biological ideas caused turmoil in the
  traditional American Protestant Religion.
• Religious Modernists found ways to reconcile
  Christianity and Darwinism.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Continued

• Du Bois was one of the founders of the National
  Association for the Advancement of Colored People
  (NAACP).
• Many of Du Boiss differences with Washington
  reflect the contrasting life experiences of
  southern and northern blacks.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Postwar Writing

• General Lewis Wallaces book Ben Hur defended
  Christianity against Darwinism.
• Lewis supported the Holy Scriptures and was
  against the beliefs of Charles Darwin.

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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
  Bloomd

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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.

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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.

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continued

• Two black writers, Paul Laurence Dunbar and
  Charles W. Chesnutt, brought another kind of
  realism to late-nineteenth-century literature.

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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.

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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.

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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)
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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.

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Prohibition of Alcohol and Social Progress

• National Prohibition Party formed in 1869 because
  they were concerned over the popularity and
  dangers of alcohol.
• Womens Christian Temperance Union rallied
  against alcohol.
• 18th Amendment deals with prohibition.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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continued

• Wild West shows like those of Buffalo Bill Cody
  and Annie Oakley became popular.

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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.

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• 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.

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continued

• James Naismith invented the game of basketball in
  1891.
• Basketball was the one of the few sports during
  the late 1800s in which womens participation was
  encouraged.

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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.