The Emergence of

Urban America

Chapter 20 Lecture Outline

© 2013 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The New Immigrants

• The New Immigrants

began to appear in

significant numbers in the

1870s, 1880s, and 1890s.

– “new” in the sense that

they were coming from

nations that had not

been represented in

the US

– Specifically, the nations

of southern and

eastern Europe: Italy,

Greece, Poland,

Russia, etc.

America’s Move to Town

• Explosive Urban Growth

– Between 1860 and 1910, America’s population expanded

from 6 million to 44 million

– switched from extending the frontier to retreating to the

safety and security of cities

Vertical Growth:

Technologies such as

elevators (1889) and less

expensive steel allowed

Horizontal growth:

Horse drawn cars

Cable cars

Electric trolleys

America’s Move to Town

America’s Move to Town

Urban mass transit: A horse-drawn streetcar

moving along rails in New York City.

America’s Move to Town

• The Allure and Problems of the Cities

– Citizens who immigrated from rural communities to cities

usually traded one set of problems for another.

– Unregulated urban growth created problems in sanitation,

health, and morale, and mortality rates in cities were

exceptionally high.

America’s Move to Town

• Cities and the Environment

– City dwellers overwhelmed

the sanitation systems;

sewage flowed freely in the

streets, and access to clean

water was a problem.

– Cholera, yellow fever, and

typhoid ravaged the populace.

– At the end of the nineteenth

century, a drive to reform

sanitation systems: banning

hogs/cattle from cities,

building separate water and

sewage systems, and

establishing trash collection.

Urbanization and the environment A garbage

cart retrieves trash in New York City, ca. 1890.

The New Immigration

By 1900, 30% of residents in

major cities were foreign-born

• America’s Pull

– American Industries sent

recruiting agents,

propaganda for RR land

and employers even paid

passage until 1885

• Ellis Island

– To counteract corruption in

the New York City

immigration department,

the Bureau of Immigration

established a reception

center on Ellis Island

The Registry Room at Ellis Island

The 29 questions:

https://ntieva.unt.edu//pages/about/newsletters/vol_11/issue1/questions.htm

Steerage deck of the S.S. Pennland, 1893 These immigrants

are about to arrive at Ellis Island in New York Harbor. Many

newcomers to America settled in cities because they lacked the

means to take up farming.

The New Immigration

• Strangers in a New Land – Since most immigrants did not speak English, they

were easy prey for swindlers.

– Many immigrants settled in communities, and these

enclaves often took on the names of their

ethnicities—for example, Little Italy and Chinatown.

The New Immigration

• The Nativist Response

– Nativist groups arose during this time. Members of

these groups were frustrated by the new arrivals’

willingness to work for substandard wages, and

were often fueled by religious prejudice.

The New Immigration

• Immigration Restriction

– In 1882, Congress overturned President Chester A.

Arthur’s veto of the Chinese Exclusion Act

• the first federal law to restrict immigration on the basis of

race and class, shutting the door to Chinese immigrants

for ten years.

Popular Culture

• A Reading Public

– Newspapers became the primary means of mass

communication for the American public after the Civil War.

Most were openly partisan.

Growing incomes & public

transportation enabled

more people to take

advantage of city life.

Vaudeville, a variety show

of comedians, singers, and

musicians, became

popular, as more citizens

took advantage of city

cultural life.

Popular Culture

• Saloon Culture

– The saloon became the

social club of the poor in

the late nineteenth

century.

– Women’s Christian

Temperance Union, Anti-

Saloon League and

Carry Nation

Popular Culture • Outdoor Recreation

– The congestion of urban

life led to the creation of

city parks, with New York’s

famous Central Park

established in 1858. The

bicycle, introduced in the

1870s, swept the country

by the end of the decade.

Popular Culture

• Working Women and Leisure

– Women remained more restricted in their options

than their male counterparts.

– Married women were expected to raise children and

keep up with housework, while their husbands

frequented saloons.

Popular Culture

• Spectator Sports – College football, basketball, and

professional baseball gained

supporters during this time. These

sports relied on large cities to support

their events.

– Baseball laid claim to being

America’s national pastime. Only

white players were allowed in the

major leagues; African-Americans

were allowed in minor leagues or

Negro leagues.

– Basketball 1891

– Olympics' 1896 Baseball card, 1887 The

excitement of rooting for the home

team united all classes.

Education and Social Thought

• Intellectual Life

– In the later nineteenth century,

Europe and the United States moved

from the accepted idealism of life to a

more scientific, “realist” study.

• Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of

Species (1859) argued that life

evolved through a process known as

natural selection.

Education and Social Thought

• Social Darwinism – Many writers of the time applied Darwin’s ideas to

social thought, arguing that society adopted a

system in which the “survival of the fittest” allowed

man’s better characteristics to be passed on.

Education and Social Thought

• Reform Darwinism

– Working to counteract Social Darwinism, Lester Frank Ward

argued that humanity could control and shape the process of

evolutionary social development.

Human brain allowed for compassion and

collaboration. Believed that cooperation,

not competition would better promote

progress.

Gov’t could be agency of progress by:

1. Ending poverty, which impeded

development of the mind

2. Promoting educating of the masses

Leads to the “progressive” movement…