1. AP
Ch. 18 The Age of the City
Urbanization-the process to moving to
cities.
During the three decades following the
Civil War, the US transformed rapidly
from a rural nation to a more urban
nation.
The urban population grew from about
10 million in 1870 to over 30 million by
1900

2. By 1890, most of the population of
some major urban areas consisted of
foreign born immigrants :
• 87% of Chicago
• 80% of New York
• 84% of Detroit
• New York had more Irish than Dublin
• New York had more Germans than Hamburg
• Chicago had more Poles than Warsaw

3. What was the reason?
• Reproduction?
• Demographics?

4. Migration—Who was going Where?
• From eastern farms Western Cities
• From farms to cities
• African Americans North
• Southern and Eastern Europeans
•

5. The Ethnic City
• Most of the new immigrants were rural people
who had a difficult time adjusting to city life.
Close knot ethnic communities developed in
cities—provided a smoother transition to the
new world.

7. What factors determined how well an
ethnic assimilated?

8. These were not W.A.S.P

9. Factors for assimilating
• $$$$$
• Skills
• American values—Education
• Jews and Germans advanced economically
• Italians and Irish less so
• Balancing wanting to blend in and at the same
time preserve traditional ethnic habits and
values

10. Assimilation not always a choice
• Public schools
• Employers
• Stores
• Churches and synagogues

11. Nativism

13. The Rise of Nativism
• http://websupport1.citytech.cuny.edu/Faculty
/pcatapano/lectures_immigration/endofopeni
mmigration.10.html

14. Immigration under Attack

15. Xenophobia
• Economic reasons
• Social reasons
• Religious reasons

17. Reaction
• American Protective Association
• Immigration Restriction league
• Congress denied entry to “undesirables”
• The Chinese Exclusion Act

18. The Urban Landscape
• Cities were a place of contrast—size and
grandeur or hovels and squalor.
• The expanse help create new technological
and industrial development.
• There was also corruption in
government, poverty, congestion
filth, epidemics and fires.

19. Housing for the well to do
• Growth of suburbs

20. Housing the Workers and the Poor
Tenements-large multi-family
apartments

24. Jacab Riis documented the slum life in
his now famous book
• “How the Other Half Lives”

25. Urban Transportation
• Roads were not always surfaced, traveling and
muddy and difficult. Horse manure created its
own set of problems.
• Mass transit was created to address these
problems—elevated railways, cable
cars, electric trolleys and the first subways
were built.

26. The Brooklyn Bridge
http://www.history.com/shows/ameri
ca-the-story-of-us/videos/the-
brooklyn-bridge#the-brooklyn-bridge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsi95z1Nmhg&feature=related

27. As city populations grew, demand
raised the price of land, giving owners
greater incentive to grow upward
rather outward.
2 Major inventions helped with this
problem:
-Bessemer Steel process
-Safety Elevator

28. Bessemer Steel Process-a way to blow
air into iron ore and make steel
cheaply
Andrew Carnegie
Between the new steel process and
the invention of the safety
elevator, new buildings began to
appear on American skylines:

29. The skyscrapers
The Flatiron Building
At 21 stories and 307
ft (93 meter), it was
one of the city‘s most
interesting buildings

30. The Chrysler Building
Built from 1929 to 1930
Constructed of steel with
brick and stainless steel on
the exterior
Height: 1046 ft
Number of Floors: 77
Height Record: Tallest building in the world at
completion, overtaken by the Empire State Building just
one year later. Currently the third tallest building in New
York City.

31. The Empire State Building
--one year and 45 days to build
--There are 102 floors
--There are 1,860 steps from street
level to 102nd floor.
--only five workers were
killed

32. What does Laissez Faire government
look like?

34. Strains of Urban Life
• Fires
• Disease
• Inadequate Sanitation

35. Urban Poverty
• “deserving poor”—those caught up in
unfortunate circumstances
• “undeserving poor”—laziness, etc.
• Salvation Army-mix of gospel and relief
•

36. High Crime Rates
• With crime , major and minor on the
rise, many cities developed bigger and more
professional police forces.
• Theodore Dreiser wrote about the fear in the
city in his novel Sister Carrie—about a young
women making a life for herself in the city.

37. “Distinctive Political Institutions”
• When there is a power vacuum that the rapid
growth of cities established and city
government could not keep up, the end result
is a need for a “political machine”--

38. The Machine and the Boss
Urban Politics
The new immigrant needed jobs,
housing, heat and police protection.
• A new kind of political system developed to
meet the needs of the new urban immigrant.
• The Political Machine—a political group
designed to gain and keep power
• Party Bosses-those who ran them
• In exchange for votes, party bosses provided
the immigrant with necessities.

39. Tammany Hall, in NYC, was the most
famous of the Political machines and
William M. “Boss” Tweed was the
most notorious of the Party Bosses.

41. Graft
• George Plunkitt “He Seen His Opportunities
and He Took ‘Em”
• Honest Graft—Read excerpt

42. • Middle class saw the Machines and political
bosses as dishonest and un-democratic. But in
fact they did provide services, expand the role
of government in an otherwise vacant
structure. Bosses served as the “invisible
government”
• The power of the immigrants made it possible.

43. The Rise of Mass Consumption
• American industry could not have grown as it
did without the expansion of markets for the
goods it produced. Incomes were rising on all
levels albeit unevenly, but mainly the Middle
Class.
• Who were the Middle Class?

44. Patterns
• Clothing
• Food
• Chain Stores and Mail-Order Houses
• A&P stores
• Woolworth
• Sears
• Montgomery Wards
• Macy’s

45. Leisure
• “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and
eight hours for what we will”
• This new economy produced new forms of
recreation and entertainment and also
redefined the idea leisure. Simon Pattern
• “Going out”
• Coney Island

46. Popular Culture
• People had more money so what were they doing?
• Coney Island in NYC
• Boxing
• Baseball
• Going to Vaudeville-a cross between theatre and a
circus
• Listening to Ragtime-a new music that echoed the
hectic pace of the city life. Syncopated rhythms-grew
out of the honky-tonk, salon pianists and banjo players
using the patterns of African American music-Scott
Joplin

47. Scott Joplin The Entertainer
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPmruHc4
S9Q
• Ziegfeld Follies
• Black entertainers—Al Jolson
• –Thomas Edison had created the technology
of the motion picture
• The Movies—Birth of a Nation
• http://youtu.be/k57rt58vUYw

48. • George Cohan— “Yankee Doodle Dandy”
• Irving Berlin– “God Bless America”

49. Working Class Leisure
• Saloons
• The 4th of July

50. New movements in Art
• Realism: portrayed people realistically instead
of idealizing them
• Thomas Eakins
• He considered no day to day subject beneath
his interest. He painted with realistic detail
young men swimming, surgeons operating
and scientists experimenting. He even painted
President Hayes working in shirtsleeves
instead of in more traditional formal dress.

53. The Gross Clinic

54. • Winslow Homer
• John Singer Sargent

57. Ashcan School
• Not a school but an idea—painting the social
realities of the era

58. John Sloan
Dreariness of American slums

59. George Bellows
vigor and violence of prize fights

60. Edward Hopper
starkness and loneliness of the
modern city

61. Birth of Modernism
• 1913 The Armory Show in NYC—beginning of
modernism in America art

63. Literature Social Realism
• Mark Twain- The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn and Tom Sawyer
• Stephen Crane- The Red Badge of Courage
• Theodore Dreiser- Sister Carrie