{"id":72,"date":"2023-03-10T23:54:12","date_gmt":"2023-03-10T23:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/chapter\/module-1-12\/"},"modified":"2023-04-27T19:30:36","modified_gmt":"2023-04-27T19:30:36","slug":"module-1-12","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1220ushistsincecivilwar\/chapter\/module-1-12\/","title":{"raw":"1.12 The Rise of the City","rendered":"1.12 The Rise of the City"},"content":{"raw":"When British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889, he described a city captivated by technology and blinded by greed. He described a rushed and crowded city, a \u201chuge wilderness\u201d with \u201cscores of miles of these terrible streets\u201d and their \u201chundred thousand of these terrible people.\u201d \u201cThe show impressed me with a great horror,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThere was no color in the street and no beauty\u2014only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.\u201d He took a cab \u201cand the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress.\u201d Kipling visited a \u201cgilded and mirrored\u201d hotel \u201ccrammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere.\u201d He visited extravagant churches and spoke with their congregants. \u201cI listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and the network of wires overhead was progress. They repeated their statements again and again.\u201d Kipling said American newspapers report \u201cthat the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress.\u201d<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a>\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Photograph Wabash Avenue, Chicago, c. 1907. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n

Chicago embodied the triumph of American industrialization. Its meatpacking industry typified the sweeping changes occurring in American life. The last decades of the nineteenth century, a new era for big business, saw the formation of large corporations, run by trained bureaucrats and salaried managers, doing national and international business. Chicago, for instance, became America\u2019s butcher. The Chicago meat processing industry, a cartel of five firms, produced four-fifths of the meat bought by American consumers. Kipling described in intimate detail the Union Stock Yards, the nation\u2019s largest meat processing zone, a square mile just southwest of the city whose pens and slaughterhouses linked the city\u2019s vast agricultural hinterland to the nation\u2019s dinner tables. \u201cOnce having seen them,\u201d he concluded, \u201cyou will never forget the sight.\u201d Like other notable Chicago industries, such as agricultural machinery and steel production, the meatpacking industry was closely tied to urbanization and immigration. In 1850, Chicago had a population of about thirty thousand. Twenty years later, it had three hundred thousand. Nothing could stop the city\u2019s growth. The Great Chicago Fire leveled 3.5 square miles and left a third of its residents homeless in 1871, but the city quickly recovered and resumed its spectacular growth. By the turn of the twentieth century, the city was home to 1.7 million people.<\/p>\r\nChicago\u2019s explosive growth reflected national trends. In 1870, a quarter of the nation\u2019s population lived in towns or cities with populations greater than 2,500. By 1920, a majority did. But if many who flocked to Chicago and other American cities came from rural America, many others emigrated from overseas. Mirroring national immigration patterns, Chicago\u2019s newcomers had at first come mostly from Germany, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, but, by 1890, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and others from southern and eastern Europe made up a majority of new immigrants. Chicago, like many other American industrial cities, was also an immigrant city. In 1900, nearly 80 percent of Chicago\u2019s population was either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born immigrants. 2<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nKipling visited Chicago just as new industrial modes of production revolutionized the United States. The rise of cities, the evolution of American immigration, the transformation of American labor, the further making of a mass culture, the creation of great concentrated wealth, the growth of vast city slums, the conquest of the West, the emergence of a middle class, the problem of poverty, the triumph of big business, widening inequalities, battles between capital and labor, the final destruction of independent farming, breakthrough technologies, environmental destruction: industrialization created a new America.\r\n

Urbanization and Immigration<\/h3>\r\nUnprecedented numbers of Americans left agricultural regions of the East. Some moved west, but the majority were moving to cities in the East and Midwest. Southern blacks left the poverty, debt, and violence of the region. An unprecedented number of new city dwellers were foreign born. The greatest number arrived from Eastern Europe. These new immigrants generally lacked education, and had little money to purchase their own land, so they stayed in port cities and settled into industrial, unskilled work.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Photograph State Street, south from Lake Street, Chicago, Ill, ca.1900-1910. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIndustry pulled ever more Americans into cities. Manufacturing needed the labor pool and the infrastructure. America\u2019s urban population increased sevenfold in the half-century after the Civil War. Soon the United States had more large cities than any country in the world. The 1920 U.S. census revealed that, for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in urban areas. Much of that urban growth came from the millions of immigrants pouring into the nation. Between 1870 and 1920, over twenty-five million immigrants arrived in the United States.\r\n

By the turn of the twentieth century, new immigrant groups such as Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews made up a larger percentage of arrivals than the Irish and Germans. The specific reasons that immigrants left their particular countries and the reasons they came to the United States (what historians call push and pull factors) varied. For example, a young husband and wife living in Sweden in the 1880s and unable to purchase farmland might read an advertisement for inexpensive land in the American Midwest and immigrate to the United States to begin a new life. A young Italian man might simply hope to labor in a steel factory long enough to save up enough money to return home and purchase land for a family. A Russian Jewish family persecuted in European pogroms might look to the United States as a sanctuary. Or perhaps a Japanese migrant might hear of fertile farming land on the West Coast and choose to sail for California. But if many factors pushed people away from their home countries, by far the most important factor drawing immigrants was economics. Immigrants came to the United States looking for work.<\/p>\r\nIndustrial capitalism was the most important factor that drew immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1920. Immigrant workers labored in large industrial complexes producing goods such as steel, textiles, and food products, replacing smaller and more local workshops. The influx of immigrants, alongside a large movement of Americans from the countryside to the city, helped propel the rapid growth of cities like New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. By 1890, immigrants and their children accounted for roughly 60 percent of the population in most large northern cities (and sometimes as high as 80 or 90 percent). Many immigrants, especially from Italy and the Balkans, always intended to return home with enough money to purchase land. But what about those who stayed? Did the new arrivals assimilate together in the American melting pot\u2014becoming just like those already in the United States\u2014or did they retain, and sometimes even strengthen, their traditional ethnic identities? The answer lies somewhere in between. Immigrants from specific countries\u2014and often even specific communities\u2014often clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods. They formed vibrant organizations and societies, such as Italian workmen\u2019s clubs, Eastern European Jewish mutual aid societies, and Polish Catholic churches, to ease the transition to their new American home. Immigrant communities published newspapers in dozens of languages and purchased spaces to maintain their arts, languages, and traditions alive. And from these foundations they facilitated even more immigration: after staking out a claim to some corner of American life, they wrote home and encouraged others to follow them (historians call this chain migration<\/em>).\r\n\r\nMany cities\u2019 politics adapted to immigrant populations. The infamous urban political machines often operated as a kind of mutual aid society. New York City\u2019s Democratic Party machine, popularly known as Tammany Hall, drew the greatest ire from critics and seemed to embody all of the worst of city machines, but it also responded to immigrant needs. In 1903, journalist William Riordon published a book, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall<\/em>, which chronicled the activities of ward heeler George Washington Plunkitt. Plunkitt elaborately explained to Riordon the difference between \u201chonest graft\u201d and \u201cdishonest graft\u201d: \u201cI made my pile in politics, but, at the same time, I served the organization and got more big improvements for New York City than any other livin\u2019 man.\u201d While exposing corruption, Riordon also revealed the hard work Plunkitt undertook on behalf of his largely immigrant constituency. On a typical day, Riordon wrote, Plunkitt was awakened at two a.m. to bail out a saloonkeeper who stayed open too late, was awakened again at six a.m. because of a fire in the neighborhood and spent time finding lodgings for the families displaced by the fire, and, after spending the rest of the morning in court to secure the release of several of his constituents, found jobs for four unemployed men, attended an Italian funeral, visited a church social, and dropped in on a Jewish wedding. He returned home at midnight.3<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nTammany Hall\u2019s corruption, especially under the reign of William \u201cBoss\u201d Tweed, was legendary, but the public works projects that funded Tammany Hall\u2019s graft also provided essential infrastructure and public services for the city\u2019s rapidly expanding population. Water, sewer, and gas lines; schools, hospitals, civic buildings, and museums; police and fire departments; roads, parks (notably Central Park), and bridges (notably the Brooklyn Bridge): all could, in whole or in part, be credited to Tammany\u2019s reign. Still, machine politics could never be enough. As the urban population exploded, many immigrants found themselves trapped in crowded, crime-ridden slums. Americans eventually took notice of this urban crisis and proposed municipal reforms but also grew concerned about the declining quality of life in rural areas.\r\n\r\nWhile cities boomed, rural worlds languished. Some Americans scoffed at rural backwardness and reveled in the countryside\u2019s decay, but many romanticized the countryside, celebrated rural life, and wondered what had been lost in the cities. Sociologist Kenyon Butterfield, concerned by the sprawling nature of industrial cities and suburbs, regretted the eroding social position of rural citizens and farmers: \u201cAgriculture does not hold the same relative rank among our industries that it did in former years.\u201d Butterfield saw \u201cthe farm problem\u201d as part of \u201cthe whole question of democratic civilization.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> He and many others thought the rise of the cities and the fall of the countryside threatened traditional American values. Many proposed conservation. Liberty Hyde Bailey, a botanist and rural scholar selected by Theodore Roosevelt to chair a federal Commission on Country Life in 1907, believed that rural places and industrial cities were linked: \u201cEvery agricultural question is a city question.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nMany longed for a middle path between the cities and the country. New suburban communities on the outskirts of American cities defined themselves in opposition to urban crowding. Americans contemplated the complicated relationships between rural places, suburban living, and urban spaces. Los Angeles became a model for the suburban development of rural places. Dana Barlett, a social reformer in Los Angeles, noted that the city, stretching across dozens of small towns, was \u201ca better city\u201d because of its residential identity as a \u201ccity of homes.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a> This language was seized upon by many suburbs that hoped to avoid both urban sprawl and rural decay. In Glendora, one of these small towns on the outskirts of Los Angeles, local leaders were \u201cloath as anyone to see it become cosmopolitan.\u201d Instead, in order to have Glendora \u201cgrow along the lines necessary to have it remain an enjoyable city of homes,\u201d they needed to \u201cbestir ourselves to direct its growth\u201d by encouraging not industry or agriculture but residential development. 7<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nFor more information on Urbanization during the Gilded Age, please watch the following video:<\/strong>\r\n\r\nWGBH Educational Foundation. The New City: A Biography of America. Produced by Annenberg Learner. 2000. Video,<\/a> 25:52.\r\n