| The New
Immigrants |
Many of the members
of both the Knights of Labor and the AFL craft unions were immigrants
from Europe. The United States has attracted large numbers of
immigrants throughout its history, but it had never experienced a flood
of immigrants like the one between the Civil War and World War I.
Nearly a quarter
million
immigrants arrived in 1865, three-quarters of a million in 1881, and a
million in 1900. In the 1870s and 1880s, most immigration came
from great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, Germany, and Canada, but
during the 1890s and after, increasing numbers began to arrive from
southern and eastern Europe. Most of these later
immigrants settled in cities of the Northeast, where they worked as
unskilled labor in the factories. These later immigrants differed from earlier groups both in their origins (southern and eastern Europe) and the patterns of the society they established after their arrival in America. Unlike earlier immigrants, who quickly learned English and tried to restructure their lives and values to resemble those of long-time residents, the new immigrants resisted rapid assimilation. Most retained elements of their own cultures even as they embraced a new life in America. They came to think of themselves as hyphenated Americans: Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans. Upon arrival, faced with a strange language and unfamiliar customs, they sought out others who shared their language and culture. Ethnic communities emerged in the cities, where immigrants formed unique institutions that blended elements of the old country with those of the new. Fraternal lodges based on ethnicity sprang up, providing not only social ties but sometimes also financial benefits in case of illness or death. Foreign-language newspapers were vital in developing a sense of identity that connected the old country to the new. Religious institutions provided the most important building blocks of ethnic group identity. Services were often conducted in the native language, and special rites from the old country helped maintain a sense of ethnic identity. |
| Nativism |
Many Americans responded negatively to the new immigrants. They
expected them to follow the patterns of earlier groups by learning
English and assimilating into existing society. This view of
immigrants came to be identified with the image of the melting pot, but
that metaphor rarely described the reality of immigrants' lives.
Most immigrants changed in some ways, but most did so slowly, over
lifetimes, gradually adopting new patterns of thinking and behavior or
modifying previous beliefs and practices. Few "old-stock" Americans appreciated or even understood the nature of immigrants' adjustments to their new home. Instead, many Americans saw only immigrants' efforts to retain their own culture. They fretted over the multiplicity of foreign-language newspapers and the sprouting of parochial schools that served immigrant children. Such fears and misgivings fostered the growth of nativism: the view that old-stock values and social patterns were preferable to those of immigrants. Nativists argued that only their values and institutions were genuinely American, and they feared immigrants posed a threat to those traditions. During the 1890s, the sources of European immigration began to shift from northwestern Europe to southern and eastern Europe, bringing large numbers of Poles, Slavs, Italians, and east European Jews. This furthered the currents of nativism. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism combined with cruel stereotypes of those from southern and eastern Europe to create a sense that the "new immigrants" were less desirable than the "old immigrants" from northwestern Europe. Partly in response these "new" immigrants, some Americans formed the American Protective Association (APA) in 1887. The APA claimed half a million members by 1894. Sometimes APA members fomented mob violence against Catholics. More often, they tried to dominate the Republican Party, and succeeded in doing so in many areas of the Midwest before they died out in the late 1890s. |
| The Rise of
the Modern City |
By 1890, immigrants made up more than forty percent of the population
of New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, and more than a third of the
population in other cities. But immigrants were not the only ones
to throng to the cities. Others came from rural areas and small
towns. Thus Americans in the 1880s witnessed a burgeoning of
their
cities as Chicago doubled in size to take second rank behind New
York. In just ten years, Brooklyn had grown by forty percent, St.
Louis by thirty percent, and San Francisco almost as much. Cities
not only added more people, but also expanded upward and outward, and
became more complex socially and economically. In the forty years after the Civil War, over 24 million people flocked to American cities. They came from rural areas in the United States but also across oceans from farming areas and industrial cities in Europe. While the United States' rural population doubled during these years, the urban population increased more than seven-fold. In 1860, sixteen cities had a population over 50,000 and only nine had a population over 100,000. By 1900, 38 cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants. The modern American city was not simply a larger version of older towns. In the late nineteenth century, American cities changed dramatically in physical size and spatial layout. In Boston in 1873, the outer boundary of settlement stood just two-and-a-half miles from City Hall. In the 1890s, after the establishment of the electric street railway, the outer border of settlement was six miles away. By annexing surrounding lands and filling in bays, cities grew larger, allowing for greater differentiation in the use of space. Manufacturing and commerce crowded into city centers. Meanwhile, the development of steam railroad lines in the 1860s, electric-powered streetcars and elevated railways in the 1880s, and electric trolleys in the 1890s allowed the wealthy and the middle class to move along newly constructed trolley and rail lines to the country's first suburbs. At the same time the urban poor were concentrated in newly constructed tenements, few of which had outside windows. Less than 10 percent had indoor plumbing or running water. |
|
Chicago was a prime
example of
how the growth of industrial America
spawned the expansion of cities. Specifically, railroads gave
Chicago the impetus for expansion. Between 1850 and 1880,
railroads transformed Chicago from a town of 30,000 residents to the
nation's fourth-largest city, with half-a-million people. By
1890, as mentioned in the preceding paragraph, it was second in size
only to New York. By 1880, more than twenty railroad lines and
15,000 miles of track connected Chicago with nearly all of the
United States and Canada. Entrepreneurs and manufacturing and
commerce soon developed new enterprises based on Chicago's unrivaled
location at the hub of a great transportation network. Mail-order
sales, for example, located their headquarters in Chicago.
Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. were headquarted in
Chicago. Chicago
factories produced more farm equipment than any
other city, and its iron and steel production rivaled that of
Pittsburgh. Other leading Chicago industries produced railway
cars and equipment, metal products, a wide variety of machinery, and
clothing. At the same time, the city also claimed title as the
world's largest grain market, and was the nation's largest center of
meat packing. What Americans saw in their cities like Chicago fascinated them. Cities boasted technological innovations, such as streetcars and telephones, and their landscape reflected new innovations in building techniques that allowed cities to grow upward as well as outward. In the early 1880s, most cities measured only a few miles across, and most residents got around on foot. Historians call these placed "walking cities." Buildings were low (anything higher than three stories was unusual) and rarely designed for a specific economic function. Small factories existed here and there among warehouses and commercial offices near the docks. In the late nineteenth century, however, this changed thanks to advances in technology and transportation. Until the 1880s, construction techniques restricted building height because the walls carried the structure's full weight. The higher a building, the thicker its walls had to be. William LeBaron Jenney usually receives credit for building the first skyscraper--ten stories high, erected in Chicago in 1885. Chicago architects also took the lead in designing other tall buildings. They could do so because of new construction technologies that allowed a metal frame to carry the weight of the walls. Jenney's building used an iron frame, but architects quickly turned to the greater strength of steel. Another crucial technological advance was the elevator, a necessity for multistory buildings. Economical and efficient, skyscrapers created unique city skylines. Just as steel-frame buildings allowed cities to grow upward, so new forms of transportation permitted cities to expand outward. In the 1850s, horses pulled the first streetcars over iron rails laid in city streets. Some cities had elevated rail lines powered by steam locomotives, but the smoke and soot from coal they burned made them unpopular. By the 1870s and 1880s, some cities boasted streetcar lines powered by underground moving cables. (San Francisco's famous streetcars still use this system today.) Electricity, however, finally revolutionized urban transit. Frank Sprague, a protégé of Thomas Edison, designed a streetcar driven by an electric motor that drew its power from an overhead wire. Sprague's system was first installed in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. Electric streetcars replaced nearly all horse cars and cable cars within a dozen years. In the early 1900s, some large cities, choked with traffic, moved their electrical streetcars above or below street level, thereby creating elevated trains and subways. Thus, elaborate networks of rails came to crisscross most large cities, connecting suburban neighborhoods to central business districts. New construction technologies also launched bridges spanning rivers and bays that had once limited urban growth. When the Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883, it was hailed as a new wonder of the world. Other bridges soon followed. As bridges and streetcar lines pushed outward from the city's center, the old walking city expanded by annexing suburban areas. In 1860 Chicago had occupied 17 square miles; only thirty years later, it took in 178 square miles. As streetcars expanded the city beyond distances that residents could cover on foot, suburban railroad lines began to bring more distant villages within commuting distance of urban centers. Wealthier urban residents who could afford the passenger fare now left the city at the end of the workday. As early as 1873, nearly a hundred suburban communities sent between five and six thousand commuters into Chicago each day, and by 1890 seventy thousand suburbanites were pouring in daily. At about the same time, commuter lines brought more than a hundred thousand workers daily into New York City just from its northern suburbs. The new technology altered the geography of the city, whereby certain areas acquired specific economic functions. Early manufacturing in port cities was often scattered along the waterfront. Clothing manufacturers sometimes used buildings once used by sail makers or as warehouses. Other manufacturing firms required specially designed facilities. Iron and steel making, meat packing, shipbuilding, and oil refining had to be established on the outskirts of the city, where open land was plentiful and cheap, freight transportation convenient, and the city center far away from the smoke, noise, and odor of heavy industry. Many manufacturing workers could not afford to ride the new streetcars, so they often had to live within walking distance of their work. Construction of industrial plants outside the cities, therefore, usually meant working-class residential neighborhoods nearby. At the same time that manufacturing was moving to the outskirts of the city, areas in the city center became specialized into distinct districts. A district of light manufacturing might include clothing and printing factories. Next to or overlapping the light manufacturing district was often a wholesale trade district with warehouses and offices of wholesalers. Retail shopping districts, anchored by department stores, emerged in a central location, where streetcar and railroad lines could bring middle- and upper-class shoppers from outlying areas. In the largest cities, banks, insurance companies, and headquarters of large corporations clustered to form the financial district. A hotel and entertainment district lay close to the financial and retail blocks. These areas together made up a central business district. |
|
| Building Urban Infrastructure |
Caught up in headlong growth, cities developed with only minimal
planning. Local governments did little to regulate expansion or
create building standards in the public interest, leaving decisions
about land use and construction practices to individual landowners,
developers, and builders. Everywhere, builders and investors
hoped to maximize the profit on their investment by producing the most
square footage for the least cost. Such profit calculations left
little room for such amenities as varied design or open space.
Most of the great urban parks that exist today, including Central Park
in New York City, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and Golden Gate Park in
San Francisco, were established on the outskirts if their cities,
before the surrounding areas were developed. Given the rapid and largely unplanned nature of most urban growth, city governments usually found it difficult to meet all the demands of expanded municipal utilities and services--fire and police protection, schools, sewage disposal, street maintenance, water supply. City residents faced major obstacles in disposing of sewage, cleaning streets, and removing garbage. Even when cities built sewer lines, they usually emptied the untreated sewage into some nearby body of water. The disgusted mayor of Cleveland in 1881 called the Cuyahoga River "an open sewer through the center of the city," but similar situations existed in most large cities. Few city streets were paved, and most became mud holes in the rain and froze into deep ruts in winter. Chicago in 1890 included 2,048 miles of streets but only 629 of which were paved, typically with wooden blocks. Only in the late nineteenth century did cities begin paving streets with asphalt. Private companies, operating under franchises from the city, typically supplied such city utilities as gas, public transit, sometimes water, and later electricity and telephone services. Entrepreneurs eagerly competed to provide such services, sometimes bribing city officials to secure them. As a result, some new residential areas had gas lines before streetcars, sewers, and even paved streets. Everywhere, growth seemed to outstrip the ability of city officials and residents to provide for the consequences. Nonetheless most city utilities and services improved significantly between 1870 and 1890. New York City created the first uniformed police force in 1845, and other cities followed. By 1871, all major cities had switched from volunteer fire companies to paid professional firefighters. |
| Sources |
Excerpts, Chapter 17,
"An Industrial Order Emerges, 1860-1880," Chapter 18,
"Becoming an Urban Industrial Society, 1880-1890,"and Chapter 20,
"Economic Crash and Political Upheaval, 1890-1900," in Berkin, et al., Making America: A History of the
United States, Vol. II from 1865, 3rd edition (Boston and New
York, 2003). Digital History, "The Rise of the City." |
© Kahne Parsons 2007-08