18: CHAPTER INDUSTRY, IMMIGRANTS, AND CITIES 18701900
I. NEW INDUSTRY A. Inventing Technology: The Electric Age 1. Technology played a major role in transforming factory work and increasing the scale of production. Steam engines and later, electricity, freed manufacturers from dependence on water power. Factories no longer had to be location by rivers. 2. For much of the nineteenth century, the United States was dependent on the industrial nations of Europe for technological innovation. By the late nineteenth century, the United States changed from a technology borrower to a technology innovator. 3. Thomas Edisons invention of a practical light bulb and electric generating system transformed electricity into a new and versatile form of industrial energy. Edisons research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, also established a model for corporate-sponsored research and development that would rapidly increase the pace of technological innovation. 4. Whoever could light the world cheaply and efficiently held the key to an enormous fortune. Ultimately, the prize fell not to Edison but to Elihu Thomson. Thomson purchased Edisons General Electric Company in 1892 and established the countrys first corporate research and development division. B. The Corporation and Its Impact 1. A corporation is an association of individuals that is legally authorized to act as a fictional person and thus relieves its individual members of certain legal liabilities. 2. The corporation had two major advantages over other forms of business organization that made it attractive to investors. First, unlike a partnership, a corporation can outlive its founders. Second, a corporations officials and shareholders are not personally liable for its debts. 3. By the early twentieth century, control of the workplace was shifting to managers, and semiskilled and unskilled workers were replacing skilled artisans. 4. Vertical integration involved the consolidation of all functions related to a particular industry, from the extraction and transport of raw materials to manufacturing and finished-product distribution and sales. The meatpacking industry provides a good example of vertical integration. 5. Horizontal integration involved the merger of competitors in the same industry. John D. Rockefellers Standard Oil Company pioneered
horizontal integration in the 1880s. James B. Duke gained control of most of the tobacco industry. Andrew Carnegie consolidated much of Americas steel industry within his Carnegie Steel Company (later U.S. Steel). C. The Changing Nature of Work 1. Low salaries and long hours a. The new workers shared little of the wealth generated by industrial expansion and enjoyed few of the gadgets and products generated by new manufacturing. Nor did the large corporations put profits into improved working conditions. b. Upton Sinclair wrote a novel, The Jungle (1906), a chronicle of the killing floors of meatpacking plants in Chicago. c. Long hours affected family life. By Sunday, more factory workers were too tired to do more than sit around home. During the week, they had time only to eat and sleep. d. The garment industry was dominated by small manufacturers who assembled clothing for retailers from cloth provided by textile manufacturers. The manufacturers squeezed workers into small, cramped, poorly ventilated sweatshops. D. Child Labor 1. Industries that employed many children were often dangerous, even for adults. In the gritty coal mines of Pennsylvania, breaker boys, youths who stood on ladders to pluck waste matter from coal tumbling down long chutes, breathed harmful coal dust all day. 2. By 1900, Pennsylvania and a few other states had passed legislation regulating child labor, but enforcement of these laws was lax. E. Working Women 1. The comparatively low wages of unskilled male workers often required women family members to work as well. Employers, claiming that women worked only for supplemental money, paid them less than men. 2. In one St. Louis factory in 1896 women received $4 a week for work for which men were paid $16 a week. Women chafed under this wage system but had no recourse other than to quit. 3. Most women worked out of economic necessity. In 1900, fully 85 percent of wage-earning women were unmarred and under the age of 25. 4. Despite the long hours and low pay, the lure of working in a glittering showplace and wielding at least a little autonomy tendered women as a showgirl as the most coveted job for working-class young women. 5. The introduction of the typewriter transformed office work, dominated by men until the 1870s, into a female preserve.
6. By 1910, women comprised 40 percent of all American college students. Most women college graduates found employment in nursing, teaching, and library work. 7. Despite these gains, womens work remained segregated. More than 90 percent of all wage-earning women in 1900 worked at occupations in which women comprised the great majority of workers. F. Responses to Poverty and Wealth 1. Introduction a. The urban poor included workers as well as the unemployed, aged, widowed, ad disabled. Workplace accidents and deaths left many families with only one parent. b. Crammed into four- to six-story buildings on tiny lots, tenement apartments in urban slums were notorious for their lack of ventilation and light. c. One early attempt to deal with these conditions was the settlement house. New Yorks Neighborhood Guild, established in 1886, was the first settlement house in the country; Chicagos Hull House, founded in 1889 by Jane Addams because the most famous. 2. The Gospel of Wealth a. According to the Gospel of Wealth, a theory popular among industrialists, intellectuals, and some politicians, any intervention on behalf of the poor was of doubtful benefit. Hard work and perseverance, in this view, led to wealth. b. According to the theory of Social Darwinism, the race evolves only through competition. The fit survive, the weak perish, and humanity moves forward. c. Few cultural icons contributed to these sentiments more than the Horatio Alger stories. Alger captured the countrys imagination beginning in the late 1860s with a series of best-selling stories about rags-to-riches heroes. His first rags-to-riches novel, Ragged Dick, was published in 1867. G. Workers Organize 1. Two prolonged depressions, one beginning in 1873 and the other in 1893, threw as many as 2 million laborers out of work. 2. Some of the earliest confrontations occurred in the Pennsylvania anthracite coal region, where the mostly Irish miners gathered in a secret labor organization, the Molly Maguires. The Molly Maguires carried out selective murders of coal company officials until 1877, when an infiltrator exposed the group for their activities. 3. More widespread and violent was the railroad strike of 1877, sometimes referred to as the Great Uprising. 4. The Knights of Labor, a union of craft workers founded in Philadelphia in 1869, grew dramatically after the Great Uprising under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly.
5. The Haymarket Square incident, and a series of disastrous walkouts that followed it, weakened the Knights of Labor. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) found in 1886, became the major organizing body for skilled workers. Led by a British immigrant, Samuel Gompers, it emphasized collective bargaining, negotiations between management and union representatives, to secure workplace concessions. 6. In 1892, Andrew Carnegie dealt the steelworkers union a major setback in the Homestead strike. Carnegies manager, Henry Clay Frick, announced to workers at Carnegies Homestead plant in Pennsylvania that he would negotiate only with workers individually and not renew the unions collective bargaining contract. 7. In 1894, workers suffered another setback in the Pullman strike, against George Pullmans Palace Sleeping Car Company. The strike began when the company cut wages for workers at its plant in the model suburb it had built outside Chicago, without a corresponding cut in the rent it charged its workers for their company-owned housing. When Pullman rejected their demands, the workers appealed for support to the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs. II. NEW IMMIGRANTS A. Introduction 1. Before the Civil War, most immigrants came from northern Europe. Most of the new immigrants, by contrast, came from southern and eastern Europe. B. Old World Backgrounds 1. A growing rural population combined with unequal land distribution to create economic distress in late nineteenth-century Europe. 2. For Russian Jews, religious persecution compounded economic hardship. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, which was falsely blamed on Jews, the government sanctioned a series of violent attacks on Jewish settlements; these attacks were known as pogroms. 3. Sometime during the 1880s, an agent from the Hamburg-American Line, a German steamship company, visited a village in the Russian Ukraine where the great-grandparents of one of this books authors lived. 4. Chinese and Japanese immigrants also came to the United States in appreciable numbers for the first time during the late nineteenth century. The first wave of Japanese immigrants came by way of Hawaii to work on farms in California, taking the place of Chinese workers who had moved to the cities. 5. Whether on farms or in squalid quarters in the barrios of El Paso or San Antonio living conditions were harsh.
6. Roughly half of all immigrants to the United States between 1880 and World War I returned to their country of origin. 7. In a few cases, entire villages migrated, drawn by the good fortune of one or two compatriots, a process called chain migration. C. The Neighborhood 1. Immigrants did not live in homogeneous communities isolated from the rest of society. In smaller cities and in the urban South, where foreignborn populations were smaller, ethnic groups were more geographically dispersed, though occasionally they might inhabit the same neighborhood. 2. Immigrants maintained their cultural traditions through the establishment of religious and communal institutions. The church or synagogue became the focal point for neighborhood immigrant life. 3. In Jewish communities, associations called landsmansheften arranged for burials, jobs, housing, and support for the sick, poor, and elderly. 4. Chinatowns were organized in clans of people with the same surname. An umbrella organization called the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association emerged; it functioned like the Jewish landsmansheften. A similar association, the Japanese Association of America, governed the Japanese community in the United States. D. The Job 1. All immigrants perceived the job as the way to independence and as a way out, either back to the Old World or into the larger American society. Immigrants typically got their first job with the help of a countryman. 2. The type of work available to immigrants depended on their skills, the local economy, and local discrimination. 3. By 1904, Japanese farmers owned more than 50,000 acres in California. George Shima, who came to California from Japan in 1889 with a little capital, made himself into the Potato King of the Sacramento Delta. By 1913, Shima owned 28,000 acres of farmland. 4. Stereotypes also channeled immigrants work options, sometimes benefiting one group at the expense of another. 5. Jews, alone among European ethnic groups, found work almost exclusively with one another. 6. The paramount goal for many immigrants was to work for themselves rather than for someone else. Most new arrivals, however, had few skills, and no resources beyond their wits, with which to realize their dreams. E. Nativism 1. When immigration revived after the Civil War, so did anti-foreign sentiment. But late-nineteenth-century nativism differed in two ways from its antebellum predecessor. First, the target was no longer Irish Catholics, but the even more numerous Catholics and Jews of southern
and eastern Europe, people whose languages and usually darker complexions set them apart from the native-born majority. Second, late-nineteenth-century nativism had a pseudoscientific underpinning. 2. When the inferior races began to arrive in the United States in significant numbers after 1880, nativists sounded the alarm. 3. Such sentiments generated proposals to restrict foreign immigration. The treatment of the Chinese a precedent. Chinese immigrants had long worked for low wages, under harsh conditions. Their different culture and their willingness to accept low wages provoked resentment among native- and European-born workers. 4. In 1870, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which limited citizenship to white persons and persons of African descent. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Chinese the only ethnic group in the world that could not immigrated freely into the United States. 5. Despite the antagonism of native-born white people towards recent immigrants, the greatest racial divide in America remained that between black and white. F. Roots of the Great Migration 1. Nearly 90 percent of African Americans still lived in the South in 1900, most in rural areas. Between 1880 and 1900, however, black families began to move into the great industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Job opportunities probably outweighed all other factors in motivating what became known as the Great Migration. 2. After the Civil War, black ghettos emerged in southern and border cities. In Washington, D.C., black residents comprised nearly 80 percent of the population in a 20-block area in the south-western quadrant of the city. 3. In the North as in the South, African Americans sought to counter the hostility of the larger society by building their own communal institutions. 4. In Chicago in 1891, black physician Daniel Hale Williams established Provident Hospital, the nations first interracially staffed hospital, with the financial help of wealthy white Chicagoans. III. NEW CITIES A. Centers and Suburbs 1. Corporate heads administered their empires from downtown, even if their factories were located on the urban periphery or in other towns and cities. The suburb emerged as the preferred place of residence for the urban middle class after 1870. 2. The design of the Russellss home reflected the principles Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe outlines in their suburban home bible, American Womans Home (1869). B. The New Middle Class
1. In the late nineteenth century, industrial technology and urban growth expanded the urban middle class to include salespeople, factory supervisors, managers, civil servants, technicians, and a broad range of white-collar office workers, such as insurance agents, bank tellers, and legal assistants. C. A Consumer Society 1. By 1910, the new middle class lived in all-electric homes with indoor plumbing. 2. Advertising played an important role in the consumer society. 3. Originating in the 1850s and 1860s with the construction of retail palaces such as Bostons Jordan Marsh, Philadelphias Wanamaker & Brown, New Yorks Lord & Taylor, and Chicagos Marshall Field, the department store came to epitomize the bounty of the new industrial capitalism. D. The Growth of Leisure Activities 1. As such sports as football became important extracurricular activities at Harvard, Yale, and other elite universities, intercollegiate games became popular occasions of the upper class to congregate. 2. The first country club in the United States was founded in Brookline, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, in 1882. Country clubs built golf courses for men and tennis courts primarily for women. 3. Organized baseball originated among the urban elite before the Civil War. The middle class took over the sport after the war. Baseball epitomized the nations transition from a rural to an urban industrial society. 4. Alcoholism was a severe problem in cities, especially, though not exclusively, among working-class men, fueling the prohibition movement of the late nineteenth century. 5. The most renowned amusement park was Brooklyns Coney Island. In 1897, George C. Tilyou opened Steeplechase Park on Coney Island. He brought an invention by George Washington Ferris, a giant rotating vertical wheel, equipped with swinging carriages, to the park from Chicago, and the Ferris Wheel quickly became a Coney Island signature.
1.
Between 1870 and 1900, the United States maintained a balance between agricultural and industrial economic growth. Your False Answer:
Correct.
2.
New technologies changed factory work by Your increasing the amount of goods produced. Answer:
Correct.
3.
__________ became the world leader in photography technology due to its research and development laboratories. Your Kodak Answer:
4.
Horizontal integration is the consolidation of all production related to one industry. Your False Answer:
Correct.
5.
Gasoline became an important fuel due to the rise of Your internal combustion engines. Answer:
Correct.
6.
__________ newspapers exposed the corruption of the corporate elite. Your Tabloid Answer:
7.
Most women entered the work force out of a desire to achieve social independence. Your False Answer:
Correct.
8.
Death and injury were fairly common in the new industrial workplace of the late 19th century. Your True Answer:
Correct.
9.
Middle-class reformers were concerned about the high numbers of female industrial laborers because Your women's labor had a damaging effect on family life. Answer:
Correct.
10 .
Jane Addams founded __________, the first American settlement house. Your Hull House Answer:
11 .
Horatio Alger stories told Americans that wealth was a product of the individual's actions. Your True Answer:
Correct. Though chance might play a role in one's fortune, Alger's stories stressed hard work, cleanliness, and thrift.
12 .
The Knights of Labor were weakened by Your the Haymarket Square bombing. Answer:
Correct.
13 .
Negotiations between union representatives and industry management is known as __________. Your collective bargaining Answer:
14 .
In the 1890s, the state and federal governments supported the right of workers to go on strike against unfair labor practices. Your False Answer:
Correct. At both the Homestead strike of 1892 and the Pullman strike of 1894, state and federal governments sided with factory owners.
15
Workers created labor unions like the American Federation of Labor to take over the new industrial system.
.
Your False Answer:
Correct.
16 .
Chain migration occurred when Your entire villages migrated to the United States. Answer:
Correct.
17 .
By 1904, __________ farmers had become major agricultural landowners. Your Japanese Answer:
18 .
The American Protective Association was created to protect Americans from the violence of nativist organizations. Your False Answer:
Correct.
19 .
Nativists objected to increased immigration because they feared that more immigrants would mean increased Your Answer: competition for jobs.
Correct.
20 .
__________ was a process in which immigrants gave up their own unique cultures for American ways. Your Assimilation Answer:
21 .
Black women had few new employment opportunities in the growing cities of the north. Your True Answer:
Correct.
22 .
African Americans left the South for the North primarily because the industrial North offered more economic opportunities Your Answer: than the rural South.
Correct.
23 .
Catharine Beecher and __________ redefined the organization of the suburban home. Your Harriet Beecher Stowe Answer:
24 .
Suburbanization contributed to the disintegration of tightly knit residential urban neighborhoods. Your True Answer:
Correct.
25 .
The new consumerism of Americans was characterized by Your the creation of the department store. Answer:
Correct.
26 .
City dwellers often enjoyed amusement parks like __________ in Brooklyn. Your Coney Island Answer:
27 .
Coney Island was so famous that it attracted such important people as Your Sigmund Freud. Answer:
Correct.
28 .
Alcoholism was a serious problem in urban working-class areas. Your True Answer:
Correct.
29 .
The first __________ opened in Brookline, Massachusetts. Your country club
Answer:
30 .
Sweatshop conditions were common in the garment industry. Your True Answer:
Correct.