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Political Cartoon #8

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Chapter Overview

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Ch 6

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Political Cartoon #6

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This digital collection of historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums documents voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression.

Concentrating heavily on the 19th century, the collection includes:

over 400,000 pages from more than 2,200 books, pamphlets, and serials

over 9,600 pages from manuscript and archival collections

more than 7,800 photographs

By incorporating diaries, biographies, and other writings capturing diverse experiences, the collected material provides a window into the lives of ordinary immigrants.

The collection also includes contextual information on voluntary immigration and quantitative data.

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Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930

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This digital collection of historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums documents voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression.

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From You Will Love History

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Ch 6

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From You Will Love History

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Growth, Cities, and Immigration: Crash Course US History #25

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A Distant Mirror: The Late Nineteenth Century

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A Distant Mirror: The Late Nineteenth Century

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Printable Version In the 1870s, a woman named Myra Bradwell did a most unladylike thing: She applied for a license to practice law.

A Vermont native, she had moved to Illinois in the mid-1850s, and after the ratification in 1868 of the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed all citizens equal protection of the law, she sued to become an attorney. After the Illinois courts rejected her petition, she turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in April 1873, said it was within the power of Illinois to limit membership in the bar to men only. Only one Justice dissented. One Justice wrote:

Man is, or should be, woman's protector of defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.... The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based on exceptional cases.

At first glance, late 19th century America might seem remote and even irrelevant. It was a society without Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, and government regulation, not to mention airplanes, antibiotics, automobiles, computers, radio, and television. The telephone had been invented, but there were only 9 in the entire country.

The government was tiny. There were only about 100,000 federal employees, and only 22,000 if the military and post office were excluded. There was no civil service system and no income tax. Government revenues were mainly raised through taxes on imports, tobacco, and alcohol.

It was a small, predominantly rural society. In 1877, the country's total population was just 47 million, just a sixth of what it is today. Only one city had more than a million people and just three others had as many as half a million.

Today, our birth rate is around the replacement level, but in 1877, 15 percent of married women had 10 or more children, and another 22 percent had between 7 and 9. As a result of the high birth rate, the population was very young. Half the population was twenty or younger; today the average American is over 30.

Perhaps most striking to us was the lack of formal education. Only about three in five children attended school in a typical year, and they only attended about 80 days a year, compared to 180 today. Most left school in their early teens. Only about two-and-a-half percent of the school-aged population graduated from high school. Advanced degrees beyond college were almost unheard of. In 1877, only one Master's degree was conferred in the whole country.

The other startling fact was how poor the average family was. The average income of an urban family in 1877 was $738, and two thirds of that was spent on food and heating. After clothing and housing were paid for, there was just $44 left over, to save for old age or to buy a house, to pay for medical care or simply to spend on entertainment. It was a society in which the average unskilled or semi-skilled worker toiled 10 hours a day for about 20 cents an hour. Of every thousand Americans, 939 died without any property to bequeath.

One might well ask: What does a society where women wore corsets and men wore top hats have to say to us? It would be easy to dismiss this era as irrelevant to the problems of our society. But this would be a mistake. In many ways, the late 19th century was an age not radically dissimilar from our own.

We are living through an era of unprecedented technological change. They witnessed the invention of the light bulb, the telephone, and the discovery of germs. Our society is undergoing a communication revolution. Their society did too, with the invention of the telephone and the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable and the appearance of the mass circulation newspaper and magazine.

Many think that our society is uniquely affected by globalization. But late 19th century America was also reshaped by global forces. Much as the contemporary United States has been radically reshaped by massive foreign immigration, so was late 19th century America. Late 19th century America became increasingly embroiled in foreign affairs lying well outside its borders. Other similarities include bitter partisanship in politics, disputed elections, deep worries about the corrupting influence of money in politics, and angry debates over morality and women's roles.

Many of the issues that we think of as uniquely modern were hotly debated during the late 19th century: corruption in business and government, ostentatious displays of wealth, the ruthless exploitation of natural resources, the growth of corporate power, and the gulf between the rich and the poor.

Even drugs, which we tend to think of as a modern plague, first became a problem during the late 19th century. By 1900, one in 200 Americans was addicted to opiates or cocaine. Many wounded Civil War veterans returned home addicted to morphine, a pain-killing opiate. The typical user became addicted during medical treatment. By the end of the 19th century, opiates could be legally purchased at corner drugstores. Laudanum, a form of opium, cost 28 cents for a three-ounce bottle from Sears, Roebuck.

In 1885, cocaine was introduced as an elixir for every ailment from depression to hay fever. A label instructed users: "For catarrh and all head disease, snuff very little up the nose 5 times a day until cured...." Advertisements urged mothers to give cranky children a dose of Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, which was laced with morphine.

By the early 20th century, the human cost of drug addiction had become obvious, and the country enacted laws criminalizing the manufacture and distribution of addictive drugs.

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Printable Version In the 1870s, a woman named Myra Bradwell did a most unladylike thing: She applied for a license to practice law. A Vermont native, she had moved to Illinois in the mid-1850s, and after the ratification in 1868 of the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed all citizens equal protection of the law, she sued to become an attorney.

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Political Cartoon #9

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Lesson 1

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Flow Chart and Review Cards

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Political Cartoon

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Chinese Exclusion Act

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Printable Version From 1882 until 1943, most Chinese immigrants were barred from entering the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the nation's first law to ban immigration by race or nationality. All Chinese people--except travelers, merchants, teachers, students, and those born in the United States--were barred from entering the country. Federal law prohibited Chinese residents, no matter how long they had legally worked in the United States, from becoming naturalized citizens.

From 1850 to 1865, political and religious rebellions within China left 30 million dead and the country's economy in a state of collapse. Meanwhile, the canning, timber, mining, and railroad industries on the United States's West Coast needed workers. Chinese business owners also wanted immigrants to staff their laundries, restaurants, and small factories.

Smugglers transported people from southern China to Hong Kong, where they were transferred onto passenger steamers bound for Victoria, British Columbia. From Victoria, many immigrants crossed into the United States in small boats at night. Others crossed by land.

The Geary Act, passed in 1892, required Chinese aliens to carry a residence certificate with them at all times upon penalty of deportation. Immigration officials and police officers conducted spot checks in canneries, mines, and lodging houses and demanded that every Chinese person show these residence certificates.

Due to intense anti-Chinese discrimination, many merchants' families remained in China while husbands and fathers worked in the United States. Since Federal law allowed merchants who returned to China to register two children to come to the United States, men who were legally in the United States might sell their testimony so that an unrelated child could be sponsored for entry. To pass official interrogations, immigrants were forced to memorize coaching books which contained very specific pieces of information, such as how many water buffalo there were in a particular village. So intense was the fear of being deported that many "paper sons" kept their false names all their lives. The U.S. government only gave amnesty to these "paper families" in the 1950s.

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Printable Version From 1882 until 1943, most Chinese immigrants were barred from entering the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the nation's first law to ban immigration by race or nationality. All Chinese people--except travelers, merchants, teachers, students, and those born in the United States--were barred from entering the country.

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Answer the questions while watching You Will Love History Politcal Machines video

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Printable Version Mark Twain called the late 19th century the "Gilded Age." In the popular view, the late 19th century was a period of greed and guile, when rapacious robber barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers engaged in shady business practices and vulgar displays of wealth. It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, scandal-plagued politics, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism. But it is more useful to think of this period as modern America's formative era, when the rules of modern politics and business practice were just beginning to be written.

It was during the Gilded Age that Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up monopolistic business combinations, and the Interstate Commerce Act, to regulate railroad rates. State governments created commissions to regulate utilities and laws regulating work conditions. Several states filed suits against corporate trusts and tried to revoke the charges of firms that joined trusts.
The Purity Crusade
During the Gilded Age there were repeated attempts to enforce moral purity. In 1880, Massachusetts became the first state to reenact "Blue Laws" that prohibited most forms of business on Sunday. Lotteries, which had been widely used by government in the early 19th century to raise revenue, were outlawed, by 1890, in 43 of the 44 states. A number of states enacted laws forbidding horse racing, boxing, and even the manufacture of cigarettes. The earliest attempts to suppress narcotics were made. In 1877, Utah became the first state to forbid the sale of opiates for non-medical purposes.

The largest movement to enforce morality was the movement to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, which was founded in 1874, lobbied for a constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol.

Perhaps the most striking example of the politics of piety was the crusade to enforce sexual prudery. In 1872, Congress enacted the Comstock Act, which banned obscene literature from the mails. The law was interpreted broadly and was used to prevent the distribution of birth control information and contraceptive devices through the mails. The law was named for Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who became the government agent responsible for enforcing the statute. Comstock had 3,000 persons arrested for obscenity and took credit for hounding 16 people to their deaths. Among the books he successfully banned were Fanny Hill and A Peep Behind the Curtains of a Female Seminary. He also convinced the Department of Interior to ban Walt Whitman for writing poetry that he considered obscene.

Many Northerners, mainly Republic in politics, were convinced that one of the Civil War's lessons was that government action was sometimes necessary to solve deep-seated social problems. During the Gilded Age, there were repeated attempts to use government to purify and morally uplift society. Laws were enacted against against polygamy and obscenity. At the state and local level, there were repeated efforts to censor books, the theater, and in the first decade of the 20th century, the movies.

The most contentious moral issue in politics involved prohibition of beer and whiskey. Many Catholic and German Lutheran voters were deeply offended by efforts to use government to enforce moral standards. Together, Catholics and German Lutheran made up about 35 percent of the Northern electorate and in urban areas Germans alone comprised 15 to 50 percent of the urban vote.

There were also attempts to purify the American society by excluding undesirable groups and "uplifting" the electorate. After the Civil War, for the first time there were concerted efforts to restrict foreign immigration. The first group to be excluded were Chinese immigrants in 1882, a subject that is discussed in our unit on immigration.

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Printable Version Mark Twain called the late 19th century the "Gilded Age." In the popular view, the late 19th century was a period of greed and guile, when rapacious robber barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers engaged in shady business practices and vulgar displays of wealth.

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Lesson 2

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Ch 18 Life in Industrial America

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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 "huge wilderness" with "scores of miles of these terrible streets" and their "hundred thousand of these terrible people." "The show impressed me with a great horror," he wrote. "There was no color in the street and no beauty-only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot." He took a cab "and the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress." Kipling visited a "gilded and mirrored" hotel "crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere." He visited extravagant churches and spoke with their congregants. "I 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." Kipling said American newspapers report "that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress."

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's 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's largest meat processing zone, a square mile just southwest of the city whose pens and slaughterhouses linked the city's vast agricultural hinterland to the nation's dinner tables. "Once having seen them," he concluded, "you will never forget the sight." 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's 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.

Chicago's explosive growth reflected national trends. In 1870, a quarter of the nation's 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's 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's population was either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born immigrants.

Kipling 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.

The railroads created the first great concentrations of capital, spawned the first massive corporations, made the first of the vast fortunes that would define the Gilded Age, unleashed labor demands that united thousands of farmers and immigrants, and linked many towns and cities. National railroad mileage tripled in the twenty years after the outbreak of the Civil War, and tripled again over the four decades that followed. Railroads impelled the creation of uniform time zones across the country, gave industrialists access to remote markets, and opened the American West. Railroad companies were the nation's largest businesses. Their vast national operations demanded the creation of innovative new corporate organization, advanced management techniques, and vast sums of capital. Their huge expenditures spurred countless industries and attracted droves of laborers. And as they crisscrossed the nation, they created a national market, a truly national economy, and, seemingly, a new national culture.

The railroads were not natural creations. Their vast capital requirements required the use of incorporation, a legal innovation that protected shareholders from losses. Enormous amounts of government support followed. Federal, state, and local governments offered unrivaled handouts to create the national rail networks. Lincoln's Republican Party-which dominated government policy during the Civil War and Reconstruction-passed legislation granting vast subsidies. Hundreds of millions of acres of land and millions of dollars' worth of government bonds were freely given to build the great transcontinental railroads and the innumerable trunk lines that quickly annihilated the vast geographic barriers that had so long sheltered American cities from one another.

As railroad construction drove economic development, new means of production spawned new systems of labor. Many wage earners had traditionally seen factory work as a temporary stepping-stone to attaining their own small businesses or farms. After the war, however, new technology and greater mechanization meant fewer and fewer workers could legitimately aspire to economic independence. Stronger and more organized labor unions formed to fight for a growing, more-permanent working class. At the same time, the growing scale of economic enterprises increasingly disconnected owners from their employees and day-to-day business operations. To handle their vast new operations, owners turned to managers. Educated bureaucrats swelled the ranks of an emerging middle class.

Industrialization also remade much of American life outside the workplace. Rapidly growing industrialized cities knit together urban consumers and rural producers into a single, integrated national market. Food production and consumption, for instance, were utterly nationalized. Chicago's stockyards seemingly tied it all together. Between 1866 and 1886, ranchers drove a million head of cattle annually overland from Texas ranches to railroad depots in Kansas for shipment by rail to Chicago. After travelling through modern "disassembly lines," the animals left the adjoining slaughterhouses as slabs of meat to be packed into refrigerated rail cars and sent to butcher shops across the continent. By 1885, a handful of large-scale industrial meatpackers in Chicago were producing nearly five hundred million pounds of "dressed" beef annually. The new scale of industrialized meat production transformed the landscape. Buffalo herds, grasslands, and old-growth forests gave way to cattle, corn, and wheat. Chicago became the Gateway City, a crossroads connecting American agricultural goods, capital markets in New York and London, and consumers from all corners of the United States.

Technological innovation accompanied economic development. For April Fool's Day in 1878, the New York Daily Graphic published a fictitious interview with the celebrated inventor Thomas A. Edison. The piece described the "biggest invention of the age"-a new Edison machine that could create forty different kinds of food and drink out of only air, water, and dirt. "Meat will no longer be killed and vegetables no longer grown, except by savages," Edison promised. The machine would end "famine and pauperism." And all for $5 or $6 per machine! The story was a joke, of course, but Edison nevertheless received inquiries from readers wondering when the food machine would be ready for the market. Americans had apparently witnessed such startling technological advances-advances that would have seemed far-fetched mere years earlier-that the Edison food machine seemed entirely plausible.

In September 1878, Edison announced a new and ambitious line of research and development-electric power and lighting. The scientific principles behind dynamos and electric motors-the conversion of mechanical energy to electrical power, and vice versa-were long known, but Edison applied the age's bureaucratic and commercial ethos to the problem. Far from a lone inventor gripped by inspiration toiling in isolation, Edison advanced the model of commercially minded management of research and development. Edison folded his two identities, business manager and inventor, together. He called his Menlo Park research laboratory an "invention factory" and promised to turn out "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so." He brought his fully equipped Menlo Park research laboratory and the skilled machinists and scientists he employed to bear on the problem of building an electric power system-and commercializing it.

By late fall 1879, Edison exhibited his system of power generation and electrical light for reporters and investors. Then he scaled up production. He sold generators to businesses. By the middle of 1883, Edison had overseen construction of 330 plants powering over sixty thousand lamps in factories, offices, printing houses, hotels, and theaters around the world. He convinced municipal officials to build central power stations and run power lines. New York's Pearl Street central station opened in September 1882 and powered a square mile of downtown Manhattan. Electricity revolutionized the world. It not only illuminated the night, it powered the Second Industrial Revolution. Factories could operate anywhere at any hour. Electric rail cars allowed for cities to build out and electric elevators allowed for them to build up.

Economic advances, technological innovation, social and cultural evolution, demographic changes: the United States was a nation transformed. Industry boosted productivity, railroads connected the nation, more and more Americans labored for wages, new bureaucratic occupations created a vast "white collar" middle class, and unprecedented fortunes rewarded the owners of capital. These revolutionary changes, of course, would not occur without conflict or consequence (see Chapter 16), but they demonstrated the profound transformations remaking the nation. Change was not confined to economics alone. Change gripped the lives of everyday Americans and fundamentally reshaped American culture.

Industry pulled ever more Americans into cities. Manufacturing needed the labor pool and the infrastructure. America's 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.

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.

Industrial 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-becoming just like those already in the United States-or did they retain, and sometimes even strengthen, their traditional ethnic identities? The answer lies somewhere in between. Immigrants from specific countries-and often even specific communities-often clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods. They formed vibrant organizations and societies, such as Italian workmen's 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 keep 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).

Many cities' politics adapted to immigrant populations. The infamous urban political machines often operated as a kind of mutual aid society. New York City's 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, which chronicled the activities of ward heeler George Washington Plunkitt. Plunkitt elaborately explained to Riordon the difference between "honest graft" and "dishonest graft": "I 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' man." 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.

Tammany Hall's corruption, especially under the reign of William "Boss" Tweed, was legendary, but the public works projects that funded Tammany Hall's graft also provided essential infrastructure and public services for the city's 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's 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.

While cities boomed, rural worlds languished. Some Americans scoffed at rural backwardness and reveled in the countryside's 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: "Agriculture does not hold the same relative rank among our industries that it did in former years." Butterfield saw "the farm problem" as part of "the whole question of democratic civilization." 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: "Every agricultural question is a city question."

Many 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 "a better city" because of its residential identity as a "city of homes." 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 "loath as anyone to see it become cosmopolitan." Instead, in order to have Glendora "grow along the lines necessary to have it remain an enjoyable city of homes," they needed to "bestir ourselves to direct its growth" by encouraging not industry or agriculture but residential development.

"There was a South of slavery and secession," Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady proclaimed in an 1886 speech in New York. "That South is dead." Grady captured the sentiment of many white southern business and political leaders who imagined a New South that could turn its back to the past by embracing industrialization and diversified agriculture. He promoted the region's economic possibilities and mutual future prosperity through an alliance of northern capital and southern labor. Grady and other New South boosters hoped to shape the region's economy in the North's image. They wanted industry and they wanted infrastructure. But the past could not be escaped. Economically and socially, the "New South" would still be much like the old.

A "New South" seemed an obvious need. The Confederacy's failed insurrection wreaked havoc on the southern economy and crippled southern prestige. Property was destroyed. Lives were lost. Political power vanished. And four million enslaved Americans-representing the wealth and power of the antebellum white South-threw off their chains and walked proudly forward into freedom.

Emancipation unsettled the southern social order. When Reconstruction regimes attempted to grant freedpeople full citizenship rights, anxious whites struck back. From their fear, anger, and resentment they lashed out, not only in organized terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan but in political corruption, economic exploitation, and violent intimidation. White southerners took back control of state and local governments and used their reclaimed power to disenfranchise African Americans and pass "Jim Crow" laws segregating schools, transportation, employment, and various public and private facilities. The reestablishment of white supremacy after the "redemption" of the South from Reconstruction contradicted proclamations of a "New" South. Perhaps nothing harked so forcefully back to the barbaric southern past than the wave of lynchings-the extralegal murder of individuals by vigilantes-that washed across the South after Reconstruction. Whether for actual crimes or fabricated crimes or for no crimes at all, white mobs murdered roughly five thousand African Americans between the 1880s and the 1950s.

Lynching was not just murder, it was a ritual rich with symbolism. Victims were not simply hanged, they were mutilated, burned alive, and shot. Lynchings could become carnivals, public spectacles attended by thousands of eager spectators. Rail lines ran special cars to accommodate the rush of participants. Vendors sold goods and keepsakes. Perpetrators posed for photos and collected mementos. And it was increasingly common. One notorious example occurred in Georgia in 1899. Accused of killing his white employer and raping the man's wife, Sam Hose was captured by a mob and taken to the town of Newnan. Word of the impending lynching quickly spread, and specially chartered passenger trains brought some four thousand visitors from Atlanta to witness the gruesome affair. Members of the mob tortured Hose for about an hour. They sliced off pieces of his body as he screamed in agony. Then they poured a can of kerosene over his body and burned him alive.

At the barbaric height of southern lynching, in the last years of the nineteenth century, southerners lynched two to three African Americans every week. In general, lynchings were most frequent in the Cotton Belt of the Lower South, where southern Black people were most numerous and where the majority worked as tenant farmers and field hands on the cotton farms of white landowners. The states of Mississippi and Georgia had the greatest number of recorded lynchings: from 1880 to 1930, Mississippi lynch mobs killed over five hundred African Americans; Georgia mobs murdered more than four hundred.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of prominent southerners openly supported lynching, arguing that it was a necessary evil to punish Black rapists and deter others. In the late 1890s, Georgia newspaper columnist and noted women's rights activist Rebecca Latimer Felton-who would later become the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate-endorsed such extrajudicial killings. She said, "If it takes lynching to protect women's dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week." When opponents argued that lynching violated victims' constitutional rights, South Carolina governor Coleman Blease angrily responded, "Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of South Carolina, I say to hell with the Constitution."

Black activists and white allies worked to outlaw lynching. Ida B. Wells, an African American woman born in the last years of slavery and a pioneering anti-lynching advocate, lost three friends to a lynch mob in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892. That year, Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a groundbreaking work that documented the South's lynching culture and exposed the myth of the Black rapist. The Tuskegee Institute and the NAACP both compiled and publicized lists of every reported lynching in the United States. In 1918, Representative Leonidas Dyer of Missouri introduced federal anti-lynching legislation that would have made local counties where lynchings took place legally liable for such killings. Throughout the early 1920s, the Dyer Bill was the subject of heated political debate, but, fiercely opposed by southern congressmen and unable to win enough northern champions, the proposed bill was never enacted.

Lynching was not only the form of racial violence that survived Reconstruction. White political violence continued to follow African American political participation and labor organization, however severely circumscribed. When the Populist insurgency created new opportunities for black political activism, white Democrats responded with terror. In North Carolina, Populists and Republicans "fused" together and won stunning electoral gains in 1896. Shocked White Democrats formed "Red Shirt" groups, paramilitary organizations dedicated to eradicating black political participation and restoring Democratic rule through violence and intimidation. Launching a self-described "white supremacy campaign" of violence and intimidation against black voters and officeholders during the 1898 state elections, the Red Shirts effectively took back state government. But municipal elections were not held that year in Wilmington, where Fusionists controlled city government. After manning armed barricades blocking black voters from entering the town to vote in the state elections, the Red Shirts drafted a "White Declaration of Independence" which declared "that that we will no longer be ruled and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin." 457 white Democrats signed the document. They also issued a twelve-hour ultimatum that editor of the city's black daily paper flee the city. The editor left, but it wasn't enough. Twelve hours later, hundreds of Red Shirts raided the city's armory and ransacked the newspaper office anyway. The mob swelled and turned on the city's black neighborhood, destroying homes and businesses and opening fire on any Black person they found. Dozens were killed and hundreds more fled the city. The mob then forced the mayor, the city's aldermen, and the police chief, at gun point, to immediately resign. To ensure their gains, the Democrats rounded up prominent fusionists, placed them on railroad cars, and, under armed guard, sent them out of the state. The mob installed and swore in their own replacements. It was a full-blown coup.

Lynching and organized terror campaigns were only the violent worst of the South's racial world. Discrimination in employment and housing and the legal segregation of public and private life also reflected the rise of a new Jim Crow South. So-called Jim Crow laws legalized what custom had long dictated. Southern states and municipalities enforced racial segregation in public places and in private lives. Separate coach laws were some of the first such laws to appear, beginning in Tennessee in the 1880s. Soon schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bathrooms, and nearly every other part of public life were segregated. So too were social lives. The sin of racial mixing, critics said, had to be heavily guarded against. Marriage laws regulated against interracial couples, and white men, ever anxious of relationships between Black men and white women, passed miscegenation laws and justified lynching as an appropriate extralegal tool to police the racial divide.

In politics, de facto limitations of Black voting had suppressed Black voters since Reconstruction. Whites stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated Black voters with physical and economic threats. And then, from roughly 1890 to 1908, southern states implemented de jure, or legal, disfranchisement. They passed laws requiring voters to pass literacy tests (which could be judged arbitrarily) and pay poll taxes (which hit poor white and poor Black Americans alike), effectively denying Black men the franchise that was supposed to have been guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. Those responsible for such laws posed as reformers and justified voting restrictions as for the public good, a way to clean up politics by purging corrupt African Americans from the voting rolls.

With white supremacy secured, prominent white southerners looked outward for support. New South boosters hoped to confront post-Reconstruction uncertainties by rebuilding the South's economy and convincing the nation that the South could be more than an economically backward, race-obsessed backwater. And as they did, they began to retell the history of the recent past. A kind of civic religion known as the "Lost Cause" glorified the Confederacy and romanticized the Old South. White southerners looked forward while simultaneously harking back to a mythic imagined past inhabited by contented and loyal slaves, benevolent and generous masters, chivalric and honorable men, and pure and faithful southern belles. Secession, they said, had little to do with the institution of slavery, and soldiers fought only for home and honor, not the continued ownership of human beings. The New South, then, would be built physically with new technologies, new investments, and new industries, but undergirded by political and social custom.

Henry Grady might have declared the Confederate South dead, but its memory pervaded the thoughts and actions of white southerners. Lost Cause champions overtook the South. Women's groups, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, joined with Confederate veterans to preserve a pro-Confederate past. They built Confederate monuments and celebrated Confederate veterans on Memorial Day. Across the South, towns erected statues of General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures. By the turn of the twentieth century, the idealized Lost Cause past was entrenched not only in the South but across the country. In 1905, for instance, North Carolinian Thomas F. Dixon published a novel, The Clansman, which depicted the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of the South against the corruption of African American and northern "carpetbag" misrule during Reconstruction. In 1915, acclaimed film director David W. Griffith adapted Dixon's novel into the groundbreaking blockbuster film, Birth of a Nation. (The film almost singlehandedly rejuvenated the Ku Klux Klan.) The romanticized version of the antebellum South and the distorted version of Reconstruction dominated popular imagination.

While Lost Cause defenders mythologized their past, New South boosters struggled to wrench the South into the modern world. The railroads became their focus. The region had lagged behind the North in the railroad building boom of the midnineteenth century, and postwar expansion facilitated connections between the most rural segments of the population and the region's rising urban areas. Boosters campaigned for the construction of new hard-surfaced roads as well, arguing that improved roads would further increase the flow of goods and people and entice northern businesses to relocate to the region. The rising popularity of the automobile after the turn of the century only increased pressure for the construction of reliable roads between cities, towns, county seats, and the vast farmlands of the South.

Along with new transportation networks, New South boosters continued to promote industrial growth. The region witnessed the rise of various manufacturing industries, predominantly textiles, tobacco, furniture, and steel. While agriculture-cotton in particular-remained the mainstay of the region's economy, these new industries provided new wealth for owners, new investments for the region, and new opportunities for the exploding number of landless farmers to finally flee the land. Industries offered low-paying jobs but also opportunity for rural poor who could no longer sustain themselves through subsistence farming. Men, women, and children all moved into wage work. At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly one fourth of southern mill workers were children aged six to sixteen.

In most cases, as in most aspects of life in the New South, new factory jobs were racially segregated. Better-paying jobs were reserved for whites, while the most dangerous, labor-intensive, dirtiest, and lowest-paying positions were relegated to African Americans. African American women, shut out of most industries, found employment most often as domestic help for white families. As poor as white southern mill workers were, southern Black people were poorer. Some white mill workers could even afford to pay for domestic help in caring for young children, cleaning houses, doing laundry, and cooking meals. Mill villages that grew up alongside factories were whites-only, and African American families were pushed to the outer perimeter of the settlements.

That a "New South" emerged in the decades between Reconstruction and World War I is debatable. If measured by industrial output and railroad construction, the New South was a reality but if measured relative to the rest of the nation, it was a limited one. If measured in terms of racial discrimination, however, the New South looked much like the Old. Boosters such as Henry Grady said the South was done with racial questions but lynching and segregation and the institutionalization of Jim Crow exposed the South's lingering racial obsessions. Meanwhile, most southerners still toiled in agriculture and still lived in poverty. Industrial development and expanding infrastructure, rather than re-creating the South, coexisted easily with white supremacy and an impoverished agricultural economy. The trains came, factories were built, and capital was invested, but the region remained mired in poverty and racial apartheid. Much of the "New South," then, was anything but new.

In 1905, Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller donated $100,000 (about $2.5 million today) to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Rockefeller was the richest man in America but also one of the most hated and mistrusted. Even admirers conceded that he achieved his wealth through often illegal and usually immoral business practices. Journalist Ida Tarbell had made waves describing Standard Oil's long-standing ruthlessness and predilections for political corruption. Clergymen, led by reformer Washington Gladden, fiercely protested the donation. A decade earlier, Gladden had asked of such donations, "Is this clean money? Can any man, can any institution, knowing its origin, touch it without being defiled?" Gladden said, "In the cool brutality with which properties are wrecked, securities destroyed, and people by the hundreds robbed of their little all to build up the fortunes of the multi-millionaires, we have an appalling revelation of the kind of monster that a human being may become."

Despite widespread criticism, the board accepted Rockefeller's donation. Board president Samuel Capen did not defend Rockefeller, arguing that the gift was charitable and the board could not assess the origin of every donation, but the dispute shook Capen. Was a corporate background incompatible with a religious organization? The "tainted money debate" reflected questions about the proper relationship between religion and capitalism. With rising income inequality, would religious groups be forced to support either the elite or the disempowered? What was moral in the new industrial United States? And what obligations did wealth bring? Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie popularized the idea of a "gospel of wealth" in an 1889 article, claiming that "the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth" was the moral obligation of the rich to give to charity. Farmers and labor organizers, meanwhile, argued that God had blessed the weak and that new Gilded Age fortunes and corporate management were inherently immoral. As time passed, American churches increasingly adapted themselves to the new industrial order. Even Gladden came to accept donations from the so-called robber barons, such as the Baptist John D. Rockefeller, who increasingly touted the morality of business. Meanwhile, as many churches wondered about the compatibility of large fortunes with Christian values, others were concerned for the fate of traditional American masculinity.

The economic and social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-including increased urbanization, immigration, advancements in science and technology, patterns of consumption and the new availability of goods, and new awareness of economic, racial, and gender inequalities-challenged traditional gender norms. At the same time, urban spaces and shifting cultural and social values presented new opportunities to challenge traditional gender and sexual norms. Many women, carrying on a campaign that stretched long into the past, vied for equal rights. They became activists: they targeted municipal reforms, launched labor rights campaigns, and, above all, bolstered the suffrage movement.

Urbanization and immigration fueled anxieties that old social mores were being subverted and that old forms of social and moral policing were increasingly inadequate. The anonymity of urban spaces presented an opportunity in particular for female sexuality and for male and female sexual experimentation along a spectrum of orientations and gender identities. Anxiety over female sexuality reflected generational tensions and differences, as well as racial and class ones. As young women pushed back against social mores through premarital sexual exploration and expression, social welfare experts and moral reformers labeled such girls feeble-minded, believing even that such unfeminine behavior could be symptomatic of clinical insanity rather than free-willed expression. Generational differences exacerbated the social and familial tensions provoked by shifting gender norms. Youths challenged the norms of their parents' generations by donning new fashions and enjoying the delights of the city. Women's fashion loosed its physical constraints: corsets relaxed and hemlines rose. The newfound physical freedom enabled by looser dress was also mimicked in the pursuit of other freedoms.

While many women worked to liberate themselves, many, sometimes simultaneously, worked to uplift others. Women's work against alcohol propelled temperance into one of the foremost moral reforms of the period. Middle-class, typically Protestant women based their assault on alcohol on the basis of their feminine virtue, Christian sentiment, and their protective role in the family and home. Others, like Jane Addams and settlement house workers, sought to impart a middle-class education on immigrant and working-class women through the establishment of settlement homes. Other reformers touted a "scientific motherhood": the new science of hygiene was deployed as a method of both social uplift and moralizing, particularly of working-class and immigrant women.

Women vocalized new discontents through literature. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" attacked the "naturalness" of feminine domesticity and critiqued Victorian psychological remedies administered to women, such as the "rest cure." Kate Chopin's The Awakening, set in the American South, likewise criticized the domestic and familial role ascribed to women by society and gave expression to feelings of malaise, desperation, and desire. Such literature directly challenged the status quo of the Victorian era's constructions of femininity and feminine virtue, as well as established feminine roles.

While many men worried about female activism, they worried too about their own masculinity. To anxious observers, industrial capitalism was withering American manhood. Rather than working on farms and in factories, where young men formed physical muscle and spiritual grit, new generations of workers labored behind desks, wore white collars, and, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, appeared "black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, [and] paste-complexioned." Neurologist George Beard even coined a medical term, neurasthenia, for a new emasculated condition that was marked by depression, indigestion, hypochondria, and extreme nervousness. The philosopher William James called it "Americanitis." Academics increasingly warned that America had become a nation of emasculated men.

Churches too worried about feminization. Women had always comprised a clear majority of church memberships in the United States, but now the theologian Washington Gladden said, "A preponderance of female influence in the Church or anywhere else in society is unnatural and injurious." Many feared that the feminized church had feminized Christ himself. Rather than a rough-hewn carpenter, Jesus had been made "mushy" and "sweetly effeminate," in the words of Walter Rauschenbusch. Advocates of a so-called muscular Christianity sought to stiffen young men's backbones by putting them back in touch with their primal manliness. Pulling from contemporary developmental theory, they believed that young men ought to evolve as civilization evolved, advancing from primitive nature-dwelling to modern industrial enlightenment. To facilitate "primitive" encounters with nature, muscular Christians founded summer camps and outdoor boys' clubs like the Woodcraft Indians, the Sons of Daniel Boone, and the Boy Brigades-all precursors of the Boy Scouts. Other champions of muscular Christianity, such as the newly formed Young Men's Christian Association, built gymnasiums, often attached to churches, where youths could strengthen their bodies as well as their spirits. It was a Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) leader who coined the term bodybuilding, and others invented the sports of basketball and volleyball.

Muscular Christianity, though, was about even more than building strong bodies and minds. Many advocates also ardently championed Western imperialism, cheering on attempts to civilize non-Western peoples. Gilded Age men were encouraged to embrace a particular vision of masculinity connected intimately with the rising tides of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Contemporary ideals of American masculinity at the turn of the century developed in concert with the United States' imperial and militaristic endeavors in the West and abroad. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders embodied the idealized image of the tall, strong, virile, and fit American man that simultaneously epitomized the ideals of power that informed the United States' imperial agenda. Roosevelt and others like him believed a reinvigorated masculinity would preserve the American race's superiority against foreign foes and the effeminizing effects of overcivilization.

But while many fretted about traditional American life, others lost themselves in new forms of mass culture. Vaudeville signaled new cultural worlds. A unique variety of popular entertainments, these traveling circuit shows first appeared during the Civil War and peaked between 1880 and 1920. Vaudeville shows featured comedians, musicians, actors, jugglers, and other talents that could captivate an audience. Unlike earlier rowdy acts meant for a male audience that included alcohol, vaudeville was considered family-friendly, "polite" entertainment, though the acts involved offensive ethnic and racial caricatures of African Americans and recent immigrants. Vaudeville performances were often small and quirky, though venues such as the renowned Palace Theatre in New York City signaled true stardom for many performers. Popular entertainers such as silent film star Charlie Chaplin and magician Harry Houdini made names for themselves on the vaudeville circuit. But if live entertainment still captivated audiences, others looked to entirely new technologies.

By the turn of the century, two technologies pioneered by Edison-the phonograph and motion pictures-stood ready to revolutionize leisure and help create the mass entertainment culture of the twentieth century. The phonograph was the first reliable device capable of recording and reproducing sound. But it was more than that. The phonograph could create multiple copies of recordings, sparking a great expansion of the market for popular music. Although the phonograph was a technical success, Edison at first had trouble developing commercial applications for it. He thought it might be used for dictation, recording audio letters, preserving speeches and dying words of great men, producing talking clocks, or teaching elocution. He did not anticipate that its greatest use would be in the field of mass entertainment, but Edison's sales agents soon reported that many phonographs were being used for just that, especially in so-called phonograph parlors, where customers could pay a nickel to hear a piece of music. By the turn of the century, Americans were purchasing phonographs for home use. Entertainment became the phonograph's major market.

Inspired by the success of the phonograph as an entertainment device, Edison decided in 1888 to develop "an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear." In 1888, he patented the concept of motion pictures. In 1889, he innovated the rolling of film. By 1891, he was exhibiting a motion-picture camera (a kinetograph) and a viewer (a kinetoscope). By 1894, the Edison Company had produced about seventy-five films suitable for sale and viewing. They could be viewed through a small eyepiece in an arcade or parlor. They were short, typically about three minutes long. Many of the early films depicted athletic feats and competitions. One 1894 film, for example, showed a six-round boxing match. The catalog description gave a sense of the appeal it had for male viewers: "Full of hard fighting, clever hits, punches, leads, dodges, body blows and some slugging." Other early kinetoscope subjects included Indian dances, nature and outdoor scenes, re-creations of historical events, and humorous skits. By 1896, the Edison Vitascope could project film, shifting audiences away from arcades and pulling them into theaters. Edison's film catalog meanwhile grew in sophistication. He sent filmmakers to distant and exotic locales like Japan and China. Long-form fictional films created a demand for "movie stars," such as the glamorous Mary Pickford, the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, the acrobatic comedian Buster Keaton, who began to appear in the popular imagination beginning around 1910. Alongside professional boxing and baseball, the film industry was creating the modern culture of celebrity that would characterize twentieth-century mass entertainment.

After enduring four bloody years of warfare and a strained, decade-long effort to reconstruct the defeated South, the United States abandoned itself to industrial development. Businesses expanded in scale and scope. The nature of labor shifted. A middle class rose. Wealth concentrated. Immigrants crowded into the cities, which grew upward and outward. The Jim Crow South stripped away the vestiges of Reconstruction, and New South boosters papered over the scars. Industrialists hunted profits. Evangelists appealed to people's morals. Consumers lost themselves in new goods and new technologies. Women emerging into new urban spaces embraced new social possibilities. In all of its many facets, by the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had been radically transformed. And the transformations continued to ripple outward into the West and overseas, and inward into radical protest and progressive reforms. For Americans at the twilight of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, a bold new world loomed.
1. Andrew Carnegie on "The Triumph of America" (1885)
Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie celebrated and explored American economic progress in this 1885 article, later reprinted in his 1886 book, Triumphant Democracy.
2. Henry Grady on the New South (1886) Atlanta newspaperman and apostle of the "New South," Henry Grady, won national recognition for his December 21, 1886 speech to the New England Society in New York City. 3. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "Lynch Law in America" (1900) Ida B. Wells-Barnett, born enslaved in Mississippi, was a pioneering activist and journalist. She did much to expose the epidemic of lynching in the United States and her writing and research exploded many of the justifications-particularly the rape of white women by Black men-commonly offered to justify the practice. 4. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) Henry Adams, the great grandson of President John Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, the son of a major American diplomat, and an accomplished Harvard historian, writing in the third person, describes his experience at the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900 and writes of his encounter with "forces totally new." 5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913) Charlotte Perkins Gilman won much attention in 1892 for publishing "The Yellow Wallpaper," a semi-autobiographical short story dealing with mental health and contemporary social expectations for women. In the following piece, Gilman reflected on writing and publishing the piece. 6. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890)
Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, combined photography and journalism into a powerful indictment of poverty in America. His 1890, How the Other Half Lives shocked Americans with its raw depictions of urban slums. Here, he describes poverty in New York.
7. Rose Cohen on the World Beyond her Immigrant Neighborhood (ca.1897/1918) Rose Cohen was born in Russia in 1880 as Rahel Golub. She immigrated to the United States in 1892 and lived in a Russian Jewish neighborhood in New York's Lower East Side. Her, she writes about her encounter with the world outside of her ethnic neighborhood. 8. Mulberry Street (ca. 1900) At the turn of the century, New York City's Lower East Side 9. Coney Island (ca. 1910-1915) Amusement-hungry Americans flocked to new entertainments at the turn of the twentieth century. In this early-twentieth century photograph, visitors enjoy Luna Park, one of the original amusement parks on Brooklyn's famous Coney Island. became the most densely packed urban area in the world. This colorized photomechanical print from the Detroit Photographic depicts daily life on Mulberry Street, the area's central artery.
This chapter was edited by David Hochfelder, with content contributions by Jacob Betz, David Hochfelder, Gerard Koeppel, Scott Libson, Kyle Livie, Paul Matzko, Isabella Morales, Andrew Robichaud, Kate Sohasky, Joseph Super, Susan Thomas, Kaylynn Washnock, and Kevin Young.

Recommended citation: Jacob Betz et al., "Life in Industrial America," David Hochfelder, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Recommended Reading

Ayers, Edward. The Promise of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Beckert, Sven. Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Briggs, Laura. "The Race of Hysteria: 'Overcivilization' and the 'Savage' Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology." American Quarterly 52 (June 2000). 246-273.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Cole, Stephanie, and Natalie J. Ring, eds. The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012.

Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.

Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.

Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Gutman, Herbert. Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History. New York: Knopf, 1976.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

Hicks, Cheryl. Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Kasson, John F. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Random House, 1993.

Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Odem, Mary. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements. Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Putney, Clifford. Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Strouse, Jean. Alice James: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1951.

Notes

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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 "huge wilderness" with "scores of miles of these terrible streets" and their "hundred thousand of these terrible people."

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Political Cartoon

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The Gentlemen's Agreement between the United States and Japan in 1907-1908 represented an effort by President Theodore Roosevelt to calm growing tension between the two countries over the immigration of Japanese workers. A treaty with Japan in 1894 had assured free immigration, but as the number of Japanese workers in California increased, they were met with growing hostility.

In August 1900, Japan agreed to deny passports to laborers seeking to enter the United States; this, however, did not stop the many workers who obtained passports to Canada, Mexico, or Hawaii and then moved on to the United States. Racial antagonism intensified, fed by inflammatory articles in the press. On May 7, 1905, a Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was organized, and on October 11, 1906, the San Francisco school board arranged for all Asian children to be placed in a segregated school.

Japan was prepared to limit immigration to the United States, but was deeply wounded by San Francisco's discriminatory law aimed specifically at its people. President Roosevelt, wishing to preserve good relations with Japan as a counter to Russian expansion in the Far East, intervened. While the American ambassador reassured the Japanese government, Roosevelt summoned the San Francisco mayor and school board to the White House in February 1907 and persuaded them to rescind the segregation order, promising that the federal government would itself address the question of immigration. On February 24, the Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan was concluded in the form of a Japanese note agreeing to deny passports to laborers intending to enter the United States and recognizing the U.S. right to exclude Japanese immigrants holding passports originally issued for other countries. This was followed by the formal withdrawal of the San Francisco school board order on March 13, 1907. A final Japanese note dated February 18, 1908, made the Gentlemen's Agreement fully effective. The agreement was superseded by the exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924.

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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The Gentlemen's Agreement between the United States and Japan in 1907-1908 represented an effort by President Theodore Roosevelt to calm growing tension between the two countries over the immigration of Japanese workers. A treaty with Japan in 1894 had assured free immigration, but as the number of Japanese workers in California increased, they were met with growing hostility.

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From Don't Know Much About History

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So, last week, we saw how commercial farming transformed the American West and gave us mythical cowboys and unfortunately not-so-mythical Indian reservations. Today, we leave the sticks and head for the cities, as so many Americans and immigrants have done throughout this nation's history.

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Objective 2.7- Mass Culture in the Gilded Age

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From You Will Love History

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Lesson 3

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Ch 4 Lesson 3 Social Darwinism and Social Reform

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Commercialized Leisure

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Of all the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the most striking involves the rapid growth of commercialized entertainment. For much of the 19th century, commercial amusements were viewed as somehow suspect. Drawing on the Puritan criticisms of play and recreation and a Republican ideology that was hostile to luxury, hedonism, and extravagance, American Victorians tended to associate theaters, dance halls, circuses, and organized sports with such vices as gambling, swearing, drinking, and immoral sexual behavior. In the late 19th century, however, a new outlook--which revered leisure and play--began to challenge Victorian prejudices.

During the first 20 years of the 20th century, attendance at professional baseball games doubled. Vaudeville, too, increased in popularity, featuring singing, dancing, skits, comics, acrobats, and magicians. Amusement parks, penny arcades, dance halls, and other commercial amusements flourished. As early as 1910, when there were 10,000 movie theaters, the movies had become the nation's most popular form of commercial entertainment.

The rise of these new kinds of commercialized amusements radically reshaped the nature of American leisure activities. Earlier in the 19th century leisure activities had been sharply segregated on the basis of gender, class, and ethnicity. The wealthy attended their own exclusive theaters, concert halls, museums, restaurants, and sporting clubs. For the working class, leisure and amusement was rooted in particular ethnic communities and neighborhoods, each with its own saloons, churches, fraternal organizations, and organized sports. Men and women participated in radically different kinds of leisure activities. Many men (particularly bachelors and immigrants) relaxed in barber shops, billiard halls, and bowling alleys, joined volunteer fire companies or militias, and patronized saloons, gambling halls, and race tracks. Women took part in church activities and socialized with friends and relatives.

After 1880, as incomes rose and leisure time expanded, new commercialized forms of cross-class, mixed-sex amusements proliferated. Entertainment became a major industry. Vaudeville theaters attracted women as well as men. The young, in particular, increasingly sought pleasure, escape, and the freedom to experiment free of parental control in mixed-sex crowds in relatively inexpensive amusement parks, dance halls, urban night clubs, and, above all, nickelodeons and movie theaters.

The transformation of Coney Island symbolized the emergence of a new leisure culture, emphasizing excitement, glamour, fashion, and romance. Formerly a center of male vice--of brothels, saloons, and gambling dens--Coney Island became the nation's first modern amusement park, complete with ferris wheels, hootchie kootchie girls, restaurants, and concert halls. Its informality and sheer excitement attracted people of every class.

If Coney Island offered an escape from an oppressive urban landscape to an exotic one, the new motion picture industry would offer an even less expensive, more convenient escape. During the early 20th century, it quickly developed into the country's most popular and influential form of art and entertainment.

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Printable Version Of all the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the most striking involves the rapid growth of commercialized entertainment. For much of the 19th century, commercial amusements were viewed as somehow suspect.

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The Statue of Liberty

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Printable Version It is the tallest metal statue ever constructed, and, at the time it was completed, the tallest building in New York, 22 stories high. It stands 151 feet high and weighs 225 tons. Its arms are 42 feet long and its torch is 21 feet in length. Its index fingers are eight feet long and it has a 4-foot 6-inch nose. For people all around the world, the statue symbolizes American freedom, hope, and opportunity.

There may be grander monuments, but this statute was not like the Egyptian pyramids or the Colossus of Rhodes, "the brazen statue of Greek fame."

The statue was originally proposed by a now obscure French historian, Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French abolitionist, and designed by the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. The statue has severed chains on one of her feet.

The Statue of Liberty was a gift from French Republicans who wanted to advance their political cause: the replacement of the monarchy of Napoleon III with a republican system of government. It was modeled, in part, on the Roman goddess Libertas, the personification of liberty and freedom in classical Rome, which led some critics to object to a heathen goddess standing in New York harbor. Others derided the statue as a "useless gift," "Neither an object of Art or of Beauty," and it seemed possible that the statue would be placed in Boston or Philadelphia.

The final $100,000 for the statue's pedestal were raised by the Hungarian-born publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who asked New York's poor for contributions. In exchange, he printed their names in his newspaper. One wrote a letter to his paper, The World: "I am a young girl alone in the world, and earning my own living. Enclosed please find 60 cents, the result of self-denial. I wish I could make it 60 thousand dollars, instead of cents, but drops make the ocean."

Over time, the statue's symbolic meaning has been transformed. It was originally intended to express opposition and slavery. After the America's emergence as a world power after its defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the statue became a symbol of American might. It was not until the 20th century and massive immigration from eastern and southern Europe that the statue became "a lady of hope" for immigrants and refugees.

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Printable Version It is the tallest metal statue ever constructed, and, at the time it was completed, the tallest building in New York, 22 stories high. It stands 151 feet high and weighs 225 tons. Its arms are 42 feet long and its torch is 21 feet in length.

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Lesson 4

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Ch 4 Lesson 4 Politics of the Gilded Age

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Political Cartoon

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Boss Tweed

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Printable Version To many late 19th century Americans, he personified public corruption. In the late 1860s, William M. Tweed was the political boss of New York City. His headquarters, located on East 14th Street, was known as Tammany Hall. He wore a diamond, orchestrated elections, controlled the city's mayor, and rewarded political supporters. His primary source of funds came from the bribes and kickbacks that he demanded in exchange for city contracts. The most notorious example of urban corruption was the construction of the New York County Courthouse, begun in 1861 on the site of a former almshouse. Officially, the city wound up spending nearly $13 million--roughly $178 million in today's dollars--on a building that should have cost several times less. Its construction cost nearly twice as much as the purchase of Alaska in 1867.

The corruption was breathtaking in its breadth and baldness. A carpenter was paid $360,751 (roughly $4.9 million today) for one month's labor in a building with very little woodwork. A furniture contractor received $179,729 ($2.5 million) for three tables and 40 chairs. And the plasterer, a Tammany functionary, Andrew J. Garvey, got $133,187 ($1.82 million) for two days' work; his business acumen earned him the sobriquet "The Prince of Plasterers." Tweed personally profited from a financial interest in a Massachusetts quarry that provided the courthouse's marble. When a committee investigated why it took so long to build the courthouse, it spent $7,718 ($105,000) to print its report. The printing company was owned by Tweed.

In July 1871, two low-level city officials with a grudge against the Tweed Ring provided The New York Times with reams of documentation that detailed the corruption at the courthouse and other city projects. The newspaper published a string of articles. Those articles, coupled with the political cartoons of Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly, created a national outcry, and soon Tweed and many of his cronies were facing criminal charges and political oblivion. Tweed died in prison in 1878.

The Tweed courthouse was not completed until 1880, two decades after ground was broken. By then, the courthouse had become a symbol of public corruption. "The whole atmosphere is corrupt," said a reformer from the time. "You look up at its ceilings and find gaudy decorations; you wonder which is the greatest, the vulgarity or the corruptness of the place."

Boss-rule, machine politics, payoff and graft, and the spoils system outraged late 19th century reformers. But were bosses and political machines as corrupt as their critics charged?

George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, New York's Democratic political machine, distinguished between "honest" and "dishonest" graft. Dishonest graft involved payoffs for protecting gambling and prostitution. Honest graft might involve buying up land scheduled for purchase by government. As Plunkitt said, "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."

Paradoxically, a political machine often created benefits for the city. Many machines professionalized urban police forces and instituted the first housing regulations. Political bosses served the welfare needs of immigrants. They offered jobs, food, fuel, and clothing to the new immigrants and the destitute poor. Political machines also served as a ladder of social mobility for ethnic groups blocked from other means of rising in society.

In The Shame of the Cities, the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens argued that it was greedy businessmen who kept the political machines functioning. It was their hunger for government contracts, franchises, charters, and special privileges, he believed, that corrupted urban politics.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, urban reformers would seek to redeem the city through beautification campaigns, city planning, rationalization of city government, and increases in city services.

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Printable Version To many late 19th century Americans, he personified public corruption. In the late 1860s, William M. Tweed was the political boss of New York City. His headquarters, located on East 14th Street, was known as Tammany Hall. He wore a diamond, orchestrated elections, controlled the city's mayor, and rewarded political supporters.

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Gilded Age Politics: Crash Course US History #26

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The Huddled Masses - America's Immigration History - Part 4

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Lesson 5

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Visual Summary

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So with all this distrust in government, after Grant served two terms, presidential elections featured a series of "one-termers": Hayes, Garfield (whose term was filled out by Chester Arthur after Garfield was assassinated), Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and then Cleveland again, McKinley (who was elected twice, but then he was assassinated).

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Mansions of the Gilded Age in Newport , RI

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Mansions of the Gilded Age in Newport , RI

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The Mansions of Newport, Rhode Island The Coolest Stuff on the Planet

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The New Immigrants

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Printable Version Some 334,203 immigrants arrived in the United States in 1886, the year of the statue's dedication. A Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti, wrote: "Irishmen, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Germans freed from tyranny or want--all hail the monument of Liberty because to them it seems to incarnate their own uplifting."

The immigrants who would catch a glimpse of the statue would mainly come from eastern and southern Europe.

In 1900, 14 percent of the American population was foreign born, compared to 8 percent a century later. Passports were unnecessary and the cost of crossing the Atlantic was just $10 in steerage.

European immigration to the United States greatly increased after the Civil War, reaching 5.2 million in the 1880s then surging to 8.2 million in the first decade of the 20th century. Between 1882 and 1914, approximately 20 million immigrants came to the United States. In 1907 alone, 1.285 million arrived. By 1900, New York City had as many Irish residents as Dublin. It had more Italians than any city outside Rome and more Poles than any city except Warsaw. It had more Jews than any other city in the world, as well as sizeable numbers of Slavs, Lithuanians, Chinese, and Scandinavians.

Unlike earlier immigrants, who mainly came from northern and western Europe, the "new immigrants" came largely from southern and eastern Europe. Largely Catholic and Jewish in religion, the new immigrants came from the Balkans, Italy, Poland, and Russia.

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Printable Version Some 334,203 immigrants arrived in the United States in 1886, the year of the statue's dedication. A Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti, wrote: "Irishmen, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Germans freed from tyranny or want--all hail the monument of Liberty because to them it seems to incarnate their own uplifting."

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Using Primary Sources

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The Rise of Mass Communication

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Printable Version The last ten years of the 19th century were critical in the emergence of modern American mass culture. In those years emerged the modern instruments of mass communication--the mass-circulation metropolitan newspaper, the best-seller, the mass-market magazine, national advertising campaigns, radio, and the movies. American culture also made a critical shift to commercialized forms of entertainment.

The Mass Market Newspaper

The urban tabloid was the first instrument to appear. It was pioneered by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and E.W. Scripp's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. These popular newspapers differed dramatically from the upper-class and staunchly partisan political newspapers that had dominated 19th century journalism. They featured banner headlines, a multitude of photographs and cartoons, and an emphasis on local news, crime, scandal, society news, and sports. Large ads made up half a paper's content, compared to just thirty percent in earlier newspapers. For easier reading on street railways, page size was cut, stories were shortened, and the text heavily illustrated.

The Hungarian born Pulitzer migrated to the United States at the age of 17 and purchased the struggling New York World from financier Jay Gould. His newspaper crusaded against corruption and fraud. He pledged that the World would be "dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of the purse-potentates" and would "expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses...[and] serve and battle for the people." Using simple words, a lively style, and many illustrations, his newspaper could be read by many immigrants who understood little English. By 1905, the World had a circulation of two million.

Hearst developed the newspaper's entertainment potential. Entertainment was stick in trade of yellow journalism (named for the "yellow kid" comic strip that appeared in the Journal). Among the innovations he pioneered were the first color comic strips, advice columns, women's pages, fashion pages, and sports pages.

Scripps's legacy was the development of the business side of the modern American newspaper. From the early 1870s through his retirement in 1908, he established or bought more than 40 newspapers, stretching from Portland, Ore., to New York City. His biggest innovations were a national news service and a feature syndicate that provided all of his newspapers with common material. He claimed that he only needed two employees--a reporter and an editor--to start a newspaper, because he could rely on his news service and features syndicate. Syndicated material accounted for 25 to 35 percent of each issue and, at times, even up to half or three-quarters.

Instead of directly competing for established readers, he instead sought to serve new readers. In his opinion, most newspapers either ignored or were hostile to the working class. His news stressed labor issues and was directed to a less-educated audience. His newspapers sold for just a penny at a time when others sold for two cents for home delivery and five cents on the street. His papers were half the size of other papers of the time.

His papers exposed trusts, supported strikes, and favored government regulation of food and transportation industries, as well as government ownership of water and electric utilities. They advocated power for the common people by direct election of public office and through initiative, referendum, and recall. They offered advice on how to run a home on a limited budget.

The Mass Circulation National Magazine, the Bestseller, and Records

Also during the 1890s the world of magazine publishing was revolutionized by the rise of the country's first mass circulation national magazines. After the Civil War, the magazine field was dominated by a small number of sedate magazines-like The Atlantic, Harper's, and Scribner's--written for "gentle" reader with highly intellectual tastes. The poetry, serious fiction, and wood engravings that filled these monthly's pages rigidly conformed to upper-class Victorian standards of taste. These magazines embodied what the philosopher George Santayana called the "genteel tradition," the idea that art and literature should reinforce morality not portray reality. Art and literature, the custodians of culture believed, should transcend the real and uphold the ideal. Poet James Russell Lowell spoke for other genteel writers when he said that no man should describe any activity that would make his wife or daughter blush.

The founders of the nation's first mass-circulation magazines considered the older "quality" magazines stale and elitist. In contrast, their magazines featured practical advice, popularized science, gossip, human interest stories, celebrity profiles, interviews, "muckraking" investigations, pictures, articles on timely topics--and a profusion of ads. Instead of cultivating a select audience, the new magazines had a very different set of priorities. By running popular articles, editors sought to maximize circulation, which, in turn, attracted advertising that kept the magazine's price low. By 1900, the nation's largest magazine, the Ladies' Home Journal reached 850,000 subscribers--more than eight times the readership of Scribner's or Harper's.

The end of the 19th century also marked a critical turning point in the history of book publishing, as marketing wizards like Frank Doubleday organized the first national book promotional campaigns, created the modern best seller, and transformed popular writers like Jack London into celebrities. The world of the Victorian man of letters, the defender of "Culture" against "Anarchy," had ended.

At the International Exposition in Paris in 1878, 30,000 people lined up to see the first demonstration of Thomas Edison's phonograph. The phonograph was treated as a dictation machine for a decade after Thomas Edison invented it in 1877. It was not until 1890 that cylinders of recorded music were first sold. In 1901, cylinders gave way to discs.

Advertising

In 1898, the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) launched the first million dollar national advertising campaign. It succeeded in making Uneeda biscuits and their water-proof "In-er-Seal" box popular household items. During the 1880s and 1890s, patent medicine manufacturers, department stores, and producers of low price packaged consumer goods (like Campbell Soups, H.J. Heinz, and Quaker Oats), developed modern advertising techniques. Where earlier advertisers made little use of brand names illustrations, or trademarks, the new ads made use of snappy slogans and colorful packages. As early as 1900, advertisements began to use psychology to arouse consumer demand by suggesting that a product would contribute to the consumer's social and psychic well-being. To induce purchases, observed a trade journal in 1890, a consumer "must be aroused, excited, terrified." Listerine mouthwash promised to cure "halitosis." Scott tissue claimed to prevent infections caused by harsh toilet paper.

By stressing instant gratification and personal fulfillment in their ads, modern advertising helped undermine an earlier Victorian ethos emphasizing thrift, self-denial, delayed gratification, and hard work. In various ways, it transformed Americans from "savers" to "spenders" and told them to give in to their desire for luxury.

The Purveyors of Mass Culture

The creators of the modern instruments of mass culture tended to share a common element in their background. Most were "outsiders"--recent immigrants or Southerners, Midwesterners, or Westerners. Joseph Pulitzer was an Austrian Jew, the pioneering "new" magazine editors, Edward W. Bok and Samuel Sidney McClure, were also first-generation immigrants. Where the "genteel tradition" was dominated by men and women from Boston's elite culture or upper-class New York, the men who created modern mass culture had their initial training in daily newspapers, commerce, and popular entertainment--and, as a result, were more in touch with popular tastes. As outsiders, the creators of mass culture betrayed an almost voyeuristic interest in what they called the "romance of real life," with high life, low life, power, and status.

The new forms of popular culture that they helped create shared a common style: simple, direct, realistic, and colloquial. The 1890s were the years when a florid Victorian style was overthrown by a new "realistic" aesthetic. At various levels of American culture, writers and artists rebelled against the moralism and sentimentality of Victorian culture and sought to live objectively and truthfully, without idealization or avoiding the ugly. The quest for realism took a variety of guises. It could be seen in the naturalism of writers like Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane, with their nightmarish depictions of urban poverty and exploitation in the paintings of the "ashcan" school of art, with their vivid portraits of tenements and congested streets and in the forceful, colorful prose of tabloid reporters and muckraking journalists, who cut through the Victorian veil of reticence surrounding such topics as sex, political corruption, and working conditions in industry.

Mass Culture Blossoms

Although they relied on 19th century inventions, the most influential innovations in mass culture would take place after the turn-of-the-century. Thomas Edison first successfully projected moving pictures on a screen in 1896, but it would not be until 1903 that Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery"--the first American movie to tell a story --demonstrated the commercial appeal of motion pictures. And while Guglielmo Marconi proved the possibility of wireless communication in 1895, commercial radio broadcasting did not begin until 1920 and commercial television broadcasts until 1939. In the 20th century, these new instruments of mass communication would reach audiences of unprecedented size. By 1922, movies sold 40 million tickets a week and radios could be found in three million homes.

The emergence of these modern forms of mass communication had far-reaching effects upon American society. They broke down the isolation of local neighborhoods and communities and ensured that for the first time all Americans, -- regardless of their class, ethnicity, or locality -- began to share standardized information and entertainment.

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Printable Version The last ten years of the 19th century were critical in the emergence of modern American mass culture. In those years emerged the modern instruments of mass communication--the mass-circulation metropolitan newspaper, the best-seller, the mass-market magazine, national advertising campaigns, radio, and the movies.

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Birds of Passage

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Printable Version Many of the millions of immigrants who arrived into the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did so with the intention of returning to their villages in the Old World. Known as "birds of passage," many of these eastern and southern European migrants were peasants who had lost their property as a result of the commercialization of agriculture. They came to America to earn enough money to allow them to return home and purchase a piece of land. As one Slavic steelworker put it: "A good job, save money, work all time, go home, sleep, no spend."

Many of these immigrants came to America alone, expecting to rejoin their families in Europe within a few years. From 1907 to 1911, of every hundred Italians who arrived in the United States, 73 returned to the Old Country. For Southern and Eastern Europe as a whole, approximately 44 of every 100 who arrived returned back home.

Some immigrants, however, did not come as "sojourners." In particular, Jewish immigrants from Russia, fleeing religious persecution, came in family groups and intended to stay in the United States from the beginning.

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Printable Version Many of the millions of immigrants who arrived into the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did so with the intention of returning to their villages in the Old World. Known as "birds of passage," many of these eastern and southern European migrants were peasants who had lost their property as a result of the commercialization of agriculture.

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Using Benchmark Skill Activities

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Immigration Restriction

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Printable Version Gradually during the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States imposed additional restrictions on immigration. In 1882, excluded people were likely to become public charges. It subsequently prohibited the immigration of contract laborers (1885) and illiterates (1917), and all Asian immigrants (except for Filipinos, who were U.S. nationals) (1917). Other acts restricted the entry of certain criminals, people who were considered immoral, those suffering from certain diseases, and paupers. Under the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907-1908, the Japanese government agreed to limit passports issued to Japanese in order to permit wives to enter the United States; and in 1917, the United States barred all Asian immigrants except for Filipinos, who were U.S. nationals. Intolerance toward immigrants from southern and eastern Europe resulted in the Immigration Act of 1924, which placed a numerical cap on immigration and instituted a deliberately discriminatory system of national quotas. In 1965, the United States adopted a new immigration law which ended the quota system.

During the 20th century, all advanced countries imposed restrictions on the entry of immigrants. A variety of factors encouraged immigration restriction. These include a concern about the impact of immigration on the economic well-being of a country's workforce as well as anxiety about the feasibility of assimilating immigrants of diverse ethnic and cultural origins. Especially following World War I and World War II, countries expressed concern that foreign immigrants might threaten national security by introducing alien ideologies.

It is only in the 20th century that governments became capable of effectively enforcing immigration restrictions. Before the 20th century, Russia was the only major European country to enforce a system of passports and travel regulations. During and after World War I, however, many western countries adopted systems of passports and border controls as well as more restrictive immigration laws. The Russian Revolution prompted fear of foreign radicalism exacerbated by the Russian Revolution, while many countries feared that their societies would be overwhelmed by a postwar surge of refugees.

Among the first societies to adopt restrictive immigration policies were Europe's overseas colonies. Apart from prohibitions on the slave trade, many of the earliest immigration restrictions were aimed at Asian immigrants. The United States imposed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It barred the entry of Chinese laborers and established stringent conditions under which Chinese merchants and their families could enter. Canada also imposed restrictions on Chinese immigration. It imposed a "head" tax (which was $500 in 1904) and required migrants to arrive by a "continuous voyage."

Xenophobia: Hatred of foreigners and immigrants.

Nativism: The policy of keeping a society ethnically homogenous.

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Printable Version Gradually during the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States imposed additional restrictions on immigration. In 1882, excluded people were likely to become public charges. It subsequently prohibited the immigration of contract laborers (1885) and illiterates (1917), and all Asian immigrants (except for Filipinos, who were U.S.

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Benchmark Note Cards