APUSH Porter

POWERPONT CHAPTER 25
The Move to Urbanization
1865-1900
 Keys to the Chapter
• Urbanization
• Immigration
• Nativism
• Education
• Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. DuBois
• Publisher Wars
• Reform Movements caused by a changing
society
 The Shift to
the City

The % of
population
living in cities
doubles from
1860 to 1900
 Urban
Growth,
1870 – 1900

NYC and
Chicago
take the
lead
• Many people from rural America drawn into cities
– Not only for jobs, but for the more glamorous and
technological city lifestyle
– Huge department stores (Macy’s, Marshall Field’s)
attracted middle-class shoppers and gave lower-
class jobs (mainly to women)
– Skyscrapers made possible by the electric elevator
– Trains allow for cities to expand their “radius”
– Waste removal becomes an issue
– Urban slums develop and criminal activity grows
– Tenement living becomes a big issue (Jacob Riis)
The Urban Slum
Overcrowding in New York City
 The New Immigration
• Immigrants from Europe poured into US
– 1850s – 1870s – about 2 million per decade
– By 1880s – about 5 million per decade entered US

Prior to 1880s most immigrants came from England

or Western Europe but starting in 1880s it
becomes primarily Eastern Europe (Jews) and
Southern Europe (Italian) and religious conflicts
arise
 Old and New Immigration – Note
Increase of Southern/ Eastern Europe
• Pushes (reasons being pushed out of Europe)
– Rapid population growth in Europe because of food
imports from US and cultivation of potato brings
overcrowding and joblessness in cities
– Poverty of displaced farm workers driven from the land by
mechanization and food imports from US
– Religious persecution, especially in Russia against the Jews
• Pulls (reasons bringing people to America)
– “America letters” sent by immigrants telling of opportunity
– US reputation for political and religious freedom
– Economic opportunities advertised by American business
interests who want cheap, unskilled labor
– Large steamships and relatively inexpensive one-way
passage
• Job of taking care of immigrants went to bosses and
political machines because government did little
– In return for immigrants’ votes, boss provided jobs
on city payroll, housing for newly arrived, gave
food and clothes to poor, helped fix small
problems with law, and got parks and schools
built in immigrant neighborhoods
– In spite of corruption, bosses gave immigrants
needed assistance that no one else did
Social reformers would gradually work to help fix
urban problems, including those of immigrants, by
making them issues that people cared about
The City Boss
• “social gospel” movement
– Protestant ministers who tried to apply the lessons of
Christianity to the urban slums
– Called on churches to use the lessons of the Sermon on the
Mount to fix problems in society
– Made middle class aware of problems of poor, leading to
progressive reforms in early 1900s
• The settlement house movement
{ Jane Addams Chicago starts Hull House 1890s}
– Located in poor, ethnic neighborhoods in big cities
– Provided instruction in English
– Provided child care for working mothers
– Hosted cultural activities
• Other followed Addams’ lead, forming settlement
houses in big cities
• Settlement houses became centers of women’s
activism for social reform (protection laws for
women and child workers are sought)
• Some women entered into careers in social work
after working in settlement houses
• Job Opportunities for women in the cities
– Mostly single women because of taboo against
married women working
– Women’s jobs depended on race, ethnicity, class
– Long hours, low pay, limited advancement
• 1880s – strong anti-foreignism against New
Immigrants aroused (Nativism)
– Feared foreigners (with a higher birthrate than
native-born Americans) would outbreed them
– Feared mixture of foreigners with Anglos,
“mongrelizing” American race
– Blamed immigrants for corruption of city
governments
– Workers in unions attacked immigrants’
willingness to work for “starvation” wages
– Immigrants blamed for radical ideas (socialism,
communism, anarchism)
Uncle Sam
Refuses
Entrance to
a Foreign
“Radical”
• Unions supported anti-immigrant causes
– Immigrants used as strikebreakers
– Immigrants pushed wages down
– Immigrants difficult to unionize because of language
barrier
– If American business got protection (through tariffs),
American workers should get protection (through
immigration restrictions)

– 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act bans Chinese immigrants

– 1886 Statue of Liberty opened (saying opp. of belief)
– 1917 Literacy Tests finally adopted into law for immigrants
Looking Backward- How they forgot
• Darwinism challenged core of established
religions
– Idea that higher forms of life had evolved
through “natural selection”
– Explicit rejection of “special creations”,
design of each fixed species by divine
(supernatural) agency
– By 1875, most scientists came to believe in
evolution, although there was
disagreement over Darwinism
– By the 1920s – most scientists had come to
accept Darwinism
• Religion’s reaction to Darwinism
– first, many scientists and religionists oppose but
– After 1875 churches split into 2 groups
• Conservative minority firmly behind literal
interpretation of Bible (leading to fundamentalism)
• “Accommodationists” reconciled Darwinism with
Christianity; did not accept Bible (in its entirety) as
history or science {wanted to keep people in
church}
• Impact of Darwinism
– Religious foundations of Americans shaken but
accommodationists kept many in churches
– Religious teaching kept to personal faith and
private conduct
– Science explained external world instead of
religion
 The Lust for Learning - Education
• Elementary schools
– After Civil War, more states made grade school
education compulsory
– Helped also stop some of the worst abuses of
child labor, kids in school instead of factories
High schools
– Before 1880s – public high schools rare
– 1880s – 1900s – free public high schools
established, along with free books
A School in New York, 1886
• The problem of education in the South
– South far behind and blacks even further behind
• Booker T. Washington
– 1881 – took lead at industrial school in Tuskegee,
Ala.
– Taught blacks useful trades so that they could gain
economic security and self-respect
– “accommodationist” because he did not challenge
white supremacy or racism; accepted inequality
– Believed social equality (with political and civil
rights) would come after achieving economic
security
– George W. Carver important teacher at Tuskegee
• W. E. B. DuBois
– Northern black who earned Ph.D. from Harvard
(first black to do so)
– Helped found NAACP
– Demanded complete equality for blacks (social
and economic), rejecting Washington’s gradualism
– Called for “talented tenth” of blacks to lead and
be given full and equal access to mainstream

WASHINGTON VS. DuBOIS WOULD BE THE FIGHT

FOR THE BLACK COMMUNITY
• Morrill Act of 1862 (got Feds involved in education)
– Gave large grants of public land to states for public education
{The A&Ms}

• Hatch Act of 1887

– Extended Morrill Act to provide federal funds for agricultural
experiment stations at land-grant colleges

• Morrill and Hatch Acts helped create over 100 colleges

and universities in US
• Private philanthropy (charity) helped build many
colleges
– Many new industrial millionaires gave money to build
colleges {Cornell, Stanford, University of Chicago }
 The Appeal of the Press
• Changes in journalism
– Linotype (invented 1885)
• Machine replaced labor-intensive typesetting by hand
• Led to more newspapers being printed, but at higher
costs (to buy the Linotype machines)
• Newspapers have to rely on advertising, making them
write tamer articles to not offend advertisers

– Appeal to immigrants and masses (less educated)

• Stories about sex, scandal to catch and keep their
attention
• 2 news tycoons compete to provide
sensationalistic news to gain more subscribers
to their chains of papers {yellow journalism)

– Joseph Pulitzer
• New York World

– William Randolph Hearst

• San Francisco Examiner

Magazines become much more popular as education

increases the number of literate readers
 Popular Reform Authors
• Henry George, Progress and Poverty
(1879)
– Inequality because there was a fixed amount of
land, but an increasing population wanted to
limit profits from land sales
• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888)
– man falls asleep in 1887, wakes up in 2000
– Finds that social & economic injustices ended
by government nationalizing big business to
operate in public’s interest
– Influenced future reform movements
• Horatio Alger
– Sold millions of books with stock formula of the
hero triumphantly overcoming obstacles with
honesty, virtue, work
Walt Whitman (poetry)
Emily Dickenson (poetry)
• Mark Twain
– Wrote in rough vernacular
– The Gilded Age (1873)
• Satire of postwar politicians and speculators
– Tom Sawyer (1876); Huckleberry Finn (1884)
• Two very important books about realities of life and
racism in the South
• Stephen Crane (died of T.B. at 29)
– Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) about a poor
prostitute driven to suicide
– The Red Badge of Courage (1895) about a young,
wounded Civil War recruit
• Theodore Dreiser
– Sister Carrie (1900), a graphically realistic novel
about a poor working girl in Chicago; the girl
rejected traditional moral standards

– JACOB RIIS – HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES

 The New Morality
• Late 1800s – culture battle over sexual
freedom and role of women in society
– “new morality” – greater freedom in sexuality
(brought about in part by women’s greater
economic freedom)
– Signs of the new morality: divorce, birth control,
open discussion of sexual topics
– Battle exemplified by clashes between Victoria
Woodhull and Anthony Comstock
• Victoria Woodhull
– Proclaimed belief in free love; worked for
feminism and Published radical magazine
• Anthony Comstock
– Campaigned against “immorality”
– Used 1873 Comstock Law to confiscate and
destroy sexuality explicit pictures, books, and
magazines, including info about birth control

– Divorce rate increased

– Birth rate decreased
Give Mother the
Vote – We Need
It

Push starts in
1900 to increase
power of women
politically
• Women’s gains toward suffrage
– States began allowing women to vote in local and
sometimes state elections (strongest in West)
– 1869 – Wyoming granted first to be unrestricted
• Other states followed
– Women also gained right to own property and
formed women’s organizations at the same time
– White women restricted black women’s
membership in their suffrage and social groups
– Ida B. Wells
• Began nationwide anti-lynching campaign
• Helped black women form their own organizations for
suffrage and equality
Woman Suffrage Before the Nineteenth
Amendment
 Woman’s
Holy War
---------------
The fight
against
alcohol
----------------
Temperance
Movement
Statewide Prohibition Before 1919
• 1893 – Anti-Saloon League formed
– Made important gains in states, banning alcohol
• 1919 – 18th Amendment banned alcohol
nationally but Repealed in 1933

• Other reform societies

– 1866 – ASPCA
– 1881 – American Red Cross
• Led by Clara Barton, nurse from Civil War

SPORTS AND THEATOR BECOME MORE WIDESPREAD AS

LESIURE TIME INCREASES ALONG WITH INCOME