Life in Industrial America
When British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889, he described a city captivated by technology and blinded by greed. Kipling wrote, “There was no color in the street and no beauty—only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging underfoot.” 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.” 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. The last decades of the nineteenth century, a new era for big business, saw the formation of large corporations, run by salaried managers, doing national and international business. Chicago became America’s butcher. 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. 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.
Trending Urban
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, Eastern and Southern Europeans including Poles, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and Jews made up most 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. By the start of the 1900s, the rise of cities, the evolution of American immigration, the transformation of American labor, the further making of consumption culture, the creation of great concentrated wealth, the growth of vast city slums, widening inequalities, battles between businesses and workers, the final destruction of independent farming, breakthrough technologies, environmental destruction: industrialization created a new America.
Industrialization & Technological Innovation
National railroad mileage tripled in the twenty years after the outbreak of the Civil War and tripled again over the four decades that followed. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 impelled the creation of uniform time zones across the country, gave industrialists access to remote markets, and opened the American West to white settlers while eroding indigious ways of life.
The railroads profited from enormous amounts of government support followed. Federal, state, and local governments offered unrivaled handouts to create the national rail networks – making the rich corporations even richer. The wealthy corporations and businessmen used their massive wealth to influence U.S. politicians. The government passed legislation granting hundreds of millions of acres of land and millions of dollars’ worth of government bonds to build the great transcontinental railroads. These projects displaced native communities continuing the process of ethnic cleansing that had been going on since first contact between Europeans and indigenous populations in what would become the United States.
The building of the transcontinental railroad required a significant number of workers from all over the world. Immigrants from China, and Europe, and Mexican Americans living on land claimed by the United States after 1848 joined with U.S.-born whites and African Americans in constructing tracks that crisscrossed the continent. The diversity of the workforce was often exploited by railroad bosses who pitted these groups against one another to lower labor costs. The tensions created by using one ethnic group to undercut the wages of another often escalated to violence with Chinese workers particularly targeted by economically insecure white workers who blamed Chinese immigrants for their low wages. The people who set their low wages including railroad management, executives, and stockholders, generally faced no such threat.
The Electrical Revolution
In September 1878, inventor Thomas Edison announced a new and ambitious line of research and development—electric power and lighting. Electricity revolutionized the world. It not only illuminated the night, it powered the Second Industrial Revolution and a new wave of urbanization.
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. Industry boosted productivity, railroads connected the nation, and more and more U.S. residents labored for wages in cities as opposed to subsistence on farms. These revolutionary changes, of course, would not occur without conflict or consequence, 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 U.S. culture.
Immigration and Urbanization
Industry pulled ever more Americans into cities. Manufacturing needed the labor pool and the infrastructure. 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, before 1882 a young Chinese man may be seeking his fortune searching for gold or laying rail far from the stranglehold of British imperialism and the resulting opioid crisis of his homeland. 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 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 facing pogroms in Russia 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 that existed earlier in the 1800s and in previous centuries. 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, Chicago, 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).
As the urban population exploded, many immigrants found themselves trapped in crowded, crime-ridden slums. Often dehumanized in political discourses and popular political cartoons, U.S. leaders tolerated and often justified the harsh living and working conditions that newly arriving immigrants faced. Still, immigrant groups found varied ways to create meaningful and fulfilling lives for themselves in their adopted home.
Immigrants resisted their persecution in several ways. Immigrants from specific countries—and often even specific communities—often clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods. They formed vibrant organizations and societies 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. They organized strong workers movements often across national origins, to demand better wages and working conditions. They became political activists, working with marginalized peoples to pressure policymakers to treat immigrant communities with dignity and respect. 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).
Gender, Religion, and Culture
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 movement to secure women the right to vote.
Urbanization and immigration fueled anxieties that old social norms 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 discussed in the next chapter.
While many men worried about female activism, they worried too about their own masculinity. To anxious observers, industrial capitalism was hurting American manhood. Rather than working on farms, where young men formed physical muscle and spiritual grit, new generations of middle-class 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.” Academics increasingly warned that America had become a nation of emasculated men.
Contemporary ideals of U.S. 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 reinvigorated masculinity would preserve the American race’s superiority against foreign foes and the effeminizing effects of “over-civilization”. Simultaneously, U.S. conquest and imperialism abroad was justified by the “under-civilization” of peoples in the Caribbean Basin, Guam, and The Philippines.
