AMERICAN URBANIZATIONGlobal Migration and Urban Explosion

Urbanization• Between 1870 and 1900, eleven million people moved

into America’s cities• Why?

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus, a young Jewish woman wrote in 1883:

Global migration• Two distinct waves of European immigration

• Before 1880—from northern and western Europe

• After 1880—from southern and eastern Europe• depression in southern Italy, persecution of Jews in eastern Europe, avoidance of Russian conscription

Ellis Island, immigration facility, New York Harbor

Ellis Island

Immigrants at Ellis Island

Women

Examination Room

Electric Street Car• Development of

electric street car in 1880s led to urban congestion and suburban sprawl

• Social segregation—those who could afford, moved to outskirts, poorest occupied city center

Structural Steel• Structural Steel changed the urban environment with bridges and sky-scrapers

Brooklyn Bridge

‘Skyscraper’

Public works

• Street paving, trolley tracks, underground subway lines

Trolley, North First in San Jose

Sewers and Water mains• Flush toilet, bathtubs, and lavatories in new apartments—because of improvements in city sewers and water mains.

Frederick Law Olmstead

Central Park New York

“Chicago School”• Great Chicago Fire of 1871 demanded a new city to be

built• Soaring population descended on Chicago• “Chicago School” a small group of professional architects

designing the new, tall, buildings

Connecticut Mill

Chicago home

Jacob Riis• How the Other Half Lives, documented the poverty, crowding and disease of New York City

• Had America become a plutocracy? The wealthiest 1% owned more than half of the real and personal property in the country.

Tenement living

• The poor did not share equally in the advantages of city life.

America’s Need for Cheap Labor

• Between 1870 and 1900 industrialists drew on rural and migrant people for labor force• Common laborers• Skilled craftsmen• Mechanization replaced workers with machines• Textile mills usually employed young women• New classes of managers, middle management• Clerical workers• Retail sales

Great Railroad Strike 1877

Knights of Labor• First mass organization of America’s working class

• Organized regardless of skill, sex, race, or nationality, became the dominate force in labor during the 1880s

• Knights of Labor advocated a workers’ democracy that embraced public ownership of railroads, an income tax, equal pay for women workers, and the abolition of child labor.

AFL rival to Knights of Labor• American Federation of Labor headed by Samuel Gompers

• His plan was to organize skilled workers and to use strikes to gain immediate objectives—higher pay and better working conditions

12-Hour Day• Since 1840, labor had sought to end the industry

standard12-hour work day, • Supporters set May 1,1886 as the date for a nationwide

general strike in support of eight-hour day• All factions of labor movement participated in Chicago on

May Day, ‘largest demonstration to date’• 45,000 workers paraded peaceful down Michigan Ave in

support of eight hour work day

Haymarket

Haymarket Riot• The riot killed the 8-hr workday movement

• Ruined the Knights of Labor

• Skilled workers turned to the AFL

• Unskilled workers were left out

Calls for Immigration Restriction• Many Americans saw newcomers as uneducated,

backward, uncouth • “blue-bloods” made unlikely alliance with organized labor

to restrict immigration• Ethnic competition between older immigrants

Anti-immigrant attitudes

Bosses• William Marcy Tweed or “Boss Tweed” of New York

• Bribery and Graft to control New York politics

Thomas Nast cartoon

Tammany Hall

Tammany Hall

Lincoln Steffens

At Home and At Play

“Cult of Domesticity”

Household chores

Washing clothes

Idealized image

Domestic servants

Coney Island

World’s Columbian Exposition 1893

Ferris Wheel

“White City”

Displays of America’s Industries

Agriculture Products at the Fair