DURING THE LAST THIRD of the nineteenth century technological, economic, and social changes transformed American life. Between roughly 1870 and 1900 America evolved rapidly from a rural, localized, traditional society to a modern, industrialized, urban nation. At the end of the Civil War, America remained, as it had been at the time of Tocqueville’s visit in the 1830s, predominantly a land of small farms, small towns, and small businesses. By the turn of the century America was rapidly becoming a nation of cities, teeming with immigrants born in villages in Europe or America but now toiling in factories operated by massive industrial combines.
Technological change was one key to this transformation. In the eight decades up to 1870, the U.S. Patent Office had recognized 118,000 inventions. In the next four decades patents were generated at nearly twenty times this rate. Some of the new inventions (like the reaper) revolutionized agricultural productivity. Some (like the sewing machine and canned food) transformed the home. But most momentous of all were the inventions that underlay the American industrial, transportation, and urban revolutions—the steam boiler, steel, electricity, the telegraph and telephone, the elevator, the air brake, and many more. Steel production, for instance, mushroomed from 77,000 tons in 1870 to 11.2 million tons in 1900. The number of factories in America nearly quadrupled from 140,000 in 1865 to 512,000 in 1900, and their size grew even faster. In 1865 the typical New England mill employed only 200 to 300 people. In 1915 the first Ford Motor plant employed no fewer than 15,000.2
Just as the sinews of the nation were now made of steel, electricity was transforming its synapses. At the turn of the century, wrote journalist Mark Sullivan,
electricity was streaking up and down the country, literally like light-ning—wires to provide it with a pathway were everywhere being extended, like long nerves of new growth, from central power houses, from the city to the suburb, longer and longer capacity for transmission carrying it to distant villages, from the villages to the farm—everywhere ending in a switch, by the turning of which man could tap for himself a practically limitless reservoir of physical power.3
Railroad and telegraph transformed America from small, isolated “island communities” scattered across 3 million square miles to an integrated national economic unit. Between 1870 and 1900 the nationwide rail network grew from 53,000 to 193,000 miles. “A transcontinental railroad network brought farm and factory, country and town, closer together,” concludes historian Sean Dennis Cashman. “Telegraph and telephone, electricity and press increased public knowledge, business efficiency, and political debate.”4
Along with these technological revolutions came a revolution in the scale of enterprise, for this was also the seed time of the modern corporation. Corporate organization decimated many occupations, such as small merchant and independent artisan, while creating new ones, such as company administrator and unskilled industrial worker. Between 1897 and 1904 the first great merger wave in American history swept over Wall Street, leaving in its wake massive new corporations—Standard Oil, General Electric, Du Pont, U.S. Steel, American Tobacco, Nabisco, and many others. In fact, in relationship to the size of the total economy, the merger wave at the end of the nineteenth century was not rivaled until the megamergers of the 1990s.5
Economic historian Glenn Porter summarizes the dramatic changes in the structure and scale of the American economy.
For the first time, whole industries came to be identified with the names of the powerful individuals who dominated them—Cornelius Vanderbilt, E. H. Harriman, and James J. Hill in railroads, Cyrus McCormick in reapers, John D. Rockefeller in oil, J. P. Morgan in finance, James B. Duke in tobacco, Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour in meatpacking, Andrew Carnegie in steel…. Similarly, the improvements in transportation and communications and the growth of cities opened opportunities for mass merchandising in the new fields of department stores, mail-order houses, and chain stores. Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roe- buck & Company led the way among the mail-order firms, while distributors such as A&P and Woolworth’s set new patterns in chain store retailing.6
Measured materially, the standard of living in the United States improved substantially during the half century after the close of the Civil War. Per capita wealth increased by some 60 percent, and real per capita GNP rose 133 percent, even as the population swelled with an influx of poor immigrants. From 1871 to 1913 the expansion of the American economy averaged 4.3 percent annually.7
These gains were not spread evenly, either across social classes or across time. The gap between rich and poor, and even the gap between skilled and unskilled laborers, widened, in the words of historian Mark Wahlgren Summers, “in work experience, in their satisfaction with American society, in pay scales and control of their own lives.” In 1896 Charles B. Spaur estimated that 1 percent of the population owned more than half of all national wealth, while the 44 percent of families at the bottom owned only 1.2 percent. Contemporary economic historians Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert report that economic inequality had increased rapidly during the years of early industrialization prior to the Civil War and continued to rise irregularly to very high levels, probably peaking just before World War I. Not until the final decades of the twentieth century would economic inequality widen as it did during the nineteenth century. Despite the growing maldistribution of well-being, however, the real income and standard of living of American workers did rise significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8
Several severe recessions (or “panics,” as they were termed) interrupted the economic progression. Unemployment surpassed 16 percent in the depressions of 1873–77 and 1893–97. No period of economic distress in American history had been as deep and traumatic as the years from 1893 to 1897. On the other hand, that depression was followed by almost two decades of nearly uninterrupted growth.9 The prosperity of these two decades would produce a society confident and efficient enough to contemplate large-scale innovation to address the problems of the day—crime, violence, disease, urban squalor, political corruption, even the growing inequalities of wealth and power. It also gave birth to a broad and internally diverse Progressive coalition united in the optimistic assumption that society was capable of improvement via intentional reform.
The decades between the Civil War and World War I were also an epoch of rapid population growth and urbanization. Between 1870 and 1900 national population nearly doubled from 40 million to 76 million, while the population of cities tripled from 10 million to 30 million. Large cities grew faster still, and new ones were added to the roles almost yearly. The number of cities with over 50,000 in population tripled from 25 to 78 in this period. In merely twenty years between 1870 and 1890, Boston’s population rose by 79 percent to nearly 450,000, San Francisco’s doubled to nearly 300,000, Milwaukee’s tripled to more than 200,000, and Denver’s multiplied twentyfold to 107,000. Chicago, barely a village in 1860, had a population of 2.2 million by 1910. Year after year an endless stream of hopeful emigrants from American farms and European villages poured into the anonymous teeming cities of tenements and skyscrapers.10 These migrants were living now not merely in a new community, but in a setting so unfamiliar and disjointed that many doubted it deserved the term community at all.
Most of the new urban dwellers were also living in a new country. In the thirty years between 1870 and 1900, nearly 12 million persons immigrated to the United States, more than had come to our shores in the previous two and a half centuries. In the following fourteen years nearly another 13 million would arrive. In 1870 one-third of all industrial workers in America were foreign born. By 1900 more than half were. In 1890 immigrant adults actually outnumbered native adults in eighteen of the twenty cities with a population over 100,000.11
The immigrants came from a wide variety of European countries as well as Canada and East Asia. Germans, Irish, French Canadians, British, and Scandinavians were most numerous up to 1890, but during the following two decades, as historian Steven Diner points out,
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p; immigrants, mostly Catholics and Jews from the unfamiliar countries of Southern and Eastern Europe, poured into America in record numbers to work in its expanding industrial economy. Often living in dense urban neighborhoods where foreign tongues predominated, they created their own churches, synagogues, and communal institutions.12
By 1890 the cacophony of strange tongues and strange customs of the newcomers had triggered a national debate about “Americanization” and ethnic identity, similar in many respects to the debate about “multiculturalism” and “English only” today. Historian Sean Dennis Cashman reminds us, for example, that “when in 1889 and 1890 the states of Illinois and Wisconsin decided that English was to be the medium of instruction in schools, there was a great outcry from Germans and Scandinavians.”13
Whether his journey had begun in rural Iowa or rural Slovakia, the new Chicagoan was living a life and facing risks quite different from those that he had been raised to expect. He had come in search of economic opportunity, and often found it, but he also encountered profound insecurity. Urban workers were frequently unemployed. Older systems of “outdoor relief”—local, temporary public assistance programs—were swamped by new demands, as was the newer system of “indoor relief”—the poorhouse. Traditional social safety nets of family, friends, and community institutions no longer fit the way new urban workers had come to live.14
On the other hand, the ever-mounting waves of immigrants would have been stilled but for the realistic prospect of better-paying work. New affluence, however unequally distributed, gradually combined with ingenuity to produce a new culture of leisure and materialism. The invention of the phonograph and movies between 1896 and 1902 portended a radical transformation in the nature of mass leisure in the new century. As early as 1908 New York City alone had more than six hundred five-cent storefront movie theaters, or “nick-elodeons.” In 1914 half a million records were produced annually, and by 1921 this figure would balloon to over one hundred million.15 As early as 1897 Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional Irish American barman) derided the new emphasis on material consumption:
I have seen America spread out from th’ Atlantic to th’ Pacific with a branch office iv th’ Standard Ile Comp’ny in ivry hamlet. I’ve seen th’ shackles dropped fr’m th’ slave, so’s he cud by lynched in Ohio. …An’ th’ invintions … th’ cottongin an’ th’ gin sour an’ th’ bicycle an’ th’ flyin’-machine an’ th’ nickel-in-th’-slot machine an’ th’ Croker machine an’ th’ sody fountain an’—crownin’ wurruk iv our civilization—th’ cash raygister.16
A decade later Harvard philosopher William James would express the same disdain in the elevated language of Yankee reformers, as he bemoaned “the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word ‘success’— is our national disease.”17
On the other hand, other cultural changes during the Gilded Age were more progressive. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, middle-class male and female spheres became less rigidly delimited. Women assumed new public roles, demanded the vote, got advanced education, and increasingly worked and played alongside men. Perhaps the critical ingredients in this change were advances in the education of women and (for middle-class women, able to enjoy the fruits of new timesaving domestic appliances) new leisure. During the Gilded Age women began to break out of their traditional “proper sphere,” many joining local reform efforts under the banner of “municipal housekeeping” and a few entering the professions, including law and medicine, thus laying the groundwork for the “new woman” of the Progressive Era.18
To those who lived through this epoch, what was most striking was simply the overwhelmingly accelerated pace of change itself. We often speak easily about the rapid pace of change in our own time. However, nothing in the experience of the average American at the end of the twentieth century matches the wrenching transformation experienced at the beginning of the century by an immigrant raised as a peasant in a Polish village little changed from the sixteenth century who within a few years was helping to construct the avant-garde skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan in the city of “big shoulders” beside Lake Michigan. Even for native-born Americans, the pace of change in the last decades of the nineteenth century was extraordinary. As Bostonian Henry Adams later wrote of his own boyhood. “The American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.”19
Much of the change was for the better, but much of it was not. Begin—as muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens and Jacob Riis did—with urban degradation. The bursting cities of the Gilded Age were industrial wastelands; centers of vice, poverty, and rampant disease; full of dank, crowded slums; corruptly administered. Infant mortality increased by two-thirds between 1810 and 1870. As early as the late 1860s, New York crusader Charles Loring Brace had warned of children he termed “street Arabs” forming gangs and creating a “dangerous class.” Child labor burgeoned: “In 1900 nearly one-fifth of the children under fifteen earned wages in nonagricultural work, and uncounted millions of others worked on farms.” Crime surged in turn-of-the-century American cities, just as it did in a number of other Western countries in the throes of industrialization and urbanization. “Some parts of Chicago had three times as many people as the most crowded parts of Tokyo and Calcutta,” writes historian Cashman. “Whole neighborhoods were congested, filthy, and foul. Offal and manure littered the street along with trash and garbage. It was hardly surprising that, in the large cities, consumption, pneumonia, bronchitis, and diarrhea were endemic. …[For example,] Pittsburgh had the highest mortality rate for typhoid in the world, 1.3 per 1,000.”20
The most vivid portrayal of American cities in the late nineteenth century remains Danish-born journalist Jacob Riis’s 1890 work, How the Other Half Lives.
In the tenements all the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; are the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral contagion.21
Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, decried the lack of public services:
The streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul beyond description. Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer.22
Less sympathetic observers cheered evangelist Josiah Strong’s antiurban philippic: “The first city was built by the first murderer, and crime and vice and wretchedness have festered in it ever since.”23
Developments in the teeming metropolis were especially unsettling to new middle-class professionals. “In their eyes,” writes historian Don Kirschner, “the cities were esthetically repulsive, commercially spastic, culturally balkanized, morally depraved, medically lethal, socially oppressive, and politically explosive.” To be sure, recent historians have suggested that Progressive Era critics exaggerated the depravity of Gilded Age cities. Jon Tieford, for example, argues that experts in city governments of the nineteenth century had many practical achievements to their credit—clean water, efficient transportation, extensive libraries. Even machine politics had beneficial effects, especially in providing political access for urban immigrants, although as urban historian Robert Barrows notes, “the fact that charitable activity was sometimes a byproduct does not excuse the bribery, graft, and general malfeasance associated with late-nineteenth-century urban politics.” As the most renowned civic critic, Lincoln Steffens, pointed out, the ultimate responsibility lay not with the politicians, but with the voters themselves. “The misgovernment of the American people is misgov
ernment by the American people.”24
City machines offered patronage to the urban, immigrant poor, contracts and licenses to legitimate business, and protection to illegitimate business. Meanwhile, rake-offs and corruption were rampant—under Boss Tweed, for example, New York City paid $179,729.60, a colossal sum at the time, for three tables and forty chairs. Historian Steven Diner summarizes the political effects in terms not entirely dissimilar to middle-American political alienation a century later:
Middle-class Americans … watched as the trusts manipulated members of Congress and used the courts and federal power to suppress dissent from farmers and workers. Government, which according to American ideals should represent the will of the people, appeared a captive of special interests.25
Gazing enviously upward, the average American saw the almost unimaginable new wealth of the robber barons—Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, and their ilk. Farmers—and into the twentieth century most Americans still lived on the land—had little protection against railroad exploitation, expensive credit, and price deflation. The new industrial trusts stifled competition and transformed economic power into political power. Unorganized, workers were dependent on wages set by massive corporations. They responded with repeated efforts to build unions, but until the turn of the century these efforts were rebuffed with violence and squelched by recurrent depressions that undermined labor’s market power. Nevertheless, waves of strikes gave evidence of their discontent.26
Peering fearfully downward, many white, native-born Americans were deeply concerned about immigrants and African Americans. As in contemporary America, ethnic cleavages tended to reinforce class lines. As historian Nell Irvin Painter observes, “Whereas the middle and upper classes were largely Protestant, native-born, of British descent, the working classes, particularly the industrial working classes, consisted of many peoples who were foreign, Catholic, or, in the South, black.” The last years of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of a defensive nativism, a heterogeneous alliance of convenience among unions (fearful of low-wage competition from immigrants), Protestant conservatives (hostile toward the rising influx of Jews and “Papists” from southern and Eastern Europe), and even some social reformers (worried that unchecked immigration exacerbated the problems of the cities). By 1894 the nativist American Protective Association, founded in Clinton, Iowa, in 1887, claimed an astonishing 2.5 million members (or roughly 7 percent of all American adults), although it declined rapidly thereafter. Distress about foreign “depravity” helped to fuel the “just say no” temperance movement, which appealed to native-born Protestants fighting against “vices” they saw most clearly in immigrant cultural traditions.27
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