19, 20 Test Flashcards
Growth of the Modern City
Cities became the main areas for industrial growth. The further industrialization advanced, the more opportunities drew more people to cities. Cities had subdivided into distinct districts.
Mechanization of Mass Transportation
Mass transportation was centrifugal, propelling people and enterprises outward. It moved people faster and farther. At first, commuter railroads carried to and from outlying communities, but soon mechanical vehicles were moving people from one part of the city to another. In the 1880s, cable cars started operating in Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities. Then, in the 1890s, electric powered street cars began to replace horses and cable cars. Electric trolleys spread to nearly every large city.
Els
In a few cities, companies raised track onto trestles, enabling “elevated” vehicles to travel above jammed streets. In other cities, they dug underground subway tunnels.
Els
In a few cities, companies raised track onto trestles, enabling “elevated” vehicles to travel above jammed streets. In other cities, they dug underground subway tunnels.
Urban Sprawl
Mass transit launched urban dwellers into remote neighborhoods and created a commuting public. The resulting urban sprawl benefited the urban public unevenly and was essentially unplanned. Streetcar lines mostly serviced the districts that promised the most riders, increasing the company revenues. Working-class families, who needed every cent, found streetcars unaffordable. Middle class people could go to the city and go back to their quiet homes anytime they wanted. When consumers moved outward, businesses followed, locating at trolley-line intersections and near elevated railway stations. Branches of department stores and banks joined groceries, theaters, taverns, and shops to create neighborhood shopping centers.
Huge Population Growth
American urban growth derived not from natural increase (excess of births over deaths) but through the annexation of boarding land and people, and mostly by net migration (excess of in-migrants over out-migrants). Every city grew territoriality. Sometimes annexation preceded settlement, adding vacant land where new residents could live.
Urban In-Migration
In-Migration from the countryside and immigration from abroad made by far the greatest contribution to urban population growth. Urban newcomers arrived from two major sources: the American countryside and Europe. Low crop prices and high debts dashed white farmers’ hopes and drove them towards opportunities that cities seemed to offer. Despair drove farm boys to cities, but for every 4 men that moved to the city, 5 women did the same, often to escape unhappy home life. But young women were also attracted by the independence that urban employment offered. Thousands of rural African Americans also moved to the city, seeking better employment and fleeing crop liens, ravages of the boll weevil on cotton crops, racial violence, and political oppression. They couldn’t work in a factory so they did service jobs.
Foreign Immigration
Even more newcomers were foreign immigrants who had fled villages and cities in other countries. Many never intended to stay, they wanted only to make enough money to return home and live in greater comfort and security. Many long-settled Americans feared those whom they called “new immigrants,” whose folk customs, Catholic and Jewish faiths, and poverty made them seem more alien than previous newcomers. These new immigrants did not speak English, and more than half worked in low-skill occupations. New arrivals usually knew where they wanted to go and how to get there, because they received aid from relatives who had already immigrated.
Social Mobility
Immigrants were always on the move. Migration offered an escape to improved opportunity; remaking oneself occupationally offered another. A person might achieve social mobility by acquiring property, like a building or house. But home ownership was not easy to achieve. Many who migrated, particularly unskilled workers, did not improve their status; they simply floated from one low-paying job to another. Only the rich got richer. A woman’s status depended on the man in her life.
Urban Neighborhoods
American cities were characterized by collections of sub communities where people, mostly immigrants, coped with daily challenges to their cultures. Rather than yield completely and assimilate, migrants and immigrants interacted with the urban environment in a complex way that enabled them to retain their identity while also changing both their own outlook and the social structure of cities themselves. In their new surroundings, immigrants first anchored their lives to the root they knew best: their culture. Newcomers re-created mutual aid societies they know in their homeland. People practiced religion as they always had, held traditional feasts, married within their group, and pursued long-standing feuds with people from rival villages.
Urban Borderlands
European immigrants initially clustered in inner city neighborhoods where low-skill jobs and cheap housing were most available. These districts often were multi-ethnic, places historians called “urban borderlands,” where a diversity of people, identities, and lifestyles coexisted.
First and Second Generation Immigrants
First and second generation immigrants looked to these places as havens until they were ready to cross into the city
Racial Segregations
Although blacks had lived near or interspersed with whites, by the late nineteenth century rigid racial discrimination forced them into relatively permanent, highly segregated ghettos. In most cities, the only way blacks could relieve the pressures of crowding that resulted from increasing migration was to expand residential borders into surrounding, previously white neighborhoods, a process that often resulted in harassment and attacks by white residents whose intolerant attitudes were intensified by fears that black neighbors would cause property values to decline.
Race Riots
The increased presence of blacks in cities, as well as their competition with whites for housing, jobs, and political influence, sparked a series of race riots.
Asian Hate
Asians also encountered discrimination and an isolated residential experience. Although Chinese immigrants often preferred to live apart from the whites, in Chinatowns, where they created their own business, government, and social institutions, whites also made every effort to keep them separated. In San Francisco, anti-Chinese hostility was fomented by Denis Kearny, an Irish immigrant who blamed Chinese for unemployment in California in the late 1870. Kearny and his followers intimidated employers into refusing to hire Chinese, and drove hundreds of Asians out of the city.
Chinese Exclusion Act
In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended immigration of Chinese laborers and prohibited naturalization of those Chinese already residing in the US.
Geary Act
Eextended immigration restriction and required Chinese Americans to carry certificates of residence issued by the Treasury Department.
Mexican Barrios
Mexicans in southwestern cities experienced somewhat more complex residential patterns. In places where Mexicans originally owned the land, and whites were migrants who overtook the city, pushing Mexicans into adjoining areas. Here, Mexicans became increasingly isolated in residential and commercial districts called barrios. These areas tended to be located away from central-city multi ethnic borderlands housing European immigrants.
Cultural Adaptations
Although many foreigners identified themselves by their village or region of birth, native-born Americans simplified by categorizing them by nationality. Immigrant institutions, such as newspapers and churches, found they had to appeal to the entire nationality in order to survive. The diversity of American cities prompted foreigners to modify their attitudes and habits. Although many immigrants tried to preserve their native language, English soon penetrated nearly every community. They had to wear American rather than traditional fabrics. Music especially revealed adaptations. The influx of so many immigrants transformed the US from a basically Protestant nation into a diverse collection of people. Newcomers changed their environment as much as they were changed by it.
Living Conditions in Cities
Although filled with inhabitants rich in varied cultures, the central sections of American cities also seemed to harbor every affliction that plagues modern society: poverty, disease, crime, and the tensions that occur when large numbers of people live close together. As cities grew, landlords took advantage of shortages in inexpensive rental housing by splitting up existing buildings to house more people, constructing multiple-unit tenements, and hiking rents. Low-income families adapted to high costs and short supply by sharing space and expenses.
Housing Reform
Housing problems sparked widespread reform campaigns. New York State took the lead by passing laws that established light, ventilation, and safety codes for new tenement buildings. These measures could not remedy ills of existing buildings, but they did impose minimal obligations on landlords. . Both reformers and public officials opposed government financing of better housing, fearing that such a step would undermine private enterprise. Still, housing codes and regulatory commissions strengthened the power of local government to oversee construction. Eventually, technology brought about important changes in home life. Advanced systems of central heating, artificial lighting, and indoor plumbing created more comfort, first for middle-class households and later for most others. These utilities helped create new attitudes about privacy among those who could afford the technology. Reforms required landlords to accept lower profits, a sacrifice few were willing to make.
Steel
Steel-frame construction, which supports a building with a metal skeleton, made skyscrapers possible, a more efficient vertical use of scarce and costly land.
Water Purification
Cities established more efficient systems of water purification and sewage disposal. Although disease and death rates remained higher in cities than in the country-side, and tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses continued to plague inner-city districts, public health regulations as applied to water purity, sewage disposal, and food quality helped control diseases. Finding sources of clean water and a way to dispose of waste became increasingly pressing challenges. Urban households used privies to dispose of human excrement, and factories dumped untreated sewage into rivers, lakes, and bays. The installation of sewer systems and flush toilets, plus the use of water as a coolant in factories, overwhelmed waterways, contaminating drinking water sources and sending pollution to communities downstream. The stench of rivers was often unbearable, and pollution bred disease. Some states passed laws that prohibited dumping raw sewage into rivers, and a few cities began chemically treating sewage. Gradually, water managers installed mechanical filters, and cities began purifying water supplies by adding chlorine.
Poverty, Crime, Violence
Crime and disorder, as much as crowding and poverty, nurtured fears that cities threatened the nation. The more cities grew, the more they shook with violence. In addition, innumerable disruptions, ranging from domestic violence to muggings to gang fights, made cities scenes of constant turbulence. Thieves roamed every city. Despite fears, however, urban crime and violence may simply have become more conspicuous and sensational rather than more prevalent. But urban lawlessness and brutality probably did not exceed that of the backwoods mining camps and southern plantations. Nativists were quick to blame immigrants for urban crime, but the law breaking population included native-born Americans.
Political Machines
Organizations whose main goal were the rewards—money, influence, and prestige—of getting and keeping power. Machine politicians routinely used fraud and bribery to further their ends. But they also provided relief, security, and services to the crowds of newcomers who voted for them and kept them in power. Machines bred bosses who built power bases among urban working classes and especially among new immigrant voters. Most knew their constituents’ needs firsthand; they had immigrant backgrounds and had grown up in the inner city. In return for votes, they provided jobs, built parks and bathhouses, distributed food and clothing to the needy, and helped when someone ran afoul of the law. To finance their activities and election campaigns, bosses exchanged favors for votes and money.
Fraud, Kickbacks, Grafts
Recipients of city business and jobs were expected to repay the machine with a portion of their profits or salaries and to cast supporting votes on election day. These were called grafts. Bribes and kickbacks made machine projects and services costly to taxpayers. Cities could not ordinarily raise enough revenue for their construction projects from taxes and fees, so they financed expansion with loans from the public in the form of municipal bonds. These bonds caused public debts to soar, and taxes had to be raised to repay their interest and principal.
Civic Reform
Many middle and upper class Americans feared that immigrant based political machines menanced democracy and that unsavory alliances between bosses and businesses wasted municipal finances. Civic reformers organized to install more responsible leaders at the helm of the government. They wanted to put experts as leaders and not corrupt politicians.
Social Reform
Driven to improve as well as manage society, social reformers—mostly young and middle class—embarked on campaigns to investigate and solve urban problems. Housing reformers pressed local governments for building codes to ensure safety in tenements. Educational reformers sought to use public school as a means of preparing immigrant children for citizenship by teaching them American values. Health reformers tried to improve medical care for those who could not afford it.
Settlement Houses, Jane Addams
The most ambitious urban reform movement was the settlement house, a place located in inner-city neighborhoods and established mostly young, middle class women who hoped to bridge the gulf between social classes by living among and directly helping immigrants and poor people. Settlements offered vocational classes, lessons in English, and childcare, and they sponsored programs to improve nutrition and housing. However, settlement houses were segregated. As settlement-house workers Jane Addams broadened their scope to fight for school nurses, factory safety codes, and public playgrounds, they became reform leaders in cities and in the nation. Their efforts to involve national and local governments in the solution of social problems made them key contributors to the Progressive era, when a reform spirit swept the nation.
