1. Until the Civil War,
cities were centers of commerce, and factories were largely rural.
2. With the invention
of the steam engine and the use of coal as a fuel, factories relocated to the
places most convenient to suppliers and markets.
3. The growth of
factories contributed to urban growth; large factories employing many workers created
small cities within their vicinities.
4. Many firms set up
their plants near a large city so that they could draw on the city’s labor
supply and transportation systems.
5. Sometimes a
metropolis spread and absorbed nearby factory towns; elsewhere, the lines between
industrial towns blurred and an extended urban-industrial area emerged.
6. Older commercial
cities became more industrial because warehouse districts could readily be
converted to small-scale manufacturing.
1. The commercial cities
of the early nineteenth century were densely settled around harbors or riverfronts.
2. A downtown area
emerged, and industrial development followed the arteries of transportation to
the outskirts of the city where concentrations of industry were formed.
3. American cities had
lower population densities than did European cities, and it was urgent that
they develop efficient transportation systems.
4. In 1887, Frank J.
Sprague’s electric trolley car became the main mode of transportation in the
cities; the trolley car had replaced the horsecar,
which had in turn replaced the omnibus.
5. Congestion in the
cities led to the development of elevated and underground transportation; with
6. With steel girders and
passenger elevators available by the 1880s,
7. The first use of
electricity was for better city lighting, and Thomas Edison’s invention of a serviceable
incandescent bulb in 1879 put electric lighting in American homes.
8. By 1900, Alexander
Graham Bell’s newly invented telephone linked urban people in a network of
instant communication.
1.
2. People believed that
city functions handled through private enterprise would far exceed what the
community could accomplish through public effort.
3. Municipal government
became more centralized, better administered, and more expansive in the
functions it undertook.
4. City streets,
however, soon became filthy and poorly maintained, smog was a problem, and families
lived in crowded tenement housing.
5.
6. Frederick Law
Olmsted’s projects gave rise to the “City Beautiful”movement;
the result was larger park systems, broad boulevards, and zoning laws and
planned suburbs.
7. Cities usually
heeded urban planners too little and too late; the American city placed its
faith in the dynamics of the marketplace, not the restraints of a planned
future.
1. In cities, the
interpersonal marks of class began to lose their force, and people began to rely
on external signs, such as choice of neighborhood, to confer status.
2. As commercial
development engulfed downtown residential areas, many well-to-do people began
an exodus out of the city.
3. Some of the richest
people preferred to stay in the heart of the city — for example, on
4. Great wealth did not
automatically confer social standing; in some cities, an established elite, or “old”
money, dominated the social heights.
5.
6. Ward McAllister’s Social
Register served as a list of all persons deemed eligible for
Chapter Annotated Outline 47
7. Americans were adept
at making money, but they lacked the aristocratic taste of Europeans for
spending it.
1. American
industrialism spawned a new salaried middle class; more than a fourth of all employed
Americans were white-collar workers in 1910.
2. Some of the middle
class lived in row houses or apartments, but most preferred to escape to the
suburbs.
3. Unlike its American
counterpart, the European middle class was not attracted to the rural ideal and
valued urban life for its own sake.
4. The geography of the
suburbs was a map of class structure; the farther from the city, the finer the
house and the larger the lot.
5. Suburban boundaries
were ever-shifting, and each family’s move usually represented an advance in
living standard.
6. In the suburbs,
unlike the cities, home ownership was the norm.
7. The need for
community lost some of its urgency for middle-class Americans; work and family
had become more important.
1. By 1900, a “family”
typically consisted of a husband, wife, and three children; the family relationship
was usually intense and affectionate — a sharp contrast to the impersonal business
world.
2. The duties of
domesticity fell on the wife, and it was nearly unheard of for her to seek
outside employment.
3. The American
Woman’s Home, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping told
wives that they were responsible for bringing sensibility, love, and beauty to
the household.
4. Custom dictated a
wife’s submission to her husband, yet some women rebelled against marriage.
5. Middle-class
bachelors neither had families to exert patriarchal hold over, nor did they
have control over their jobs. A palpable anxiety arose that the American male
was becoming weak and effeminate; men began engaging in competitive sports to
combat this image.
6. From the 1870s
onward, contraceptive devices and birth control information were legally classified
as obscene, and abortion became illegal except to save the mother’s life.
7. During the 1890s the
image of a “new woman” began to emerge, one that was proud of her female form
and sexuality and who was emerging from her dependence on her father or husband
for financial support.
8. Parents no longer
expected their children to work; instead, families were responsible for providing
a nurturing environment.
9. Preparation for
adulthood became linked to formal education, and as a youth culture began to
take shape, adolescence shifted much of the socializing role from parents to
peer groups.
1. At the turn of the
century, upwards of 30 percent of the residents of
2. The later arrivals
from southern and Eastern
3. Capitalizing on
fellow feeling within ethnic groups, immigrants built a rich and functional institutional
life in urban
4. A great African
American migration from the rural South to northern cities began at the turn of
the century, but urban blacks could not escape discrimination; job
opportunities were few, and they retreated into ghettos to live.
5. Urban blacks built
their own communities with middle-class businesses and black churches, and the
preacher was the most important local citizen.
1. Politics integrated
newcomers into urban society; each migrant to a city became a ward resident and
immediately acquired a spokesman at city hall in his local alderman.
2. Urban political
machines depended on a loyal grassroots constituency, so each ward was divided into
election districts of a few blocks.
3. The machine served
as a social service agency for city dwellers, providing jobs, lending help, and
interceding against the city bureaucracy.
4. In
5. For city businesses,
the machine served a similar purpose, but it exacted a price in return for its
favors: tenement dwellers gave a vote, businesses wrote a check.
6. For the young and
ambitious—whether white, black, or foreign-born—machine politics was the most
democratic of American institutions;
it served an integrating function
that cut across ethnic lines.
1. For many city
dwellers the church was a central institution of urban life, although all the
great
48 Chapter 19 The Rise of the City
faiths of the time found it
difficult to reconcile religious belief with urban secular demands.
2. The monocultural environment upon which strict religious
observance depended could not be re-created in the city. Orthodox Judaism survived
by reducing its claim on the lives of its faithful.
3. The Catholic Church
managed to satisfy the immigrant faithful and made itself a central institution
for the expression of ethnic identity in urban
4. To counter a decline
in the number of its members, city-center Protestant churches turned to
evangelizing as well as becoming instruments of social uplift.
5. For single people
new to the city, there were Young Men’s and Women’s Christian Associations; no
other association so effectively combined activities with evangelizing appeal through
nondenominational worship and a religious atmosphere.
6. Beginning in the
mid-1870s, revival meetings swept through the cities, pioneered by figures such
as Dwight L.Moody and Billy Sunday.
1. City people needed
amusement as a reward for working and to prove to themselves that life was
better in the
2. Amusement parks and
theaters were built to entertain families, and working-class youth forged a
culture of sexual interaction and pleasure seeking.
3. Prostitution became
less closeted and more intermingled with other forms of public entertainment.
4. A robust gay
subculture could be found in certain parts of the city, with a full array of
saloons and clubs supported by gay patrons.
5. Baseball grew into
more than just an afternoon of fun; by rooting for the home team, fans found a
way of identifying with the cities in which they lived.
6. Newspapers were
sensitive to the public they served and catered to city people’s hunger for information
and sensational news.
1. The Corcoran Gallery
of Art opened in 1869, followed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1871, the
2. Symphony orchestras
appeared first in
3. Public libraries,
many established by Andrew Carnegie, grew into major urban institutions.
4. Generous with their
wealth, new millionaires patronized the arts partly to establish themselves in
society, partly out of a sense of civic duty and partly out of a sense of
national pride.
5. Mark Twain and
Charles Dudley Warner published A Gilded Age (1873) to satirize
6. The idea of culture
took on an elitist cast and simultaneously became feminized; men represented the
“force principle” and women the “beauty principle.”
7. The “genteel
tradition” dominated universities and publishers from the 1860s onward.
8. By the early 1900s,
the city had entered the American imagination and had become a main theme of
American art and literature—the city had also become an overriding concern of
reformers.