Chapter 19 Civilizations Inferno: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880-1917 Part One: The New Metropolis.

Chapter 19 Civilization’s Inferno: The Rise and Reform of Industrial

Cities, 1880-1917

Part One: The New Metropolis

Citizens of the Urban Republic

• 1860 total population of US = 31.4 million; less than 20% of Americans lived in a city of greater than 2,500; number of slaves is 4 million

• 1910 more than 42.1 million lived in cities; NYC had 5 million residents;

• location of largest cities: New England, Mid Atlantic, Mid West

The Growth of The Major Cities

• Industrial hub: railroads and minerals• Agricultural hub: railroads, cattle and grains• Commerce hub: railroads, rivers, • Immigration hub: seacoasts• Inner city transportation: trolleys [horse,electric]• Suburbs: trolleys [horse, electric]• Communication: telephone [1876], 1907—3 million

telephone customers• Skyscrappers: Iron 3 to 5 stories; steel 5+ stories• Lighting---light bulbs 1879, street lighting 1880s• Elevators: consistent electrical current

Cities, Neighborhoods, Newcomers

• Mutual aid societies: ethnics taking care of ethnics, church based

• Enclaves and ghettoes • Warehouse apartments• The creation of dumbbell tenements:

apartments—3 or 4 rooms, largest 10x11, two hall bathrooms shared by 40+

• Air flow: ‘cutouts’ on the side of each building

Dumbbell Tenement

Space Between• In 1879, the magazine The

Plumber and Sanitary Engineer sponsored a design competition.

• create/design building complexes to house immigrants and maximize space and profit of landlords.

• James Ware created the dumbbell design; it housed 300 people in 84 rooms, reaching to six stories high.

• many serious problems with the dumbbell tenement, such as the narrow airshafts that ran through it in which people put their trash (causing it to stink).

• They also got poor ventilation and only had one window per room

Hot Nights in the Cities

• Vaudeville: variety shows• Amusement parks: Kennywood, Coney Island• Dance Halls: ragtime music, swing jazz• Outdoor: band shells, marching band music• Relationships: the era of the bachelor, the era of

female room mates, the era of the boarding house• High Culture: symphonies, operas, theatre• Low Culture: jazz, vaudeville, dance halls,

burlesque theatre

Investigative Journalism and Comics

• Mass market newspapers• Era of telegraphic news from each time zone and

continent• Collier’s, McClure’s, New York Journal • Ida B. Wells• Ida Tarbell• Prisoners of Poverty [1887]: Helen Campbell• How The Other Half Lives [1890]: Jacob Riis• Muckrakers

Muckraking Journalism

• The term muckraker is closely associated with reform-oriented journalists who wrote largely for popular magazines.

• continued a tradition of investigative journalism reporting, and emerged in the United States after 1900 and continued to be influential until World War I.

• through a combination of advertising boycotts, dirty tricks and patriotism, the movement, associated with the Progressive Era in the United States, came to an end.

Watch Dog Journalism

• After World War I, the term "muckraker" was used to refer in a general sense to a writer who investigates and publishes truthful reports to perform an auditing or watchdog function.

• In contemporary use, the term describes either a journalist who writes in the adversarial or alternative tradition or a non-journalist whose purpose in publication is to advocate reform and change

• Investigative journalists view the muckrakers as early influences and a continuation of watchdog journalism

• The term is a reference to a character in John Bunyan's classic Pilgrim's Progress, "the Man with the Muck-rake" that rejected salvation to focus on filth. It became popular after President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the character in a 1906 speech.

Pittsburgh’s Nellie Bly

• Nellie Bly used the undercover technique of investigation in reporting "Ten Days In The Mad-House,"

• 1887 exposé on patient abuse at Bellevue Mental Hospital, first published as a series of articles in The World newspaper and then as a book.

• Nellie would go on to write more articles on corrupt politicians, sweat-shop working conditions and other societal injustices.

Several Famous Muckrakers• Helen Hunt Jackson (1831–1885) — A Century of Dishonor, U.S. policy

regarding Native Americans.

• Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847–1903) — Wealth Against Commonwealth, exposed the corruption within the Standard Oil Company.

• Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) — an author of a series of articles concerning Jim Crow laws and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in 1884, and co-owned the newspaper The Free Speech in Memphis in which she began an anti-lynching campaign.

• Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913(?)) — author of a long-running series of articles published from 1883 through 1896 in The Wasp and the San Francisco Examiner attacking the Big Four and the Central Pacific Railroad for political corruption.

Ida B. Wells• Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16,

1862 – March 25, 1931) was an African American journalist, newspaper editor and, with her husband, newspaper owner Ferdinand L. Barnett, an early leader in the civil rights movement.

• She documented lynching in the United States, showing how it was often a way to control or punish blacks who competed with whites. She was active in the women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations.

• Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician, and traveled internationally on lecture tours.

Ida B. Wells

• Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, just before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

• Her father James Wells was a carpenter and her mother was Elizabeth "Lizzie" Warrenton Wells.

• Both parents were enslaved until freed under the Proclamation, one year after she was born.

Father was very interested in politics, and was a member of the Loyal League.

• He attended public speeches and campaigned for local black candidates, but he never ran for office.

• Her mother Elizabeth was a cook for the Bolling household before her death from yellow fever.

• She was a religious woman who was very strict with her children. Wells' parents took their children's education very seriously.

• They wanted their children to take advantage of having the opportunity to be educated and attend school.