reading response

5

Urbanizing America

Robert G. Barrows

Booth Tarkington, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who achieved distinction as an author during the first two decades of the twenti- eth century, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1869. The medium-sized midwestern city where he grew up often appeared as the setting in his critically acclaimed fiction. In a series of nov- els in which he thinly disguised his hometown as a "Midland city," Tarkington described "a deteriorating social order caused by ur- banization and industrialization" and contrasted it, often unfavor- ably, with the city of his youth. The opening pages of The Turmoil (1915) set forth his view of the changes late nineteenth-century urbanization had brought to Indianapolis and, by extension, to other American cities:

Not quite so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no heaving, grimy city; there was but a pleasant big town of neighborly people who had understanding of one another, be- ing, on the whole, much of the same type. It was a leisurely and kindly place-"homelike," it was called .... The good burghers were given to jogging comfortably about in phaetons or in sur- reys for a family drive on Sunday. No one was very rich; few were very poor; the air was clean. and there was time to live. 1

This rosy view of life in the Hoosier capital during the Gilded Age is clearly an oversimplification born of nostalgia. But Tarkington's lament for a simpler time also reflected a reality that readers of his generation would have accepted without hesitation-that during the previous forty or fifty years the nation's cities had undergone a profound transformation.

91

92 T/ze Gilded Age

When the Constitution was ratified in 1788 only about 5 per- ..... ~- §. ;;;' ;;;' cent of the residents of the new nation Jived in cities. Today, about =="" E·- r-Q.l ~ - t:i r-\0 r--. '7 {"'\ "' "' 75 percent of the population lives in places defined as urban. Thus, ~~~:: IMtril"f"ir-i - ~ -Cl., ..::; .:: 2-- - C"l- ..... u ~ § u a central theme of U.S. history has been the transition from a rural,

C·- 0.. Q " ;; Q

agrarian society to one that is highly urbanized. The latter third of " ~- " 0 :s g_ .9 ._ 'U ;;: 5 "'

(..) c the nineteenth century-years when the interrelated processes of .,.,c..

00 c O'l"':tOOOOO c

~ ~ .g ·;:: ["f')t'--">t-::t :2 Cc;, - ('\ C"l rf') :2 urbanization, industrialization, and immigration reached high tide- l.,) <:u 1... ...9 I oi c--i ,0 ,.0 ~ ~"' ~ :u b ~ :::: llj":j-lr){"f")

~ ~"'

~ was a key period in that transition. Horace Greeley's 1850s dictum Cl.,..::; .:: l "" a· §o that young men should consider seeking their fortunes in the ex- '"

:;:- '" 0 0

pansive West grew more urgent as he observed developments in ~ ~

... tl,l- i5 "' "' the East during and after the Civil War. "We cannot all live in cit- ~ ti .:2 -~ r:--ll"lr- ci ci ~~~"::;: I C"i c:i rr} 0 "' "' ies," the New York editor wrote in 1867, "yet nearly all seem deter- ~ ~ .:: ~

("\ ["I") C"l C'l

"' "' - -mined to do so."2 0.. " " Decennial census statistics demonstrate these demographic

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ -" "" ~ changes in a variety of ways. The first, and most obvious, change ~ ;::: E

is the growth in the number and percentage of persons who lived in §E C"l C""l 00 0\ ["f') ] ~ ~ ] 0~~-,tO - ~

~ ~ OOt"'-t-\01.0 ~

.::: .s ~ urban areas (see Table 5.1). In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, ~"" •C.. c ti == r 0\ C"l -::t 0\ c

the nation's urban population (defined as those living in places of (..)

~ ~ 1.0 -q ..q- C"\ (..)

2,500 or more) stood at 6.2 million, just under one-fifth of the to- - ~i: -~::::: ~ ..:::~ ~ tal. By the end of the century 30 million urbanites constituted about ~ ~ oor-r-1-r- ~ ':2~ ~ ~'"E oitrioOtrioi ~ two-fifths of the nation's residents. Thus, in just forty years, the ~;::,

-r--\("\("f")["f')

"' ~ "' ~ ~ ~ - ~ number of urban dwellers in the country had almost quintupled, 0..

and their proportion of the total population had doubled. -- ~ ~ ~ E i3 "" ~-~::: § r-1.0\Q,......V) ~

-;;: This is not to say that the nation's rural population was not also 0 C"\ on C"l ">:~- M '& 0 C"\1.000000

growing. It was-from 25 million in 1860 to nearly 46 million by "' tl::~~ trioci>..elcitri ~ ~ ,.., ... §- 0 NC"'M"<t"'o;t ~ .~ I :~ 1900. The point, however, is that the rate of urban population growth 0 ~Cl., -;:: -~ ,.,

was significantly greater during these years than the rate of growth 00 ;;; ~ ,.., ~ .,; "' c for rural residents, which is how "urbanization" is defined. Between §::: ~ " "" " ~ ~ 1880 and 1890, for example, urban population increased by 56 per- " ..t:l .2_ ~ t--N0\00 ·~ ;::, " -~ "'

~ ~ - '&~

C"\["f')0\001:-- ::::> ..9 .:.: 6 -0('110\0 "

0\\0M"<t"rt"\ " C"\0\---cent, the total U.S. population by 26 percent, and rural population "' ..... ::::-::: ..0"'.:; C"i ci " ~.s ("fl\00\Mt'--. :E " ~ §- 0 :;: 0 -SrJ... .....:....: ~ - {'\ ["f') by only 13 percent. ·= "'"-

-;;: 0

'" "' ~ '" Another way of measuring urban growth during the Gilded Age ;::> 0 ,.., 0 " ~ I ~ c 0 0 is simply to look at the expansion in the number of places that sur- : "

,., " u ., u passed the threshold of 2,500 residents. Even with this rather gen-

.5 vj 5 "7;;' " ,..,

" = . ·- "'tl -.:::tOO\Ot"-l.rl -5 '" -5 erous definition of "urban," only about 400 localities could claim = ::::> ~ - :::: '<j"IJjiJj"<j"O\ ~ " ~ "' ~::~~ -:j"Vj-0\0\ 0 " 0 ...:cOQc--lv-) 0

such status at the beginning of the Civil War (see Table 5.2). This 0 - 0.. - 0 ;;:: 0 N ~ 0 0 C'!"lrt'\11')\0t- 0 0 ·= Cl... -;:: " = " number grew to 663 during the 1860s, an increase of over two-

~ ~

0 0 0 0

"" ~ "" ~ thirds. While this rate of growth slowed during the next thirty ... «i ... ;::> ;::> "' years, the overall pattern continued. By the end of the century the ,.., ~ 00000 ::i "'

~ 00000 ::i .,; ~ \Of'.000\0 .. c--i .,; c 1.0 ('--. 00 0'1 0 ~

nation recorded some 1,737 "urban places," an increase since 1860 :::: co co co 00 0\ "- :::: co co 00 00 0'1 "' ----- J: I " .............................. " :0 :0 ... . of a remarkable 343 percent. This growth resulted from both the =- =-~ 0~ ~ =~ "'- "'-

94 The Gilded Age

development of older towns and cities and the creation of new ur- ban places, especially in the West.

Late nineteenth-century urbanization was characterized by the growth of cities of all sizes, from small county seats to metropoli- tan giants. Widely remarked upon, then and now, was the growth in the number of big cities-those with more than 100,000 residents- that seemed to dominate the age. Only nine such places existed in the country in 1860. Two decades later the nation had twenty such cities, and thirty-eight by 1900. By 1880, New York had become the first U.S. city to claim one million inhabitants.

Smaller cities and towns were also growing. And, in spite of the economic and cultural importance of places such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New Orleans, the smaller cities were in many ways more representative of the nation's urban experience. In 1880 almost eight million Americans lived in urban areas of less than 100,000, compared to about six million in larger ones. By the end of the century the small- to medium-sized cities still claimed a slight majority of the nation's urban population: about sixteen mil- lion persons lived in cities smaller than 100,000, fourteen million in places of 100,000 or more. Between 1860 and 1900 the number of urban areas in the 10,000-25,000 range grew from 58 to 280, and the percentage of native-born residents in cities smaller than 25,000 exceeded that of larger ones throughout the late nineteenth century.'

While it is important to understand these broad national trends, it is equally important to recognize that summary data for the entire United States obscure significant regional differences (see Table 5.3). Throughout the late nineteenth century the northeastern section of the country was by far the most heavily urbanized. In 1860, when about one-fifth of the nation's total population lived in urban areas, more than one-third of the residents of the Northeast did so. By the end of the century the Northeast was two-thirds ur- ban, the nation as a whole about two-fifths. At the other end of the spectrum, only about 10 percent of southerners lived in cities on the eve of secession. That figure almost doubled during the next forty years but still stood at only 18 percent-less than half the national figure-at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The North Central and West regions fell between the extremes of the Northeast and South; the urban percentages of their popula- tions were in the midteens in 1860 and approached 40 percent by the close of the Gilded Age. As had been true in the Ohio and Mis-

Urbanizing America 95

sissippi river valleys earlier in the nineteenth century, cities and towns were "spearheads" in the post-Civil War settlement of the trans-Mississippi West. That is, as seats of government and centers of business, transportation, and communication they were integral parts of the settlement process, not afterthoughts that only devel- oped once farming, ranching, mining, or logging activities were well under way.

Table 5.3 Percentage Urban by Region, 1860-1900

United States Northeast North Central South West

1860

19.8 35.7 13.9 9.6

16.0

1880

28.2 50.8 24.2 12.2 30.2

1900

39.7 66.1 38.6 18.0 39.9

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial TI'mes to 1970. 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1975), 1:22- 37.

States within regions also exhibited substantially different pat- terns of urbanization. In 1880, for example, the northeastern states of Rhode Island and Vermont recorded urban populations of 82 and 10 percent, respectively. In the North Central region, twenty years later, the population of Illinois was 54 percent urban (in part be- cause of the rapid expansion of Chicago during the late nineteenth century), but the urban compositions of Illinois's eastern and west- ern neighbors at the end of the century were 34 percent (Indiana) and 26 percent (Iowa). North Dakota, also in the North Central re- gion, had a population in 1900 that was only 7 percent urban. In short, the urban population of the United States during the late nine- teenth century was quite unevenly distributed and in 1900 was still concentrated in the northeastern quadrant of the country in a band extending from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River.

Where did these millions of new city dwellers come from? Some of the population growth resulted from net natural increase-an excess of births over deaths among those already situated in urban areas. The bulk of city growth during the late nineteenth century, however, came from net migration. Urban areas attracted far more new inhabitants than they lost. Roughly half of these new

96 The Gilded Age

city residents came from rnral areas in the United States, while the other half were foreign immigrants. In the words of historian Raymond A. Mohl, "The rapid nrban growth of the period resulted from a tremendous release of rural population. Most of the new urbanites came from the American farm and peasant villages of the old world. "4

Students of American land policy and agricultural history once argued that the western frontier served as a "safety valve" during the late nineteenth century, absorbing excess population from the increasingly crowded cities of the East. Historians now believe that the reverse of that hypothesis is closer to the truth. The high birth- rates of rural areas, combined with agricultural mechanization that reduced the demand for farm workers, led to a surplus of rural popu- lation. So, too, did farm failures, especially during the depressions of the mid-1870s and the mid-1890s. As the cultural and economic disparities between country and city grew wider, and as rural youth heard that (in the words of a twentieth-century Broadway song) "everything's up to date in Kansas City," many of those without good prospects at home joined the urban exodus, especially to the manufacturing cities of the Northeast and Midwest.

African Americans, particularly those from the rnral South, comprised a numerically small but socially significant component of that exodus. During the 1870s roughly 68,000 southern blacks moved to the North, most to urban areas. During the final decade of the nineteenth century the number of African Americans who left the South grew to 185,000, a prefiguring of the "Great Migra- tion" of the World War I decade and thereafter. Between 1870 and 1900 popular destinations in the North were not necessarily the largest cities. In 1900, for example, blacks constituted less than 2 percent of the population in New York, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. In contrast, African Americans made up over 9 percent of the population of Indianapolis in that year, and almost 13 percent in Evansville, Indiana (the latter situated on the Ohio River and thus an easily accessible northern destination). It is important to recognize, however, and it is a point often ignored as historians focus their attention on the northward migration of southern blacks, that the urbanization of the African-American population also dra- matically affected southern cities. Not all rural blacks who aban- doned the land automatically decamped for the North, especially not as a first step. Thus, between 1880 and 1900, the African- American populations of Savannah and Nashville almost doubled.

Urbanizing America 97

In Atlanta the black population more than doubled, growing from 16,000 to 36,000, and the number of black residents in Memphis increased during the final two decades of the nineteenth century by 235 percent.'

The pushes that impelled some rural Americans to leave the farm, and the pulls that attracted them to the city, also affected large numbers of foreigners. "Farmers who left the country for the city," observes historian Alan M. Kraut, "were met there by the new im- migrants. " 6 Immigration was not, of course, a new phenomenon in the post-Civil War decades; net immigration to the United States in the 1840s had been 1.4 million persons, and about 2.6 million had arrived in the 1850s. What was new in the late nineteenth century was the increased size of this stream, as well as its origins.

Immigration, which had fallen off slightly during the Civil War decade, rebounded during the 1870s to the prewar level of2.6 mil- lion. Then, in the 1880s, a decade of American prosperity and rela- tive political stability in Europe, some 5 million immigrants came to the United States, almost twice as many as had arrived in any previous ten-year period. The numbers declined somewhat but were still high during the 1890s; in spite of a severe depression in the middle years of the decade, net immigration was 3.7 million.'

During the 1880s the so-called new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe ("new" as contrasted with the "old" prewar in- flux from northern and western Europe) began to appear in notice- able numbers at American ports of entry. This trend accelerated in the 1890s and continued on through the first two decades of the new century. Whereas Germans had constituted 28 percent of all immigrants to the United States in the 1880s, their proportion fell to 16 percent in the 1890s and to just 4 percent between 1900 and 1909. Italians, however, increased their proportion of the immi- grant stream from 5 percent in the 1880s to 16 percent in the 1890s and 24 percent during the first decade of the twentieth century. Former residents of Poland, Russia, and Austria-Hungary recorded equally impressive gains. 8

Not all of these newcomers stayed. Some, especially young males, were "birds of passage" who followed seasonal patterns of migration or who stayed for only a few years to acquire a nest egg before returning to their home villages. Of the millions who did remain, the great majority settled in urban areas. "By the 1880s," observes a careful student of the process, "most immigrants found that cities offered them more plentiful economic opportunities than

98 The Gilded Age

the countryside .... With few exceptions most newcomers congre- gated in cities, many never leaving the port city in which they landed. Unlike earlier immigrants, the latest settlers soon found that their own skills and preferences, as well as the state of the [rapidly industrializing] American economy, combined to make them urban dwellers."' By 1890 the populations of New York and San Francisco were just over 40 percent foreign born. Interior cit- ies were affected as well; sizable foreign-born contingents were to be found in Chicago (41 percent), Cleveland (37 percent), Minne- apolis (37 percent), and Kansas City (16 percent). 10

Their burgeoning populations, combined with advances in tech- nology, led to striking spatial changes in American urban areas during the late nineteenth century. Cities expanded, both horizon- tally and vertically, in an attempt to accommodate not only their new residents but also the concomitant increase in commercial and industrial activity. Between the Civil War and the turn of the cen- tury the built environment of urban America underwent a radical transformation. The most important developments in the creation of what Mohl has called the "new city" were in the areas of trans- portation and construction.

In the preindustrial city of midcentury "the heaviest users of streets were not whee], or hoofs, but human feet. ... The vast majority of people walked to their destinations, and it was this form of transportation that determined the city's size and shape." 11 The "walking city," as it has been termed, was, by later standards, re- markably compact, rarely extending much beyond two miles (a half hour's walk) from the city's center. As a consequence, there was little differentiation of land use. Commercial, residential, govern- mental, religious, educational, and even industrial structures were jumbled together. Different types of people were jumbled together, too. "Limited housing options in the walking city brought a degree of social integration," and only "short distances separated rich and poor, native and immigrant, white and black." 12

The development most responsible for reshaping the walking city was probably the postwar spread of the street railway. The con- cept of urban mass transit did not suddenly appear on the scene in the late nineteenth century. Most major eastern cities in the ante- bellum decades had omnibus service (a sort of urban stagecoach from which the modern word "bus" derives), some early railroads provided local commuter operations in addition to their long-haul passenger and freight activities, and a horse-drawn street railway

Urbanizing America 99

began running in New York City as early as the 1830s. This latter form of transportation spread slowly in the 1840s and 1850s and then much more rapidly in the years after the Civil War. Whereas the omnibus had bounced along on rutted or cobblestoned thoroughfares, the streetcar rolled smoothly on iron rails. In addi- tion, streetcars required no more horse (or mule) power than omni- buses, yet they held more passengers and could travel faster (six to eight miles per hour). By the mid-1880s over five hundred street railway lines were operating in three hundred American cities, and they had become the country's most important form of intraurban transportation.

In urban public transit, the horse gradually gave way to other forms of motive power as the century wore on. Several cities in- stalled cable cars. These looked much like horsecars but were pro- pelled by a stationary engine that moved an underground cable to which the cars could be attached or detached. They were faster, larger, and more comfortable than horsecars, and they were par- ticularly suited for hilly cities such as San Francisco or Pittsburgh. Their disadvantages included high installation and maintenance costs and frequent breakdowns that idled all the cars operated on a given cable. Most cable car systems were gradually phased out.

The principal successor to the horsecar was the electrified street- car. These trolleys (so called because of the moving "troller" that connected the vehicle with overhead electrical wires) could cover ten or twelve miles per hour. The new technology spread rapidly following its introduction in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. By the early twentieth century the vast m~ority of urban mass transit mile- age had been converted to electricity.

These improvements in urban transportation signaled the de- mise of the compact walking city. As street railway lines extended out from the city's center-often to a "destination" site, such as a lake, amusement park, or cemetery-residential and commercial development followed. Outlying city wards, as well as areas be- yond the city limits, experienced rapid population growth. It was a process that left some late nineteenth-century urban areas with the appearance of a wagon wheel-a downtown hub with radiating spokes of settlement. As Howard P. Chudacoff and Judith E. Smith observe, horsecars and trolleys "spread people into outlying areas, but because transit owners built track only where it appeared that settlement would be most dense and because subdividers and builders located their real estate projects near mass-transit lines,

100 The Gilded Age

Transportation in the New City. Horse~drawn wagons and carriages, an electric trolley car, and pedestrians congest a cobblestoned street in Philadelphia in 1897. Courtesy Na· tiona[ Archives

outward expansion proceeded unevenly .... Only slowly did they fill in the vacant districts between existing fingers of settlement. " 13

As noted earlier, the social geography of the walking city was characterized by a mingling of economic classes and ethnic groups. The most desirable residences were often located very close (the shortest walk) to the city's center. Urban mass transit rearranged- indeed, inverted-that pattern. "The physical growth and expan- sion of the city," writes Mob!, "promoted social fragmentation and differentiation, as people sorted themselves out by class, ethnicity, and race .... The streetcar encouraged the wealthy and the middle class to abandon the central district of the city as a place of resi-

Urbanizing America 101

dence. Simultaneously, the urban working class, immigrants, and the poor began occupying vacated housing in the urban core." 14

The late nineteenth century was thus a period not just of urban- ization but also of suburbanization. Rapid population growth coupled with the expansion of reasonably priced mass transit both permitted and encouraged residential construction at the constantly retreating margins of American cities. These areas tended to be economically and architecturally homogeneous. As Sam Bass Warner, Jr., observed in his acclaimed book Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 ( 1962), both homeowners and speculative builders in Gilded Age Boston "sought safety for their investment by building dwellings of a type common to the area .... Even though there were no zoning laws and no mass build- ers who put up whole communities in a few years, this repetitive habit of little builders produced an effect somewhat similar to the modern class-graded residential suburbs." Paradoxically, Warner notes, the decentralized and individualized nature oflate nineteenth- century suburban residential construction led to "great uniformity of behavior, a kind of regulation without laws." 15

As the periphery of the city changed, so too did the core. Whereas the suburbs were differentiated by income and wealth, central cities developed distinct sections based on specialized eco- nomic functions. Districts emerged that were known for banking and finance (New York's Wall Street, for example), warehousing, wholesaling, transportation (any union railroad station and its en- virons), retailing, government, and both legal and illegal entertain- ment. Downtown land values, now expressed as dollars per frontage foot along the major thoroughfares, rose sharply as this process continued, as did the taxes on such property. These developments soon squeezed out any single-family residences that still existed in the city's center.

As increasing numbers of white-collar workers found employ- ment in the central business district, most cities underwent build- ing booms to accommodate them. Multistory office buildings began to dominate the urban skyline. By today's standards these were not very tall structures. The weight of brick and masonry construction had long placed practical limits on building heights; the higher they went (and the heavier they became), the thicker the lower walls and foundations needed to be. With a few exceptions, mainly in New York, most new commercial and office buildings erected in

102 The Gilded Age

the immediate post-Civil War decades did not surpass five or, at most, ten stories.

New construction technologies permitted central cities to grow vertically, just as the street railway had permitted urban areas to expand horizontally for great distances. Use of a load-bearing steel skeleton sheathed with a light masonry or stone skin-"curtain wall" construction, as it became known-allowed architects to raise their sights (and thus their sites). They perfected this technique in Chi- cago where the ten-story Home Insurance Building (1885) became the prototype skyscraper. Day-to-day use of the new structures, which quicldy rose to thirty or forty stories, became practicable with the concurrent development of high-speed electric elevators to deliver office workers to the upper floors and central heating plants to keep them comfortable once they got there. Mostly in the early twentieth century, but to some extent in the late nineteenth as well, the skyscraper was "a symbol of increasing concentration, both of people and of power[,] in the city center." 16

Residential construction also began to extend upward. As city populations mushroomed, "vertical space became acceptable and even necessary for residential as well as business and commercial purposes. " 17 Architects and builders thus began to construct multi- story apartment houses for upper- and middle-class urbanites and tenement houses for poorer working-class families. The apartments ranged from large, luxurious structures built of the finest materials to small wood-frame buildings constructed by speculators seeking a quick profit.

Tenement houses evolved in antebellum New York and spread to many other cities during the last third of the nineteenth century. (Seldom, however, were tenements packed so closely together as they were in Manhattan. New York's housing density was by far the highest in the nation.) 18 While details differed from place to place, a typical tenement was 25 by 90 feet (with a 10-foot rear Jot}, stood four to six stories tall, and had four apartments on each floor. Depending on the number of stories, each building was in- tended to house sixteen to twenty-four families. Many tenants, how- ever, sublet their small rooms, some no more than 8 feet wide, to secure additional income. A single building might thus shelter some !50 people. Privacy, obviously, did not exist. Disease, not surpris- ingly, was rampant.

The infamous "dumbbell" tenement (whose name refers to the shape) featured a narrow air shaft in the center of the building

Urbanizing America 103

The Changing Urban Lnndsc:Jpe. An elevaled railroad train wends its way among the multistory buildings of New York City, 1894. Courtesy Library of Co11gress

intended to provide light and ventilation. As urban historians David R. Goldfield and Blaine A. Brownell note, this supposed amenity was in fact "a real health and safety hazard. The shaft was a convenient duct for flames to leap from one story to the next and a garbage dump that reeked with foul odors, especially in the hot summer months. It was also an excellent echo chamber for noise." 19

The failure of tenements as a solution for housing the working- class urban poor became increasingly apparent, especially when the conditions of New York's Lower East Side were publicized by Jacob Riis in his renowned description of How the Other Half Lives (1890). The New York Tenement House Law of 1901, which estab- lished more stringent criteria for multifamily dwellings, was a be- lated response to the tenement crisis, and its provisions were copied in statutes and ordinances across the country.

Street railways, discussed earlier, were only one part of a com- plex urban infrastructure that developed during the late nineteenth century. By 1900, and somewhat earlier in many places, American cities had become, in Joel A. Tarr's words, "networked" or "wired, piped, and tracked." Following the economic depression of the mid- 1870s, improvements in urban infrastructure advanced steadily.

104 The Gilded Age

These developments went hand in hand with an increase in the qual- ity and number of civil engineers. Quoting Tarr again: "At the turn of the century the city was the center of economic activity, and the construction of urban infrastructure, both public and private, often attracted the nation's best engineering talent." 20

Cities hired such engineers in a quest for, among other things, safe and reliable systems to provide water and remove sewage. A typhoid epidemic in Massachusetts during the 1880s prompted the city of Lawrence to install ~ new type of sand filter to purify its water. Subsequent improvements in technology and increased un- derstanding of the nature of waterborne diseases led numerous other urban areas during the next twenty years to adopt advanced meth- ods of filtration and purification. Between 1890 and 1920 the num- ber of waterworks increased from 1,878 to 9,850, and the population served by filtered water grew from 310,000 to over 17 million be- tween 1890 and 1914.21

Water treatment arid the extension of water mains throughout metropolitan areas were followed by calls for sanitary sewers. The earliest of these merely emptied into a convenient body of water. (In the case of Chicago, that meant Lake Michigan, from which the city drew its drinking water.) To avoid fouling their own nests, cit- ies employed "a new generation of sanitary engineers [who] began in the eighties to devise filters and to build [sewage] treatment plaots that incorporated new chemical and biological discoveries." By the 1890s "saoitary bathrooms aod kitchens with running water became standard features in new urban homes, and plumbing was installed in the better dwellings of maoy older districts." The number of miles of sewers in use expanded from six thousand in 1890 to almost twenty-five thousand by 1909. Gas, electric, and telephone service also came to many American cities during the closing years of the nineteenth century. Gas was originally used primarily for lighting, although gas lamps began to be replaced by electric lights in the eighties. The nation's forty-eight thousand telephone subscribers in 1880 grew to eight hundred thousand by the end of the century, most of them in urban areas. 22

Urbanization and industrialization can exist independently; cit- ies obviously existed before the machine age, and early factories were often located in rural areas. In late nineteenth-century America, however, the processes were closely associated. In the decades fol- lowing the Civil War the "twin forces of urbanization and industri- alization now fed upon each other: each reinforced and modified

Urbanizing America 105

the course of the other. Together ... cities and their factories trans- formed the United States from an agricultural debtor nation into a manufacturing and financial power. " 23

Urban areas centralized resources that were important for in- dustrial growth. As hubs of transportation they could most easily concentrate raw materials and disperse finished products. As cen- ters of communication they could facilitate the rapid exchange of information that became increasingly vital as the economy became more complex. Moreover, as centers of population they provided pools of both industrial workers and consumers of manufactured goods.

During these years "the factory became a characteristic and ever- present urban institution." And as cities grew in size, so did their workplaces. The Cambria Iron Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, for example, employed about one thousand persons in 1860-a large force for the time. Twenty years later, however, Cambria Steel had forty-two hundred workers, and that number grew to almost ten thousand by 1900. Around the turn of the century the meat- packing plants that had grown up in Chicago, whose brutal work- ing conditions soon shocked readers of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906), employed some thirty thousand people. 24

While urbanization and industrialization grew increasingly in- tertwined, factories and central business districts gradually became less closely associated. Just as residences were eventually forced out of the city center, so too were large manufacturing establish- ments. The cost of land in the city core, and the requirements of many industries such as steel and railroad repair for large amounts of horizontal space, drove factories to the periphery where, as Gold- field and Brownell put it, "land was cheap and municipal regula- tions were few." 25

The result was the development of industrial suburbs, some- times called "satellite cities." One of the most famous was Pull- man, Illinois, a combination railroad-car factory and residential town established in the 1880s south of Chicago and the site of a violent strike in 1894. (Readily accessible from Interstate 94, Pullman is now a National Historic Landmark.) Pittsburgh's steel industry moved upriver to Allegheny and Homestead (the latter town the site of another well-known labor disturbance in the 1890s). The suburbanization of industry also encouraged residential diffusion. Factory workers, many of whom could not afford a daily commute by trolley, often located close to their place of employment. Near

106 The Gilded Age

Indianapolis, for example, the small industrial/residential suburb of Brightwood was platted in 1872 about two and one-half miles northeast of the city's center. Annexed into Indianapolis in 1897, the suburb-turned-neighborhood continued for many years to serve as a residential area for the workers in nearby industries.

The complexity of urban life in the late nineteenth century pre- sented challenges that the municipal governments of the age were often unable to meet. Cities were creatures of their states, and leg- islatures were rarely willing to cede control of city charters or to grant municipalities a significant degree of home rule. Mayors had little authority, and their terms of office generally were limited to only one or two years. City councils were often fragmented, with members focusing attention on their own wards at the expense of broader municipal concerns. Little wonder that a visiting English- man reported in the late 1880s that "the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States."26

The vacuum in governmental power and authority was filled by urban political machines (or, less pejoratively, party organiza- tions) of which New York's Tammany Hall is perhaps the best- known example. Critics then and since have excoriated the machines and the bosses who ran them for everything from incompetence to grand larceny. There is ample evidence to support the charges. In one notorious case, the construction of a courthouse budgeted at $250,000 cost in excess of $13 million; contractors were instructed to pad their bills, and the excess payments were returned to the machine in the form of kickbacks. Less brazenly (but no less costly to the taxpayers), political bosses engaged in what Tammany dis- trict leader George Washington Plunkitt called "honest graft"- profiteering based on, for example, inside knowledge of where future public improvements were planned. Throughout the late nine- teenth century there were periodic attempts to "throw the rascals out"; such efforts, while sometimes successful, were generally short- lived. Reformers, Plunkitt observed, were "only morning glories" who had little staying power."

If the urban political bosses of the Gilded Age have not been quite rehabilitated by recent scholarship, they have at least been reevaluated and reassessed. The "functionalist" (as opposed to the "reformist") analysis of urban machine politics focuses on the ubiq- uity and longevity of the institution. How did city bosses maintain control if their activities were so scandalous? The answer, simply, is that they responded to the felt needs of many of their constitu-

Urbanizing America 107

ents. As Mohl summarizes this interpretation: "In an age when of- ficial municipal welfare and social services were wealdy developed or administered in a bureaucratic or tight-fisted manner, the bosses and the machines provided very real and important services in the urban neighborhoods .... They offered a humanizing contact with a government increasingly perceived as distant and bureaucratic.""

This could be especially important to recent immigrants grap- pling with the myriad difficulties of acculturation in a strange en- vironment. Plunkitt proudly described the operation of his system in New York's Fifteenth Assembly District:

What tells in holdin' your grip on your district is to go right down among the poor families and help them in the different ways they need help .... If a family is burned out I don't ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don't refer them to the Char- ity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up till they get things runnin' again. It's philanthropy, but it's poli- tics, too-mighty good politics. Who can tell how many votes one of these fires bring me? 29

Doing good was not, of course, the sole or even the principal motivation of the city boss or ward heeler, and the fact that chari- table activity was sometimes a by-product does not excuse the bribery, graft, and general malfeasance associated with late nineteenth-century urban politics. It does, however, help to explain why the system was not only tolerated but also actively supported in immigrant and working-class districts. It also explains why, as Plunkitt observed, "reform administrations never succeed themselves."30

Some students oflate nineteenth-century city government have gone beyond the reformist-functionalist dichotomy. As historian Jon Teaford has written, "Municipal government was no simple dualis- tic struggle between a citywide party boss with a diamond shirt stud and malodorous cigar and a good-government reformer with a Harvard degree and kid gloves." Teaford himself has focused at- tention on the activities and successes of various experts-land- scape architects, civil engineers, and public health and public safety officials-who turned their departments into "strongholds of ex- pertise." Rejecting interpretations of Gilded Age municipal gover- nance in which "scoundrels have won much greater coverage than

108 The Gilded Age

conscientious officials," he contends that the evolution of Ameri- can city government during the years from 1870 to 1900 was in fact an "unheralded triumph." "Problems persisted" at the turn of the century, he admits, "and there were ample grounds for com- plaint. But in America's cities, the supply of water was the most abundant, the street lights were the most brilliant, the parks the grandest, the libraries the largest, and the public transportation the fastest of any place in the world.""

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, economist and stat- istician Adna Ferrin Weber published a pioneering study that ex- amined the previous one hundred years of urban development. Weber introduced his book with the observation that "the concen- tration of population in cities" had been "the most remarkable so- cial phenomenon" cif the century. Fascinated by the processes of urbanization and the complexity of modern urban life, he described the late nineteenth-century city as "the spectroscope of society; it analyzes and sifts the population, separating and classifying the diverse elements. The entire progress of civilization is a process of differentiation, and the city is the greatest differentiator." His in- terest in the details of population concentration did not, however, blind him to the mixed results: "The cities, as the foci of progress, inevitably contain both good and bad. "32 Reflecting on the positive and negative developments in their cities since the Civil War, most urban Americans at the turn of the century would no doubt have agreed with Weber's assessment.

Notes

1. Booth Tarkington, The Turmoil (New York, 1915), 2, as quoted in Clifton J. Phillips, Indiana in Transition: The Emergence of an Industrial Commonwealth, 1880-1920 (Indianapolis, 1968), 523-24.

2. Raymond A. Mohl, The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860-1920 (Arlington Heights, IL, 1985), 2-3.

3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colo- nial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1975), 1:11-12; Blake McKelvey, The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1963), 63.

4. Mob!, The New City, 19. 5. Ibid., 21-22; David R. Goldfield and Blaine A. Brownell, Urban America:

A History, 2d ed. (Boston, 1990), 221-26, especially Table 7.2; Darrel Bigham, We Ask Only a Fair Trial: A History of the Black Community of Evansville, lndi~ ana (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 22; Lawrence H. Larsen, The Rise of the Urban South (Lexington, KY, 1985), 38.

6. Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921 (Arlington Heights, IL, 1982), 64.

Urbanizing America 109

7. Mohl, The New City, 23. 8. Kraut, The Huddled Masses, 20-21. 9. Ibid., 12, 63. 10. Mohl, The New City, 20. 11. Howard P. Chudacoff and Judith E. Smith, The Evolution of American Ur~

ban Society, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1994), 79. 12. Mohl, The New City, 28. 13. Chudacoff and Smith, The Evolution of American Urban Society, 85. 14. Mohl, The New City, 37. 15. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Bos-

ton, 1870-1900 (1962; reprinted., Cambridge, MA, 1978), 76-77, 117. 16. Goldfield and Brownell, Urban America, 273, 300. 17. Mohl, The New City, 49. 18. Robert G. Barrows, "Beyond the Tenement: Patterns of American Urban

Housing, 1870-1930," Journal of Urban History 9 (August 1983): 395-420. 19. Goldfield and Brownell, Urban America, 249. 20. Joel A. Tarr, "Building the Urban Infrastructure in the Nineteenth Century:

An Introduction," 61-85, in Infrastructure and Urban Growth in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1985), 61, 78.

21. McKelvey, The Urbanization of America, 90; Tarr, "Building the Urban Infrastructure in the Nineteenth Century," 73.

22. McKelvey, The Urbanization of America, 90-91 (quotations); Goldfield and Brownell, Urban America, 171-73; Tarr, "Building the Urban Infrastructure in the Nineteenth Century," 73.

23. Chudacoff and Smith, The Evolution of American Urban Society, 107. 24. Mohl, The New City, 51, 59; Goldfield and Brownell, Urban America, 187-

88. 25. Goldfield and Brownell, Urban America, 188. 26. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (London, 1889}, 1 :608. 27. Alexander B. Callow, Jr., The Tweed Ring (New York, 1965), especially

198-200; idem, ed., The City Boss in America: An Interpretive Reader (New York, 1976); William L. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, paperback ed. (New York, 1963), 3-6, 17-20.

28. Mob!, The New City, 87. 29. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, 27-28. 30. Ibid., 17. 31. Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America,

1870-1900 (Baltimore, !984), 7-8, 4, 6. 32. Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A

Study in Statistics (1899; reprinted., Ithaca, NY, 1963), I, 442-43.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Barth, Gunther. City People: The Rise of Modem City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York, 1980.

Buder, Stanley. Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Com- munity Planning, 1880-1930. New York, 1967.

Callow, Alexander B., Jr., ed. The City Boss in America: An Interpretive Reader. New York, 1976.