Assignment 2: The Urban Frontie

Voices from the Cities

Because American cities contained so many experiences, they also elicited a variety of responses. These selections touch on several different kinds of urban experiences—the horror of urban poverty, the compassion of social reformers, the corruption of urban politics, and the thrill of urban discovery.

Urban Conditions and Reform

Critique of Cities

The rapidity with which American society changed in the second half of the nineteenth century frightened and worried many who saw in these changes an undermining of essential American values and culture. Vast accumulations of money by a few industrialists, a growing and exploited industrial workforce, increasing numbers of Catholic and Jewish immigrants, and the appeal of socialist politics all represented threats to the defenders of an older American order.

Josiah Strong, a Congregationalist minister from New England, was among those who objected most strenuously to the changes taking place in American society. In his widely-read book Our Country, Strong warned Americans about the dangers they now faced. For Strong, the city stood as the place where all of society’s problems were concentrated. The city, for Strong, embodied in microcosm everything wrong with industrial America.

Excerpted from Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York, 1885), 128-30, 132-42.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center. The fact, therefore, that it is growing much more rapidly than the whole population is full of significance. In 1790 one-thirtieth of the population of the United States lived in cities of 8,000 inhabitants and over; . . . in 1880, 22.5 per cent., or nearly one-fourth. From 1790 to 1880 the whole population increased twelve fold, the urban population eighty-six fold. . . . In 1800 there were only six cities in the United States which had a population of 8,000 or more. In 1880 there were 286.

The city has become a serious menace to our civilization, because in it . . . each of the dangers we have discussed is enhanced, and all are focalized. It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant. . . . While a little less than one-third of the population of the United States is foreign by birth or parentage, sixty-two per cent. of the population of Cincinnati are foreign, eighty-three per cent. of Cleveland, sixty-three per cent. of Boston, eighty per cent. of New York, and ninety-one per cent. of Chicago.

Because our cities are so largely foreign, Romanism [Catholicism] finds in them its chief strength.

For the same reason the saloon, together with the intemperance and the liquor power which it represents, is multiplied in the city. . . .

It is the city where wealth is massed; and here are the tangible evidences of it piled many stories high. Here the sway of Mammon [a biblical reference to money and material wealth] is widest, and his worship the most constant and eager. Here are luxuries gathered—everything that dazzles the eye, or tempts the appetite; here is the most extravagant expenditure. Here, also, is the congestion of wealth the severest. . . . The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer, in the city than elsewhere; and, as a rule, the greater the city, the greater are the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor. Not only does the proportion of the poor increase with the growth of the city, but their condition becomes more wretched. . . .

It gives a very dim impression of what may exist in a great city side by side with enormous wealth. Is it strange that such conditions arouse a blind and bitter hatred of our social system?

Socialism not only centers in the city, but is almost confined to it; and the materials of its growth are multiplied with the growth of the city. Here is heaped the social dynamite; here roughs, gamblers, thieves, robbers, lawless and desperate men of all sorts, congregate; men who are ready on any pretext to raise riots for the purpose of destruction and plunder; here gather foreigners and wage-workers; here skepticism and irreligion abound; here inequality is the greatest and most obvious, and the contrast between opulence and penury the most striking; here is suffering the sorest. As the greatest wickedness in the world is to be found not among the cannibals of some far off coast, but in Christian lands where the light of truth is diffused and rejected, so the utmost depth of wretchedness exists not among savages, who have few wants, but in great cities, where, in the presence of plenty and of every luxury men starve. Let a man become the owner of a home, and he is much less susceptible to socialistic propagandism. But real estate is so high in the city that it is almost impossible for a wage-worker to become a householder. . . .

We have seen how the dangerous elements of our civilization are each multiplied and all concentered in the city. Do we find there the conservative forces of society equally numerous and strong? . . . The city, where the forces of evil are massed, and where the need of Christian influence is peculiarly great, is from one-third to one-fifth as well supplied with churches as the nation at large. And church accommodations in the city are growing more inadequate every year. . . . There are wards in New York and other large cities where there is but one Protestant church to every ten or fifteen thousand souls: which means that those wards are from one-twentieth to one-thirtieth as well supplied with churches as the whole land. . . .

If moral and religious influences are peculiarly weak at the point where our social explosives are gathered, what of city government? . . .

As a rule, our largest cities are the worst governed. It is natural, therefore, to infer that, as our cities grow larger and more dangerous, the government will become more corrupt, and control will pass more completely into the hands of those who themselves most need to be controlled. . . .

. . . In gathering up the results of the foregoing discussion of these several perils, it should be remarked that to preserve republican institutions requires a higher average intelligence and virtue among large populations than among small. . . . If the people are to govern, they must grow more intelligent as the population and the complications of government increase. And a higher morality is even more essential. . . .

Is our progress in morals and intelligence at all comparable to the growth of population? . . . At present, only one voter in six is illiterate; but judging from a report of the Senate Committee on Education, the proportion will soon increase. That committee estimates the school population of the United States at 18,000,000, of which number “7,500,000, or five-twelfths of the whole, are growing up in absolute ignorance of the English alphabet.” . . . What, then, is our moral progress? Are popular morals as sound as they were twenty, or even ten, years ago? There is, perhaps, no better index of general morality than Sabbath observance; and everybody knows there has been a great increase of Sabbath desecration in [the last] ten years. There was three times as much intoxicating liquor used per caput [capita] in the United States in 1883 as there was in 1840. Says the Rev. S. W. Dike: “It is safe to say that divorce has been doubled, in proportion to marriages or population, in most of the Northern States within thirty years. Present figures indicate a still greater increase.” . . . While the population increased thirty per cent. from 1870 to 1880, the number of criminals in the United States increased 82.33 per cent. It looks very much as if existing tendencies were in the direction of the dead-line of vice.

. . .

. . . These several dangerous elements are singularly netted together, and serve to strengthen each other. It is not necessary to prove that any one of them is likely to destroy our national life, in order to show that it is imperiled.

Boston in 1893

At the turn of the twentieth century, all American cities seemed to have developed neighborhoods or sections of extraordinary poverty and deprivation. The slum, or the ghetto, had become a hallmark of the American urban experience.

Most middle-class Americans had little or no direct contact with those who lived in these areas of urban despair. They learned about the desperate conditions in city slums largely through the work of writers and journalists. The most famous of these was Jacob Riis who ventured through the ethnic ghettos of lower Manhattan and produced an illustrated book titled How the Other Half Lives.

In the selection below, writer B. O. Flower takes his readers through the North End of Boston. Excerpted from B. O. Flower, Civilization’s Inferno, or, Studies in the Social Cellar (Boston, 1893), 30-33, 39-44, 47.

The scenes I am about to describe were witnessed on a sunless, dreary afternoon, the day being strangely in keeping with the environment of the exiles of society who dwell in the slums. The sobbing rain, the sad, low murmur of the wind under the eaves and through the narrow alleys, the cheerless, frowning sky above, were in perfect harmony with the pathetic drama of life I was witnessing. . . .

The first building we entered faced a narrow street. The hallway was as dark as the air was foul or the walls filthy. Not a ray or shimmer of light fell through transoms or sky-light. The stairs were narrow and worn. By the aid of matches we were able to grope our way along, and also to observe more than was pleasant to behold. It was apparent that the hallways or stairs were seldom surprised by water, while pure, fresh air was evidently as much a stranger as fresh paint. After ascending several flights, we entered a room of undreamed-of wretchedness. On the floor lay a sick man. He was rather fine looking, with an intelligent face, bright eyes, and a countenance indicative of force of character. No sign of dissipation, but an expression of sadness, or rather a look of dumb resignation peered from his expressive eyes. For more than two years he had been paralyzed in his lower limbs, and also affected with dropsy [edema]. The spectacle of a strong man with the organs of locomotion dead, is always pathetic; but when the victim of such misfortune is in the depths of abject poverty, his case assumes a tragic hue. There, for two years, he had lain on a wretched pallet of rags, seeing his faithful wife tirelessly sewing, hour by hour and day by day, and knowing full well that health, life and hope were hourly slipping from her. This poor woman supports the invalid husband, her two children and herself, by making pants for leading Boston clothiers. No rest, no surcease, a perpetual grind from early dawn often till far into the night; and, what is more appalling, outraged nature has rebelled; the long months of semi-starvation and lack of sleep have brought on rheumatism, which has settled in the joints of her fingers, so that every stitch means a throb of pain. Thus with one of the most painful diseases enthroned in that part of the body which must move incessantly from dawn till midnight, with two small dependent children and a husband who is utterly powerless to help her, this poor woman struggles bravely and uncomplainingly, confronted ever by a nameless dread of pending misfortune. Eviction, sickness, starvation,—such are the ever-present spectres, while every year marks the steady encroachment of disease, and the lowering of the register of vitality. Moreover, from the window of her soul falls the light of no star athwart the pathway of life. . . .

In an attic in another tenement we found a widow weeping and working by the side of a little cradle where lay a sick child, whose large, luminous eyes shone with almost phosphorescent brilliancy from great cavernous sockets, as they wandered from one to another, with a wistful, soul-querying gaze. Its forehead was large and prominent, so much so that, looking at the upper part of the head, one would little imagine how terrible the emaciation of the body, which was little more than skin and bones, speaking more eloquently than words of the ravages of slow starvation and wasting disease. . . .

I thought, as I studied the anxious and sorrowful countenance of that mother, how hard, indeed, is the lot of the very poor. They have to buy coal by the basketful and pay almost double price, likewise for food and all life’s necessities. They are compelled to live in frightful disease-fostering quarters, and pay exorbitant rents for the accomodations [accommodations] they receive. When sick they are not always free from imposition, even when they receive aid in the name of charity, and sometimes theology, under the cloak of religion, oppresses them. . . .

It is not strange that many in this world of misery become embittered against society; that they sometimes learn to hate all who live in comfort, and who represent the established order of things, and from the rank of the patient, uncomplaining struggler descend to a lower zone, where the moral nature is eclipsed by degradation and crime, and life takes on a deeper shade of horror. This class of people exist on the brink of a precipice. . . . [They] have ever below them starvation, eviction and sickness. Above stands . . . a three-headed monster: a soulless landlord; the slave master who pays only starvation wages; and disease, the natural complement of the wretched squalor permitted by the one, and the slow starvation necessarily incident to the prices paid by the other. . . .

We cannot afford to remain ignorant of the real status of life in our midst, any more than we can afford to sacrifice truth to optimism. It has become a habit with some to make light of these grim and terrible facts, to minify the suffering experienced, or to try and impute the terrible condition to drink. This may be pleasant but it will never alter conditions or aid the cause of reform. It is our duty honestly to face the deploroble [deplorable] conditions and to endeavor while ameliorating the suffering, to bring about radical reformatory measures calculated to invest life with a new and joyous significance for this multitude so long exiled from joy, gladness, and comfort.