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The American Yawp, Volume 2, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 5 · pp. 129–165
Between about 1860 and 1900, the United States changed so quickly that even well-educated people felt lost in it. Cities, immigration, big business, new technology, and mass culture all grew at once. This chapter looks at the immigrants who came, the nativists who resisted them, the Jim Crow South, the changing roles of women and men, and the rise of popular entertainment. Together these changes made a new America that still carried the prejudices of the old one.
The historian Henry Adams wrote in 1900 that his country was completely different from the one he knew in 1860. He said he felt like a stranger in it and that no one fully understood it. Adams was describing a mix of changes: growing cities, new kinds of work, great fortunes, large slums, and fast-moving technology. Many Americans struggled to adjust. They were heading into the modern age while still carrying the habits and prejudices of the past. (p. 129)
From 1870 to 1920, more than 25 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Early in this period, the newcomers looked like the people who had come before the Civil War, mostly Irish and Germans. By 1900, Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews made up a bigger share of arrivals than the Irish and Germans did. (pp. 130–131)
Push and pull factors. Historians use these terms for the reasons people leave one country (push) and the reasons they are drawn to another (pull). Each group had its own mix:
Many things pushed people away, but the strongest pull was economic. Immigrants came to find work. (p. 131)
Industrial capitalism as the main pull. Between 1880 and 1920, large factories making steel, textiles, and food products replaced small local workshops. These factories needed huge numbers of workers. Immigrants, along with Americans moving from farms to cities, fueled the growth of New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. (pp. 131–132)
The effect on city populations was dramatic. By 1890, immigrants and their children made up about 60 percent of the people in most large northern cities, and sometimes 80 or 90 percent. Many immigrants, especially from Italy and the Balkans, planned to earn money and return home to buy land. Plenty of others stayed. (p. 132)
A common wrong belief is that immigrants had only two choices: melt completely into American life, or stay exactly as they were. The real picture falls in between. Immigrants from the same country, and often the same town, settled together in ethnic neighborhoods. They created Italian workmen's clubs, Jewish mutual aid societies, and Polish Catholic churches to make the move easier. They printed newspapers in dozens of languages and kept spaces where their arts, languages, and traditions lived on. At the same time, they adapted to American life. (p. 132)
These communities also led to more immigration through chain migration. Once a group had found a place in American life, such as a neighborhood or a trade, its members wrote home and urged relatives and neighbors to come. This is why people from one village often ended up living on the same streets. (p. 132)
Life in these neighborhoods was hard. Wages were low and housing was scarce. In 1890, the journalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives. He described New York's slums and also photographed them, so readers could see tenement squalor for themselves. The book helped bring housing reform to New York and other cities. It also strengthened the idea that society has at least some duty to reduce poverty. (p. 132)
Nativists opposed mass immigration and favored native-born Americans. Their reasons differed:
(pp. 132–133)
Ideas about limiting immigration were common by the 1870s. In 1876, a Massachusetts charity official, Franklin Sanborn, argued for federal regulation. He claimed that unregulated immigration brought disease, crime, and pauperism. Between the 1870s and 1920s, the federal government passed a series of laws that limited or ended immigration from particular groups. Critics said these laws turned racism, class bias, and ethnic prejudice into national policy. (p. 133)
The Page Act of 1875. Federal action began in California, where hostility toward Chinese immigrants had been rising since the mid-1800s. Opponents called the Chinese racially inferior and said they hurt society with cheap labor and immoral practices such as prostitution. The Page Act banned convicted criminals, Asian laborers brought against their will, and women brought in for prostitution. In practice it was aimed mainly at keeping out Chinese women. (p. 133)
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In May 1882, Congress suspended immigration of all Chinese laborers. The Chinese became the first group barred from entering because of their race. The law also created the first illegal immigrants in American history, just a year before Emma Lazarus wrote her poem about the Statue of Liberty welcoming the world's exiles. (p. 133)
The East Coast gave federal policy another starting point. Since colonial times, states there had used passenger laws to stop destitute foreigners from landing unless shipmasters paid bonds to cover their support. This state control of pauper immigration became federal policy in the early 1880s. (p. 134)
In August 1882, the same year as the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress passed the Immigration Act. It denied entry to people who could not support themselves, people with mental illness, and criminals. (p. 134)
After that, Congress kept adding categories:
(pp. 134–135)
By the late nineteenth century, most immigrants no longer came from the same places as before. Earlier arrivals were mainly from northern and western Europe. Now more came from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia. Historians call them the "new immigrants." They included Italians, Jews, Slavs, and Greeks. On average they were poorer, less likely to speak English, and often Catholic or Jewish. White Protestant Americans tended to see them as inferior, so calls for restriction grew more openly prejudiced than before (p. 135).
Two examples show how this prejudice shaped policy:
The Catholic experience shows the double pressure on immigrant groups. In 1800 Catholics were about 1 percent of the population. By 1900 Catholicism was the largest single denomination, though Protestants together still outnumbered Catholics (p. 135).
The outside challenge was Protestant anti-Catholicism. Many Americans thought of their nation as Protestant. Anti-Catholic writings and rumors spread widely. Critics doubted that Catholics could be loyal citizens because they supposedly owed first loyalty to the pope (p. 135).
The inside challenge was how far Catholics should become like native-born Americans. The Church held many languages and customs. Irish clergy dominated its leadership. Italians, Poles, and Mexicans resented this, and the question arose whether such different groups could stay in one Church (p. 136).
Clergy split into two camps:
In 1899 Pope Leo XIII sent a letter to a US archbishop. He reminded Americanists that the Church was one global body and that American liberty did not let Catholics change its teachings. Americanists said they never meant to. Conservatives claimed the pope had taken their side. The tension lasted well into the twentieth century (p. 136).
By 1900 about 500,000 people of Mexican descent lived in the United States. Most were in California, Texas, and the territories of New Mexico and Arizona. Some were recent arrivals who came for jobs on railroads and large commercial farms. Perhaps a million more came after the Mexican Revolution began in 1910. Others came from families who had lived there under Spain and Mexico, which is why people said the border had crossed them (pp. 136–137).
As more Anglos arrived, ethnic Mexican communities faced segregation, especially poorer, darker-skinned, and Spanish-speaking people. Some historians call this "Juan Crow." It was less systematic than anti-Black Jim Crow but still affected communities along the Rio Grande and the wider border. Mexican Americans fought back. They formed mutual aid societies called mutualistas, such as the Alianza Hispano-Americana. They organized against violence and went to court. These efforts laid roots for the later civil rights struggle (p. 137).
Owning land for generations did not guarantee rights. In 1911 educated Native leaders founded the Society of American Indians. Members included Zitkála-Šá and Carlos Montezuma. They wanted full US citizenship, with a place in American life and protection from abusive government power. Other Native leaders, such as Clinton Rickard and Pablo Abeita, feared that citizenship would erode Native sovereignty. Their debates helped shape the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (p. 137).
Chicago shows how industry and immigration built American cities. Its population rose from about 30,000 in 1850 to 300,000 in 1870 and 1.7 million by 1900. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed 3.5 square miles but only briefly slowed this growth (pp. 138–139).
Meatpacking was a leading industry. A cartel of five firms produced about four-fifths of the meat Americans bought. The Union Stock Yards were the nation's largest meat processing zone. This industry shows a new kind of big business: large corporations run by salaried managers, operating nationally (pp. 138–139).
Chicago's growth matched national trends. In 1870 about a quarter of Americans lived in places with more than 2,500 people. By 1920 a majority did. The urban population grew sevenfold in the fifty years after the Civil War, and the United States ended up with more large cities than any other country. Many newcomers came from the countryside, and many came from abroad. By 1900 nearly 80 percent of Chicagoans were foreign-born or had foreign-born parents (pp. 139–140).
City governments adapted to immigrant voters through political machines such as New York's Tammany Hall. A machine worked like a mutual aid society, trading help for votes. George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany ward heeler, spent a typical day bailing out constituents, finding homes for fire victims, finding jobs for the unemployed, and going to funerals and weddings in many communities. He also grew rich, and he claimed a difference between "honest graft" and dishonest graft (pp. 140–141).
Tammany's corruption under leaders like William "Boss" Tweed was legendary. Yet the public works that fed the graft also built real infrastructure: water and sewer lines, schools, hospitals, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Even so, machines could not end slum crowding and crime (p. 141).
While cities boomed, rural areas declined. Some people mocked the countryside, but many romanticized it. Sociologist Kenyon Butterfield worried that farming was losing status and that this threatened democratic values. Liberty Hyde Bailey chaired the 1907 Commission on Country Life. He argued that every agricultural question is a city question, meaning the two were linked (p. 141).
Some people wanted a middle path, and suburbs offered one. Los Angeles was called a "city of homes." Small towns like Glendora aimed for residential growth rather than industry or farming, hoping to avoid both urban sprawl and rural decay (pp. 141–142).
Around 1900 about 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South. Most worked in farming, and 85 percent owned no land. Their options were share tenantry, sharecropping, or wage labor. Outside farming, Black men took jobs white men would not do, such as street cleaning, railroad portering, and work in lumber and mining (p. 142).
Daily life was ruled by "racial etiquette," unwritten Jim Crow rules demanding deference to whites. A Black southerner could not question white authority, claim to know more than a white person, laugh at whites, or suggest a white person was lying. Richard Wright described the constant mental strain of working in white homes under these rules (p. 142).
Black women had fewer job choices. In Atlanta about 90 percent were domestic workers. They worked long hours for very low pay, and they risked sexual harassment and assault. Some chose laundry work. It was grueling, but laundresses lived outside white homes and kept more control over their lives. In 1881 three thousand Atlanta laundresses formed the Washing Society and struck for higher, uniform wages. They won despite arrests and fines (p. 143).
Segregation also pushed middle-class Black southerners to build separate institutions. Shut out of politics and white society, they founded funeral homes, insurance companies, banks, and stores. They also worked as teachers, journalists, and clergy. In 1887 Isaiah Montgomery and his cousins founded Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all-Black town that grew to about four thousand people (p. 143).
This segregation took two forms. De jure segregation was required by law. De facto segregation came from custom or tradition. Jim Crow laws often wrote into law what custom had long demanded, such as separate railroad coaches (pp. 143, 148).
After the Civil War, the southern economy was wrecked. Property was destroyed, many lives were lost, and the planter class lost both political power and the wealth it had held in enslaved people. Some white business leaders wanted to attract northern money and rebuild. They described a "New South." (p. 144)
The best-known voice was Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. In an 1886 speech in New York, he said the South of slavery and secession was dead. Grady and other boosters wanted a region built on industry, diversified farming (not just cotton), and a partnership between northern capital and southern labor. They wanted the South to look more like the North, with factories and infrastructure. Yet the economy and society stayed much like the old South. (p. 144)
The idea of a clean break was also contradicted by politics. When Reconstruction governments tried to give freedpeople full citizenship, frightened whites fought back. They used the Ku Klux Klan, political corruption, economic exploitation, and intimidation. Once white southerners regained control of state and local governments, they used that power to take away Black voting rights and to pass Jim Crow laws. These laws separated schools, transportation, jobs, and other facilities. The return of white supremacy after "redemption" did not fit the claim that the South was new. (p. 145)
Lynching means murder of a person by a vigilante mob, outside the law. White mobs killed roughly five thousand African Americans this way between the 1880s and the 1950s. Victims were accused of real crimes, invented crimes, or nothing at all. (p. 145)
Lynchings were public rituals, not hidden crimes. Some became spectacles with thousands of spectators. Railroads ran special trains, vendors sold goods, and participants posed for photographs. In 1899, about four thousand people traveled by chartered train from Atlanta to Newnan, Georgia, to watch the torture and burning of Sam Hose. At the peak, in the late 1890s, two to three people were lynched every week. Lynching was most common in the Cotton Belt of the Lower South, where many Black people worked as tenant farmers and field hands. From 1880 to 1930, Mississippi mobs killed over 500 people and Georgia mobs over 400. (p. 145)
Some prominent southerners defended lynching. They called it a necessary evil that punished Black men accused of rape and scared others. Rebecca Latimer Felton, a Georgia columnist and women's rights activist who later became the first woman in the US Senate, supported it. South Carolina governor Coleman Blease dismissed the argument that lynching violated constitutional rights. These defenses relied on the myth of the Black rapist. (p. 146)
Opponents fought back in three main ways:
Racial violence also targeted Black political activity. In 1896, Populists and Republicans in North Carolina joined as "Fusionists" and won big electoral gains. White Democrats formed "Red Shirt" paramilitary groups to end Black political participation through terror. Their "white supremacy campaign" in the 1898 state elections put Democrats back in control of the state government. (p. 147)
Wilmington held no city election in 1898, and Fusionists still ran its government. The Red Shirts blocked Black voters with armed barricades. They then wrote a "White Declaration of Independence," signed by 457 white Democrats. They demanded that the editor of the city's Black daily newspaper leave within twelve hours. When that deadline passed, they ransacked his newspaper office. The mob then attacked Black neighborhoods, killing dozens of people, and hundreds fled. At gunpoint, the mob forced the mayor, aldermen, and police chief to resign. It exiled leading Fusionists and installed its own replacements. This was a coup against an elected government. (pp. 147–148)
Jim Crow laws turned long-standing custom into law. Separate coach laws, first passed in Tennessee in the 1880s, were among the earliest. Segregation soon covered schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bathrooms, and almost all public life. Miscegenation laws banned interracial marriage. Whites who feared relationships between Black men and white women also used lynching to police this racial line. (p. 148)
Voting restrictions went through two stages. Informal suppression came first. Whites stuffed ballot boxes and threatened Black voters with violence and loss of work. This was de facto limitation. From roughly 1890 to 1908, southern states wrote restrictions into law, which was de jure disfranchisement. They required literacy tests, which officials could grade arbitrarily, and poll taxes, which hurt poor whites as well as poor Black people. In practice, these rules denied Black men the vote that the Fifteenth Amendment was meant to protect. The lawmakers called themselves reformers, claiming they were cleaning up politics. (p. 148)
With white supremacy secure, boosters wanted to persuade the nation that the South was more than a poor, race-obsessed backwater. At the same time, white southerners built a retelling of the past called the "Lost Cause." This civic religion glorified the Confederacy and romanticized the Old South. It pictured loyal, contented slaves and kind masters. It claimed that secession had little to do with slavery and that soldiers fought for home and honor. (pp. 148–149)
Groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, together with veterans, built Confederate monuments and honored veterans on Memorial Day. Towns across the South put up statues of Robert E. Lee and other figures. Popular culture spread the myth nationally. Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman portrayed the Klan as heroes. D. W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, based on the novel, reached huge audiences and helped revive the Klan. (p. 149)
Boosters focused on railroads. The South had fallen behind the North in railroad building, and new lines linked rural areas with growing cities. Boosters also pushed for hard-surfaced roads to move goods and people and to attract northern business, and the automobile added pressure for better roads. (p. 149)
They also promoted manufacturing, mainly textiles, tobacco, furniture, and steel. Cotton farming remained the economic mainstay. Still, factories gave owners new wealth. They also gave landless farmers who could no longer live by subsistence farming a way off the land, though the jobs paid poorly. Men, women, and children all took wage work. Around 1900, nearly one fourth of southern mill workers were children aged six to sixteen. (pp. 149–150)
Factory work was segregated by race. Whites held the better-paying jobs. Black workers got the most dangerous, dirtiest, hardest, and lowest-paid ones. Black women, shut out of most industry, mostly worked as domestic servants for white families, and some white mill families could afford such help. Mill villages were whites-only, and Black families lived on the outer edges. (p. 150)
A common mistake is to think the New South left poverty and discrimination behind. It depends on what is measured. By industrial output and railroad mileage, the South did grow. Compared with the rest of the nation, the effect was small. Most southerners still farmed and lived in poverty. Lynching, segregation, and Jim Crow showed that white supremacy continued beside modernization. Railroads, factories, and investment fit easily with racial discrimination and a poor farm economy. (p. 150)
In 1905, John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in America, gave 2.5 million today) to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He was also widely distrusted. Even admirers admitted his wealth came from often illegal and usually immoral methods, and journalist Ida Tarbell had exposed Standard Oil's ruthlessness. (p. 150)
Clergy led by Washington Gladden protested. Years earlier, Gladden had asked whether money made by ruining others could be touched without being defiled. The board accepted the gift anyway. Its president, Samuel Capen, did not defend Rockefeller. He argued that the gift was charitable and that the board could not trace the source of every donation. The dispute still troubled him. (pp. 150–151)
The "tainted money" debate raised bigger questions. What was moral in an industrial country? What duties came with wealth? Would churches have to side with the elite or with the poor? In an 1889 article, Andrew Carnegie popularized the "gospel of wealth," the idea that the rich have a moral duty to give to charity, which he saw as the cure for unequal wealth. Farmers and labor organizers answered that God favored the weak and that Gilded Age fortunes were immoral. Over time, churches adapted to the industrial order. Even Gladden came to accept gifts from wealthy donors, including Rockefeller. (pp. 151–152)
By the early 1900s, the huge fortunes of the Gilded Age raised a hard question: how should religion deal with money? In 1905, the "tainted money" debate arose when John D. Rockefeller gave $100,000 to a missionary board. Critics such as the minister Washington Gladden protested. Gladden asked whether money gained by wrecking businesses and ruining small investors could ever be "clean." The board accepted the gift anyway. Its president said the board could not trace every donation, but the dispute still troubled him. (pp. 151–152)
The gospel of wealth, popularized by Andrew Carnegie in 1889, offered one answer. Carnegie said the rich have a moral duty to give money to charity, and he saw this as the cure for unequal wealth. Farmers and labor organizers disagreed. They argued that God favored the weak and that the new fortunes and corporate management were immoral. Over time, though, churches adjusted to the new industrial order, and even Gladden began accepting gifts from wealthy donors. (p. 151)
Money and secular knowledge also changed colleges, and religion's role shrank. Elites funded new private universities. The Morrill Land Grants of 1862 and 1890 paid for schools teaching practical subjects such as science, engineering, and agriculture. The 1890 act also supported Black colleges in states with segregated universities. Booker T. Washington had founded Tuskegee Institute in 1881 as a model of Black vocational education. Other changes:
Cities and immigration weakened older social controls. In the anonymity of a city, people could experiment with sexuality and gender in ways small towns did not allow. This also caused anxiety. Reformers sometimes called sexually active young women "feeble-minded," treating their behavior as a sign of illness. Young people also challenged their parents' norms through fashion: corsets relaxed and hemlines rose. (pp. 152–153)
Victoria Woodhull was a leading voice for women's rights. She was the first woman to address Congress (1871), and in 1872 she became the first woman to run for president. She argued that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments already gave women a constitutional right to vote. She also promoted "voluntary motherhood," the idea that a wife could control her own reproduction and refuse sex. In an age when the idea of marital rape did not exist, this was radical. (pp. 153–154)
The backlash came as the Comstock Act of 1873. It let Anthony Comstock, a Post Office special agent, censor the mail for "obscene" material. He defined this broadly, so it covered birth control information as well as pornography. Senders faced hard labor and heavy fines. Comstock targeted Woodhull herself. The law shows two forces clashing: women's push for rights and a powerful repressive "moral politics." (p. 154)
Many women also worked to "uplift" others. Middle-class Protestant women led the temperance movement, citing their role as protectors of home and family. Jane Addams and other settlement house workers taught middle-class values to immigrant and working-class women. Supporters of "scientific motherhood" used hygiene science to improve and moralize these same women. (pp. 154–155)
Literature voiced women's discontent. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" attacked the idea that domestic life was "natural" for women and criticized the Victorian "rest cure." Kate Chopin's The Awakening expressed women's malaise and desire. Both challenged Victorian ideas of femininity. (p. 156)
Many men worried about their own masculinity. Desk jobs seemed to be replacing the physical work of farms and factories. Neurologist George Beard invented the term neurasthenia for a supposed condition of nervous weakness, with symptoms such as depression, indigestion, and nervousness. William James called it "Americanitis." (p. 156)
Churches worried that women made up most of their members and that religion had become "feminized." Muscular Christianity tried to toughen young men through outdoor life and sports. Its supporters founded boys' clubs and summer camps, which were forerunners of the Boy Scouts. The YMCA built gyms; a YMCA leader coined the word bodybuilding, and YMCA men invented basketball and volleyball. (pp. 156–157)
This ideal of manhood was tied to nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Muscular Christians supported "civilizing" non-Western peoples. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders in the 1898 Spanish-American War became the model of the strong, fit American man. Roosevelt believed renewed manliness would protect American superiority from the weakening effects of "overcivilization." (p. 157)
Vaudeville was a traveling stage show with comedians, musicians, jugglers, and other acts, and it peaked from 1880 to 1920. Earlier shows were rowdy, aimed at men, and served alcohol. Vaudeville was seen as polite and family-friendly, though it relied on offensive racial and ethnic caricatures. Charlie Chaplin and Harry Houdini got their start on its circuit. (pp. 157–158)
Edison's inventions shaped mass entertainment too. He expected the phonograph to be used for dictation, such as recording letters and speeches. His sales agents found that customers wanted music, for example in nickel phonograph parlors. Recordings could be copied, which expanded the popular music market, and by 1900 people were buying phonographs for home use. (pp. 158–159)
Edison's motion pictures developed between 1888 and 1896:
The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago drew over twenty million visitors. Its Neoclassical "White City" displayed American industry, art, and science, and its midway had the first Ferris Wheel. Yet its exhibits used racial stereotypes, and Frederick Douglass and other Black leaders protested the poor representation of Black Americans. The fair showed both American pride and its limits. (pp. 159–161)
By 1900, the nation had been transformed. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, businesses grew, wealth concentrated, immigrants filled the cities, and the Jim Crow South erased Reconstruction's gains. These changes led toward Western expansion, overseas empire, radical protest, and progressive reform. (pp. 160–161)
