Pictures of the Industrial Revolution Fashion for Women in the Industrial Revolution

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I. Introduction
II. Industrialization & Technological Innovation
III. Immigration and Urbanization
Four. The New South and the Problem of Race
V. Gender, Religion, and Culture
Vi. Decision
VII. Primary Sources
8. Reference Fabric

I. Introduction

When British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889, he described a city captivated by technology and blinded by greed. He described a rushed and crowded city, a "huge wilderness" with "scores of miles of these terrible streets" and their "hundred thousand of these terrible people." "The show impressed me with a groovy horror," he wrote. "There was no color in the street and no beauty—only a maze of wire ropes overhead and muddy rock flagging nether foot." He took a cab "and the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress." Kipling visited a "gilded and mirrored" hotel "crammed with people talking most money, and spitting nigh everywhere." He visited extravagant churches and spoke with their congregants. "I listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of fe to forest, and getting a steam and iron thing to run along them was progress, that the phone was progress, and the network of wires overhead was progress. They repeated their statements again and again." Kipling said American newspapers written report "that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress."¹

Wabash Artery, Chicago, c. 1907. Library of Congress, LC-D4-70163.

Chicago embodied the triumph of American industrialization. Its meatpacking manufacture typified the sweeping changes occurring in American life. The last decades of the nineteenth century, a new era for large business, saw the formation of large corporations, run by trained bureaucrats and salaried managers, doing national and international concern. Chicago, for instance, became America'south butcher. The Chicago meat processing industry, a cartel of v firms, produced four fifths of the meat bought past American consumers. Kipling described in intimate detail the Wedlock Stock Yards, the nation's largest meat processing zone, a square mile just southwest of the city whose pens and slaughterhouses linked the city's vast agricultural hinterland to the nation'south dinner tables. "Once having seen them," he concluded, "you volition never forget the sight." Like other notable Chicago industries, such as agricultural mechanism and steel production, the meatpacking industry was closely tied to urbanization and immigration. In 1850, Chicago had a population of well-nigh 30 thousand. Twenty years afterward, it had iii hundred k. Nothing could stop the city'due south growth. The Great Chicago Fire leveled 3.5 foursquare miles and left a third of its residents homeless in 1871, but the city quickly recovered and resumed its spectacular growth. By the plough of the twentieth century, the metropolis was home to i.7 1000000 people.

Chicago's explosive growth reflected national trends. In 1870, a quarter of the nation's population lived in towns or cities with populations greater than 2,500. By 1920, a majority did. Only if many who flocked to Chicago and other American cities came from rural America, many others emigrated from overseas. Mirroring national immigration patterns, Chicago'south newcomers had at starting time come mostly from Germany, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, merely, by 1890, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and others from southern and eastern Europe made up a majority of new immigrants. Chicago, like many other American industrial cities, was also an immigrant urban center. In 1900, near 80 per centum of Chicago'south population was either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born immigrants.²

Kipling visited Chicago just as new industrial modes of production revolutionized the United states. The ascent of cities, the evolution of American immigration, the transformation of American labor, the further making of a mass civilization, the cosmos of great concentrated wealth, the growth of vast city slums, the conquest of the Westward, the emergence of a middle grade, the trouble of poverty, the triumph of big business, widening inequalities, battles between capital and labor, the final devastation of independent farming, breakthrough technologies, environmental destruction: industrialization created a new America.

Ii. Industrialization & Technological Innovation

The railroads created the first nifty concentrations of capital, spawned the starting time massive corporations, fabricated the first of the vast fortunes that would define the Gilded Historic period, unleashed labor demands that united thousands of farmers and immigrants, and linked many towns and cities. National railroad mileage tripled in the twenty years afterwards the outbreak of the Civil War, and tripled again over the 4 decades that followed. Railroads impelled the cosmos of compatible time zones across the land, gave industrialists access to remote markets, and opened the American W. Railroad companies were the nation'southward largest businesses. Their vast national operations demanded the creation of innovative new corporate system, advanced direction techniques, and vast sums of capital letter. Their huge expenditures spurred countless industries and attracted droves of laborers. And as they crisscrossed the nation, they created a national marketplace, a truly national economy, and, seemingly, a new national culture.³

The railroads were not natural creations. Their vast upper-case letter requirements required the use of incorporation, a legal innovation that protected shareholders from losses. Enormous amounts of government support followed. Federal, state, and local governments offered unrivaled handouts to create the national rail networks. Lincoln'southward Republican Party—which dominated government policy during the Ceremonious War and Reconstruction—passed legislation granting vast subsidies. Hundreds of millions of acres of country and millions of dollars' worth of government bonds were freely given to build the not bad transcontinental railroads and the innumerable trunk lines that apace annihilated the vast geographic barriers that had so long sheltered American cities from one another.

This print shows the four stages of pork packing in nineteenth-century Cincinnati: Killing, cutting, rendering, and salting.

This print shows the 4 stages of pork packing in nineteenth-century Cincinnati. This centralization of production made meat-packing an innovative industry, ane of peachy interest to industrialists of all ilks. In fact, this chromo-lithograph was exhibited past the Cincinnati Pork Packers' Association at the International Exposition in Vienna, Austria. 1873. Wikimedia.

As railroad construction drove economic development, new means of production spawned new systems of labor. Many wage earners had traditionally seen manufacturing plant work equally a temporary stepping-stone to attaining their own small businesses or farms. After the state of war, yet, new engineering and greater mechanization meant fewer and fewer workers could legitimately aspire to economical independence. Stronger and more than organized labor unions formed to fight for a growing, more-permanent working class. At the same fourth dimension, the growing calibration of economic enterprises increasingly disconnected owners from their employees and twenty-four hours-to-day business operations. To handle their vast new operations, owners turned to managers. Educated bureaucrats swelled the ranks of an emerging middle class.

Industrialization too remade much of American life outside the workplace. Rapidly growing industrialized cities knit together urban consumers and rural producers into a unmarried, integrated national market. Food production and consumption, for instance, were utterly nationalized. Chicago'southward stockyards seemingly tied it all together. Between 1866 and 1886, ranchers drove a million caput of cattle annually overland from Texas ranches to railroad depots in Kansas for shipment by rail to Chicago. Afterwards travelling through modern "disassembly lines," the animals left the adjoining slaughterhouses as slabs of meat to be packed into refrigerated rail cars and sent to butcher shops across the continent. By 1885, a handful of big-scale industrial meatpackers in Chicago were producing well-nigh five hundred million pounds of "dressed" beef annually.^iv The new scale of industrialized meat production transformed the landscape. Buffalo herds, grasslands, and one-time-growth forests gave way to cattle, corn, and wheat. Chicago became the Gateway Metropolis, a crossroads connecting American agricultural goods, majuscule markets in New York and London, and consumers from all corners of the United States.

Technological innovation accompanied economic evolution. For April Fool's Day in 1878, the New York Daily Graphic published a fictitious interview with the historic inventor Thomas A. Edison. The slice described the "biggest invention of the age"—a new Edison automobile that could create twoscore different kinds of nutrient and drink out of simply air, h2o, and clay. "Meat will no longer be killed and vegetables no longer grown, except past savages," Edison promised. The machine would end "famine and pauperism." And all for $five or $half-dozen per machine! The story was a joke, of course, but Edison nevertheless received inquiries from readers wondering when the nutrient car would be ready for the market. Americans had manifestly witnessed such startling technological advances—advances that would have seemed far-fetched mere years earlier—that the Edison nutrient machine seemed entirely plausible.^v

In September 1878, Edison announced a new and aggressive line of enquiry and development—electric ability and lighting. The scientific principles backside dynamos and electric motors—the conversion of mechanical energy to electric power, and vice versa—were long known, simply Edison applied the age'southward bureaucratic and commercial ethos to the problem. Far from a lone inventor gripped by inspiration toiling in isolation, Edison avant-garde the model of commercially minded management of enquiry and development. Edison folded his 2 identities, business organisation manager and inventor, together. He called his Menlo Park research laboratory an "invention manufactory" and promised to plow out "a minor invention every x days and a big thing every six months or then." He brought his fully equipped Menlo Park enquiry laboratory and the skilled machinists and scientists he employed to affect the problem of building an electric power system—and commercializing it.

By late fall 1879, Edison exhibited his system of power generation and electrical lite for reporters and investors. And then he scaled up production. He sold generators to businesses. By the middle of 1883, Edison had overseen construction of 330 plants powering over lx thousand lamps in factories, offices, printing houses, hotels, and theaters around the world. He convinced municipal officials to build key power stations and run ability lines. New York's Pearl Street central station opened in September 1882 and powered a square mile of downtown Manhattan. Electricity revolutionized the world. It not only illuminated the night, it powered the Second Industrial Revolution. Factories could operate anywhere at any hour. Electric track cars allowed for cities to build out and electrical elevators allowed for them to build up.

Economic advances, technological innovation, social and cultural evolution, demographic changes: the Usa was a nation transformed. Industry boosted productivity, railroads continued the nation, more and more Americans labored for wages, new bureaucratic occupations created a vast "white collar" heart class, and unprecedented fortunes rewarded the owners of capital. These revolutionary changes, of course, would not occur without disharmonize or upshot (run into Chapter sixteen), merely they demonstrated the profound transformations remaking the nation. Modify was not confined to economics lonely. Change gripped the lives of everyday Americans and fundamentally reshaped American culture.⁶

III. Clearing and Urbanization

A photograph of State Street, south from Lake Street, Chicago, Ill. A streetcar mixes with horse-drawn carriages, and automobiles.

State Street, south from Lake Street, Chicago, Ill, ca.1900-1910. Library of Congress, LC-D4-70158.

Manufacture pulled e'er more Americans into cities. Manufacturing needed the labor pool and the infrastructure. America's urban population increased sevenfold in the half century after the Civil War. Soon the United States had more big cities than whatsoever country in the world. The 1920 U.South. census revealed that, for the get-go time, a bulk of Americans lived in urban areas. Much of that urban growth came from the millions of immigrants pouring into the nation. Betwixt 1870 and 1920, over twenty-v 1000000 immigrants arrived in the U.s.a..

By the plough of the twentieth century, new immigrant groups such as Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews fabricated up a larger percentage of arrivals than the Irish gaelic and Germans. The specific reasons that immigrants left their particular countries and the reasons they came to the United States (what historians call push button and pull factors) varied. For instance, a immature husband and wife living in Sweden in the 1880s and unable to purchase farmland might read an advertisement for inexpensive land in the American Midwest and immigrate to the United States to begin a new life. A young Italian man might only hope to labor in a steel factory long enough to save upwards enough money to return home and purchase land for a family. A Russian Jewish family unit persecuted in European pogroms might look to the United States every bit a sanctuary. Or perhaps a Japanese migrant might hear of fertile farming land on the West Declension and choose to sail for California. Just if many factors pushed people away from their abode countries, by far the nigh important factor drawing immigrants was economics. Immigrants came to the United States looking for work.

Industrial commercialism was the well-nigh of import factor that drew immigrants to the United states between 1880 and 1920. Immigrant workers labored in large industrial complexes producing appurtenances such every bit steel, textiles, and food products, replacing smaller and more local workshops. The influx of immigrants, aslope a large motion of Americans from the countryside to the city, helped propel the rapid growth of cities similar New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. By 1890, immigrants and their children deemed for roughly 60 percent of the population in most large northern cities (and sometimes equally high every bit lxxx or 90 percent). Many immigrants, especially from Italy and the Balkans, always intended to render home with plenty coin to buy land. But what about those who stayed? Did the new arrivals assimilate together in the American melting pot—becoming merely similar those already in the The states—or did they retain, and sometimes even strengthen, their traditional ethnic identities? The answer lies somewhere in between. Immigrants from specific countries—and often even specific communities—often clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods. They formed vibrant organizations and societies, such as Italian workmen's clubs, Eastern European Jewish mutual assist societies, and Polish Cosmic churches, to ease the transition to their new American abode. Immigrant communities published newspapers in dozens of languages and purchased spaces to go along their arts, languages, and traditions alive. And from these foundations they facilitated even more immigration: afterward staking out a claim to some corner of American life, they wrote domicile and encouraged others to follow them (historians call this concatenation migration).

Many cities' politics adapted to immigrant populations. The infamous urban political machines ofttimes operated as a kind of mutual aid gild. New York Urban center's Autonomous Party machine, popularly known as Tammany Hall, drew the greatest ire from critics and seemed to embody all of the worst of city machines, simply information technology as well responded to immigrant needs. In 1903, journalist William Riordon published a book, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, which chronicled the activities of ward heeler George Washington Plunkitt. Plunkitt elaborately explained to Riordon the difference betwixt "honest graft" and "dishonest graft": "I made my pile in politics, simply, at the same time, I served the organisation and got more large improvements for New York City than any other livin' man." While exposing corruption, Riordon also revealed the difficult work Plunkitt undertook on behalf of his largely immigrant constituency. On a typical day, Riordon wrote, Plunkitt was awakened at two a.yard. to bond out a saloonkeeper who stayed open up also late, was awakened once more at six a.k. considering of a fire in the neighborhood and spent time finding lodgings for the families displaced by the burn down, and, after spending the residue of the morning in court to secure the release of several of his constituents, found jobs for four unemployed men, attended an Italian funeral, visited a church building social, and dropped in on a Jewish wedding. He returned home at midnight.⁷

Tammany Hall'due south corruption, specially under the reign of William "Boss" Tweed, was legendary, but the public works projects that funded Tammany Hall'southward graft too provided essential infrastructure and public services for the city's rapidly expanding population. Water, sewer, and gas lines; schools, hospitals, civic buildings, and museums; police force and fire departments; roads, parks (notably Central Park), and bridges (notably the Brooklyn Span): all could, in whole or in part, exist credited to Tammany's reign. Still, auto politics could never be plenty. As the urban population exploded, many immigrants establish themselves trapped in crowded, crime-ridden slums. Americans eventually took notice of this urban crisis and proposed municipal reforms just also grew concerned about the declining quality of life in rural areas.

While cities boomed, rural worlds languished. Some Americans scoffed at rural backwardness and reveled in the countryside's decay, but many romanticized the countryside, celebrated rural life, and wondered what had been lost in the cities. Sociologist Kenyon Butterfield, concerned by the sprawling nature of industrial cities and suburbs, regretted the eroding social position of rural citizens and farmers: "Agriculture does non hold the same relative rank amongst our industries that information technology did in former years." Butterfield saw "the farm problem" as part of "the whole question of democratic civilization."⁸ He and many others thought the rise of the cities and the fall of the countryside threatened traditional American values. Many proposed conservation. Freedom Hyde Bailey, a botanist and rural scholar selected by Theodore Roosevelt to chair a federal Commission on Land Life in 1907, believed that rural places and industrial cities were linked: "Every agricultural question is a city question."⁹

Many longed for a centre path between the cities and the country. New suburban communities on the outskirts of American cities defined themselves in opposition to urban crowding. Americans contemplated the complicated relationships between rural places, suburban living, and urban spaces. Los Angeles became a model for the suburban development of rural places. Dana Barlett, a social reformer in Los Angeles, noted that the urban center, stretching beyond dozens of small towns, was "a ameliorate city" considering of its residential identity as a "urban center of homes."^ten This language was seized upon by many suburbs that hoped to avoid both urban sprawl and rural decay. In Glendora, one of these pocket-size towns on the outskirts of Los Angeles, local leaders were "loath as anyone to see it become cosmopolitan." Instead, in order to have Glendora "abound along the lines necessary to have information technology remain an enjoyable city of homes," they needed to "bestir ourselves to direct its growth" by encouraging not industry or agronomics only residential development.¹¹

IV. The New South and the Trouble of Race

"There was a South of slavery and secession," Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady proclaimed in an 1886 speech in New York. "That South is expressionless."¹² Grady captured the sentiment of many white southern business and political leaders who imagined a New Southward that could turn its back to the past by embracing industrialization and diversified agronomics. He promoted the region'southward economic possibilities and mutual future prosperity through an alliance of northern capital letter and southern labor. Grady and other New South boosters hoped to shape the region's economy in the North's image. They wanted manufacture and they wanted infrastructure. But the past could not be escaped. Economically and socially, the "New Southward" would still be much like the old.

The ambitions of Atlanta, seen in the structure of such thou buildings equally the Kimball House Hotel, reflected the larger regional aspirations of the and then-called New South. 1890. Wikimedia.

A "New South" seemed an obvious need. The Confederacy's failed coup wreaked havoc on the southern economy and bedridden southern prestige. Property was destroyed. Lives were lost. Political power vanished. And four 1000000 enslaved Americans—representing the wealth and power of the antebellum white S—threw off their chains and walked proudly frontward into freedom.

Emancipation unsettled the southern social gild. When Reconstruction regimes attempted to grant freedpeople total citizenship rights, broken-hearted whites struck back. From their fearfulness, anger, and resentment they lashed out, not but in organized terrorist organizations such equally the Ku Klux Klan but in political corruption, economical exploitation, and violent intimidation. White southerners took back control of state and local governments and used their reclaimed power to disenfranchise African Americans and pass "Jim Crow" laws segregating schools, transportation, employment, and various public and private facilities. The reestablishment of white supremacy after the "redemption" of the South from Reconstruction contradicted proclamations of a "New" Due south. Perhaps nothing harked then forcefully dorsum to the barbarian southern past than the wave of lynchings—the extralegal murder of individuals by vigilantes—that washed across the South later Reconstruction. Whether for actual crimes or made crimes or for no crimes at all, white mobs murdered roughly five one thousand African Americans between the 1880s and the 1950s.

Lynching was non just murder, it was a ritual rich with symbolism. Victims were not simply hanged, they were mutilated, burned live, and shot. Lynchings could go carnivals, public spectacles attended by thousands of eager spectators. Rail lines ran special cars to accommodate the rush of participants. Vendors sold goods and keepsakes. Perpetrators posed for photos and collected mementos. And it was increasingly mutual. One notorious example occurred in Georgia in 1899. Accused of killing his white employer and raping the homo's wife, Sam Hose was captured past a mob and taken to the town of Newnan. Word of the impending lynching apace spread, and particularly chartered passenger trains brought some four thousand visitors from Atlanta to witness the gruesome affair. Members of the mob tortured Hose for virtually an hour. They sliced off pieces of his body as he screamed in agony. Then they poured a tin of kerosene over his trunk and burned him alive.¹³

At the barbarian height of southern lynching, in the concluding years of the nineteenth century, southerners lynched two to three African Americans every week. In general, lynchings were almost frequent in the Cotton Belt of the Lower Southward, where southern Blackness people were most numerous and where the majority worked as tenant farmers and field hands on the cotton farms of white landowners. The states of Mississippi and Georgia had the greatest number of recorded lynchings: from 1880 to 1930, Mississippi lynch mobs killed over v hundred African Americans; Georgia mobs murdered more than four hundred.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of prominent southerners openly supported lynching, arguing that it was a necessary evil to punish Black rapists and deter others. In the late 1890s, Georgia newspaper columnist and noted women's rights activist Rebecca Latimer Felton—who would after get the first woman to serve in the U.Southward. Senate—endorsed such extrajudicial killings. She said, "If it takes lynching to protect women's dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a k a calendar week."¹⁴ When opponents argued that lynching violated victims' constitutional rights, South Carolina governor Coleman Blease angrily responded, "Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of South Carolina, I say to hell with the Constitution."¹⁵

This photograph shows the lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson on May 25, 1911 in Okemah, Oklahoma. One of thousands of lynchings throughout the South in the late nineteenth and century twentieth centuries, this particular case of the lynching of a mother and son garnered national attention. In response, the local white newspaper in Okemah simply wrote,

This photograph captures the lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, a mother and son, on May 25, 1911, in Okemah, Oklahoma. In response to national attending, the local white newspaper in Okemah simply wrote, "While the full general sentiment is agin to the method, information technology is generally thought that the negroes got what would take been due them under due process of law." Wikimedia.

Black activists and white allies worked to outlaw lynching. Ida B. Wells, an African American woman born in the last years of slavery and a pioneering anti-lynching abet, lost iii friends to a lynch mob in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892. That year, Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Constabulary in All Its Phases, a groundbreaking work that documented the South's lynching culture and exposed the myth of the Black rapist.¹⁶ The Tuskegee Institute and the NAACP both compiled and publicized lists of every reported lynching in the United states of america. In 1918, Representative Leonidas Dyer of Missouri introduced federal anti-lynching legislation that would have made local counties where lynchings took place legally liable for such killings. Throughout the early on 1920s, the Dyer Bill was the subject of heated political debate, but, fiercely opposed by southern congressmen and unable to win enough northern champions, the proposed pecker was never enacted.

Lynching was non only the course of racial violence that survived Reconstruction. White political violence connected to follow African American political participation and labor system, however severely circumscribed. When the Populist insurgency created new opportunities for blackness political activism, white Democrats responded with terror. In North Carolina, Populists and Republicans "fused" together and won stunning electoral gains in 1896. Shocked White Democrats formed "Red Shirt" groups, paramilitary organizations defended to eradicating black political participation and restoring Democratic rule through violence and intimidation. Launching a self-described "white supremacy campaign" of violence and intimidation confronting black voters and officeholders during the 1898 land elections, the Blood-red Shirts finer took back state government. But municipal elections were not held that twelvemonth in Wilmington, where Fusionists controlled urban center regime. Subsequently manning armed barricades blocking blackness voters from entering the town to vote in the country elections, the Ruddy Shirts drafted a "White Declaration of Independence" which declared "that that nosotros will no longer exist ruled and volition never again be ruled, by men of African origin." 457 white Democrats signed the document. They also issued a twelve-hour ultimatum that editor of the city'due south black daily paper flee the city. The editor left, simply it wasn't enough. Twelve hours afterwards, hundreds of Cherry-red Shirts raided the city'south armory and ransacked the newspaper office anyhow. The mob swelled and turned on the city's black neighborhood, destroying homes and businesses and opening fire on any Black person they found. Dozens were killed and hundreds more fled the urban center. The mob and so forced the mayor, the city's aldermen, and the police principal, at gun indicate, to immediately resign. To ensure their gains, the Democrats rounded upwardly prominent fusionists, placed them on railroad cars, and, under armed baby-sit, sent them out of the state. The mob installed and swore in their own replacements. It was a total-blown coup.

Lynching and organized terror campaigns were merely the vehement worst of the South's racial world. Discrimination in employment and housing and the legal segregation of public and private life also reflected the rising of a new Jim Crow South. And so-called Jim Crow laws legalized what custom had long dictated. Southern states and municipalities enforced racial segregation in public places and in individual lives. Separate double-decker laws were some of the first such laws to appear, beginning in Tennessee in the 1880s. Soon schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bathrooms, and nearly every other office of public life were segregated. And then too were social lives. The sin of racial mixing, critics said, had to exist heavily guarded against. Spousal relationship laws regulated confronting interracial couples, and white men, ever broken-hearted of relationships between Black men and white women, passed miscegenation laws and justified lynching as an appropriate extralegal tool to police force the racial divide.

In politics, de facto limitations of Blackness voting had suppressed Black voters since Reconstruction. Whites stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated Black voters with physical and economic threats. And and so, from roughly 1890 to 1908, southern states implemented de jure, or legal, disfranchisement. They passed laws requiring voters to laissez passer literacy tests (which could be judged arbitrarily) and pay poll taxes (which hitting poor white and poor Blackness Americans alike), effectively denying Black men the franchise that was supposed to have been guaranteed past the Fifteenth Amendment. Those responsible for such laws posed as reformers and justified voting restrictions as for the public good, a manner to clean up politics by purging corrupt African Americans from the voting rolls.

With white supremacy secured, prominent white southerners looked outward for support. New South boosters hoped to face up post-Reconstruction uncertainties by rebuilding the South's economy and convincing the nation that the Due south could be more than an economically astern, race-obsessed backwater. And as they did, they began to retell the history of the contempo past. A kind of civic religion known as the "Lost Cause" glorified the Confederacy and romanticized the Sometime South. White southerners looked forward while simultaneously harking back to a mythic imagined by inhabited by contented and loyal slaves, chivalrous and generous masters, chivalric and honorable men, and pure and faithful southern belles. Secession, they said, had piddling to do with the institution of slavery, and soldiers fought only for dwelling and laurels, non the continued buying of human beings. The New South, then, would exist built physically with new technologies, new investments, and new industries, but undergirded past political and social custom.

Henry Grady might have declared the Confederate Southward dead, but its memory pervaded the thoughts and actions of white southerners. Lost Cause champions overtook the South. Women'due south groups, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, joined with Confederate veterans to preserve a pro-Confederate past. They built Confederate monuments and historic Amalgamated veterans on Memorial 24-hour interval. Across the Southward, towns erected statues of General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures. By the turn of the twentieth century, the idealized Lost Cause past was entrenched non only in the South only beyond the state. In 1905, for instance, North Carolinian Thomas F. Dixon published a novel, The Clansman, which depicted the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of the Due south against the abuse of African American and northern "carpetbag" misrule during Reconstruction. In 1915, acclaimed moving-picture show director David Due west. Griffith adapted Dixon's novel into the groundbreaking blockbuster film, Birth of a Nation. (The picture show almost singlehandedly rejuvenated the Ku Klux Klan.) The romanticized version of the antebellum South and the distorted version of Reconstruction dominated popular imagination.¹⁷

While Lost Cause defenders mythologized their past, New South boosters struggled to wrench the Southward into the modern world. The railroads became their focus. The region had lagged behind the Due north in the railroad edifice blast of the midnineteenth century, and postwar expansion facilitated connections between the most rural segments of the population and the region's rising urban areas. Boosters campaigned for the construction of new hard-surfaced roads equally well, arguing that improved roads would further increase the flow of goods and people and entice northern businesses to relocate to the region. The rising popularity of the automobile afterwards the turn of the century but increased pressure level for the construction of reliable roads between cities, towns, county seats, and the vast farmlands of the South.

Along with new transportation networks, New South boosters connected to promote industrial growth. The region witnessed the rise of various manufacturing industries, predominantly textiles, tobacco, article of furniture, and steel. While agriculture—cotton wool in item—remained the mainstay of the region'due south economy, these new industries provided new wealth for owners, new investments for the region, and new opportunities for the exploding number of landless farmers to finally abscond the land. Industries offered low-paying jobs but also opportunity for rural poor who could no longer sustain themselves through subsistence farming. Men, women, and children all moved into wage work. At the plow of the twentieth century, about one fourth of southern mill workers were children aged six to 16.

In most cases, every bit in most aspects of life in the New South, new factory jobs were racially segregated. Meliorate-paying jobs were reserved for whites, while the most dangerous, labor-intensive, dirtiest, and lowest-paying positions were relegated to African Americans. African American women, close out of near industries, found employment most often as domestic aid for white families. As poor as white southern manufactory workers were, southern Black people were poorer. Some white manufacturing plant workers could even afford to pay for domestic help in caring for young children, cleaning houses, doing laundry, and cooking meals. Mill villages that grew upwardly alongside factories were whites-only, and African American families were pushed to the outer perimeter of the settlements.

That a "New South" emerged in the decades between Reconstruction and Earth State of war I is debatable. If measured by industrial output and railroad construction, the New South was a reality just if measured relative to the rest of the nation, it was a limited one. If measured in terms of racial discrimination, withal, the New Due south looked much like the Old. Boosters such as Henry Grady said the Due south was washed with racial questions merely lynching and segregation and the institutionalization of Jim Crow exposed the Due south's lingering racial obsessions. Meanwhile, most southerners notwithstanding toiled in agriculture and still lived in poverty. Industrial development and expanding infrastructure, rather than re-creating the South, coexisted easily with white supremacy and an impoverished agricultural economy. The trains came, factories were built, and capital was invested, simply the region remained mired in poverty and racial apartheid. Much of the "New South," then, was anything but new.

Five. Gender, Religion, and Culture

Visitors to the Columbian Exposition of 1893 took in the view of the Court of Honor from the roof of the Manufacturers Building. Art Institute of Chicago, via Wikimedia

In 1905, Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller donated $100,000 (well-nigh $2.5 one thousand thousand today) to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Rockefeller was the richest man in America simply also one of the most hated and mistrusted. Even admirers conceded that he accomplished his wealth through frequently illegal and normally immoral business practices. Journalist Ida Tarbell had made waves describing Standard Oil's long-standing ruthlessness and predilections for political abuse. Clergymen, led by reformer Washington Gladden, fiercely protested the donation. A decade earlier, Gladden had asked of such donations, "Is this clean coin? Can any man, can any institution, knowing its origin, touch it without being defiled?" Gladden said, "In the cool brutality with which properties are wrecked, securities destroyed, and people past the hundreds robbed of their lilliputian all to build upwards the fortunes of the multi-millionaires, nosotros have an appalling revelation of the kind of monster that a human may go."^eighteen

Despite widespread criticism, the board accepted Rockefeller's donation. Board president Samuel Capen did not defend Rockefeller, arguing that the gift was charitable and the lath could non assess the origin of every donation, only the dispute shook Capen. Was a corporate background incompatible with a religious arrangement? The "tainted coin contend" reflected questions about the proper relationship between religion and capitalism. With rising income inequality, would religious groups be forced to back up either the elite or the disempowered? What was moral in the new industrial United States? And what obligations did wealth bring? Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie popularized the idea of a "gospel of wealth" in an 1889 article, challenge that "the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth" was the moral obligation of the rich to give to charity.^xix Farmers and labor organizers, meanwhile, argued that God had blessed the weak and that new Golden Age fortunes and corporate management were inherently immoral. As time passed, American churches increasingly adapted themselves to the new industrial guild. Fifty-fifty Gladden came to accept donations from the so-chosen robber barons, such as the Baptist John D. Rockefeller, who increasingly touted the morality of business. Meanwhile, as many churches wondered about the compatibility of big fortunes with Christian values, others were concerned for the fate of traditional American masculinity.

The economical and social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—including increased urbanization, immigration, advancements in science and technology, patterns of consumption and the new availability of goods, and new awareness of economic, racial, and gender inequalities—challenged traditional gender norms. At the same time, urban spaces and shifting cultural and social values presented new opportunities to claiming traditional gender and sexual norms. Many women, conveying on a campaign that stretched long into the past, vied for equal rights. They became activists: they targeted municipal reforms, launched labor rights campaigns, and, above all, bolstered the suffrage movement.

Urbanization and clearing fueled anxieties that erstwhile social mores were being subverted and that old forms of social and moral policing were increasingly inadequate. The anonymity of urban spaces presented an opportunity in particular for female sexuality and for male person and female sexual experimentation along a spectrum of orientations and gender identities. Feet over female sexuality reflected generational tensions and differences, as well equally racial and form ones. As young women pushed back against social mores through premarital sexual exploration and expression, social welfare experts and moral reformers labeled such girls feeble-minded, believing even that such unfeminine beliefs could exist symptomatic of clinical insanity rather than gratuitous-willed expression. Generational differences exacerbated the social and familial tensions provoked past shifting gender norms. Youths challenged the norms of their parents' generations by donning new fashions and enjoying the delights of the metropolis. Women'south way loosed its concrete constraints: corsets relaxed and hemlines rose. The newfound concrete freedom enabled past looser dress was besides mimicked in the pursuit of other freedoms.

While many women worked to liberate themselves, many, sometimes simultaneously, worked to uplift others. Women'south work confronting alcohol propelled temperance into one of the foremost moral reforms of the period. Heart-course, typically Protestant women based their attack on booze on the basis of their feminine virtue, Christian sentiment, and their protective role in the family and dwelling. Others, like Jane Addams and settlement house workers, sought to impart a middle-class didactics on immigrant and working-class women through the establishment of settlement homes. Other reformers touted a "scientific motherhood": the new science of hygiene was deployed every bit a method of both social uplift and moralizing, specially of working-class and immigrant women.

Taken a few years after the publication of

Taken a few years afterwards the publication of "The Xanthous Wallpaper," this portrait photograph shows activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminine poise and respectability even as she sought massive change for women's place in social club. An outspoken supporter of women's rights, Gilman'southward works challenged the supposedly "natural" inferiority of women. Wikimedia.

Women vocalized new discontents through literature. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" attacked the "naturalness" of feminine domesticity and critiqued Victorian psychological remedies administered to women, such as the "rest cure." Kate Chopin'southward The Awakening, set in the American South, likewise criticized the domestic and familial role ascribed to women by society and gave expression to feelings of malaise, agony, and want. Such literature directly challenged the status quo of the Victorian era'south constructions of femininity and feminine virtue, likewise as established feminine roles.

While many men worried almost female activism, they worried too about their ain masculinity. To anxious observers, industrial capitalism was withering American manhood. Rather than working on farms and in factories, where young men formed physical muscle and spiritual grit, new generations of workers labored behind desks, wore white collars, and, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, appeared "black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, [and] paste-complexioned."²⁰ Neurologist George Beard even coined a medical term, neurasthenia, for a new emasculated condition that was marked by depression, indigestion, hypochondria, and farthermost nervousness. The philosopher William James chosen it "Americanitis." Academics increasingly warned that America had get a nation of emasculated men.

Churches likewise worried about feminization. Women had ever comprised a clear majority of church memberships in the Usa, simply now the theologian Washington Gladden said, "A preponderance of female influence in the Church or anywhere else in gild is unnatural and injurious." Many feared that the feminized church had feminized Christ himself. Rather than a rough-hewn carpenter, Jesus had been made "mushy" and "sweetly effeminate," in the words of Walter Rauschenbusch. Advocates of a and then-called muscular Christianity sought to stiffen young men's backbones by putting them back in touch with their cardinal manliness. Pulling from gimmicky developmental theory, they believed that young men ought to evolve as culture evolved, advancing from primitive nature-dwelling to modern industrial enlightenment. To facilitate "archaic" encounters with nature, muscular Christians founded summertime camps and outdoor boys' clubs like the Woodcraft Indians, the Sons of Daniel Boone, and the Boy Brigades—all precursors of the Male child Scouts. Other champions of muscular Christianity, such equally the newly formed Young Men's Christian Association, built gymnasiums, often attached to churches, where youths could strengthen their bodies every bit well every bit their spirits. It was a Young Men's Christian Clan (YMCA) leader who coined the term bodybuilding, and others invented the sports of basketball and volleyball.²¹

Muscular Christianity, though, was nigh even more than building strong bodies and minds. Many advocates also ardently championed Western imperialism, cheering on attempts to acculturate not-Western peoples. Gilded Age men were encouraged to embrace a particular vision of masculinity connected intimately with the rise tides of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Contemporary ethics of American masculinity at the plow of the century developed in concert with the United States' imperial and militaristic endeavors in the West and abroad. During the Spanish-American State of war in 1898, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders embodied the idealized image of the tall, stiff, virile, and fit American man that simultaneously epitomized the ideals of ability that informed the United States' regal calendar. Roosevelt and others like him believed a reinvigorated masculinity would preserve the American race'south superiority against foreign foes and the effeminizing furnishings of overcivilization.

Amusement-hungry Americans flocked to new entertainments at the turn of the twentieth century. In this early-twentieth-century photograph, visitors enjoy Luna Park, ane of the original entertainment parks on Brooklyn's famous Coney Island. Visitors to Coney Island'due south Luna Park, ca.1910-1915. Library of Congress (LC-B2- 2240-13).

Only while many fretted about traditional American life, others lost themselves in new forms of mass civilization. Vaudeville signaled new cultural worlds. A unique variety of popular entertainments, these traveling circuit shows first appeared during the Civil War and peaked between 1880 and 1920. Vaudeville shows featured comedians, musicians, actors, jugglers, and other talents that could captivate an audition. Unlike earlier rowdy acts meant for a male audience that included alcohol, vaudeville was considered family-friendly, "polite" entertainment, though the acts involved offensive ethnic and racial caricatures of African Americans and recent immigrants. Vaudeville performances were often minor and quirky, though venues such as the renowned Palace Theatre in New York City signaled truthful stardom for many performers. Popular entertainers such as silent moving picture star Charlie Chaplin and magician Harry Houdini made names for themselves on the vaudeville excursion. Only if live amusement still captivated audiences, others looked to entirely new technologies.

By the turn of the century, 2 technologies pioneered past Edison—the phonograph and motion pictures—stood ready to revolutionize leisure and help create the mass entertainment culture of the twentieth century. The phonograph was the starting time reliable device capable of recording and reproducing sound. But it was more than that. The phonograph could create multiple copies of recordings, sparking a dandy expansion of the market for pop music. Although the phonograph was a technical success, Edison at first had trouble developing commercial applications for it. He idea information technology might be used for dictation, recording audio letters, preserving speeches and dying words of bully men, producing talking clocks, or teaching elocution. He did not anticipate that its greatest use would exist in the field of mass entertainment, only Edison'due south sales agents before long reported that many phonographs were being used for but that, especially in and so-called phonograph parlors, where customers could pay a nickel to hear a piece of music. By the turn of the century, Americans were purchasing phonographs for home use. Entertainment became the phonograph's major market.

Inspired by the success of the phonograph as an entertainment device, Edison decided in 1888 to develop "an musical instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear." In 1888, he patented the concept of movement pictures. In 1889, he innovated the rolling of film. By 1891, he was exhibiting a motion-picture camera (a kinetograph) and a viewer (a kinetoscope). By 1894, the Edison Company had produced virtually seventy-five films suitable for auction and viewing. They could be viewed through a pocket-sized eyepiece in an arcade or parlor. They were brusque, typically well-nigh three minutes long. Many of the early films depicted athletic feats and competitions. Ane 1894 picture, for example, showed a half-dozen-circular boxing lucifer. The catalog description gave a sense of the appeal information technology had for male viewers: "Full of hard fighting, clever hits, punches, leads, dodges, torso blows and some slugging." Other early kinetoscope subjects included Indian dances, nature and outdoor scenes, re-creations of historical events, and humorous skits. By 1896, the Edison Vitascope could projection film, shifting audiences away from arcades and pulling them into theaters. Edison'south film itemize meanwhile grew in sophistication. He sent filmmakers to afar and exotic locales like Japan and People's republic of china. Long-course fictional films created a demand for "movie stars," such as the glamorous Mary Pickford, the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, the acrobatic comedian Buster Keaton, who began to announced in the pop imagination commencement around 1910. Alongside professional battle and baseball game, the film industry was creating the modern culture of glory that would characterize twentieth-century mass entertainment.²²

VI. Conclusion

Designers of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago built the White Metropolis in a neoclassical architectural style. The integrated pattern of buildings, walkways, and landscapes propelled the burgeoning Urban center Beautiful motility. The Fair itself was a huge success, bringing more than than 20-seven one thousand thousand people to Chicago and helping to establish the credo of American exceptionalism. Wikimedia.

After enduring four bloody years of warfare and a strained, decade-long effort to reconstruct the defeated South, the United States abandoned itself to industrial development. Businesses expanded in scale and telescopic. The nature of labor shifted. A middle class rose. Wealth concentrated. Immigrants crowded into the cities, which grew upward and outward. The Jim Crow South stripped away the vestiges of Reconstruction, and New South boosters papered over the scars. Industrialists hunted profits. Evangelists appealed to people's morals. Consumers lost themselves in new goods and new technologies. Women emerging into new urban spaces embraced new social possibilities. In all of its many facets, by the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had been radically transformed. And the transformations connected to ripple outward into the Due west and overseas, and inward into radical protestation and progressive reforms. For Americans at the twilight of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, a bold new world loomed.

Seven. Chief Sources

1. Andrew Carnegie on "The Triumph of America" (1885)

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie historic and explored American economic progress in this 1885 article, afterward reprinted in his 1886 volume,Triumphant Commonwealth.

2. Henry Grady on the New South (1886)

Atlanta newspaperman and campaigner of the "New Due south," Henry Grady, won national recognition for his December 21, 1886 speech to the New England Social club in New York City.

3. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "Lynch Law in America" (1900)

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, born enslaved in Mississippi, was a pioneering activist and journalist. She did much to expose the epidemic of lynching in the United states and her writing and research exploded many of the justifications—especially the rape of white women by Black men—commonly offered to justify the practice.

4. Henry Adams,The Instruction of Henry Adams (1918)

Henry Adams, the great grandson of President John Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, the son of a major American diplomat, and an accomplished Harvard historian, writing in the third person, describes his feel at the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900 and writes of his run across with "forces totally new."

5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I WroteThe Yellow Wallpaper" (1913)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman won much attending in 1892 for publishing "The Yellow Wallpaper," a semi-autobiographical short story dealing with mental health and gimmicky social expectations for women. In the following piece, Gilman reflected on writing and publishing the piece.

6. Jacob Riis,How the Other Half Lives (1890)

Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, combined photography and journalism into a powerful indictment of poverty in America. His 1890,How the Other Half Livesshocked Americans with its raw depictions of urban slums. Here, he describes poverty in New York.

7. Rose Cohen on the World Beyond her Immigrant Neighborhood (ca.1897/1918)

Rose Cohen was born in Russian federation in 1880 as Rahel Golub. She immigrated to the United states in 1892 and lived in a Russian Jewish neighborhood in New York's Lower East Side. Her, she writes about her encounter with the world outside of her indigenous neighborhood.

8. Mulberry Street (ca. 1900)

At the plough of the century, New York City'due south Lower East Side became the most densely packed urban area in the world. This colorized photomechanical print from the Detroit Photographic depicts daily life on Mulberry Street, the area's central artery.

9. Coney Island (ca. 1910-1915)

Entertainment-hungry Americans flocked to new entertainments at the turn of the twentieth century. In this early-twentieth century photograph, visitors bask Luna Park, ane of the original amusement parks on Brooklyn'south famous Coney Isle.

VIII. Reference Material

This affiliate was edited by David Hochfelder, with content contributions by Jacob Betz, David Hochfelder, Gerard Koeppel, Scott Libson, Kyle Livie, Paul Matzko, Isabella Morales, Andrew Robichaud, Kate Sohasky, Joseph Super, Susan Thomas, Kaylynn Washnock, and Kevin Young.

Recommended commendation: Jacob Betz et al., "Life in Industrial America," David Hochfelder, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Printing, 2018).

Pictures of the Industrial Revolution Fashion for Women in the Industrial Revolution

I. Introduction

Ii. Industrialization & Technological Innovation

III. Clearing and Urbanization

IV. The New South and the Trouble of Race

Five. Gender, Religion, and Culture

VI. Conclusion

Seven. Chief Sources

VIII. Reference Material

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