Urbanization
The romance of the appeal to what Richard Hofstadter called "the agrarian myth" was the pervasive belief that life "lived in close communion with beneficent nature" had by very definition "a wholesomeness and integrity impossible for the depraved populations of cities". This had long been part of American folklore, which recalled visions of the frontier, of a pristine, open land quite different from the dirt and teeming life of contemporary urban society.
The steady movement of rural dwellers to urban industrial areas and ever-increasing numbers of immigrants provided business owners a constant source of cheap labor, willing to work under the most deplorable of conditions. In the 1870s, workers did not yet organize; when they finally did, their unions were not sanctioned or protected by the federal government until decades later, in the 1930s.
In the new industrial order, the city was the nerve center, bringing to a focus all the nation’s dynamic economic forces: vast accumulations of capital, business, and financial institutions, spreading railroad yards, smoky factories, armies of manual and clerical workers. Villages, attracting people from the countryside and from lands across the sea, grew into towns and towns into cities almost overnight. In 1830 only one of every 15 Americans lived in communities of 8,000 or more; in 1860 the ratio was nearly one in every six; and in 1890 three in every 10. No single city had as many as a million inhabitants in 1860; but 30 years later New York had a million and a half; Chicago, Illinois, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, each had over a million. In these three decades, Philadelphia and Baltimore, Maryland, doubled in population; Kansas City, Missouri, and Detroit, Michigan, grew fourfold; Cleveland, Ohio, sixfold; Chicago, tenfold. Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Omaha, Nebraska, and many communities like them — hamlets when the Civil War began — increased 50 times or more in population.
With electricity to power machinery, it became possible to redesign the organization of factories to create an integrated flow of work (assembly lines) to take advantage of a larger number of workers in one location. Larger factories were located in cities where labor was more plentiful. And cities were disproportionately the home of immigrants. Even in 1850, when only 15% of the American population lived in cities, more than one-third of the population of most large American cities was foreign born. Assuming that second generation immigrants (the children of immigrants) were as numerous as the foreign born, it seems reasonable to conclude that almost all large American cities were predominantly composed of immigrants and their children as early as 1850.
Unlike farm families that were largely self sufficient in food and made most of their clothing, urban families needed to purchase everything in the market. The large and growing urban populations, primarily fueled by immigration throughout the second half of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, created a huge demand for the increased production of the emerging industrial sector.
The avoidance of large cities, and industrial employment, by old stock white Americans who were reared in rural areas and small towns was probably reinforced by popular culture. For most of American history, cities, where most immigrants settled, were derided and feared as places filled with dangerous people and radical ideas. Popular beliefs about the natural superiority of a rural way of life were intertwined with ethnic stereotypes of urban residents and the corruption of people who moved to cities. These stereotypes probably discouraged the children of farmers in the late 19th century and early 20th century from migrating to cities and taking the unskilled jobs in the industrial economy.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
