Openstax Us History 1876 to Present Review Answer Key

Learning Objectives

Past the finish of this section, you will be able to:

• Place how each class of Americans—working class, middle class, and upper class—responded to the challenges associated with urban life
• Explain the process of machine politics and how it brought relief to working-course Americans

Settlement houses and religious and civic organizations attempted to provide some support to working-class city dwellers through free wellness care, education, and leisure opportunities. However, for urban citizens, life in the urban center was chaotic and challenging. Merely how that chaos manifested and how relief was sought differed greatly, depending on where people were in the social caste—the working grade, the upper class, or the newly emerging professional heart class—in addition to the same issues of race and ethnicity. While many communities institute life in the largest American cities disorganized and overwhelming, the ways they answered these challenges were as diverse as the people who lived there. Broad solutions emerged that were typically class specific: The rising of motorcar politics and pop culture provided relief to the working class, higher education opportunities and suburbanization benefitted the professional middle class, and reminders of their elite status gave condolement to the upper course. And everyone, no matter where they fell in the class system, benefited from the efforts to improve the physical landscapes of the fast-growing urban environment.

THE LIFE AND STRUGGLES OF THE URBAN WORKING CLASS

For the working-class residents of America's cities, ane practical way of coping with the challenges of urban life was to take advantage of the system of car politics, while another was to seek relief in the variety of popular culture and entertainment institute in and around cities. Although neither of these forms of relief was restricted to the working grade, they were the ones who relied most heavily on them.

Machine Politics

The master form of relief for working-course urban Americans, and peculiarly immigrants, came in the form of machine politics. This phrase referred to the process by which every citizen of the city, no thing their ethnicity or race, was a ward resident with an alderman who spoke on their behalf at city hall. When everyday challenges arose, whether sanitation problems or the need for a sidewalk along a muddy route, citizens would approach their alderman to find a solution. The aldermen knew that, rather than work through the long bureaucratic process associated with city hall, they could work inside the "machine" of local politics to find a speedy, mutually benign solution. In machine politics, favors were exchanged for votes, votes were given in exchange for fast solutions, and the toll of the solutions included a kickback to the dominate. In the short term, everyone got what they needed, merely the process was neither transparent nor democratic, and it was an inefficient way of conducting the metropolis's business.

One example of a machine political organisation was the Democratic political car Tammany Hall in New York, run by machine dominate William Tweed with help from George Washington Plunkitt (Figure 19.ten). There, citizens knew their immediate issues would exist addressed in return for their promise of political support in future elections. In this way, machines provided timely solutions for citizens and votes for the politicians. For example, if in Little Italy there was a desperate need for sidewalks in order to improve traffic to the stores on a detail street, the request would likely become bogged downward in the bureaucratic red tape at metropolis hall. Instead, store owners would approach the machine. A commune captain would approach the "dominate" and make him enlightened of the problem. The boss would contact metropolis politicians and strongly urge them to advisable the needed funds for the sidewalk in exchange for the hope that the dominate would direct votes in their favor in the upcoming election. The boss then used the funds to pay one of his friends for the sidewalk construction, typically at an exorbitant cost, with a financial kickback to the boss, which was known as graft. The sidewalk was built more than quickly than anyone hoped, in commutation for the citizens' promises to vote for machine-supported candidates in the next elections. Despite its corrupt nature, Tammany Hall substantially ran New York politics from the 1850s until the 1930s. Other large cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Kansas City, made utilize of political machines likewise.

Figure 19.10 This political cartoon depicts the control of Dominate Tweed, of Tammany Hall, over the ballot procedure in New York. Why were people willing to accept the corruption involved in car politics?

Pop Culture and Entertainment

Working-class residents also found relief in the diverse and omnipresent offerings of popular civilisation and entertainment in and effectually cities. These offerings provided an immediate escape from the squalor and difficulties of everyday life. As improved ways of internal transportation developed, working-grade residents could escape the city and experience one of the popular new forms of amusement—the amusement park. For case, Coney Island on the Brooklyn shoreline consisted of several unlike amusement parks, the beginning of which opened in 1895 (Figure xix.xi). At these parks, New Yorkers enjoyed wild rides, beast attractions, and big phase productions designed to help them forget the struggles of their working-solar day lives. Freak "side" shows fed the public'due south marvel about physical deviance. For a mere 10 cents, spectators could watch a high-diving horse, have a ride to the moon to picket moon maidens consume light-green cheese, or witness the electrocution of an elephant, a spectacle that fascinated the public both with technological marvels and exotic wild fauna. The treatment of animals in many acts at Coney Island and other public entertainment parks drew the attention of middle-grade reformers such equally the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Despite questions regarding the propriety of many of the acts, other cities quickly followed New York's lead with like, if smaller, versions of Coney Isle'south attractions.

Figure nineteen.11 The Dreamland Entertainment Park tower was just one of Coney Isle'south amusements.

Click and Explore

The Coney Island History Project shows a photographic history of Coney Island. Await to see what elements of American civilization, from the hot dog to the roller coaster, debuted there.

Some other common grade of popular entertainment was vaudeville—large stage variety shows that included everything from singing, dancing, and one-act acts to alive animals and magic. The vaudeville circuit gave rise to several prominent performers, including magician Harry Houdini, who began his career in these multifariousness shows earlier his fame propelled him to solo acts. In addition to live theater shows, it was primarily working-class citizens who enjoyed the advent of the nickelodeon, a forerunner to the motion-picture show theater. The first nickelodeon opened in Pittsburgh in 1905, where nigh i hundred visitors packed into a storefront theater to come across a traditional vaudeville show interspersed with one-minute motion picture clips. Several theaters initially used the films as "chasers" to indicate the end of the show to the live audience so they would articulate the auditorium. Nevertheless, a vaudeville performers' strike generated even greater interest in the films, eventually resulting in the ascent of modernistic motion-picture show theaters by 1910.

Ane other major form of amusement for the working class was professional baseball (Figure 19.12). Lodge teams transformed into professional baseball game teams with the Cincinnati Ruddy Stockings, now the Cincinnati Reds, in 1869. Soon, professional teams sprang up in several major American cities. Baseball game games provided an inexpensive class of amusement, where for less than a dollar, a person could bask a double-header, ii hot dogs, and a beer. But more importantly, the teams became a manner for newly relocated Americans and immigrants of diverse backgrounds to develop a unified civic identity, all cheering for 1 squad. By 1876, the National League had formed, and soon afterwards, cathedral-way ballparks began to jump up in many cities. Fenway Park in Boston (1912), Forbes Field in Pittsburgh (1909), and the Polo Grounds in New York (1890) all became touch points where working-grade Americans came together to support a common cause.

Figure 19.12 Boston's Fenway Park opened in 1912 and was a popular site for working-course Bostonians to spend their leisure time. The "Greenish Monster," the iconic, left field wall, makes it one of the almost recognizable stadiums in baseball today.

Other popular sports included prize-fighting, which attracted a predominantly male, working- and middle-class audience who lived vicariously through the triumphs of the boxers during a fourth dimension where opportunities for private success were chop-chop shrinking, and college football, which paralleled a modernistic corporation in its team bureaucracy, divisions of duties, and emphasis on time direction.

THE UPPER CLASS IN THE CITIES

The American financial aristocracy did not need to oversupply into cities to detect piece of work, similar their working-course counterparts. Merely as urban centers were vital business organization cores, where multi-million-dollar fiscal deals were made daily, those who worked in that world wished to remain close to the action. The rich chose to be in the midst of the chaos of the cities, but they were also able to provide significant measures of comfort, convenience, and luxury for themselves.

Wealthy citizens seldom attended what they considered the crass entertainment of the working form. Instead of entertainment parks and baseball game games, urban elites sought out more than refined pastimes that underscored their knowledge of art and civilisation, preferring classical music concerts, fine fine art collections, and social gatherings with their peers. In New York, Andrew Carnegie built Carnegie Hall in 1891, which rapidly became the centre of classical music performances in the country. Nearby, the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art opened its doors in 1872 and still remains one of the largest collections of fine art in the globe. Other cities followed adjust, and these cultural pursuits became a mode for the upper grade to remind themselves of their elevated place amid urban squalor.

Every bit new opportunities for the eye class threatened the austerity of upper-class citizens, including the newer forms of transportation that allowed middle-class Americans to travel with greater ease, wealthier Americans sought unique means to further set themselves apart in society. These included more expensive excursions, such every bit vacations in Newport, Rhode Island, winter relocation to sunny Florida, and frequent trips aboard steamships to Europe. For those who were non of the highly respected "old money," but merely recently obtained their riches through business ventures, the relief they sought came in the grade of one book—the almanac Social Annals . First published in 1886 by Louis Keller in New York Urban center, the register became a directory of the wealthy socialites who populated the urban center. Keller updated it annually, and people would watch with varying degrees of anxiety or complacency to come across their names appear in print. Too called the Blue Book, the register was instrumental in the planning of guild dinners, balls, and other social events. For those of newer wealth, there was relief found simply in the notion that they and others witnessed their wealth through the publication of their names in the register.

A NEW MIDDLE CLASS

While the working class were bars to tenement houses in the cities by their need to be close to their piece of work and the lack of funds to find anyplace better, and the wealthy class chose to remain in the cities to stay close to the action of big business organization transactions, the emerging middle form responded to urban challenges with their own solutions. This group included the managers, salesmen, engineers, doctors, accountants, and other salaried professionals who still worked for a living, but were significantly meliorate educated and compensated than the working-class poor. For this new middle form, relief from the trials of the cities came through education and suburbanization.

In large role, the middle course responded to the challenges of the urban center by physically escaping information technology. As transportation improved and outlying communities connected to urban centers, the eye class embraced a new blazon of customs—the suburbs. Information technology became possible for those with adequate means to work in the urban center and escape each evening, past way of a train or trolley, to a business firm in the suburbs. As the number of people moving to the suburbs grew, there also grew a perception among the middle form that the farther one lived from the city and the more amenities i had, the more abundance one had achieved.

Although a few suburbs existed in the United states prior to the 1880s (such every bit Llewellyn Park, New Jersey), the introduction of the electric railway generated greater interest and growth during the last decade of the century. The ability to travel from abode to work on a relatively quick and cheap way of transportation encouraged more Americans of modest means to consider living abroad from the anarchy of the city. Somewhen, Henry Ford'due south popularization of the automobile, specifically in terms of a lower price, permitted more families to own cars and thus consider suburban life. Subsequently in the twentieth century, both the appearance of the interstate highway system, along with federal legislation designed to allow families to construct homes with low-involvement loans, further sparked the suburban phenomenon.

New Roles for Middle-Class Women

Social norms of the day encouraged centre-class women to take great pride in creating a positive domicile environs for their working husbands and schoolhouse-age children, which reinforced the business and educational principles that they good on the job or in school. It was at this fourth dimension that the magazines Ladies' Home Journal and Skilful Housekeeping began distribution, to tremendous popularity (Figure 19.13).

Figure 19.thirteen The heart-class family of the belatedly nineteenth century largely embraced a separation of gendered spheres that had commencement emerged during the marketplace revolution of the antebellum years. Whereas the married man earned money for the family outside the home, the married woman oversaw domestic chores, raised the children, and tended to the family unit's spiritual, social, and cultural needs. The mag Skilful Housekeeping, launched in 1885, capitalized on the center-form woman'due south focus on maintaining a pride-worthy home.

While the vast majority of middle-grade women took on the expected role of housewife and homemaker, some women were finding paths to higher. A pocket-size number of men'southward colleges began to open up their doors to women in the mid-1800s, and co-education became an option. Some of the almost elite universities created affiliated women's colleges, such as Radcliffe College with Harvard, and Pembroke College with Brown University. But more importantly, the offset women'south colleges opened at this time. Mountain Holyoke, Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley Colleges, still some of the all-time known women's schools, opened their doors betwixt 1865 and 1880, and, although enrollment was low (initial class sizes ranged from lx-one students at Vassar to seventy at Wellesley, seventy-one at Smith, and upward to eighty-eight at Mount Holyoke), the opportunity for a higher educational activity, and even a career, began to emerge for young women. These schools offered a unique, all-women environment in which professors and a community of education-seeking immature women came together. While almost higher-educated young women still married, their education offered them new opportunities to work outside the home, most ofttimes equally teachers, professors, or in the same settlement house environments created past Jane Addams and others.

Educational activity and the Middle Class

Since the children of the professional person class did not have to get out school and observe work to support their families, they had opportunities for education and advocacy that would solidify their position in the middle class. They also benefited from the presence of stay-at-home mothers, different working-class children, whose mothers typically worked the same long hours as their fathers. Public school enrollment exploded at this time, with the number of students attending public school tripling from seven million in 1870 to twenty-one meg in 1920. Dissimilar the old-fashioned one-room schoolhouses, larger schools slowly began the do of employing different teachers for each grade, and some fifty-fifty began hiring discipline-specific instructors. High schools also grew at this time, from one hundred high schools nationally in 1860 to over six grand by 1900.

The federal government supported the growth of higher instruction with the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. These laws ready aside public land and federal funds to create state-grant colleges that were affordable to middle-class families, offering courses and degrees useful in the professions, only besides in trade, commerce, industry, and agriculture (Effigy 19.14). Land-grant colleges stood in contrast to the expensive, private Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale, which notwithstanding catered to the aristocracy. Iowa became the first state to accept the provisions of the original Morrill Act, creating what later became Iowa Land University. Other states presently followed adapt, and the availability of an affordable college education encouraged a heave in enrollment, from 50,000 students nationwide in 1870 to over 600,000 students past 1920.

Figure 19.14 This rendering of Kansas Country University in 1878 shows an early country-grant college, created past the Morrill Act. These newly created schools allowed many more students to attend college than the elite Ivy League organisation, and focused more on preparing them for professional careers in business organisation, medicine, and law, likewise equally business, agriculture, and other trades.

College curricula also inverse at this fourth dimension. Students grew less probable to take traditional liberal arts classes in rhetoric, philosophy, and strange language, and instead focused on preparing for the modern work world. Professional schools for the written report of medicine, law, and business likewise developed. In brusk, pedagogy for the children of middle-form parents catered to class-specific interests and helped ensure that parents could establish their children comfortably in the middle class equally well.

"CITY BEAUTIFUL"

While the working poor lived in the worst of it and the wealthy elite sought to avoid information technology, all metropolis dwellers at the time had to deal with the harsh realities of urban sprawl. Skyscrapers rose and filled the air, streets were crowded with pedestrians of all sorts, and, every bit developers worked to meet the always-increasing demand for space, the few remaining dark-green spaces in the city speedily disappeared. Equally the U.S. population became increasingly centered in urban areas while the century drew to a close, questions most the quality of city life—particularly with regard to problems of aesthetics, criminal offense, and poverty—speedily consumed many reformers' minds. Those middle-form and wealthier urbanites who enjoyed the costlier amenities presented by city life—including theaters, restaurants, and shopping—were gratis to escape to the suburbs, leaving behind the poorer working classes living in squalor and unsanitary conditions. Through the Metropolis Cute motility, leaders such as Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham sought to champion centre- and upper-grade progressive reforms. They improved the quality of life for urban center dwellers, simply also cultivated middle-class-dominated urban spaces in which Americans of different ethnicities, racial origins, and classes worked and lived.

Olmsted, ane of the primeval and most influential designers of urban dark-green space, and the original designer of Cardinal Park in New York, worked with Burnham to innovate the idea of the City Beautiful movement at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. There, they helped to design and construct the "White Metropolis"—so named for the plaster of Paris construction of several buildings that were subsequently painted a brilliant white—an example of landscaping and architecture that shone as an example of perfect city planning. From wide-open greenish spaces to brightly painted white buildings, connected with modernistic transportation services and appropriate sanitation, the "White City" set the phase for American urban city planning for the next generation, beginning in 1901 with the modernization of Washington, DC. This model encouraged metropolis planners to consider three principal tenets: Kickoff, create larger park areas inside cities; 2d, build wider boulevards to decrease traffic congestion and allow for lines of copse and other greenery between lanes; and third, add more suburbs in guild to mitigate congested living in the city itself (Figure 19.xv). As each city adapted these principles in various ways, the City Beautiful movement became a cornerstone of urban development well into the twentieth century.

Figure 19.xv This blueprint shows Burnham's vision for Chicago, an example of the City Beautiful movement. His goal was to preserve much of the green space along the metropolis's lakefront, and to ensure that all city dwellers had access to green space.

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Source: https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/19-3-relief-from-the-chaos-of-urban-life

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