American Society in the Industrial Age

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American Society in the Industrial Age
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African Americans Post Reconstruction

• Army removed, Southern states govern to oppress
  African-Americans
• Hall v. DeCuir (1877)
• Civil Rights Cases (1883)
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
• Separate but equal
• Booker T. Washington
• Tuskegee Institute
• Atlanta Compromise
• Voting restrictions
• Poll taxes, Literacy tests, Grandfather clauses

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Native Americans

• Plains Indians and the Buffalo
• Destruction of the Buffalo
• Pacification of native Americans
• Concentration Strategy
• Reservations
• Dawes Severalty Act (1887)
• Helen Hunt Jackson A Century of Dishonor (1881)
• Wounded Knee (1890)
• Ghost Dance

4
New Immigration

• Between 1866-1915 about 25 million immigrated to
  the US
• Steam liner - passage safer, quicker and cheaper
• Industrialization opportunity
• Farming market in Europe crashed
• Mainly from Southern Eastern Europe
• Italy, Croatia, Poland, Russia
• Catholic, Jews

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Once They Arrived

• Ellis Island (1892)
• Processed 12 million people in 60 years
• Pass the test
• Immigrants were inspected and interviewed
• Criminals or mentally deficient people were
  generally the ones to go
• Not many rejected maybe one in fifty
• Often names were butchered by over-worked customs
  officials and family names lost.

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Ellis IslandThe Gateway to America
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Angel Island

• Located in San Francisco, CA
• The Ellis Island of the West
• Predominantly Chinese emigrants

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Growth of cities

• Cities become overcrowded
• Sanitation issues
• sewers couldnt keep up
• Garbage couldnt be picked up fast enough
• City waterways became polluted from sewage
• Tuberculosis became common
• Housing
• Overcrowded
• No indoor sanitation, so people relieved
  themselves in outhouses in court yards
• The smell was unbearable
• Jacob Riis Wrote How the Other Half Lives
• Crime
• Conditions led to violence
• Street gangs formed from juvenile delinquents

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Ethnic Neighborhoods

• Most immigrants created/moved into ethnic based
  communities upon arrival.
• WHY?

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• Life in urban centers meant filth, poverty, and
  the rampant spreading of disease.
• Early organized crime emerged
• Ethnic neighborhoods abounded

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Nativist Reaction

• Nativists did not appreciate the influx of
  immigrants
• Cities are already too crowded
• Feared low wage workers
• Radicalism in the wake of the Haymarket bombing
• Congress passed a literacy test in 1897 for
  immigrants upon arrival
• vetoed by President Cleveland

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City Improvements

• Once the connection was made between filth and
  disease efforts were made to clean things up
• Streets were paved
• Streetlights
• Trolleys improved public transport in the late
  1800s
• These streetcars made it easier for the area of
  the city to increase. More folks could live in
  the suburbs
• Suspension bridges increased traffic flows to the
  suburbs as well
• Brooklyn Bridge (1883) connected Manhattan to
  Brooklyn

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Labor Problems

• Long Work Days
• Low pay
• Poor working conditions
• Industrial accidents
• Dissatisfaction with work Monotony
• No benefits/sick leave/vacation
• Child Labor

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Working Women

• Worked more and more outside the home
• Textile mills employed a large of women
• Paid lower wages than men

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Upward Mobility

• American Dream - believed society offered
  opportunity
• White collar jobs offered this
• Public Education system
• Work Ethic
• Rags to riches stories were rare
• Horatio Alger

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Labor Movements

• Labor begins to organize to combat industrialists
• Boycotts
• Picketing
• Strikes
• Great Railroad Strike (1877)
• Haymarket Square (1886)
• Homestead Steel Strike (1892)
• Pullman Strike (1894)
• Coal Strike (1902)

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Knights of Labor

• Led By Terence Powderly
• Open to unskilled workers artisans
• Open to minorities, women, immigrants
• What did they want?
• Eight-hour workday
• Workers cooperatives.
• Worker-owned factories.
• Abolition of child and prison labor.
• Increased circulation of greenbacks.
• Equal pay for men and women.
• Safety codes in the workplace.
• Prohibition of contract foreign labor.

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End of Knights of Labor

• Haymarket Square
• unions violence strikes socialists
  immigrants anarchists
• Americans turned against labor as a result

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American Federation of Labor (AFL) - 1886

• Led by Samuel Gompers
• Catered to the skilled worker.
• Understood workers would remain working class
• Promoted pride in being a worker
• Pushed for 8 hour days
• Workers safety laws
• Maintained a national strike fund.
• Mediated disputes between management and labor.

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Religious Answers to the Poor

• Urban religious leaders
• Asked what caused the problems with slums
• Henry Ward Beecher liquor and tobacco
• Catholics aided poor but blamed their conditions
  on their sins
• Did not recognizing the connection of living
  conditions and poverty

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Social Gospel

• Social Gospel Some preachers believed slum
  conditions caused sin and crimes
• Focused on improving living conditions rather
  than saving souls
• Believed people must have enough to eat and
  decent living conditions to behave properly
• Believed in civil service reform, child labor
  laws, regulation of corporations, and taxing the
  wealthy

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Reformers

• Settlement Houses
• Located in poor districts provided guidance and
  services to the poor
• Workers were young idealists
• Some men, but many women fresh from college
• Hull House 1889 Chicago
• Founded by Jane Addams

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Reformers

• Henry George Progress and Poverty
• Believed that those who create should reap the
  benefits
• Disturbed by land owners profiting from workers
• Believed that land should belong to all humanity.
• Felt land owners should be heavily taxed
• His book is critical of the mal distribution of
  wealth
• Edward Bellamy Looking Backward
• Believed in the socialization of America
• Book set in year 2000. America is socialist
  society
• Popular in underground circles