APUSH Textbook Chapter 18

The Victorians Make the Modern
18
C H A P T E R
1880–1917
W
COMMERCE AND hen Philadelphia hosted the IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA
CULTURE 1876 Centennial Exposition, How did the changes wrought by
Consumer Spaces Americans weren’t sure what industrialization shape Americans’
Masculinity and the Rise to expect from their first world’s fair — identities, beliefs, and culture?
of Sports including what foods exhibitors would
The Great Outdoors offer. One cartoonist humorously proposed that Russians would serve castor oil, Arabs
would bring camel’s milk punch, and Germans would offer beer. Reflecting widespread
WOMEN, MEN, AND THE
SOLITUDE OF SELF racial prejudices, the cartoon showed Chinese men selling “hashed cat” and “rat pie.”
In reality, though, the 1876 Exposition offered only plain lunchrooms and, for the
Changes in Family Life
wealthiest visitors, expensive French fare.
Education
By the early twentieth century, American food had undergone a revolution. Visitors
From Domesticity to Women’s
to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 could try food from Scandinavia, India, and the
Rights
Philippines. Across the United States, Chinese American restaurants flourished as a chop
SCIENCE AND FAITH suey craze swept the nation. New Yorkers could sample Hungarian and Syrian cuisine;
Darwinism and Its Critics a San Francisco journalist enthusiastically reviewed local Mexican and Japanese restau-
Realism in the Arts rants. Even small-town diners could often find an Italian or German meal.
Religion: Diversity and What had happened? Americans had certainly not lost all their prejudices: while
Innovation plates of chop suey were being gobbled up, laws excluding Chinese immigrants remained
firmly in place. Industrialization reshaped class identities, however, and promoted a cre-
ative consumer culture. In the great cities, amusement parks and vaudeville theaters
catered to industrial workers (Chapter 19). Other institutions served middle-class cus-
tomers who wanted novelty and variety at a reasonable price. A Victorian ethos of self-
restraint and moral uplift gave way to expectations of leisure and fun. As African Amer-
icans and women claimed a right to public spaces — to shop, dine, and travel freely — they
built powerful reform movements. At the same time, the new pressures faced by profes-
sional men led to aggressive calls for masculine fitness, exemplified by the rise of sports.
Stunning scientific discoveries — from dinosaur fossils to distant galaxies — also chal-
lenged long-held beliefs. Faced with electricity, medical vaccines, and other wonders,
Americans celebrated technological solutions to human problems. But while science
gained popularity, religion hardly faded. In fact, religious diversity grew, as immigrants
brought new faiths and Protestants responded with innovations of their own. Ameri-
cans found themselves living in a modern world — one in which their grandparents’
beliefs and ways of life no longer seemed to apply. In a market-driven society that
claimed to champion individual freedom, Americans took advantage of new ideas while
expressing anxiety over the accompanying upheavals and risks.
574
Chicago Department Store Advertisement, 1893 In the same year that the Chicago World’s
Columbian Exhibition offered an array of dazzling experiences for visitors, the city’s Siegel-Cooper
Department Store did the same for consumers who could afford to shop in its halls. Note the many types
of goods and services offered in its “Sixty-Five Complete Departments,” from meat and groceries to
medical and legal advice. What evidence, here, shows the types of customers the store sought to attract,
inviting them to say, “I’ll meet you at the Fountain”? How did the store encourage shoppers to linger?
Chicago History Museum.
575
576 PART 6 INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA: UPHEAVALS AND EXPERIMENTS, 1877–1917
Even working-class Americans enjoyed cheaper

Commerce and Culture products delivered by global trade and mass produc-
tion, from bananas and cigarettes to colorful dime
As the United States industrialized, the terms middle
novels and magazines. Edison’s moving pictures, for
class and working class came widely into use. Americans
example, first found popularity among the urban work-
adopted these broad identities not only in the work-
ing class (Chapter 19). Consumer culture appeared, at
place but also in their leisure time. Professionals and
least, to be democratic: anyone should be able to eat at
corporate managers prospered; they and their families
a restaurant or buy a rail ticket for the “ladies’ car” — as
enjoyed rising income and an array of tempting ways
long as she or he could pay. In practice, though, this
to spend their dollars. Celebrating these new techno-
was not the case, and consumer venues became sites of
logical wonders, Americans hailed inventors as heroes.
struggle over class inequality, race privilege, and proper
The most famous, Thomas Edison, operated an inde-
male and female behavior.
pendent laboratory rather than working for a corpora-
tion. Edison, like many of the era’s businessmen, was a
shrewd entrepreneur who focused on commercial suc-
cess. He and his colleagues helped introduce such Consumer Spaces
lucrative products as the incandescent lightbulb and America’s public spaces — from election polls to
the phonograph, which came widely into use in Ameri- saloons and circus shows — had long been boisterous
can homes. and male-centered. A woman who ventured there
Pacific Railway Poster, c. 1900

This color lithograph emphasized
the family atmosphere of the rail-
road’s Pullman Palace Dining Cars.
Pullman, a Chicago-based manufac-
turer, became a household name by
providing high-class sleeping and
dining cars to the nation’s railroads.
Such advertisements invited prosper-
ous Americans to make themselves
“at home” in public, commercial
spaces that were safe and comfort-
able for respectable women and
children. Note that all the passen-
gers are white, and the waiters
black. Work as a railroad waiter or
porter was one of the better-paid,
more prestigious jobs available to
African American men. Demands
for segregated rail cars often
focused on the alleged threat
that black men might pose to
white women — while, at the
same time, such men and
women regularly came in con-
tact as railroad employees and
passengers. Wisconsin Historical
Society.
CHAPTER 18 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 577
without a male chaperone risked damaging her reputa- 1876, entrepreneurs introduced
EXPLAIN
tion. But the rise of new businesses encouraged change. the device for business use, but it
CONSEQUENCES
To attract an eager public, purveyors of consumer cul- soon found eager residential cus- How did new consumer
ture invited women and families, especially those of tomers. Telephones changed eti- practices, arising from
the middle class, to linger in department stores and quette and social relations for industrialization, reshape
enjoy new amusements. middle-class suburban women — Americans’ gender, class,
No one promoted commercial domesticity more while providing their working- and race relationships?
successfully than showman P. T. Barnum (1810–1891), class counterparts with new
who used the country’s expanding rail network to employment options (Thinking Like a Historian, p. 578).
develop his famous traveling circus. Barnum con- Railroads also reflected the emerging privileges of
demned earlier circus managers who had opened their professional families. Finding prosperous Americans
tents to “the rowdy element.” Proclaiming children as eager for excursions, railroad companies, like depart-
his key audience, he created family entertainment for ment stores, made things comfortable for middle-class
diverse audiences (though in the South, black audi- women and children. Boston’s South Terminal Station
ences sat in segregated seats or attended separate boasted of its modern amenities, including “everything
shows). He promised middle-class parents that his cir- that the traveler needs down to cradles in which the
cus would teach children courage and promote the baby may be soothed.” An 1882 tourist guide promised
benefits of exercise. To encourage women’s attendance, readers that they could live on the Pacific Railroad
Barnum emphasized the respectability and refinement “with as much true enjoyment as the home drawing
of his female performers. room.” Rail cars manufactured by the famous Pullman
Department stores also lured middle-class women Company of Chicago set a national standard for taste
by offering tearooms, children’s play areas, umbrellas, and elegance. Fitted with rich carpets, upholstery, and
and clerks to wrap and carry every purchase. Store woodwork, Pullman cars embodied the growing pros-
credit plans enabled well-to-do women to shop with- perity of America’s elite, influencing trends in home
out handling money in public. Such tactics succeeded decor. Part of their appeal was the chance for people of
so well that New York’s department store district became modest means to emulate the rich. An experienced
known as Ladies’ Mile. Boston department store mag- train conductor observed that the wives of grocers, not
nate William Filene called the department store an millionaires, were the ones most likely to “sweep . . . into
“Adamless Eden.” a parlor car as if the very carpet ought to feel highly
These Edens were for the elite and middle class. honored by their tread.”
Though bargain basements and neighborhood stores First-class “ladies’ cars” soon became sites of
served working-class families, big department stores struggle for racial equality. For three decades after the
enlisted vagrancy laws and police to discourage the end of the Civil War, state laws and railroad regula-
“wrong kind” from entering. Working-class women tions varied, and African Americans often succeeded
gained access primarily as clerks, cashiers, and cash in securing seats. One reformer noted, however, “There
girls, who at age twelve or younger served as internal are few ordeals more nerve-wracking than the one
store messengers, carrying orders and change for $1.50 which confronts a colored woman when she tries to
a week. The department store was no Eden for these secure a Pullman reservation in the South and even in
women, who worked long hours on their feet, often some parts of the North.” When they claimed first-class
dealing with difficult customers. Nevertheless, many seats, black women often faced confrontations with
clerks claimed their own privileges as shoppers, mak- conductors, resulting in numerous lawsuits in the
ing enthusiastic use of employee discounts and battling 1870s and 1880s. Riding the Chesapeake & Ohio line
employers for the right to wear their fashionable pur- in 1884, young African American journalist Ida B.
chases while they worked in the store. Wells was told to leave. “I refused,” she wrote later, “say-
In similar ways, class status was marked by the ing that the [nearest alternative] car was a smoker, and
ways technology entered American homes. The rise of as I was in the ladies’ car, I proposed to stay.” Wells
electricity, in particular, marked the gap between afflu- resisted, but the conductor and a baggage handler
ent urban consumers and rural and working-class fam- threw her bodily off the train. Returning home to
ilies. In elite houses, domestic servants began to use — Memphis, Wells sued and won in local courts, but
or find themselves replaced by — an array of new devices, Tennessee’s supreme court reversed the ruling.
from washing machines to vacuum cleaners. When In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court settled such issues
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in decisively — but not justly. The case, Plessy v. Ferguson,
THINKING LIKE
A HISTORIAN
New consumer technologies often had different impacts on working-class and

America Picks Up rural Americans than they did on the prosperous elite and the middle class. The
documents below also suggest some of the ways that telephone use reflected
the Telephone new expectations about women’s roles in the home, workplace, and society.
1. “Hello Ma Baby” sheet music cover and lyrics, 2. “The Perfect Operator,” Saturday Evening Post,
1899. This popular music hit, this song was written July 12, 1930. Katherine Schmitt opened the New
in the voice of an African American man to his girl. York Operator’s School in 1902. Looking back later,
The man’s tuxedo is a bit disheveled; in 1899, most she described the qualities sought in operators.
white Americans would have assumed he wore What does this document tell us about the values
it for waiting tables or other service work. The of the emerging corporate workplace?
woman wears a dressing gown — not how a [The operator] must now be made as nearly as possible
respectable lady would want to appear. Nonethe- a paragon of perfection, a kind of human machine, the
less, the racial depiction here is more modern than exponent of speed and courtesy; a creature spirited
those of old-fashioned minstrel shows. The song’s enough to move like chain lightning, and with perfect
chorus appears below. What changing expectations accuracy; docile enough to deny herself the sweet privi-
does it convey about courtship and dating? lege of the last word. She must assume that the subscriber
is always right, and even when she knows he is not, her
only comeback must be: “Excuse it please,” in the same
smiling voice.
3. “The Mischievous Telephone Girl Makes More

Trouble,” Wheeling Register, West Virginia, Octo-
ber 26, 1884. Early operators had to speak to each
caller and manually connect the call. Newspapers
in the 1880s featured many stories like this one.
Telephone companies predominantly hired young
white native-born women as operators, or “hello
girls.” Many such employees came from the work-
ing class.
The girl had been asleep a long time, when somebody
called. Looking at the switch board, she observed that
No. 1,111 was down, and leisurely raised the phone to her
ear. . . . “Hello! . . . You bald headed old sinner! What do
you want?”
“Dr. Highflyer. No. 2,222.”
“Hello!”
“Hello, Highflyer! My wife is not very well to-night.
She has a severe pain in the back of her neck, and com-
Courtesy of the E. Azalia Hackley Collection of Negro Music, Dance and
Drama, Detroit Public Library. plains of a sort of goneness in the abdomen. . . . What
shall I do for her?”
Hello! ma Baby, Hello! ma honey, Hello! ma ragtime Here the wicked telephone girl switched on a machin-
gal, ist who was telling the owner of a saw mill what he
Send me a kiss by wire, Baby, my heart’s on fire! thought ailed his boiler and the answer . . . was as follows:
If you refuse me, honey, you’ll lose me, then you’ll be “I think she’s covered with scales inside about an inch
left alone; thick. Let her cool down during the night, and before she
Oh baby, telephone, and tell me I’m your own. fires up in the morning, take a hammer and pound her
578
350
300
Telephones per 1000 residents
250
Palo Alto
200
150
San Rafael
100
Antioch
50
0
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
Based on Figure 9 from A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, by Claude S. Fischer (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992). Copyright © 1992 by The Regents of the University of California. Used by permission of the University of California Press.
thoroughly all over, and then take a hose and hitch it on excuse for telephoning an invitation when time is not
the fire plug and wash her out.” an object, or when the person invited is not an intimate
. . . The result is that No. 1,111 does not now speak to friend.
No. 2,222, and Dr. Highflyer has had the telephone taken
out of his house. 6. Bell Telephone advertisement, 1910. The text from
this ad was accompanied by a picture of a young
4. Estimated residential telephones in three California woman on the telephone with young men and
locations, 1900–1940 (top of page). Palo Alto was women in a room behind her, dancing.
an affluent university town. Antioch was working- For Social Arrangements: The informal invitation which
class. San Rafael had a mixed economy, including comes over the phone is generally the most welcome. The
some industry; it served increasingly as a bedroom Bell service makes it possible to arrange delightful social
community for San Francisco professionals. affairs at the last moment. . . .
5. Telephone etiquette from “A Woman of Fashion,” For Impromptu Invitations: The easiest way to get up an
1898. At the turn of the century, etiquette authori- informal party, quickly, is by telephone.
ties began grudgingly to acknowledge the role of
telephones in social life. Do you notice any contra-
dictions in the advice below? Sources: (2) Venus Green, Race on the Line (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001), 67; (3) Wheeling Register, October 26, 1884; (5) Etiquette for Americans (New
Invitations by telephone, for anything other than infor- York: Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1898), 59, 70–71; (6) Claude S. Fischer, America Calling
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 184.
mal engagements . . . are hopelessly vulgar. They should
be the last resort. Invitations to bicycle or to play golf may
be transmitted in this way, and the telephone is a blessing ANALYZING THE EVIDENCE
often in adjusting details, or making explanations; but for
1. Consider the audience for each of these sources. Who
most social matters the use of the telephone is question- was intended to read, view, or listen to it? What mes-
able, at best. Many women will stand with aching feet and sage does it convey?
irritated brow at a telephone for half an hour rather than 2. Sources 2, 5, and 6 all give advice on how women should
write a note which would take four minutes. . . . Invita- behave. Compare these pieces of advice. In what ways
are they similar and different?
tion by telephone is one of those modern innovations
3. Based on these sources, which groups of Americans
to which the conservative have never been accustomed, appear to have been affected by the arrival of tele-
and which shocks elderly, conventional persons still. The phones, and how?
convenience of the telephone for quickness and prompt
response appeals, however, to so many persons, that it PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
is hopeless and useless to inveigh against it. . . . If some Using evidence from these sources and your knowledge
of the period, write an essay explaining how the tele-
one’s note has been mislaid or forgotten, there is nothing
phone contributed to, and reflected, changes in American
simpler than to telephone to repair the error, and to explain. women’s social and economic roles.
It is much speedier than sending a note. . . . There is no
579
Jim Crow laws applied to public schools and parks

and also to emerging commercial spaces — hotels, res-
taurants, streetcars, trains, and eventually sports stadi-
ums and movie theaters. Placing a national stamp of
approval on segregation, the Plessy decision remained
in place until 1954, when the Court’s Brown v. Topeka
Board of Education ruling finally struck it down. Until
then, blacks’ exclusion from first-class “public accom-
modations” was one of the most painful marks of rac-
ism. The Plessy decision, like the rock-bottom wages
earned by twelve-year-old girls at Macy’s, showed that
consumer culture could be modern and innovative
without being politically progressive. Business and
consumer culture were shaped by, and themselves
shaped, racial and class injustices.
Masculinity and the Rise of Sports

While industrialization spawned public domesticity —
a consumer culture that courted affluent women and
families — it also changed expectations for men in the
workplace. Traditionally, the mark of a successful
American man was economic independence: he was
his own boss. Now, tens of thousands worked for other
men in big companies — and in offices, rather than
using their muscles. Would the professional American
Horatio Alger Jr.
male, through his concentration on “brain work,”
In dozens of popular boys’ books published between 1867
become “weak, effeminate, [and] decaying,” as one edi-
and 1917, Horatio Alger Jr. assured young readers that if
they were honest, worked hard, and cultivated good char- tor warned? How could well-to-do men assert their
acter, they could succeed in the new competitive economy. independence if work no longer required them to
His heroes, such as the famous “Ragged Dick,” often grew prove themselves physically? How could they develop
up in poverty on the streets of big cities. Brave and Bold
(1874) told the story of a small-town boy forced to work
toughness and strength? One answer was athletics.
in a factory; he is unfairly fired, but through persistence
and courage he wins a good job and recovers an inheri- “Muscular Christianity” The Young Men’s Christ-
tance for his mother. Alger’s books were republished often, ian Association (YMCA) was one of the earliest and
as in this boys’ magazine from 1911, and many remain in
print today. Courtesy Stanford University Archives. most successful promoters of athletic fitness. Intro-
duced in Boston in 1851, the group promoted muscu-
lar Christianity, combining evangelism with gyms and
athletic facilities where men could make themselves
was brought by civil rights advocates on behalf of “clean and strong.” Focusing first on white-collar work-
Homer Plessy, a New Orleans resident who was one- ers, the YMCA developed a substantial industrial pro-
eighth black. Ordered to leave a first-class car and gram after 1900. Railroad managers and other corpo-
move to the “colored” car of a Louisiana train, Plessy rate titans hoped YMCAs would foster a loyal and
refused and was arrested. The Court ruled that such contented workforce, discouraging labor unrest. Busi-
segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment ness leaders also relied on sports to build physical and
as long as blacks had access to accommodations that mental discipline and help men adjust their bodies to
were “separate but equal” to those of whites. “Separate the demands of the industrial clock. Sports honed men’s
but equal” was a myth: segregated facilities in the South competitive spirit, they believed; employer-sponsored
were flagrantly inferior. Jim Crow segregation laws, teams instilled teamwork and company pride.
named for a stereotyped black character who appeared Working-class men had their own ideas about
in minstrel shows, clearly discriminated, but the Court sports and leisure, and YMCAs quickly became a site
allowed them to stand. of negotiation. Could workers come to the “Y” to play
billiards or cards? Could they smoke? At first, YMCA provided fresh air and exercise,
TRACE CHANGE
leaders said no, but to attract working-class men they kept men out of saloons, and pro- OVER TIME
had to make concessions. As a result, the “Y” became a moted discipline and teamwork. How and why did Ameri-
place where middle-class and working-class customs Players on company-sponsored can sports evolve, and
blended — or existed in uneasy tension. At the same teams, wearing uniforms embla- how did athletics soften or
time, YMCA leaders innovated. Searching for winter zoned with their employers’ sharpen social divisions?
activities in the 1890s, YMCA instructors invented the names, began to compete on paid
new indoor games of basketball and volleyball. work time. Baseball thus set a pattern for how other
For elite Americans, meanwhile, country clubs American sports developed. Begun among indepen-
flourished; both men and women could enjoy tennis, dent craftsmen, it was taken up by elite men anxious to
golf, and swimming facilities as well as social gather- prove their strength and fitness. Well-to-do Americans
ings. By the turn of the century — perhaps because then decided the sport could benefit the working class.
country club women were encroaching on their ath- Big-time professional baseball arose with the
letic turf — elite men took up even more aggressive launching of the National League in 1876. The league
physical sports, including boxing, weightlifting, and quickly built more than a dozen teams in large cities,
martial arts. As early as 1890, future president Theodore from the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers to the Cleveland
Roosevelt argued that such “virile” activities were Spiders. Team owners were, in their own right, profit-
essential to “maintain and defend this very civiliza- minded entrepreneurs who shaped the sport to please
tion.” “Most masterful nations,” he claimed, “have consumers. Wooden grandstands soon gave way to
shown a strong taste for manly sports.” Roosevelt, son concrete and steel stadiums. By 1900, boys collected
of a wealthy New York family, became one of the first lithographed cards of their favorite players, and the
American devotees of jujitsu. During his presidency baseball cap came into fashion. In 1903, the Boston
(1901–1909), he designated a judo room in the White Americans defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first
House and hired an expert Japanese instructor. World Series. American men could now adopt a new
Roosevelt also wrestled and boxed, urging other Ameri- consumer identity — not as athletes, but as fans.
can men — especially among the elite — to increase their
leadership fitness by pursuing the “strenuous life.” Rise of the Negro Leagues Baseball stadiums, like
first-class rail cars, were sites of racial negotiation and
To see a longer excerpt of Theodore Roosevelt’s conflict. In the 1880s and 1890s, major league man-
views on sports, along with other primary sources agers hired a few African American players. As late
from this period, see Sources for America’s History.
as 1901, the Baltimore Orioles succeeded in sign-
ing Charlie Grant, a light-skinned black player from
America’s Game Before the 1860s, the only distinc- Cincinnati, by renaming him Charlie Tokohoma and
tively American game was Native American lacrosse, claiming he was Cherokee. But as this subterfuge
and the most popular team sport among European suggested, black players were increasingly barred. A
Americans was cricket. After the Civil War, however, Toledo team received a threatening note before one
team sports became a fundamental part of American game in Richmond, Virginia: if their “negro catcher”
manhood, none more successfully than baseball. A played, he would be lynched. Toledo put a substitute on
derivative of cricket, the game’s formal rules had begun the field, and at the end of the season the club termi-
to develop in New York in the 1840s and 1850s. Its nated the black player’s contract.
popularity spread in military camps during the Civil Shut out of white leagues, players and fans turned
War. Afterward, the idea that baseball “received its to all-black professional teams, where black men could
baptism in the bloody days of our Nation’s direst dan- showcase athletic ability and race pride. Louisiana’s top
ger,” as one promoter put it, became part of the game’s team, the New Orleans Pinchbacks, pointedly named
mythology. themselves after the state’s black Reconstruction gover-
Until the 1870s, most amateur players were clerks nor. By the early 1900s, such teams organized into sep-
and white-collar workers who had leisure to play and arate Negro Leagues. Though players suffered from
the income to buy their own uniforms. Business erratic pay and rundown ball fields, the leagues thrived
frowned on baseball and other sports as a waste until the desegregation of baseball after World War II.
of time, especially for working-class men. But late- In an era of stark discrimination, they celebrated black
nineteenth-century employers came to see baseball, manhood and talent. “I liked the way their uniform fit,
like other athletic pursuits, as a benefit for workers. It the way they wore their cap,” wrote an admiring fan of
the Newark Eagles. “They showed a style in almost injured players from the game. But such measures were
everything they did.” adopted grudgingly, with supporters arguing that they
ruined football’s benefits in manly training.
American Football The most controversial sport of Like baseball and the YMCA, football attracted
the industrializing era was football, which began at sponsorship from business leaders hoping to divert
elite colleges during the 1880s. The great powerhouse workers from labor activism. The first professional
was the Yale team, whose legendary coach Walter teams emerged in western Pennsylvania’s steel towns,
Camp went on to become a watch manufacturer. soon after the defeat of the steelworkers’ union. Car-
Between 1883 and 1891, under Camp’s direction, Yale negie Steel executives organized teams in Homestead
scored 4,660 points; its opponents scored 92. Drawing and Braddock; the first league appeared during the
on the workplace model of scientific management, anthracite coal strike of 1902. Other teams arose in the
Camp emphasized drill and precision. He and other midwestern industrial heartland. The Indian-Acme
coaches argued that football offered perfect training Packing Company sponsored the Green Bay Packers;
for the competitive world of business. The game was the future Chicago Bears, first known as the Decatur
violent: six players’ deaths in the 1908 college season Staleys, were funded by a manufacturer of laundry
provoked a public outcry. Eventually, new rules pro- starch. Like its baseball equivalent, professional foot-
tected quarterbacks and required coaches to remove ball encouraged men to buy in as spectators and fans.
Football Practice, Chilocco Indian School, 1911

Football became widely popular, spreading from Ivy League schools and state universities to schools like this
one, built on Cherokee land in Oklahoma. The uniforms of this team, typical of the day, show very limited
padding and protection — a factor that contributed to high rates of injury and even death on the field. As
they practiced in 1911, these Chilocco students had an inspiring model to look up to: in that year Jim
Thorpe, a fellow Oklahoman and a member of the Sac and Fox tribe, was winning national fame by leading
the all-Indian team at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle School to victory against Harvard. Thorpe, one of the finest ath-
letes of his generation, went on to win gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in
Stockholm, Sweden. National Archives.
expanded its park system and,

The Great Outdoors IDENTIFY CAUSES
during Theodore Roosevelt’s What changes in American
As the rise of sports suggests, elite and middle-class presidency, extended the reach society precipitated the
Americans began by the 1880s and 1890s to see of national forests. Starting in 1872 rise of national parks and
Victorian culture as stuffy and claustrophobic. They with the preservation of Yellow- monuments?
revolted by heading outdoors. A craze for bicycling stone in Wyoming, Congress had
swept the country; in 1890, at the height of the mania, begun to set aside land for national parks. In 1916,
U.S. manufacturers sold an astonishing ten million President Woodrow Wilson provided comprehensive
bikes. Women were not far behind men in taking up oversight of these national parks, signing an act creat-
athletics. By the 1890s, even elite women, long con- ing the National Park Service (Map 18.1). A year later,
fined to corsets and heavy clothes that restricted their the system numbered thirteen parks — including
movement, donned lighter dresses and pursued archery Maine’s Acadia, the first east of the Mississippi River.
and golf. Artist Charles Gibson became famous for his Environmentalists also worked to protect wildlife.
portraits of the Gibson Girl, an elite beauty depicted on By the 1890s, several state Audubon Societies, named
the tennis court or swimming at the beach. The Gibson in honor of antebellum naturalist John James Audubon,
Girl personified the ideal of “New Women,” more edu- banded together to advocate broader protections for
cated, athletic, and independent than their mothers. wild birds, especially herons and egrets that were being
Those with money and leisure time used railroad slaughtered by the thousands for their plumes. They
networks to get to the national parks of the West, succeeded in winning the Lacey Act (1900), which
which, as one senator put it, became a “breathing-place established federal penalties for selling specified birds,
for the national lungs.” People of more modest means animals, and plants. Soon afterward, state organiza-
began to take up camping. As early as 1904, California’s tions joined together to form the National Audubon
Coronado Beach offered tent rentals for $3 a week. A Society. Women played prominent roles in the move-
decade later, campgrounds and cottages in many parts ment, promoting boycotts of hats with plumage. In
of the country catered to a working-class clientele. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt created the first
an industrial society, the outdoors became associated National Wildlife Refuge at Pelican Island, Florida.
with leisure and renewal rather than danger and hard Roosevelt also expanded preservation under the
work. One journalist, reflecting on urban life from the Antiquities Act (1906), which enabled the U.S. presi-
vantage point of a western vacation, wrote, “How student, without congressional approval, to set aside
pid it all seems: the mad eagerness of money-making “objects of historic and scientific interest” as national
men, the sham pleasures of conventional society.” In monuments. Two years later, Roosevelt used these
the wilderness, he wrote, “your blood clarifies; your powers to preserve 800,000 acres at Arizona’s magnifi-
brain becomes active. You get a new view of life.” cent Grand Canyon. The act proved a mixed blessing
As Americans searched for such renewal in rem- for conservation. Monuments received weaker protec-
nants of unexploited land, the nation’s first environ- tion than national parks did; many fell under the
mental movement arose. John Muir, who fell in love authority of the U.S. Forest Service, which permitted
with the Yosemite Valley in 1869, became the most logging and grazing. Business interests thus lobbied to
famous voice for wilderness. Raised in a stern Scots have coveted lands designated as monuments rather
Presbyterian family on a Wisconsin farm, Muir knew than national parks so they could more easily exploit
much of the Bible by heart. He was a keen observer resources. Nonetheless, the creation of national monu-
who developed a deeply spiritual relationship with the ments offered some protection, and many monuments
natural world. His contemporary Mary Austin, whose (such as Alaska’s Katmai) later obtained park status.
book Land of Little Rain (1905) celebrated the austere The expanding network of parks and monuments
beauty of the California desert, called him “a devout became popular places to hike, camp, and contemplate
man.” In cooperation with his editor at Century maga- natural beauty.
zine, Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892. Like the The great outdoors provided new opportunities for
earlier Appalachian Mountain Club, founded in Boston women with the means to travel. One writer, advising
in 1876, the Sierra Club dedicated itself to preserving women to enjoy mountain hikes, hinted at liberating
and enjoying America’s great mountains. possibilities: “For those loving freedom and health,”
Encouraged by such groups, national and state he recommended “short skirts, pantlets, stout shoes,
governments set aside more public lands for preserva- tasty hat.” And like other leisure venues, “wilderness”
tion and recreation. The United States substantially did not remain in the hands of elite men and women.
Bering Kobuk Gates of North Cascades (1968) Isle Royale

Land Valley the Arctic
Olympic
CANADA (1931)
Bridge (1980) (1980) Pictured Rocks Acadia
(1909) Glacier (1966)
(1978) Coulee Dam (1910) (1916)
Mt. Rainier (1946) Voyageurs
Denali (1917) Wrangel- (1899) Theodore (1971)
Lake Clark St. Elias Roosevelt
(1980) (1980) (1947)
Katmai
(1980) Glacier Crater Lake Yellowstone Wind Cave (1903)
Kenai Redwood (1902) Craters of (1872)
Bay the Moon Badlands Cape
Aniakchak Fjords (1980) (1968) (1929) Cod
(1978) (1980) Lava Beds (1924) Grand Teton
(1966)
(1929)
Lassen Volcanic (1925) Dinosaur
(1916) Great Basin Capitol (1915)
Yosemite
(1890) (1922) Reef Arches Rocky Mountain Shenandoah
Kings Canyon Bryce Canyon (1937) (1929) (1915) (1926)
Haleakala (1940) (1924)
(1960) (General Grant Zion Canyonlands (1964) Mammoth Cave
Great Sand Dunes (1932) (1926) N
1890) (1909)
Mesa Verde (1906) Great Smoky Mountains
Sequoia Death Valley Lake Meredith
Grand Canyon de Chelly (1931) (1965) (1926) E
(1890) (1933) Hot Springs W
Canyon Petrified Forest (1906) (1921)
Hawaii Volcanoes Channel (1893) Alibates Flint
(1916) Joshua Tree El Malpais Quarries (1965) S
Islands (1936) (1987)
(1938) Saguaro
(1933) White Sands
Carlsbad Caverns ATLANTIC
(1923)
(1933) Guadalupe Mountains
OCEAN
PACIFIC OCEAN (1966)
Big Bend (1935)
0 250 500 miles Amistad (1965)
0 250 500 kilometers Virgin Islands Biscayne (1968)

(1956)
Puerto Everglades
National parks (date established) MEXICO Rico
Dry Tortugas (1934)
VIRGIN IS. (1935)
National forests
MAP 18.1
National Parks and Forests, 1872–1980
Yellowstone, the first national park in the United States, dates from 1872. In 1893, the federal
government began to intervene to protect national forests. Without Theodore Roosevelt, how-
ever, the national forest program might have languished; during his presidency, he added 125
million acres to the forest system, plus six national parks in addition to several that had already
been created during the 1890s. America’s national forest and park systems remain one of the
most visible and beloved legacies of federal policy innovation in the decades between the Civil
War and World War I.
As early as the late 1880s, the lakes and hiking trails passenger pigeon, which vanished around 1900, they
of the Catskill Mountains became so thronged with made it harder for rural people to support themselves
working-class tourists from nearby New York City, from the bounty of the land.
including many Jewish immigrants, that elite visitors
began to segregate themselves into gated summer com-
munities. They thus preserved the “seclusion and pri-
vacy” that they snobbishly claimed as the privilege of Women, Men, and the
those who could demonstrate “mental and personal
worth.”
Solitude of Self
At the state level, meanwhile, new game laws trig- Speaking to Congress in 1892, women’s rights advocate
gered conflicts between elite conservationists and the Elizabeth Cady Stanton described what she called the
poor. Shifting from year-round subsistence hunting to “solitude of self.” Stanton rejected the claim that women
a limited, recreational hunting season brought hard- did not need equal rights because they enjoyed men’s
ship to poor rural families who depended on game for protection. “The talk of sheltering woman from the
food. Regulation brought undeniable benefits: it sup- fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery,” she
pressed such popular practices as songbird hunting declared. “They beat on her from every point of the
and the use of dynamite to kill fish. Looking back on compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal
the era before game laws, one Alabama hunter remem- results, for he has been trained to protect himself.”
bered that “the slaughter was terrific.” But while game Stanton’s argument captured one of the dilemmas
laws prevented further extinctions like that of the of industrialization: the marketplace of labor brought
both freedom and risk, and working-class women were

particularly vulnerable. At the same time, middle-class
women — expected to engage in selfless community
service — often saw the impact of industrialization
more clearly than fathers, brothers, and husbands did.
In seeking to address alcoholism, poverty, and other
social and economic ills, they gained a new sense of
their own collective power. Women’s protest and
reform work thus helped lay the foundations for pro-
gressivism (Chapter 20) and modern women’s rights.
Changes in Family Life

The average American family, especially among the
middle class, decreased in size during the industrial
era. In 1800, white women who survived to menopause
had borne an average of 7.0 children; by 1900, the aver-
age was 3.6. On farms and in many working-class fam-
ilies, youngsters counted as assets on the family balance
sheet: they worked in fields or factories. But parents who
had fewer sons and daughters could concentrate their
resources, educating and preparing each child for suc-
cess in the new economy. Among the professional
classes, education became a necessity, while limiting
family size became, more broadly, a key to upward
mobility.
Several factors limited childbearing. Americans
married at older ages, and many mothers tried to space
pregnancies more widely — as their mothers and grand-
mothers had — by nursing children for several years,
which suppressed fertility. By the late nineteenth cen-
tury, as vulcanized rubber became available, couples also
had access to a range of other contraceptive methods,
such as condoms and diaphragms. With pressure for
family limitation rising, these methods were widely used
and apparently effective. But couples rarely wrote about
them. Historians’ evidence comes from the occasional
frank diary and from the thriving success of the mail-
order contraceptive industry, which advertised promi-
John Singer Sargent, Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps nently and shipped products — wrapped in discreet
Stokes, 1897
brown paper packages — to customers nationwide.
This painting was a wedding gift to this wealthy young
couple, both of whom inherited substantial fortunes. In
Reluctance to talk about contraceptives was under-
what ways does the artist, a famous portraitist, represent standable, since information about them was stig-
Edith Minturn Stokes as a “New Woman” of the 1890s? matized and, after 1873, illegal to distribute. During
What does he suggest about the relationship between Reconstruction, Anthony Comstock, crusading secre-
husband and wife? How might we reconcile this with the
painting’s title, which identifies the central figure as “Mrs. tary of the New York Society for the Suppression of
I. N. Phelps Stokes,” not as “Edith”? Mrs. Stokes was a Vice, secured a federal law banning “obscene mate-
noted beauty and active in an array of charitable causes. rials” from the U.S. mail. The Comstock Act (1873) pro-
Here she wears a shirtwaist and skirt, more practical than hibited circulation of almost any information about sex
the traditional heavy dresses and bustles of the previous
decade. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art and birth control. Comstock won support for the law,
Resource, NY. in part, by appealing to parents’ fears that young people
were receiving sexual information through the mail,
Portrait of a Middle-Class
American Family
This photograph of the Hedlund family
was taken on July 4, 1911, on the front
porch of their home in St. Paul, Minne-
sota. Christian, Grace, and Anna Hedlund
appear on the top row, Louis and George
on the bottom. Families like this one —
with three children — were becoming
typical among the middle class, in contrast
to larger families in earlier generations.
This photo was taken by twenty-one-year-
old Joseph Pavlicek, a recent immigrant
from Eastern Europe who was boarding
with the Hedlunds. Pavlicek bought fire-
works for the children to celebrate the
holiday. He remembered being so proud
and grateful to be in America that his
heart “was nearly bursting.” Minnesota
Historical Society.
promoting the rise of “secret vice.” degree — was valuable for boys who hoped to enter
PLACE EVENTS
Though critics charged Comstock professional or managerial work. Daughters attended
IN CONTEXT
In what ways did the
with high-handed interference in in even larger numbers than their brothers (Table 18.1).
Comstock Act reflect and private matters, others supported Parents of the Civil War generation, who had witnessed
contradict the realities of his work, fearful of the rising tide the plight of war widows and orphans, encouraged
American life in the indus- of pornography, sexual informa- girls to prepare themselves for teaching or office jobs,
trial era? tion, and contraceptives made work before marriage, and gain skills they could fall
available by industrialization. A back on, “just in case.” By 1900, 71 percent of Americans
committee of the New York legislature declared between the ages of five and eighteen attended school.
Comstock’s crusade “wholly essential to the safety and That figure rose further in the early twentieth century,
decency of the community.” It appears, however, that as public officials adopted laws requiring school
Comstock had little success in stopping the lucrative attendance.
and popular trade in contraceptives. Most high schools were coeducational, and almost
every high school featured athletics. Recruited first as
cheerleaders for boys’ teams, girls soon established
Education field hockey and other sports of their own. Boys and
In the industrial economy, the watchword for young girls engaged in friendly — and sometimes not-so-
people who hoped to secure good jobs was education. friendly — rivalry in high school. In 1884, a high school
A high school diploma — now a gateway to a college newspaper in Concord, New Hampshire, published
TABLE 18.1
High School Graduates, 1870–1910
Percent
Year Number 17-Year-Olds Male Female
1870 16,000 2.0 7,000 9,000
1890 44,000 3.0 19,000 25,000
1910 156,000 8.6 64,000 93,000
Source: Historical Statistics of the United States, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), 1: 386.
this poem from a disgruntled boy who caricatured his In the South, one of the most famous educational
female classmates: projects was Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute,
founded in 1881. Washington both taught and exem-
We know many tongues of living and dead,
plified the goal of self-help; his autobiography, Up from
In science and fiction we’re very well read,
But we cannot cook meat and cannot make bread
Slavery (1901), became a best-seller. Because of the
And we’ve wished many times that we were all dead. deep poverty in which most southern African Amer-
icans lived, Washington concluded that “book educa-
A female student shot back a poem of her own, tion” for most “would be almost a waste of time.” He
denouncing male students’ smoking habit: focused instead on industrial education. Students, he
argued, would “be sure of knowing how to make a liv-
But if boys will smoke cigarettes
ing after they had left us.” Tuskegee sent female gradu-
Although the smoke may choke them,
One consolation still remains —
ates into teaching and nursing; men more often entered
They kill the boys that smoke them. the industrial trades or farmed by the latest scientific
methods.
The rate of Americans attending college had long Washington gained national fame in 1895 with his
hovered around 2 percent; driven by public universi- Atlanta Compromise address, delivered at the Cotton
ties’ expansion, the rate rose in the 1880s, reaching States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. For the exposi-
8 percent by 1920. Much larger numbers attended a tion’s white organizers, the racial “compromise” was
growing network of business and technical schools. inviting Washington to speak at all. It was a move
“GET A PLACE IN THE WORLD,” advertised one intended to show racial progress in the South.
Minneapolis business college in 1907, “where your tal- Washington, in turn, delivered an address that many
ents can be used to the best advantage.” Typically, such interpreted as approving racial segregation. Stating
schools offered both day and night classes in subjects that African Americans had, in slavery days, “proved
such as bookkeeping, typewriting, and shorthand. our loyalty to you,” he assured whites that “in our
The needs of the new economy also shaped the humble way, we shall stand by you . . . ready to lay
curriculum at more traditional collegiate institutions. down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours.” The
State universities emphasized technical training and races could remain socially detached: “In all things that
fed the growing professional workforce with graduates are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,
trained in fields such as engineering. Many private col- yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual
leges distanced themselves from such practical pur- progress.” Washington urged,
suits; their administrators argued that students who however, that whites join him in TRACE CHANGE
aimed to be leaders needed broad-based knowledge. working for “the highest intelli- OVER TIME
But they modernized course offerings, emphasizing gence and development of all.” How did educational
French and German, for example, rather than Latin and Whites greeted this address opportunities change
Greek. Harvard, led by dynamic president Charles W. with enthusiasm, and Washington after the Civil War, and
Eliot from 1869 to 1909, pioneered the liberal arts. became the most prominent black for whom?
Students at the all-male college chose from a range of leader of his generation. His sooth-
electives, as Eliot called for classes that developed each ing rhetoric and style of leadership, based on avoiding
young man’s “individual reality and creative power.” confrontation and cultivating white patronage and
institutions, including teacher-training colleges. For

affluent families, private colleges offered an education
equivalent to men’s — for an equally high price. Vassar
College started the trend when it opened in 1861;
Smith, Wellesley, and others followed. Anxious doc-
tors warned that these institutions were dangerous:
intensive brain work would unsex young women and
drain energy from their ovaries, leading them to bear
weak children. But as thousands of women earned
degrees and suffered no apparent harm, fears faded.
Single-sex higher education for women spread from
private to public institutions, especially in the South,
where the Mississippi State College for Women (1885)
led the way.
Coeducation was more prevalent in the Midwest
and West, where many state universities opened their
doors to female students after the Civil War. Women
were also admitted to most African American colleges
founded during Reconstruction. By 1910, 58 percent of
America’s colleges and universities were coeducational.
While students at single-sex institutions forged strong
bonds with one another, women also gained benefits
from learning with men. When male students were
friendly, they built comfortable working relationships;
when men were hostile, women learned coping skills
Booker T. Washington that served them well in later employment or reform
In an age of severe racial oppression, Booker T. Washington work. One doctor who studied at the University of
emerged as the leading public voice of African Americans. Iowa remembered later that he and his friends merci-
He was remarkable both for his effectiveness in speaking to lessly harassed the first women who entered the medi-
white Americans and for his deep understanding of the aspi-
rations of blacks. Born a slave, Washington had plenty of
cal school. But when the women showed they were
firsthand experience with racism. But having befriended good students, the men’s attitudes changed to “whole-
several whites in his youth, he also believed that African some respect.”
Americans could appeal to whites of good will — and Whether or not they got a college education, more
maneuver around those who were hostile — in the
struggle for equality. He hoped, most of all, that and more women recognized, in the words of Elizabeth
economic achievement would erase white prejudice. Cady Stanton, their “solitude of self.” In the changing
Brown Brothers. economy, they could not always count on fathers and
husbands. Women who needed to support themselves
could choose from dozens of guidebooks such as
private influence, was well suited to the difficult years What Girls Can Do (1880) and How to Make Money
after Reconstruction. Washington believed that money Although a Woman (1895). The Association for the
was color-blind, that whites would respect economic Advancement of Women, founded in 1873 by women’s
success. He represented the ideals of millions of African college graduates, defended women’s higher education
Americans who hoped education and hard work would and argued that women’s paid employment was a pos-
erase white prejudice. That hope proved tragically itive good.
overoptimistic. As the tide of disenfranchisement and Today, many economists argue that education and
segregation rolled in, Washington would come under high-quality jobs for women are keys to reducing pov-
fire from a younger generation of race leaders who erty in the developing world. In the United States, that
argued that he accommodated too much to white process also led to broader gains in women’s political
racism. rights. As women began to earn advanced degrees,
In addition to African American education, women’s work for wages and salaries, and live independently, it
higher education expanded notably. In the Northeast became harder to argue that women were “dependents”
and South, women most often attended single-sex who did not need to vote.
Class of 1896, Radcliffe College

When Harvard University, long a bastion of male privilege, created an “Annex” for women’s instruction in
1879, it was a sure sign of growing support for women’s higher education. The Annex became Radcliffe
College in 1894. Two years later, this graduating class of thirty posed for their portrait. Among them was
Alice Sterling of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who went on to marry Harvard graduate Frank Cook and devote
herself to Protestant foreign missions. On two trips around the world, Alice Sterling Cook visited all the
women’s colleges that missionaries had founded in India, China, and Japan. Cook’s energetic public activities
typified those of many women’s college alumnae. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard
University.
modern arguments for women’s equality. “Women’s

From Domesticity to Women’s Rights place is Home,” declared the journalist Rheta Childe
As the United States confronted industrialization, Dorr. But she added, “Home is the community. The city
middle-class women steadily expanded their place full of people is the Family. . . . Badly do the Home and
beyond the household, building reform movements Family need their mother.”
and taking political action. Starting in the 1880s, wom-
en’s clubs sprang up and began to study such problems The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union One
as pollution, unsafe working conditions, and urban maternalist goal was to curb alcohol abuse by prohibit-
poverty. So many formed by 1890 that their leaders ing liquor sales. The Woman’s Christian Temperance
created a nationwide umbrella organization, the Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, spread rapidly after
General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Women justi- 1879, when charismatic Frances Willard became its
fied such work through the ideal of maternalism, leader. More than any other group of the late nine-
appealing to their special role as mothers. Maternalism teenth century, the WCTU launched women into
was an intermediate step between domesticity and reform. Willard knew how to frame political demands
in the language of feminine self- drinking for religious reasons. Immigrants passion-
UNDERSTAND
sacrifice. “Womanliness first,” she ately disagreed, however: Germans and Irish Catholics
POINTS OF VIEW
How did women use wide-
advised her followers; “afterward, enjoyed their Sunday beer and saw no harm in it.
spread beliefs about their what you will.” WCTU members Saloons were a centerpiece of working-class leisure and
“special role” to justify vividly described the plight of community life, offering free lunches, public toilets,
political activism, and for abused wives and children when and a place to share neighborhood news. Thus, while
what goals? men suffered in the grip of alco- some labor unions advocated voluntary temperance,
holism. Willard’s motto was attitudes toward prohibition divided along ethnic, reli-
“Home Protection,” and though it placed all the blame gious, and class lines.
on alcohol rather than other factors, the WCTU WCTU activism led some leaders to raise radical
became the first organization to identify and combat questions about the shape of industrial society. As she
domestic violence. investigated alcohol abuse, Willard increasingly con-
The prohibitionist movement drew activists from fronted poverty, hunger, unemployment, and other
many backgrounds. Middle-class city dwellers worried industrial problems. “Do Everything,” she urged her
about the link between alcoholism and crime, espe- members. Across the United States, WCTU chapters
cially in the growing immigrant wards. Rural citizens founded soup kitchens and free libraries. They intro-
equated liquor with big-city sins such as prostitution duced a German educational innovation, the kinder-
and political corruption. Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, garten. They investigated prison conditions. Though
and members of other denominations condemned she did not persuade most prohibitionists to follow her
A Plea for Temperance, 1874

The origins of the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union lay in spontaneous
prayer meetings held by women outside
local saloons, where they appealed for
men to stop drinking and liquor sellers
to destroy their product. A string of such
meetings in Ohio won national attention,
as in this image from a popular magazine,
the Daily Graphic. “Who Will Win?” asked
the artist. The answers varied. A few saloon
owners, struck with remorse over the dam-
age caused by alcohol abuse, smashed their
beer kegs and poured their liquor into the
gutters. Far more refused, but in the 1880s,
temperance women succeeded in organiz-
ing the largest grassroots movement of their
day to build support for outlawing liquor
sales. The Granger Collection, New York.
lead, Willard declared herself a Christian Socialist and

urged more attention to workers’ plight. She advocated
laws establishing an eight-hour workday and abolish-
ing child labor.
Willard also called for women’s voting rights, lend-
ing powerful support to the independent suffrage
movement that had emerged during Reconstruction.
Controversially, the WCTU threw its energies behind
the Prohibition Party, which exercised considerable
clout during the 1880s. Women worked in the party as
speakers, convention delegates, and even local candi-
dates. Liquor was big business, and powerful interests
mobilized to block antiliquor legislation. In many
areas — particularly the cities — prohibition simply did
not gain majority support. Willard retired to England,
where she died in 1898, worn and discouraged by many
defeats. But her legacy was powerful. Other groups
took up the cause, eventually winning national prohi-
bition after World War I.
Through its emphasis on human welfare, the WCTU
encouraged women to join the national debate over
poverty and inequality of wealth. Some became active
in the People’s Party of the 1890s, which welcomed
women as organizers and stump speakers. Others led
groups such as the National Congress of Mothers,
founded in 1897, which promoted better child-rearing
techniques in rural and working-class families. The
WCTU had taught women how to lobby, raise money,
and even run for office. Willard wrote that “perhaps the
most significant outcome” of the movement was wom- Ida B. Wells
en’s “knowledge of their own power.” In 1887, Ida Wells (Wells-Barnett after she married in 1895)
was thrown bodily from a train in Tennessee for refusing to
vacate her seat in a section reserved for whites, launching her
Women, Race, and Patriotism As in temperance into a lifelong crusade for racial justice. Her mission was to
work, women played central roles in patriotic move- expose the evil of lynching in the South. This image is the title
ments and African American community activism. page of a pamphlet she published in 1892. Manuscripts,
Members of the Daughters of the American Revolution Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
(DAR), founded in 1890, celebrated the memory of Foundations.
Revolutionary War heroes. Equally influential was the
United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), founded
in 1894 to extol the South’s “Lost Cause.” The UDC’s and undertook public health campaigns. Such women
elite southern members shaped Americans’ memory of shared with white women a determination to carry
the Civil War by constructing monuments, distribut- domesticity into the public sphere. Journalist Victoria
ing Confederate flags, and promoting school textbooks Earle Matthews hailed the American home as “the
that defended the Confederacy and condemned Recon- foundation upon which nationality rests, the pride of
struction. The UDC’s work helped build and main- the citizen, and the glory of the Republic.” She and
tain support for segregation and disenfranchisement other African American women used the language of
(Chapter 15, Thinking Like a Historian, p. 502). domesticity and respectability to justify their work.
African American women did not sit idle in the One of the most radical voices was Ida B. Wells,
face of this challenge. In 1896, they created the National who as a young Tennessee schoolteacher sued the
Association of Colored Women. Through its local Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for denying her a seat in
clubs, black women arranged for the care of orphans, the ladies’ car. In 1892, a white mob in Memphis
founded homes for the elderly, advocated temperance, invaded a grocery store owned by three of Wells’s
friends, angry that it competed with a nearby white- Suffrage (1911). Antisuffragists argued that it was
owned store. When the black store owners defended expensive to add so many voters to the rolls; wives’ bal-
themselves, wounding several of their attackers, all lots would just “double their husbands’ votes” or worse,
three were lynched. Grieving their deaths, Wells left cancel them out, subjecting men to “petticoat rule.”
Memphis and urged other African Americans to join Some antisuffragists also argued that voting would
her in boycotting the city’s white businesses. As a jour- undermine women’s special roles as disinterested
nalist, she launched a one-woman campaign against reformers: no longer above the fray, they would be
lynching. Wells’s investigations demolished the myth plunged into the “cesspool of politics.” In short, women
that lynchers were reacting to the crime of interracial were “better citizens without the ballot.” Such argu-
rape; she showed that the real cause was more often ments helped delay passage of national women’s suf-
economic competition, a labor dispute, or a consensual frage until after World War I.
relationship between a white woman and a black man. By the 1910s, some women moved beyond suffrage
Settling in Chicago, Wells became a noted and accom- to take a public stance for what they called feminism —
plished reformer, but in an era of increasing racial women’s full political, economic, and social equality.
injustice, few whites supported her cause. A famous site of sexual rebellion was New York’s
The largest African American women’s organiza- Greenwich Village, where radical intellectuals, includ-
tion arose within the National Baptist Church (NBC), ing many gays and lesbians, created a vibrant commu-
which by 1906 represented 2.4 million black church- nity. Among other political activities, women there
goers. Founded in 1900, the Women’s Convention of founded the Heterodoxy Club (1912), open to any
the NBC funded night schools, health clinics, kinder- woman who pledged not to be “orthodox in her opin-
gartens, day care centers, and prison outreach programs. ions.” The club brought together intellectuals, jour-
Adella Hunt Logan, born in Alabama, exemplified nalists, and labor organizers. Almost all supported
how such work could lead women to demand political suffrage, but they had a more ambitious view of what
rights. Educated at Atlanta University, Logan became a was needed for women’s liberation. “I wanted to belong
women’s club leader, teacher, and suffrage advocate. “If to the human race, not to a ladies’ aid society,” wrote
white American women, with all their mutual and one divorced journalist who joined Heterodoxy. Fem-
acquired advantage, need the ballot,” she declared, inists argued that women should not simply fulfill
“how much more do Black Americans, male and expectations of feminine self-sacrifice; they should
female, need the strong defense of a vote to help secure work on their own behalf.
them their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness?”
Women’s Rights Though it had split into two rival

Science and Faith
organizations during Reconstruction, the movement Amid rapid change, the United States remained a
for women’s suffrage reunited in 1890 in the National deeply religious nation. But new discoveries enhanced
American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). another kind of belief: faith in science. In the early
Soon afterward, suffragists built on earlier victories in nineteenth century, most Americans had believed the
the West, winning full ballots for women in Colorado world was about six thousand years old. No one knew
(1893), Idaho (1896), and Utah (1896, reestablished as what lay beyond the solar system. By the 1910s, pale-
Utah gained statehood). Afterward, movement leaders ontologists were classifying the dinosaurs, astronomers
were discouraged by a decade of state-level defeats and had identified distant galaxies, and physicists could
Congress’s refusal to consider a constitutional amend- measure the speed of light. Many scientists and ordi-
ment. But suffrage again picked up momentum after nary Americans accepted the theory of evolution.
1911 (Map 18.2). By 1913, most women living west of Scientific discoveries received widespread publicity
the Mississippi River had the ballot. In other localities, through a series of great world’s fairs, most famously
women could vote in municipal elections, school elec- Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, held
tions, or liquor referenda. (a year late) to celebrate Columbus’s arrival in America
The rising prominence of the women’s suffrage in 1492. At the vast fairgrounds, visitors strolled
movement had an ironic result: it prompted some through enormous buildings that displayed the latest
women — and men — to organize against it, in groups inventions in industry, machinery, and transportation.
such as the National Association Opposed to Woman They marveled over a moving sidewalk and, at dusk,
Dates on the map indicate when Note how women won the right to
individual states, on their own initiative, vote in a roughly west-to-east movement.
granted full suffrage to women. What reasons might be advanced to
CANADA explain this pattern of diffusion?
WASH. ME.
1910
MONTANA NORTH MINN.
DAKOTA VT.
1914
NEW N.H. MASS.
OREGON YORK
1912 SOUTH WIS.
IDAHO DAKOTA 1917
MICH. R.I.
1896 WYOMING 1918 1918 CONN.
1890 PA.
N.J.
IOWA
NEBRASKA OHIO MD. DEL.
NEVADA IND.
ILL. N
1914 UTAH W.
1896 COLORADO VA. VA.
CALIF. 1893 KANSAS MO. E
1911 1912 KY. W
NORTH
CAROLINA S
TENNESSEE
OKLAHOMA S.C.
ARIZONA NEW 1918 ARK.
1912 MEXICO ALA. GEORGIA
MISS. ATLANTIC
LA. OCEAN
PACIFIC TEXAS
OCEAN FLA.
0 250 500 miles

Effective Date of Equal Suffrage MEXICO 0 500 kilometers
250
By 1909
This map uses colors to divide the states into four categories. Purple
1910–1918 indicates where women had the right to vote before 1910. In blue states
Partial suffrage by 1919 women had equal voting rights prior to 1919. Red shows where women
enjoyed the right to vote in some elections, but not others. Green indicates
No women’s suffrage by 1919 the states where women could not vote at all in 1919.
(after Opdycke)
MAP 18.2
Women’s Suffrage, 1890–1919
By 1909, after more than sixty years of agitation, only four lightly populated western states had
granted women full voting rights. A number of other states offered partial suffrage, limited to
voting for school boards and such issues as taxes and local referenda on whether or not to permit
the sale of liquor licenses (the so-called local option). Between 1910 and 1918, as the effort shifted
to the struggle for a constitutional amendment, eleven states joined the list granting full suffrage.
The West remained the most progressive region in granting women’s voting rights; the most
stubborn resistance lay in the ex-Confederacy.
saw the fair buildings illuminated with strings of elec- of realism. Other Americans struggled to reconcile sci-
tric lights. One observer called the fair “a vast and won- entific discoveries with their religious faith.
derful university of the arts and sciences.”
It is hardly surprising, amid these achievements,
that “fact worship” became a central feature of intellec- Darwinism and Its Critics
tual life. Researchers in many fields argued that one Evolution — the idea that species are not fixed, but ever
could rely only on hard facts to understand the “laws of changing — was not a simple idea on which all scien-
life.” In their enthusiasm, some economists and sociol- tists agreed. In his immensely influential 1859 book,
ogists rejected all social reform as sentimental. Fiction On the Origin of Species, British naturalist Charles
writers and artists kept a more humane emphasis, but Darwin argued that all creatures struggle to survive.
they made use of similar methods — close observation When individual members of a species are born with
and attention to real-life experience — to create works random genetic mutations that better suit them for
their environment — for example, camouflage coloring suffered from eugenics policies. Advocates of eugen-
for a moth — these characteristics, since they are genet- ics had a broad impact. Because they associated mental
ically transmissible, become dominant in future gener- unfitness with “lower races” — including people of
ations. Many scientists rejected this theory of natural African, Asian, and Native American descent — their
selection. They followed a line of thinking laid out by arguments lent support to segregation and racial dis-
French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who argued, crimination. By warning that immigrants from Eastern
unlike Darwin, that individual animals or plants could and Southern Europe would dilute white Americans’
acquire transmittable traits within a single lifetime. racial purity, eugenicists helped win passage of immi-
A rhinoceros that fought fiercely, in Lamarck’s view, gration restriction in the 1920s.
could build up a stronger horn; its offspring would
then be born with that trait.
Darwin himself disapproved of the word evolution Realism in the Arts
(which does not appear in his book) because it implied Inspired by the quest for facts, American authors
upward progress. In his view, natural selection was rejected nineteenth-century romanticism and what
blind: environments and species changed randomly. they saw as its unfortunate product, sentimentality.
Others were less scrupulous about drawing sweeping Instead, they took up literary realism. In the 1880s, edi-
conclusions from Darwin’s work. In the 1870s, British tor and novelist William Dean Howells called for writ-
philosopher Herbert Spencer spun out an elaborate ers “to picture the daily life in the most exact terms
theory of how human society possible.” By the 1890s, a younger generation of writers
PLACE EVENTS advanced through “survival of pursued this goal. Theodore Dreiser dismissed unreal-
IN CONTEXT the fittest.” Social Darwinism, as istic novels that always had “a happy ending.” In Main-
How did the ideas of sci- Spencer’s idea became (confus- Travelled Roads (1891), based on the struggles of his
entists and social scientists ingly) known, found its American midwestern farm family, Hamlin Garland turned the
reflect events they saw champion in William Graham same unsparing eye on the hardships of rural life.
happening around them? Sumner, a sociology professor at Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893),
Yale. Competition, said Sumner, privately printed because no publisher would touch it,
was a law of nature, like gravity. Who were the fittest? described the seduction, abandonment, and death of a
“Millionaires,” Sumner declared. Their success showed slum girl.
they were “naturally selected.” Some authors believed realism did not go far
Even in the heyday of Social Darwinism, Sumner’s enough to overturn sentimentalism. Jack London
views were controversial (American Voices, p. 596). spent his teenage years as a factory worker, sailor, and
Some thinkers objected to the application of biological tramp. In stories such as “The Law of Life” (1901), he
findings to the realm of society and government. They dramatized what he saw as the harsh reality of an
pointed out that Darwin’s theories applied to finches uncaring universe. American society, he said, was “a
and tortoises, not human institutions. Social Darwin- jungle wherein wild beasts eat and are eaten.” Similarly,
ism, they argued, was simply an excuse for the worst Stephen Crane tried to capture “a world full of fists.”
excesses of industrialization. By the early twentieth London and Crane helped create literary naturalism.
century, intellectuals revolted against Sumner and his They suggested that human beings were not so much
allies. rational shapers of their own destinies as blind victims
Meanwhile, though, the most dubious applications of forces beyond their control — including their own
of evolutionary ideas were codified into new reproduc- subconscious impulses.
tive laws based on eugenics, a so-called science of America’s most famous writer, Samuel Langhorne
human breeding. Eugenicists argued that mentally Clemens, who took the pen name of Mark Twain, came
deficient people should be prevented from reproduc- to an equally bleak view. Though he achieved enor-
ing. They proposed sterilizing those deemed “unfit,” mous success with such lighthearted books as The
especially residents of state asylums for the insane or Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Clemens courted
mentally disabled. In early-twentieth-century America, controversy with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
almost half of the states enacted eugenics laws. By the (1884), notable for its indictment of slavery and rac-
time eugenics subsided in the 1930s, about twenty ism. In his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
thousand people had been sterilized, with California Court (1889), which ends with a bloody, technology-
and Virginia taking the lead. Women in Puerto Rico driven slaughter of Arthur’s knights, Mark Twain
and other U.S. imperial possessions (Chapter 21) also became one of the bitterest critics of America’s idea of
John French Sloan, A Woman’s

Work, 1912
The subject of this painting — a woman
hanging out laundry behind a city
apartment building — is typical of the
subjects chosen by American artist John
Sloan (1871–1951). Sloan and a group
of his allies became famous as realists;
critics derided them as the “Ash Can
school” because they did not paint
rural landscapes or other conventional
subjects considered worthy of painting.
Sloan, though, warned against seeing
his paintings as simple representations
of reality, even if he described his work
as based on “a creative impulse derived
out of a consciousness of life.” “ ‘Looks
like’ is not the test of a good painting,”
he wrote: “Even the scientist is inter-
ested in effects only as phenomena
from which to deduce order in life.”
Cleveland Museum of Art. Gift of Amelia
Elizabeth White.
progress. Soon afterward, Clemens was devastated by In the visual arts, new technologies influenced aes-
the loss of his wife and two daughters, as well as by thetics. By 1900, some photographers argued that their
failed investments and bankruptcy. An outspoken “true” representations made painting obsolete. But
critic of imperialism and foreign missions, Twain even- painters invented their own forms of realism. Nebraska-
tually denounced Christianity itself as a hypocritical born artist Robert Henri became fascinated with life in
delusion. Like his friend the industrialist Andrew the great cities. “The backs of tenement houses are liv-
Carnegie, Clemens “got rid of theology.” ing documents,” he declared, and he set out to put them
By the time Clemens died in 1910, realist and natu- on canvas. Henri and his followers, notably John Sloan
ralist writers had laid the groundwork for modernism, and George Bellows, called themselves the New York
which rejected traditional canons of literary taste. Realists. Critics derided them as
Questioning the whole idea of progress and order, the Ash Can school because they EXPLAIN
modernists focused on the subconscious and “primi- chose subjects that were not con- CONSEQUENCES
What effect did technol-
tive” mind. Above all, they sought to overturn conven- ventionally beautiful.
ogy and scientific ideas
tion and tradition. Poet Ezra Pound exhorted, “Make In 1913, Realists participated
have on literature and the
it new!” Modernism became the first great literary and in one of the most controversial
arts?
artistic movement of the twentieth century. events in American art history,
AMERICAN
VOICES
The idea that human society advanced through “survival of the fittest” was a
popular doctrine, referred to by historians as “Social Darwinism.” Many Ameri-
Three Interpretations cans agreed with Harvard sociologist William Graham Sumner, who argued that
the poor and weak were a “burden,” a “dead-weight on the society in all its
of Social Darwinism struggles.” Such views prompted a range of responses, ranging from enthusias-
tic endorsement to uneasy accommodation to impassioned opposition.
Theodore Dreiser The lobster was in the corner. Before him was the squid
The Financier cut in two and partially devoured. . . .
The incident made a great impression on him. It
Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) was an American literary answered in a rough way that riddle which had been
naturalist. His novel The Financier (1912) traces the rise of annoying him so much in the past: “How is life orga-
Frank Cowperwood, a young man who, during the last years nized?” Things lived on each other — that was it. Lobsters
of the nineteenth century, becomes a powerful banker. lived on squids and other things. What lived on lobsters?
Dreiser loosely based the character on the life of financier Men, of course! . . . And what lived on men? he asked
Charles Yerkes. In this excerpt, the narrator describes a himself. Was it other men? Wild animals lived on men.
transformative moment in Cowperwood’s youth. And there were Indians and cannibals. And some men
[Cowperwood] could not figure out how this thing he were killed by storms and accidents. He wasn’t so sure
had come into — this life — was organized. How did all about men living on men; but men did kill each other.
these people get into the world? What were they doing How about wars and street fights and mobs? . . .
here? Who started things, anyhow? His mother told him Frank thought of this and of the life he was tossed
the story of Adam and Eve, but he didn’t believe it. . . . into, for he was already pondering on what he should be
One day he saw a squid and a lobster put in [a] tank, in this world, and how he should get along. From seeing
and in connection with them was witness to a tragedy his father count money, he was sure that he would like
which stayed with him all his life and cleared things up banking; and Third Street, where his father’s office was,
considerably intellectually. The lobster, it appeared from seemed to him the cleanest, most fascinating street in
the talk of the idle bystanders, was offered no food, as the the world.
squid was considered his rightful prey. He lay at the bottom
of the clear glass tank . . . apparently seeing nothing — you Source: Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), 10–15.
could not tell in which way his beady, black buttons of

eyes were looking — but apparently they were never off Lyman Abbott
the body of the squid. The latter, pale and waxy in texture, The Evolution of Christianity
looking very much like pork fat or jade, moved about in
Liberal Congregationalist Lyman Abbott (1835–1922) was
torpedo fashion; but his movements were apparently
a noted advocate of the Social Gospel. In The Evolution of
never out of the eyes of his enemy, for by degrees small
Christianity (1892), Abbott sought to reconcile the theory
portions of his body began to disappear, snapped off by
of evolution with the development of Christianity.
the relentless claws of his pursuer. . . .
[One day] only a portion of the squid remained. . . . The doctrine of evolution is not a doctrine of harmonious
In the corner of the tank sat the lobster, poised apparently and uninterrupted progress. The most common, if not the
for action. The boy stayed as long as he could, the bitter most accurate formula of evolution is “struggle for exis-
struggle fascinating him. Now, maybe, or in an hour or tence, survival of the fittest.” The doctrine of evolution
a day, the squid might die, slain by the lobster, and the assumes that there are forces in the world seemingly hos-
lobster would eat him. He looked again at the greenish- tile to progress, that life is a perpetual battle and progress
copperish engine of destruction in the corner and a perpetual victory.
wondered when this would be. . . . The Christian evolutionist will then expect to find
He returned that night, and lo! the expected had Christianity a warfare — in church, in society, in the
happened. There was a little crowd around the tank. individual. . . . He will remember that the divine life is
596
resident in undivine humanity. He will not be surprised to all the definitions. Art is the antithesis of nature. If we call
find the waters of the stream disturbed; for he will reflect one the natural method, we must call the other the artifi-
that the divine purity has come into a turbid stream, and cial method. If nature’s process is rightly named natural
that it can purify only by being itself indistinguishably selection, man’s process is artificial selection. The survival
combined with the impure. When he is told that modern of the fittest is simply the survival of the strong, which
Christianity is only a “civilized paganism,” he will reply, implies, and might as well be called, the destruction of the
“That is exactly what I supposed it to be; and it will con- weak. And if nature progresses through the destruction of
tinue to be a civilized paganism until civilization has the weak, man progresses through the protection of the
entirely eliminated paganism.” He will not be surprised to weak. . . .
find pagan ceremonies in the ritual, ignorance and super- . . . Man, through his intelligence, has labored success-
stition in the church, and even errors and partialisms in fully to resist the law of nature. His success is conclusively
the Bible. For he will remember that the divine life, which demonstrated by a comparison of his condition with that
is bringing all life into harmony with itself, is a life resi- of other species of animals. No other cause can be
dent in man. He will remember that the Bible does not assigned for his superiority. How can the naturalistic phi-
claim to be the absolute Word of God; that, on the con- losophers shut their eyes to such obvious facts? Yet, what
trary . . . it claims to be the Word of God . . . as spoken to is their attitude? They condemn all attempts to protect the
men, and understood and interpreted by men, which saw weak, whether by private or public methods. They claim
it in part as we still see it, and reflected it as from a mirror that it deteriorates the race by enabling the unfit to sur-
in enigmas. vive and transmit their inferiority. . . . Nothing is easier
He will remember that the Church is not yet the bride than to show that the unrestricted competition of nature
of Christ, but the plebeian daughter whom Christ is edu- does not secure the survival of the fittest possible, but
cating to be his bride. He will remember that Christianity only of the actually fittest, and in every attempt man
is not the absolutely divine, but the divine in humanity, makes to obtain something fitter than this actual fittest
the divine force resident in man and transforming man he succeeds, as witness improved breeds of animals and
into the likeness of the divine. Christianity is the light grafts of fruits. Now, the human method of protecting the
struggling with the darkness, life battling with death, the weak deals in such way with men. It not only increases
spiritual overcoming the animal. We judge Christianity as the number but improves the quality.
the scientist judges the embryo, as the gardener the bud,
as the teacher the pupil, — not by what it is, but by what it Source: Lester Frank Ward, Glimpses of the Cosmos (New York: Harper, 1913), 371, 374.
promises to be.
Source: Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892),
8–10.
Lester Frank Ward

Glimpses of the Cosmos
Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913) helped establish sociology QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
in the United States. Following French philosopher 1. By telling the squid and lobster story, what message was
Auguste Comte, he held that the social sciences should Dreiser conveying to readers, about men such as Cow-
perwood? If Abbott and Ward had read The Financier,
develop methods of improving society. In his autobiogra-
how might they have responded? Why?
phy Glimpses of the Cosmos (1913–1918), Ward rejected 2. Historians sometimes claim that American thinkers of
Social Darwinism. this era, endorsing Social Darwinism and “survival of
the fittest,” opposed social reform. How do Abbott and
How shall we distinguish this human, or anthropic, Ward complicate that view?
method from the method of nature? Simply by reversing
597
the Armory Show. Housed in an enormous National Robert Henri banned small brushes as “too feminine.”
Guard building in New York, the exhibit introduced In their own ways, these writers and artists contributed
America to modern art. Some painters whose work to a broad movement to masculinize American culture.
appeared at the show were experimenting with cubism,
characterized by abstract, geometric forms. Along with
works by Henri, Sloan, and Bellows, organizers fea- Religion: Diversity and Innovation
tured paintings by European rebels such as Pablo By the turn of the twentieth century, emerging scien-
Picasso. America’s academic art world was shocked. tific and cultural paradigms posed a significant chal-
One critic called cubism “the total destruction of the lenge to religious faith. Some Americans argued that
art of painting.” But as the exhibition went on to Boston science and modernity would sweep away religion
and Chicago, more than 250,000 people crowded to altogether. Contrary to such predictions, American reli-
see it. gious practice remained vibrant. Protestants developed
A striking feature of both realism and modernism, creative new responses to the challenges of industrial-
as they developed, was that many leading writers and ization, while millions of newcomers built institutions
artists were men. In making their work strong and for worship and religious education.
modern, they also strove to assert their masculinity.
Paralleling Theodore Roosevelt’s call for “manly sports,” Immigrant Faiths Arriving in the United States in
they denounced nineteenth-century culture as hope- large numbers, Catholics and Jews wrestled with similar
lessly feminized. Stephen Crane called for “virility” questions. To what degree should they adapt to
in literature. Jack London described himself as a Protestant-dominated American society? Should the
“man’s man, . . . lustfully roving and conquering.” Artist education of clergy be changed? Should children attend
Arthur B. Davies, Dancers, 1914–1915

Artist Arthur Davies (1862–1928) was one of the primary organizers of New York’s 1913 Armory Show,
which introduced Americans to modernist art. An associate of John Sloan and other New York Realists,
Davies experimented with an array of painting styles, as well as printmaking and tapestry making. This
painting dates from a three-year period, just after the Armory Show, in which Davies experimented with
Cubist techniques. Dancers, 1914–1915 (oil on canvas), Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/Gift of Ralph Harman Booth/The
Bridgeman Art Library.
religious or public schools? What happened if they mar- gious practices as keeping a kosher kitchen and con-
ried outside the faith? Among Catholic leaders, Bishop ducting services in Hebrew. This was not the way
John Ireland of Minnesota argued that “the principles of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, who
of the Church are in harmony with the interests of arrived in large numbers after the 1880s. Generally
the Republic.” But traditionalists, led by Archbishop much poorer and eager to preserve their own traditions,
Michael A. Corrigan of New York, disagreed. They they founded Orthodox synagogues, often in vacant
sought to insulate Catholics from the pluralistic Ameri- stores, and practiced Judaism as they had at home.
can environment. Indeed, by 1920, almost two million But in Eastern Europe, Judaism had been an entire
children attended Catholic elementary schools nation- way of life, one not easily replicated in a large American
wide, and Catholic dioceses operated fifteen hundred city. “The very clothes I wore and the very food I ate
high schools. Catholics as well as Jews feared some of the had a fatal effect on my religious habits,” confessed the
same threats that distressed Protestants: industrial pov- hero of Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David
erty and overwork kept working-class people away from Levinsky (1917). “If you . . . attempt to bend your reli-
worship services, while new consumer pleasures enticed gion to the spirit of your surroundings, it breaks. It falls
many of them to go elsewhere. to pieces.” Levinsky shaved off his beard and plunged
Faithful immigrant Catholics were anxious to pre- into the Manhattan clothing business. Orthodox
serve familiar traditions from Europe, and they gener- Judaism survived the transition to America, but like
ally supported the Church’s traditional wing. But they other immigrant religions, it had to renounce its claims
also wanted religious life to express their ethnic identi- to some of the faithful.
ties. Italians, Poles, and other new arrivals wanted sep-
arate parishes where they could celebrate their customs, Protestant Innovations One of the era’s dramatic
speak their languages, and establish their own paro- religious developments — facilitated by global steamship
chial schools. When they became numerous enough, and telegraph lines — was the rise of Protestant foreign
they also demanded their own bishops. The Catholic missions. From a modest start before the Civil War,
hierarchy, dominated by Irishmen, felt the integrity of this movement peaked around 1915, a year when
the Church was at stake. The demand for ethnic par- American religious organizations sponsored more than
ishes implied local control of church property. With nine thousand overseas missionaries, supported at home
some strain, the Catholic Church managed to satisfy by armies of volunteers, including more than three
the diverse needs of the immigrant faithful. It met the million women. A majority of Protestant missionaries
demand for representation, for example, by appointing served in Asia, with smaller numbers posted to Africa
immigrant priests as auxiliary bishops within existing and the Middle East. Most saw American-style domes-
dioceses. ticity as a central part of evangelism, and missionary
In the same decades, many prosperous native-born societies sent married couples into the field. Many
Jews embraced Reform Judaism, abandoning such reli- unmarried women also served overseas as missionary
Christian Missions in
Japan, 1909
Through this colorful postcard,
Protestant missionaries in Japan
demonstrate their success in
winning converts (at least a
few) and their adaptation of
missionary strategies to meet
local needs and expectations.
Here, outside their headquarters,
they demonstrate “preaching by
means of banners.” The large
characters on the vertical banner
proclaim the “Association of
Christian Gospel Evangelists.”
The horizontal banner is a Jap-
anese translation of Matthew
11:28, “Come unto me, all ye
who labor and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.”
© Bettmann/Corbis.
teachers, doctors, and nurses, who resolved to live by Christ’s precepts for one year.
IDENTIFY CAUSES
though almost never as minis- “If church members were all doing as Jesus would do,”
How did America’s reli-
gious life change in this
ters. “American woman,” declared Sheldon asked, “could it remain true that armies of
era, and what prompted one Christian reformer, has “the men would walk the streets for jobs, and hundreds of
those changes? exalted privilege of extending them curse the church, and thousands of them find in
over the world those blessed influ- the saloon their best friend?”
ences, that are to renovate degraded man.” The Salvation Army, which arrived from Great
Protestant missionaries won converts, in part, by Britain in 1879, also spread a gospel message among
providing such modern services as medical care and the urban poor, offering assistance that ranged from
women’s education. Some missionaries developed deep soup kitchens to shelters for former prostitutes. When
bonds of respect with the people they served. Others
showed considerable condescension toward the “poor
heathen,” who in turn bristled at their assumptions
(America Compared, p. 601). One Presbyterian, who
found Syrians uninterested in his gospel message,
angrily denounced all Muslims as “corrupt and
immoral.” By imposing their views of “heathen races”
and attacking those who refused to convert, Christian
missionaries sometimes ended up justifying Western
imperialism.
Chauvinism abroad reflected attitudes that also
surfaced at home. Starting in Iowa in 1887, militant
Protestants created a powerful political organization,
the American Protective Association (APA), which for
a brief period in the 1890s counted more than two mil-
lion members. This virulently nativist group expressed
outrage at the existence of separate Catholic schools
while demanding, at the same time, that all public
school teachers be Protestants. The APA called for a
ban on Catholic officeholders, arguing that they were
beholden to an “ecclesiastic power” that was “not cre-
ated and controlled by American citizens.” In its viru-
lent anti-Catholicism and calls for restrictions on
immigrants, the APA prefigured the revived Ku Klux
Klan of the 1920s (Chapter 22).
The APA arose, in part, because Protestants found
their dominance challenged. Millions of Americans,
especially in the industrial working class, were now
Catholics or Jews. Overall, in 1916, Protestants still
constituted about 60 percent of Americans affiliated The Salvation Army on the Streets
with a religious body. But they faced formidable rivals: This theater poster for the popular play On the Bowery
the number of practicing Catholics in 1916 — 15.7 mil- (1894), written by theater agent Robert Neilson Stephens,
shows how many Americans perceived the Salvation Army.
lion — was greater than the number of Baptists, Here, Salvation Army workers in New York City offer the
Methodists, and Presbyterians combined. organization’s newspaper, War Cry, to a man who brushes
Some Protestants responded to the urban, immi- them off (rudely). The man is Steve Brodie, a celebrity who
grant challenge by evangelizing among the unchurched. was recruited to portray himself onstage. A former East River
lifesaving champion who became a saloon owner in New
They provided reading rooms, day nurseries, voca- York’s Bowery district, Brodie had won fame in 1886 by
tional classes, and other services. The goal of renewing claiming to have jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge and
religious faith through dedication to justice and social survived. (It was later claimed that he faked the stunt, but
“doing a Brodie” became popular slang for taking a big
welfare became known as the Social Gospel. Its goals risk.) While many Americans admired the Salvation Army,
were epitomized by Charles Sheldon’s novel In His others — particularly men of working-class origins, like
Steps (1896), which told the story of a congregation Brodie — rejected its appeals. Library of Congress.
AMERICA
C O M PA R E D
During the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition, a Parliament of Reli-

Christianity in the gions brought together representatives of prominent faiths for discussion.
English-speaking Protestants dominated the program, but several Asian rep-
United States and resentatives included Kinzo Hirai, a lay Buddhist from Japan. In his speech,
Hirai reviewed Japan’s experiences with the United States since Commodore
Japan Matthew C. Perry “opened” the country in 1853.
I do not understand why the Christian lands have ignored last year the Japanese were driven out in wholesale from
the rights and advantages of forty million souls of Japan one of the territories of the United States; when our busi-
for forty years. . . . One of the excuses offered by foreign ness men in San Francisco were compelled by some union
nations is that our country is not yet civilized. Is it the not to employ Japanese assistants and laborers, but the
principle of civilized law that the rights and profits of the Americans; when there are some in the same city who
so-called uncivilized, or the weaker, should be sacrificed? speak on the platform against those of us who are already
As I understand it, the spirit and necessity of law is to here; when there are many who go in procession hoisting
protect the rights and profits of the weaker against the lanterns marked “Japs must go”; when the Japanese in the
aggression of the stronger. . . . Hawaiian Islands were deprived of their suffrage; when
From the religious source, the claim is made that the we see some western people in Japan who erect before the
Japanese are idolaters and heathen. . . . [A]dmitting for entrance to their houses a special post upon which is the
the sake of argument that we are idolaters and heathen, notice, “No Japanese is allowed to enter here” — just like a
is it Christian morality to trample upon the rights and board upon which is written, “No dogs allowed”; when we
advantages of a non-Christian nation, coloring all their are in such a situation, notwithstanding the kindness of
natural happiness with the dark stain of injustice? . . . the western nations from one point of view, who send
You send your missionaries to Japan and they advise their missionaries to us, that we unintelligent heathens
us to be moral and believe Christianity. We like to be are embarrassed and hesitate to swallow the sweet and
moral, we know that Christianity is good; and we are warm liquid of the heaven of Christianity, will not be
very thankful for this kindness. But at the same time our unreasonable.
people are rather perplexed. . . . For when we think that
the treaty stipulated in the time of feudalism, when we
Source: The World’s Parliament of Religions, ed. John Henry Barrows (Chicago:
were yet in our youth, is still clung to by the powerful Parliament Publishing Co., 1893), 444–450.
nations of Christendom; when we find that every year a
good many western vessels of seal fishery are smuggled
into our seas; when legal cases are always decided by the ANALYZING THE EVIDENCE
foreign authorities in Japan unfavorably to us; when some 1. What is Hirai’s attitude toward American Christians?
years ago a Japanese was not allowed to enter a university 2. Of what events is Hirai aware that are taking place in the
on the Pacific coast of America because of his being of a United States? How does this shape his view of Christian
different race; when a few months ago the school board missions in Japan?
3. How might American delegates to the Parliament, espe-
in San Francisco enacted a regulation that no Japanese
cially Protestant missionaries, have responded to Hirai?
should be allowed to enter the public school there; when
all else failed, down-and-outers knew they could count different theological path. Disturbed by what they saw
on the Salvation Army, whose bell ringers became a as rising secularism, conservative ministers and their
familiar sight on city streets. The group borrowed up- allies held a series of Bible Conferences at Niagara Falls
to-date marketing techniques and used the latest busi- between 1876 and 1897. The resulting “Niagara Creed”
ness slang in urging its Christian soldiers to “hustle.” reaffirmed the literal truth of the Bible and the certain
The Salvation Army succeeded, in part, because it damnation of those not born again in Christ. By the
managed to bridge an emerging divide between Social 1910s, a network of churches and Bible institutes had
Gospel reformers and Protestants who were taking a emerged from these conferences. They called their
601
Billy Sunday with His Bible

One of the most popular
Protestant preachers of the early
twentieth century, Billy Sunday
(1862–1935) was a former pro-
fessional baseball player with an
imposing physique and dynamic
preaching style. More willing
than most of his predecessors to
make direct political arguments,
Sunday championed antiradical-
ism and prohibition — stances
that foreshadowed the
Protestant political crusades of
the 1920s. Sunday’s most
famous sermon was his anti-
liquor exhortation, “Get on
the Water Wagon.” Library of
Congress.
movement fundamentalism, based on their belief in conversion he had been a hard-drinking outfielder for
the fundamental truth of the Bible. the Chicago White Stockings. To advertise his revivals,
Fundamentalists and their allies made particularly Sunday often organized local men into baseball teams,
effective use of revival meetings. Unlike Social Gospel then put on his own uniform and played for both sides.
advocates, revivalists said little about poverty or earthly Through such feats and the fiery sermons that fol-
justice, focusing not on the matters of the world, but on lowed, Sunday offered a model of spiritual inspiration,
heavenly redemption. The pioneer modern evangelist manly strength, and political engagement. His revivals
was Dwight L. Moody, a former Chicago shoe sales- were thoroughly modern: marketed shrewdly, they
man and YMCA official who won fame in the 1870s. provided mass entertainment and the chance to meet a
Eternal life could be had for the asking, Moody prom- pro baseball player. Like other cultural developments
ised. His listeners needed only “to come forward and of the industrializing era, Billy Sunday’s popularity
take, take!” Moody’s successor, Billy Sunday, helped showed how Americans often adjusted to modernity:
bring evangelism into the modern era. More often than they adapted older beliefs and values, enabling them to
his predecessors, Sunday took political stances based endure in new forms.
on his Protestant beliefs. Condemning the “booze traf-
fic” was his greatest cause. Sunday also denounced
unrestricted immigration and labor radicalism. “If I
had my way with these ornery wild-eyed Socialists,”
SUMMARY
he once threatened, “I would stand them up before a Industrialization and new consumer practices created
firing squad.” Sunday supported some progressive foundations for modern American culture. While
reform causes; he opposed child labor, for example, middle-class families sought to preserve the Victorian
and advocated voting rights for women. But in other domestic ideal, a variety of factors transformed family
ways, his views anticipated the nativism and antiradi- life. Families had fewer children, and a substantial
calism that would dominate American politics after majority of young people achieved more education
World War I. than their parents had obtained. Across class and gen-
Billy Sunday, like other noted men of his era, broke der lines, Americans enjoyed athletics and the out-
free of Victorian practices and asserted his leadership doors, fostering the rise of environmentalism.
in a masculinized American culture. Not only was he Among an array of women’s reform movements,
a commanding presence on the stage, but before his the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union sought
CHAPTER 18 CHAPTER REVIEW 603
prohibition of liquor, but it also addressed issues such the results, including Theodore Dreiser’s scandalous
as domestic violence, poverty, and education. Members novel Sister Carrie, Mark Twain’s rejection of Christian
of women’s clubs pursued a variety of social and eco- faith, and the boldly modernist paintings displayed at
nomic reforms, while other women organized for race New York’s Armory Show. Science and modernism did
uplift and patriotic work. Gradually, the Victorian ideal not, however, displace religion. Newly arrived Catholics
of female moral superiority gave way to modern claims and Jews, as well as old-line Protestants, adapted their
for women’s equal rights. faith to the conditions of modern life. Foreign mis-
New intellectual currents, including Darwinism, sions, in the meantime, spread the Christian gospel
challenged Victorian certainties. In the arts, realist and around the world, with mixed results for those receiv-
naturalist writers rejected both romanticism and Vic– ing the message.
torian domesticity. Many Americans were shocked by
C H A P T E R R E V I E W
M A K E I T S T I C K Go to LearningCurve to retain what you’ve read.
TERMS TO KNOW Identify and explain the significance of each term below.
Key Concepts and Events Key People

Plessy v. Ferguson (p. 577) National American Woman Thomas Edison (p. 576)
Young Men’s Christian Associa- Suffrage Association (p. 592) John Muir (p. 583)
tion (p. 580) feminism (p. 592) Booker T. Washington (p. 587)
Negro Leagues (p. 581) natural selection (p. 594) Frances Willard (p. 589)
Sierra Club (p. 583) Social Darwinism (p. 594) Ida B. Wells (p. 591)
National Park Service (p. 583) eugenics (p. 594) Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne
National Audubon Society (p. 583) realism (p. 594) Clemens) (p. 594)
Comstock Act (p. 585) naturalism (p. 594) Billy Sunday (p. 602)
liberal arts (p. 587) modernism (p. 595)
Atlanta Compromise (p. 587) American Protective Association
maternalism (p. 589) (p. 600)
Woman’s Christian Temperance Social Gospel (p. 600)
Union (p. 589) fundamentalism (p. 602)
National Association of Colored
Women (p. 591)
REVIEW QUESTIONS Answer these questions to demonstrate your

understanding of the chapter’s main ideas.
1. Why did athletics become popular in the late- 2. What changes in women’s private and public lives
nineteenth-century United States? In what ways occurred in the decades after the Civil War, and
did this trend represent broader changes in Ameri- how did these affect women from different back-
can society and culture? grounds? Why do you think emphasis on the status
of “ladies” became so insistent in this era?
604 PART 6 CHAPTER REVIEW
3. Some historians argue that the changes brought by 5. THEMATIC UNDERSTANDING On the Part 6
industrialization caused Americans to become a thematic timeline (p. 543), review developments in
more secular people. To what extent do you agree “Ideas, Beliefs, and Culture” and “Environment and
or disagree, and why? Use evidence from this chap- Geography.” How did industrialization change
ter to make your case. Americans’ relationship to the outdoors — to natu-
ral environments? What connections do you see
4. What policy changes resulted, in part, from
between those changes and other, broader shifts in
Americans’ new zest for outdoor recreation? (You
American society and culture?
may also want to review Chapter 16, pp. 521 and
524–525 on John Wesley Powell, the creation of
Yellowstone, and early wildlife conservation.)
MAKING Recognize the larger developments and continuities within

CONNECTIONS and across chapters by answering these questions.
1. ACROSS TIME AND PLACE This chapter 2. VISUAL EVIDENCE This chapter contains sev-
explains cultural transformation as largely the eral depictions of domestic spaces, and also of
result of industrialization. That’s true, but it’s not women in public. After studying these images, how
the whole story: the Civil War also helped bring would you describe the ideal roles that Americans
about change. Organizers of the WCTU, for ex- of this era believed women should fulfill? Did the
ample, were distressed by alcoholism among the ideal differ, based on social and economic class?
industrial working class but also by the plight of Compare these images to the photographs of
veterans, some of whom anaesthetized their war women in this chapter. What differences do you see
wounds through heavy drinking. Review the mate- between the “ideal” depictions and the ways in
rial in Chapters 14 and 15, on the Civil War and its which real women appeared in front of the
aftermath, and then write an essay in which you camera?
explain how changes in American society during
the Civil War and Reconstruction laid the ground-
work for new controversies in the areas of race rela-
tions, reform, science, and religious faith.
MORE TO EXPLORE Start here to learn more about the events discussed in this chapter.
Patrick W. Carey, The Roman Catholics in America emerged in this period, and their impact on religious
(1996). A major synthesis of American Catholic faith.
history.
Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (2004). Provides
Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement an excellent account of the negotiations between
(1985). A history of the rise of environmentalism. Americanized Jews and new Eastern European
immigrants in this era.
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (1996). An
influential account of African American women’s David Shi, Facing Facts (1994). Explores the impact
activism in reform and politics. of realism and scientific thinking on the arts and
intellectual life.
Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity (2001). A good
introduction to the new ideas of masculinity that
CHAPTER 18 CHAPTER REVIEW 605
TIMELINE Ask yourself why this chapter begins and ends with these dates
and then identify the links among related events.
1861 t Vassar College founded for women
1872 t First national park established at Yellowstone
1873 t Association for the Advancement of Women founded
t Comstock Act
1874 t Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founded
1876 t Baseball’s National League founded
t Appalachian Mountain Club founded
1879 t Salvation Army established in the United States
1881 t Tuskegee Institute founded
1885 t Mississippi State College for Women founded
1890 t National American Woman Suffrage Association founded
t Daughters of the American Revolution founded
1892 t Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivers “solitude of self” speech to Congress
t John Muir founds Sierra Club
1893 t Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition
1894 t United Daughters of the Confederacy founded
1895 t Booker T. Washington delivers Atlanta Compromise address
1896 t National Association of Colored Women founded
t Charles Sheldon publishes In His Steps
t Plessy v. Ferguson legalizes “separate but equal” doctrine
1900 t Lacey Act
1903 t First World Series
t First National Wildlife Refuge established
1906 t Antiquities Act
1913 t Armory Show of modern art held in New York City
1916 t National Park Service created
KEY TURNING POINT: Some historians have argued that the 1890s was a crucial turning
point in American culture — a decade when “modernity arrived.” Based on events in this chap-
ter, do you agree?

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The Victorians Make the Modern

Even working-class Americans enjoyed cheaper

Pacific Railway Poster, c. 1900

New consumer technologies often had different impacts on working-class and

3. “The Mischievous Telephone Girl Makes More

Jim Crow laws applied to public schools and parks

Masculinity and the Rise of Sports

Football Practice, Chilocco Indian School, 1911

expanded its park system and,

Bering Kobuk Gates of North Cascades (1968) Isle Royale

0 250 500 kilometers Virgin Islands Biscayne (1968)

both freedom and risk, and working-class women were

Changes in Family Life

institutions, including teacher-training colleges. For

Class of 1896, Radcliffe College

modern arguments for women’s equality. “Women’s

A Plea for Temperance, 1874

lead, Willard declared herself a Christian Socialist and

Women’s Rights Though it had split into two rival

0 250 500 miles

John French Sloan, A Woman’s

could not tell in which way his beady, black buttons of

Lester Frank Ward

Arthur B. Davies, Dancers, 1914–1915

During the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition, a Parliament of Reli-

Billy Sunday with His Bible

Key Concepts and Events Key People

REVIEW QUESTIONS Answer these questions to demonstrate your

MAKING Recognize the larger developments and continuities within

1861 t Vassar College founded for women

1872 t First national park established at Yellowstone

1873 t Association for the Advancement of Women founded

1874 t Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founded

1876 t Baseball’s National League founded

t Appalachian Mountain Club founded

1879 t Salvation Army established in the United States

1881 t Tuskegee Institute founded

1885 t Mississippi State College for Women founded

1890 t National American Woman Suffrage Association founded

t Daughters of the American Revolution founded

1892 t Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivers “solitude of self” speech to Congress

t John Muir founds Sierra Club

1893 t Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition

1894 t United Daughters of the Confederacy founded

1895 t Booker T. Washington delivers Atlanta Compromise address

1896 t National Association of Colored Women founded

t Charles Sheldon publishes In His Steps

t Plessy v. Ferguson legalizes “separate but equal” doctrine

1900 t Lacey Act

1903 t First World Series

t First National Wildlife Refuge established

1906 t Antiquities Act

1913 t Armory Show of modern art held in New York City

1916 t National Park Service created

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