In 1893, Chicago hosted a world's fair known as the World's Columbian

Exposition. More than 12 million people traveled to the White City, as Chicago's fairgrounds and gleaming white
buildings were known. Visitors saw the progress of American civilization as represented by new industrial
technologies and by the architects' grand visions of an ideal urban environment.
In just six decades, Chicago's population had grown to more than one million.
Its central business district was a marvel of modern urban structures: steel-framed skyscrapers, department stores,
and theaters. Around this central hub lay a sprawling gridiron of workers' housing near the city's factories and
warehouses, and a few miles beyond were tree-lined suburban retreats for the wealthy. The entire urban complex
was connected by hundreds of miles of streetcars and railroads.
Visitors to Chicago also experienced a "gray city" of pollution, poverty, crime, and vice. Some complained of the
confusion of tongues, "worse than the tower of Babel," for in 1893 Chicago was a city of immigrants. More than
three-fourths of its population were either foreign-born or the children of the foreign-born. Both the real Chicago and
the idealized "White City" represented the complex ways in which three great forces of change-industrialization,
and urbanization-were transforming the nature of American
society in the late 19th century. A previous chapter covered industrialization.
This chapter focuses on immigration and urbanization.
A Nation of Immigrants
In the last half of the 19th century, the U.S. population more than tripled, from about 23.2 million in 1850 to 76.2
million in 1900. The arrival of 16.2 million immigrants fueled the growth. An additional 8.8 million more arrived during
the peak years of immigration, 1901-1910.
Growth of Immigration
The growing connections between the United States and the world are evident during this period, especially in the
area of immigration. A increased combination of "pushes" (negative factors from which people are fleeing) and "pulls"
(positive attractions of the adopted country) increased migrations around the world. The negative forces driving
Europeans to emigrate included (1) the poverty of displaced farmworkers driven from the land by political turmoil and
the mechanization of farmwork, (2) overcrowding and joblessness in cities as a result of a population boom, and (3)
religious persecution, particularly of Jews in eastern Europe. Positive reasons for moving to the United States
included this country's reputation for political and religious freedom and the economic opportunities afforded by the
settling of the West and the abundance of industrial jobs in U.S. cities. Furthermore, the introduction of large
steamships and the relatively inexpensive one-way passage in the ships' "steerage" made it
possible for millions of poor people to emigrate.
"Old" Immigrants and "New" Immigrants
Through the 1880s, the vast majority of immigrants came from northern and western Europe: the British Isles,
Germany, and Scandinavia. Most of these
"old" immigrants were Protestants, although many were Irish or German Cath-olics. Their language (mostly
English-speaking) and high level of literacy and occupational skills made it relatively easy for these immigrants to
blend into a mostly rural American society in the early decades of the 19th century.
New Immigrants Beginning in the 1890s and continuing to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the national origins of
most immigrants changed. The
"new" immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe. They were Italians, Greeks, Croats, Slovaks, Poles, and
Russians. Many were poor and illiterate peasants who had left autocratic countries and therefore were unaccustomed
to democratic traditions. Unlike the earlier groups of Protestant immigrants, the newcomers were largely Roman
Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and Jewish. On arrival, most new immigrants crowded into poor ethnic
neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, and other major U.S. cities.
An estimated 25 percent of them were "birds of passage," young men contracted for unskilled factory, mining, and
construction jobs, who would return to their native lands once they had saved a fair sum of money to bring back to
their families.
Restricting Immigration
In the 1870s, when the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi began work on the Statue of Liberty, there were
few legal restrictions on immigration to the United States. By 1886, however-the year that the great welcoming-statue
was placed on its pedestal in New York Harbor-Congress had passed a number of new laws restricting immigration.
First came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, placing a ban on all new immigrants from China. As already noted in
the last chapter, this hostility to the Chinese mainly came from the western states. Restrictions also came in 1882 on
the immigration of "undesirable" persons, such as paupers, criminals, convicts, and those diagnosed as mentally
incompetent. The Contract Labor Law of 1885 restricted temporary workers to protect American workers. A literacy
test for immigrants was vetoed by President Cleveland, but passed in 1917. Soon after the opening of Ellis Island as
an immigration center in 1892, new arrivals had to pass more rigorous medical examinations and pay a tax before
entering the United States.
Efforts to restrict immigration were supported by diverse groups such as
(1) labor unions, which feared that employers would use immigrants to depress wages and break strikes, (2) a nativist
society, the American Protective Asso-ciation, which was openly prejudiced against Roman Catholics, and (3) social
Darwinists, who viewed the new immigrants as biologically inferior to English and Germanic stocks. During a severe
depression in the 1890s, foreigners became a convenient scapegoat for jobless workers as well as for employers
who blamed strikes and the labor movement on foreign agitators.
However, anti-immigrant feelings and early restrictions did not stop the flow of newcomers. At the turn of the century,
almost 15 percent of the U.S. population were immigrants. The Statue of Liberty remained a beacon of hope for the
poor and the oppressed of southern and eastern Europe until the 1920s, when the Quota Acts almost closed Liberty's
golden door (see Chapter 23).
Urbanization
Urbanization and industrialization developed simultaneously. Cities provided both laborers for factories and a market
for factory-made goods. The shift in population from rural to urban became more obvious with each passing decade.
By 1900 almost 40 percent of Americans lived in towns or cities. By 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in
urban areas than in rural areas.
Those moving into the cities were both immigrants and internal migrants born in the rural United States. In the late
19th century, millions of young Americans from rural areas decided to seek new economic opportunities in the cities.
They left the farms for industrial and commercial jobs, and few of them returned. Among those who joined the
movement from farms to cities were African Americans from the South. Between 1897 and 1930, nearly I million
southern blacks settled in northern and western cities.
Changes in the Nature of Cities
Cities of the late 19th century underwent significant changes not only in their size but also in their internal structure
and design.
Streetcar Cities Improvements in urban transportation made the growth of cities possible. In the walking cities of the
pre-Civil War era, people had little choice but to live within walking distance of their shops or jobs. Such cities gave
way to streetcar cities, in which people lived in residences many miles from their jobs and commuted to work on
horse-drawn streetcars. By the 1890s, both horse-drawn cars and cable cars were being replaced by electric trolleys,
elevated railroads, and subways, which could transport people to urban residences even farther from the city's
commercial center. The building of massive steel suspension bridges such as New York's Brooklyn Bridge (completed
in 1883) also made possible longer commutes between residential areas and the center city.
Mass transportation had the effect of segregating urban workers by income.
The upper and middle classes moved to streetcar suburbs to escape the pollution, poverty, and crime of the city. The
exodus of higher-income residents left older sections of the city to the working poor, many of whom were immigrants.
The residential areas of the cities and suburbs both reflected and contributed to the class, race, ethnic, and cultural
divisions in American society.
Skyscrapers As cities expanded outward, they also soared upward, since increasing land values in the central
business district dictated the construction of taller and taller buildings. In 1885, William Le Baron Jenny built the
ten-story Home Insurance Company Building in Chicago-
—the first true skyscraper with
a steel skeleton. Structures of this size were made possible by such innovations as the Otis elevator and the central
steam-heating system with radiators in every room.
By 1900 steel-framed skyscrapers for offices of industry had replaced
church spires as the dominant feature of American urban skylines.
Ethnic Neighborhoods As affluent citizens moved out of residences near the business district, the poor moved into
them. To increase their profits, landlords divided up inner-city housing into small, windowless rooms. The resulting
slums and tenement apartments could cram more than 4,000 people into one city block. In an attempt to correct
unlivable conditions, New York City passed a law in 1879 that required each bedroom to have a window. The
cheapest way for landlords to respond to the law was to build the so-called dumbbell tenements, with ventilation
shafts in the center of the building to provide windows for each room. However, overcrowding and filth in new
tenements continued to promote the spread of deadly diseases, such as cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis.
In their crowded tenement quarters, different immigrant groups created distinct ethnic neighborhoods where each
group could maintain its own lan-guage, culture, church or temple, and social club. Many groups even supported their
own newspapers and schools. While often crowded, unhealthy, and crime-ridden, these neighborhoods (sometimes
called "ghettos") often served springboards for ambitious and hardworking immigrants and their children to achieve
their version of the American dream.
Residential Suburbs The residential
pattern in the United States
contrasted with that of Europe, where wealthy people remained near the business districts of modern cities and
lower-income people live in the outlying areas. Five factors prompted Americans who could afford to move to the
suburbs: (1) abundant land available at low cost, (2) inexpensive transportation by rail, (3) low-cost construction
methods such as the wooden, balloon-frame house, (4) ethnic and racial prejudice, and (5) an American fondness for
grass, privacy, and detached individual houses.
Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York's Central Park in the 1860s, went on to design
suburban communities with graceful curved roads and open spaces—"a village in the park." By 1900, suburbs had
grown up around every major U.S. city, and a single-family dwelling surrounded by an ornamental lawn soon became
the American ideal of comfortable living. Thus began the world's first suburban nation.
Private City Versus Public City At first, city residents tried to carry on life in large cities much as they had in small
villages. Private enterprise shaped the development of American cities, and provided services such as streetcars and
utilities for a profit. In time, increasing disease, crime, waste, water pol-lution, and air pollution slowly convinced
reform-minded citizens and city governments of the need for municipal water purification, sewerage systems, waste
disposal, street lighting, police departments, and zoning laws to regulate urban development. In the 1890s, the "City
Beautiful" movement advanced grand plans to remake American cities with tree-lined boulevards, public parks and
public cultural attractions. The debate between the private good and the public good in urban growth and
development has continued as an open issue.
Boss and Machine Politics
The consolidation of power in business had its parallel in urban politics. Political parties in major cities came under
the control of tightly organized groups of politicians, known as political machines. Each machine had its boss, the top
politician who gave orders to the rank and file and doled out government jobs to loyal supporters. Several political
machines, such as Tammany Hall in New York City, started as social clubs and later developed into power centers to
coordinate the needs of businesses, immigrants, and the underprivileged. In return, machines asked for people's
votes on election day.
Successful party bosses knew how to manage the competing social, ethnic, and economic groups in the city. Political
machines often brought modern services to the city, including a crude form of welfare for urban newcomers.
The political organization would find jobs and apartments for recently arrived immigrants and show up at a poor
family's door with baskets of food during hard times. But the political machine could be greedy as well as generous
and often stole millions from the taxpayers in the form of graft and fraud. In New York City in the 1860s, for example,
an estimated 65 percent of public building funds ended up in the pockets of Boss Tweed and his cronies.
Awakening of Reform
Urban problems, including the desperate poverty of working-class families, inspired a new social consciousness
among the middle class. Reform movements begun in earlier decades increased strength in the 1880s and 1890s.
Books of Social Criticism A San Francisco journalist,
Henry George,
published a provocative book in 1879 that became an instant best-seller and jolted readers to look more critically at
the effects of laissez-faire econom-ics. George called attention to the alarming inequalities in wealth caused by
industrialization. In his book Progress and Poverty, George proposed one innovative solution to poverty: replacing all
taxes with a single tax on land. Another popular book of social criticism, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, was written
by Edward Bellamy in 1888. It envisioned a future era in which a cooperative society had eliminated poverty, greed,
and crime. So enthusiastic were many of the readers of George's and Bellamy's books that they joined various reform
movements and organizations to try to implement the authors' ideas. Both books encouraged a shift in American
public opinion away from pure laissez-faire and toward greater government regulation.
Settlement Houses Concerned about the lives of the poor, a number of young, well-educated women and men of the
middle class settled into immigrant neighborhoods to learn about the problems of immigrant families first-hand. Living
and working in places called settlement houses, the young reformers hoped to relieve the effects of poverty by
providing social services for people in the neighborhood. The most famous such experiment was Hull House in
Chicago, which was started by Jane Addams and a college classmate in 1889. Settlement houses taught English to
immigrants, pioneered early-childhood education, taught industrial arts, and established neighborhood theaters and
music schools. By 1910 there were more than 400 settlement houses in America's largest cities.
Settlement workers were civic-minded volunteers who created the foundation for the later job of social worker. They
were also political activists who crusaded for child-labor laws, housing reform, and women's rights. Two settlement
workers, Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins, went on to leadership roles in President Franklin Roosevelt's reform
program, the New Deal, in the 1930s.
Social Gospel In the 1880s and 1890s, a number of Protestant clergy espoused the cause of social justice for the
poor-especially the urban poor.
They preached what they called the Social Gospel, or the importance of applying Christian principles to social
problems. Leading the Social Gospel movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a Baptist minister from
New York, Walter Rauschenbusch, who worked in the poverty-stricken neighborhood of New York City called Hell's
Kitchen, wrote several books urging organized religions to take up the cause of social justice. His Social Gospel
preaching linked Christianity with the Progressive reform movement (see Chapter 21) and encouraged many
middle-class Protestants to attack urban problems.
Religion and Society All religions adapted to the stresses and challenges of modern urban living. Roman Catholicism
grew rapidly from the influx of new immigrants. Catholic leaders such as Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore
inspired the devoted support of old and new immigrants by defending the Knights of Labor and the cause of
organized labor. Among Protestants, Dwight Moody, who founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in 1889, would
help generations of urban evangelists to adapt traditional Christianity to city life. The Salvation Army, imported from
England in 1879, provided basic necessities to the homeless and the poor while preaching the Christian gospel.
Members of the urban middle class were attracted to the religious message of Mary Baker Eddy, who taught that
good health was the result of correct thinking about "Father Mother God." By the time of her death in 1910, hundreds
of thousands had joined the church she had founded, the Church of Christ, Scientist-popularly known as Christian
Science.
Families in Urban Society Urban life placed severe strains on parents and their children by isolating them from the
extended family (relatives beyond the family nucleus of parents and children) and village support. Divorce rates
increased to one in 12 marriages by 1900, partly because a number of state legislatures had expanded the grounds
for divorce to include cruelty and desertion.
Another consequence of the shift from rural to urban living was a reduction in family size. Children were an economic
asset on the farm, where their labor was needed at an early age. In the city, however, they were more of an economic
liability. Therefore, in the last decades of the 19th century, the national average for birthrates and family size
continued to drop.
Voting Rights for Women The cause of women's suffrage, launched at Seneca Falls in 1848. was vigorously carried
forward by a number of middle-class women. In 1890, two of the pioneer feminists of the 1840s, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony of New York, helped found the National American Woman Suffrage Association
(NAWSA) to secure the vote for women.
A western state,
Wyoming, was the first to grant full suffrage to women, in
1869. By 1900, some states allowed women to vote in local elections, and most allowed women to own and control
property after marriage.
Temperance Movement Another
of urban reformers was temperance. Excessive drinking of alcohol by male factory workers was one cause of poverty
for immigrant and working-class families. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was formed in
1874. Advocating total abstinence from alcohol, the WCTU, under the leadership of Frances E. Willard of Evanston,
Illinois, had 500,000 members by
1898. The Antisaloon League, founded in 1893, became a powerful political force and by 1916 had persuaded 21
states to close down all saloons and bars.
Unwilling to wait for the laws to change, Carry A. Nation of Kansas created a sensation by raiding saloons and
smashing barrels of beer with a hatchet.
Urban Reforms Across the country, grassroots efforts arose to combat corruption in city governments. In New York, a
reformer named Theodore Roosevelt tried to clean up the New York City Police Department. As a result of his efforts,
he became a vice-presidential nominee in 1896, and later the president.
However, many of the reformers of the Gilded Age would not see their efforts reach fruition or have a national impact
until the early 20th century.
Intellectual and Cultural Movements
The change from an agricultural to an industrial economy and from rural to urban living profoundly affected all areas
of American life, including educa-tion, sciences, literature, arts, and popular entertainment.
Changes in Education
The growing complexity of life, along with reactions to Darwin's theory of evolution, raised challenging questions
about what schools should teach.
Public Schools Elementary schools after 1865 continued to teach the 3
R's (reading, writing, arithmetic) and the traditional values promoted in the standard texts, McGuffey's readers. New
compulsory education laws that required children to attend school. however. dramatically increased the number
students enrolled. As a result, the literacy rate rose to 90 percent of the population by 1900. The practice of sending
children to kindergarten (a concept borrowed from Germany) became popular and reflected the growing interest in
early-childhood education in the United States.
Perhaps even more significant than lower-grade schools was the growing support for tax-supported public high
schools. At first these schools followed the college preparatory curriculum of private academies, but soon the public
high schels became mone conchehensive Ta s began to provide vocational Higher Education The number of U.S.
colleges increased in the late 1800s largely as a result of: (1) land-grant colleges established under the federal Morrill
acts of 1862 and 1890, (2) universities founded by wealthy philanthropists the University of Chicago by John D.
Rockefeller, for example, and (3) the founding of new colleges for women, such as Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Mount
Holyoke. By 1900, 71 percent of the colleges admitted women, who represented more than one-third of the attending
students.
The college curriculum also changed greatly in the late 19th century. Soon after becoming president of Harvard in
1869, Charles W. Eliot reduced the number of required courses and introduced electives (courses chosen by
students) to accommodate the teaching of modern languages and the sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, and
geology. Johns Hopkins University was founded in Baltimore in 1876 as the first American institution to specialize in
advanced graduate studies. Following the model of German universities, Johns Hopkins emphasized research and
free inquiry. As a result of such innovations in cur-riculum, the United States produced its first generation of scholars
who could compete with the intellectual achievements of Europeans. As the curriculum was changing, colleges added
social activities, fraternities, and intercollegiate sports, additions that soon dominated the college experience for many
students.
Social Sciences The application of the scientific method and the theory of evolution to human affairs revolutionized
the study of human society in the late 19th century. New fields, known as the social sciences, emerged, such as
psy-chology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins attacked laissez-faire
economic thought as dogmatic and outdated and used economics to study labor unions, trusts, and other existing
economic institutions not only to understand them but also to suggest remedies for economic problems of the day.
Evolutionary theory influenced leading sociologists (Lester
F. Ward), political scientists (Woodrow Wilson), and historians (Frederick Jackson Turner) to study the dynamic
process of actual human behavior instead of logical abstractions.
One social scientist who used new statistical methods to study crime in urban neighborhoods was W. E. B. Du Bois.
The first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard, Du Bois was the leading black intellectual of the era.
He advocated for equality for blacks, integrated schools, and equal access to higher education for the "talented tenth"
of African Americans.
The Professions Scientific theory and methodology also influenced the work of doctors, educators, social workers,
and lawyers. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the law should evolve with the times in response to changing
needs and not remain restricted by legal precedents and judicial decisions of the past. Clarence Darrow, a famous
lawyer, argued that criminal behavior could be caused by a person's environment of poverty, neglect, and abuse.
These changes in the professions, along with changes in the universities, would provide a boost to progressive
legislation and liberal reform in the 20th century.
Literature and the Arts
American writers and artists responded in diverse ways to industrialization and urban problems. In general, the work
of the best-known innovators of the era reflected a new realism and an attempt to express an authentic American
style.
Realism and Naturalism Many of the popular works of literature of the post-Civil War years were romantic novels that
depicted ideal heroes and hero-ines. Breaking with this genteel literary tradition were regionalist writers such as Bret
Harte, who depicted life in the rough mining camps of the West. Mark Twain (the pen name for Samuel L. Clemens)
became the first great realist author. His classic work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), revealed the
greed, violence, and racism in American society.
A younger generation of authors who emerged in the 1890s became known for their naturalism, which focused on
how emotions and experience shaped human experience. In his naturalistic novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893), Stephen Crane told how a brutal urban environment could destroy the lives of young people. Crane also
wrote the popular Red Badge of Courage about fear and human nature on the Civil War battlefield before dying
himself of tuberculosis at only 29. Jack London, a young California writer and adven-turer, portrayed the conflict
between nature and civilization in novels such as The Call of the Wild (1903). A naturalistic book that caused a
sensation and shocked the moral sensibilities of the time was Theodore Dreiser's novel about a poor working girl in
Chicago, Sister Carrie (1900).
Painting Some American painters responded to the new emphasis on realism, while others continued to cater to the
popular taste for romantic subjects. Winslow Homer,
the foremost American painter of seascapes and
watercolors, often rendered scenes of nature in a matter-of-fact way. Thomas Eakins's realism included paintings of
surgical scenes and the everyday lives of working-class men and women. He also used the new technology of
serial-action photographs to study human anatomy and paint it more realistically.
James McNeill Whistler was born in Massachusetts but spent most of his life in Paris and London. His most famous
painting, Arrangement in Grey and Black (popularly known as "Whistler's Mother"), hangs in the Louvre.
This study of color, rather than subject matter, influenced the development of modern art. A distinguished portrait
painter, Mary Cassatt, also spent much of her life in France where she learned the techniques of impressionism,
especially in her use of pastel colors. As the 19th century ended, a group of social realists, such as George Bellows,
of the "Ashcan School" painted scenes of everyday life in poor urban neighborhoods. Upsetting to realists and
roman-ticists alike were the abstract, nonrepresentational paintings exhibited in the Armory Show in New York City in
1913. Art of this kind would be rejected by most Americans until the 1950s when it finally achieved respect among
collectors of fine art.
Architecture In the 1870s, Henry Hobson Richardson changed the direc-
tion of American architecture.
While earlier architects found inspiration in
classical Greek and Roman styles, his designs were often based on the medieval Romanesque style of massive
stone walls and rounded arches. Richardson
1890s. Sullivan's buildings achieved a much-admired aesthetic unity, in which the form of a building flowed from its
function—a hallmark of the Chicago School of architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright, an employee of Sullivan's in the
1890s, developed an "organic" style of architecture that was in harmony with its natural surroundings. Wright's vision
is exemplified in the long, horizontal lines of his prairie-style houses. Wright became the most famous American
architect of the 20th century. Some architects, such as Daniel H. Burnham,
who revived classical Greek and Roman architecture in his designs for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893,
continued to explore historical styles.
One of the most influential urbanists, Frederick Law Olmsted specialized in the planning of city parks and scenic
boulevards, including Central Park in New York City and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
As the originator of landscape architecture, Olmsted not only designed parks, parkways, campuses, and suburbs but
also established the basis for later urban
Music With the growth of cities came increasing demand for musical performances appealing to a variety of tastes.
By 1900, most large cities had either an orchestra, an opera house, or both. In smaller towns, outdoor bandstands
were the setting for the playing of popular marches by John Philip Sousa.
Among the greatest innovators of the era were African Americans in New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy
Bolden expanded the audience for jazz, a musical form that combined African rhythms with European instruments,
and mixed improvisation with a structured format. The remarkable black composer and performer Scott Joplin sold
nearly a million copies of sheet music of his "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899). Also from the South came blues music that
expressed the pain of the black experience. Jazz, ragtime, and blues music gained popularity during the early 20th
century as New Orleans performers headed north into the urban centers of Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and
Chicago.
Popular Culture
Entertaining the urban masses became big business in the late 19th century.
People wanted amusements as respites from their work.
Popular Press Mass-circulation newspapers had been around since the 1830s, but the first newspaper to exceed a
million in circulation was Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Pulitzer filled his daily paper with both sensational stories
of crimes and disasters and crusading feature stories about political and economic corruption. Another New York
publisher, William Randolph Hearst, pushed scandal and sensationalism to new heights (or lows).
Mass-circulation magazines also became numerous in the 1880s. Advertising revenues and new printing
technologies made it possible for the Ladies' Home Journal and similar magazines to sell for as little as 10 cents a
copy.
Amusements In addition to urbanization, other factors also promoted the growth of leisure-time activities: (1) a
gradual reduction in the hours people worked, (2) improved transportation, (3) promotional billboards and
adver-tising, and (4) the decline of restrictive Puritan and Victorian values that discouraged "wasting" time on play.
Based on numbers alone, the most popular form of recreation in the late 19th century, despite the temperance
movement, was drinking and talking at the corner saloon. Theaters that presented comedies and dramas flourished in
most large cities, but vaudeville with its variety of acts drew the largest audiences. The national rail network
encouraged traveling circuses such as Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers to create circus
trains that moved a huge number of acts and animals from town to town, as the
"Greatest Show on Earth." Also immensely popular was the Wild West show brought to urban audiences by William F.
Cody ("Buffalo Bill"') and headlining such personalities as Sitting Bull and the markswoman Annie Oakley.
Commuter streetcar and railroad companies also promoted weekend recreation in order to keep their cars running on
Sundays and holidays. They created parks in the countryside near the end of the line so that urban families could
enjoy picnics and outdoor recreation.
Spectator Sports Professional spectator sports originated in the late 19th century. Boxing attracted male spectators
from all classes, and champions such as John L. Sullivan became national heroes. Baseball, while it recalled a rural
past of green fields and fences, was very much an urban game that demanded the teamwork needed for an industrial
age. Owners organized teams into leagues, much as trusts of the day were organized. In 1909, when President
William Howard Taft started the tradition of the president throwing out the first ball of the season, baseball was the
national pastime. However, Jim Crow laws and customs prevented blacks from playing on all-white big-league
baseball teams between the 1890s and 1947.
Football developed primarily as a college activity, with the first game played by two New Jersey colleges, Rutgers and
Princeton, in 1869. In the 1920s professional football teams and leagues were organized. Basketball was invented in
1891 at Springfield College, in Massachusetts. Within a few years, high schools and colleges across the nation had
teams. The first professional basketball league was organized in 1898.
American spectator sports were played and attended by men. They were part of a "bachelor subculture" for single
men in their twenties and thirties, whose lives centered around saloons, horse races, and pool halls. It took years for
some spectator sports. such as boxing and football, to gain middle-class
Amateur Sports The value of sports as healthy exercise for the body gained acceptance by the middle and upper
classes in the late 19th century Women were considered unfit for most competitive sports. but they engaged in such
recreational activities as croquet and bicycling. Sports such as golf and tennis grew, but mostly among the
prosperous members of athletic clubs. The very rich pursued expensive sports of polo and yachting. Clubs generally
discriminated against Jews, Catholics, and Africans Americans.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: MELTING POT OR CULTURAL DIVERSITY?

To what extent did immigrants give up their heritage to become American-ized, or fully assimilated into the existing
culture? The prevailing view in the 19th and early 20th centuries was that the United States was a melting pot, in
which immigrant groups quickly shed old-world characteristics in order to become successful citizens of their adopted
country. This view was expressed as early as 1782 by a naturalized Frenchman, J. Hector St.
John Crévecoeur. In his Letters From an American Farmer, Crévecoeur described how the American experience
"melted" European immigrants
"into a new race of men." The term "melting pot" became firmly associated with immigration in a popular play by that
name: Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot (1908). One line of this drama described "how the great Alchemist melts and
fuses them immigrants] with purging flames!"
In recent decades, the melting pot concept has come under intense scrutiny and challenge by modern historians. Carl
N. Degler, for example, has argued that a more accurate metaphor would be the salad bowl, in which each ingredient
(ethnic culture) remains intact. To support this view, Degler points to the diversity of religions in the United States.
Neither immigrants nor their descendants gave up their religions for the Protestant-
In his groundbreaking study of immigration, The Uprooted (1952), Oscar Handlin observed that newcomers to a
strange land often became alienated from both their native culture and the culture of their new coun-try. According to
Handlin, first-generation immigrants remained alienated and did not lose their cultural identity in the melting pot. Only
the immigrants' children and children's children became fully assimilated into mainstream culture.
Many historians agree with Handlin that, after two or three generations, the melting pot, or assimilation, process
reduced the cultural differences among most ethnic groups. However, certain groups have had a different experience.
Historian Richard C. Wade has observed that African Americans who migrated to northern cities faced the special
problem of racism, which has created seemingly permanent ghettos with "a growingly alienated and embittered
group."
Historians remain divided in their analysis of the melting pot. Those who accept the concept see people of diverse
ethnic backgrounds coming together to build a common culture. Others see American urban history characterized by
intergroup hostility, alienation, crime, and corruption.
The questions about past immigration shape current views of ethnic tensions in contemporary society. Is there a
process, common to all groups, in which initial prejudice against the most recent immigrants fades after two or three
generations? Is the cultural diversity in U.S. society today a permanent condition-
or just unmelted bits of foreign ways that will someday
fuse into a homogeneous culture?