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Introduction for Chapter 19

CHAPTER 19 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA

How did the rise of large cities shape American society and politics?

Clarence Darrow, a successful lawyer from Ashtabula, Ohio, felt isolated and overwhelmed when he moved to Chicago in the 1880s. “There is no place so lonely to a young man as a great city,” Darrow later wrote. “When I walked along the street I scanned every face I met to see if I could not perchance discover someone from Ohio.” Instead, he saw a “sea of human units, each intent upon hurrying by.” At one point, Darrow felt near despair. “If it had been possible I would have gone back to Ohio,” he wrote, “but I didn’t want to borrow the money, and I dreaded to confess defeat.”

George Bellows, New York George Bellows, a member of the so-called Ash Can school of painters, was fascinated by urban life. In this 1911 painting, he depicts Madison Square during a winter rush-hour, crowded with streetcars, horse-drawn wagons, and pedestrians. If you could enter the world of this painting, what might you hear, feel, and smell, as well as see? What does Bellows suggest about the excitement and challenges of life in the big city? Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In the era of industrialization, more and more Americans had experiences like Darrow’s. In 1860, the United States was rural: less than 20 percent of Americans lived in an urban area, defined by census takers as a place with more than 2,500 inhabitants. By 1910, more Americans lived in cities (42.1 million) than had lived in the entire nation on the eve of the Civil War (31.4 million). The country now had three of the world’s ten largest cities (America Compared). Though the Northeast remained by far the most urbanized region, the industrial Midwest was catching up. Seattle, San Francisco, and soon Los Angeles became hubs on the Pacific coast. Even the South boasted of thriving Atlanta and Birmingham. As journalist Frederic C. Howe declared in 1905, “Man has entered on an urban age.”

The scale of industrial cities encouraged experiments that ranged from the amusement park to the art museum, the skyscraper to the subway. Yet the city’s complexity also posed problems, some of them far worse than Clarence Darrow’s loneliness. Brothels flourished, as did slums, pollution, disease, and corrupt political machines. Fast-talking hucksters enjoyed prime opportunities to fleece newcomers; homeless men slept in the shadows of the mansions of the superrich. One African American observer called the city “Civilization’s Inferno.” The locus of urgent problems, industrial cities became important sites of political innovation and reform.