Despite their dangers and problems, industrial cities could be exciting places to live. In the nineteenth century, white middle-class Protestants had set the cultural standard; immigrants and the poor were expected to follow cues from their betters, seeking “uplift” and respectability. But in the cities, new mass-based entertainments emerged among the working classes, especially youth. These entertainments spread from the working class to the middle class — much to the distress of many middle-class parents. At the same time, cities became stimulating centers for intellectual life.

Urban Amusements One enticing attraction was vaudeville theater, which arose in the 1880s and 1890s. Vaudeville customers could walk in anytime and watch a continuous sequence of musical acts, skits, magic shows, and other entertainment. First popular among the working class, vaudeville quickly broadened its appeal to include middle-class audiences. By the early 1900s, vaudeville faced competition from early movie theaters, or nickelodeons, which offered short films for a nickel entry fee. With distaste, one reporter described a typical movie audience as “mothers of bawling infants” and “newsboys, bootblacks, and smudgy urchins.” By the 1910s, even working girls who refrained from less respectable amusements might indulge in a movie once or twice a week.

More spectacular were the great amusement parks that appeared around 1900, most famously at New York’s Coney Island. These parks had their origins in world’s fairs, whose paid entertainment areas had offered giant Ferris wheels and camel rides through “a street in Cairo.” Entrepreneurs found that such attractions were big business. Between 1895 and 1904, they installed them at several rival amusement parks near Coney Island’s popular beaches. The parks offered New Yorkers a chance to come by ferry, escape the hot city, and enjoy roller coasters, lagoon plunges, and “hootchy-kootchy” dance shows. Among the amazed observers was Cuban revolutionary José Martí, working as a journalist in the United States. “What facilities for every pleasure!” Martí wrote. “What absolute absence of any outward sadness or poverty! …The theater, the photographers’ booth, the bathhouses!” He concluded that Coney Island epitomized America’s commercial society, driven not by “love or glory” but by “a desire for gain.” Similar parks grew up around the United States. By the summer of 1903, Philadelphia’s Willow Grove counted three million visitors annually; so did two amusement parks outside Los Angeles.

Ragtime and City Blues Music also became a booming urban entertainment. By the 1890s, Tin Pan Alley, the nickname for New York City’s song-publishing district, produced such national hit tunes as “A Bicycle Built for Two” and “My Wild Irish Rose.” The most famous sold more than a million copies of sheet music, as well as audio recordings for the newly invented phonograph. To find out what would sell, publishers had musicians play at New York’s working-class beer gardens and dance halls. One publishing agent, who visited “sixty joints a week” to test new songs, declared that “the best songs came from the gutter.”

African American musicians brought a syncopated beat that began, by the 1890s, to work its way into mainstream hits like “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Black performers became stars in their own right with the rise of ragtime. This music, apparently named for its ragged rhythm, combined a steady beat in the bass (played with the left hand on the piano) with syncopated, off-beat rhythms in the treble (played with the right). Ragtime became wildly popular among audiences of all classes and races who heard in its infectious rhythms something exciting — a decisive break with Victorian hymns and parlor songs.

For the master of the genre, composer Scott Joplin, ragtime was serious music. Joplin, the son of former slaves, grew up along the Texas-Arkansas border and took piano lessons as a boy from a German teacher. He and other traveling performers introduced ragtime to national audiences at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Seeking to elevate African American music and secure a broad national audience, Joplin warned pianists, “It is never right to play ‘Ragtime’ fast.” But his instructions were widely ignored. Young Americans embraced ragtime.

They also embraced each other, as ragtime ushered in an urban dance craze. By 1910, New York alone had more than five hundred dance halls. In Kansas City, shocked guardians of morality counted 16,500 dancers on the floor on a Saturday night; Chicago had 86,000. Some young Polish and Slovak women chose restaurant jobs rather than domestic service so they would have free time to visit dance halls “several nights a week.” New dances like the Bunny Hug and Grizzly Bear were overtly sexual: they called for close body contact and plenty of hip movement. In fact, many of these dances originated in brothels. Despite widespread denunciation, dance mania quickly spread from the urban working classes to rural and middle-class youth.

By the 1910s, black music was achieving a central place in American popular culture. African American trumpet player and bandleader W. C. Handy, born in Alabama, electrified national audiences by performing music drawn from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. Made famous when it reached the big city, this music became known as the blues. Blues music spoke of hard work and heartbreak, as in Handy’s popular hit “St. Louis Blues” (1914):

Got de St. Louis Blues jes blue as I can be,

Dat man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea,

Or else he wouldn’t gone so far from me.

Blues spoke to the emotional lives of young urbanites who were far from home, experiencing dislocation, loneliness, and bitter disappointment along with the thrills of city life. Like Coney Island and other leisure activities, ragtime and blues helped forge new collective experiences in a world of strangers.

Ragtime and blues spread quickly and had a profound influence on twentieth-century American culture. By the time Handy published “St. Louis Blues,” composer Irving Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant, was introducing altered ragtime pieces into musical theater — which eventually transferred to radio and film. Lyrics often featured sexual innuendo, as in the title of Berlin’s hit song “If You Don’t Want My Peaches (You’d Better Stop Shaking My Tree).” The popularity of such music marked the arrival of modern youth culture. Its enduring features included “crossover” music that originated in the black working class and a commercial music industry that brazenly appropriated African American musical styles.

Sex and the City In the city, many young people found parental oversight weaker than it had been before. Amusement parks and dance halls helped foster the new custom of dating, which like other cultural innovations emerged first among the working class. Gradually, it became acceptable for a young man to escort a young woman out on the town for commercial entertainments rather than spending time at home under a chaperone’s watchful eye. Dating opened a new world of pleasure, sexual adventure, and danger. Young women headed to dance halls alone to meet men; the term gold digger came into use to describe a woman who wanted a man’s money more than the man himself.

But young women, not men, proved most vulnerable in the system of dating. Having less money to spend because they earned half or less of men’s wages, working-class girls relied on the “treat.” Some tried to maintain strict standards of respectability, keenly aware that their prospects for marriage depended on a virtuous reputation. Others became so-called charity girls, eager for a good time. Such young women, one investigator reported, “offer themselves to strangers, not for money, but for presents, attention and pleasure.” For some women, sexual favors were a matter of practical necessity. “If I did not have a man,” declared one waitress, “I could not get along on my wages.” In the anonymous city, there was not always a clear line between working-class treats and casual prostitution.

Dating and casual sex were hallmarks of an urban world in which large numbers of residents were young and single. The 1900 census found that more than 20 percent of women in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston lived as boarders and lodgers, not in family units; the percentage topped 30 percent in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Single men also found social opportunities in the city. One historian has called the late nineteenth century the Age of the Bachelor, a time when being an unattached male lost its social stigma. With boardinghouses, restaurants, and abundant personal services, the city afforded bachelors all the comforts of home and, on top of that, an array of men’s clubs, saloons, and sporting events.

Many industrial cities developed robust gay subcultures. New York’s gay underground, for example, included an array of drinking and meeting places, as well as clubs and drag balls. Middle-class men, both straight and gay, frequented such venues for entertainment or to find companionship. One medical student remembered being taken to a ball at which he was startled to find five hundred gay and lesbian couples waltzing to “a good band.” By the 1910s, the word queer had come into use as slang for homosexual. Though harassment was frequent and moral reformers like Anthony Comstock issued regular denunciations of sexual “degeneracy,” arrests were few. Gay sex shows and saloons were lucrative for those who ran them (and for police, who took bribes to look the other way, just as they did for brothels). The exuberant gay urban subculture offered a dramatic challenge to Victorian ideals.

High Culture For elites, the rise of great cities offered an opportunity to build museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions that could flourish only in major metropolitan centers. Millionaires patronized the arts partly to advance themselves socially but also out of a sense of civic duty and national pride. As early as the 1870s, symphony orchestras emerged in Boston and New York. Composers and conductors soon joined Europe in new experiments. The Metropolitan Opera, founded in 1883 by wealthy businessmen, drew enthusiastic crowds to hear the innovative work of Richard Wagner. In 1907, the Met shocked audiences by presenting Richard Strauss’s sexually scandalous opera Salome.

Art museums and natural history museums also became prominent new institutions in this era. The nation’s first major art museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, opened in Washington, D.C., in 1869, while New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art settled into its permanent home in 1880. In the same decades, public libraries grew from modest collections into major urban institutions. The greatest library benefactor was steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who announced in 1881 that he would build a library in any town or city that was prepared to maintain it. By 1907, Carnegie had spent more than $32.7 million to establish over a thousand libraries throughout the United States.

Urban Journalism Patrons of Carnegie’s libraries could read, in addition to books, an increasing array of mass-market newspapers. Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York World, led the way in building his sales base with sensational investigations, human-interest stories, and targeted sections covering sports and high society. By the 1890s, Pulitzer faced a challenge from William Randolph Hearst (Thinking Like a Historian). The arrival of Sunday color comics featuring the “Yellow Kid” gave such publications the name yellow journalism, a derogatory term for mass-market newspapers. Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s sensational coverage was often irresponsible. In the late 1890s, for example, their papers helped whip up frenzied pressure for the United States to declare war against Spain (see “The War of 1898” in Chapter 21). But Hearst and Pulitzer also exposed scandals and injustices. They believed their papers should challenge the powerful by speaking to and for ordinary Americans.

Along with Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s stunt reporters, other urban journalists also worked to promote reform. New magazines such as McClure’s introduced national audiences to reporters such as Ida Tarbell, who exposed the machinations of John D. Rockefeller, and David Graham Phillips, whose “Treason of the Senate,” published in Cosmopolitan in 1906, documented the deference of U.S. senators — especially Republicans — to wealthy corporate interests. Theodore Roosevelt dismissed such writers as muckrakers who focused too much on the negative side of American life. The term stuck, but muckrakers’ influence was profound. They inspired thousands of readers to get involved in reform movements and tackle the problems caused by industrialization.