PART 6 Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917
CHAPTER 17
Industrial America: Corporations and Conflicts, 1877–1911
CHAPTER 18
The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917
CHAPTER 19
“Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917
CHAPTER 20
Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917
Touring the United States around 1900, a Hungarian Catholic abbot named Count Péter Vay visited the steel mills of Pittsburgh. “Fourteen-thousand tall chimneys… discharge their burning sparks and smoke incessantly,” he reported. He was moved by the plight of fellow Hungarians, laboring “wherever the heat is most insupportable, the flames most scorching.” One worker had just been killed in a foundry accident. Vay, attending the funeral, worried that immigration was “of no use except to help fill the moneybags of the insatiable millionaires.”
Vay witnessed America’s emergence as an industrial power — and the consequences of that transformation. In 1877, the United States was overwhelmingly rural and dependent on foreign capital. By 1917, its landscapes, population, and ways of life were forever altered. Industrialization brought millions of immigrants from around the globe and built immense cities whose governance and social relations offered unaccustomed rewards and challenges. It sharpened class divisions and led to the rise of national labor movements, while prompting Americans to redefine men’s and women’s roles. Industrialization also created pressure for political innovation. As ex-president Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1910, American citizens needed to “control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.” Workers, farmers, and urban reformers sought to regulate corporations, fight poverty, and clean up politics and the environment. In their creative responses to the problems of the industrial age, such reformers gave their name to the Progressive Era.