Introduction to Chapter 19

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19

The City and Its Workers

1870–1900

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BROOKLYN BRIDGE FAN This commemorative fan celebrates the opening of the bridge on May 24, 1883. It took fourteen years and cost the lives of twenty-seven men to complete the bridge.
© Museum of the City of New York, USA/Bridgeman Images.

CONTENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading and studying this chapter, you should be able to:

  • Identify the factors that led to rapid urbanization during the late nineteenth century. Describe how the social geography of the city changed and the reactions to those changes.

  • Describe the diversity of American labor, including the role of women and children in the workforce.

  • Understand why workers organized and how management responded to labor’s demands. Analyze the impact of the Great Strike of 1877, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and the Haymarket bombing.

  • Describe how notions of domesticity and everyday amusements reflected class divisions.

  • Identify the nature of city government in the late nineteenth century and the growth of city amenities. Explain Americans’ ambivalence toward cities.

“A TOWN THAT CRAWLED NOW STANDS ERECT, AND WE WHOSE backs were bent above the hearths know how it got its spine,” boasted a steelworker surveying New York City. Where once wooden buildings stood rooted in the mire of unpaved streets, cities of stone and steel sprang up in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The labor of millions of workers, many of them immigrants, laid the foundations for urban America.

No symbol better represented the new urban landscape than the Brooklyn Bridge, opened in May 1883. The great bridge soared over the East River in a single mile-long span. Building the Brooklyn Bridge took fourteen years and cost the lives of twenty-seven men. To sink the foundation in the riverbed, laborers tunneled through the mud and worked in boxes that were open at the bottom and pressurized to keep the water out. Before long, workers experienced the malady they called “bends” because it left them doubled over in pain when they rose to the surface. (Scientists later learned that nitrogen bubbles trapped in the bloodstream caused the bends, which could be prevented by allowing for decompression.) The first death occurred when the foundation reached a depth of seventy-one feet. A German immigrant complained that he did not feel well. He collapsed and died on his way home. Eight days later, another man dropped dead, and the entire workforce went out on strike. Terrified workers demanded a higher wage for fewer hours of work.

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A scrawny sixteen-year-old from Ireland, Frank Harris, remembered the fearful experience of going to work on the bridge a few days after landing in America:

The six of us were working naked to the waist in the small iron chamber with the temperature of about 80 degrees Fahrenheit: In five minutes the sweat was pouring from us, and all the while we were standing in icy water that was only kept from rising by the terrific pressure. No wonder the headaches were blinding.

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VISUAL ACTIVITYWorkers on the Brooklyn Bridge Illustrations show workers tunneling under the East River to lay the foundations for the Brooklyn Bridge. A cylindrical airlock took them down more than seventy feet. “What with the flaming lights, the deep shadows, the confusing noise of hammer, drills, and chains, the half-naked forms flitting about,” wrote one reporter, the scene resembled hell.READING THE IMAGE: What would you guess about the age and the physical condition of the workers pictured?CONNECTIONS: Who did the work of building America’s new industrial infrastructure? How were they rewarded?
Library of Congress, 3c24944.

By his fifth day, Harris quit. Many immigrant workers walked off the job, often as many as a hundred a week. But a ready supply of immigrants meant that new workers took up the digging, where they could earn in a day more than they made in a week in Ireland or Italy.

Begun in 1869, the bridge was the dream of builder John Roebling, who died in a freak accident almost as soon as construction began. Washington Roebling took over as chief engineer after his father’s death, routinely working twelve- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week. Soon he too fell victim to the bends. He directed the completion of the bridge through a telescope from his bedroom window in Brooklyn Heights. His wife, Emily Warren Roebling, acted as site superintendent and general engineer of the project.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Brooklyn Bridge stood as a symbol of many things: the industrial might of the United States; the labor of the nation’s immigrants; the ingenuity and genius of its engineers and inventors; the rise of iron and steel; and, most of all, the ascendancy of urban America. Poised on the brink of the twentieth century, the nation was shifting from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial nation. The gap between rich and poor widened. In the burgeoning cities, tensions erupted into conflict as workers squared off to organize into labor unions and to demand safer working conditions, shorter hours, and better pay, sometimes with violent and bloody results. The explosive growth of the cities fostered political corruption as unscrupulous bosses and entrepreneurs cashed in on the building boom. Immigrants, political bosses, middle-class managers, poor laborers, and the very rich populated the nation’s cities, crowding the streets, laboring in the stores and factories, and taking their leisure at the new ballparks, amusement parks, dance halls, and municipal parks. As the new century dawned, the city and its workers moved to center stage in American life.

CHRONOLOGY

1869
  • Knights of Labor founded.

  • Cincinnati mounts first paid baseball team.

1871
  • Boss Tweed’s rule in New York City ends.

  • Chicago’s Great Fire breaks out.

1873
  • Panic on Wall Street touches off depression.

1877
  • Great Railroad Strike paralyzes nation.

1880s
  • Immigration from southern and eastern Europe rises.

1882
  • Chinese Exclusion Act enacted.

1883
  • Brooklyn Bridge opens.

1886
  • American Federation of Labor founded.

  • Haymarket bombing occurs in Chicago.

1890
  • Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives.

1890s
  • African American migration from the South begins.

1892
  • Ellis Island opens.

1893
  • World’s Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago.

  • Panic on Wall Street touches off major economic depression.

1895
  • Boston Public Library opens in Copley Square.

1896
  • President Grover Cleveland vetoes immigrant literacy test.

1897
  • Steeplechase Park opens on Coney Island.

  • Nation’s first subway system opens in Boston.