Chapter Overview

Ward boss George Washington Plunkitt was emblematic of the new breed of urban politicians. Drawn from the common folk, they regarded politics as a profession like any other, with opportunities to make money.

A New Urban Age

The modern city was the product of industrialization. The vast systems of communication and transportation, of manufacturing, marketing, and finance, of labor and management came together in these. Cities acted as magnets and as nuclei, the hubs of regional networks.

Cities began to assume their modern shape of ringed residential patterns around central business districts -- slum cores, zones of emergence, and suburban fringes. New forms of urban transportation helped these segmented cities hold together even as they probed outward into growing suburbs. Bridges also helped to join the city. New skyscrapers soared into the air, revealing the value of urban space. Tenements carried the same message, cramming hundreds into what soon became overcrowded, disease-ridden dwellings.

Running and Reforming the City

Industries and people demanded a host of services from cities hamstrung by outdated and cumbersome political structures. Boss-dominated political machines developed in response. Somewhat like the corporation, they centralized control and imposed order. They furnished needed goods and services, such as coal, jobs, and building projects. In the process, immigrants sometimes found a way out of poverty and into the American mainstream. But the price was high -- graft and corruption, inflated taxes, and election fraud.

Urban blight and corruption, together with the flood of new immigrants, inspired social as well as political action. Some Protestant ministers continued to see poverty as the result of individual failure; others, allied with new nativist organizations, called for the restriction of immigration; still others embarked on urban religious revivals to bridge the gap between the poor and the middle class. A minority began preaching a "Social Gospel," which advocated the betterment of society as a way to save individual souls. Settlement houses served as community centers to help the working class and immigrant poor.

City Life

The various social and economic classes in America were vividly evident in the city. The immigrant underclass clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods. Their mix of old- and new-world ways added diversity and vitality that sometimes produced tensions between natives and newcomers.

Urban middle-class life blossomed. By 1900 over one-third of the middle class owned their homes. Victorian morality governed personal conduct and stressed sobriety, industriousness, self-control, and modesty, all designed to protect against the turbulent life of the industrial city. This middle-class creed of social discipline extended to society at large in a host of social reforms.

City Culture

Cities also served as centers of culture, education, and leisure. Enrollment in public schools doubled between 1870 and 1890. Education became a powerful tool for social control and assimilation. Colleges and universities furnished a corps of educated leaders and managers. Women's enrollment increased both in coeducational schools and in new all-women's schools.

Urbanites gained access to a new material culture of consumption and enjoyed new forms of mass entertainment. Ready-made clothing, mass-produced furniture, department and chain stores, and a growing mail-order business made consumption a national endeavor. City people turned leisure into a consumable commodity. Sports grew in popularity and the popular arts became more widely available.