Chapter 25

Between 1865 and 1900 the United States urbanized at a breathtaking pace, as factory jobs pulled millions of rural Americans and immigrants into fast-growing cities. Skyscrapers, made possible by steel-frame construction and the electric elevator, transformed city skylines, while horse-drawn and later electric streetcars let cities sprawl outward.

Rapid growth far outpaced city services: sewage, clean water, and fire protection lagged behind, and many newcomers crowded into tenements — cramped, poorly ventilated multifamily buildings rife with disease. Urban political machines like New York's Tammany Hall filled the gap left by weak city government, trading jobs and favors for votes.

After 1880 a flood of "New Immigrants" arrived from southern and eastern Europe — Italians, Poles, Greeks, and Jews fleeing poverty and persecution — sharply different in language, religion, and custom from the largely Protestant "Old Immigrants" of earlier decades. Most entered through Ellis Island in New York Harbor, opened in 1892, while Chinese and other Asian arrivals were processed at the more restrictive Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.

These immigrants supplied the muscle for America's booming factories, mines, and mills, settling in dense urban enclaves that preserved familiar languages and customs even as they adapted to American life.

Native-born Americans reacted to the New Immigration with nativism, blaming newcomers for urban crime, disease, and job competition. The American Protective Association, founded in 1887, campaigned against Catholic immigrants, while labor leaders worried that desperate immigrants would undercut American wages.

Anti-Chinese agitation on the West Coast culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first major federal law to bar immigration by nationality. Calls to restrict European immigration through literacy tests grew louder in these decades, though broader restriction would not succeed until the 1920s.

Reformers responded to urban misery with the settlement house movement, in which educated volunteers lived among the poor to offer childcare, English classes, and job training. Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, founded in 1889, became the movement's most famous example, inspiring similar houses across the country.

Journalist Jacob Riis jolted middle-class readers with his 1890 exposé "How the Other Half Lives," which paired vivid prose with pioneering photography of tenement squalor. Meanwhile, the Social Gospel movement urged Protestant churches to address poverty and labor exploitation directly, rather than focus solely on individual salvation.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, published decades earlier, increasingly unsettled American religious life by the late 19th century, as some scientists and theologians argued that Darwin's findings clashed with a literal reading of Genesis. Fundamentalist Protestants dug in against "godless" science, while modernist clergy sought to reconcile faith with evolution.

Thinkers like William Graham Sumner extended Darwin's ideas into Social Darwinism, arguing that unrestrained economic competition mirrored natural selection and that government aid to the poor unnaturally interfered with the "survival of the fittest." Popular urban revivalists like Dwight L. Moody countered with old-time evangelical crusades that drew huge city crowds.

Public education expanded significantly in this period, though immigrant and working-class children often left school early to help support their families. The Morrill Act funded land-grant colleges specializing in agriculture and engineering, broadening access to higher education for a growing middle class.

For Black Americans still living under the shadow of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute promoted vocational training and economic self-help, as expressed in his 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech. The Harvard-educated W.E.B. Du Bois pushed back, insisting on liberal arts education and full civil rights for a "talented tenth" of Black leaders — a debate that intensified after the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling legitimized "separate but equal" segregation.

American writers increasingly turned toward realism, depicting ordinary life and social conditions honestly rather than through romantic idealism. Mark Twain, whose satirical wit gave the era its name, captured authentic regional speech and skewered Gilded Age greed and hypocrisy in his novels.

Painters of the Ashcan School similarly turned their brushes toward gritty city streets and working-class subjects instead of idealized landscapes. Together, these realist writers and artists documented an America transformed by industry, immigration, and the rise of the modern city.