Murrin Et Al., Liberty, Equality, Power: a History of the American People 5/E (Thomson, 2008)

U.S. History

Mr. Detjen

Murrin et al., Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People 5/e (Thomson, 2008)

Ch. 20 “An Industrial Society, 1900-1920”

Chapter Outline. The following is a basic outline for the chapter, based on section headings in/of the chapter. Your task is to expand upon/amend/add to/enhance this basic foundation with details, examples and supporting evidence for each component of the outline. That is, flesh out the outline in a way that communicates your understanding of the substantive material in the chapter. In the class notes section of your notebook, write out your expanded outline at the beginning of each new respective unit or section so that it serves as the organizational concept map for subsequent class (lecture/discussion) notes on related material.

I. Sources of Economic Growth

A. Technology

B. Corporate Growth

C. Mass Production and Distribution

D. Corporate Consolidation

E. Revolution in Management

F. Scientific Management on the Factory Floor

II. “Robber Barons” No More

III. Obsession With Physical and Racial Fitness

IV. Immigration

A. European Immigration

B. Chinese and Japanese Immigration

C. Immigration Labor

D. Living Conditions

V. Building Ethnic Communities

A. A Network of Institutions

B. The Emergence of an Ethnic Middle Class

C. Political Machines and Organized Crime

VI. African American Labor and Community

VII. Workers and Unions

A. Samuel F. Gompers and the AFL

B. “Big Bill” Haywood and the IWW

VIII. The Joys of the City

IX. The New Sexuality and the Rise of Feminism

A. Feminism

X. Conclusion

IDs and Sigs. For the following key terms—people, events, concepts, places, titles—first, identify and place each in historical time and place and context by answering the “Who? What? When? Where?” questions, and second, analyze the “Why-is-this-important-and/or-significant?” question. Each component—identifying the term and analyzing its significance—is an essential aspect for understanding.

Social Darwinism craft union

Frederick Winslow Taylor continuous assembly line

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Gospel of Wealth

separate spheres strenuous life

sweat shop graft

industrial union Victorianism

feminism

FRQs/Short Essay /Review Questions. This final component of the study guide is designed to get you to think critically and collectively about the material in the chapter. You have outlined the chapter for use as an organizational map; you have identified and given the significance of some (very few) people and events of the period; now you will write a number of short (3-4 paragraph) essays that put the material together. For each of the following questions, rewrite (and underline) each question in the form of a thesis statement, and make sure that each paragraph itself begins with a topic sentence, contains appropriate supporting details and examples, and has an effective conclusion that brings everything together.

1. Examine changes in management and production during the early 20th century.

2. Describe the living and working conditions of immigrant laborers.

3. Explore the theory of Social Darwinism. Why was it so popular among native-born Americans at the turn of the century.

4. Describe the developing urban African-American community at the turn of the century.

5. Examine the changes in amusements and in commercial entertainment at the turn of the century.

6. Examine the changing sexual mores and attitudes toward women in the period from 1890 to 1920.

7. Describe the rise of corrupt party machines and organized crime in urban America.

U.S. History

Mr. Detjen

Source Analysis

“The Great Fear”

Questions to consider:

1. Based on the cartoon "The Great Fear," why were so many Americans concerned about immigration?

2. Why were fears of the effects of immigration so prevalent in the late nineteenth century?

Political Cartoon-The Great Fear

1. Based on the cartoon "The Great Fear," why were so many Americans concerned about immigration?

Your answer should include the following:
• Emergence of new cultures
• New peoples overwhelming ""Old Stock"" Americans
• economic competition
• Swelling ranks of poor: Irish immigrant's carpetbag suggests poverty
• Immigrants portrayed as grotesque--fear of racial ""contamination""

2. Why were fears of the effects of immigration so prevalent in the late nineteenth century?

Your answer should include the following:
• "New" immigrants from regions that had not previously provided large numbers of immigrants
• Foreignness of new arrivals: racial and cultural differences
• Large numbers of immigrants
• Sense that foreigners would overtake country, not assimilate into nation

U.S. History

Mr. Detjen

Source Analysis

“Dumbbell Tenement”

Questions to consider:

1. In what ways did the "dumbbell" design depicted in this schemata represent an improvement on previous tenements? What specific problems was the layout intended to address and how did it address them? What problems did the layout unintentionally create? Despite the improvements, did the design still place profit over health and comfort?

2. What did the spread of "dumbbell" tenements such as the one pictured here suggest about living conditions in cities of the time? What do these tenements reveal about attitudes toward the urban poor? Were the problems that came to be associated with these tenements the fault of their designers or the fault of their residents?

Diagram-Dumbbell Tenement

Your answer should include the following:
• Ventilation and windows to help with disease
• Only two toilets per floor (up to 16 families)
• Every inch of space used
• Tenements built close together
• Ventilation shafts used as garbage dumps

Your answer should include the following:
• Widespread poverty
• Need for cheap housing
• Attempt to improve conditions for the poor
• tenants used ventilation shafts as garbage dumps
• insufficient toilets
• cramped space

U.S. History

Mr. Detjen

Source Analysis

“City Life: Edith Wharton and Frank Norris”

City life fascinated novelists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of them lived in cities and observed the cityscape as it shifted shape under the impact of industrialization and immigration. Edith Wharton, the child of wealthy New Yorkers, saw New York's upper crust—of old-money, self-styled aristocrats with colonial pedigrees—crumble as a new generation of wealthy industrialists and financiers breeched its barriers in the 1870s and 1880s. Her Age of Innocence (1921), describes the effect on the patrons of New York's old opera house, the Academy of Music. The second document, Frank Norris's portrait of turn-of-the-century San Francisco from his novel McTeague (1899), presents an entirely different slice of city life.

DOCUMENT 1

Edith Wharton describes the Opera Scene

Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances “above the Forties,” of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendor with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

… what the daily press had already learned to describe as “an exceptionally brilliant audience” had gathered … transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler, more convenient “Brown coupé.”*

*Broughams, landaus, and coupés are horse-drawn carriages with drivers.

To come to the Opera in a Brown coupé was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one's own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy. It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Source: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York, 1920), pp. 1–2.

DOCUMENT 2

Frank Norris Describes a Working Class Scene

[Polk Street in San Francisco] never failed to interest him. It was one of those cross streets peculiar to Western cities, situated in the heart of the residence quarter, but occupied by small tradespeople who lived in the rooms above their shops. There were corner drug stores with huge jars of red, yellow, and green liquids in their windows, very brave and gay; stationers' stores where illustrated weeklies were tacked upon bulletin boards; barber shops with cigar stands in their vestibules; sad-looking plumbers' offices; cheap restaurants, in whose windows one saw piles of unopened oysters weighted down by cubes of ice, and china pigs knee deep in layers of white beans….

On week days the street was very lively. It woke to its work about seven o'clock, at the time when the newsboys made their appearance together with the day laborers. The laborers went trudging past in a straggling file—plumbers' apprentices, their pockets stuffed with sections of lead pipe, tweezers, and pliers; carpenters, carrying nothing but their little pasteboard lunch baskets painted to imitate leather; gangs of street workers, their overalls soiled with yellow clay, their picks and long-handled shovels over their shoulders; plasters, spotted with lime from head to foot. This little army of workers, tramping steadily in one direction, met and mingled with other toilers of a different description—conductors and “swing men” of the cable company going on duty; heavy-eyed night clerks from the drug stores on their way home to sleep; roundsmen returning to the precinct police station to make their night report, and Chinese market gardeners teetering past under their heavy baskets. The cable cars began to fill up; all along the street could be seen the shop keepers taking down their shutters.

Source: Frank Norris, McTeague (New York, 1899), pp. 5–6.

Questions to consider:

1. What values are associated with the lower and upper classes in the works of Edith Wharton and Frank Norris? Of what do the lives of the two classes seem to consist? How are members of the two classes defined?

2. Based on the excerpts by Frank Norris and Edith Wharton, which group was more cosmopolitan, the city's upper or lower classes? Which group was more sociable? Is there any suggestion in either account that the upper and lower classes ever came into contact?

3. Who populated Wharton's “world of fashion,” and who were the “new people”? Why did New York's self-styled aristocrats prefer the small Academy to larger, newer buildings? How does Norris's San Francisco street scene compare with Wharton's description of New York's Academy of Music? What can the excerpts from these novels tell us about city life at the turn of the twentieth century? About the interests of these two novelists?

Literary Excerpt-City Life-Wharton and Norris

Your answer should include the following:
• Upper class associated with refinement, exclusion
• Lower class associated with labor
• Life of upper class consisted of amusement
• Life of lower class consisted of work
• Upper class defined as conservative, musical, sentimental
• Lower class defined by occupation

Your answer should include the following:
• Upper class more attuned with European fashions
• Lower class more diversified, multicultural
• Upper class fled from amusement when it ended
• Lower class moved in a more crowded world
• Norris makes no mention of upper class
• Lower class appears in Wharton as servants

U.S. History

Mr. Detjen

Source Analysis

“Daily Lives: The Vaudeville Show”

It looked like a palace or some high-toned concert hall. Patrons walked through a richly ornamented arched gateway to gold-domed, marble ticket booths. Ushers guided them through a stately lobby cushioned with velvet carpets. The house seats were thick and comfortable and positioned well back from the stage. Thousands of electrical fixtures set the place aglow.

Benjamin Franklin Keith, who had worked in circuses, tent shows, and dime museums, opened the New Theatre in Boston in 1894. Seeing housewives with children as a source of new profits, resourceful theater owners such as Keith had cleaned up the bawdy variety acts of saloons and music halls, borrowed the animal and acrobat acts from circuses and Wild West shows and the comedy acts of minstrel shows, and moved them to plusher surroundings. They called the new shows “vaudeville,” after the French “pièces de vaudeville” developed at eighteenth-century street fairs.

For anywhere from a dime to two dollars, a customer could see up to nine acts—singers, jugglers, acrobats, magicians, trained animals, and comics. The mix of performers reflected the urban tempo and new urban tastes. Skits often drew on the experience of immigrants, and early comedy teams had such names as “The Sport and the Jew” and “Two Funny Sauerkrauts.” “Continuous shows” ran one after another, from early morning until late at night.

Saloon music halls had catered to a rowdy all-male, working-class clientele. Vaudeville was aimed at middle-class and wealthier working-class families. Keith worked diligently to make each of his theaters “homelike.” Backstage signs warned performers not to say “slob” or “son-of-a-gun” or “‘hully-gee’ ….” Within a few years Keith was producing the kind of show, as one comedian put it, “to which any child could bring his parents.”