A History of the United States: Chapter 21: An Urban Society

Many people emigrated, or left their homelands, because of economic hardship.

Some countries made unfair laws against certain ethnic groups—people who share a common culture or heritage.

They traveled in cramped quarters on the lower decks of the ships. This section was known as steerage.

An immigrant's greatest challenge was finding work. Sometimes organizations in his or her homeland recruited, or tried to sign up, workers for jobs in the United States.

Immigrants tried to preserve their cultures. Yet most also wanted to assimilate, or become part of the larger American culture.

Assimilation was slowed by the attitudes of many native-born Americans, who resented the new wave of immigrants.

Other legislation affected immigrants from all nations. In 1897 Congress passed a bill that required immigrants to be able to read and write in some language.

“America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming...Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.”

Without offense, but with regard to the salvation of our own, let us shut the door and assimilate what we have, and let us breed pure American citizens and develop our own American resources....If we may not have that, then I am in favor of putting the quota down to the lowest possible point, with every selective element in it that may be.

We do not want to tangle the skein of America's progress by those who imperfectly understand the genius of our Government and the opportunities that lie about us.

In 1870 one of four Americans lived in a community of 2,500 or more people. By 1910 nearly half lived in an urban area—a thickly populated city or town.

In major urban centers such as New York, Detroit, and Chicago, immigrants and their children made up 80 percent or more of the population in 1890.

In the most crowded cities, the poorest people—including most immigrants—lived in tenements.

Originally, a tenement was simply a building in which several families rented rooms. By the late 1800s, the word had come to mean an apartment building in the slums—poor, run-down urban neighborhoods.

The cities also had a growing middle class, made up of people who enjoyed a comfortable life but not great wealth. Among the middle class were the families of doctors, lawyers, and ministers, as well as teachers, managers, office clerks, and others.

A growing network of streetcars allowed some middle-class people to move to the suburbs, residential areas that sprang up outside city centers.

Orphaned and homeless children sometimes resorted to committing minor, or less serious, crimes.

Establishments called settlement houses offered many types of assistance to the urban poor.

In 1884 William LeBaron Jenney put up a 10-story office building in Chicago. It was the world's first skyscraper.

Around 1900, schools began practicing a new educational philosophy, or set of ideas and beliefs.

Reservation schools and boarding schools opened to educate and train Native Americans. Although these schools provided useful training, they also isolated, or cut off, Native Americans from their cultural traditions.

Hearst had his reporters exaggerate the dramatic or shocking aspects of stories. This writing style became known as yellow journalism.

Spectator sports—games watched for enjoyment in one's free time—grew in popularity.

The theaters staged performances ranging from Shakespeare tragedies and comedies to vaudeville shows, which featured dancing, singing, comedy, and magic acts.

African American musicians in New Orleans developed an entirely new kind of music—jazz. Jazz combined elements of work songs, gospel music, spirituals, and African rhythms in a new and exciting mix. The first important jazz composer was Jelly Roll Morton.

Related to jazz was ragtime music. Like jazz, one of ragtime's major features was syncopation, a shifting of the usual musical accent. The pianist Scott Joplin was the leading ragtime composer.