The Growing Cities, c. 1870–1900

This is Unit Four, part two, on the machine, the city's leisure, and the ideas of the Gilded Age. Part one closed with the political machine trading favours for votes. This part opens on its most notorious boss. Carry one habit through it: some things in this city were two things at once. The machine is the first. The anchor's own phrase for Tammany is corrupt, but effective, and the course holds both halves. Later, two ideas borrow the same science and point in opposite directions. By the end you will be able to explain whether the machines were only corrupt. To describe how leisure divided the city by class. To describe how schooling expanded. To distinguish social Darwinism from pragmatism by what each told government to do. And to name the writers and painters who described and attacked the new order.

Two entries on the machine: its most notorious boss, and the question of whether it was only corrupt.

The most notorious boss.

USH2 0469 Boss Tweed

William Tweed was the political boss of New York City in the late eighteen sixties, controlling its mayor and demanding kickbacks for city contracts; the New York County Courthouse cost many times what it should have. In July eighteen seventy-one documents given to the New York Times exposed the Tweed Ring, and Thomas Nast's cartoons fed the outcry.

Whether the machines were only corrupt.

USH2 0470 Corrupt but Effective

The sources answer this with both halves. The corruption is not in doubt. Digital History describes Tweed's courthouse, begun in eighteen sixty-one, costing several times what it should have, with contractors paid fortunes for a few days' work, and bribes and kickbacks as the boss's main source of funds. Yet the anchor says the machine solved people's immediate problems in exchange for their votes, and that Tammany dominated the city's politics for some eighty years. The Yawp says Tammany responded to immigrant needs, worked as a kind of mutual aid society, and built essential infrastructure with the same public works that funded its graft. Two misreadings sit on either side. One treats the machines as pure theft, and cannot explain why immigrant voters kept them in power for generations. The other treats them as charities, and ignores what the courthouse cost. The machines survived because they delivered services no other institution offered newcomers, and they paid for that loyalty with public money. The anchor's phrase holds both halves: corrupt, but effective. The Progressive reformers of unit six set out to replace the machines with government that was honest and still delivered.

Four entries on what city people did with their free time, and how leisure divided them by class.

What city workers did with their free time.

USH2 0471 Amusements

Working-class city dwellers found new leisure at Coney Island, whose first amusement park opened in eighteen ninety-five on the Brooklyn shore, and in vaudeville and the nickelodeon, the first of which opened in Pittsburgh in nineteen oh five. Harry Houdini performed in vaudeville. The trolley made a day at the amusement park possible for a worker's family.

The sport and the books working people loved.

USH2 0472 Baseball and Dime Novels

Professional baseball began with the Cincinnati Red Stockings in eighteen sixty-nine, and the National League had formed by eighteen seventy-six, followed by new ballparks such as the Polo Grounds, Forbes Field and Fenway Park. The first dime novel, Ann S. Stephens's Malaeska, was printed in eighteen sixty. Cheap novels and ball games were entertainment a worker could afford.

How the wealthy spent their leisure.

USH2 0473 The Upper Class

The wealthy built their own cultural world: the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in eighteen seventy-two and Carnegie Hall in eighteen ninety-one, and the Social Register, first published by Louis Keller in eighteen eighty-six, listed the city's elite families. New money sought acceptance by old money, and the Register decided who belonged. Leisure divided the city by class.

The families who left the city every evening.

USH2 0474 The Suburbs

Electric railways let middle-class families work in the city and live outside it, and suburbs grew quickly in the eighteen eighties and nineties, with clerks riding the trolley each evening to houses beyond the crowded centre. The anchor says they sought escape from the city's chaos. Unit thirteen returns to the suburbs on a vast scale.

Two entries on the growth of schooling, and on a plan to make the city beautiful.

The growth of public schooling.

USH2 0475 Schools for a Nation

Public education expanded enormously. Public school enrolment tripled, from seven million students in eighteen seventy to twenty-one million in nineteen twenty. High schools multiplied from about one hundred in eighteen sixty to more than six thousand in nineteen hundred. College enrolment rose from fifty thousand in eighteen seventy to over six hundred thousand by nineteen twenty, helped by the land-grant colleges of the Morrill Acts, which the Yawp says emphasised practical knowledge in science, engineering and agriculture. Women's colleges such as Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith and Wellesley opened alongside. The growth was uneven: expensive private universities still served the elite, while land-grant colleges made higher education affordable for middle-class families.

The plan to make the city beautiful.

USH2 0476 The City Beautiful

Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park, and Daniel Burnham promoted the City Beautiful movement, introduced at Chicago's Columbian Exposition of eighteen ninety-three with its gleaming, temporary White City and plans for wider boulevards and larger parks. The anchor notes the movement also built middle-class spaces that shaped who used the city. Chicago's waterfront plan followed.

Three entries on two ideas that borrowed the same science, and the third shows how far apart they landed.

An idea that justified inequality.

USH2 0477 Social Darwinism

Herbert Spencer applied Darwin's theory to society and popularised the phrase survival of the fittest, arguing that social position reflected fitness. Yale's William Graham Sumner, its leading American voice, argued that government should keep its hands off the economy. Critics said it ignored unequal opportunity, and the idea fell into disrepute in the nineteen thirties and forties, when eugenicists used it.

The philosophy that answered it.

USH2 0478 Pragmatism

The philosopher William James argued for pragmatism, testing ideas by their consequences and treating truth as something found through experience, and John Dewey's instrumentalism made education and scientific observation the tools of reform. Digital History says James and Dewey rejected the idea that social change should go unregulated, arguing that government should act on social ills.

How to tell the two ideas apart.

USH2 0479 Two Ideas of Society

Social Darwinism and pragmatism both borrowed from science, and both are sometimes filed under the same heading of Gilded Age thought, but they pointed in opposite directions. Social Darwinism held that the social order was what the struggle for survival had produced, so interference with it was useless and harmful. Pragmatism held that ideas are tools to be tested and changed, so society could be studied, experimented on and improved. Ask what each thinker concluded government should do. Sumner's answer justified the fortunes of unit three; Dewey's fed the Progressive reforms of unit six. The same scientific prestige served both.

Three entries on the writers and painters who described the new America, and the writers who attacked it.

The writers who described it.

USH2 0480 Realism in Literature

Writers turned to realism and naturalism, portraying life as it was lived: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn of eighteen eighty-four, Stephen Crane's stories of the slums, and Kate Chopin's The Awakening of eighteen ninety-nine, which questioned the domestic role society gave women. Paul Laurence Dunbar, writing in standard English and in dialect, became the leading African American writer of his generation.

The painters of the city.

USH2 0481 The Ashcan School

Painters including George Bellows, Edward Hopper and Robert Henri formed the Ashcan School, depicting working-class city life in canvases of tenements and congested streets, as Digital History puts it. Their subject was the city itself, slums included. Twain and Warner's novel of eighteen seventy-three gave the era its name, the Gilded Age.

The writers who attacked the new order.

USH2 0482 Critics of Industrial Capitalism

Three writers attacked the industrial order: Henry George in Progress and Poverty, with his single tax on land; Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward, with his utopian socialism; and Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class, with his conspicuous consumption. Their books appeared in eighteen seventy-nine, eighteen eighty-eight and eighteen ninety-nine. Unit five shows Bellamy's and George's followers joining the Populists.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain whether the machines were only corrupt, holding both halves: Tweed's courthouse and its kickbacks, and services no other institution offered newcomers. Corrupt, but effective. You can describe how leisure divided the city: Coney Island, vaudeville, baseball and dime novels for workers; the Metropolitan Museum, Carnegie Hall and the Social Register for the wealthy; and the suburbs for the middle class. You can describe how schooling expanded. Public enrolment tripled, high schools went from about a hundred to over six thousand, and land-grant colleges opened higher education to middle-class families. You can distinguish social Darwinism from pragmatism by what each told government to do: keep its hands off, or act on social ills. And you can name the realists, the Ashcan painters, and the three critics, George, Bellamy and Veblen.