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Chapter 19 - The Incorporations of America

 

The Rise of Industry, The Triumph of Business

Labor in the Age of Big Business

The New South

The Industrial City

The Rise of Consumer Society

Cultures in Conflict, Culture in Common



    • Packingtown, Chicago, Illinois (I aimed for their hearts and hit their stomachs.)
      • Packingtown: adjoining the Union Stockyards, center of Chicago meatpacking, and full of the odor of the industry.
      • The various ethnic groups here—Irish, Germans, Bohemians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks—rarely intermixed (despite being nearly all Roman Catholic), except in the saloon; saloons hosted weddings and dances, providing meeting places for trade unions and fraternities, and cashed paychecks. In unemployment, workers spent plenty of time here, making friends across ethnic barriers.
      • Most “knife men” in the “killing gangs” who did the actual butchering were from Germany and Ireland, who learned their skills in the old country—skilled workers. Recent immigrants from Eastern Europe were the unskilled laborers who had no experience in meatpacking and many had not previously earned wages. The wages ($2 or less a day) were often not enough to pay for basic needs, and many died of tuberculosis.
      • Packingtown, though insular to its residents, was part of a network of industries that was transforming American industry and life, making Chicago a gateway city.
      • Meatpacking—led by the “big five” of Armour, Cudahy, Morris, Schwarzchild, and Sulzberger—expanded by 900 percent between 1870-90 and established a standard for monopoly capitalism. They built specialized factories  that could operate year round with ice and reliable refrigeration, with local packinghouses losing out to competition from Chicago.
      • Midwestern farmers no longer raised calves on pastures, but bought steers from the West and fed them on feedlots. Industry and agriculture merged in the meatpacking industry for nationwide distribution.
      • Chicago became home to several of the most technologically advanced industries in the world which had created a population of wealthy individuals. This also gave rise to a militant labor movement, which led to a major campaign in 1886 to shorten the working day, leading to the Haymarket Massacre in early May.
      • The typical American business was a small enterprise that was owned and managed by a single family producing goods for a local or regional market. By the turn of the century, large-scale investment created corporations that grew to mammoth sizes that produced for national and international market. This created wealthy men such as Andrew Carnegie, Philip Danforth Armour, Jay Gould, and John. D. Rockefeller.
    • Revolutions in Technology And  Transportation
      • The Centennial Exposition of 1876 held in Philadelphia celebrated the promise of the century to come, such as the new telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell.
      • 1876 marked the opening of Thomas Alva Edison’s new Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratory devoted to industrial research, which created the incandescent light bulb three years later. Electricity soon replaced steam as the main source of power.
      • Henry Ford experimented with a gasoline-burning internal combustion engine for c automobile, American makers producing more than 4,000 by 1900. Orville and Wilbur Wright staged the first airplane flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903.
      • The transcontinental railroad, finished in 1869, and three more railroads (Southern Pacific; Northern Pacific; and the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe) in the 1880s created an extensive transportation network.
      • The advances in communication and transportation helped the westward movement of industry. The center of industry (determined by gross value of products) was in the middle of Pennsylvania in 1850, Western Pennsylvania by 1880, and near Mansfield, Ohio in 1900.
      • In 1865, annual production was valued at $2 billion; in 1900, at $13 billion, changing the US from fourth to first in terms of production. The US produced one third of goods by the early 20thcentury.
    • Mechanization Takes Command
      • Mechanization greatly increased productivity, alongside the reorganization of labor and large scale economies that catered to a growing market.
      • These changes depended on anthracite coal, widely used after 1850. Cheap and reliable energy made dramatic changes in industrial use of light, heat, and motion. Coal also fueled the open-heart furnaces and mills of the iron and steel industries, making the US the largest steel producer by the end of the century, creating train rails and parts to make machines to make more goods.
      • Mass production replaced wasteful and chaotic practices in many industries, including meatpacking.
      • The cigarette making machine was one of many inventions that could mechanize every stage of production from the raw material to packaging. Within a generation, continuous production became the standard in most manufacturing areas.
    • Expanding the Market for Goods
      • To sell all they were making, business demanded new techniques of mass marketing on a national and sometimes international scale, replacing the “drummers” who worked individual routes to individual buyers and retail stores. Mass marketing convinced consumers to buy company goods over local and homemade items.
      • Francis Wayland Ayer founded an agency in 1869 to handle advertising campaigns such as those for Montgomery Ward and national Biscuit Company, selling biscuits under the name “Uneeda,” helping retailers’ revenue go from $8 million in 1860 to $102 million in 1900.
      • Mail-order helped get products to consumers, reaching free rural delivery in distant communities by 1896.
      • The Chicago-based mail-order houses drew urban and rural consumers into a common marketplace. Sears, Roebuck and Company, and Montgomery Ward offered a variety of goods, even giving rural consumers the fruits of their labor (post-production).
      • The chain store grew similarly, with a half-dozen springing up by 1900, the largest of which was A&P. Department stores similarly took over specialty shops with variety.
    • Integration, Combination, Merger
      • The business community gained greater control over the economy, trying to control it against alternating economic cycles. They grew more powerful as economic setbacks wiped out weaker competitors, leaving only stronger firms that quickly expanded.
      • Businesses grew through vertical integration—controlling the steps of production under one firm—such the United Fruit Company (today known as Chiquita, famous for screwing over all of agricultural Latin America), which controlled various Central American plantations and distribution centers in the US.
      • They also grew through horizontal integration—buying out competitors over a single product—made famous by John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, securing preferential rates with railroad operators, convincing (coercing) oil operators to sell their stock to him, and finally controlling 90% of the oil industry in 1882.
      • In 1890, the Sherman Antitrust Act was created to restore competition, but was actually used to restrict trade unions (who apparently stopped the free flow of labor) and helped consolidate business. 2,600 firms disappeared between 1898 and 1902, and by 1910 the companies that would dominate the first half of the 20th century—U.S. Rubber, Goodyear, American Smelting and Refining, Anaconda Copper, General Electric, Westinghouse, Nabisco, Swift and Company, Armour, International Harvester, Eastman Koad, and American Can—has already incorporated.
    • The Gospel of Wealth
      • Ninety percent of the nation’s business leaders were Protestant (White Anglo-Saxon and very poisonous, too) and mixed religion with their wealth.
      • The gospel of wealth made wealth a function of personal integrity, meaning poverty was a character flaw. This justified the behavior of characters such as Jay Gould, who made their fortunes off the backs of laborers.
      • Gould took over the Erie Railroad, paying off New York legislators to expand it, and acquired the US Express Company buy pressuring its stockholders before moving onto the Union Pacific, where he cut wages, caused strikes, and manipulated elections. He bought major newspapers to stifle their caricatures of them.
      • Carnegie, the Richest Man in the World, represented the “captain of industry” that apparently rose through diligence. His Gospel of Wealth (1889) outlined his philosophy of fair dealings and honesty.
      • Carnegie rose from an immigrant to a steel magnate, using vertical integration and new technology to increase his market share before selling to J.P. Morgan’s new United States Steel Corporation in 1901. Despite viciously underpaying his employees and controlling their labor, many saw him as a philanthropist for his patronage of the arts and learning.
      • The business community used Social Darwinism to justify why some succeeded while others didn’t, perverting Darwin’s theory of evolution as told in the Origin of Species (1859) by imposing a the idea of natural competition over society under the principle of “survival of the fittest.”
      • Yale Professor William Graham published What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883) to argue that only a few had the necessary moral character to produce the capital that drove the industrial economy and deserved their great riches, while the rest were lazy and profligate individuals who deserved their poverty. Tampering with the “natural” order through welfare or wealth redistribution would be hazardous to society.
      • Popular writer Horatio Alger published rags-to-riches novels that created heroes that rose to middle-class comfort, if not great wealth, through hard work and luck.
      • The “gospel of work” affirmed the dignity of work, thrift, and initiative, but did not see wealth as proof of good work. They instead wished for honesty and competence to become the cornerstones of society, inspiring 3 percent of the workforce to form unions, creating a movement that represented the most significant and lasting response to business by the working class.
    • The Wage System
      • The mechanization of labor changed employer-employee relations that created new categories of workers.
      • Craft workers had their long-standing practices destroyed, chipped away at autonomy, and were placed in completion against other workers. Frederick Winslow Taylor, who pioneered scientific management, explained that managers should make all decisions for workers.
      • The garment industry kept old labor as well as the new, but fostered intense competition between the contracted home workers and factory workers in a system called “sweating” and paying by the piece.
      • Industry required labor. Many people from rural areas traveled to the cities, most from Europe and Asia.
      • Industrialization led to opportunities for women. African American and immigrant women worked in domestic jobs least affected by technological advance while English-speaking white women moved into clerical and sales positions, particularly with the rise of the typewriter and telephone in the 1890s. 8.6 million women worked outside the home by 1900, tripe the number in 1870.
      • African American men found themselves excluded from work in the new fields.
      • Discrimination and exclusion fell hardest on Chinese immigrants earlier recruited to work in the mines, railroads, and market gardening. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which ended immigration from China for ten years, limited the rights of resident Cihnese and forbade naturalization.
      • The new workplace was extremely dangerous, due to hazardous working conditions caused by employers. Fast-moving machines meant that workers who could not keep up or were injured found themselves without a job.
      • Workers complained of the repetitive work and the long workday of ten to twelve hours, though federal employees had been granted the eight-hour day. This was the same for saleswomen in department stores, though they preferred this to domestic work as in-house servants.
      • Steady employment was rare. From 1866-1897, fourteen years were prosperous while seventeen were hard times, with major depressions in 1873-1879 and 1893-1897, with recessions at 1866-67, 1883-1885, and 1890-91.
    • The Knights of Labor
      • The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was a labor organization founded by Philadelphia garment cutters in 1869 and grew to be the largest in the country. Led by Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly, they brought together wage earners regardless of skill to organize widely against wage slavery.
      • The Knights endorsed the restriction of child labor, graduated income tax, land set aside for homesteads, the abolition of contract labor, and monetary reform to offset the power of industrialists. They believed the producing class would make the United States a truly democratic society once removed from corporate monopoly.
      • The Knights promoted cooperatives, where workers collectively made decisions for prices and wages, sharing all the profits. The Knights launched many cooperatives, but were unable to compete with the large capitalized enterprises.
      • The Knights led the campaign for a shorter workday, advocating a natural rhythm of eight hours sleep, eight hours leisure, eight hours work.  The movement collapsed in 1870 during the economic recession, but revived it in the next decade with the help of sympathetic consumers and boycotts.
      • The Knights grew from a few thousand to three-quarters of a million by 1880, 10% of them women after the Knights appointed Leonora Barry to organize. The Knights included 20 to 30 thousand African American workers in separate assemblies, but excluded Chinese workers.
      • In May 1886, a third of a million workers walked off their jobs in support of the eight hour day, with 200,000 of them wining shorter hours, including the Packingtown workers.
      • On 4 May 1886, after confrontations between strikers and authorities, a protest against police violence became a massacre after a bomb was thrown, killing one policeman and fatally wounding seven others. Police fired into the crowd. A sham trial convicted a group of anarchists who were never linked to the bombing, with four executed, another committing suicide, and three eventually being pardoned in 1893.
      • The Knights of Labor were eventually crushed as employers’ associations and the Big Five firms no longer negotiated with unions and blacklisted labor organizers, quickly reinstituting the ten hour day.
    • The American Federation of Labor
      • The AFL, founded in 1886, accepted the wage system and sought to bargain with companies, giving them the benefit of highly skilled workers in exchange for fair negotiations, only using strikes when the companies refused to bargain in good faith.
      • The federation—12 national unions and 140,000 members—went ahead of the Knights by disregarding unskilled workers, racial minorities, and immigrants. AFL president Samuel Gompers believed them impossible to organize and unworthy of membership; this extended to women, who he believed should stay at home (to not lower wages due to competition, apparently) while the husband earned the “family wage.” The AFL and Gompers advanced the “aristocrat of labor.”
      • Local AFL members kept some of the Knights policies, providing support for strikers, gathering votes for pro-labor candidates, sponsoring social activities, and publishing their own weekly papers.
      • Chicago’s Central Labor Federation embodied the AFL’s new spirit. They worked closely with civic minded members of the community in women’s clubs, church groups, within the state legislature, and some in the business community, creating an atmosphere of civic responsibility. The Illinois Factory Investigation Act of 1893 secured funds to monitor working conditions, and to improve the conditions of women and child laborers, as the result of the CLF’s work.
      • The AFL only gained about 10% of the working American population, but still became an importance force in their communities. Politicians courted the AFL’s votes and Labor Day, first celebrated in the 1880s, became a national holiday in 1894.
      • The South, after the Civil War, had little investment capital and few banks to manage it. The South, with only 27% of the per capita wealth of the Northeast, remained stagnant due to its continued reliance on northern finance, cotton, and the legacy of slavery.
    • An Internal Colony
      • Woodfin Grady (editor of the Atlanta Constitution)and his followers insisted that the south had great potential in its natural resources of coal, iron, turpentine, tobacco, and lumber. Grady saw a New South with modern mills located close to growing cotton plantations, plentiful and cheap labor unrestricted by labor unions or legal restrictions on child labor.
      •  Northern investors gained many concessions from Southern legislators, including land, forest, and mineral rights and large tax exemptions. They used these concessions to lay new railroad tracks, making new cities and opening the region to national markets.
      • Northerners used various means to protect themselves from southern competition, such as Andrew Carnegie ordering railroads to charge higher rates to Birmingham iron factories, investors buying stock to take Birmingham profits, and finally US Steel simply buying them out.
      • Merchants and landowners used vertical integration to control cotton textile production, which supplied the capital for industrial expansion and technological improvements. The new mills in the four cotton-manufacturing states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama—had production far surpassing New England mills.
      • Northern investors shifted investments South, owning much of the region’s wealth, but returning only a small portion through employment and services.
      • Beyond steel and textile, Southern industry remained extractive and rural. Turpentine and lumber, and sawmills and distilleries with them, moved into the dwindling pine forests. Fruit canning and sugar refining boom. Southern industry remained a raw materials industry, perpetuating the North-South economic imbalance.
      • The rise of the New South reinforced the South’s status as the nation’s internal colony.
    • Southern Labor
      • Southern industry did little to improve the lives of African Americans, even though they made up more than one-third of the population. Most continued to work in agriculture, but some moved into industries such as railroad, others gaining jobs such as bricklayers, carpenters, and painters. Most were limited to unskilled, low-paying jobs, and were rigidly segregated; in the textile and cigarette industries, African Americans were stuck to janitorial jobs. Women who earned wages did so as household workers.
      • Most trade unions refused membership to black workers, a white carpenters’ union employing out-of-town white workers rather than employ the local black union.In an Atlanta mill in 1897, 1400 white women went on strike when the company proposed to hire two black spinners.
      • The Knights of Labor briefly organized both races in the 1880s, enrolling two-thirds of Richmond’s 5000 tobacco operatives and many quarry workers, coopers, typographers, iron molders, and builders; when white politicians and newspapers raised the specter of black domination, the Knights were forced to retreat.
      • Wages remained low for workers of both races. Southern textile workers made half the wages of their New England counterparts, earning 12 cents an hour when investors made profits of 30 to 75 percent. Black men earned at or below the poverty line of $300 per year, black women earning less than $120, and white women $220. The poorest paid were children, the mainstay of Southern labor.
      • Child labor expanded with industry, especially in the South. One on four North Carolina mill operatives was younger than sixteen, compared to one in twenty in Massachusetts. Seasonal labor, causing families to move, made formal education difficult. Only twentieth century compulsory schooling laws limited child labor.
      • Convict labor thrived in the bituminous coal mines and public work projects, especially in remote areas, which created conditions similar to slavery. African Americans made up 90 of the convict workforce, suffering high mortality in the work conditions. White politicians took pride in the “good roads movement” as proof of progress.
    • Transformation of Piedmont Communities
      • Piedmont, the region from Southern Virginia and Central Carolinas to northern Alabama and Georgia, was most affected by the New South. Long-established farms and plantations gave way to railroads, textile factories, mill villages, and cities. By 1900, five Piedmont towns had populations > 10,000 and 52 with populations of 1,000-5,000. Piedmont went from rural backcountry to surpassing New England in yarn and cloth production.
      • Rural poverty and new lifestyles encouraged families to move to mill towns, with those with the least access to credit going first (mostly widows with children and single mothers). Families sent their children. Some worked seasonally, but many abandoned the countryside as the agricultural crisis deepened.
      • A mill community owned “lock, stock, and barrel” by the manufacturers was composed of family houses, a small school, churches, a company store, and the superintendent’s home. Superintendent’s prowled the neighborhood to see who was awake past nine, telling violators to go to bed. The company controlled many aspects of workers’ lives and workers had no privacy.
      • Superintendents relied on the clergy and teachers. The Baptist and Methodist preachers were paid to encourage workers to be thrifty, orderly, temperate, and hard working. Teachers taught children social order and to follow their parents into the mill, but only taught the younger children, and even those were pulled out when the mills needed more workers.
      • Mill villages retained many aspects of isolated rural communities and their agricultural past, with factory owners rarely paving roads or sidewalks or providing adequate sanitation. Diseases thrived in these conditions, and workers formed community ties through intermarriage to endure. Most workers had some connection to each other by a few generations, and those that didn’t still lived collectively, creating a family-like atmosphere.
    • Populating the City
      • Cities grew at double the population of the nation. By 1890, one-third of Americans lived in cities. Eleven cities had more than 250,000 people.
      • The largest cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, and Baltimore received international fame for their diverse populations, with most new residents emigrating from rural communities. Seven thousand African Americans moved into cities each year from 1870-1910 to escape the poverty and oppression of the South. Nearly 80% of African Americans in the North lived in urban areas. Young women moved north in search of manufacturing or domestic work, outnumbering young men in the east coast.
      • Immigrants and their children majorly contributed to population growth in urban areas, coming primarily from eastern and southern Europe. Chicago claimed a population that was 45% foreign born, Chicago had more Germans than most German cities and more Poles than most Polish cities, New York had more Italians than most Italian cities, and Boston had almost as many Irish as Dublin. Men dominated every group but the Irish.
      • Many intended to work before returning home, while others intended to stay. Half of the Italian, Greek, and Serbian immigrants left in the 1880s. The Jews emigrated to escape persecution in Russia and Russia-dominated Polish and Romanian lands.
      • Jews had the most experience with urban life, having formed thriving urban communities in Europe after being forbidden to own land. Most worked in garment manufacturing and followed needlework.
      • Other groups sought their kin, more easily finding housing and employment. Bohemians settled in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. French Canadians from Quebec settled in New England and upper New York, finding work in textile mills. Cubans, often immigrants from Spain themselves, moved into Tampa to Ybor city to work in cigar factories. Others went to fishing, shoemaking, and glassblowing, crafts from the Old Country. Italians went northeast and laid track, excavated subways, and erected buildings.
      • Immigrants continued to move frequently after settling as manufacturing moved outward, America experiencing a population turnover three or four times each decade in the lasts half of the 19th century.
    • The Urban Landscape
      • Cities experienced a building boom, creating many beautiful and useful structures. Cities worked to improve the conditions of housing, who worked in dingy factories and lived in cramped tenements.
      • American streets followed a grid pattern, with builders getting rid of anything in the way, though city officials lacked a master plan. Factories occupied the best sites near waterways, where goods could be transported and chemicals dumped.
      • Tenements were built to maximize space, producing high population densities.
      • However, engineers also planned richer communities with mansions and townhouses, with public architecture such as a public library, fine arts and science museums, and an orchestra.
      • Civic architecture used fireproof materials, expanded foundations, and internal metal construction to build offices and factories many stories high.
      • Architects build in a monumental or imperial style, promoting urban excitement and cultural uplift, but made the city more congested and noisy, making it better to visit than to live.
      • The Brooklyn Bridge, designed by John Roebling (died in early construction from an accident) and son William (became an invalid), was hailed as a practical and aesthetic wonder, uniting technology with art.
      • Streetcars and elevated railroads changed business by moving information, people, and goods faster and farther than before.
    • The City and the Environment
      • Mass transportation made it possible for workers to live farther from their place of employment, allowing the metropolitan region to grow dramatically.
      • Trolleys eliminated the waste from horsecars that fouled city streets, but increased congestion and new safety hazards, killing 600 a year. Elevated trains placed entire communities under rickety wooden platforms.
      • Modern water and sewer systems grew with the city, but did not eradicate serious environmental or health problems because cities continued to dumb sewage into nearby water bodies and cities used separate reservoirs rather than outlaw upriver dumping. Downriver communities complained about the stench.
      • Coal burning for fuel and to heat buildings contributed to air pollution. Noise continued to rise. Overcrowded conditions and inadequate sanitation bred tuberculosis, smallpox, scarlet fever, etc. After 1900, after a campaign against corruption, laws started to address public health.
      • The distance between the countryside and city narrowed, against the wishes of naturalists who wanted a buffer zone to protect natural resources.
    • Conspicuous Consumption
      • After the Civil War, the Gilded Age (Mark Twain) favored the growth of a class united by the pursuit of leisure and money, forming national networks, the Social Register indentifying the 500 families that controlled the nation’s wealth.
      • The rich had created a style of conspicuous consumption (Thorstein Veblen), designing ostentatious households and displaying their wealth.
      • In New York, families hosted dinner parties for their dogs or pet monkey, “Diamond Jim” Brady enjoying after-theatre “snacks” at lobster palaces.
      • The “cottages” of Newport were more magnificent than the English houses they mimicked, where the rich played new amateur sports or went yachting.
      • The Waldorf-Astoria hotel incorporated the grandeur of European royalty, but had corridors and restaurants open for public viewing, because the rich wanted to be watched. The rich started a custom of opening their Fifth Avenue mansion curtains so the public could marvel at the décor.
      • The wealthy became patron of the arts, procuring art treasures from Europe and Asia while funding many art projects.
    • Self Improvement and the Middle Class
      • A new middle class formed included both professionals and a number of salaried employees, mostly specialized workers.
      • Middle class families lived in suburban retreats, away from the city, allowing workers to separate work and home.
      • Middle class women devoted their time to taking care of the home, employing one or two servants as well as the new appliances such as the gas cooking stove. Magazines and cookbooks made food more complex. Though the sweeper was more efficient than the broom, new carpets demanded more care. Instead of reducing time, housework expanded to fill the leisure time.
      • Middle-class women spent most of their time consuming, buying machine-made goods, packaged foods, manufactured clothing, and personal luxuries. Department stores and shopping became a pastime for women.
      • The new white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant middle class embraced a culture of self-improvement, becoming consumers of learning.
      • They engaged in the gospel of EXERCISE (emphasis not mine) for physical and mental discipline, biking, hiking, camping, roller skating, and ice skating.
      • Middle class children, not having to work, enjoyed creative play and physical activity such as summer camps and sports.
    • Life in the Streets
      • Immigrants found the US had a better material life, but only by working much harder than they did in the Old Country. Suicide rates and alcoholism soared and immigrants variously called the country a pretty horrible place.
      • Newcomers concentrated in districts marked by racial or ethnic lines. San Francisco excluded Chinese from opening laundries and their children from schools. They crowded into a dozen blocks of restaurants, shops, and small factories called Chinatown.  Mexicans in Los Angeles and San Antonia moved into barrios. African Americans were made to live in the worst parts of the city.
      • Young people lived in the hotels or boardinghouses. The Young Men’s Christian Association and Young Women’s Christian Association provided temporary residence to native-born, white, self supporting young people. The most successful “women adrift” lived in furnished-room districts bordering the business districts. The least prosperous lived on “skid row.”
      • In tenements, families shared rooms with other families or boarders, with everyone competing for sleeping place on the fire escape on the roof during the summers. Various income and social customs prevented a pattern from emerging, with some living relatively well and others living paycheck-to-paycheck.
      • Household labor was performed without the new appliances and the crowded homes were used for domestic work to provide a little more income, such as sewing garments, wrapping cigars, stringing beads, or painting vases before cooking and cleaning for boarders who paid rent.
      • The working class often bought shoddy replicas of middle-class goods, such as inferior food, inexpensive clothes patterned off of wealthier clothes, and patent medicines for a variety of ailments.
      • The close quarters allowed immigrants to preserve Old World customs, speaking their native language, playing cards, forming fraternities, and performing other social functions.
      • Immigrants helped shape the emerging popular culture, creating the Tin Pan Alley (popular music) and promoting ragtime.
      • Developers realized “wholesome fun” could be profitable, so developed Coney Island into a seaside park.
    • Education
      • Public education grew with business, providing industry with the educated populace it needed to keep it and government going.
      • Public high schools saw increasing attendance, but still only served only 4% of children between fourteen and seventeen were enrolled in school, most schoolgirls planning to become teachers or office workers. They mostly served middle-class families, the immediate demands of working class families forcing children into the workforce.
      • Agricultural colleges and developed alongside liberal arts colleges, but only served 3% of the college-age population.
      • Professional training grew, offering advanced degrees in the arts and sciences.
      • After the Civil War, women’s colleges opened and coeducation grew at an expanding rate, 47% of colleges admitting women by 1890. The Women’s Educational and Industrial Union offered classes to Boston’s wage-earning women.
      • Business leaders promoted manual training for working-class and immigrant boys, which craft unions opposed in favor of apprenticeship, but merchants and manufacturers managed to gain funds for their schools, having courses in all elementary and high schools in Chicago.
      • African Americans were often excluded from collages attended b white students, so they founded their own. Booker T. Washington promoted practical education and founded the Tuskegee Institute.
    • Leisure and Public Space
      • Cities set aside land for leisure use, such as parks, but placed many restrictions to appease a middle class looking for escape from work.
      • Workers wanted the space for sports, picnics, and lovers’ trysts instead of the many restrictions on parks. Many openly defied or voted against these ordinances.
      • Park administrators set aside sections for playgrounds and athletic fields, but conflicts erupted. When parents protested, city officials instated supervised play, dismaying children.
      • Alcohol laws provoked disputes as well, with “blue laws” rigidly enforced against immigrants, but not against firms such as railroads. Immigrants, particularly Germans, defied such laws.
      • African Americans, of course, were excluded. FROM EVERYTHING (except for small parts of the park and other concessions).
    • National Pastimes
      • Younger members of the middle-class began to find common ground with working class pastimes, including ragtime.
      • Vaudeville bridged middle and working class tastes, drawing on variety show tradition that made racial and ethnic stereotypes and city life into amusement.
      • Sports outdistanced all other amusements in appealing to fans, especially baseball. Baseball, a sport of gentlemen and Union soldiers, became a national pastime first played by English children in a game known as “rounders.”
      • Rowdy behavior gave it a working-class feel, with players known for their saloon brawls disappearing for days on “benders.” Team owners often owned breweries and depended on beer sales; keeping order was difficult. Outfielders sometimes leaped into the stands to punch hecklers. The National League raised prices, prohibited alcohol, and observed Sunday blue laws. The American Association refused to do such frivolous things.
      • Baseball soon became incorporated, with merchants and then companies sponsoring teams. The White Stockings, organized as a joint-stock company, recruited star pitcher Alber Spalding from the Red Stockings, who eventually became a manager and president of the team. He procured various rights and marketed the game, making huge profits.
      • Spalding restricted the rules of participation, such as “reserve clauses” that limited player negotiation and from leaving their teams, forbid the White Stockings from playing against teams with African American players, and effectively excluded African Americans (AGAIN). They formed the Negro League instead.
      • Players complained about wages and rules, forming the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball players, with profits divided between participants and investors. It failed, mostly because baseball franchises required large amounts of capital. Enthusiasm for baseball created an urban identity and temporarily united a nation.
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