Chapter 18: "Civilization's Inferno": The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880-1917

By 1900, city reformers worked on altering urban landscapes as part of a movement given what name?

"City Beautiful" For example, New York's Central Park was designed as a natural retreat from the industrial city, an innovation inspired by the "City Beautiful" movement. This vision of reformers was an attempt to mitigate the density, industrialization, and utilitarian nature of American cities.

What was the key to the successful building of skyscrapers in American cities in the late nineteenth century?

An interior skeleton made of manufactured steel beams.

What entrepreneur donated money that was used to found more than a thousand libraries across the United States?

Andrew Carnegie

Which city was the first to build an underground railroad line?

Boston

Which technological innovation transformed urban nightlife in the United States in the late nineteenth century?

Electric wiring

How did electricity catalyze the construction of skyscrapers in the late 1800s and early 1900s?

Elevators could now be incorporated. Before electricity, elevators were rare and were generally powered by hand or animals. With electric passenger elevators, builders could construct upward without forcing patrons to trudge up flight after flight of stairs.

Which of the following helped found symphony orchestras and opera companies in late-nineteenth-century American cities?

Elites

What allowed engineers and planners in the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a new urban geography in the United States?

New Technologies

In the late nineteenth century, many cities cut death rates from typhoid, yellow fever, and cholera by instituting what?

New sewage and drainage system

Joseph Pulitzer worked in which industry in the late nineteenth century?

Newspaper

Why did big cities in the United States become sites of manufacturing as well as finance and trade after the Civil War?

Steam engines allowed factory operators to move away from water-driven power. Prior to the Civil War, most factories stood in towns that had formed along rivers with sufficient fall lines to power machinery. The steam engine allowed factories to go where the biggest labor pools were—the big cities.

Which subculture emerged in American cities in the late nineteenth century and offered a dramatic challenge to Victorian ideals?

The gay community

What new institution arose as a result of the work with children of Julia Lathrop, one of the workers at Chicago's Hull House?

The juvenile justic system

To what does the term "private city" refer in historians' discussions of urban life in the United States in the late nineteenth century?

Urban areas shaped by individuals and profit-seeking businesses

What did Florence Kelley hope to achieve through her leadership of the National Consumers' League (NCL)?

Worker protection Kelley believed that only government oversight could protect exploited workers. Under her crusading leadership, the NCL became one of the most powerful progressive organizations advocating worker protection laws.

Immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occupied cheap housing near what institution?

Workplaces

What form of government did the leaders of the National Municipal League advise cities in the United States to institute in the early twentieth century?

a city manager system

In what type of buildings did New York City's poor immigrants generally make their homes?

tenements

Which act, passed by Congress in 1906, created an administration to regulate food and medical products?

the pure food an drug act

Why did audiences enjoy the vaudeville, an urban entertainment that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s?

the variety of entertainment types

Why did most black men and women who migrated to the large cities of the North between 1880 and 1917 end up working in the service sector?

they were routinely rejected from other jobs

During the depression of the 1890s, what percentage of working-class Americans was unemployed?

up to 25 %

In the early 1900s, a baby born to a Slavic woman in an American city had what chance of dying in infancy?

1 in 3

What was the Triangle factory fire?

A sweatshop fire that resulted in the deaths of nearly 150 people

What did New York State do in response to the public outrage expressed here over the Triangle fire tragedy?

Appointed a factory commission that developed labor reform

A mob of whites attacked the black community in 1906 in which city?

Atlanta One of the most virulent riots occurred in Atlanta in 1906, fueled by a nasty political campaign that generated sensational, false charges of "negro crime." Roaming mobs attacked black Atlantans, even invading middle-class black neighborhoods. The rioters killed at least twenty-four blacks and wounded over a hundred.

What was significant about the formation of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) in the early twentieth century?

Bridging of class lines The WTUL, founded in New York in 1903 and financed by wealthy women, trained working-class leaders like Rose Schneiderman, who organized unions among garment workers. Although the trade-union women were often frustrated by the patronizing attitude of elite sponsors, they and their well-to-do allies joined together in the broader struggle for women's rights.

How did the early-twentieth-century campaign against prostitution affect prostitutes in many Americans cities at the time?

By closing brothels, new laws worsened many prostitutes' lives.

How did the citizens of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, try to bring innovative reforms to their city around the turn of the nineteenth century?

By electing socialists to city government Milwaukee's citizens elected socialist candidates who experimented with a sweeping array of measures, including publicly subsidized medical care and housing.

How did the development of outlying suburbs in the middle and late nineteenth century change the social structure of cities?

By separating well-off suburbanites from working-class urbanites

How did adoption of steam power change manufacturing in the middle and late nineteenth century?

By vastly expanding scale

Which city suffered a terrible fire in 1871?

Chicago

The social geography of the suburbs in the late nineteenth century was in large part determined by which of the following factors?

Class Structures

What was America's best-known amusement park around 1900?

Coney Island

Which statement describes living conditions in New York City's Eleventh Ward at the turn of the nineteenth century?

Crowding was a serious problem in tenements. In New York's Eleventh Ward, an average of 986 persons occupied an acre. One investigator in Philadelphia described 26 people living in nine rooms of a tenement.

What distinguished the new "vertical aesthetic" of the Chicago school in the late nineteenth century?

Designs that expressed rather than masked structure and function

Which Hull House volunteer became the first American woman to hold a U.S. cabinet post?

Frances Perkins

What city was struck by a violent hurricane in 1900, leading to a major reform of its city government structure?

Galveston, Texas

What innovation did Detroit mayor Hazen Pingree offer to address the problems of the depression of the 1890s?

Giving city lands for urban gardens

How did reform-minded businessman Tom Johnson recapture the political support of Cleveland's working class in the early twentieth century?

He advocated public ownership of city utilities.

How did Henry Huntington expand the suburban ideal in southern California in the early twentieth century?

He used his family's fortune to buy up real estate and subdivide it into lots.

Why was Margaret Sanger indicted for publishing her newspaper column "What Every Girl Should Know" in the 1910s?

Her frank discussion of birth control violated obscenity laws.

Why is the Yellow Kid seen in this image historically significant?

His presence in newspapers coined the term yellow journalism. The arrival of Sunday color comics featuring the "Yellow Kid" gave sensationalist publications like the New York World the name yellow journalism, a derogatory term for mass-market newspapers.

Why did New York State undertake serious workplace safety reforms after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911?

In response to public outrage

Why did New York State undertake serious workplace safety reforms after the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911?

In response to public outrage Shocked by this horrific event, New Yorkers responded with an outpouring of anger and grief that crossed ethnic, class, and religious boundaries. Facing demands for action, New York State appointed a factory commission that developed fifty-six laws dealing with such issues as fire hazards, unsafe machines, and wages and working hours for women and children.

What impact did city politics have on immigrant communities in the United States in the late nineteenth century?

Integrated them into urban society

Which ethnic group was the largest in Boston in the late nineteenth century?

Irish

Which of the following statements assesses the impact of New York's Tenement House Law of 1901 on the 44,000 tenements that existed at the time?

It failed to change older structures because reform was not profitable

Why was the reform effort aimed at wiping out urban prostitution in the early twentieth century shortsighted?

It ignored the multiple factors that led women to prostitution.

How was public welfare changed in the late 1800s and early 1900s?

It rejected the old model of private Christian charity and adopted social science methods. Social workers at this time rejected the older model of private Christian charity, dispensed by well-meaning middle-class volunteers to those in need. Instead, social workers defined themselves as professional caseworkers who served as advocates of social justice. Like many reformers of the era, they allied themselves with the new social sciences, such as sociology and economics, and undertook statistical surveys and other systematic methods for gathering facts.

How did the city of Chicago address its sewage problem around the turn of the century?

It reversed the course of the Chicago River. Chicago engaged in an ambitious sanitation project around the turn of the century, reversing the course of the Chicago River to carry sewage into Lake Michigan and away from city residents.

What accounted for the popularity of ragtime music in the United States in the 1890s?

Its decisive break with Victorian music Ragtime had an infectious off-beat rhythm, which broke decisively with Victorian hymns and parlor songs.

Who founded Hull House in 1889 in Chicago as part of the settlement movement?

Jane Addams

Who were the "muckrakers" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century?

Journalists who promoted reform.

What were the political machines that played such a vital role in late-nineteenth-century American cities?

Local party bureaucracies that controlled elected and appointed offices

Working separately in the 1880s and 1890s, researcher Helen Campbell and photographer Jacob Riis both sought to call attention to what problem?

Miserable conditions in urban tenement housing.

Where in the United States did the blues music popular in the 1910s originate?

Mississippi

To which political party did the American reform mayors of the early twentieth century belong?

NO particular party

What was the ultimate basis for the cohesion of urban political machines?

Party loyalty Urban political machines were held together by party loyalty, which they built by providing commercial and social services.

Which of the following bore primary responsibility for developing the infrastructure of late-nineteenth-century American cities?

Private enterprise

What did the New York Tammany ward boss George Washington Plunkitt mean by "honest graft"?

Profiting from insider status

Congress passed the Mann Act in 1910 to achieve what purpose?

Prohibit the transportation of prostitutes across state lines

The nation's first electric trolley car system was built in which American city?

Richmond

Which Jewish nationality established the most institutions on this map?

Russian Most of the institutions are found in the Russian sector.

The settlement houses that emerged in early-twentieth-century cities pioneered what new occupational field?

Social work The women who worked through settlement houses in the early twentieth century allied themselves with the new social sciences and essentially created the field of social work. By 1920, women made up nearly two-thirds of U.S. social workers.

The settlement houses that emerged in early-twentieth-century cities pioneered what new occupational field?

Social worker

The dominance of private development in U.S. cities and the preference for business solutions to city needs are expressed in what concept?

The "private city" In the United States, cities relied largely on private developers to build streetcar lines and provide urgently needed water, gas, and electricity. This preference for business solutions gave birth to what one urban historian calls the "private city"—a place shaped by individuals, all pursuing their own goals and bent on making money.

Which institution was the first major art museum in the United States?

The Corcoran Gallery of Art

Why were audiences at the Metropolitan Opera in New York shocked by an opera presented there in 1907?

The Metropolitan performed the sexually scandalous opera Salome.

At the turn of the twentieth century, 90 percent of African Americans still lived in what region?

The South

Which building, completed in 1913, marked the beginning of the modern Manhattan skyline

The Woolworth Building New York, with its unrelenting demand for prime downtown space, took the lead in skyscraper construction by the late 1890s. The fifty-five-story Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, marked the beginning of the modern Manhattan skyline.

What does this image suggest about the extent to which the publication's readers shared urban white Americans' racial attitudes at the time?

The brutal depiction of whites massacring blacks reveals Parisians' abhorrence of white Americans' racism.

Which statement assesses the early-twentieth-century crusade against prostitution in the United States?

The crusade pushed prostitution out of brothels and into the street. The crusade against prostitution accomplished its main goal, closing brothels. But in the long term, it worsened the conditions for prostitutes since women now lost control of the trade and found themselves working as "streetwalkers" or "call girls." This made them more vulnerable to violence and led to lower earnings.

Which statement assesses the consequences of the Triangle fire in New York City in 1911?

The fire showed that only stronger laws could alleviate sweatshop conditions.

After running their Chicago settlement house for a few years, what did Jane Addams and her colleagues believe the working-class people they served needed?

The resources and political voice to improve their lives Addams and her colleagues believed that the working class knew what it needed, and their settlement could help to provide the resources and political voice they needed to improve the conditions under which they lived.

Which institution of progressivism offered a laboratory to experiment with solving social problems?

The settlement movement

Why were women more vulnerable than men in the new system of dating that emerged in American cities around the turn of the nineteenth century?

They earned less than men, making them vulnerable to gifts in exchange for sex.

Why were skyscrapers an impetus to urban development?

They made it possible to crowd more work and living space into a given area.

In what way was the power of city governments limited?

They were subject to state law

What was the purpose of the phenomenon that took shape in the United States in the late nineteenth century and came to be known as progressivism?

To combat the problems caused by industrialization and urbanization in the United States

Why did journalist Upton Sinclair write his 1904 novel The Jungle?

To expose labor exploitation in Chicago's meatpacking plants

Why did music publishing agents spend so much time in urban beer gardens and dance halls in the United States after the 1890s?

To have their musicians test their songs on the audiences there

This image was taken from The Great War on White Slavery, published by the American Purity Foundation in 1911. Which of the following is the artist attempting to show?

White slavers took advantage of newly arrived women immigrants. The boat in the background, the caption, and the lifeless expression on the girl's face suggest that the immigrant, who likely did not speak much English, was the ideal target of white slavers.

What prompted urban reform movements in the 1890s?

Widespread suffering from the depression of that decade

What political boss made Tammany Hall a byword for corruption in the late nineteenth century?

William Marcy Tweed

What was the main feature of the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other newspaper publishers of the late nineteenth century

sensational stories

What was the main feature of the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other newspaper publishers of the late nineteenth century?

sensational stories

Beginning in the 1850s and accelerating in the late nineteenth century, the spread of railroads in the United States spurred the growth of

suburbs