The Emergence of Urban America
Issues of the 21st century are not unlike those of the 19th century

“Charity and Skills Justify It All” proclaims the headline of the New York Times article on the attitudes of today’s “richest of the rich” chief executives and entrepreneurs (New York Times, July 15, 2007). The Times’ lead article compared today’s concentration of wealth among a relatively few “titans” with the similar situation during the Gilded Age. At the end of the 19th century and during the years preceding World War I, barons of business “ushered in the industrialization of the United States.” They took risks with new technologies, speculated on growth and predicted social and economic patterns. Their domain included railroads, oil, coal, manufacturing, retail sales and finance.

Today’s wealthy elite plumb the possibilities of new and different transformative technologies—personal computing and the world of the Internet. In the Times story, we hear the titans of our century declare the enormous impact and potential of their philanthropy. Roughly a century from the era of their gilded peers, their stories of remarkable and growing wealth share a backdrop: momentous social and intellectual change as well as complex social problems. The public debate today echoes the one that raged at the turn of the 19th and early 20th century.

Students at Milton start reading, thinking about and discussing the age of industrialization in the United States during the third semester of the two-year course: The United States and the Modern World. Whether we are talking, today, about the pace of scientific developments or the impact of enterprise consolidation, about global competition or the migration of peoples, whether we see cities as centers of intellectual and artistic life or of festering inequalities, we are raising issues that opinion leaders during the era of industrialization thought to be central to humanity’s destiny.

Students begin by reading Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, written in 1888. Bellamy was concerned about the destiny of individual freedom and the values of democracy when the overwhelming drive of industry, led by the few, had seemingly oppressed the many. Material gains seemed to go hand in hand with inequity, chaos and strife. Bellamy’s protagonist, Julian West, went to sleep in 1887 and awoke in 2000, when a new social order had taken hold. In the ideal world of 2000, injustices—poverty and hunger—and social disruption have been overcome. The economy was based on public capital; revenues were distributed equally; a college education and the right to choose a fulfilling career were available to all.

Bellamy’s book represented a strand of 1880s thought: that good people have been corrupted by industrialization, and they will act to change the nature of their society.

At issue for Bellamy and for today’s thinkers is whether the accumulation of wealth in such a concentrated way is natural or right for individuals; whether it causes or exacerbates problems; and how the riches that flow from commerce and industry are best applied for the advancement of the country and the world. “Society should place an initial emphasis on abundance,” the Times quotes billionaire investor Warren Buffett, but “then should continuously strive” to redistribute the abundance more equitably.

Students, according to history faculty members Carly Wade and David Ball, are somewhat skeptical of the 19th-century socialist ideas Bellamy asserts. They are equally skeptical of some of the most ardent defenders of industrial capitalism.

One such defender whom they read is the late-19th-century Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, who believed that calls for reform and resistance were a brand of ignorance. Sumner viewed the social and economic processes at work in the United States from a Darwinian perspective.1 He saw growth in the “industrial organization” as inevitable and irreversible: a package of benefits with necessary tradeoffs. The phenomenon of the industrial organization, he wrote, “controls us all because we are all in it. It creates the conditions of our existence, sets the limits of our social activity, regulates the bonds of our social relations, determines our conceptions of good and evil, suggests our life-philosophy, molds our inherited political institutions and reforms the oldest and toughest customs, like marriage and property.”

Cities seemed to embody both the benefits and harms of industrial capitalism. Students read Josiah Strong, a prominent Congregationalist minister from Ohio, who wrote in 1885, “The city has become a serious menace to our civilization.”2 The city had “a particular attraction for the immigrant,” Strong said, “It is the city where wealth is massed…the congestion of wealth is severest...Not only does the proportion of the poor increase with the growth of the city, but their condition becomes more wretched. Socialism not only centers in the city, but is almost confined to it…here gather foreigners and wage-workers; here skepticism and irreligion abound.” Other writers affirmed Strong’s worry about aliens—described variously as Romans [Roman Catholics], socialists, and immigrants.

Adna Ferrin Weber, writing in 1889 countered Strong’s view; she asserted that enumerating the advantages of the city would take too much space, but they would include educational and artistic preeminence, a higher standard of living, cultivated associations (“cities are the center of intellect as well as wealth”).3 [City life] has brought thinkers into touch with one another. “As the seat of political power, as the nursery of the arts and sciences, as the center of industry and commerce, the city represents the highest achievements of political, intellectual and industrial life.”

Students read what reformers such as Jane Addams called the effort to “add the social function to democracy.” She opened and staffed Hull House to serve urban immigrants in Chicago acting on the theory that “the dependence of the classes on each other is reciprocal.” They read excerpts from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, about life in the meatpacking district of Chicago in 1906 and witness the photography of Jacob Riis, who provided new visual documentation of New York’s destitute wage earners.

Students read pleas expressed in letters written by black men and women trying to leave the South, seeking jobs and a taste of that freedom and equality that had been promised them. As students learn about the challenges for blacks in the industrialized age, they encounter the list of political and social demands drafted by W.E.B. Du Bois and other black activists in 1905. Du Bois, for example, called for black suffrage and civil rights and access to higher education.

Some writers advocated applying controls, and others recommended resisting controls on the corporations that were rapidly consolidating and monopolizing to maximize opportunity and profit. Congress set up the Industrial Commission (1901), to study “trusts” and to recommend legislation. Students read the Commission’s explanation of why businesses were consolidating.4 Efficiency of production and management of the labor force, standardization of quality, lowering of marketing costs, more solid financial control (particularly of credit and debt), and reduced shipping charges were among the positive outcomes the Commission names.

President Theodore Roosevelt, in response to the problem of trusts, made the case to Congress in 1901 that there were good and bad trusts—that the character of business leaders affected that status.5 He argued that the United States needed to be in a dominant competitive position, globally, and that the government shouldn’t compromise that goal. Corporate transactions and accounting should be transparent and truthful. Federal supervision and regulation should be applied to those organizations doing interstate business (framers of the Constitution could not have imagined businesses that would be inadequately regulated through state action). “Great corporations,” Roosevelt argued, “exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.”

Cities, industrialization, the growth of corporate giants forced people to rethink their understanding of what America was. At the same time, 19th-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner proposed that the defining element of America, and of Americans as distinguished from Europeans, was the experience of the American frontier. The experience of taming the wilderness shaped what was exceptional about Americans, rather than the inventiveness and drive of urbanization.

Are urban areas where America reinvents itself? Or where America could reinvent itself? What do students think?

This two-year course considers the United States in dynamic relationship with the world; cities figure as factors in numerous historical developments prior to this point in the course. In this section of the course, however, Milton students are looking at the growth of the industrial city, once a Western phenomenon, that has since spread around the world.

“Our students are primarily from metropolitan areas,” Carly says. “For them, the notion that our country, until 1920, was more rural and agricultural than urban is challenging to their imaginations. They would need to work harder to imagine living on the plains of North Dakota than living in crowded conditions in New York. They tend to take the notion of the city for granted. They derive their ideas from their view of their own experience: that could be shopping for the right labels in one of the world’s fashion centers or negotiating public transportation to get to an inner-city public school. The increasing diversity of our students’ backgrounds, the different worldviews they bring, markedly affects the quality of the conversation while we’re studying. It’s eye-opening.”

“High school students start out with a certain blindness to aspects of the city, even people who are in the city all the time,” says David Ball. “It’s amazing that you can look past so many interesting things. One of the great advantages of Milton is that we’re near Boston; we have the opportunity to get people to see new things, to ask good questions. Students learn a lot, at Milton, about what they should be asking.”
When they begin in our classes, David and Carly explain, students are not yet capable of social or intellectual criticism of real depth, comments beyond the critiques that surround them in their families’ conversations. What Milton does, on this issue and on others throughout the curriculum, is begin to build the inclination and the ability to think critically. We ask them to read, observe, listen, think, express themselves, and, above all, question.

CDE

1. William Graham Sumner, “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over” (1883), War and Other Essays (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1911), pp. 195–210.
2. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: The American Home Missionary Society, 1885), pp. 128–43.
3. Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (New York: Macmillan, 1889), pp. 218–22, 439–42, 444–45.
4. U.S. Congress, Report of the United States Industrial Commission (Washington, D.C., 1901), 13:v–vii.
5. “First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1901,” in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 15:87–93.

 

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