The chapter begins in the heart of an industrial city—at a bootblack stand in New York—where politics intersected with grimy city life. Ward boss George Washington Plunkitt sat atop the stand, dispensing favors in return for votes. Born of immigrant parents, Plunkitt was emblematic of a new breed of urban politicians, drawn from the common folk and regarding politics as a profession like any other, with similar opportunities to make money. For Plunkitt and many other Americans, the dawning urban age provided a wealth of new economic and social opportunities.

A New Urban Age

The modern city was the product of industrialization. Vast systems of communication and transportation, of manufacturing, marketing, and finance, of labor and management came together in the industrial city. Cities acted as magnets, pulling in people from the American countryside and from overseas.

During the late 1800s, cities began to assume their modern shape of ringed residential patterns around central business districts—slum cores, zones of emergence, and suburban fringes. New forms of urban transportation, including horse-drawn railways, cable cars, elevated railroads, and electrified trolleys and subways, helped these segmented cities hold together even as they sprawled outward into growing suburbs. Bridges also helped to join cities. New skyscrapers soared high into the air and elevators carried people to appointments within them; both inventions revealed the growing value of urban space. Tenements, smaller and squatter, carried the same message. They crammed hundreds into what soon became overcrowded, disease-ridden dwellings. Even such innovations as the dumbbell tenement, introduced in the early 1880s, failed to improve matters.

Running and Reforming the City

Growing industries and exploding populations presented cities with an unprecedented host of demands for services. As they attempted to adapt, cities became hamstrung by political problems, including outdated charters, a cumbersome system of checks and balances, the hostility of state legislatures, and a lack of middle- and upper-class leadership. Boss-dominated political machines developed in part to resolve those problems. Like corporations, urban machines centralized control and imposed order on the world around them. They furnished needed goods and services, ranging from coal to heat the homes of the poor and jobs for the unemployed to building projects that modernized the urban landscape. Through this process, poor immigrants sometimes found a way out of poverty and into the mainstream of American life, but the political and economic costs of such services were considerable—graft and corruption, inflated taxes, and election fraud.

Urban blight and corruption, along with a flood of new immigrants, inspired a host of social and political movements, which often began within churches. Some Protestant ministers continued to look on poverty as the result of individual failure. Others, allied with new nativist organizations, called for the restriction of immigration to reduce the menace they perceived from the influx of new cultures and ethnicities in the nation's cities. Still others embarked on urban religious revivals to bridge the gaps between the poor and the middle class. A minority began preaching a "Social Gospel," which advocated the betterment of society and the saving of individual souls through institutions such as boys' clubs, gymnasiums, libraries, and training programs. Settlement houses, like Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago (1889), served as community centers to help the working class and immigrant poor.

City Life

Immigrants affected city life as much as their native-born counterparts. They clustered together in ethnic neighborhoods and assimilated slowly. Their mix of old- and new-world ways added diversity and vitality to American cities that sometimes produced tensions between natives and newcomers.

During this period, urban middle-class life blossomed. By the turn of the century over one-third of the middle class owned their own homes. More and more middle-class urbanites lived in single-family dwellings on suburban fringes of the city, with husbands away at the office during the day, wives at home, and children in school. Victorian morality governed personal conduct and stressed sobriety, industriousness, self-control, and modesty, all qualities designed to protect against the turbulent life of the industrial city. The middle-class creed of discipline and social control extended beyond the home to society at large in a host of social reforms, including the temperance and anti-obscenity movements. Some women bridled against such rigidity and moved toward liberalization by advocating greater sexual freedom and female suffrage.

City Culture

Cities also served as centers of culture and education. Enrollment in public schools doubled between 1870 and 1890 under the impact of greater demands for literate and well-trained workers. Education became a powerful tool for social control and assimilation. Colleges and universities increasingly met the needs of an urban industrial society by furnishing a corps of educated leaders and managers. Women's enrollment increased both in coeducational schools and in new all-women's schools, many of which added home economics courses to a more conventional curriculum. By the turn of the century, although still only about 5 percent of college-aged Americans pursued it, higher learning extended more and more beyond college to include graduate and professional education.

In cities, middle- and working-class urbanites gained access to a new material culture and new forms of mass entertainment that were leveling and homogenizing American society. Ready-made clothing, mass-produced furniture, department stores, chain stores, and a growing mail-order business made consumption a national endeavor and bound up the nation as never before. Leisure time also became increasingly oriented toward consumable commodities. Sports—from the mannered games of tennis and croquet to more "democratic" ones such as bicycling, baseball, football, and basketball—grew in popularity. Other entertainments divided along class lines, with symphony concerts, museums, and a growing record industry for the upper classes, melodramas for the middle class and saloons, amusement parks and vaudeville houses for the workers. Only occasional events such as traveling circuses attracted customers from all segments of society.

Cities, radiating their influence outward into suburban and rural areas, transformed America. Yet even as they grew, their political systems struggled to find—within the traditions of a democratic republic—some way to bring order out of the seeming chaos of urban life.