Learning Objectives
- Identify how middle- and upper-class Americans responded to the changes associated with urban life
The Upper Class in the Cities
The American financial elite did not need to crowd into cities to find employment, like their working-class counterparts. But as urban downtowns were vital business centers, where multi-million-dollar financial deals were made daily, those who worked in that world wished to remain close to the action. The rich chose to be in the midst of the chaos of the cities, but they were also able to enjoy significant measures of comfort, convenience, and luxury.
Wealthy citizens seldom attended what they considered the crass entertainments of the working class. Instead of amusement parks and baseball games, urban elites sought out more refined pastimes that underscored their knowledge of art and culture, preferring classical music concerts, fine art collections, and social gatherings with their peers. In New York, Andrew Carnegie built Carnegie Hall in 1891, which quickly became the center of classical music performances in the country. Nearby, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors in 1872 and remains one of the largest collections of fine art in the world. Other cities followed suit, and these cultural pursuits became a way for the upper class to remind themselves of their elevated place amid urban squalor.
As new opportunities for the middle class threatened the exclusive status of upper-class citizens, including the newer forms of transportation that allowed middle-class Americans to travel with greater ease, wealthier Americans sought unique ways to further set themselves apart in society. These included more expensive excursions, such as vacations in Newport, Rhode Island, winter relocation to sunny Florida, and frequent trips aboard steamships to Europe. For those who were not of the highly respected “old money,” but only recently obtained their riches through business ventures, the recognition and validation they sought came in the form of a book—the annual Social Register. First published in 1886 by Louis Keller in New York City, the register became a directory of the wealthy socialites who populated the city. Keller updated it annually, and people would watch with varying degrees of anxiety or complacency to see their names appear in print. Also called the Blue Book, the register was instrumental in the planning of society dinners, balls, and other social events. For those of newer wealth, there was relief in the confirmation that they and others witnessed their wealth and standing through inclusion among the names in the register.
A New Middle Class
While working-class people were confined to tenements in the cities by their need to be close to work and by the lack of funds to afford anyplace better, and the wealthy class chose city living to stay close to big business transactions, the emerging middle class responded to urban challenges with their own solutions. This group included the managers, salesmen, engineers, doctors, accountants, and other salaried professionals who still worked for a living, but were significantly better educated and compensated than the working-class poor. For this new middle class, relief from the trials of the cities came through education and suburbanization.
In large part, the middle class responded to the challenges of the city by physically escaping it. As transportation improved and outlying communities were connected to urban centers, the middle class embraced a new type of community—the suburbs. It became possible for those with adequate means to work in the city and escape each evening, by way of a train or trolley, to a house in the suburbs. As the number of people moving to the suburbs grew, there also grew a perception among the middle class that the farther one lived from the city and the more amenities one had, the more affluence one had achieved.
Although a few suburbs existed in the United States prior to the 1880s (such as Llewellyn Park, New Jersey), the introduction of the electric railway generated greater interest and growth during the last decade of the century. The ability to travel from home to work on a relatively quick and cheap mode of transportation encouraged more Americans of modest means to consider living away from the chaos of the city. Eventually, Henry Ford’s popularization of the automobile, specifically in terms his model’s lower price, permitted more families to own cars and thus consider suburban life. Later in the twentieth century, both the advent of the interstate highway system, along with federal legislation designed to allow families to construct homes with low-interest loans, further sparked the suburban phenomenon.
New Roles for Middle-Class Women
Figure 1. The middle-class family of the late nineteenth century largely embraced a separation of gendered spheres that had first emerged during the market revolution of the antebellum years. Whereas the husband earned money for the family outside the home, the wife oversaw domestic chores, raised the children, and tended to the family’s spiritual, social, and cultural needs. The magazine Good Housekeeping, launched in 1885, capitalized on the middle-class woman’s focus on maintaining a pride-worthy home.
Social norms of the day encouraged middle-class women to take pride in creating a positive home environment for their working husbands and school-age children, which reinforced the business and educational principles that they practiced on the job or in school. It was at this time that the magazines Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping began distribution and became popular.
While the vast majority of middle-class women took on the expected role of housewife and homemaker, some women were finding paths to college. A small number of men’s colleges began to open their doors to women in the mid-1800s, and co-education became an option. Some of the most elite universities created affiliated women’s colleges, such as Radcliffe College with Harvard, and Pembroke College with Brown University. But more importantly, the first women’s colleges opened at this time. Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley Colleges, still some of the best known women’s schools, opened their doors between 1865 and 1880, and, although enrollment was low (initial class sizes ranged from sixty-one students at Vassar to seventy at Wellesley, seventy-one at Smith, and up to eighty-eight at Mount Holyoke), the opportunity for a higher education, and even a career, began to emerge for young women. These schools offered a unique, all-women environment in which professors and a community of education-seeking young women came together. While most college-educated young women still married, their education offered them new opportunities to work outside the home, most frequently as teachers or social workers, sometimes in the aforementioned settlement houses created by Jane Addams and others.
Challenging Gender Norms
Urban spaces and shifting cultural and social values presented new opportunities to challenge traditional gender and sexual norms. Many women, carrying on a campaign that stretched long into the past, vied for equal rights. They became activists: they targeted municipal reforms, launched labor rights campaigns, and, above all, bolstered the suffrage movement in pursuit of the vote.
Urbanization and immigration fueled anxieties that old social mores were being subverted and that old forms of social and moral policing were increasingly inadequate. The anonymity of urban spaces presented an opportunity in particular for female sexuality and for male and female sexual experimentation along a spectrum of orientations and gender identities. Anxiety over female sexuality reflected generational tensions and differences, as well as racial and class ones.
As young women pushed back against social mores through premarital sexual exploration and expression, social welfare experts and moral reformers labeled such girls feeble-minded, believing even that such unfeminine behavior could be symptomatic of clinical insanity rather than free-willed expression. Generational differences exacerbated the social and familial tensions provoked by shifting gender norms. Youths challenged the norms of their parents’ generations by donning new fashions and enjoying the delights of the city. Women’s fashion loosened its physical constraints: corsets relaxed and hemlines rose. The newfound physical freedom enabled by looser dress was also mimicked in the pursuit of other freedoms.
While many women worked to liberate themselves, many, sometimes simultaneously, worked to uplift others. Women’s work against alcohol propelled temperance into one of the foremost moral reform movements of the period. Middle-class, typically Protestant women based their assault on alcohol on the basis of their feminine virtue, Christian sentiment, and their protective role in the family and home. Others, like Jane Addams and her peers, sought to impart a middle-class education on immigrant and working-class women through the establishment of settlement homes. Other reformers touted a “scientific motherhood”: the new science of hygiene was deployed as a method of both social uplift and moralizing, particularly of working-class and immigrant women.
Education and the Middle Class
Since the children of the professional class did not have to leave school and find work to support their families, they had opportunities for education and advancement that would solidify their position in the middle class. They also benefited from the presence of stay-at-home mothers, unlike working-class children, whose mothers typically worked the same long hours as their fathers. Public school enrollment exploded at this time, with the number of students attending public school tripling from seven million in 1870 to twenty-one million in 1920. Unlike the old-fashioned one-room schoolhouses, larger schools slowly began the practice of employing different teachers for each grade, and some even began hiring discipline-specific instructors. High schools also grew at this time, from one hundred high schools nationally in 1860 to over six thousand by 1900.
Figure 2. This rendering of Kansas State University in 1878 shows an early land-grant college, created by the Morrill Act. These newly created schools allowed many more students to attend college than the elite Ivy League system, and focused more on preparing them for professional careers in business, medicine, and law, as well as business, agriculture, and other trades.
The federal government supported the growth of higher education with the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. These laws set aside public land and federal funds to create land-grant colleges that were affordable to middle-class families, offering courses and degrees useful in the professions, but also in trade, commerce, industry, and agriculture. Land-grant colleges stood in contrast to the expensive, private Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale, which still catered to the elite. Iowa became the first state to accept the provisions of the original Morrill Act, creating what later became Iowa State University. Other states soon followed suit, and the availability of an affordable college education encouraged a boost in enrollment, from 50,000 students nationwide in 1870 to over 600,000 students by 1920.
College curricula also changed at this time. Students grew less likely to take traditional liberal arts classes in rhetoric, philosophy, and foreign language, and instead focused on preparing for the modern work world. Professional schools for the study of medicine, law, and business also developed. In short, education for the children of middle-class parents catered to class-specific interests and helped ensure that parents could establish their children comfortably in the middle class as well.
City Beautiful
Figure 3. This blueprint shows Burnham’s vision for Chicago, an example of the City Beautiful movement. His goal was to preserve much of the green space along the city’s lakefront, and to ensure that all city dwellers had access to green space.
While the working poor lived in the worst of it and the wealthy elite sought to avoid it, all city dwellers at the time had to deal with the harsh realities of urban sprawl. Skyscrapers rose and filled the air, streets were crowded with pedestrians of all sorts, and, as developers worked to meet the always-increasing demand for space, the few remaining green spaces in the city quickly disappeared. As the U.S. population became increasingly centered in urban areas while the century drew to a close, questions about the quality of city life—particularly with regard to issues of aesthetics, crime, and poverty—quickly consumed many reformers’ minds. Those middle-class and wealthier urbanites who enjoyed the costlier amenities presented by city life—including theaters, restaurants, and shopping—were free to escape to the suburbs, leaving behind the poorer working classes living in squalor and unsanitary conditions.
Through the City Beautiful movement, leaders such as Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham sought to champion middle- and upper-class progressive reforms. They improved the quality of life for city dwellers, but also cultivated middle-class-dominated urban spaces in which Americans of different ethnicities, racial origins, and classes worked and lived.
Olmsted, one of the earliest and most influential designers of urban green space, and the original designer of Central Park in New York, worked with Burnham to introduce the idea of the City Beautiful movement at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. There, they helped to design and construct the “White City”—so named for the plaster of Paris construction of several buildings that were subsequently painted a bright white—an example of landscaping and architecture that shone as an example of perfect city planning. From wide-open green spaces to brightly painted white buildings, connected with modern transportation services and appropriate sanitation, the White City set the stage for American urban city planning for the next generation, beginning in 1901 with the modernization of Washington, DC. This model encouraged city planners to consider three principal tenets: First, create larger park areas inside cities; second, build wider boulevards to decrease traffic congestion and allow for lines of trees and other greenery between lanes; and third, add more suburbs in order to mitigate congested living in the city itself. As each city adapted these principles in various ways, the City Beautiful movement became a cornerstone of urban development well into the twentieth century.
The Brooklyn Bridge: marvels of engineering
The Brooklyn Bridge, which taught the world how to span great distances, was one of the three wonders of nineteenth-century engineering. The other two were the Crystal Palace in London (1851), which demonstrated how to enclose vast spaces, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris (1889), which showed how to reach great heights.
Manhattan is nearly unique among the world’s great urban centers in that it is an island. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its geography necessitated ferries to convey people and goods across New York’s busy waterways. In the far colder winters of the early nineteenth century, ferrying could become difficult when the East and Hudson Rivers froze over. This made a bridge between Manhattan and what was then the rapidly growing city of Brooklyn highly desirable to allow for the movement of workers, goods, and services between the two. But until the mid-nineteenth century, the technology of bridge building did not allow a span of the required size and height above the water to allow shipping to pass beneath.
Figure 4. The front page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper shows men working on wooden seats that are attached to the cables of the bridge. The caption reads “Completing a great work—lashing the stays of the Brooklyn Bridge.”
When a bridge was planned to cross the Ohio River at Cincinnati at about the same time, John Augustus Roebling was hired to design it. Roebling had been born in 1806 in Prussia, where his mathematical talents were soon recognized and he received a first-class education in engineering. In 1831, he joined a group of German settlers moving to western Pennsylvania but was soon practicing engineering rather than the more common occupation of farming. Roebling was struck by how much engineering projects like the Suez Canal and the intercontinental railroad contributed to economic growth and to the development of civilization. He began to manufacture metal-wire rope on his land, and he later founded a large wire-making facility in Trenton, New Jersey.
In 1845, he designed and built his first suspension bridge. He later built a suspension bridge that carried vehicles and railroads over the Niagara River. The Cincinnati-Covington Bridge over the Ohio River (now named the John A. Roebling Bridge in his honor) was the longest in the world when it was finally completed in 1866.
Roebling began designing the Brooklyn Bridge, with a span half again as long as the Cincinnati bridge, in 1867. But in 1869, just as construction was about to begin, he was standing on the edge of a dock on the Brooklyn side of the East River when his foot was crushed by an arriving ferry, and he died of a resulting tetanus infection three weeks later. The project was taken over by his 32-year-old son, Washington Roebling, who had been the assistant engineer on the project.
By far the most difficult part of constructing this unprecedented structure was setting the uprights, the massive stone towers that were designed to bear the weight of the cables that, in turn, would bear the weight of the roadway. The uprights had to be footed on the bedrock beneath the rock and soil (called muck) of the East River, which is actually a tidal race where the tides can reach speeds of eight knots.
To dig beneath the water level, Washington Roebling designed two immense, airtight caissons made of yellow pine, open at the bottom. Compressed air forced the water out of the caissons and an airlock allowed workers to enter and leave. As the workers dug, they shoveled the muck to a water-filled pit in the center of the caisson. From there it was forced up a tube by the pressure of compressed air and removed by a crane using a clamshell bucket. This process and the air pressure put on the workers at such great depths caused headaches, compression sickness, and even death. Washington Roebling himself became so sick from the illness that his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, took over the many of his duties. This HistoryPod video explains the magnitude of the project.
When the towers had been completed after five years of construction, work could begin on the cables, which contained 14,000 miles of steel wire—the first time steel wire was used in bridge construction. This was possible because of the radical drop in the cost of steel after the invention of the Bessemer converter in 1857. Finally, after 14 years, the bridge was complete.
Figure 5. The Brooklyn Bridge.
A week later, a panic broke out on the bridge when people thought it might suddenly collapse, and 12 people were trampled to death. Several days afterward, the circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum steered 21 elephants across the bridge, led by the famous Jumbo, to demonstrate the bridge’s strength. Today, the Brooklyn Bridge remains world-famous as one of the icons of New York City, and it is still one of the vital parts of the great city’s transportation infrastructure. The bridge was a marvel of modern technology. It repaid its wealthy boosters and provided opportunities for common workers, immigrants, and small business owners in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
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Review Question
In what way did education play a crucial role in the emergence of the middle class?
Glossary
City Beautiful: a movement begun by Daniel Burnham and Fredrick Law Olmsted, who believed that cities should be built with three core tenets in mind: the inclusion of parks within city limits, the creation of wide boulevards, and the expansion of suburbs
Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890: Laws that set aside public land and federal funds to create affordable land-grant colleges, offering training in the professions, but also in trade, commerce, industry, and agriculture
Social Register: a directory of the wealthy socialites in each city, first published by Louis Keller in 1886