Putting It Together: Industrialization and Urbanization

Photograph of the neoclassical buildings of the White City at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Figure 1. Designers of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago built the White City in a neoclassical architectural style. The integrated design of buildings, walkways, and landscapes propelled the burgeoning City Beautiful movement. The Fair itself was a huge success, bringing more than twenty-seven million people to Chicago and helping to establish the ideology of American exceptionalism. Wikimedia.

After enduring four bloody years of warfare and a strained, decade-long effort to reconstruct the defeated South, the United States diversified its economy and embraced industrial development. Businesses expanded in scale and scope. The nature of labor shifted. A middle class rose. Wealth concentrated. Immigrants crowded into the cities, which grew upward and outward. The last remnants of the pre-industrial economy, society, culture, and values of America were in many places being displaced.

Jim Crow laws negated many of the gains of Reconstruction, producing a surge of internal migration from the South to the cities of the North. Industrialists pursued ever greater profits. Evangelists appealed to people’s morals. Consumers lost themselves in new goods and new technologies. Women emerging into new urban spaces embraced new social possibilities. Across the socio-economic spectrum, the United States had been radically transformed, and its evolutions would ripple outward to the West and overseas, and inward into radical protest and progressive reforms. For Americans at the twilight of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, a bold new world loomed.

Critical Thinking Questions

  1. Consider the fact that the light bulb and the telephone were invented only three years apart. Although it took many more years for such devices to find their way into common household use, they eventually wrought major changes in a relatively brief period of time. What effects did these inventions have on the lives of those who used them? Are there contemporary analogies in your lifetime of significant changes due to inventions or technological innovations?
  2. Industrialization, immigration, and urbanization all took place on an unprecedented scale during this era. What were the relationships of these processes to one another? How did each process serve to catalyze and fuel the others?
  3. What triumphs did the late nineteenth-century witness in the realms of industrial growth, urbanization, and technological innovation? What challenges did these developments pose for urban dwellers, workers, and recent immigrants? How did city officials and everyday citizens respond to these challenges?
  4. How was Darwin’s work on the evolution of species exploited by proponents of the industrial age? Why might they have latched on to this idea in particular?
  5. Describe the various attempts at labor organization in this era, from the Molly Maguires to the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor. How were the goals, philosophies, and tactics of these groups similar and different? How did their agendas represent the concerns and grievances of their members and of workers more generally?
  6. How did the new industrial order represent both new opportunities and new limitations for rural and working-class urban Americans?
  7. How did the emergent consumer culture change what it meant to be “American” at the turn of the century?
  8. Historians often mine the arts for clues to the social, cultural, political, and intellectual shifts that characterized a given era. How do the many works of visual art, literature, and social philosophy that emerged from this period reflect the massive changes that were taking place? How were Americans—both those who created these works and those who read or viewed them—struggling to understand the new reality through art, literature, and scholarship?