American Experiment (195 page)

The most compelling needs in turn-of-century America were those of masses of newcomers. By 1900, the first great waves of immigrants, primarily from Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, had reached into the American heartland, and now were yielding to another huge tide of newcomers mainly from eastern and southern Europe. Pogroms and poverty in Russia were impelling Jews by the hundreds of thousands to begin the long journey west toward the vaunted land of tolerance and freedom. The stream of Italian immigrants broadened from about 1 million in the entire nineteenth century to 2 million in the first decade of the twentieth; and while the earlier immigrants had primarily been northerners, these newcomers more often hailed from southern and rural Italy. French
Canadians were still moving off the poor farms of Nova Scotia and Quebec into the textile and shoe towns of New England. Chinese immigration, totaling over 300,000 by century’s end, had slowed to a trickle in the wake of harsh exclusion acts in the promised land of liberty and equality.

Most of the immigrants headed toward where the jobs were, the cities. There they commingled with another vast migration of Americans from rural to urban areas. The desolate New England farms, with their sagging fences, broken windows, and overgrown pastures, hinted of earlier decisions to desert century-old homes for the rumored shorter hours and higher pay of factory life. Southerners, including blacks, were leaving for Northern cities; Chicago’s Negro population of about 7,000 in 1880 doubled in the next ten years.

All told, in the sixty years after 1850 the population of the United States rose roughly fourfold—from 23 million to about 92 million—while world population rose by about one-half. The population explosion in American cities was phenomenal; between 1860 and 1900, New York City grew from 1 million to 3.5 million, Philadelphia from half a million to 1.3 million, Boston from 170,000 to over half a million, Chicago from a small city to almost 1.7 million. Equally spectacular was the rise in the number of cities with more than 100,000 persons—from nine to fifty between 1860 and 1910. People talked about the ever-growing midwestern and eastern metropolises, but smaller cities of the West also underwent rapid growth, as did some in the South—Birmingham, Louisville, Memphis, the bustling cities of Texas. In sum, the American people were becoming more numerous, more diversified ethnically, more urbanized, older, and a bit more “western.”

Behind the big but impersonal figures lay countless life histories etched in fear, hope, expectation, and final reality. In the old days, many migrants to the city could bring their cows and pigs and chickens with them, but now newcomers experienced an almost total change of environment. Now they were crammed into buildings. One ward in Manhattan in 1890 had a density of 523 persons per acre, another 429. Cincinnati housed 25,000 families, numbering over 100,000 persons, in 5,600 tenements with a total of 54,000 rooms. The stench rising from open privies, garbage-strewn alleys, and stagnant water produced, someone said, a “stink enough to knock you down.” It was worse than stench, the Chicago
Times
sniffed, for “stench means something finite. Stink reaches the infinite and becomes sublime in the magnitude of odiousness.”

The crowding into urban America of migrants and immigrants coincided with decisions of financiers and industrialists in effect to industrialize the large American city. Most of these cities during the earlier years of the
century had been primarily commercial centers serving rural hinterlands. Of the nine cities that had reached 100,000 in population by 1860, eight were ports on ocean, lake, or river. These commercial cities had taken on a special character with their mostly English-speaking merchants and clerks and bookkeepers, gathered in medium-sized populations that had a sense of coherence and community. Manufacturing establishments typically were located outside these trading centers, on power-generating streams or at transportation junctions or near the oil or coal or minerals they consumed.

The commercial centers were natural targets for industrialization. They already had sizable populations, work forces, transportation facilities, consumer markets. Of the fifteen leading cities enjoying natural trade advantages by 1910, Blake McKelvey notes, fourteen had become major industrial cities as well. “New York, the chief banker and printer, was even more busy manufacturing clothing and cigars. Chicago, which by 1870 had become the leading butcher and packer and the leading grain and lumber mart, was now taking the lead in steel fabrication. Philadelphia, which after 1905 lost top place to Lawrence in the production of woolen goods, stood second or third only to New York or Chicago in other important industries.”

In effect these commercial centers added a whole new population of rural migrants and immigrants and a brand new economy of industrial production to their existing socioeconomic bases. By combining a variety of industries, they were able to take advantage of the “specialization and division of labor” much touted by economists. These forces stimulated one another in a relationship that was both dynamic and reciprocal, producing new industrial systems that were technically specialized, occupationally diverse, and yet economically integrated. Critical to this process, however, were investors’ decisions on the location of plants—decisions influenced by the availability of cheap labor that could be trained and disciplined and deployed, and that would in turn serve as a growing market for goods produced. Capital was the catalyst, but human bodies provided the manual and brain power.

Thus urbanization meant industrialization—and the reverse. Some cities continued to specialize and became famous for their main product. Troy made shirt collars and cuffs, Waterbury brassware, Gloversville gloves, Providence silverware, Paterson silk goods, St. Louis tobacco products, Toledo glass, Springfield (Ohio) farm machinery, Youngstown iron and steel, South Omaha meat products, Tulsa oil, Houston railroad cars. But the big industrial city combined a variety of such enterprises into a dynamic whole. In the process, these cities were transformed, as were the rural
populations that had come to stay. The ungainly, unplanned, and uneasy partnership of industrial elites at the top and masses of impoverished, non-English-speaking newcomers at the bottom unleashed a torrent of forces that produced the modern industrial city in its protean shape, its vitality, its ills, and its reformation.

The grandest sight in most big cities was the railroad terminal. By century’s turn, the modest old-time depot had become an imperial palace of extravagant gables, lofty towers, arched entrances, long colonnades, behind imposing Doric columns and pilasters. Cities vied with one another in terminal size and show. St. Louis boasted of the “largest depot in the world,” with its enormous train shed and Grand Hall; Chicago of its clock tower rising 247 feet; Detroit of a shaft that was half tower, half skyscraper; Boston of an arched and columned entrance fit for the arrival of Hapsburgs. You had to look sharp, though, because “terminal madness” meant repeated tearing down of old depots and building anew. There were three Grand Centrals at 42nd and Vanderbilt in New York City. Borrowing heavily from European art and experience, depot styles in the United States shifted from the Romanesque to the Renaissance to the neo-Romanesque.

The main Chicago station was so elaborate and complex, with its various levels and a waiting room sporting a mosaic floor and marble wainscoting, that architect Louis Sullivan attacked its “public-be-damned” style. But for many Americans the depot was the common man’s palace.

Into the wide-arching sheds inched the powerful new turn-of-the-century locomotives, snorting smoke, blowing off steam, and pulling dozens of cars. Down from the gleaming Pullmans stepped the magnates, the more successful traveling salesmen, the affluent professional men, and whole families with their maids and governesses and truckloads of luggage. The coaches disgorged also the plain people, carrying their valises and carpetbags. Arriving passengers paraded toward the cavernous terminals, amid flocks of porters and carters, then stepped outside into a hubbub of arriving passengers, besieging taximen, waiting trams, and drays piled high with barrels, boxes, bags of every size and shape.

It was usually a short distance from the terminal to the central business district; and here hubbub changed to bedlam. Crowds overflowed narrow sidewalks and fought with trams, hansom cabs, delivery wagons, and drays for passage space in the streets. People poured in and out of side streets packed with shoppers and lined with peddlers’ carts. Messenger boys
dashed in and out of office buildings; newsboys shouted out the day’s headlines; deliverymen bent under cakes of ice, kegs of ale, piles of clothing. Overhead, telephone and tram wires were so dense as to shadow the streets. The tumult only increased at intersections, where streetcars, imprisoned on their rails, pushed aggressively ahead while drivers of smaller vehicles tried to thread their horses through to the opposite street and constables sought desperately to avert a hopeless standstill.

Huge and intimidating, piloted by imperious motormen, the trolleys were the lords of the street, and often so crowded that most riders had to stand, lurching and swaying as the cars made sharp turns over rough rails. A complaining youngster might hear from his father how the streetcars of old had been pulled by horses over even rougher rails, at a pace so slow that it was quicker to get out and walk. And that father might once have been reminded by
his
parents that in their earlier days they had ridden on horsecars over cobbled streets without rails, sometimes at a feverish pace as rival liverymen competed for business. And crowded? Mark Twain himself had mentioned horsecar platforms so packed you had to “hang on by your eyelashes and your toenails.” Perhaps the grandparents remembered too the piles of horse manure left in the streets—several hundred tons a day in a medium-large city, according to measurers of such phenomena.

City transport was still the most dynamic element in urban change. Inventors had dreamed up alternatives to horsepower: compressed-air cars, propulsion by ammonia gas, steam engines on street rails, an endless underground cable powered by a stationary steam engine. Only the last of these worked. Tried out on the steep hills of San Francisco, the cable was used also in Chicago, Seattle, and a score of other cities in the 1880s. Steam-powered cables were also employed for elevated transit lines along Sixth and Ninth Avenues in New York and in the Chicago Loop. But none of these changes solved the intracity transit problem: steam engines were too big, noisy, and awkward for the streets; cables moved slowly at an unvarying speed, even during rush hours, and often broke down; the “els” deafened people in their second-story flats, blocked out light, and spewed dirt and oil on the streets below.

Electrified streetcars with overhead wires changed all this. First tried out in Alabama on Montgomery’s Court Street line in 1886, electric railways came into wide use after Frank Sprague, a naval engineer who had worked for Edison, formed a company and built a successful line in Richmond. Sprague had to overcome so many technical problems, at such heavy expense, that he would not have signed the Richmond contract had he foreseen them, he said later. This remarkable inventor also designed a
multiple-unit control system that enabled each trolley car to be independently powered, lighted, and braked, at the same time capable of being controlled by a master switch located in any one of them.

Soon the big rugged horses were disappearing from the city railways. Fifty cities had adopted trolley systems by 1890, another eighty-eight by 1895. Streetcars now sped along at twelve miles an hour, about twice as fast as the horses’ pace. Sprague continued to pioneer and perfect, ultimately winning the title “father of electric traction.” But Edison so dominated the popular imagination that he was often credited with inventing electric traction too, much to Sprague’s chagrin. “Popular applause, commercial propaganda and sentimental gush have helped to build up a legend largely mythical, to the effect that if Mr. Edison ever had anything to do with anything electrical, no matter how remotely,” Sprague complained, it “immediately became an Edison offspring.” Hence it was all the more ironic that in 1890 his company was absorbed by the Edison General Electric Company.

Not until the 1890s did American cities adopt the most dramatic advance in city transportation, the subway. Some years after London had pioneered with travel through the “underground,” Boston built a subway a mile long under Tremont Street, and New York in 1904 opened a longer line running from City Hall to 145th Street. Sprague’s multiple-unit control system helped make the subway possible, for it eliminated the need of a steam locomotive, whose smoke and soot would have made tunnel traveling all but unbearable. This inventor-industrialist also helped perfect the most invisible but in the long run perhaps most consequential of improvements, the electric elevator. Lifts powered by horse, steam, and hydraulic power had long existed, but only when harnessed to electric power did they come into general use. Chicago, busily building skyscrapers, pioneered in the use of “express” elevators, which made “the passenger seem to feel his stomach pass into his shoes,” a traveler wrote. Sprague, whose dependable, constant-speed motors were crucial to lifts, manufactured about six hundred of them before his business was turned over to the Otis Elevator Company.

Elevators made high-rise buildings possible even as the rising skyscrapers made elevators necessary. As the inner city grew more congested and its land more dear, one way out was the vertical. But the problem with building “up” had always been the enormously thick masonry needed to support sides and interiors. The solution, in the age of iron and steel, was first iron and then steel. Iron supports on buildings led to the first wholly cast-iron building in Manhattan at the corner of Centre and Duane. The strength, durability, and fire-resistance of cast iron brought a spate of
office buildings, department stores, and warehouses built of this material, some of them surprisingly attractive and even elegant.