The Foundations for Social Reform – The 1890s

The 1890s -- A Decade of Extremes (Historical Process = Action)

The 1890s were marked by extremes. On one hand, it was the decade in which Thomas Edison invented electricity, and William Graham Bell, the telephone. It was the decade that saw the advent of professional baseball, the bicycle, and Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Men, especially from the middle class, discovered that hard work, good character, and a college education launched them into better paying and more respectable white-collar jobs. Middle class women gained new freedoms. They shed their confining crinolines and bustles in favor of a shirtwaist blouse and ankle-length skirt and joined literary societies charity groups and reform clubs. More women went to college and many decided to seek a profession rather than marry. Married women were granted more property rights in many states of the country, and statistically, women of the middle class chose to have fewer children. Thus, for the middle and upper classes of American society, the 1890s were the "gay nineties."

Yet, on the other hand, the decade of the 1890s did not represent the "gay nineties for many. African Americans living in the southern states, for example, continued to be oppressed (see PowerPoint Presentation – Agrarian Domains). Though no longer slaves, these men, women and children continued to be kept separate and unequal. White southerners put into place a series of laws and "black" codes, an ongoing threat of violence exhibited most dramatically by the Ku Klux Klan, a system of sharecropping, and inferior schools. Taken in totality, these measures kept the "colored" in their place. In response to this new form of slavery, many former slaves and/or their children migrated to northern cities, hoping for better lives and a greater share in their inalienable rights. However, these migrants soon discovered that racial discrimination was not confined to the former slave states. The jobs available to them were the lowest paid, and, more often than not, "new immigrants" were the preferred workers in the nation’s growing factory system.

One of the best examples of the extremes of the 1890s is the growing gap between the rich and poor. This is the major point of the start of Edward Bellamy's bestseller, Looking Backward. Published in 1888, Bellamy's allegory tale begins with metaphor of American society of that time being like a huge stagecoach. At the top of the coach sat the favored few, riding well in breezy comfort, while the "the masses of humanity" straining "under the pitiless lashing of hunger" had to drag the coach along the roads and hills

One major reason for the popularity of Bellamy's book during the late 1880s and 1890s was that he had tapped into a reality that concerned most Americans. This reality was the uneven distribution of the growing wealth of the United States. In 1890, the top 10% of American families possessed 73% of the nation’s wealth. Within this elite group, the top 1% controlled 25% of these dollars. This implies, of course, that the remaining 90% of the United States’ population had slim base from which to carve out a reasonable standard of living.

The widening gap between rich and poor certainly had daily relevance for most Americans. But it also represents only one manifestation of a general anxiety felt by most Americans in the last decade of the 19^th century. This general anxiety had come about because of dramatic and rapid changes in the United States since the end of the Civil War.

These changes were:

· Industrialization

· Immigration

· Urbanization

Because of these changes, the majority of Americans be they native-born or newly arrived immigrants, were becoming increasingly more concerned about the directions the country seemed to be taking. Citizens started to realize that the nation had shifted from a rural to an urban society, and with this change, the values of hard work, good character, and virtuous living seemed to be at risk. In addition, citizens had watched as technology, finance capital, and individual entrepreneurship shifted the center of gravity of the nation’s economy away from the small, family owned business to the corporate owned industrial monopoly. With this shift, many hard-working professionals felt a loss of status. Finally, native born Americans wanted assurances that the millions of immigrants now coming to the United States become Americanized as quickly as possible, so that these newcomers would not threaten the American value system with their alien cultures.

The Reform Impulse (Historical Process = Response)

Emerging from the general feeling of unrest and upheaval was a sense that things had to change. More and more people in the United States concluded that the existing social, political, and economic structures in American society no longer worked. Although these structures had been strong enough to support the needs of society in the past, they now were overburdened by the problems created by rapid and unprecedented industrialization, urbanization, and immigration.

The situation faced by new immigrants in New York City serves as a good illustration. Thousands of immigrants arrived in New York City because industrialization had created a vast number of new jobs in that city. These immigrants thus had to get hired for these jobs and find a place to live. However, because the surge of population into the city was so rapid, no one within the city, county, and state government had planned for adequate housing and support services. To meet the demands for housing, real estate developers purchased land and build cheap housing. This housing --- called tenement buildings --- lacked proper ventilation and sewage facilities. Each "apartment" was small and the rent was high. To meet that rent, several people needed to live in one apartment, because the wages for unskilled labor in the factories was so low.

In addition, the city did not have sufficient classroom space for the newly arrived children of immigrants, and the public school teachers were not trained to teach students whose languages and customs were so very different from those of the Untied States. There were neither enough firemen nor policemen, sewage and garbage were disposed of in the streets, and contagious diseases spreading through a tenement building was common. Many immigrant families did not have enough to eat, and when winter came, they often did not have enough money to buy coal or wood to heat their apartments.

Jacob Riis, journalist and photographer, publicized the housing and living conditions for those living in the tenement building in his 1890 expose, How the Other Half Lives. What made his book especially powerful to readers were the photographs he included. Why not take a few minutes, go back some 100 years, and let Jacob Riis give you a tour of the slums of New York City in the 1890s. His photographs are identified in the List of Illustrations.

Jacob Riis was one of many who began to express concerns and recommend solutions regarding the tensions and problems in American society at the close of the 19^th century. As your textbook notes, Jane Addams, Frances Willard, Andrew Carnegie, and others, primarily of the middle class, began to seek ways to deal with the pressures and tensions of a society now defined by urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. By 1900 those who wanted things changed channeled their efforts into what became known as the Progressive Reform Movement.

In the next learning module, we will examine the ways that Riis, Addams and others initiated a social reform movement that addressed the problems created by rapid industrialization, immigration and urbanization. This social reform movement was the Progressive Reform Movement.

Last updated: 1/5/2008