When was urbanization in america

Progressives also advocated legislation that would reduce the power of city bosses and get rid of corruption within city politics. These reform efforts significantly improved life in cities, although they did not get rid of all of the problems of urban life or end poverty.

In Ohio, a number of cities faced tremendous population growth during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unsurprisingly, these same cities experienced rapid industrialization during this era as well. Cities such as Toledo, Akron, Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Cleveland experienced growth because of immigration from Europe as well as migration from more rural areas of Ohio and elsewhere.

Like other American cities, Ohio cities faced similar problems from urbanization, and Ohio Progressives actively sought to improve conditions in their communities. Toggle navigation. Urbanization From Ohio History Central. Jump to: navigation , search. Years later, a floodwall was built on the banks of the Scioto to contain its flooding. Quantity and speed were the main requirements of producing Bessemer steel.

Structural steel required a more carefully made product. The demands of structural steel encouraged steelmakers like Andrew Carnegie to redesign entire factories, most notably replacing older Bessemer converters with the open-hearth process. This new kind of steelmaking not only produced higher quality steel, it also required fewer skilled workers.

The other innovation that made skyscrapers possible was the electric elevator. Elisha Graves Otis designed the first reliable elevator in With electric power, it became possible to rise sixty stories in a matter of seconds. With elevators, tenants willing paid a premium in order to get better views out their windows. Without elevators, nobody would have bothered to erect a building taller than five stories.

The construction of skyscrapers was itself a terrific example of the industrial age coordination of labor and materials distribution. Steel skeletons meant that the unornamented higher sections of a building could be worked on even before the inevitable elaborate ornamental fringes on the lower part of the building were finished.

This saved both time and money. When New York got so crowded that there was no space to store raw materials, the appearance of those materials would be carefully choreographed, and they would be taken directly off of flatbed trucks and placed in their exact positions near the tops of new buildings.

Around the turn of the 20th century, a major skyscraper could be built in as little as one year. The faster a building could be built, the faster an owner could collect rents and begin to earn back construction expenses. The great benefit of skyscrapers was the ability to compress economic activity into smaller areas.

Each building is an almost complete city, often comprising within its walls, banks and insurance offices, post office and telegraph office, business exchanges restaurants, clubrooms and shops. By the s, the value of land in Manhattan grew so fast because of its possible use for skyscrapers that second generation industrial families sold their mansions, since they no longer wanted to pay huge property taxes on them.

The same basic principles of skyscraper production—build it quick and large, and pack it with people—motivated the way that builders produced other kinds of urban domiciles. They came about as the result of a design contest, but were generally so crowded that they did more harm than good to the people who lived in them. Four families might live on a single floor with only two bathrooms between them. Designed to let light and air into central courtyards which explains why they were shaped like a dumbbell from above , stacked up back-to-back, one against the other they did neither.

Widely copied, New York City actually outlawed this design for new buildings in —but the old structures remained. Apartment houses made it easier to pack people into small urban areas and therefore live closer to where they worked. To counter these unequal tendencies, New Yorkers developed the idea of the cooperative, where many people bought a single building and managed it themselves. Lavish apartments became alternatives for mansions once Manhattan real estate became too expensive for all except those with huge fortunes.

The farther away that people lived from central business districts, the more they needed efficient transportation. Streetcars helped, to an extent, but passenger lines that centered on downtown neighborhoods left large areas that could be occupied with housing for a growing working population, provided that these residents had their own way to get around.

It also revolutionized the entire concept of American production. He would make a market for his cars by producing them so cheaply that nearly every American could afford one. Ford could achieve both quality and a low price at scale because of the assembly line. In the same way that a single carcass was picked apart by men with specialized jobs as it moved along a line, mounted upon a hook, Ford arranged his new factory at Highland Park so that men with highly specialized assignments could build an automobile much faster than before.

The assembly line moved work to the men rather than forcing men to move to the work, thereby saving valuable time and energy. It also extended the concept of the division of labor to its logical extreme so that workers would only perform one function in a much larger assembly process all day, every day.

The applicability of these principles to the manufacturing of just about everything is what made Ford such an important figure in the history of industrialization. Mass production became possible for all kinds of things that had once seemed far removed from the automobile. Ford built Model Ts at three different facilities over the entire history of that vehicle. He improved his production methods over time which included introducing and improving upon the assembly line so that he could produce them more cheaply and efficiently.

Efficiency depended on speed, and speed depended upon the exact place in the factory where those machines were placed. Because Ford made only one car, he could employ single-purpose machine tools of extraordinarily high quality.

The company also used lots of other automated manufacturing equipment, like gravity slides and conveyors, to get parts of the car from one place to another in its increasingly large, increasingly mechanized factories. Because the assembly line moved the work to the men rather than the men to the work, the company could control the speed of the entire operation. Like earlier manufacturers, Ford depended upon standardized, identical parts to produce more cars for less, but the assembly line also made it possible to conserve labor—not by mechanizing jobs that had once been done by hand, but by mechanizing work processes and paying employees just to feed and tend to those machines.

This was not fun work to do. Before Ford came along, cars were boutique goods that only rich people could afford to operate. After Ford introduced the assembly line actually a series of assembly lines for every part of the car , labor productivity improved to such a degree that mass production became possible.

Perhaps more important than mass production was mass consumption, since continual productivity improvements meant that Ford could lower the price of the Model T every year, while simultaneously making small but significant changes that steadily improved the quality of the car. Mass production eliminated choice, since Ford produced no other car, but Ford built variations of the Model T, like the runabout with the same chassis, and owners retro-fitted their Model Ts for everything from camping to farming.

The increased number of automobiles on city streets further congested already congested downtown areas. Streetcars got blocked. Pedestrians died in gruesome traffic accidents. One of the basic requirements of having so many new cars on the roads was to improve the quality and quantity of roads.

Local city planners tended to attack such problems on a case-by-case basis, laying pavement on well-traveled roads and widening them when appropriate. New traffic rules, such as the first one-way streets, appeared in an effort to alleviate these kinds of problems.

Traffic control towers and traffic lights—the mechanical solution to a problem inspired by industrialization—also appeared for the first time during this era. Cities grew when industries grew during this era. Since people had to live near where they worked and few people lived in skyscrapers , many builders built out into undeveloped areas. If a city had annexed much of the land around it previous to these economic expansions like Detroit , those areas became parts of a larger city.

Chicago was so confident of further growth during this period that it built streetcar lines into vacant fields. To meet rising demand for housing, homebuilders applied industrial principles to building—using standardized parts that were themselves the result of mass production techniques.

By the s, buying pre-cut mail order houses became big business. After , mechanization made factories even more productive thanks to technological improvements. The electrical and chemical industries formed the vanguard for the blending of science and the useful arts during this era.

By the s, engineers had been formally integrated into the management hierarchies of countless American industries. Reorganization of production merged with technological improvement had made mass production possible long before Ford developed the assembly line. By the end of that decade, it could produce , cigarettes in a day.

By the s, mass production had arrived in industries that produced goods that were much more expensive than cigarettes. Among the other manufacturers that used Fordist principles during the s were the makers of home appliances, like refrigerators and radios. General Electric, for example, built an eighteen million dollar assembly line for its Monitor Top refrigerator and sold a million refrigerators just four years after its introduction in Even craft-dominated industries like furniture making came to depend upon mass production to make their products more available to the masses.

People who moved from farms to cities desperately needed furniture for their new urban residences, but in industrial towns like Grand Rapids, Michigan, they could not afford pieces made by craftsman. New mass-produced models made with minimal carving and overlays, based on stylish patterns, found a market all over the country.

It helped that companies like Bassett, founded in Virginia in , discouraged their workers from forming unions, just like Ford did. An unorganized workforce made it easier for industrialists to impose changes in the production process without resistance from employees. The changeover from the Model T to the Model A, in , demonstrated the limits of industrialized mass production.

The Model A was incredibly expensive, and Ford had to shut his main plant for months to retool the production line for his new models. While the new car sold well initially, sales dropped precipitously as the Depression deepened.

Urban building slowed precipitously during the Depression too. Since cities were the focal points of industrialization, urban citizens suffered disproportionately when production waned. Of course, when the United States sank into the economic downturn of the Great Depression, both urban and industrial growth decreased sharply. It is difficult to cite previous scholarship on either industrialization or urbanization from precisely the — period because both these trends pre- and post-date this period.

Equally importantly, both are so broad, in the sense that they encompass all kinds of industries and locations that they include a huge range of books and other sources. While none of the following suggestions are exact fits for these subjects during this time, they are all worth reading because they cast at least some light on industrialization and urbanization during this particular time period.

It covers a few very important industries in detail like automobile manufacturing , but it is at its best when dealing with the similarities in production technologies from industry to industry. My own Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life is a simplified introduction to these principles and a summary of their effects on many aspects of American history during this period, including urbanization.

A number of excellent studies of important industries during this period show how industrialization progressed in some detail. Rockefeller, Sr. Richard R. My own Refrigeration Nation is a close study of the American ice and refrigeration industries. Sam Bass Warner Jr. The best works of urban history published since then tend to deal with particular cities or with the relationship between cities and surrounding suburban communities. Donald L. Building Suburbia by Dolores is a detailed work that covers a similar subject over the same time period.

Churches were moved to intervene through their belief in the concept of the social gospel. This philosophy stated that all Christians, whether they were church leaders or social reformers, should be as concerned about the conditions of life in the secular world as the afterlife, and the Reverend Washington Gladden was a major advocate.

Rather than preaching sermons on heaven and hell, Gladden talked about social changes of the time, urging other preachers to follow his lead. He advocated for improvements in daily life and encouraged Americans of all classes to work together for the betterment of society.

As a result of his influence, churches began to include gymnasiums and libraries as well as offer evening classes on hygiene and health care. Beginning in the s, these organizations began providing community services and other benefits to the urban poor. In the secular sphere, the settlement house movement of the s provided additional relief. Pioneering women such as Jane Addams in Chicago and Lillian Wald in New York led this early progressive reform movement in the United States, building upon ideas originally fashioned by social reformers in England.

With no particular religious bent, they worked to create settlement houses in urban centers where they could help the working class, and in particular, working-class women, find aid. Their help included child daycare, evening classes, libraries, gym facilities, and free health care. The movement spread quickly to other cities, where they not only provided relief to working-class women but also offered employment opportunities for women graduating college in the growing field of social work.

Oftentimes, living in the settlement houses among the women they helped, these college graduates experienced the equivalent of living social classrooms in which to practice their skills, which also frequently caused friction with immigrant women who had their own ideas of reform and self-improvement. Department of Labor in Julia Lathrop—herself a former resident of Hull House—became the first woman to head a federal government agency, when President William Howard Taft appointed her to run the bureau.

Jane Addams was a social activist whose work took many forms. She is perhaps best known as the founder of Hull House in Chicago, which later became a model for settlement houses throughout the country. Here, she reflects on the role that the settlement played. But in order to obtain these conditions, the Settlement recognizes the need of cooperation, both with the radical and the conservative, and from the very nature of the case the Settlement cannot limit its friends to any one political party or economic school.

The Settlement casts side none of those things which cultivated men have come to consider reasonable and goodly, but it insists that those belong as well to that great body of people who, because of toilsome and underpaid labor, are unable to procure them for themselves.

The educational activities of a Settlement, as well its philanthropic, civic, and social undertakings, are but differing manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the very existence of the Settlement itself. She was instrumental in the relief effort after World War I, a commitment that led to her winning the Nobel Peace Prize in Urbanization spread rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century due to a confluence of factors.

New technologies, such as electricity and steam engines, transformed factory work, allowing factories to move closer to urban centers and away from the rivers that had previously been vital sources of both water power and transportation.

The growth of factories—as well as innovations such as electric lighting, which allowed them to run at all hours of the day and night—created a massive need for workers, who poured in from both rural areas of the United States and from eastern and southern Europe. As cities grew, they were unable to cope with this rapid influx of workers, and the living conditions for the working class were terrible.

Tight living quarters, with inadequate plumbing and sanitation, led to widespread illness. Churches, civic organizations, and the secular settlement house movement all sought to provide some relief to the urban working class, but conditions remained brutal for many new city dwellers. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content.

Module 4: Urbanization and Immigration. Search for:. Urbanization and Its Challenges Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain the growth of American cities in the late nineteenth century Identify the key challenges that Americans faced due to urbanization, as well as some of the possible solutions to those challenges.

This Bureau of Labor Statistics report from Boston looks in detail at the wages, living conditions, and moral code of the girls who worked in the clothing factories there. Section Summary Urbanization spread rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century due to a confluence of factors. Review Question What technological and economic factors combined to lead to the explosive growth of American cities at this time?

Answer to Review Question At the end of the nineteenth century, a confluence of events made urban life more desirable and more possible. Technologies such as electricity and the telephone allowed factories to build and grow in cities, and skyscrapers enabled the relatively small geographic areas to continue expanding.

The new demand for workers spurred a massive influx of job-seekers from both rural areas of the United States and from eastern and southern Europe. Urban housing—as well as services such as transportation and sanitation—expanded accordingly, though cities struggled to cope with the surging demand. Together, technological innovations and an exploding population led American cities to grow as never before. Glossary settlement house movement an early progressive reform movement, largely spearheaded by women, which sought to offer services such as childcare and free healthcare to help the working poor social gospel the belief that the church should be as concerned about the conditions of people in the secular world as it was with their afterlife.